Museum of Microminiature "Russian Levsha"

A stone's throw from Nevsky Prospekt, on the corner of Karavannaya and Italyanskaya streets, is the Museum of Microminiature "Russian Levsha" — a collection of works that cannot be seen without magnifying instruments. The name refers to the hero of Nikolai Leskov's short story, who shod a flea, and the exhibition itself is devoted to an art form in which the size of a work is measured in fractions of a millimetre.

The museum opened in 2006 on the initiative of the non-profit partnership "International Guild of Masters," which brought together Russia's leading microminiaturists. The genre itself only emerged as an independent form of decorative art by the end of the twentieth century: such works serve no practical purpose, are made and displayed exclusively with the aid of optical instruments, and aim to show the viewer an entire universe contained within an object the size of a poppy seed.

The craftsmen work under a stereomicroscope, using miniature chisels, homemade lathes the size of a palm, and micro-drills capable of boring a hole through a human hair. Exhibits in the permanent collection include a shod flea with horseshoes millions of times smaller than a real horse's, a caravan of camels passing through the eye of a needle, text inscribed on a grain of rice, and entire compositions arranged on the cross-section of a poppy seed. In total, the museum's collection holds around seventy-five such works.

A prominent place in the collection belongs to the works of the Novosibirsk scientist and microminiaturist Vladimir Aniskin, a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences who took up the art in the late 1990s. Among his miniatures are a New Year tree just over half a millimetre tall, mounted on the cross-section of a poppy seed, a copy of Vermeer's painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring," and a book recognised as the smallest in the world. His copy of the "Sower" coin, just over three millimetres in diameter, was officially recognised in 2019 as the smallest coin replica on the planet and entered into the Guinness Book of Records. Similar works are also created by other members of the guild — Nikolai Aldunin, Anatoly Konenko, Nikolai Syadristy, and a number of other Russian masters of micro-art.

Today the museum is included in the tour catalogues of Russian and European operators and remains one of the unconventional attractions of central St Petersburg — a compact exhibition a stone's throw from Gostiny Dvor, visited not so much for the size of the building as for the scale of the craftsmanship. Most of the works here can only be viewed through special magnifying glasses and microscopes built into the display cases.

The "Russian Levsha" museum carries on a tradition that in Russian culture is associated above all with Leskov's blacksmith: the ability to create outstanding things out of the simplest materials and makeshift tools. For visitors, it is a rare opportunity to see how present-day craftsmen turn a poppy seed or a grain of rice into a fully-fledged work of art.