Exhibitions of the Novokuznetsk Local History Museum branch

About exhibition

The museum is located in the historic center of Novokuznetsk — in the building of the former Kuznetsk District School. Many people who later became prominent figures, cultural personalities, and military leaders studied here. For example, the superintendent of the Kuznetsk school in the mid-19th century was Fyodor Alekseyevich Bulgakov; one of his sons, Valentin Fyodorovich, served as secretary to the great Russian writer Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in the last year of his life and later became the organizer of Tolstoy museums in Moscow and Yasnaya Polyana. Visitors to the museum can learn about the life and creative career of Tolstoy’s last personal secretary and see memorial items that belonged to the Bulgakov family. The museum presents the history of the Kuznetsk District School: the construction of the building that housed the school and the teaching system — curriculum content, number of students, and their social composition. Artifacts from the past help illustrate this: basic writing implements, old textbooks and handwriting copybooks used by students of the Kuznetsk District School at the beginning of the 20th century. The exhibitions also offer a glimpse into the lifestyle of the affluent strata of Kuznetsk society at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and display a recreated interior of a well-to-do townsman’s room. Also on display are items reflecting the traditions of Russian tea drinking across different historical periods: coal-fired and electric samovars, sugar bowls and candy dishes decorated with Khokhloma and Gzhel painting, tea boxes from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, teapots and podstakanniks (glass holders), and porcelain and ceramic tea sets — examples of Soviet factory and artisanal production.