Pictures:
07.17.2013
Today we went to
Trigorskoye – an estate of Pushkin’s friends where he spent a lot of time
during his exile. We waited for the tour for about 40 minutes, but the guide
was the main curator of this museum so the tour was very interesting: he read a
lot of poems and was talking with rapture. This estate of Praskovia Wolf
(Osipova by her second husband) and her children was always full with a lot of
young people. That is probably why there are more real objects and details
saved from 19th century than in Mikhailovskoye. Now there are 8
rooms completely restored as they looked like at Pushkin times. Every room is
telling some stories about Pushkin, his life, his loves and his poems. He found
a second family here because he had bad relations with his own parents: for his
mum he was the most unloved child of all and his dad agreed to spy on him and
control his every step when Alexander was exiled to Mikhailovskoye. In the
family Osipova-Wolf he was admired, loved and respected. Plus Praskovia Wolf
had several pretty and interesting daughters, who ran out of the house just
before the lunch to see if Pushkin was arriving by a river shore.
The daily routine of
Eugene Onegin was copied from a day of the author; a well-known library room
which Onegin checked from cover to cover being bored in the village is restored
exactly how it looked like when Pushkin was spending time in it. Aleksey, a son
of Osipova, was often the first judge of Alexander’s poems and his destiny was
predicted so correctly in the Lenski, a character of the poem “Eugene Onegin”.
He was a student of philosophic department in Derpt University, went to the
army after graduation, never made a career there, so settled down in his parents’
estate, became an aristocrat and a landlord, organizes kind of a harem of serf
girls, encouraged corporal punishments and absolutely forgot thoughts about
liberty and reforming of a serfdom in Russia. Evpraksia, the youngest daughter
of Osipova, was the girl that Pushkin played with as with a child, but several
years later he dedicated one of the most beautiful poem “Winter morning”. We
saw a bathhouse where Alexander and his friends, also great artists and
writers, were having parties and drinking hot punch whole nights. There was an
atmosphere of friendship, flirt, love and an incredible thirst for living
everywhere here at that time. And there was an endless anguish in Pushkin’s
heart after the whole family Osipova-Wolf left for Riga to live with the husband
of Anna Kern (a niece of Praskovia Wolf). The reason was serious: there was a
love affair between Pushkin and Kern, and her aunt was worrying about niece’s
reputation.
After the house we
visited a park around, made in English style, with a sundial and flower dial,
“green hall” and another 400 years old oak which in Stephen Báthory was planted on the place of
mass grave. There were a lot of beautiful ponds and fragile water lilies. We
spent about an hour in a “green hall” just chatting and smelling these
wonderful forest aromas. On our way home we bought freshly-salted cucumbers, bilberries
and mushrooms from old women in the village. They were so surprised and touched
when my dad gave them more money than they asked - “for a start” (how we say in
Russia). We had a great lunch with all that delicious food at home. After it we
discussed the future of Russian language and played poker.
In the evening we
decided to explore the road to Petrovskoye, the estate of Pushkin’s great
grandfather Hannibal. This estate is smaller than Mikhailovskoye and
Trigorskoye and the house is made more in aristocratic style. However, I liked
it and a park around: there is a grotto-pavilion just on the bank of a
beautiful lake Kuchina, from where you can see not only Mikhailovskoye on the
other side of the lake but also a house of Petrovskoye through the park mall.
We ate green sour apples from the trees in the garden and admired huge oaks and
elms on the periphery of the park. It was quiet and desert in the park, where
drops of recent rain were whispering on the leaves creating a magical aroma of
summer freshness…
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