History

The idea took shape in December 1905, when a commission planning a Pushkin monument, led by Sergei Oldenburg and Aleksey Shakhmatov, proposed something bolder than a statue. Why not a museum bearing Pushkin’s name, gathering manuscripts, belongings and first editions of Russia’s great writers? Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich backed the plan. A purpose-built Neoclassical Odeon was envisioned but never funded. In 1907 Minister of Finance Vladimir Kokovtsov proposed acquiring Alexander Onegin’s vast Pushkin collection, assembled in Paris since 1879; negotiations dragged on until Onegin’s death in 1925, though most of it eventually reached Russia. The Revolution shut down independent institutions, but Pushkin House survived, absorbed into the Academy of Sciences in 1918. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Lev Kamenev and Maksim Gorky served as honorary directors, shielding it through upheaval. In 1927 the institute moved from cramped Academy rooms to the Customs House on the Strelka, built to Giovanni Francesco Lucchini’s designs between 1829 and 1832. Alexander Blok’s final poem, “To Pushkin House,” addressed the earlier Kunstkamera rooms, invoking Pushkin’s legacy as a flicker of hope amid post-revolutionary chaos. The institute stayed open through the Siege of Leningrad, though staff and manuscripts were largely evacuated. Postwar scholars there included Boris Eikhenbaum and Dmitry Likhachov.