russian burnt

We met the other day on a short trip to Kadiya, this is the border of the Kostroma region, the border of Ivanovskaya. We drove along the old Vyatka road – now it is a modern, very good highway with excellent asphalt, signs and a speed limit up to 90 km/h. The road is not very busy, but it is alive, they carry goods with them, ordinary cars drive, and there are forests, swamps on the sides, but if you carefully study the map, you will encounter surprises.

We stopped on the way to the village of Kozlovka and immediately came across a goat peeking out from behind a barn wall. And further along the bridge – behind a fence, a long one-story building covered with light-colored siding, windows covered with insect tulle. It turned out to be a psycho-neurological boarding school for boys. The territory is well-maintained, flowers, roads, everything is clean, tidy, not boring. Patients walk around the garden, walk. But we returned to Kozlovka not because of them. We read on the Internet that in this village there used to be a mansion, the Plautins family lived here since the 18th century, there was a stone mansion, as it turns out, nothing is left now, once a house. instead it was opened for the disabled, so the existing boarding school takes over the same property. Plautins are ordinary Kostroma nobles, one of them, Mikhail Gavrilovich, was a navigator of the northern expedition of Bering in 1773, after which, together with Laptev, he discovered the Arctic Ocean. st. Paul died of scurvy en route from Kamchatka to America on the voyage of the pack boat.

Another Plautin married the sister of the poet Nikolai Ogarev (remember the vows of Herzen and Ogarev?) Anna Platonovna, who also ruled in Kozlovka. In 1880, the estate passed to Nikolai Alekseevich Podsosov, a successful entrepreneur engaged in distillation and brewing. However, it remained in history, most likely thanks to the portrait of the artist Boris Kustodiev (now the painting is in the Russian Museum), which depicted the manufacturer on the terrace of the summer house in Kozlovka, because they were neighbors. (but about Kustodiev and his appearance in these places – a little later). Podsosov founded a vinegar factory in Kozlovka, the construction of which stands by the river, in memory of local residents, in Soviet times it housed a collective farm office, but now there is no trace, it burned down in a building. fire.

Another attraction of Kozlovka is in the cemetery of the Dmitrievskaya Church, built in 1818 by one of the owners, Alexander Yuryevich Pushkin, the cousin of the poet’s mother, Nadezhda Osipovna Gannibal, was buried and they almost grew up. together. Nadezhda Osipovna’s naming of her eldest son was given the honor of making the future poet godfather in absentia (in absentia, because at that time he participated in the famous Italian Suvorov campaign). Uncle Pushkin wrote in his memoirs: “Our regiment was on a campaign at that time, where I received a letter from my sister that my son was named Alexander in memory of him, and I was his successor in absentia.”

Alexander Yuryevich became the founder of the Kostroma branch of the Pushkins, he had three children, one of whom was Lev Alexandrovich, whose fate was generously endowed with heirs who received a good education and honestly served their homeland. One of his daughters, Evgenia Lvovna Pushkina, born in 1851, became a gynecologist and went to St. He operated a maternity hospital in St. Petersburg. In the summer he came to the estate of Novinka’s father – he built two zemstvo schools very close to Kozlovka and at his own expense. Since 1907 she has constantly lived in Novinki and provides medical assistance to the villagers. After the revolution, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR left the estate of Evgenia Lvovna for life, for her merits. She died in 1930 and was buried in the same place with her parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters in the cemetery in Kozlovka she. And his house became a boarding school for the mentally ill elderly, but in 1971, after the completion of the overhaul, it burned down, and the boarding school was moved to Kozlovka. And now there is nothing left of innovations.

Since neither the cemetery nor the church survived, a memorial stone was erected by local historians in the church building, which was rebuilt in 2003 and now houses one of the boarding school buildings. We tried to find him and succeeded with the help of boarding school staff. On a stone hidden among the bushes and flower beds, “Cousin AS is buried here. Pushkin Alexander Yurievich Pushkin, his children and grandchildren. The residents of the orphanage were satisfied with our appearance, asked for cigarettes and generally seemed satisfied. On the way back, we passed a rabbit kennel with white and gray ears sticking out of the cages, and a toilet with plastic buckets under plastic chairs and holes in the seats.

On the old map, many villages were marked around Kozlovka, but now there are only overgrown traces of collective farm plots. Next on the road was the village of Klevantsovo, the former estate of the local collective farm – it is still quite large. To the right of the highway are the ruins of old farms, to the left are the remains of a bus stop and a store, residential buildings and the Vysokovo estate on the high bank of the Medoza River. At one time it belonged to the father of the same Princess Dashkova, a partner of Catherine the Great, the first president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, but later it was resold several times. On May 15, 1837, Emperor II. It is known that Alexander himself visited the Klevantsovskaya station, where he “deigned to take breakfast prepared by Mrs. Grek” – the wife of the then owner of the property, the leader of the Kostroma nobility. At the end of the 19th century, the property belonged to their unmarried daughters, Greek sisters, three old servants who had a very good education – foreign languages, music, painting. In memory of their younger brother, who died prematurely, the Greek sisters, a prominent zemstvo figure, built the Anatolyevsky School in 1881 – it still works and is the only thing that has survived from those times, although the building has been completely rebuilt.

As for the mansion, it once had a magnificent park, but now we can only imagine its scale, thanks to a few old lindens and overgrown acacias. The Greek sisters had two students, and young artists, traveling in a summer peasant car, looked at the estate, among which Boris Kustodiev. One of the girls became his wife. At first, young people visited Vysokovo, but later Kustodiev bought the land nearby and built a Russian-style estate there, which he called Terem. Needless to say, neither the village of Maurino, near which Terem stood, nor himself survived. In the 1920s, Kustodiev’s home was moved to a village called Pochinok-Pozharische, “he spent 1,712 man-days and 358 at-weeks on it.” And then the tower burned down …

On the other hand, the old Anatolyevskaya school in Klevantsovo surprised me with the unusually clean and neatly arranged space of the schoolyard, where sports equipment, a football field, vegetable gardens, even a beet flower were very decorative. And a huge pile of wood – gasification has not yet reached Klevantsovo, so a lot of birch wood is prepared for the winter – students brought by bus from all over the region will not freeze without gas. The main thing is that there is no fire.

After returning to the highway, we followed without stopping by Kadiya, as we did not encounter anything remarkable along the way.

However, there is not much to do in Kadye. In the central part, the still town planning of the old Catherine has been preserved. It was once a county town and even a salt-producing center, but has since grown impoverished and burned so completely in a forest fire in 1841 that all its inhabitants were exempted from taxes and duties for two years. Each has long ceased to be a city – now a rather dull village, although it has its own museum of local history, but we visited on a Sunday and the museum, oddly enough, is closed on the weekend. According to the statement, the museum has three halls and three exhibitions that describe nature, military glory and the history of Kadiya.

Then we got off the highway and headed towards the Nemda River, which is where we were actually going.

Still, the historical and cultural significance of these places cannot compete with fishing and hunting, which remain the main leisure activities of the region. In these outskirts of the Kostroma region, only hunters and fishermen pave the way and support the tourism business.

For them, campsites and fishermen’s houses are being built, to which townspeople from Kostroma, Nizhny, Kineshma rush. Nemda is a beautiful and majestic river, they call it the fish river. We stopped at a relatively new campsite, where it is very comfortable and beautiful, the geese walk along the pond, the boats dock at the pier, there is also a beach, but now it’s not summer, a restaurant where the staff is friendly, dresses simply and cooks well. Visitors are especially attracted here in the fall, and therefore tourists leave good reviews.

There must have been another hostel nearby. We became interested in him, because there, unexpectedly for these places, they offered to relax in the spirit of Indian ashram – vegan cuisine, music, yoga. But the business did not go, the business was closed and sold, now the new owners are building a family hotel on this site. But in this place there are stronger and newer houses and people with a different appearance – they walk with purebred dogs, there are boat sheds along the shore.

It is strange and somewhat sad to realize that in the old days this area was so dense and dense, that zemstvo life flourished here, although there were no cultural centers, but no backyards.

If we recall Russian classical literature, its heroes lived precisely on such sites, it was an important source of development for the region. Later, estates were replaced by collective farms, which no one remembers, unprofitable in this part of the country and kept only by cheap labor and loans. But still, a certain way of life was produced on the collective farms with its own rules, customs and influence on the surrounding world. When the pressure on the peasants dried up, the collective farms fell apart, and it turned out that there was nothing to live together – except fishing, but even then there is less fish every year. As experience shows, tourism is of course possible, but the possibilities are slim: there is a lot of bad weather and loneliness cannot be sold in bulk. So there was “Eve” and “Fathers and Sons” and “Noble Home”, only “Notes of a Hunter” remained.

Do not expect any results from this. Unless I’m quoting the Chief Inspector: “When you go to Petersburg, I humbly ask you to tell all the different nobles there that Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky lives in the city or something. So tell me Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky is alive. So, in our big country there is the Kady district, which today is perhaps nothing particularly remarkable, but it was. And who knows, maybe there will be more.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.