Aksakov House-Museum (Ufa)

The Aksakov House-Museum in Ufa is a memorial museum in the wooden house where the Russian writer Sergei Timofeyevich Aksakov spent the first years of his life at the end of the 18th century. The house belonged to his maternal grandfather, collegiate councillor Nikolai Stepanovich Zubov, and is considered the oldest surviving wooden building in Ufa: it is built of Ural larch and holds the status of a cultural heritage site of regional significance. The museum itself opened in 1978, and in 1991, when Aksakov's 200th birthday was marked and UNESCO declared the year his anniversary year, a memorial exhibition was opened inside the house. The interiors were recreated partly from the descriptions Aksakov himself left in his autobiographical novella "Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson".

The House and Garden in Aksakov's Memoirs

"We lived then in the provincial town of Ufa and occupied the huge Zubov wooden house... The house was covered with boards but not painted; it had darkened from the rains, and the whole massive building had a rather gloomy look. The house stood on a slope, so the windows looking onto the garden were very low to the ground, while the dining-room windows facing the street, on the opposite side of the house, rose some three arshins above the ground... the front porch had more than twenty-five steps, and from it the Belaya river could be seen almost across its whole width" (the river can no longer be seen from the porch today — a park and modern city buildings block the view, but the porch itself has survived).

"The two children's rooms, where I lived together with my sister, plastered and painted light blue, adjoined the bedroom and had windows looking onto the garden; the raspberry bushes planted beneath them grew so tall that they reached a quarter of the way up into our windows, which delighted me and my inseparable companion, my little sister. The garden, though, while fairly large, was not beautiful: here and there bushes of currant, gooseberry and barberry, two or three dozen scrawny apple trees, round flower-beds with marigolds, crocuses and asters, and not a single large tree, no shade at all; but even this garden gave us pleasure, especially my sister, who had never seen mountains, fields or forests..." (raspberries no longer grow in the garden, but tall trees now shield the museum grounds from the noise of the big city and create a sense of seclusion and cosiness; the children's rooms hold toys like those Aksakov's generation played with, and the interior of the children's bedroom has been recreated with a canopied bed, a lace bedspread and old wooden chests).

Rooms and Exhibits

Besides the children's rooms, the house-museum shows:

• the grandfather's study
• the dining room
• the drawing rooms
• Maria's study

They hold documentary displays and photographs about the Aksakov family. Visitors can see, for example, a model of the church that once stood where the Monument to the Friendship of Nations now stands, in which Maria Zubova and Timofei Aksakov were married. Friends and relatives of Maria considered the marriage unequal: a brilliantly educated, witty and talented young woman who shone in Ufa society ended up married to the taciturn Aksakov, who lacked the manners expected in society and disliked society itself, preferring country life. The prospect of leaving Ufa was a real blow to Maria, and she tried to postpone the move by every possible means; as it happened, circumstances worked in her favour — their long-awaited son was a weak, sickly child in his first years, which required staying in a large city close to doctors.

The Hall of Aksakov's Descendants

A separate hall, opened a few years ago, is dedicated to Aksakov's children and grandchildren — in particular Olga Grigoryevna, the writer's favourite granddaughter, for whom he wrote the fairy tale "The Scarlet Flower". As an adult she devoted herself to public work and in 1889, near the town of Belebey, founded a kumis-cure establishment, now the S. T. Aksakov sanatorium. She also assembled a rich archive of talented members of the Aksakov family, preserved it, partly published it, and passed the rest on for safekeeping. The walls of the house-museum also display the Aksakov family tree, engravings and photographs of 19th- and 20th-century Ufa, and N. Bogatov's illustrations for the first edition of "The Scarlet Flower".