House-museum of Pushkin in Tsarskoe Selo

In Tsarskoye Selo, on the corner of Dvortsovaya and Pushkinskaya streets, there is a beautiful house with a mezzanine that belonged to Yakov Kitaev, a personal attendant of Emperor Nicholas I. However, this house went down in history as the House-museum of Pushkin where the latter spent the first, happiest, months of joint life with his young wife.

Kitaev commissioned the architect Gornostaev with the construction of the house in 1827. In 1831, Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin and his young wife Natalya Goncharova, just married, rented this house and lived in it for 5 months. Before that, they lived in Moscow on Stary (Old) Arbat, but Pushkin was much irked by the neighborhood with his mother-in-law with whom he had very poor relations. For this reason, he decided to go to Tsarskoye Selo for summer.

In the house of Kitaev they rented 8 rooms, including a large mezzanine. Pushkin turned this mezzanine into his study. He wrote many poems there, as well as the Tale of Tsar Saltan and the Letter of Onegin to Tatyana. There was almost no furniture in the study, so books were just on the floor. Nowadays, at the museum there were restored almost the same interiors as in the time of Pushkin.