Literary and Art Museum Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva — the House of two Talented Sisters

Museums and Exhibitions • Other places

The Literary and Art Museum of Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva is dedicated to the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva and her sister Anastasia who lived in Alexandrov in 1915-1917. It is known that Anastasia Tsvetaeva arrived in the town together with her husband, a chemist, who was sent here on an assignment to build a military plant. Poetess Marina Tsvetaeva often visited her sister who lived in the Lebedevs’ house, rented by Anastasia’s husband. Later, this wooden building became the core of the museum. Its exposition is devoted not only to the life of Marina and Anastasia in this town, but also to the poetess Tsvetaeva’s creative work and her relationship with another outstanding poet, Osip Mandelstam, who visited her here.

Anastasia Tsvetaeva was also literary gifted, but she has always stayed in the background, so the Tsvetaevy’s Museum is an attempt to remedy this situation. It keeps a lot of her photos and personal things, including a piano. Visitors of the museum plunge into the atmosphere of Alexandrov of the 1910s: the first part of the exposition describes the town image of those years and the life of its citizens. All this can be seen if look through the windows of partially reconstructed buildings right in the museum: a house of a well-to-do family, a church and a tavern.

One of the museum excursions is devoted to the role of Alexandrov in the days of political repressions in the USSR. That time it became a refuge for many repressed men of science and art, who were forbidden to live in Moscow. Alexandrov was a place of exile for Sergey Maslennikov, a doctor who successfully treated oncology patients, including writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; the Hungarian artist Victor Toot and the writer Jozsef Lengyel. This excursion is conducted in another building of the museum, the former Baranovs’ factory.

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