How Is the Memory of Yury Nechayev-Maltsov Preserved Within the Walls of the Pushkin Museum?

How is the memory of Yury Nechayev-Maltsov preserved within the walls of the Pushkin Museum? The Egyptian Hall bears his name, and on the façade of the museum there is a memorial plaque with a bas-relief portrait of Yury Stepanovich.

And rightly so: Yury Stepanovich Maltsov was, together with Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, one of the two principal founders of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, today the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Tsvetaev, to whom the idea belongs, who conceived this museum, who spent six years promoting the project, presented it to the Tsar and found the patrons, is truly the spiritual and intellectual father of the museum. But Maltsov, essentially, gave it physical life.

Emperor Nicholas II personally donated 200,000 roubles towards the creation of the museum, and the government contributed the same amount. The merchant's widow Alexeyeva gave 150,000 roubles on condition that the museum be named after Alexander III. Other private donors put in sums ranging from 500 to 30,000 roubles: Kharitonenko, Tretyakov, Soldatenkov, Protopopov, Shelaputin and Morozov. Nechayev-Maltsov gave 300,000 at once, and by the end of construction the total of his contributions exceeded 2 million roubles.

Marina Tsvetaeva writes that “Nechayev-Maltsov became the chief, broadly speaking the only donor of the museum, its physical creator just as my father was its spiritual one... The Alexander III Museum is my father's fourteen years of selfless labour and three Maltsov millions, just as selfless.”