The National Pushkin Museum in St. Petersburg - one of the oldest literary museums in Russia and the first and the largest National museum dedicated to the poet Alexander Pushkin - was founded in 1879 on the initiative of Professors and students of the Imperial Alexander (formerly, Tsarskoe Selo) Lyceum. The main goal of the creation of the Pushkin Museum was to concentrate in it "all materials connected with life and creative work of Alexander Pushkin".

The National Pushkin Museum is the center for collecting, research and promotion of materials that tell about life and creative work of the great poet. The Museum holds tens of thousands of works of art connected with Pushkin's life, work and epoch; nearly all of the poet's personal belongings that have preserved to the present time; illustrations for his works; the poet's portraits; hundreds of portraits of Pushkin's contemporaries; paintings dedicated to different episodes of the poet's life; and views of various places connected with his biography. The authors of the majority of these works are celebrated Russian artists of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The Museum also stores works of applied art, furniture and a rich book collection, including all of the poet's lifetime editions and the rarest books with autographs of Pushkin's contemporaries. The National Pushkin Museum has become the most important research and educational center for Pushkin studies in Russia. About half a million people visit the Museum annually.

The National Pushkin Museum presents a museum complex which includes the literary exposition "Alexander Pushkin. Life and Creative work" and four memorial branch museums: the Pushkin Apartment Museum, the Lyceum Museum, the Pushkin Country House Museum, and the Nekrasov Apartment Museum, that are located in the buildings nominated the architectural monuments of the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries.