The Nabokov Museum offers guided tours in Russian and in English, both for groups and for individual visitors. Please see the description of the tours below. The cost of the bus tours includes transportation.

 

 

 

 

 

Tour of Rozhdestveno and Vyra Estates

 

A full-day field trip to the Nabokov family estates in the Gatchina area near St. Petersburg (about 50 miles from the city) takes you to the villages of Rozhdestveno and Vyra. Nabokov described the area, with its beautiful scenery and special landmarks, full of the writer’s personal recollections, in his autobiography, Speak, Memory. The locale also formed the setting for the novels Mary, The Defense, The Gift, Ada, and a number of short stories. The guided tour begins with a visit to the site where the Nabokovs’ house once stood on the bank of the Oredezh River. The house did not survive World War II, but remnants of some of the minor structures, which were part of the estate, still stand. And so do some of the old trees. From there the bus takes you to the neighboring Roshdestveno estate that belonged to VN’s uncle, which the writer inherited. The restoration of the Rozhdestveno mansion, which was almost destroyed by fire in 1995, is now nearing completion. After a visit to the local church, near to which VN’s grandparents are buried in a family vault, the tour ends at the Samson Vyrin Museum in the village of Vyra. This literary museum – the site of one of the stories in Pushkin’s Belkin’s Tales, which Nabokov esteemed very highly - lovingly recreates the station-master’s house of the old days. Dinner at the Samson Vyrin Cafe in Vyra will provide a pleasant relaxation at the end of the trip.

 

Costs:

 

·         $30 per person includes tickets to the Station-Master’s Museum.

·         Dinner at the Samson Vyrin  Cafe, about $ 3-4 per person. They accept rubles only.

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Per person: $30  (for a group of eight and more)

 

 

 

 

Tour of the Nabokov Sites in St. Petersburg (Part 1).

 

This is a 2-hour walking tour around the center of St. Petersburg, in the vicinity of Bolshaya Morskaya Street. Our tour guide will show you parts of the city Nabokov knew well when he was a child: the Alexandrovsky garden with its monument to the explorer Przhevalsky (one of the prototypes for Godunov-Cherdyntsev senior in The Gift), the house on the Admiralty Embankment where Vladimir Nabokov’s grandfather, Ivan Rukavishnikov, held a private school for boys, which his own sons attended, and the former English Shop on Nevsky, from where “all sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession” to the anglophile Nabokovs. Such important sightseeing attractions as St. Isaac’s Square, the  monument to Peter the Great (the Bronze Horseman), the Neva Embankment, and Palace Square will also be included in the tour.

 

Cost: $5 per person.

 

 

 

 

 

Tour of the Nabokov Sites in St. Petersburg (Part 2).

 

This 3-hour bus tour will take us along Nevsky Prospect following the route of the horse-drawn carriage (later, the automobile) that every morning took Vladimir Nabokov from the house in Bolshaya Morskaya to the Tenishev School, which he attended from 1911 till 1917. All the buildings that used to attract young VN’s attention along the route are still there. From the former Tenishev school we’ll move on to see “Luzhin’s Aunt’s house”. The apartment building where Lyussya Shulgina (“Tamara” and  “Mary”)  lived is nearby and so is the house where Vera Slonim/Nabokov grew up. We’ll also stop by the Tauride Gardens and the Suvorov Museum – two of the haunts of the young lovers from Speak, Memory and Mary.

This part of the city is also where many of the Silver Age artists lived. The term, coined by the poet Anna Akhmatova, is used to describe Russian Culture at the turn of the 20th century.

The Silver Age was one of the most fascinating eras of Russian Culture. In one of his letters to Edmund Wilson Nabokov wrote about that era: “I am a product of that period, I was bred in that atmosphere”.  During the tour we will see the famous Vyacheslav Ivanov Tower, the Muruzi House, and other places reminiscent of the Silver Age.

 

Costs:

$15 per person (for a group of eight and more)

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Tour of the Pushkinsky Dom Institute

 

The Institute, once set up especially to preserve and study Alexander Pushkin’s literary heritage, has since become Russia’s leading center of literary studies.

 

The collection at the Pushkinsky Dom’s Literary Museum  includes manuscripts, personal items, and other memorabilia that belonged to Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian writers. The tour may serve as a visual aid to the history of Russian literature known from Nabokov’s The Gift.  The Institute, located in an impressive 18th century building, is within walking distance of the Nabokov Museum. The Institute staff members will give the tour, and translation will be provided.

 

Per person: $10

 

 

Tour of Dostoevsky Sites in St. Petersburg

 

As we all know, Vladimir Nabokov did not like Dostoevsky’s novels. Nevertheless, St. Petersburg is inseparably linked to Dostoyevsky: the city is the setting for most of his novels and short stories. This walking tour will take you around the Haymarket district, where the events described in Crime and Punishment take place and where the writer himself lived.  The tour will end at the Dostoevsky Memorial Museum.

 

 

 

Per person: $10 (for a group of five and more)