State Pushkin Museum

This guide to the State Pushkin Museum in Moscow opens with the twist that Pushkin himself never set foot in the mansion that now bears his name. It follows the real occupants instead: the retired officer who rebuilt the fire-gutted plot in 1814, the daughter whose marriage brushed against the poet's own wedding, and the Seleznevs who later added a winter garden and coat of arms. Under Soviet rule the mansion cycled through very different lives, from a museum of toys to a shrine for another poet entirely.