The Gorky House/Museum is located near the Patriarchs Pond neighborhood on the Garden Ring, an area made famous by another writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. He lived on Ulitsa Sadovaya, and used his own apartment there as one of the settings for his masterpiece The Master and Margarita. We did not have time to visit it, but I understand it has become a kind of shrine; I wonder if there is a huge black cat sitting in the window...
Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, alias Maxim Gorky (literally 'Bitter"), fared better during his life as a writer than Bulgakov. He was one of Stalin's favorites, and was given the magnificent Ryabushinsky House in 1931 as one of his rewards. After his suspicious death there in 1936 (Russia, after all, is filled with suspicious deaths) his birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod, was renamed for him (this city was the place of internal exile for dissident Andrei Sakharov) as well as the Moscow boulevard Tverskaya (both his birthplace and the boulevard have now been given back their original names).
The Ryabushinsky mansion was originally designed and built by architect Fyodor Shekhtel in 1907 for industrialist and art patron, Stepan Ryabushinsky. It is one of the finest residences in the Art Nouveau style anywhere in the world, both for its exterior and its interior.
The famous central staircase of polished limestone is truly spectacular. The floors are finely crafted parquet. The light fixtures and windows are of lovely colored glass. Gorky's furniture, books and collection of oriental figurines are just as he left them. It is hard to imagine a more creative environment for a writer than here.
On the top floor, reached via a narrow hidden wooden staircase, was a large sky-blue room with a domed skylight, that served as a secret chapel for the Ryabushinsky family. They were members of the Old Believers,a 17th Century sect of Russian Orthodoxy, officially illegal in tsarist times, even though many of Ryabushinsky family and other families were wealthy entrepreneurs and influential political reformers. (When Stephan's house and factories were seized by the Bolsheviks in 1918, he fled to France and continued to be a great industrialist and art patron there.) When Hemingway said "Man can be destroyed but never defeated" he must've had Russians like Stepan Ryabushinsky in mind.
As we were leaving the Gorky House (not that we wanted to -- they were closing for the evening), Yelena pointed out a rather non-descript church across the street. "Pushkin was married in that Church," she said. We fell into a discussion about his beautiful wife, whose flirtations led to the tragic duel that took Pushkin's life in 1836. Yelena
thought that Pushkin's death was also suspicious -- that somehow his wife and the other duelist were part of a plot that used Pushkin's well-known temper to set-up the duel. She also thought that Pushkin name had become such a household word that people, who had never read much of him, automatically called him Russia's greatest
poet. "That's not necessarily true," she said. "Russia has had many great poets."
Who was I to argue with her..
RJ Fensterman
09.14.2008
1-800-884-1721
