V.I. Dahl Museum and Cultural and Educational Center at Presnya

About museum

The "V.I. Dahl Museum and Cultural and Educational Center" occupies two rooms in the house where the outstanding lexicographer, ethnographer and writer lived and worked from 1859 until his death in 1872. It was in this house that Dahl prepared for publication the complete collected works in eight volumes, the anthology "Proverbs of the Russian People", and completed the work of his life, the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language". On the covers of the issues of his dictionary Dahl placed a notice with the address: "The dictionary can be obtained from its compiler, at the Presnensky Bridge, his own house." After the death of the writer and scholar, Muscovites began to call this mansion the "Dahl House". Today V.I. Dahl's house is not visible from Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street, because in Soviet times administrative buildings were erected and it ended up in the courtyard of the Ministry of Natural Resources. In 1986 the V.I. Dahl Museum was opened through the efforts of the Moscow City Branch of the All‑Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments (MGO VOOPIiK) as a public museum and essentially remains so to this day. The museum's exhibition displays V.I. Dahl's personal belongings, drawings, photographs and documents from the family archives of his descendants, the lifetime and other editions of the Dictionary, and numerous literary and scholarly works by the writer and scholar.