In the space of a 20-minute walk from an apartment where I stay when in Moscow, a remarkable array of literary landmarks can be viewed. From time to time I live at number 10 Three-pond Lane; next door, at number eight, the poet Marina Tsvetayeva was born and spent her early childhood. The "Chocolate House" where Marina grew up has long since been demolished. The building of the Loewensohn printing works remains. Its Scottish baronial design, with battlements and turrets, intrigued the young Marina and her sister Asya. It became their fairy-tale castle.
There are no ponds now at Three-pond Lane - but there is just one a short stroll away, at the square known as the Patriarch's Ponds. Here Mikhail Bulgakov set the opening scene in his masterpiece The Master and Margarita. The characters Berlioz and Bezdomny sat on a park bench and talked of literature. Unexpectedly they were confronted by a strange figure. Impossibly tall and clad in a vast tweed, a bizarre man named Koroviev stunned the pair of critics. He told them, among other things, that he had spoken earlier in the day to the longdead Immanuel Kant. Berlioz made to leave, saying he had an important appointment.
Koroviev told him there was no point. Anyushka had, after all, spilled the oil. Berlioz failed to get the cryptic message. He walked from the park on to Malaya Bronnaya Street, slipped on a small pool of cooking oil, fell in front of a moving tram and was decapitated. His head rolled down Malaya Bronnaya towards Spiridonovsky Lane.
If one follows the direction taken by Berlioz's head and turns right at the Donna Klara cafe, literary landmarks come thick and fast. In a small park set back from Spiridonovskaya Street a statue of the poet Aleksandr Blok looks out upon the traveller. There appears to be no geographical reason for this commemoration in bronze, but this was the territory of Tsvetayeva, whose Stikhi k Bloky (verses to Blok) pay him tribute.
After Blok's statue comes the house of Alexei Nikolayevich Tolstoy, a distant relative of the great Leo. A nobleman and emigre, Alexei Tolstoy returned to Russia in the 1920s and for the most part wrote in the style expected of Soviet writers. His long historical novel Pyotr Pervyi (Peter the First or Peter the Great) won him the Stalin prize in 1956 and had genuine literary merit.
Right next door is one of the most remarkably beautiful houses in Moscow. Built by the Ryabushinsky family of wealthy textile industrialists, it became, after his return to Russia in 1928, the palatial home of Maxim Gorky. Although Gorky was portrayed as the quintessential proletarian there was little irony in his occupying such palatial premises. His work earned him vast sums in his lifetime. In a capitalist society he could have easily bought a similarly beautiful mansion. This, however, was the Russia of the Terror; Gorky's death in 1936 may have taken place on Stalin's orders.
Now far less appreciated as a writer than he was in his lifetime, Gorky's house and museum is, all the same, the most visited in Moscow. One suspects, however, that more visitors come to admire the stunning artnouveau architecture than to pay tribute to Gorky. A few hundred yards further on, past the Church of the Ascension where Pushkin was married, is Borisoglebsky Lane. At number six Tsvetayeva lived with her husband Sergei Efron in an impossibly unsuitable two-storey apartment from 1914 until she left Russia in 1922.
On June 18th 1939 she returned after 17 years in exile and lived with friends in Moscow until her war-time evacuation to the small and remote town of Yelabuga, where she took her own life in 1941. The precise location of her grave is unknown. Muscovites place fresh flowers, instead, on a window ledge near her commemorative plaque at Borisoglebsky Lane.
Marina Tsvetayeva's house on Borisoglebsky Lane.
