Moscow City Guide - Culture

The city's cultural history spans all the arts and, having been the capital for so long, much of the nation's cultural effort was concentrated here. Notable achievements include the long period of icon painting up to the time of Peter the Great. The most famous icon painter of the Russian Orthodox Church, Andrey Rublyov, had his workshop and was buried in the Spaso-Andronikovsky Monastyr (Monastery of the Saviour and Andronicus) in the eastern suburbs of the city. The 19th century brought painters such as Ilia Repin whose Realist works portrayed peasants and other ordinary people. The excitement of the Constructivists' avant-garde work, in the early 20th century, was dampened by Stalin's regime and, until recently, Socialist Realism has been the only publicly produced art.

The former Soviet Union took great pride in its cultural institutions and these were often of the very highest calibre. A number of these are based in Moscow, notably the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera Company and the Moscow Circus. Advance tickets can be quite cheap but those purchased from ticket touts on the evening of the performance are usually fairly expensive. Concert and theatre tickets can be purchased at the venues, large hotels or from a range of online booking services that will also deliver tickets for a small fee (tel: (495) 228 0987; website: www.topbilet.ru) or more cheaply from kiosks on almost every main street.
Moscow Out (website: http://eng.moscowout.ru) is an excellent source of listings and information (in several languages, including English) on cultural events in the capital.

Music: The Moscow Conservatory, Nikitskaya ulitsa 13 (tel: (495) 629 9401; website: www.mosconsv.ru), is an important music school, as well as the venue for major concerts - premieres of works by Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitry Shoshtakovich took place here. Pyotr Tchaikovsky taught at the Conservatory but died before public concerts started in 1898. One of the students who he commended for his thesis project was none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff. Concerts take place in both the Great and Small Halls.

The Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, Triumphalaya ploshchad 4/30 (tel: (495) 299 3681), hosts a full programme of symphony and chamber concerts, as well as special festivals and performances of Russian national dance and organ and choral music. The high-quality Russian National Orchestra (tel: (495) 504 0781; website: www.rno.ru) plays here when it is not on tour.

Theatre: Moscow's pre-eminent theatre company is the MKHAT imeni Chekhova (Moscow Art Theatre, named after Chekhov), Kamergersky pereulok 3 (tel: (495) 629 8760; website: www.mxat.ru), founded in 1898. It revolutionised drama in Europe, staging plays by Anton Chekhov and providing a venue for the method-acting techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky. No longer avant-garde, the theatre today continues the tradition of method acting.

The Maly Teatr (Small Theatre), Teatralnaya ploshchad 1 (tel: (495) 623 2621; website: www.maly.ru), has a history of staging plays of political and social satire, notably during the 19th century. Some of Russia's most famous playwrights, including Nikolai Gogol, staged their first plays here. There are performances daily at 1900, although most of these are in Russian. The Taganka Drama and Comedy Theatre, Zemlyanoy val (tel: (495) 915 1217; website: www.taganka.org), has an excellent reputation, earned through its staging of modern classics such as Doctor Zhivago and The Master and Margarita. The Satirikon Theatre (tel: (495) 218 2030; website: www.satirikon.ru) stages many critically acclaimed productions, both contemporary and classical.

Dance: The Bolshoi Ballet and Opera Company, one of the world's most renowned, performs at the Bolshoi Theatre, Teatralnaya ploshchad 1 (tel: (495) 250 7317; website: www.bolshoi.ru), from September to June (performances are daily at 1900 with weekend matinees). The company, formed in 1773, began its rise to fame in 1918. Yuri Grigorovich, who directed the company for decades, until 1995, raised the Bolshoi's status internationally, aided by some formidable dancers. The Bolshoi Theatre, a grand neo-classical building constructed in 1824, is renowned for its size and the quality of the acoustics. However, the theatre is undergoing serious reconstruction and will not be open until 2008. In the meantime, the New Stage at the Bolshoi hosts classic productions, but in less sumptuous surroundings (tel: (495) 250 7317).

Film: Russian film is enjoying something of a renaissance thanks to generous state and private funding. Cinemas are opening in Moscow at the fastest rate in the world, with three Russian films hitting the screens each week in 2007. Although not all of it is good, and even less of it is dubbed or subtitled, at least the domestic film-makers are getting a chance to screen their creations rather than being muscled out by Hollywood blockbusters. Anything by Aleksei Balabanov, director of the highly rated Brat series of films, is worth watching. Also look out for the International Moscow Film Festival in July (website: http://miff.ru/). If you need a Hollywood fix in English, then the Oktyabr cinema (tel: (495) 225 8700) on the Novy Arbat shows films in their native tongue. Sergei Eisenstein captured one of Moscow and Russia's harshest rulers in the films Ivan the Terrible I and II (1945 and 1958 respectively). The famous director also used the Kolisei cinema (now the Sovremennik Theatre) for his Proletcult worker's theatre.

Literary Notes: Moscow has been home to many important writers and has often been the setting for their works. The houses where playwright Anton Chekhov and novelists Leo Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy ulitsa) and Maxim Gorky (Malaya Nikitskaya ulitsa) spent part of their lives, are all open to the public. Philosopher, moral thinker, nobleman, writer of realism and intellectual giant, Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born on his family estate, south of Moscow. In many of his works, Tolstoy illustrates life in the capital, particularly in War and Peace (1865-69), considered one of the greatest novels ever written, in which he describes the burning of Moscow during the Napoleonic wars.

Chekhov's play, The Seagull (1896), premiered at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1898. Chekhov and the novelist/playwright Nikolai Gogol, were both buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, in the southwest of the city (see Key Attractions). Fyodor Dostoevsky was born and spent his early years in Moscow, returning to give a stirring speech (as did Ivan Turgenev) at the unveiling of the monument to Alexander Pushkin in 1880 - it was the first public recognition of Russian national literature. Seen as the father of Russian national literature, the best-know works of Pushkin are Eugene Onegin (1825) and Boris Godunov (1824).

Boris Pasternak lived in the outskirts of Moscow (1939-60), among the artists and writers in Peredelinko. It was here that he wrote his sweeping romantic novel about the Russian Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1957). Mikhail Bulgakov set parts of his novel, The Master and Margarita (written in the 1930s, first published posthumously in 1967), in the Central House of Writers restaurant, as well as at Patriarshiye Prudy (Patriarch's Ponds), where the novel begins.

Mikhail Lermontov, the poet and novelist, studied at Moscow University and lived just off present-day Novy Arbat. The house of Ivan Turgenev's mother, where he stayed while in Moscow, can also be visited. More recently, Victor Pelevin, who penned The Clay Machine Gun (1996), has been compared to Martin Amis. Other leading authors of quality fiction are Boris Akunin and Vladimir Sorokin. Other novelists who have recently emerged to critical acclaim are Vladimir Kozlov, Ilya Stogov, Mikhail Elizarov, the duo of Alexander Garos and Aleksei Evdokimov, and Oxana Robski for her tales of Moscow's new rich, so called ‘Russian glamour' novel.

There is no shortage of works by Western novelists set during the Cold War - Moscow was a favourite setting for John Le Carré and there is also the eponymous Gorky Park (1981), written by Martin Cruz Smith.