Picture-Museum “One day in the Fifties”

In 2022, Elina Arsenyeva visited Tesovo-Nytylsky for the first time and was amazed at how well the signs of the 1950s have been preserved here. “We need to make a museum in this village! The whole village is already a museum!” – She decided to start collecting and restoring exhibits and searching for premises.

She found it quickly – a two-room flat in a house built in 1955. The original layout and wood-fired titanium were preserved, the previous owners left a lot of authentic things and the family archive, which was especially valuable.

The name “Picture-Museum” came as soon as the room was found: the furnishings perfectly matched Tatiana Yablonskaya’s painting “Morning” from 1954. This painting was included in the textbook “Native Speech”, and all schoolchildren of the country wrote essays on it for decades. And now you can get inside this painting, as you dreamed in your childhood, to spend the whole day there in sunlight and silence, for quiet studies.

In 2023 Picture-Museum “One day in the Fifties” already welcomed its first visitors.

Museum for individual visits

The museum is a flat in a residential building built in 1955, which recreates the atmosphere and everyday processes of the Soviet 1950s. The atmosphere of the main room is as close as possible to the one depicted in the painting “Morning” by Tatiana Yablonskaya.

The point of the museum is not to look at things, but to live your day as a person of the 1950s: to make handicrafts, spend leisure time, eat and rest “as it was then”.

The whole exposition is interactive: visitors touch and study things, read books, use crockery, melt wood-fired titanium, use tools for needlework. The clock is ticking, the cuckoo is cuckooing by the clock. “This is the chair, they sit on it. This is a table, at which they eat.”

All the furnishings are authentic.

Guests will see a cast iron, mechanical desk and wall clocks, a radio, porcelain elephants and lace decor, and 1950s furniture. Breakfast and lunch will be prepared and served according to all the rules of the era. The finale will be a shared photo against the backdrop of a carpet with reindeer.

In addition to household items, the exposition includes the family archive of the former tenants – the Maksimov family: household photos, order books, certificates of honor, trade union cards, etc. The preserved documents make it possible to clearly show what a “noble worker” was in the USSR.

The programme also includes a tour of the working village with a visit to the open-air museum of the Tesovo narrow-gauge railway.