The Goncharov Literary Museum, housed in a handsome classical building at 3/4 Novy Venets Boulevard in the heart of the historic centre, is dedicated to Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, author of Oblomov and the travel memoir The Frigate Pallada. Goncharov was born in Simbirsk in 1812 and the museum holds manuscripts, first editions, personal correspondence, and period furniture that recreate the literary world of mid-19th-century Russia.
The museum also covers Goncharov's other major novels — A Common Story and The Precipice — and his career as a civil servant and censor. The building has a pleasant reading room and changing literary exhibitions. For anyone interested in Russian literature, this is a more rewarding stop than the Lenin sites; for everyone else, the Novy Venets Boulevard setting is reason enough to pass by.