The Vladimir Dal Russian State Literature Museum is the largest museum in Russia of the history of Russian literature, created on the initiative of Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich. As of 2021, the museum consisted of 12 departments, and its collections comprise more than 600,000 storage units.
The museum's directorate is at building 15, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow.
History The Vladimir Dal Russian State Literature Museum has a rich and complex history. According to the author of the concept of the country's central literary museum, Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruyevich (1873–1955), the idea for the museum took shape as early as 1903, when he was living in exile in Geneva. The history of the present museum traces back to the creation of two museums dedicated to the legacy of Russian authors of classics. Moscow State A. P. Chekhov Museum, founded in October 1921. Its collections are held mainly in the funds of the Dal museum, which traces its lineage from that dateVinogradova K. M. Gosudarstvennyy literaturnyy muzey (1921–1960 gg.) // Voprosy raboty muzeev literaturnogo profilya. M., 1962. pp. 51–93. and was preparing to mark its centenary in October 2021.
The initiative to create a museum dedicated to another author of Russian classics, F. M. Dostoevsky, was also founded in 1921, on the eve of the writer's centenary. The Dostoevsky Museum was founded in 1928, and in 1940 it became part of the country's main literary museum.
Of particular significance in the history of the Dal museum is the establishment in 1933, on the initiative of V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich, of the Central Museum of Fiction, Criticism and Journalism. Its collections included museum objects acquired, among other things, as a result of the work of the state Commission for the Identification of Monuments of Literature and Art of the Peoples of the USSR Located Abroad, established in 1931.
Considerable financial resources were allocated to support the commission's work, including from gold and foreign exchange reserves. Given how difficult the period at the turn of the 1920s–1930s was for the USSR, it becomes evident that the creation and development of the main literary museum of a literature-centric country was a paramount state objective.
On 16 July 1934, by order of People's Commissar of Education A. S. Bubnov, the Central Museum of Fiction, Criticism and Journalism was abolished, and in its place the State Literary Museum was created, which, according to this order, no longer had legal autonomy and was incorporated into the State Library of the USSR named after V. I. Lenin. A difficult period began for the country's main literary museum, which soon managed to regain its status as an independent cultural institution.
By the late 1930s, the museum's collection numbered hundreds of thousands of relics: manuscripts, books, documents, photographs, paintings, graphics, decorative and applied arts objects, and memorial items. It was at this time that many valuable collections entered the museum, a highly professional team was formed, and intensive scholarly and publishing activities began.
By 1941, the museum's holdings consisted of more than three million storage units and included manuscripts, books, documents, photographs, as well as decorative and applied arts objects and writers' and poets' memorial belongings. That same year, by a decision of the Soviet Government, the majority of items in the manuscript collection were confiscated and transferred to the authority of the Main Archival Administration of the NKVD for the organization of the Central State Literary Archive (now RGALI).
By a decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR of 6 October 1943, On the Organization of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, the State Literary Museum (GLM) was abolished. Only a month and a half later, following a series of appeals to the CC of the AUCP(b), the situation was reconsidered and the museum was reinstated as an independent institution. Once the situation stabilized, the museum resumed building its collections, including manuscript materials. During the war, the museum received about 5,000 documents that had been confiscated from repressed writers and literary figures, and in the 1950s and 1960s it acquired a large quantity of literary and documentary materials. The manuscript collections department currently holds more than 80,000 manuscripts organized into more than 500 collections of Russia's major writers. The museum is now among Russia's leading repositories, whose holdings include handwritten books from the 15th–19th centuries, as well as extremely rare autographs of V. A. Zhukovsky, N. V. Gogol, A. I. Herzen, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky, I. A. Goncharov, A. N. Ostrovsky, F. I. Tyutchev, A. P. Chekhov, A. A. Blok, N. S. Gumilev, V. V. Mayakovsky, M. I. Tsvetaeva, A. A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam, S. A. Yesenin, I. A. Bunin, M. A. Bulgakov, K. G. Paustovsky, K. M. Simonov, M. A. Sholokhov, and others.
Starting from 1940, museum departments organized in the former memorial homes and apartments of Moscow writers began to join the museum, and its extensive collection made it possible to create a full-fledged exhibition in each of the newly formed departments.
On 26 July 1963, pursuant to an order of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, the museum officially received the status of "the leading museum entrusted with coordinating the research and exhibition work of similar museums in the country and providing them with consultative and methodological assistance". Over the following decades, with the direct participation of staff from the country's flagship literary museum, dozens of museums were created in various regions of the USSR, including major ones that are now widely known, and many permanent exhibitions at leading literary museums were updated.
On 20 August 1984, by decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the museum was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples.
Present day In 2014, a part of the museum's holdings was placed in a new building in Shelaputinsky Lane. This had been constructed in the 1830s and 1840s on the foundation of stone chambers dating from the late 18th century. The mansion is planned to house the Museum of Sounding Literature, which will display materials from the sound recording collection created under the direction of Lev Shilov. As part of the modernization project, a national center, "Ten Centuries of Russian Letters", is also planned for house no. 37 on Arbat.
In 2015, the museum suggested forming an Initiative Group of Leading Literary Museums of Russia, which was followed by the establishment of the Association of Literary Museums in 2018. The association operates as a section of the Union of Museums of the Russian Federation.
On 24 April 2017, the country's flagship literary museum received a new official name: Vladimir Dal Russian State Literature Museum. This name fully corresponds not only to the modern mission of the country's largest literary museum, but also to the concept of its main "ideologist", V. D. Bonch-Bruyevich, who believed that the cornerstone condition for the existence of this cultural institution should be a combination of the functions of five cultural institutions: the museum itself, as well as an archive, a library, a research institute, and a publishing house.
Dal is the figure that serves as a metaphor for our museum's mission: we want it to be an internationally recognizable brand, like those of other cultural institutions abroad. We are convinced that the Dal Museum will represent the entire history of Russian literature, which has lasted many centuries both within and beyond our country. (Director Dmitry Bak)
On 29 May 2019, exhibition halls in the museum's new building at 15 Zubovsky Boulevard, in the former tenement house of the Lyuboshchinskys, opened to visitors.
As of 2021, the museum's holdings comprised more than 600,000 storage units. Its research library holds more than 175,000 volumes. It holds personal archives of writers and figures of Russian culture from the 18th to 20th centuries, engravings of the 17th and 18th centuries with views of Moscow and Petersburg, painted portraits, miniatures depicting statesmen, handwritten and early printed books of spiritual content, the first books of civil print from the Petrine era, extremely rare books with autographs, manuscripts, drawings by writers, paintings, rare photographs, and copies of works by Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Radishchev, Nikolay Karamzin, Alexander Griboyedov, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and other materials related to the history of Russian classical and contemporary literature, numbering more than half a million storage units.
Directors 1933–1940 — Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruyevich 1940–1941 — Nikolai Vasilyevich Boyev 1941–1944 — Polina Lvovna Vaynshenker 1945–1946 — Ivan Grigoryevich Klabunovsky 1946–1955 — Boris Pavlovich Kozmin 1955–1959 — Nikolai Ivanovich Sokolov 1960–1966 — Nikolai Fyodorovich Piyashev 1966–1972 — Alexander Dmitrievich Timrot 1972–2006 — Natalia Vladimirovna Shakhalova 2006–2013 — Marina Semyonovna Gomozková 2013–present — Dmitry Petrovich Bak
Departments