Alexander Ostrovsky House Museum

On Malaya Ordynka Street in Zamoskvorechye stands a surviving two-story wooden house where the future playwright Alexander Ostrovsky was born on 12 April 1823 — he spent the first three years of his life here. Since 1984 the house has been home to a museum, a branch of the Bakhrushin Theater Museum; the collection includes archival documents, family photographs, antique furniture, and theatrical costumes.

The house was built in 1822 on a plot belonging to deacon Nikifor Maksimov, whose family occupied the second floor — nearby once stood the five-domed Church of the Intercession in Goliki, demolished in 1931 and later replaced by a bust of the playwright. The house stood empty from 1850 to 1920, and under Soviet rule it was converted into communal apartments; the building took on its present appearance after a reconstruction at the turn of the 1870s–1880s.

Zamoskvorechye in the early 19th century was not considered a prestigious district — it was settled by merchants and modest gentry, and after the fire of 1812, which destroyed most of the buildings, many plots took a long time to rebuild. This very merchant everyday life became the central theme of Ostrovsky’s work: his first sketch, “Notes of a Zamoskvorechye Resident,” was published in 1847. While creating the exhibition, local residents themselves brought museum staff antique lamps, samovars, and shawls, helping to recreate the atmosphere of the era.

The central room of the ground floor, the “Red Drawing Room,” holds photographs of the playwright’s family and friends, a mid-19th-century Schröder clavichord, and the cover of the journal Moskvityanin, in which the play “It’s a Family Affair — We’ll Settle It Ourselves” was first published in 1850. Nearby, the study of the writer’s father has been recreated, with an antique desk and part of the family library, unusually rich for Zamoskvorechye, while the former bedroom holds Ostrovsky’s original bed and an icon case with icons from the demolished parish church.

The second floor, where the deacon and his family once lived, is devoted to the stage history of the playwright’s plays: on display are a model of the Maly Theater as it looked in 1840, props and documents related to the 1859 production of “The Storm,” as well as models of stagings of “The Forest” as interpreted by Vsevolod Meyerhold and “A Fervent Heart,” staged by Konstantin Stanislavsky. A separate room is dedicated to “Without a Dowry,” featuring a 19th-century guitar and a portrait of Vera Komissarzhevskaya, who played the role of Larisa Ogudalova.

Across from the house, the “Theater Gallery on Malaya Ordynka” has operated since 1997 — four exhibition halls hosting classical music concerts and creative meetings, with a garden planted by museum staff in front of the entrance. Today the museum complex remains one of Moscow’s key sites preserving the memory of the playwright who gave Russian theater the merchant world of Zamoskvorechye as a literary realm in its own right.