Carry on as far as the outer, Garden Ring and turn right into the main road for the Chekhov House-Museum (6 ul Sadovaya Kudrinskaya), in pink stucco, easy to spot because of the theatrical billboard in the courtyard plastered with notices for Chekhov's plays. Ignore it, as you go round the back to the museum entrance, and look in the other direction at the door still bearing the modest bronze plate of 'Dr A P Chekhov'.The museum itself contains other touching reminders of Chekhov's life as a writer and as a physician and the final room, leading to the exit, is now a lecture hall, with a display of first editions and translations, and children's portraits of the writer, made during a school visit. Leaving the museum, turn left, then left again into ul Povarskaya. The mansion on the left, set back from the road, now the Central House of Writers, is the original of the Rostovs' home in War and Peace.Chekhov is well-known abroad, the poet Mikhail Lermontov much less so, and the Lermontov House-Museum (2 ul Malaya Molchanovka, metro Arbatskaya) is correspondingly less frequented - and harder to find. The simplest way, leaving the Chekhov Museum, is to continue down Noviskiy bulvar and turn left into ul Noviy Arbat (formerly Prospekt Kalinina). The museum is in a small street just before you reach the large bookshop on the left - a dingy pile of concrete and glass, but still selling Russian books, translations, language courses, CDs, records and cassettes, all of which are still relatively cheap in Russia.Lermontov lived from 1829 to 1832 in a two-storey clapboard house, painted pink, which now eloquently recalls the poet and his time.

There is also every chance that you will be alone here, apart from the ladies who will be anxious to hand you the English-language room guides, as you potter around in your overshoes, looking at Lermontov's sketches and watercolours, his manuscripts, books and other possessions. The poet's work may be unfamiliar, but anyone can read the evidence here of his links with the Romanticism of his age, which was also that of Byron and Lamartine. This is the epitome of the Moscow literary museum, with the austere charm of something that you hardly find in Britain any more: a cultural institution that does not see itself primarily as a device for marketing the past.It is a rather different story at the next stop, the Pushkin Apartment-Museum (53 ul Arbat, metro Smolenskaya). Cross the Noviy Arbat by the underpass and cut through to the tourist-ridden, pedestrian Arbat, avoiding the temptation to pay over the odds for a can of some soft drink. Pushkin lived briefly in the house at the end of the street, on the left-hand side.

You will be asked to assemble in the basement, then given a guided tour of the ground floor by a young woman whose manner poignantly recalls the heyday of the Soviet factory visit. She delivers her commentary, room-by-room, like a Young Pioneer reciting the production figures for the Donbas, while using a pointer to direct your attention to the exhibits. She will not fail to mention the letter in which Pushkin remarked how happy he was in this house; you will not fail to wonder how he would feel if he could see it now.In fact, he only lived here for three months, in 1831, immediately after his (ultimately very unhappy) marriage to Natalya Goncharova. Upstairs, his apartment has been refurbished in the spirit of the Queen's House at Greenwich; that is, as it might have looked if Pushkin had done his shopping at Harrods and never used the chairs.

The guide goes off to collect her next group and you are allowed to wander around freely, though pursued by a recorded commentary, quoting passages from the writer's work: piped poetry. 'This is the house where Pushkin was happy,' it ends, in case you had not grasped the theme of this Pushkin Experience. If nothing else, it is a fine demonstration of Pushkin's apotheosis: like Shakespeare in Stratford, he has become less a poet and more a brand name, which proved as acceptable to the former socialist regime as it now does to the New Capitalism.Tolstoy has not quite suffered the same fate, though it is disturbing to learn that the Tolstoy Museum (11 ul Prechistenka, formerly ul Kropotkinskaya), which was in perfectly good order when I visited it last year, has been closed for 'redecoration'; it is due to reopen this month. This is Tolstoy's house, a well-preserved building of 1822, with an exhibition of books, manuscripts etc, giving a clear, chronological account of the writer's life. One can only hope it has not been revamped as the Tolstoy Experience.