Museums opened for free – MK

Every third week of the month you can freely visit cultural points

This is good news against the backdrop of a general increase in prices, including in museums. Now you can go to the “temples of art” for free for a whole week. The Moscow authorities have improved the program that has existed for the last five years: on the third Sunday of every month you could get into the museum for one fee. Now museums distribute open days among themselves in such a way that everyone can visit different art venues for free throughout the week.

A logical solution – it’s strange that they didn’t think of it before. Instead of creating a crowd on Sundays, diffuse the viewing activity throughout the week. There is no pleasure in viewing pictures in a crowd, which will give a head start to the crowd only during rush hour of the Moscow metro. People go to a museum to meditate, think, relax, and it is clear that it is more pleasant to do this in a calm atmosphere. Muscovites and guests of the capital can test the updated schedule, which has turned into a museum open week, from Monday, January 15. But first it is better to check the museum schedule.

So where to go? On Monday, which is a day off in most museums, only two sites are available – the Battle of Borodino Panorama Museum and Zaryadye. On Tuesday there are already four points. These are the Gulag History Museum, the Vasily Nesterenko Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Darwin Museum. On Wednesday – five sites: Losev House on Arbat (the only public philosophical library in Russia), the Museum of the Navy (on a ship) in Severnoye Tushino Park, the Integration cultural center named after. Ostrovsky, where Nikolai Alekseevich lived in 1935–1936 and set up a library, the Museum of the History of the Vnukovo District and exhibition halls in Moscow (and these are 20 addresses in the capital).

Thursday will be literary. You can look into the Museum of Yesenin, Tsvetaeva or Vysotsky. Or you can visit the Biological Museum named after Timiryazev or the Museum of Cosmonautics, or go to visit the early 19th century portrait master Vasily Tropinin. Friday is Pushkin’s. On this day, you are invited to visit one of the five sites of the State Literary Museum, named after the “sun of Russian poetry”. Here you can learn not only about the poet himself, fashion and medicine of Pushkin’s time and listen to readings of “Eugene Onegin,” but also immerse yourself in the fate and work of Tyutchev, Turgenev and Andrei Bely.

Saturday is Paustovskaya. On the first weekend, the Moscow museum of the writer and his house-museum in Tarusa open their doors to visitors free of charge. There is a reason to escape to the old quiet town where Konstantin Georgievich spent the last 13 years of his life – in a small log house on a cliff. Here he wrote the stories “A Time of Great Expectations”, “Throw to the South”, chapters from “The Golden Rose”, many short stories and articles, and also contributed to the return of Tsvetaev’s creativity to the Russian reader. There is also an alternative for Saturday – an exhibition hall of the history of the war in Afghanistan in Perov, which, with the help of documentary showcases and installations, will immerse you in the peaceful and military historical context of 1970–1980

years.

On the last day off, you can go to the Moscow Defense Museum, the Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad, the Shilov or Glazunov Galleries, the Bulgakov Museum or the Gogol Scientific Library. Or visit one of the seven sites of the Museum of Moscow and learn more about the history of the capital. By the way, at one of them – at the Gilyarovsky Museum – there is a small but interesting exhibition “Constructivist trends in the work of Alexei Shchusev. From sketches and ideas to reality”, dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the architect, which was celebrated last year.

It must be said that the list of sites participating in museum week is likely to expand. We’ll see you in February – next museum week.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29195 dated January 16, 2024

Newspaper headline:
Museums opened for free