Pushkin Memorial Apartment on the Arbat

In the building at 53 Arbat Street operates the Pushkin Memorial Apartment, a museum space that forms part of Moscow’s main Pushkin museum, set up in the rooms that the poet rented together with his young wife, Natalia Goncharova, during the first months after their wedding in 1831. It is the only museum in Moscow dedicated specifically to this brief but happy period of Pushkin’s life.

The plot on the Arbat has been known since 1752, and the present building was erected in 1777–1780 to a design by architect Semyon Karin for the collegiate councillor Sergei Neronov. In 1806 the property passed to the Khitrovo family; during the fire of 1812 the house was badly damaged and was rebuilt by 1816. In early 1831 Pushkin rented the second floor of the mansion for six months: the owners were living in Oryol at the time, having fled the cholera epidemic that had reached Moscow from St. Petersburg.

Here, on 17 February 1831, on the eve of his wedding, Pushkin held a bachelor party for his closest friends — among the guests were Pyotr Vyazemsky, Nikolai Yazykov, Denis Davydov, and Ivan Kireyevsky. After the wedding ceremony at the Church of the Grand Ascension, the newlyweds were greeted at the gates of the house by family and friends, and ten days later the couple held their first ball here, described in detail by one of the guests in a letter to his brother. Just three months after the wedding, the Pushkins left the Arbat apartment and moved to Tsarskoye Selo.

In the decades that followed, the building repeatedly changed owners and purpose: in the 1880s it was home for a time to the brother of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and by the early 20th century the ground floor was occupied by shops and workshops. After the revolution the house was first given over to an army theater and later turned into communal apartments — by 1970, thirty-three families lived there. The memory of Pushkin’s apartment was preserved only by a memorial plaque installed in 1937 on the initiative of the Pushkin Commission led by literary scholar Mstislav Tsyavlovsky.

The decision to create a museum was made in 1972, and the building was almost immediately put through a major restoration that dragged on for more than a decade. Its doors opened to visitors on 18 February 1986. The exhibition occupies two floors: the first tells the story of Pushkin’s connection to Moscow, while the second recreates, based on the descriptions of his contemporaries, the family’s memorial rooms — a drawing room, a dining room, and bedrooms — housing portraits of the poet’s friends, a grand piano that later belonged to Sergei Rachmaninoff, and other artifacts of the era.

Today the apartment on the Arbat remains one of Moscow’s most personal Pushkin addresses — not a grand monument, but a reconstructed domestic space where a memorial atmosphere blends with genuine artifacts of the early 19th century. For the city it offers a rare chance to glimpse not the poet’s creative biography, but a private episode of his family life.