Museum of the History of Tatar Literature with the Memorial Apartment of Sharif Kamal

The House of the Tatar Book — as Kazan’s literary museum is known today — combines a permanent exhibition on the history of Tatar literature with the preserved memorial apartment of the writer Sharif Kamal, all under one roof. The institution occupies a merchant’s mansion on Ostrovsky Street and combines the functions of a museum, a library, a bookshop, and a venue for meetings with authors.

The two-storey mansion was built in the early 20th century — according to various guidebooks, in either 1905 or 1908; before the revolution it changed hands several times among owners that included the merchant’s wife Podurueva and the merchants Sanin, Zhuravlyov, and Ivanov. In 1908 the house underwent a major reconstruction, with its façade and interiors redesigned in the spirit of Western European Baroque. After 1917 the mansion was turned into communal housing, and in the early 1920s it also housed an orphanage; one of the children raised there was the future chess player Rashid Nezhmetdinov. In 1928 a three-room apartment on the second floor was given to the prose writer Sharif Kamal, who lived there until his death in 1942.

The building’s façade and formal interiors retain the Baroque plasticity of the early 20th century, with stucco ornamentation typical of the merchant architecture on Voznesenskaya Street. The memorial section occupies two of the three rooms of Kamal’s former apartment, preserving the domestic setting of the Kazan intelligentsia of the 1930s, including a cabinet grand piano the writer bought for his daughter; the composer Salikh Saydashev often played this instrument.

The Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR decided to open a literary branch of the local history museum in Kamal’s house on 2 June 1944, but resettling the other tenants took time, and the memorial apartment did not receive its first visitors until 29 January 1950. Over the following decades the institution repeatedly closed for re-exhibition and reopened, sharing the building with a children’s library and communal apartments, until it received its current name in 2007. A major restoration in 2017–2019 restored the building’s lost decorative elements and balcony, and returned to the museum the last rooms still occupied by outside tenants.

Since 1 June 2019 the institution has operated as the House of the Tatar Book: alongside the memorial apartment it now includes sections on the history of the Tatar book from manuscripts to digital editions, an interactive children’s library, and a media centre. Notable exhibits include an old manuscript of the poem “Qissa-i Yusuf” and a travel bag that belonged to the poet Khasan Tufan. The museum awards a literary prize named after Sharif Kamal and regularly holds lectures and book presentations.

Today the House of the Tatar Book remains one of the few places in Kazan where the memorial function of a literary museum is combined with living publishing and educational work, drawing both scholars of Tatar literature and casual visitors to the city’s historic centre.