The first museum devoted to Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was opened in Moscow in 1928. It was housed in a building of the Mariinsky Hospital for the poor. The future great Russian writer was born there. The modest dwelling of the Dostoevsky family remained almost intact to our days.
Mariinsky Hospital is located in Novoslobosky District. The hospital built in 1806 became one of the first Russian medical institutions where absolutely all people could be treated regardless of their financial situation and social class. In 1821 Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky was appointed there as a headquarters physician. He was assigned a 2-room apartment in a building of the hospital.
A year earlier, on January 14, 1820, he married Maria Fyodorovna Nechaeva, daughter of a merchant in the Third Guild, and on October 30, 1821, when they already lived at the hospital, a second son was born to them. It was the future great Russian writer, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The Dostoevsky had 7 children: 4 sons и 3 daughters.
In 1831 Mikhail Dostoevsky was able to acquire a small estate in Darovoye near Zaraysk. The village had 11 households and 70 serfs. Since that time the Dostoevsky spent much time in the country. In 1836 Maria Fyodorovna, mother of Fyodor Dostoevsky, got severely ill and died. Mikhail Dostoevsky was very upset by her death, retired and moved to Darovoye. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, just after his father moved to Darovoye in 1837, left the Moscow apartment and went to Petersburg to study at Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute.
The arrangement of furniture in the apartment was restored based on the memoirs of the younger brother Andrei Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The personal belongings of Dostoevsky were given to the museum by the former wife of Dostoevsky, Anna Grigorievna, as well as his children.
There are two big rooms in the apartment. The whole family gathered in the sitting-room. It was the biggest room of the apartment. Its walls are light yellow. The other room, its walls were blue, is divided in two parts by a partition. One part of the room was used as a kitchen and a dining-room. A bookcase and book shelves were in the other part of the room.
