The Memorial House-Museum of A. S. Grin in Old Crimea is the oldest museum of the city of Old Crimea and the first memorial museum of the writer. The creator of the museum Nina Nikolaevna Grin (widow of the writer), to restore the memorial exposition, had to go through many trials. Finally in July 1960 Grin’s house received its first visitors first as a «people’s», and on July 8, 1971 the state memorial house-museum was opened here. In many respects it took place thanks to the efforts and incredible strength of spirit of Nina Nikolayevna Grin, despite all the hardships that fell on her share … Her dream — to create a museum in the house where she and Alexander Stepanovich spent the last hard, but the happiest moments of their lives — was realized! Since February 6, 2001 the museum is a part of the Koktebel Ecological-Historical-Cultural Reserve «M.A. Voloshin’s Kimmeria».
A small white house under a tiled roof in the shade of a dense cozy garden is immersed in the thickets of flowers and twined with vines of grapes. In front of us — the only own house of Alexander Grin for all his long history, full of searches and wanderings life. Here the writer, tormented by a serious illness, felt the long-awaited peace and tranquility. The exposition of the museum consists of two small rooms. One of them fully preserves the memorial atmosphere. A strict iron bed by the window, a couch on which Nina Nikolayevna Grin was on duty at the patient’s bedside, a lomber table that served the writer as a working table and gave him about fifty depicted subjects, a badger skin as a bedside mat, a clock that «does not return the lived moments». Here in the creative imagination continued to build the plot lines of «Unfinished», the last, unfinished novel about the pure and bright people of the «shadow side». Here AS Grin saw out of print his last book — a modest volume of «Autobiographical Tale». Alexander Stepanovich died quiet and bright evening July 8, 1932, having lived in his cottage for a little more than a month.
In the second room — books, publications, copies of manuscripts, old photographs, telling about the acquaintance of the Grin family with the Old Crimea in 1928-1929, about the life of the family after moving here, to the «city of flowers, silence and ruins» in November 1930. It also presents items that belonged to the writer: furniture, personal belongings, books, photographs. This literary and memorial exposition is decorated by the honored worker of arts of the RSFSR, artist-architect S. G. Brodsky and opened by the writer. Brodsky and opened in 1971. It was supplemented in 2005-2006 with the assistance of the famous Moscow photographer Sasha Gusev. The poet Osip Mandelstam stayed and lived in this house in 1933. In 1934 Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky visited Grin’s house. Shocked by the last shelter of the Great Wanderer, he did his best to make the disgraced romantic writer return to his readers and a memorial museum was opened in his house.
The most important events in the life of the museum are traditionally Alexander Grin’s birthday and memorial day. With the support of friends of Grin’s house was revived the annual informal creative holiday of raising the Scarlet Sails on Mount Agarmysh over the Old Crimea at dawn on August 23, the writer’s birthday. The house-museum annually holds thematic exhibitions, literary meetings, concert programs, classes with gifted children (including using materials from Oksana Taranenko’s Live Journal).