Konstantin Vasilyev Museum

The Konstantin Vasilyev Museum on Kazan’s Bauman Street holds the bulk of the artist’s legacy — an oeuvre built on epic and mythological subjects that gained wide recognition only after his death. The exhibition occupies a historic mansion a stone’s throw from the Kremlin and brings together works from both the Kazan and Moscow collections of the artist’s heritage.

The idea of creating a museum arose among the artist’s friends soon after his death: in 1988 admirers of Vasilyev’s painting formed a club, and on 29 October 1996 — exactly twenty years after the artist’s death — a small gallery opened on Gvardeiskaya Street, displaying about eighty canvases from private collections. A decade and a half later the city authorities allocated a more spacious building on the pedestrian Bauman Street for the museum, and on 26 June 2013 a new exhibition opened there with a significantly expanded collection.

The mansion at the intersection of Bauman and Astronomicheskaya streets was built in the early 19th century and changed hands several times among owners of Kazan’s German community: it first belonged to the wine merchant Vogt, who kept a cellar of Rhine wines here well known in the city’s student life, then passed to the merchant Reshe, and from him to the Petzold family of brewers, related by marriage to the family of the singer Chaliapin. Later the building was owned by the confectionery manufacturer Mikhail Gorshin. The house’s present appearance still reflects the merchant architecture of pre-revolutionary Kazan’s central street.

Konstantin Vasilyev was born in 1942 in Maykop; as a child he studied at the Moscow art school attached to the Surikov Institute, and in 1957 entered the Kazan Art College, from which he graduated with honours in 1961, staying on to work at the Kazan art fund after his assignment there. From 1969 his painting took on its signature style — heroic and mythological imagery inspired by Slavic and Scandinavian epics. On 29 October 1976, the artist died under the wheels of a train at Lagernaya station near Kazan, together with a friend, while returning from the closing of a young artists’ exhibition in Zelenodolsk; he was buried in the birch grove of the village of Vasilyevo, a place he had loved in life.

The museum’s five modern halls display around one hundred and sixty of the artist’s works — epic canvases on themes from Russian bylinas, Scandinavian mythological cycles, portraits, and landscapes — along with an archive, a library, and a corner recreating the artist’s studio with his personal belongings. According to the museum’s own figures, the collection encompasses roughly nine-tenths of Vasilyev’s surviving legacy, uniting the Kazan and Moscow portions of the collection.

Today the museum remains one of the main attractions on the tourist route along Bauman Street, hosting guided tours, lectures, and themed exhibitions that introduce visitors to the fate of an artist whose recognition came only after his death.