Exhibition of the A. N. Tolstoy Apartment Museum

About exhibition

The main exhibition of the Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy Memorial Museum occupies four rooms — the study, the dining-living room, the small sitting room and the Blue Room — where the personal belongings and unique collections of this outstanding Russian writer of the first half of the 20th century are displayed. In Tolstoy's study you can see antique Chinese incense burners and chairs from the palace of Emperor Paul I, a Carrara marble writing set and an Underwood typewriter, the writer's favorite smoking pipes and a mantel clock by the firm Pavel Bure, as well as numerous items that aided the author in his work on the novel "Peter I". In the dining-living room, in addition to Empire-style furniture and a crystal chandelier dating from the time of Catherine II, still lifes by renowned Flemish painters are exhibited — David Teniers and Melchior de Hondecoeter. Among the museum's other curiosities are a traveling trunk from the era of Peter I, a Venetian mirror in a carved frame, a concert grand piano on which Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev played, a frog chair and an inlaid card table…