Lev Gumilyov Apartment Museum

About museum

The Lev Gumilyov Apartment Museum — dedicated to the Soviet historian, ethnologist, geographer, and author of books on the history of Russia and Central Asia — is located on the second floor of a residential building dating from the late 19th century at No. 1/15 Kolomenskaya Street. This was the first separate apartment of the only son of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov. Before that he lived in other people’s “corners,” endured more than 13 years of prisons and camps, and later occupied rooms in communal apartments.
\r\n
\r\nThe scholar received the two-room apartment in the former income house on Kolomenskaya Street in 1989. After his death the furnishings were carefully preserved by his widow, Natalya Viktorovna Gumilyova-Simonovskaya. In 2004 the apartment was designated a branch of the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House. Today the museum’s exhibition allows visitors to drop in and see how this man with a complicated fate lived.
\r\n
\r\nThe main part of the memorial space is the study-living room where Lev Nikolaevich worked: he wrote books and prepared television lectures. Here his personal belongings, gifts from friends and admirers, and the scholar’s library are kept. Among the exhibits are an antique desk with a collection of postcards displayed under glass; an anonymous portrait of Nikolai Gumilyov, the scholar’s father, and his photographic portrait by the renowned photographer Moisey Nappelbaum; and a 16th-century Persian miniature — a mysterious gift from his mother, Anna Akhmatova, which Lev Gumilyov received after his return from the camp.
\r\n
\r\nIn addition, the museum displays many carefully preserved items of late-Soviet daily life. A separate part of the exhibition, created with the participation of the Norilsk Museum, tells of Lev Gumilyov’s time in detention and, above all, of his scientific work under camp conditions.