Theatrical Museum

a scholarly, cultural, and educational institution that collects and preserves original materials and documents on the history of the theater. The most important theatrical museums in the USSR are the A. A. Bakhrushin Central Theatrical Museum and the M. I. Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow and the Theatrical Museum in Leningrad.

Museums of the national theatrical arts are maintained by individual republics of the USSR in Kiev, Yerevan (the Museum of Literature and the Theater), Baku, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Riga. Museums are affiliated with several major Soviet theaters: in Moscow, the Moscow Art Academic Theater, the Bolshoi and Malyi theaters, the Central Puppet Theater, and the Vakhtangov Theater; in Leningrad, the S. M. Kirov Theater of Opera and Ballet, the M. Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theater, and the Malyi Theater of Opera and Ballet; and in Yaroslavl, the F. Volkov Yaroslavl Theater.

Theatrical museums also include memorial museums, for example, those of K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, as well as apartment-museums and memorial rooms, including those of M. N. Ermolova, F. I. Chaliapin, and A. V. Nezhdanova. The Leningrad Circus has the world’s only museum on the history and the technical aspects of the circus.

Theatrical museums in the USSR conduct scholarly and educational work and arrange museum tours, lectures, and evenings devoted to specific themes in theater studies. They publish the most valuable works from their collections.

Theatrical museums outside the USSR include the museums attached to the Comedie Franchise and the Opera in Paris, the Finnish National Theater in Helsinki, the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo, La Scala in Milan, and the Shakespeare Memorial Museum in Stratford-on-Avon. Valuable materials on the history of European theater are housed in the National Library in Vienna and the Max Reinhardt Institute (Vienna-Salzburg).