Novodevichy Cemetery
Park-like burial ground of angels and sculpted monuments beside a sixteenth-century convent, resting place of writers, composers and statesmen.
This guide to Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow opens on a summer day in 1904, when a crowd gathers at a Moscow train station to receive the body of Anton Chekhov, the country's best-loved writer, who has just died in Germany at only forty-four. It follows the string of small absurdities that met his return home, and Maxim Gorky's lasting fury about it. Along the way you'll hear about the cemetery itself, opened just six years earlier beside the old convent walls, and its later reputation as the country's second most prestigious resting place. Wander slowly among the sculpted angels near where the writer lies beside his father.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.