Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russia's most renowned living poet, is giving his house and an extensive art collection to the state as a museum.
The museum, in the writer's colony of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, joins nearby house-museums including those of Boris Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava. It includes paintings by Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Yevtushenko, who opened the museum at a ceremony Saturday, came to prominence during the Soviet Union's so-called cultural "thaw" under Nikita Khrushchev.
One of his best-known poems is 1961's "Babi Yar," which denounces anti-Semitism and the failure of Soviet authorities to build a monument commemorating the Nazi massacre of Jews in Kiev.
