Sergei Diaghilev Museum, 19th-century cultural heritage mansion in Perm, Russia

The Sergei Diaghilev Museum is a 19th-century two-story mansion with classical proportions and refined architectural details like decorated window frames and ornamental moldings. The exterior preserves its original style, showing the typical residential architecture that was common in Perm during that era.

The house was built in 1852 and bought in 1862 by Pyotr (P. D.) Diaghilev, a retired Ministry of Finance official and the grandfather of Sergei Diaghilev. He had it rebuilt in late Russian classicism style to a design by provincial architect R. I. Karvovsky. Sergei spent his childhood and youth here, and the family sold the house in 1891.

Contemporaries called the house "Permian Athens"; on Thursdays the city's intelligentsia gathered here to play music, sing and stage home performances. Sergei Diaghilev's first music teacher was E. E. Dennemark, a teacher at the Perm men's gymnasium, and the boy took part in concerts at home and at the school. The museum holds family photographs, estate objects from Bikbard and Nikolayevskoye, and costumes of dancer Yuri Zorich.

The mansion stands at the corner of Sibirskaya Street and Pushkina Street, at No. 33 Sibirskaya, in central Perm. The museum forms a single complex with Gymnasium No. 11, which occupies the building; the entrance is from the street side. Look for the memorial panel on the facade, unveiled on 19 August 2013.

The house appears on the 500 Ural franc note issued in 1991. In 2007 a sculpture of Sergei Diaghilev by Ernst Neizvestny was installed in its concert hall, and in 2013 a memorial panel on the facade was unveiled in the presence of Diaghilev's descendants.