Bely House Museum (Музей Квартира Андрея Белого) (Moscow)

 

Ulitsa Arbat 55

Tel. (499) 241 7702

Subway: Smolenskaya

Open: 10am- 6pm Wed, Fri- Sun

12- 9pm Thu

Closed: last Friday of Month

 

Description of the Bely House Museum

In the next building to the Pushkin House-Museum is the house of the childhood of the symbolist writer Andrey Bely. It passed to him from his father, Professor of Moscow University N. V. Bugaev. Here he lived for 26 years until 1906. Andrey Bely was born Boris Bugaev in 1880, but later adopted the name by which he became known as a writer. He grew up here before becoming a student at Moscow University, where he began writing poetry. However, he is best known for the novel Petersburg, completed in 1916, and his memoirs. The apartment was turned into a Museum dedicated to the writer only in 1988. Museum apartment of Andrei Belega is a branch of the state Museum of A. S. Pushkin. Only two rooms of Bugaev's family apartment were preserved here. In one room there is a photo exhibition about the life and work of the writer. The most interesting item in the Museum is the Lifeline, an illustration of White to show how his mood swings combine with cultural influences to guide his work.

 

History Of The Andrey Bely Apartment Museum
The Museum-apartment of Andrey Bely is located on the third floor of the building on the corner of Arbat and Money lane. Nikolai Bugaev, Dean of the faculty of physics and mathematics at Moscow University, and his wife Alexandra Egorova had been renting an apartment since the second half of the 1870s, and it was here that their son Boris was born in 1880. The family was often visited by famous guests: Maxim Kovalevsky, Nikolai Storozhenko, Alexander Veselovsky, brothers Sergey and Vladimir Taneyev, Lev Tolstoy and others.

Since the beginning of the 1900s, the Argonauts club, headed by the writer, had been gathering in Andrey Bely's apartment on Arbat. It was visited by poets Konstantin Balmont, Jurgis Baltrushaitis, Valery Bryusov and Maximilian Voloshin, artists Viktor Borisov-Musatov and Mikhail Shesterkin, as well as many others. Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Alexander Blok came from St. Petersburg to attend one of the meetings. In 1906, Bely and his mother rented an apartment in Nikolsky pereulok; his father had died three years earlier. Subsequently, the writer lived in other places in Moscow, in the village of Kuchino, St. Petersburg, Dornach and Berlin. In memoirs and autobiographical prose, for example, "the Baptized Chinese" and "Cat Letaev", Bely described in detail his apartment on the Arbat.

"I got out of the nursery - into the apartment, and found an environment in it; between our apartment, the Arbat, Moscow, then Russia, and the nursery, there was a boundary for me, because the apartment is already a circle of apartments subject to a single rule; you can say that my perception of the apartment in my infancy is double.
The apartment is first broken up for me; in fact: I know the nursery; everything in it is familiar, not terrible; it is a house; what is behind the wall is no longer a house, because the living room with Windows on the world, on the Arbat, is the same as this world, or the Arbat, from which one or the other comes to us with rules; and with these semi-known personalities, Papa and Mama are closely connected, and these personalities are often completely unknown to me, very suspicious.
Andrew White"

The building
Andrey Bely's apartment is located in a former apartment building that belonged to a noblewoman named M. I. Khromova. In 1876, the mansion that stood on this site was completely rebuilt according to the project of the architect Mitrofan Arsenyev, after which there were retail premises on the first floor, and the second and third occupied apartments for rent. After the renovation was completed, Khromova sold the house to N. I. Rakhmanov, a private associate Professor at the Moscow Imperial University. Apartments in the building were rented out to University employees: Ivan Yanzhul, a statistician, lived here, and Mikhail Solovyov, the brother of the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and the father of the poet Sergei Solovyov, with whom Andrey Bely became friends, rented housing on the floor below.

Andrey Bely's apartment consisted of an entrance hall, a kitchen, and five living rooms. The front rooms faced Money lane, and the living room had a view of old Moscow. Sitting on the balcony in the living room, the writer created the work "Symphony (2nd, dramatic)", which brought him fame. From the living room, you could get to a small nursery, the parents ' bedroom, and the father's office, which later became the office of Andrey Bely.

In the 1930s, the building housed communal apartments, and since 1970, the building has been placed at the disposal of the Ministry of foreign Affairs. In the 1980s, the former apartment of the Bugaev family became part of the state Museum of Alexander Pushkin, whose memorial apartment is located in the next building.

Museum opening
For the first seven years since its opening, the Museum functioned as an exhibition space, while employees of the institution were engaged in collecting the memorial collection. The official opening of the Museum took place in September 2000.

The Museum's funds were formed largely due to gifts. Most of the collection is made up of materials by Tatyana Norina. before her death, Andrey Bely's second wife gave Her the family's property: memorial furniture, personal belongings of the writer, letters, photographs, and other materials. The Museum's collections contain the archives of Bely's first wife, ASI Turgeneva, and His literary Secretary, P. N. Zaitsev. The Museum received a large archive from the literary Secretary of the writer Pyotr Zaitsev, who had worked for Bely since 1932. Zaitsev's collection included autographed books by the writer, as well as an original poem by Osip Mandelstam, written on the day of Andrey Bely's funeral.

Politician Fyodor Golovin donated to the Museum an album of drawings that depict Andrey Bely in a satirical manner. In several of the drawings, the writer is sitting at a table with a member of the cadet party, Dmitry Shakhovsky, while in others he is debating.
 
Valentina Rykova gave the archive of the writer's first wife to the Museum. It contained documents about Andrey Bely's friends and colleagues — the poets Sergei Spassky and Vladimir Piast, as well as the sculptor Sonya Kaplun. In addition, the Museum acquired part of the archive of A. Polyakova, the daughter of a scientist who studied the writer's brain after his death. At the opening ceremony of the Museum in 2000, the Ministry of foreign Affairs of Russia announced the donation of a photograph of Andrey Bely and a copy of the permission to enter Russia from Switzerland, issued in 1916 to Boris Bugaev for military service.