Nizhny spent decades as a closed city and its culture grew inward: mirrored merchant palaces, a contemporary art centre inside a Kremlin arsenal, Gorky's preserved rooms, street art on tannery brick and wooden churches in the oak woods.
The Sirotkin mansion on the upper embankment holds the Russian collection: Roerich, Kustodiev, Repin, and Makovsky's 6x7m 'Minin's Appeal' in a hall built for it. Open 11:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays, Thursdays to 20:00.
The Volga-Vyatka branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts fills a restored 1840s military arsenal inside the Kremlin walls with rotating shows of Russian video, sound and installation art, plus a design bookshop.
Merchant Sergey Rukavishnikov's 1877 palazzo is the city's most extravagant interior: stucco caryatids, a mirrored ballroom, a cast-iron staircase and gilded parlours restored to their 19th-century state. Entry by guided tour only.
The lower town's merchant street runs from Blinov's arcade to the Stroganov Church of 1719, whose limestone carving of grapes and pomegranates is the finest Naryshkin baroque on the Volga. Facades are floodlit after dusk.
The museum's second building hangs Western European painting — Cranach, Flemish still life, Italian baroque — alongside Russian avant-garde rooms with Kandinsky, Malevich and Rozanova canvases. Open 11:00–18:00, closed Tuesdays.
Literary café with mismatched armchairs, a wall of second-hand books and poetry readings most Thursday evenings. Borsch, syrniki and Georgian wine by the glass; the courtyard tables are quieter than the street room.
Maxim Gorky's 1902–1904 flat survives down to his writing desk, Chaliapin's piano and the dining table where Chekhov and Repin sat. Eleven rooms of Nizhny intelligentsia life, furnished with the family's own possessions.
Russian repertoire has run here since 1935 in an 1896 hall of rococo tiers and a single vast chandelier; every September the Boldino Autumn festival fills the programme with Pushkin-based operas and ballets.
Fourteen timber buildings moved from Volga villages stand in oak forest south of the city: two 17th-century log churches, a windmill and peasant izbas you can walk into, complete with painted looms and stoves.
Ilyinskaya climbs the ravine through the old artisans' quarter: carved wooden merchant houses, the Church of Elijah the Prophet founded in 1655, and restored 19th-century shopfronts now holding craft studios and small bookshops.
The old tannery street below the Kremlin is the heart of Nizhny's street-art scene: Nikita Nomerz's giant faces on derelict brick, the Tolk gallery's rotating shows and murals painted straight onto crumbling warehouses.
A 1930s constructivist cinema reopened as an arthouse centre: restored Soviet prints, subtitled European premieres, lectures and a lobby bar that works as the meeting point for the city's film and design crowd.