Ulitsa Arbat 55
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Subway: Smolenskaya
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12- 9pm Thu
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In the next building to the Pushkin House-Museum (Музей Квартира Андрея Белого) 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.
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 Bely"
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.
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.