Gogol's House — memorial museum and research library

Moscow
Nikitsky blvd., 7A, Moscow
Phones: +7 495 690-58-81
Web site: http://www.domgogolya.ru/

Museum is located in the very centre of Moscow, near the Arbat Square, in an old city mansion, with its history dating back to the 17th century. “Gogol House” combines a research library of over 250 000 volumes, a research centre, an exhibition hall, and a memorial museum.

On the ground floor there are six memorial rooms. In two of them, Gogol worked on the second volume of "Dead Souls". In the rooms you can see authentic historical objects and works of art, as well as things that belonged to the writer. On the second floor there are books by Gogol, research about his life and work.
The interiors of the rooms where Gogol lived are recreated with documentary accuracy according to the memoirs of contemporaries who often visited him. The exhibition reproduces the atmosphere of the middle of the XIX century: you can hear the crackle of wood burning in the fireplace, as well as the noise of Nikitsky Boulevard, which mixed voices, the sounds of passing carriages and the ringing of bells. In the hall where Nikolai Vasilyevich last arranged a public reading of the "Inspector General", the visitors can see the characters of the immortal comedy frozen in a silent scene.
In each hall, the main object is highlighted in a special way, conveying the atmosphere, the cultural style of the time, as well as the connection of a particular place with the personality of the writer. So, for example, in the Memory Room there is an author's copy of the death mask of N. V. Gogol, made by the sculptor N. A. Ramazanov. Memorials are also on display: a bone case for needles, given to the writer by his mother; an ink device from the Kibintsy estate, where little Nikosha (so affectionately called the future classic as a child) lived for a long time with his family; a glass with a rocaille ornament of the 1840s. - a wedding gift from the writer to his sister Elizabeth; a sofa from the house of the outstanding historian M. P. Pogodin, with whom N. V. Gogol lived for a long time.

Gogol`s house on Nikitsky Boulevard is the only place in Moscow that keeps the memory of the last years of Nikolai Gogol alive. In this house, the writer worked on the second volume of Dead Souls. Here, he burnt the manuscripts of the poem. And in this very house, on February 21 (O.S.) of 1852 the writer died.

Here he publicly read the play "The Inspector General", worked on the second volume of the poem "Dead Souls", spiritual prose, prepared a collection of works for publication, and before his death burned almost all of his manuscripts.
The house in which N. V. Gogol lived the last years of his life has a long history. Built before the fire of Moscow in 1812, this unique monument of architecture and culture was rebuilt several times and changed its owners.
Home ownership can be traced back to the beginning of the XVII century, when the manor was located in a country yard boyars Saltikov "for the Arbat gate in Mastryukovo street" (now on merzlyakovskiy pereulok)
It is known that in 1693, the land was owned by the steward Ivan Buturlin. From then until the mid-eighteenth century the house belonged to the family of A. V. Plohovo.
At the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries, the city estate "in the parish of Simeon Stylite in Mostryukovsky Lane in the 3rd quarter of the Arbat part of No. 323..." was the property of the wife of the chamberlain and privy councilor, a relative of Alexander Pushkin's father Maria Fedorovna Saltykova (1759-1793), nee Princess Solntseva. At the same time, the separate chambers of the building were united. In 1802, wooden residential and non-residential buildings still stood in the courtyard of Saltykova. The residential stone house measured 14 fathoms in length and 12 in width.
Under the collegiate assessor Dmitry Sergeevich Boltin (1757-1824) — a distant relative of the historian Ivan Nikitich Boltin-the building already had an extension and reached 22 fathoms in length. Thus, the extension, which appeared between 1806 and 1809, is the part of the house where N. V. Gogol later lived.
In 1809, the construction of a large two-story building of services, which housed the human services, was completed.
A fire in 1812 destroyed the wooden buildings in the courtyard of Boltin, and the main house and services were so badly damaged that the owner had to move to his Nizhny Novgorod estate.
In 1816, Major General of the Izmailovsky Regiment Alexander Ivanovich Talyzin, a participant in the Battle of Borodino, became the owner of the estate. Apparently, the housing was restored by the new owner by 1822.
After the renovation, the main house and the service building acquired identical stone arcades with balconies above them, creating the impression of a single architectural ensemble. The facade of the manor house has since survived unchanged
After the death of A. I. Talyzin in August 1847, the house went to his relative-titular adviser Talyzina. In the same year, Count Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy, who returned from Europe, settled here. He rented the entire top floor. In all likelihood, the count's wife Anna Georgievna bought the estate in late 1847-early 1848. And in December 1848, N. V. Gogol moved to them.
According to archival documents, in 1857 the yard belonged to A. G. Tolstoy. Wanting to enlarge the house with an extension to the northern facade, she bought a plot of land adjacent to the border of her property from her neighbor A. A. Goncharova. In March 1876, the next owner of the estate, the staff captain Maria Alexandrovna Stolypina, replaced the wooden second floor of the eastern part of the house with a stone one.
Since 1878, the estate was owned by the widow of the actual state councilor Natalia Afanasyevna Sheremetyevo. When it was built in 1889, two window openings on the second floor were laid.
In 1909, under the last owner of the estate, Maria Vladimirovna Katkova, a fireproof staircase was built into the western part of the house, which still exists today.
After the October Revolution of 1917, the house was transferred to the municipal fund with the use of it for housing. By 1964, it had 31 families (77 people).
In 1964, the building was transferred to the Permanent Mission of the Kyrgyz SSR to the Council of Ministers of the USSR . By the middle of 1966, there was a situation when the architectural monument was owned by two organizations at once: the Permanent Mission of Kyrgyzstan and the editorial board of the magazine "Radio and Television". In the same year, by the decision of the Executive Committee of the Moscow City Council, the building was transferred to the City Library No. 2, whose work in the new room began in 1971. In 1974, two museum rooms were opened at the library, the literary and memorial exposition of which was highly appreciated by Academician Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev.
In 1979, the library was named after N. V. Gogol
In 2005, the institution was transformed into the Central City Library — Memorial Center "House of Gogol", and in 2009 — into the State Library "House of N. V. Gogol — Memorial Museum and Scientific Library".
Today, the "Gogol House" unites a scientific library (fund — more than 250 thousand volumes), a research center, an exhibition hall and a memorial museum. The new, expanded and expanded exposition of the museum was opened on March 27, 2009 to mark the 200th anniversary of the writer's birth.

The exhibition uses innovative museum technologies.

The Gogol House has a theater lounge, where concerts, performances, music and poetry evenings, lectures and seminars are held.