🖼 Ostafyevo Museum-Estate: the “Russian Parnassus”

Москва, пос. Рязановское, с. Остафьево, Троицкая ул., 1А

The estate of the Princes Vyazemsky, where Karamzin wrote his “History of the Russian State” and where Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Gogol and Griboyedov were guests; the palace has an Oval Hall with a painted ceiling.

The palace was built at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries under Prince Andrey Vyazemsky, presumably to a design by Ivan Starov.
Karamzin, who was married to the owner's daughter, lived at Ostafyevo for 12 years, from 1804 to 1815.
On 2 October 1803 a balloon landed here carrying Praskovya Gagarina, the first Russian woman to go up in the air, and André-Jacques Garnerin.
In 1899, for Pushkin's centenary, Count Sergey Sheremetev turned the estate into a public Pushkin museum.
The Oval Hall for receptions is decorated with sixteen Corinthian half-columns of artificial marble.
Pyotr Vyazemsky's library numbered 5,000 volumes by poets and writers of Pushkin's time.
After the museum closed in the 1930s there was a military hospital here, then a rest home of the Council of Ministers; museum status returned on 5 December 1988.

Part of these routes

Ostafyevo and Dubrovitsy: Karamzin and the crowned church