For everything took part in such an important event, everything was fussing, running and shouting. It took a long time to cope with the stubborn river: for a long time it tore and carried away brushwood, straw, manure and turf; but finally the people prevailed, the water could no longer break through, it stopped, as if thinking, spun, went back, filled the banks of its channel, flooded, crossed them, began to spill over the meadows, and by evening a pond had already formed, or, better to say, it floated a lake without shores, without greenery, herbs and bushes that always grow on them; in some places the tops of flooded dead trees stuck out. The next day the crowd began to grind, the mill ground, and it’s still grinding and grinding.”
I don’t know until what year the mill was pushing and grinding, but its very structure, the mill barn, the causa and the wheels - all of it burned down in 1966, outliving the Aksakov house by six years. The pond did not burn down, as one might guess, but it had not been cleaned or washed since Aksakov’s times, it was polluted and silted, became shallow and overgrown, became deprived of fish and turned into a huge puddle.
I don’t know why it was and is always called a pond. This is, rather, a mill whirlpool, precisely a reservoir, a reservoir that decorates and ennobles a steppe place. And if it were cleaned, taking all the silt to the fields of the Rodina collective farm, and skillfully stocked with fish, and a minimum of effort put into keeping it clean and tidy , then it would even have economic significance.
Well, it means that in all respects there was complete compliance: the park became wild, the pond was neglected, the house was broken, the mill burned down. The time has come to take up the protection and restoration of the so-called memorial complex.
"ORENBURG REGIONAL DEPARTMENT
ALL-RUSSIAN SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF MONUMENTS.
G. ORENBURG, ST. SOVETSKAYA, 66, ROOM. 68
The State Inspectorate for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments reports that the former estate of S. T. Aksakov in the Buguruslan district of the Orenburg region is included in the list of historical monuments subject to state protection.
In this regard, we ask you to submit a petition to the regional executive committee to take urgent measures to preserve the memorial park, as well as to allocate premises for the S. T. Aksakov Museum. Materials for this museum can be provided, according to the message received, by the Abramtsevo estate museum.
Head of the State Security Inspectorate (Makovetsky).
"TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE ABRAMTSEVO MEMORIAL MUSEUM"
TOB. MANINA V.F.
In May 1971, the Executive Committee of the Orenburg Regional Council of Workers' Deputies adopted a decision “On the creation of a memorial complex for the writer Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov in the village of Aksakovo, Buguruslan district.”
By decision of the executive committee, design and estimate organizations are required to develop a master plan for the restoration work of the former estate of S. T. Aksakov. The project assignment for drawing up a master plan for restoration and repair work provides for: restoration of the house in the Aksakov estate, improvement of the park, clearing of existing plantings and planting of valuable trees, installation of gazebos, pedestrian paths, layout of the ground park, restoration of the pond with a water mill, dam and diversion canal .
For design, photographs, drawings, blueprints, descriptions of Aksakov’s house, mill, pond, park, gazebos and other materials are required. Our regional department does not have such materials.
In order to assist the designers in the most complete restoration of the memorial complex to its previous form, we kindly ask you to suggest where and how you can find the necessary materials on the estate of the writer Aksakov.
If your museum has photographs, drawings, drawings, descriptions of Aksakov’s house, mill, pond, park, gazebos and other materials, would you be so kind as to send copies of these materials to the regional branch of the society: Orenburg, st. Sovetskaya, 66, room 68.
Chairman of the Presidium
regional branch of the Society
(A. Bochagov) “.
INSTITUTE DESIGN TASK
ORENBURGSELKHOZPROEKT
“Based on the minutes of the meeting of the presidium of the Orenburg regional department of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments dated August 17, 1970 and the inspection report of monuments and memorial sites of the Buguruslan region dated November 12, 1968, it is necessary to draw up design estimates for the restoration of the Aksakov estate.
When drawing up design and estimate documentation, provide for:
1. Park fencing (iron fence on reinforced concrete supports).
2. Clearing existing plantings and planting valuable tree species.
3. Cleaning and restoration of the pond with fish cages.
4. Strengthening the banks of the Buguruslan River.
5. Preservation and renovation of the existing five brick buildings.
6. Construction of a memorial complex, where to place a hotel for tourists, a dining room, and a memorial room for Aksakov.
7. Placement of tombstones from the graves of Aksakov’s parents and restoration of inscriptions on the tombstones.
When drawing up a master plan for the village of Aksakovo, provide for the preservation of the memorial park, including it in the recreation area of the central estate of the collective farm.
Payment for the preparation of the draft estimate documentation is made by the Orenburg branch of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
Chairman
regional branch of VOOPIK Bochagov
Chairman of the collective farm "Rodina" Markov "
“DECISION OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
ORENBURG REGIONAL COUNCIL
WORKERS' DEPUTIES
dated May 26, 1971
ABOUT THE CREATION OF THE MEMORIAL COMPLEX
WRITER SERGEY TIMOFEEVICH AKSAKOV
IN THE VILLAGE OF AKSAKOVO, BUGURUSLAN DISTRICT
October 1971 marks the 180th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer S. T. Aksakov, who lived and worked for a long time in the Orenburg region, given his great merits in the development of culture and popularity among Russian and foreign readers, in order to perpetuate his memory
Executive Committee of the Regional Council R E S H I L:
1. Create a memorial complex for S. T. Aksakov in the village of Aksakovo, on the territory of the writer’s former estate. The memorial complex will include all buildings that belonged to S. T. Aksakov, a park, a museum and a monument to the writer. Save the tombstones from the graves of the writer’s parents and brother.
2. Oblige the head of the regional design office of the Obluprkomkhoz Belyaev N.I. to include in the design plan for 1972 the development of a master plan for the restoration and repair work of the former estate of S.T. Aksakov, in 1971 to draw up design estimates for the renovation of the house for the museum of S.T. Aksakov, installation of a monument and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents and brother.
3. To oblige the director of the Orenburg Agricultural Project Institute G. A. Reshetnikov, when drawing up a master plan for the development of the village of Aksakovo (collective farm “Rodina”), to take into account the obligation to preserve the estate of S. T. Aksakov with all its buildings and park. No later than July. with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, to establish the boundaries of the writer’s estate and the security zone.
Payment of the cost of design and estimate documentation and repair work on the house to the museum, installation of monuments and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents should be made at the expense of the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
4. Oblige the regional construction trust (t. Chekmarev S.S.) to carry out capital work during 1971 to create a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo. The regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments should conclude an agreement with the regional construction trust to carry out restoration work and provide them with financing.
5. To oblige the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (Comrade A.K. Bochagov) to conclude an agreement with the Rodina collective farm by July 15, 1971 for the protection of premises that were transferred to it for use for economic purposes.
6. Oblige the Buguruslan district executive committee (comrade V. D. Proskurin):
a) no later than July this year. d. resolve the issue of vacating one house occupied by a boarding school in order to create a museum of the writer there;
b) ensure the safety of all buildings remaining on the writer’s estate, transferred to the Rodina collective farm;
c) improve access roads in the village. Aksakovo.
7. Oblige the regional department of culture (T. Soloviev A.V.) to submit a petition to the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR to open a branch of the S. T. Aksakov Museum.
8. Oblige the regional tourism council (T. M. F. Pustovalov) to develop an Aksakovo excursion route by 1972, and consider the issue of creating a tourist base in the village. Aksakovo and, together with the regional branch of the Association for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, publish a guide to Aksakovo places.
9. Oblige the regional consumer union (ie Serbian G.P.) to resolve the issue of construction in 1972 in the village. Aksakovo canteen for 25 - 30 seats and provide in the supply plan for 20 - 30 prefabricated houses for sale to the population of the village of Aksakovo.
10. To oblige the regional forestry department (t. Nechaev N.A.) in 1971 to carry out the necessary repair work in the park with. Aksakovo.
11. Ask the regional branch of the Society for Nature Conservation (T. Vlasyuk A.E.) to take under protection the park in the Aksakov estate.
12. Instruct the Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz (t. Tafintsev A.G.) to draw up design estimates for the restoration work of the pond in the park in 1971 at the expense of regional water management limits.
13. Oblige the regional department of reclamation and water management (t. Bomov P.I.) to carry out all restoration work of the pond in the park.
14. To ask the Committee for Press Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to reissue the works of S. T. Aksakov.
15. Ask the regional committee of the Komsomol (comrade Zelepukhin A.G.) for the period of restoration work in the village. Aksakovo to allocate a student team of construction workers.
16. Oblige the regional department of culture (comrade A.V. Solovyov) and the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (comrade A.K. Bochagov) to monitor the implementation of work on the creation of a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo, equipping the museum’s house, and also jointly resolve the issue of allocating a full-time museum employee for the period of its repair and organization.
Chairman of the executive committee of the regional council of workers' deputies.
A. Balandin
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Workers' Deputies
A. Karpunkov
That's right: head. protocol part
3. Chaplygina ".
Distributed to: Orenburgselkhozproekt, regional repair construction, regional tourism council, regional consumer union, regional municipal administration, regional department of land reclamation and water management, regional department of culture, Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, regional department of nature conservation, regional committee of the Komsomol, regional press department, regional department for construction and architecture, etc. Chernysheva, regional plan, regional federal district, regional committee of the CPSU, regional prosecutor comrade. Vlasyuk, Buguruslan district executive committee, collective farm “Rodina” of Buguruslan district, Buguruslan city committee of the CPSU comrade. Karpets, Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz.
After all that has been said, it is not difficult to imagine what I found and saw in Aksakov.
In Buguruslan, that is, in the region, they treated me well and attentively, truly like a Moscow guest, and even with a document from the Literary Newspaper. However, Buguruslan impressions are inappropriate here, because this would not be an Aksakov theme, or, more precisely, not an Aksakov theme in its pure form. Therefore, I will only say that I was given a car for the trip to Aksakovo, as well as fellow travelers: one person from the district executive committee, one from the local newspaper and one more person, I now don’t remember which organization. In a word, the gas car of the new model was jam-packed, and off we went.
On this day, a session of the district executive committee was held, and the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, I. A. Markov, was supposed to attend it. And we had to wait for him in Aksakov; he promised to arrive no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, that is, by lunchtime. This means that until two we could independently get acquainted with the object. They, however, thought that this was my first time in Aksakovo. But I already lived in Buguruslan for three days before they gave me a car. And as if I could calmly sit in a hotel for three days! Meanwhile, the very next day, a private driver gave me a ride to Aksakov for five, drove me around the village, waited while I walked around and asked questions, and brought me back to Buguruslan.
But our current trip was distinguished not only by, so to speak, legality and officiality, but also by the fact that we were going to come to Aksakovo from the other end of the Buguruslan region, make a big circle to get to the old Ufa road, and along it, as it were, repeat the multiple road Aksakov himself from Ufa to his native village.
It turned out to be a wonderful day, as if ordered - quiet, sunny, rare for the end of October in these places. Two tones predominated around us: blue and gold. The clear sky was blue, and the hills stretching under the sky were golden, and even the sun, large and sharply outlined in the thick blue. Of course, sometimes the hills were reddish, which is typical for these places, sometimes among the autumn gold rectangles of plowed black soil turned bright and velvety black, of course, the forests on the hills and in the depressions between the hills had already lost most of their foliage and were now blackish, except for the oak groves, according to still copper-red, cast and minted. But the black leafless forests also turned golden under the clear autumn sun. There was also a different diversity: fields and villages, roads, pillars on the sides of the road, oil derricks here and there. But still, now, when I want to remember the picturesque state of that day, I see two main, predominant tones - blue and gold.
The road always led us through a sharply rugged landscape: from a hill into a deep ravine, diagonally along a slope, from a deep ravine to a hill. Finally, from a rounded height, we saw below, truly in full view or as if on a tray, a large village, in the overall picture of which stood out even rows of new standard houses under slate, built, apparently, quite recently. There were several dozen of them here, and I remember I immediately noted to myself, knowing the approximate price of each such house, that the Rodina collective farm was not a poor collective farm at all, and I had to connect what I saw with the lines from the original letter, which, as they say, called on a business trip. “A document was drawn up for cleaning the pond, and the Rodina collective farm asked to take into account the need for a watering place for four thousand heads of cattle, as well as the possible organization of a profitable fishery. The cost of all this work amounted to up to one million rubles. Naturally, there was no such money, and the collective farm itself flatly refused even equity participation, citing the weakness of its farm.”
But I must say first that when I first looked at Aksakovo from a high mountain, I felt that something was missing here and that this view was somehow unusual. Of course, until now I had only seen the village from this high place in pictures, sometimes reproduced in Aksakov’s books or in books about him. The gaze had become accustomed to the sight of the village, and now the usual gaze was missing something. It’s the same as if there is a view of Moscow, and suddenly there is no Kremlin. In place of the Kremlin there is empty space and small, nondescript buildings. Involuntarily, your gaze will be caught in search of the familiar, the established.
In the previous pictures, the village of Aksakova had an organizing center - a white church in the middle, a square in front of it, and then an Aksakov house with buildings in the letter “P”. Around this, so to speak, ancient architectural complex, the rest of the village was located. Well, since now I haven’t seen and can’t see the church, and two shops and a canteen and an oblong barracks-type collective farm House of Culture were built on the square, then the overall picture of the village of Aksakova crumbled for me into a flat, architecturally unorganized cluster of houses.
We arrived earlier than my escorts expected. There were at least three hours left before the chairman returned from the session, which we spent inspecting what is called in the papers the memorial complex of the Aksakov estate. We started, of course, with the house, or rather, with the place where the house stood fifteen years ago. Well, school is like school. The head teacher Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko took us around it. Desks, blackboards, corridors - everything is as it should be in a new school. Is it possible to object to a school, especially such a good and new one? But still, but still, why “instead” and not “together”? Moreover, during this excursion, Andrei Pavlovich said that it was unreasonable to build a school on the old foundation, that the rectangle of the old foundation limited the dimensions of the school and its internal premises are now cramped. But the windows of the school look in the same direction and from them the same view of the area opens up that was revealed to the eyes of Seryozha Aksakov one hundred and seventy years ago. Because of this alone, it was necessary to walk around the school and look through its windows at the former park, at the river and further, at the bare reddish Belyaevskaya Mountain.
A public garden was laid out in front of the school, and a specialist from Yerevan was invited to lay it out. He managed to give the area in front of the school that boring, official look that areas in front of factories, bus stations or factory canteens usually have. Only instead of the indispensable Board of Honor in those cases, there were three tombstones made of polished granite in the middle of the square.
As we remember, these tombstones appeared more than once in various papers that we copied into this article, and, naturally, we stopped near them. All three of them were approximately the same forums. Well, how can I give you an idea about them... Well, three of these caskets on stone stands, that is, more horizontal and oblong than vertical. There are letters carved on the front walls. Researcher at the regional museum A.S. Popov could not read all the inscriptions, but now we have finally read them. Apparently, the letters, all beaten up and crumbled, were slightly renewed and clarified. These were tombstones from the graves of the writer’s father, Timofey Sergeevich, mother, Maria Nikolaevna, and brother, Arkady Timofeevich. The tombstones were located in a row, one next to the other, in the middle of the square in front of the school, where, according to the usual layout, one would expect a plaque of honor. I immediately asked Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko to show me the place of the graves themselves. According to A.S. Popov, in 1968, “on the site of the church, which was built by Sergei Timofeevich’s father at the end of the 18th – beginning of the 19th centuries, there was a heap of rubble and garbage and three tombstones were lying next to them.” It is obvious that we were talking about them, about these tombstones, it is obvious that the graves were located next to the church, which Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko confirmed to us.
“Near the church there was a small chapel, and under it there was a crypt. The parents of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov were buried there. Let's go to the square, I'll show you this place.
We came to a flat, asphalted area, lined on four sides with low sand-lime brick buildings of two shops, a canteen and a collective farm cultural center. There was no more rubble or garbage here. As well as signs of the Znamenskaya Church that once stood on this square. Only at the entrance to the House of Culture, instead of a threshold, there was a large semicircular flat stone, which in no way combined with the sand-lime brick and slate and was obviously a detail of an old church building. Perhaps he was in front of the entrance to the altar. Having stepped onto it, we went to the House of Culture and found ourselves in small, white-blue, low rooms, cells, heated to a stupefying stuffiness. In one cell there was a sparse collective farm library. We asked the librarian girl what books by Aksakov she kept. The girl, embarrassed, replied that they did not have a single book by Aksakov.
- That is, as if not one? So not one? At least a cheap edition?
- None.
Some kind of loud conversation was heard behind the wall, more like a radio. It turned out that the main and largest part of the House of Culture was the cinema hall and that now there was a daytime show there. We stopped by for five minutes. The foreign spy was running away from our scouts, either jumping out of the train as it moved, or jumping back into the train. Cars rushed by, barriers were lowered, policemen were talking on the radio. In a word, it was clear that the spy was not going anywhere.
But still, I wanted to more accurately establish the location of the crypt, and Andrei Pavlovich led me to a flat asphalt area between the House of Culture, two shops and a dining room to a small rectangular hatch.
- This is where the crypt was.
I looked into the hole and saw that the top had recently been cemented. Nothing further in the depths was visible.
“Well, yes, exactly,” Tovpeko repeated, looking around. “Here was a church, here was a porch, here is a chapel, and this is a crypt.”
– But why, if the church and chapel are broken, did they leave this hole in the middle of the square? For what?
- Adapted. In theory, they were going to keep water there. Fire precautions. Storage tank. The chairman will even tell you that they dug and built this reservoir on purpose. But where have you seen such reservoirs in at least one village or city? They adapted the crypt. And since there is never any water in it and, thank God, there have been no fires in Aksakov since its very foundation, the stores, in turn, adapted this hatch for garbage.
- Can't be! I will not believe. Now we'll ask.
A woman, a collective farmer of about fifty, walked past. I turned to her and began asking where the church was, where the chapel was, where the porch was. The woman answered and showed to the nearest meter.
- And this? – I pointed to the hole.
“They were buried here.” Mother father. Now near the school... Stones... maybe you saw...
- Why is this hole?
- Garbage is thrown out of stores.
My idea of the park as a huge tangled washcloth coincided with amazing accuracy. Only a few ancient linden trees created a semblance of an alley in one place. The rest of the space was filled with overgrown bushes, supplemented by tall herbaceous plants, now withered and prickly.
Tovpeko tried to explain to me where there were fish cages, where there was a gazebo, where there was a park pond in which swans swam (as if!), but it was impossible to imagine any of this now. From the park, making our way through bushes and thorns, we approached a mill pond, already covered in ice. There were a lot of stones and sticks scattered on the ice. We, too, as boys, used to throw things casually to see who could slip and roll away further. They also showed me the place where the Aksakovs’ mill, which burned down, stood nine years ago.
Now we just had to look at what was done to perpetuate the memory of the writer. Well, we already talked about the square and the three tombstones placed in a row there. At the very beginning of the square, a monument to Sergei Timofeevich was erected in 1971 (one hundred and eighty years since his birth). A large and heavy bust resting on an even heavier pedestal, or better yet, on a rough rectangular concrete block. If the square was entrusted to a specialist from Yerevan, then for some reason the monument was ordered in Georgia and was installed (there is a detailed story about this by Tamara Aleksandrovna Lazareva) hastily, at night, in cold rain, with muddy ground and a piercing wind. But be that as it may, the monument stands in the park.
To the side of the square, in a surviving outbuilding, renovated and covered with slate, there is a school dormitory. They took one room from this hostel, about fifteen meters in area, and turned this room into the museum of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov. The sweet girl Galya, a Bashkir by nationality, is the only staff member of this museum. She carefully hung on the walls of the room photographs (copies of copies), blurry and grainy, sent here from the museum in Abramtsevo near Moscow. The writer's parents. View of the house. View of the mill. View of the village. Rephotographed title pages of some books by Sergei Timofeevich. Of course, there are no things. One of Galina’s inventions especially touched me. She bent white sheets of paper so that they looked like the spines of a book, and wrote on these “spines”: Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy... That is, she imitated the books of writers with whom Aksakov was close in life. She arranged these “roots” as if on a bookshelf.
As far as I understand, there is a struggle going on (from whom to whom?) to take away, if not this entire side building, then at least one more room from the school dormitory for the museum. Then Galya will have the opportunity to hang up another dozen or two photographs.
...Meanwhile, the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov, was about to arrive from a session of the district executive committee. Frankly, I was looking forward to this meeting with great interest. I wanted to look at the man who personally broke Aksakov’s house. In the region they gave the most flattering description of him. A wonderful host. Fulfills all plans. Delivers products on time. Builds new houses for collective farmers. The new house that was built as a collective farm office was given to the hospital. Twice awarded orders - the Order of Lenin and the Order of the October Revolution. Holds the challenge Red Banner. Lots of certificates and awards.
All this somehow did not fit together: a wonderful man - and suddenly he broke Aksakov’s house. What about a crypt adapted for a reservoir? What about the burnt-out mill and abandoned pond? And an overgrown park, and a collective farm library, in which there is not a single book by Aksakov?
As a starting point in assessing this event (the liquidation of Aksakov’s house), I took one speculative assumption.
3. To oblige the director of the Orenburg Agricultural Project Institute G. A. Reshetnikov, when drawing up a master plan for the development of the village of Aksakovo (collective farm "Rodina"), to take into account the obligation to preserve the estate of S. T. Aksakov with all its buildings and park. No later than July. with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, to establish the boundaries of the writer’s estate and the security zone.
The cost of design and estimate documentation and repair work on the house-museum, the installation of monuments and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents will be paid at the expense of the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
4. Oblige the regional construction trust (t. Chekmarev S.S.) to carry out capital work during 1971 to create a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo. The regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments should conclude an agreement with the regional construction trust to carry out restoration work and provide them with financing.
5. To oblige the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (Comrade A.K. Bochagov) to conclude an agreement with the Rodina collective farm by July 15, 1971 for the protection of premises that were transferred to it for use for economic purposes.
6. Oblige the Buguruslan district executive committee (comrade V. D. Proskurin):
a) no later than July this year. d. resolve the issue of vacating one house occupied by a boarding school in order to create a museum of the writer there;
b) ensure the safety of all buildings remaining on the writer’s estate, transferred to the collective farm “Rodina”;
c) improve access roads in the village. Aksakovo.
7. Oblige the regional department of culture (T. Soloviev A.V.) to submit a petition to the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR to open a branch of the S. T. Aksakov Museum.
8. Oblige the regional tourism council (T. M. F. Pustovalov) to develop an Aksakovo excursion route by 1972, and consider the issue of creating a tourist base in the village. Aksakovo and, together with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, publish a guide to Aksakovo places.
9. Oblige the regional consumer union (ie Serbian G.P.) to resolve the issue of construction in 1972 in the village. Aksakovo canteen for 25 - 30 seats and provide in the delivery plan for 20 - 30 prefabricated houses for sale to the population of the village of Aksakovo.
10. To oblige the regional forestry department (t. Nechaev N.A.) in 1971 to carry out the necessary repair work in the park with. Aksakovo.
11. Ask the regional branch of the Society for Nature Conservation (T. Vlasyuk A.E.) to take under protection the park in the Aksakov estate.
12. Instruct the Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz (T. A. G. Tafintsev) to draw up design estimates for the restoration work of the pond in the park in 1971 at the expense of the regional water management limits.
13. Oblige the regional department of reclamation and water management (t. Bomov P.I.) to carry out all restoration work of the pond in the park.
14. To ask the Committee for Press Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to reissue the works of S. T. Aksakov.
15. Ask the regional committee of the Komsomol (comrade Zelepukhin A.G.) for the period of restoration work in the village. Aksakovo to allocate a student team of construction workers.
16. Oblige the regional department of culture (comrade A.V. Solovyov) and the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (comrade A.K. Bochagov) to monitor the implementation of work on the creation of a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo, equipping the house-museum, and also jointly resolve the issue of allocating a full-time museum employee for the period of its repair and organization.
Chairman of the executive committee of the regional council of workers' deputies.
A. Balandin
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Workers' Deputies
A. Karpunkov
That's right: head. protocol part
3. Chaplygina".
Distributed to: Orenburgselkhozproekt, regional repair construction, regional tourism council, regional consumer union, regional municipal administration, regional department of land reclamation and water management, regional department of culture, Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, regional department of nature conservation, regional committee of the Komsomol, regional press department, regional department for construction and architecture, etc. Chernysheva, regional plan, regional federal district, regional committee of the CPSU, regional prosecutor comrade. Vlasyuk, Buguruslan district executive committee, collective farm "Rodina" of Buguruslan district, Buguruslan city committee of the CPSU comrade. Karpets, Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz.
After all that has been said, it is not difficult to imagine what I found and saw in Aksakov.
In Buguruslan, that is, in the region, they treated me well and attentively, truly like a Moscow guest, and even with a document from the Literary Newspaper. However, Buguruslan impressions are inappropriate here, because this would not be an Aksakov theme, or, more precisely, not an Aksakov theme in its pure form. Therefore, I will only say that I was given a car for the trip to Aksakovo, as well as fellow travelers: one person from the district executive committee, one from the local newspaper and one more person, I now don’t remember which organization. In short, the new model GAZ car was jam-packed, and off we went.
On this day, a session of the district executive committee was held, and the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, I. A. Markov, was supposed to attend it. And we had to wait for him in Aksakov; he promised to arrive no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, that is, by lunchtime. This means that until two we could independently get acquainted with the object. They, however, thought that this was my first time in Aksakovo. But I already lived in Buguruslan for three days before they gave me a car. And as if I could calmly sit in a hotel for three days! Meanwhile, the very next day, a private driver gave me a ride to Aksakov for five, drove me around the village, waited while I walked around and asked questions, and brought me back to Buguruslan.
But our current trip was distinguished not only by, so to speak, legality and officiality, but also by the fact that we were going to come to Aksakovo from the other end of the Buguruslan region, make a big circle to get to the old Ufa road, and along it, as it were, repeat the multiple road Aksakov himself from Ufa to his native village.
It turned out to be a wonderful day, as if ordered - quiet, sunny, rare for the end of October in these places. Two tones predominated around us: blue and gold. The clear sky was blue, and the hills stretching under the sky were golden, and even the sun, large and sharply outlined in the thick blue. Of course, sometimes the hills were reddish, which is typical for these places, sometimes among the autumn gold rectangles of plowed black soil turned bright and velvety black, of course, the forests on the hills and in the depressions between the hills had already lost most of their foliage and were now blackish, except for the oak groves, according to -still copper-red, cast and chased. But the black leafless forests also turned golden under the clear autumn sun. There was also a different diversity: fields and villages, roads, pillars on the sides of the road, oil derricks here and there. But still, now, when I want to remember the picturesque state of that day, I see two main, predominant tones - blue and gold.
The road always led us through a sharply rugged landscape: from a hill into a deep ravine, diagonally along a slope, from a deep ravine to a hill. Finally, from a rounded height, we saw below, truly in full view or as if on a tray, a large village, in the overall picture of which stood out even rows of new standard houses under slate, built, apparently, quite recently. There were several dozen of them here, and I remember I immediately noted to myself, knowing the approximate price of each such house, that the Rodina collective farm was not a poor collective farm at all, and I had to connect what I saw with the lines from the original letter, which, as they say, called on a business trip. “A document was drawn up for cleaning the pond, and the Rodina collective farm asked to take into account the need for a watering place for four thousand heads of cattle, as well as the possible organization of a profitable fishery. The cost of all this work amounted to up to one million rubles. That kind of money, naturally, it didn’t turn out, and the collective farm itself flatly refused even share participation, citing the weakness of its farm.”
But I must say first that when I first looked at Aksakovo from a high mountain, I felt that something was missing here and that this view was somehow unusual. Of course, until now I had only seen the village from this high place in pictures, sometimes reproduced in Aksakov’s books or in books about him. The gaze had become accustomed to the sight of the village, and now the usual gaze was missing something. It’s the same as if there is a view of Moscow, and suddenly there is no Kremlin. In place of the Kremlin there is empty space and small, nondescript buildings. Involuntarily, your gaze will be caught in search of the familiar, the established.
In the previous pictures, the village of Aksakova had an organizing center - a white church in the middle, a square in front of it, and then an Aksakov house with buildings in the letter “P”. Around this, so to speak, ancient architectural complex, the rest of the village was located. Well, since now I haven’t seen and can’t see the church, and two shops and a canteen and an oblong barracks-type collective farm House of Culture were built on the square, then the overall picture of the village of Aksakova crumbled for me into a flat, architecturally unorganized cluster of houses.
We arrived earlier than my escorts expected. There were at least three hours left before the chairman returned from the session, which we spent inspecting what is called in the papers the memorial complex of the Aksakov estate. We started, of course, with the house, or rather, with the place where the house stood fifteen years ago. Well, school is like school. The head teacher Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko took us around it. Desks, blackboards, corridors - everything is as it should be in a new school. Is it possible to object to a school, especially such a good and new one? But still, but still, why “instead” and not “together”? Moreover, it was during this excursion that Andrei Pavlovich said that it was unreasonable to build a school on the old foundation, that the rectangle of the old foundation limited the dimensions of the school and its internal premises were now cramped. But the windows of the school look in the same direction and from them the same view of the area opens up that was revealed to the eyes of Seryozha Aksakov one hundred and seventy years ago. Because of this alone, it was necessary to walk around the school and look through its windows at the former park, at the river and further, at the bare reddish Belyaevskaya Mountain.
A public garden was laid out in front of the school, and a specialist from Yerevan was invited to lay it out. He managed to give the area in front of the school that boring, official look that areas in front of factories, bus stations or factory canteens usually have. Only instead of the indispensable Board of Honor in those cases, there were three tombstones made of polished granite in the middle of the square.
As we remember, these tombstones appeared more than once in various papers that we copied into this article, and, naturally, we stopped near them. All three of them were approximately the same forums. Well, how can I give you an idea about them... Well, three of these caskets on stone stands, that is, more horizontal and oblong than vertical. There are letters carved on the front walls. Researcher at the regional museum A.S. Popov could not read all the inscriptions, but now we have finally read them. Apparently, the letters, all beaten up and crumbled, were slightly renewed and clarified. These were tombstones from the graves of the writer’s father, Timofey Sergeevich, mother, Maria Nikolaevna, and brother, Arkady Timofeevich. The tombstones were located in a row, one next to the other, in the middle of the square in front of the school, where, according to the usual layout, one would expect a plaque of honor. I immediately asked Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko to show me the place of the graves themselves. According to A.S. Popov, in 1968, “on the site of the church, which was built by Sergei Timofeevich’s father at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, there was a heap of rubble and garbage and three tombstones were lying next to them.” It is obvious that we were talking about them, about these tombstones, it is obvious that the graves were located next to the church, which Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko confirmed to us.
- Near the church there was a small chapel, and under it there was a crypt. The parents of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov were buried there. Let's go to the square, I'll show you this place.
We came to a flat, asphalted area, lined on four sides with low sand-lime brick buildings of two shops, a canteen and a collective farm cultural center. There was no more rubble or garbage here. As well as signs of the Znamenskaya Church that once stood on this square. Only at the entrance to the House of Culture, instead of a threshold, there was a large semicircular flat stone, which in no way combined with the sand-lime brick and slate and was obviously a detail of an old church building. Perhaps he was in front of the entrance to the altar. Having stepped onto it, we went to the House of Culture and found ourselves in small, white-blue, low rooms, cells, heated to a stupefying stuffiness. In one cell there was a sparse collective farm library. We asked the librarian girl what books by Aksakov she kept. The girl, embarrassed, replied that they did not have a single book by Aksakov.
- That is, like not one? So, not one? At least a cheap edition?
- None.
Some kind of loud conversation was heard behind the wall, more like a radio. It turned out that the main and largest part of the House of Culture was the cinema hall and that now there was a daytime show there. We stopped by for five minutes. The foreign spy was running away from our scouts, either jumping out of the train as it moved, or jumping back into the train. Cars rushed by, barriers were lowered, policemen were talking on the radio. In a word, it was clear that the spy was not going anywhere.
But still, I wanted to more accurately establish the location of the crypt, and Andrei Pavlovich led me to a flat asphalt area between the House of Culture, two shops and a dining room to a small rectangular hatch.
- This is where the crypt was.
I looked into the hole and saw that the top had recently been cemented. Nothing further in the depths was visible.
“Well, yes, exactly,” Tovpeko repeated, looking around. - Here was a church, here was a porch, here is a chapel, and this is a crypt.
- But why, if the church and chapel are broken, did they leave this hole in the middle of the square? For what?
- Adapted. In theory, they were going to keep water there. Fire precautions. Storage tank. The chairman will even tell you that they dug and built this reservoir on purpose. But where have you seen such reservoirs in at least one village or city? They adapted the crypt. And since there is never any water in it and, thank God, there have been no fires in Aksakov since its very foundation, the stores, in turn, adapted this hatch for garbage.
- Can't be! I will not believe. Now we'll ask.
A woman walked past - a collective farmer of about fifty. I turned to her and began asking where the church was, where the chapel was, where the porch was. The woman answered and showed to the nearest meter.
- And this? - I pointed to the hole.
- They were buried here. Mother father. Now near the school... Stones... maybe you saw...
- Why is this hole?
- Garbage is thrown out of stores.
My idea of the park as a huge tangled washcloth coincided with amazing accuracy. Only a few ancient linden trees created a semblance of an alley in one place. The rest of the space was filled with overgrown bushes, supplemented by tall herbaceous plants, now withered and prickly.
Tovpeko tried to explain to me where there were fish cages, where there was a gazebo, where there was a park pond in which swans swam (as if!), but it was impossible to imagine any of this now. From the park, making our way through bushes and thorns, we approached a mill pond, already covered in ice. There were a lot of stones and sticks scattered on the ice. We, too, as boys, used to throw things casually to see who could slip and roll away further. They also showed me the place where the Aksakovs’ mill, which burned down, stood nine years ago.
Now we just had to look at what was done to perpetuate the memory of the writer. Well, we already talked about the square and the three tombstones placed in a row there. At the very beginning of the square, a monument to Sergei Timofeevich was erected in 1971 (one hundred and eighty years since his birth). A large and heavy bust resting on an even heavier pedestal, or better yet, on a rough rectangular concrete block. If the square was entrusted to a specialist from Yerevan, then for some reason the monument was ordered in Georgia and was installed (there is a detailed story about this by Tamara Aleksandrovna Lazareva) hastily, at night, in cold rain, with muddy ground and a piercing wind. But be that as it may, the monument stands in the park.
To the side of the square, in a surviving outbuilding, renovated and covered with slate, there is a school dormitory. They took one room from this hostel, about fifteen meters in area, and turned this room into the museum of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov. The sweet girl Galya, a Bashkir by nationality, is the only staff member of this museum. She carefully hung on the walls of the room photographs (copies of copies), blurry and grainy, sent here from the museum in Abramtsevo near Moscow. The writer's parents. View of the house. View of the mill. View of the village. Rephotographed title pages of some books by Sergei Timofeevich. Of course, there are no things. One of Galina’s inventions especially touched me. She bent white sheets of paper so that they looked like the spines of a book, and wrote on these “spines”: Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy... That is, she imitated the books of writers with whom Aksakov was close in life. She arranged these “roots” as if on a bookshelf.
As far as I understand, there is a struggle going on (from whom to whom?) to take away, if not this entire side building, then at least one more room from the school dormitory for the museum. Then Galya will have the opportunity to hang up another dozen or two photographs.
...Meanwhile, the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov, was about to arrive from a session of the district executive committee. Frankly, I was looking forward to this meeting with great interest. I wanted to look at the man who personally broke Aksakov’s house. In the region they gave the most flattering description of him. A wonderful host. Fulfills all plans. Delivers products on time. Builds new houses for collective farmers. The new house that was built for the collective farm office was given to the hospital. Twice awarded orders - the Order of Lenin and the Order of the October Revolution. Holds the challenge Red Banner. Lots of certificates and awards.
All this somehow did not fit together: a wonderful man - and suddenly he broke Aksakov’s house. What about a crypt adapted for a reservoir? What about the burnt-out mill and abandoned pond? And an overgrown park, and a collective farm library, in which there is not a single book by Aksakov?
As a starting point in assessing this event (the liquidation of Aksakov’s house), I took one speculative assumption. Only a person who had never read Aksakov could raise his hand against Aksakov’s house. It cannot be that a person who read “The Family Chronicle” and “The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson”, involuntarily got used to that era, became closely acquainted with the heroes of these books, that is, with the inhabitants of Aksakov’s house, and shared with Seryozha all the joys of his childhood, looking through his eyes at the surroundings, at the nature around, in short, it cannot be that a person who has read, and therefore fell in love with Aksakov, could raise his hand and break the writer’s genuine (authentic!) house.
How close is the elbow! Fifteen years ago the original house was intact and everything was still fixable. And now I have to contact Abramtsevo to see if they can at least send me a photograph of the house or memories of it and verbal descriptions. And everything depended on the will of one person, and this person showed bad will towards the house, and the house was pulled apart log by log by tractors. Does this mean that this man did not read Aksakov and acted out of blindness, not knowing what he was doing? This was my speculative premise.
Imagine my surprise when, during the conversation, Ivan Aleksandrovich began to pour out quotes from the “Family Chronicle,” from “Notes on Fishing,” from “Notes of a Gun Hunter.” But first, of course, we said hello and got to know each other when the chairman got out of the car and, smiling, walked towards us, standing and waiting for him in the square near the store. It was already four o'clock in the afternoon, we had not eaten anything since the morning, so the chairman, like a really good host, immediately moved on to the question of lunch. Lunch, it turned out, was already waiting for us at the house of the secretary of the party organization. Moreover, the lunch is hot (fat fiery cabbage soup with pork), as well as with “light” - with a snack invented and existing in those places. They pass equal amounts of horseradish, garlic and ripe tomatoes through a meat grinder. The result is a liquid spicy food, nicknamed “fire”. It is served in a bowl and eaten with spoons. Over the cabbage soup, behind this “light,” the conversation flowed like a river. It was here that Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov’s erudition was revealed. However, he cleverly evaded direct answers and my direct questions.
- Yes, they allocated funds, but then they didn’t find it possible...
- Yes, there was roofing iron, but then they didn’t find it possible...
- The house was in disrepair. His attic and the top floor were filled with snow, and then the snow melted... You understand... The kids are climbing, how long before trouble comes. A heavy beam would break...
- Wasn’t it possible to install glass so that the floor would not be filled with snow?..
- Then they didn’t find it possible... What are you all doing with this house, yes, this house? You better look at the school we built on this site!
The chairman was a man of about fifty, reddish, with a reddish, freckled face, well-fed and even slightly smug. Things are going well, the authorities praise them, they give them orders and certificates... But why are they all bothering with this Aksakov? Well, the landowners lived in the bar, and now pray for them? These tourists too... go in large groups in the summer, they have nothing to do... They should all go to the collective farm, dig potatoes...
I attributed such rude thoughts to the chairman in the first half hour of our acquaintance, trying to understand his psychology and the motives for his behavior. But of course, when he himself began to recite entire periods from the “Family Chronicle” by heart, I had to change my mind. The greater the mystery it became for me, to put it mildly, the indifference of this owner to the Aksakov memorial sites, to all this, using the language of documents, the memorial complex. The cabbage soup and the “light” had already been eaten, but I still didn’t understand anything about the motives and actions of this man.
My conclusion is that there is no mystery here and that the chairman of the collective farm is by no means an attacker, but a really good owner and, probably, a good person. I do not state this categorically only because our acquaintance was too brief and I did not have time to get to know this person more broadly, deeply, more thoroughly for a more categorical statement of his human and spiritual qualities. Let's say that he is even a very good person.
But he is the chairman of a collective farm with all the ensuing consequences, and not at all a local historian-enthusiast, not a guardian of antiquity, not the chairman of the local Society for the Protection of Architectural Monuments, not a museum worker. The chairman of a collective farm is not required to have broad, enlightened views on Russian culture, literature in particular, especially when it comes to the past of our culture and literature. The potato digger is not required to plant flowers at the same time. This is not her function. It is not structurally adapted for this. And if she were adapted, she would probably do her main job poorly.
Again, I do not want to offend the huge army of collective farm chairmen, conscientious and diligent workers who, by the way, are becoming more and more cultured and educated. Just different functions. The collective farm receives telephone calls and papers demanding indicators and figures (and therefore agricultural products), the chairman, in response to these demands, gives indicators and figures. The concept of a memorial complex does not fit into these two oncoming flows. There is no place for him to fit there. And since the implementation of indicators and figures requires daily tension of both ordinary collective farmers and the chairman himself, since this tension does not leave “backlash” for doing side activities like putting in order a park, a pond, a mill (which can now only have a decorative function) Naturally, the chairman perceives these side affairs only as an annoying hindrance and a distraction from the main everyday and urgent collective farm affairs.
In order to confirm the correctness of this conclusion, we will take the thought to the extreme and use the mathematical method of proof by contradiction. There is such a method in mathematics for proving theorems. For example, when they want to prove the equality of two angles, they say: “Suppose that the angles are not equal, then...” Then the result is absurd and it immediately becomes obvious that these angles are equal. I'm simplifying, but in principle it's true. So, proof by contradiction. The question is: is it possible to transfer Yasnaya Polyana to the nearby collective farm for maintenance? Mikhailovskoe? Tarkhany? Muranovo? Spasskoye-Lutovinovo? And what would happen if the entire memorial complex of Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana came under the jurisdiction and, so to speak, on the balance sheet of the local collective farm? After all, besides the park, there is a genuine Tolstoy’s house. Library, old furniture, mirrors, parquet floors, piano, paintings, fresh flowers in the house, original Tolstoy items. This all needs to be kept completely safe. This requires a whole staff of employees, watchmen, stokers, floor polishers, fat specialists, tour guides and gardeners.
Let us further assume that the collective farm would have tensed up and done everything there in Aksakov. He would have found the one million rubles included in the project estimate (or let the region give him this money), and would have built the house again, put the park and pond in order, and restored the mill. So what is next? Without a whole staff of employees and museum specialists, everything would again very quickly begin to become overgrown, deteriorate, lose its decent appearance, and fall into disrepair. Without the daily and attentive maintenance of the memorial complex, which, in turn, requires everyday material costs, the matter could not have been done.
Let us agree that it is not at all the job of the collective farm to maintain a large and troublesome memorial and literary complex on a daily basis. Then it will be possible to understand the almost instinctive desire of the collective farm chairman to push away from the Aksakov affairs being imposed on him and to get rid of them as radically and firmly as possible. As a person who read Aksakov, Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov can be condemned for this, but as the chairman of a collective farm - it’s unlikely.
Thus, if we want to preserve, and now actually restore, the Aksakov complex, we need to put the matter on a state, all-Union basis. We need to put this memorial complex on a par with those mentioned: Yasnaya Polyana, Tarkhany, Spassky-Lutovinov, Muranov, Mikhailovsky. You can add here Karabikha, Polenovo, or at least Abramtsevo near Moscow.
This is where they might say: “There is already one Aksakov complex in Abramtsevo. Isn’t that enough?”
But, firstly, because we have three Chekhov memorial complexes, no one is suffering yet. House-Museum in Moscow, House-Museum in Yalta and House-Museum in Melikhovo.
Secondly, Abramtsevo is already more Mamontovsky (Vasnetsovsky, Vrubelsky, Serovsky, Polenovsky, Korovinsky) complex than purely Aksakovsky.
Thirdly, most importantly. Abramtsevo is located near Moscow, where there are many other museum, tourist, and excursion places nearby. In the Buguruslan and Orenburg steppes, the Aksakov complex would be the only one for five hundred kilometers around as the only and necessary cultural center for those places, attracting both school excursions and free tourist groups, combining elements of both education and nurturing love for native nature (cultivating patriotism), and even relaxation. I am against the construction of tourist centers near literary memorial sites, but there, in the Orenburg remoteness and, so to speak, lack of museums, it would be possible to even organize a tourist base, especially since the beautiful pond, if it were cleaned out, and the Buguruslan river itself, and the park, put in order, and the surrounding copses would be conducive to health and at the same time cultural recreation.
If we believe that Aksakov as a writer, as a literary and historical phenomenon, is not worthy of having his memorial place put on a par with the memorial places of Turgenev and Tyutchev, Tolstoy and Nekrasov, Lermontov and Pushkin, Polenov and Chekhov, and that the village of Aksakovo can be only a literary monument of local significance, on the balance sheet of a collective farm, district (or even a region!), then it is better to immediately stop all talk about it, all correspondence, decisions, resolutions, survey reports, projects and estimates. The long and fruitless history of conversations, projects, decisions, acts and estimates confirms the correctness of this sad conclusion.
My trip to Aksakovo, apparently, could not end without one poignant motive related to nature. This happened when the train had already started moving. I stood at the window in the aisle of the carriage and looked at the hills and valleys running past. By the way, it was still autumn, the direct and frank breath of winter was still not heard, but the train (long-distance, Karaganda) arrived at the Buguruslan station with snow-covered steps, and this snow no longer melted. Through the golden autumn lands of the western Orenburg region we carried the fine, corrosive snow of the Karaganda steppes on the steps of the train to Moscow.
Then a fellow passenger stopped next to me near another window. We stood at two different windows, but looked in the same direction.
- Aksakov places! - a fellow traveler told me. - Here he did all his hunting and all his fishing.
- There was a lot of game, and various animals, but now it has diminished.
- There are fewer animals and game everywhere. The twentieth century. But do you know what miracle happened in Aksakov last year?
- Well?
- There were a couple of swans on a pond in Aksakov. They arrived in the spring and stayed here to raise their chicks. What brought them here? Maybe some kind of distant memory. Was anything passed on through these... genes? Maybe their ancestors once lived here, and the memory of this place awoke in the blood of their descendants. But if they had hatched chicks, the chicks would have flown here the next year as if they were home. They would definitely come. So, you see, swans would take root here. They would decorate the pond and the landscape in general, so to speak. It's beautiful if wild swans swim on the pond! And Aksakov, too, would have had a kind of memory, as a connoisseur and singer of nature.
"DECISION OF THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
ORENBURG REGIONAL COUNCIL
WORKERS' DEPUTIES
ABOUT THE CREATION OF THE MEMORIAL COMPLEX
WRITER SERGEY TIMOFEEVICH AKSAKOV
IN THE VILLAGE OF AKSAKOVO, BUGURUSLAN DISTRICT
October 1971 marks the 180th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer S. T. Aksakov, who lived and worked for a long time in the Orenburg region, given his great merits in the development of culture and popularity among Russian and foreign readers, in order to perpetuate his memory
Executive Committee of the Regional Council R E S H I L:
1. Create a memorial complex for S. T. Aksakov in the village of Aksakovo, on the territory of the writer’s former estate. The memorial complex will include all buildings that belonged to S. T. Aksakov, a park, a museum and a monument to the writer. Save the tombstones from the graves of the writer’s parents and brother.
2. Oblige the head of the regional design office of the Obluprkomkhoz Belyaev N.I. to include in the design plan for 1972 the development of a master plan for the restoration and repair work of the former estate of S.T. Aksakov, in 1971 to draw up design estimates for the renovation of the house for the museum of S.T. Aksakov, installation of a monument and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents and brother.
3. To oblige the director of the Orenburg Agricultural Project Institute G. A. Reshetnikov, when drawing up a master plan for the development of the village of Aksakovo (collective farm "Rodina"), to take into account the obligation to preserve the estate of S. T. Aksakov with all its buildings and park. No later than July. with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, to establish the boundaries of the writer’s estate and the security zone.
Payment of the cost of design and estimate documentation and repair work on the house to the museum, installation of monuments and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents should be made at the expense of the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
4. Oblige the regional construction trust (t. Chekmarev S.S.) to carry out capital work during 1971 to create a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo. The regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments should conclude an agreement with the regional construction trust to carry out restoration work and provide them with financing.
5. To oblige the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (Comrade A.K. Bochagov) to conclude an agreement with the Rodina collective farm by July 15, 1971 for the protection of premises that were transferred to it for use for economic purposes.
6. Oblige the Buguruslan district executive committee (comrade V. D. Proskurin):
a) no later than July this year. d. resolve the issue of vacating one house occupied by a boarding school in order to create a museum of the writer there;
b) ensure the safety of all buildings remaining on the writer’s estate, transferred to the collective farm “Rodina”;
c) improve access roads in the village. Aksakovo.
7. Oblige the regional department of culture (T. Soloviev A.V.) to submit a petition to the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR to open a branch of the S. T. Aksakov Museum.
8. Oblige the regional tourism council (T. M. F. Pustovalov) to develop an Aksakovo excursion route by 1972, and consider the issue of creating a tourist base in the village. Aksakovo and, together with the regional branch of the Association for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, publish a guide to Aksakovo places.
9. Oblige the regional consumer union (ie Serbian G.P.) to resolve the issue of construction in 1972 in the village. Aksakovo canteen for 25 - 30 seats and provide in the supply plan for 20 - 30 prefabricated houses for sale to the population of the village of Aksakovo.
10. To oblige the regional forestry department (t. Nechaev N.A.) in 1971 to carry out the necessary repair work in the park with. Aksakovo.
11. Ask the regional branch of the Society for Nature Conservation (T. Vlasyuk A.E.) to take under protection the park in the Aksakov estate.
12. Instruct the Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz (t. Tafintsev A.G.) to draw up design estimates for the restoration work of the pond in the park in 1971 at the expense of regional water management limits.
13. Oblige the regional department of reclamation and water management (t. Bomov P.I.) to carry out all restoration work of the pond in the park.
14. To ask the Committee for Press Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to reissue the works of S. T. Aksakov.
15. Ask the regional committee of the Komsomol (comrade Zelepukhin A.G.) for the period of restoration work in the village. Aksakovo to allocate a student team of construction workers.
16. Oblige the regional department of culture (comrade A.V. Solovyov) and the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (comrade A.K. Bochagov) to monitor the implementation of work on the creation of a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo, equipping the museum’s house, and also jointly resolve the issue of allocating a full-time museum employee for the period of its repair and organization.
Chairman of the executive committee of the regional council of workers' deputies.
A. Balandin
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Workers' Deputies
A. Karpunkov
That's right: head. protocol part
3. Chaplygina ".
Distributed to: Orenburgselkhozproekt, regional repair construction, regional tourism council, regional consumer union, regional municipal administration, regional department of land reclamation and water management, regional department of culture, Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, regional department of nature conservation, regional committee of the Komsomol, regional press department, regional department for construction and architecture, etc. Chernysheva, regional plan, regional federal district, regional committee of the CPSU, regional prosecutor comrade. Vlasyuk, Buguruslan district executive committee, collective farm "Rodina" of Buguruslan district, Buguruslan city committee of the CPSU comrade. Karpets, Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz.
After all that has been said, it is not difficult to imagine what I found and saw in Aksakov.
In Buguruslan, that is, in the region, they treated me well and attentively, truly like a Moscow guest, and even with a document from the Literary Newspaper. However, Buguruslan impressions are inappropriate here, because this would not be an Aksakov theme, or, more precisely, not an Aksakov theme in its pure form. Therefore, I will only say that I was given a car for the trip to Aksakovo, as well as fellow travelers: one person from the district executive committee, one from the local newspaper and one more person, I now don’t remember which organization. In short, the new model GAZ car was jam-packed, and off we went.
On this day, a session of the district executive committee was held, and the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, I. A. Markov, was supposed to attend it. And we had to wait for him in Aksakov; he promised to arrive no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, that is, by lunchtime. This means that until two we could independently get acquainted with the object. They, however, thought that this was my first time in Aksakovo. But I already lived in Buguruslan for three days before they gave me a car. And as if I could calmly sit in a hotel for three days! Meanwhile, the very next day, a private driver gave me a ride to Aksakov for five, drove me around the village, waited while I walked around and asked questions, and brought me back to Buguruslan.
But our current trip was distinguished not only by, so to speak, legality and officiality, but also by the fact that we were going to come to Aksakovo from the other end of the Buguruslan region, make a big circle to get to the old Ufa road, and along it, as it were, repeat the multiple road Aksakov himself from Ufa to his native village.
It turned out to be a wonderful day, as if ordered - quiet, sunny, rare for the end of October in these places. Two tones predominated around us: blue and gold. The clear sky was blue, and the hills stretching under the sky were golden, and even the sun, large and sharply outlined in the thick blue. Of course, sometimes the hills were reddish, which is typical for these places, sometimes among the autumn gold rectangles of plowed black soil turned bright and velvety black, of course, the forests on the hills and in the depressions between the hills had already lost most of their foliage and were now blackish, except for the oak groves, according to still copper-red, cast and minted. But the black leafless forests also turned golden under the clear autumn sun. There was also a different diversity: fields and villages, roads, pillars on the sides of the road, oil derricks here and there. But still, now, when I want to remember the picturesque state of that day, I see two main, predominant tones - blue and gold.
The road always led us through a sharply rugged landscape: from a hill into a deep ravine, diagonally along a slope, from a deep ravine to a hill. Finally, from a rounded height, we saw below, truly in full view or as if on a tray, a large village, in the overall picture of which stood out even rows of new standard houses under slate, built, apparently, quite recently. There were several dozen of them here, and I remember I immediately noted to myself, knowing the approximate price of each such house, that the Rodina collective farm was not a poor collective farm at all, and I had to connect what I saw with the lines from the original letter, which, as they say, called on a business trip. “A document was drawn up for cleaning the pond, and the Rodina collective farm asked to take into account the need for a watering place for four thousand heads of cattle, as well as the possible organization of a profitable fishery. The cost of all this work amounted to up to one million rubles. That kind of money, naturally, it didn’t turn out, and the collective farm itself flatly refused even share participation, citing the weakness of its farm.”
But I must say first that when I first looked at Aksakovo from a high mountain, I felt that something was missing here and that this view was somehow unusual. Of course, until now I had only seen the village from this high place in pictures, sometimes reproduced in Aksakov’s books or in books about him. The gaze had become accustomed to the sight of the village, and now the usual gaze was missing something. It’s the same as if there is a view of Moscow, and suddenly there is no Kremlin. In place of the Kremlin there is empty space and small, nondescript buildings. Involuntarily, your gaze will be caught in search of the familiar, the established.
Oblige the regional department of reclamation and water management (T. Bomov P.I.) to carry out all restoration work of the pond in the park.
14. To ask the Committee for Press Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to reissue the works of S. T. Aksakov.
15. Ask the regional committee of the Komsomol (comrade Zelepukhin A.G.) for the period of restoration work in the village. Aksakovo to allocate a student team of construction workers.
16. Oblige the regional department of culture (comrade A.V. Solovyov) and the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (comrade A.K. Bochagov) to monitor the implementation of work on the creation of a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo, equipping the house-museum, and also jointly resolve the issue of allocating a full-time museum employee for the period of its repair and organization.
Chairman of the executive committee of the regional council of workers' deputies.
A. Balandin
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Workers' Deputies
A. Karpunkov
That's right: head. protocol part
3. Chaplygina".
Distributed to: Orenburgselkhozproekt, regional repair construction, regional tourism council, regional consumer union, regional municipal administration, regional department of land reclamation and water management, regional department of culture, Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, regional department of nature conservation, regional committee of the Komsomol, regional press department, regional department for construction and architecture, etc. Chernysheva, regional plan, regional federal district, regional committee of the CPSU, regional prosecutor comrade. Vlasyuk, Buguruslan district executive committee, collective farm "Rodina" of Buguruslan district, Buguruslan city committee of the CPSU comrade. Karpets, Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz.
After all that has been said, it is not difficult to imagine what I found and saw in Aksakov.
In Buguruslan, that is, in the region, they treated me well and attentively, truly like a Moscow guest, and even with a document from the Literary Newspaper. However, Buguruslan impressions are inappropriate here, because this would not be an Aksakov theme, or, more precisely, not an Aksakov theme in its pure form. Therefore, I will only say that I was given a car for the trip to Aksakovo, as well as fellow travelers: one person from the district executive committee, one from the local newspaper and one more person, I now don’t remember which organization. In short, the new model GAZ car was jam-packed, and off we went.
On this day, a session of the district executive committee was held, and the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, I. A. Markov, was supposed to attend it. And we had to wait for him in Aksakov; he promised to arrive no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, that is, by lunchtime. This means that until two we could independently get acquainted with the object. They, however, thought that this was my first time in Aksakovo. But I already lived in Buguruslan for three days before they gave me a car. And as if I could calmly sit in a hotel for three days! Meanwhile, the very next day, a private driver gave me a ride to Aksakov for five, drove me around the village, waited while I walked around and asked questions, and brought me back to Buguruslan.
But our current trip was distinguished not only by, so to speak, legality and officiality, but also by the fact that we were going to come to Aksakovo from the other end of the Buguruslan region, make a big circle to get to the old Ufa road, and along it, as it were, repeat the multiple road Aksakov himself from Ufa to his native village.
It turned out to be a wonderful day, as if ordered - quiet, sunny, rare for the end of October in these places. Two tones predominated around us: blue and gold. The clear sky was blue, and the hills stretching under the sky were golden, and even the sun, large and sharply outlined in the thick blue.
3. To oblige the director of the Orenburg Agricultural Project Institute G. A. Reshetnikov, when drawing up a master plan for the development of the village of Aksakovo (collective farm "Rodina"), to take into account the obligation to preserve the estate of S. T. Aksakov with all its buildings and park. No later than July. with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, to establish the boundaries of the writer’s estate and the security zone.
The cost of design and estimate documentation and repair work on the house-museum, the installation of monuments and tombstones of S. T. Aksakov’s parents will be paid at the expense of the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
4. Oblige the regional construction trust (t. Chekmarev S.S.) to carry out capital work during 1971 to create a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo. The regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments should conclude an agreement with the regional construction trust to carry out restoration work and provide them with financing.
5. To oblige the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (Comrade A.K. Bochagov) to conclude an agreement with the Rodina collective farm by July 15, 1971 for the protection of premises that were transferred to it for use for economic purposes.
6. Oblige the Buguruslan district executive committee (comrade V. D. Proskurin):
a) no later than July this year. d. resolve the issue of vacating one house occupied by a boarding school in order to create a museum of the writer there;
b) ensure the safety of all buildings remaining on the writer’s estate, transferred to the collective farm “Rodina”;
c) improve access roads in the village. Aksakovo.
7. Oblige the regional department of culture (T. Soloviev A.V.) to submit a petition to the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR to open a branch of the S. T. Aksakov Museum.
8. Oblige the regional tourism council (T. M. F. Pustovalov) to develop an Aksakovo excursion route by 1972, and consider the issue of creating a tourist base in the village. Aksakovo and, together with the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, publish a guide to Aksakovo places.
9. Oblige the regional consumer union (ie Serbian G.P.) to resolve the issue of construction in 1972 in the village. Aksakovo canteen for 25 - 30 seats and provide in the delivery plan for 20 - 30 prefabricated houses for sale to the population of the village of Aksakovo.
10. To oblige the regional forestry department (t. Nechaev N.A.) in 1971 to carry out the necessary repair work in the park with. Aksakovo.
11. Ask the regional branch of the Society for Nature Conservation (T. Vlasyuk A.E.) to take under protection the park in the Aksakov estate.
12. Instruct the Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz (T. A. G. Tafintsev) to draw up design estimates for the restoration work of the pond in the park in 1971 at the expense of the regional water management limits.
13. Oblige the regional department of reclamation and water management (t. Bomov P.I.) to carry out all restoration work of the pond in the park.
14. To ask the Committee for Press Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR to reissue the works of S. T. Aksakov.
15. Ask the regional committee of the Komsomol (comrade Zelepukhin A.G.) for the period of restoration work in the village. Aksakovo to allocate a student team of construction workers.
16. Oblige the regional department of culture (comrade A.V. Solovyov) and the regional branch of the Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (comrade A.K. Bochagov) to monitor the implementation of work on the creation of a memorial complex in the village. Aksakovo, equipping the house-museum, and also jointly resolve the issue of allocating a full-time museum employee for the period of its repair and organization.
Chairman of the executive committee of the regional council of workers' deputies.
A. Balandin
Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Regional Council of Workers' Deputies
A. Karpunkov
That's right: head. protocol part
3. Chaplygina".
Distributed to: Orenburgselkhozproekt, regional repair construction, regional tourism council, regional consumer union, regional municipal administration, regional department of land reclamation and water management, regional department of culture, Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, regional department of nature conservation, regional committee of the Komsomol, regional press department, regional department for construction and architecture, etc. Chernysheva, regional plan, regional federal district, regional committee of the CPSU, regional prosecutor comrade. Vlasyuk, Buguruslan district executive committee, collective farm "Rodina" of Buguruslan district, Buguruslan city committee of the CPSU comrade. Karpets, Orenburg branch of Sredvolgovodgiprovodkhoz.
After all that has been said, it is not difficult to imagine what I found and saw in Aksakov.
In Buguruslan, that is, in the region, they treated me well and attentively, truly like a Moscow guest, and even with a document from the Literary Newspaper. However, Buguruslan impressions are inappropriate here, because this would not be an Aksakov theme, or, more precisely, not an Aksakov theme in its pure form. Therefore, I will only say that I was given a car for the trip to Aksakovo, as well as fellow travelers: one person from the district executive committee, one from the local newspaper and one more person, I now don’t remember which organization. In short, the new model GAZ car was jam-packed, and off we went.
On this day, a session of the district executive committee was held, and the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, I. A. Markov, was supposed to attend it. And we had to wait for him in Aksakov; he promised to arrive no later than two o’clock in the afternoon, that is, by lunchtime. This means that until two we could independently get acquainted with the object. They, however, thought that this was my first time in Aksakovo. But I already lived in Buguruslan for three days before they gave me a car. And as if I could calmly sit in a hotel for three days! Meanwhile, the very next day, a private driver gave me a ride to Aksakov for five, drove me around the village, waited while I walked around and asked questions, and brought me back to Buguruslan.
But our current trip was distinguished not only by, so to speak, legality and officiality, but also by the fact that we were going to come to Aksakovo from the other end of the Buguruslan region, make a big circle to get to the old Ufa road, and along it, as it were, repeat the multiple road Aksakov himself from Ufa to his native village.
It turned out to be a wonderful day, as if ordered - quiet, sunny, rare for the end of October in these places. Two tones predominated around us: blue and gold. The clear sky was blue, and the hills stretching under the sky were golden, and even the sun, large and sharply outlined in the thick blue. Of course, sometimes the hills were reddish, which is typical for these places, sometimes among the autumn gold rectangles of plowed black soil turned bright and velvety black, of course, the forests on the hills and in the depressions between the hills had already lost most of their foliage and were now blackish, except for the oak groves, according to -still copper-red, cast and chased. But the black leafless forests also turned golden under the clear autumn sun. There was also a different diversity: fields and villages, roads, pillars on the sides of the road, oil derricks here and there. But still, now, when I want to remember the picturesque state of that day, I see two main, predominant tones - blue and gold.
The road always led us through a sharply rugged landscape: from a hill into a deep ravine, diagonally along a slope, from a deep ravine to a hill. Finally, from a rounded height, we saw below, truly in full view or as if on a tray, a large village, in the overall picture of which stood out even rows of new standard houses under slate, built, apparently, quite recently. There were several dozen of them here, and I remember I immediately noted to myself, knowing the approximate price of each such house, that the Rodina collective farm was not a poor collective farm at all, and I had to connect what I saw with the lines from the original letter, which, as they say, called on a business trip. “A document was drawn up for cleaning the pond, and the Rodina collective farm asked to take into account the need for a watering place for four thousand heads of cattle, as well as the possible organization of a profitable fishery. The cost of all this work amounted to up to one million rubles. That kind of money, naturally, it didn’t turn out, and the collective farm itself flatly refused even share participation, citing the weakness of its farm.”
But I must say first that when I first looked at Aksakovo from a high mountain, I felt that something was missing here and that this view was somehow unusual. Of course, until now I had only seen the village from this high place in pictures, sometimes reproduced in Aksakov’s books or in books about him. The gaze had become accustomed to the sight of the village, and now the usual gaze was missing something. It’s the same as if there is a view of Moscow, and suddenly there is no Kremlin. In place of the Kremlin there is empty space and small, nondescript buildings. Involuntarily, your gaze will be caught in search of the familiar, the established.
In the previous pictures, the village of Aksakova had an organizing center - a white church in the middle, a square in front of it, and then an Aksakov house with buildings in the letter “P”. Around this, so to speak, ancient architectural complex, the rest of the village was located. Well, since now I haven’t seen and can’t see the church, and two shops and a canteen and an oblong barracks-type collective farm House of Culture were built on the square, then the overall picture of the village of Aksakova crumbled for me into a flat, architecturally unorganized cluster of houses.
We arrived earlier than my escorts expected. There were at least three hours left before the chairman returned from the session, which we spent inspecting what is called in the papers the memorial complex of the Aksakov estate. We started, of course, with the house, or rather, with the place where the house stood fifteen years ago. Well, school is like school. The head teacher Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko took us around it. Desks, blackboards, corridors - everything is as it should be in a new school. Is it possible to object to a school, especially such a good and new one? But still, but still, why “instead” and not “together”? Moreover, it was during this excursion that Andrei Pavlovich said that it was unreasonable to build a school on the old foundation, that the rectangle of the old foundation limited the dimensions of the school and its internal premises were now cramped. But the windows of the school look in the same direction and from them the same view of the area opens up that was revealed to the eyes of Seryozha Aksakov one hundred and seventy years ago. Because of this alone, it was necessary to walk around the school and look through its windows at the former park, at the river and further, at the bare reddish Belyaevskaya Mountain.
A public garden was laid out in front of the school, and a specialist from Yerevan was invited to lay it out. He managed to give the area in front of the school that boring, official look that areas in front of factories, bus stations or factory canteens usually have. Only instead of the indispensable Board of Honor in those cases, there were three tombstones made of polished granite in the middle of the square.
As we remember, these tombstones appeared more than once in various papers that we copied into this article, and, naturally, we stopped near them. All three of them were approximately the same forums. Well, how can I give you an idea about them... Well, three of these caskets on stone stands, that is, more horizontal and oblong than vertical. There are letters carved on the front walls. Researcher at the regional museum A.S. Popov could not read all the inscriptions, but now we have finally read them. Apparently, the letters, all beaten up and crumbled, were slightly renewed and clarified. These were tombstones from the graves of the writer’s father, Timofey Sergeevich, mother, Maria Nikolaevna, and brother, Arkady Timofeevich. The tombstones were located in a row, one next to the other, in the middle of the square in front of the school, where, according to the usual layout, one would expect a plaque of honor. I immediately asked Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko to show me the place of the graves themselves. According to A.S. Popov, in 1968, “on the site of the church, which was built by Sergei Timofeevich’s father at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries, there was a heap of rubble and garbage and three tombstones were lying next to them.” It is obvious that we were talking about them, about these tombstones, it is obvious that the graves were located next to the church, which Andrei Pavlovich Tovpeko confirmed to us.
- Near the church there was a small chapel, and under it there was a crypt. The parents of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov were buried there. Let's go to the square, I'll show you this place.
We came to a flat, asphalted area, lined on four sides with low sand-lime brick buildings of two shops, a canteen and a collective farm cultural center. There was no more rubble or garbage here. As well as signs of the Znamenskaya Church that once stood on this square. Only at the entrance to the House of Culture, instead of a threshold, there was a large semicircular flat stone, which in no way combined with the sand-lime brick and slate and was obviously a detail of an old church building. Perhaps he was in front of the entrance to the altar. Having stepped onto it, we went to the House of Culture and found ourselves in small, white-blue, low rooms, cells, heated to a stupefying stuffiness. In one cell there was a sparse collective farm library. We asked the librarian girl what books by Aksakov she kept. The girl, embarrassed, replied that they did not have a single book by Aksakov.
- That is, like not one? So, not one? At least a cheap edition?
- None.
Some kind of loud conversation was heard behind the wall, more like a radio. It turned out that the main and largest part of the House of Culture was the cinema hall and that now there was a daytime show there. We stopped by for five minutes. The foreign spy was running away from our scouts, either jumping out of the train as it moved, or jumping back into the train. Cars rushed by, barriers were lowered, policemen were talking on the radio. In a word, it was clear that the spy was not going anywhere.
But still, I wanted to more accurately establish the location of the crypt, and Andrei Pavlovich led me to a flat asphalt area between the House of Culture, two shops and a dining room to a small rectangular hatch.
- This is where the crypt was.
I looked into the hole and saw that the top had recently been cemented. Nothing further in the depths was visible.
“Well, yes, exactly,” Tovpeko repeated, looking around. - Here was a church, here was a porch, here is a chapel, and this is a crypt.
- But why, if the church and chapel are broken, did they leave this hole in the middle of the square? For what?
- Adapted. In theory, they were going to keep water there. Fire precautions. Storage tank. The chairman will even tell you that they dug and built this reservoir on purpose. But where have you seen such reservoirs in at least one village or city? They adapted the crypt. And since there is never any water in it and, thank God, there have been no fires in Aksakov since its very foundation, the stores, in turn, adapted this hatch for garbage.
- Can't be! I will not believe. Now we'll ask.
A woman walked past - a collective farmer of about fifty. I turned to her and began asking where the church was, where the chapel was, where the porch was. The woman answered and showed to the nearest meter.
- And this? - I pointed to the hole.
- They were buried here. Mother father. Now near the school... Stones... maybe you saw...
- Why is this hole?
- Garbage is thrown out of stores.
My idea of the park as a huge tangled washcloth coincided with amazing accuracy. Only a few ancient linden trees created a semblance of an alley in one place. The rest of the space was filled with overgrown bushes, supplemented by tall herbaceous plants, now withered and prickly.
Tovpeko tried to explain to me where there were fish cages, where there was a gazebo, where there was a park pond in which swans swam (as if!), but it was impossible to imagine any of this now. From the park, making our way through bushes and thorns, we approached a mill pond, already covered in ice. There were a lot of stones and sticks scattered on the ice. We, too, as boys, used to throw things casually to see who could slip and roll away further. They also showed me the place where the Aksakovs’ mill, which burned down, stood nine years ago.
Now we just had to look at what was done to perpetuate the memory of the writer. Well, we already talked about the square and the three tombstones placed in a row there. At the very beginning of the square, a monument to Sergei Timofeevich was erected in 1971 (one hundred and eighty years since his birth). A large and heavy bust resting on an even heavier pedestal, or better yet, on a rough rectangular concrete block. If the square was entrusted to a specialist from Yerevan, then for some reason the monument was ordered in Georgia and was installed (there is a detailed story about this by Tamara Aleksandrovna Lazareva) hastily, at night, in cold rain, with muddy ground and a piercing wind. But be that as it may, the monument stands in the park.
To the side of the square, in a surviving outbuilding, renovated and covered with slate, there is a school dormitory. They took one room from this hostel, about fifteen meters in area, and turned this room into the museum of Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov. The sweet girl Galya, a Bashkir by nationality, is the only staff member of this museum. She carefully hung on the walls of the room photographs (copies of copies), blurry and grainy, sent here from the museum in Abramtsevo near Moscow. The writer's parents. View of the house. View of the mill. View of the village. Rephotographed title pages of some books by Sergei Timofeevich. Of course, there are no things. One of Galina’s inventions especially touched me. She bent white sheets of paper so that they looked like the spines of a book, and wrote on these “spines”: Turgenev, Gogol, Tolstoy... That is, she imitated the books of writers with whom Aksakov was close in life. She arranged these “roots” as if on a bookshelf.
As far as I understand, there is a struggle going on (from whom to whom?) to take away, if not this entire side building, then at least one more room from the school dormitory for the museum. Then Galya will have the opportunity to hang up another dozen or two photographs.
...Meanwhile, the chairman of the Rodina collective farm, Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov, was about to arrive from a session of the district executive committee. Frankly, I was looking forward to this meeting with great interest. I wanted to look at the man who personally broke Aksakov’s house. In the region they gave the most flattering description of him. A wonderful host. Fulfills all plans. Delivers products on time. Builds new houses for collective farmers. The new house that was built for the collective farm office was given to the hospital. Twice awarded orders - the Order of Lenin and the Order of the October Revolution. Holds the challenge Red Banner. Lots of certificates and awards.
All this somehow did not fit together: a wonderful man - and suddenly he broke Aksakov’s house. What about a crypt adapted for a reservoir? What about the burnt-out mill and abandoned pond? And an overgrown park, and a collective farm library, in which there is not a single book by Aksakov?
As a starting point in assessing this event (the liquidation of Aksakov’s house), I took one speculative assumption. Only a person who had never read Aksakov could raise his hand against Aksakov’s house. It cannot be that a person who read “The Family Chronicle” and “The Childhood Years of Bagrov the Grandson”, involuntarily got used to that era, became closely acquainted with the heroes of these books, that is, with the inhabitants of Aksakov’s house, and shared with Seryozha all the joys of his childhood, looking through his eyes at the surroundings, at the nature around, in short, it cannot be that a person who has read, and therefore fell in love with Aksakov, could raise his hand and break the writer’s genuine (authentic!) house.
How close is the elbow! Fifteen years ago the original house was intact and everything was still fixable. And now I have to contact Abramtsevo to see if they can at least send me a photograph of the house or memories of it and verbal descriptions. And everything depended on the will of one person, and this person showed bad will towards the house, and the house was pulled apart log by log by tractors. Does this mean that this man did not read Aksakov and acted out of blindness, not knowing what he was doing? This was my speculative premise.
Imagine my surprise when, during the conversation, Ivan Aleksandrovich began to pour out quotes from the “Family Chronicle,” from “Notes on Fishing,” from “Notes of a Gun Hunter.” But first, of course, we said hello and got to know each other when the chairman got out of the car and, smiling, walked towards us, standing and waiting for him in the square near the store. It was already four o'clock in the afternoon, we had not eaten anything since the morning, so the chairman, like a really good host, immediately moved on to the question of lunch. Lunch, it turned out, was already waiting for us at the house of the secretary of the party organization. Moreover, the lunch is hot (fat fiery cabbage soup with pork), as well as with “light” - with a snack invented and existing in those places. They pass equal amounts of horseradish, garlic and ripe tomatoes through a meat grinder. The result is a liquid spicy food, nicknamed “fire”. It is served in a bowl and eaten with spoons. Over the cabbage soup, behind this “light,” the conversation flowed like a river. It was here that Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov’s erudition was revealed. However, he cleverly evaded direct answers and my direct questions.
- Yes, they allocated funds, but then they didn’t find it possible...
- Yes, there was roofing iron, but then they didn’t find it possible...
- The house was in disrepair. His attic and the top floor were filled with snow, and then the snow melted... You understand... The kids are climbing, how long before trouble comes. A heavy beam would break...
- Wasn’t it possible to install glass so that the floor would not be filled with snow?..
- Then they didn’t find it possible... What are you all doing with this house, yes, this house? You better look at the school we built on this site!
The chairman was a man of about fifty, reddish, with a reddish, freckled face, well-fed and even slightly smug. Things are going well, the authorities praise them, they give them orders and certificates... But why are they all bothering with this Aksakov? Well, the landowners lived in the bar, and now pray for them? These tourists too... go in large groups in the summer, they have nothing to do... They should all go to the collective farm, dig potatoes...
I attributed such rude thoughts to the chairman in the first half hour of our acquaintance, trying to understand his psychology and the motives for his behavior. But of course, when he himself began to recite entire periods from the “Family Chronicle” by heart, I had to change my mind. The greater the mystery it became for me, to put it mildly, the indifference of this owner to the Aksakov memorial sites, to all this, using the language of documents, the memorial complex. The cabbage soup and the “light” had already been eaten, but I still didn’t understand anything about the motives and actions of this man.
My conclusion is that there is no mystery here and that the chairman of the collective farm is by no means an attacker, but a really good owner and, probably, a good person. I do not state this categorically only because our acquaintance was too brief and I did not have time to get to know this person more broadly, deeply, more thoroughly for a more categorical statement of his human and spiritual qualities. Let's say that he is even a very good person.
But he is the chairman of a collective farm with all the ensuing consequences, and not at all a local historian-enthusiast, not a guardian of antiquity, not the chairman of the local Society for the Protection of Architectural Monuments, not a museum worker. The chairman of a collective farm is not required to have broad, enlightened views on Russian culture, literature in particular, especially when it comes to the past of our culture and literature. The potato digger is not required to plant flowers at the same time. This is not her function. It is not structurally adapted for this. And if she were adapted, she would probably do her main job poorly.
Again, I do not want to offend the huge army of collective farm chairmen, conscientious and diligent workers who, by the way, are becoming more and more cultured and educated. Just different functions. The collective farm receives telephone calls and papers demanding indicators and figures (and therefore agricultural products), the chairman, in response to these demands, gives indicators and figures. The concept of a memorial complex does not fit into these two oncoming flows. There is no place for him to fit there. And since the implementation of indicators and figures requires daily tension of both ordinary collective farmers and the chairman himself, since this tension does not leave “backlash” for doing side activities like putting in order a park, a pond, a mill (which can now only have a decorative function) Naturally, the chairman perceives these side affairs only as an annoying hindrance and a distraction from the main everyday and urgent collective farm affairs.
In order to confirm the correctness of this conclusion, we will take the thought to the extreme and use the mathematical method of proof by contradiction. There is such a method in mathematics for proving theorems. For example, when they want to prove the equality of two angles, they say: “Suppose that the angles are not equal, then...” Then the result is absurd and it immediately becomes obvious that these angles are equal. I'm simplifying, but in principle it's true. So, proof by contradiction. The question is: is it possible to transfer Yasnaya Polyana to the nearby collective farm for maintenance? Mikhailovskoe? Tarkhany? Muranovo? Spasskoye-Lutovinovo? And what would happen if the entire memorial complex of Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana came under the jurisdiction and, so to speak, on the balance sheet of the local collective farm? After all, besides the park, there is a genuine Tolstoy’s house. Library, old furniture, mirrors, parquet floors, piano, paintings, fresh flowers in the house, original Tolstoy items. This all needs to be kept completely safe. This requires a whole staff of employees, watchmen, stokers, floor polishers, fat specialists, tour guides and gardeners.
Let us further assume that the collective farm would have tensed up and done everything there in Aksakov. He would have found the one million rubles included in the project estimate (or let the region give him this money), and would have built the house again, put the park and pond in order, and restored the mill. So what is next? Without a whole staff of employees and museum specialists, everything would again very quickly begin to become overgrown, deteriorate, lose its decent appearance, and fall into disrepair. Without the daily and attentive maintenance of the memorial complex, which, in turn, requires everyday material costs, the matter could not have been done.
Let us agree that it is not at all the job of the collective farm to maintain a large and troublesome memorial and literary complex on a daily basis. Then it will be possible to understand the almost instinctive desire of the collective farm chairman to push away from the Aksakov affairs being imposed on him and to get rid of them as radically and firmly as possible. As a person who read Aksakov, Ivan Aleksandrovich Markov can be condemned for this, but as the chairman of a collective farm - it’s unlikely.
Thus, if we want to preserve, and now actually restore, the Aksakov complex, we need to put the matter on a state, all-Union basis. We need to put this memorial complex on a par with those mentioned: Yasnaya Polyana, Tarkhany, Spassky-Lutovinov, Muranov, Mikhailovsky. You can add here Karabikha, Polenovo, or at least Abramtsevo near Moscow.
This is where they might say: “There is already one Aksakov complex in Abramtsevo. Isn’t that enough?”
But, firstly, because we have three Chekhov memorial complexes, no one is suffering yet. House-Museum in Moscow, House-Museum in Yalta and House-Museum in Melikhovo.
Secondly, Abramtsevo is already more Mamontovsky (Vasnetsovsky, Vrubelsky, Serovsky, Polenovsky, Korovinsky) complex than purely Aksakovsky.
Thirdly, most importantly. Abramtsevo is located near Moscow, where there are many other museum, tourist, and excursion places nearby. In the Buguruslan and Orenburg steppes, the Aksakov complex would be the only one for five hundred kilometers around as the only and necessary cultural center for those places, attracting both school excursions and free tourist groups, combining elements of both education and nurturing love for native nature (cultivating patriotism), and even relaxation. I am against the construction of tourist centers near literary memorial sites, but there, in the Orenburg remoteness and, so to speak, lack of museums, it would be possible to even organize a tourist base, especially since the beautiful pond, if it were cleaned out, and the Buguruslan river itself, and the park, put in order, and the surrounding copses would be conducive to health and at the same time cultural recreation.
If we believe that Aksakov as a writer, as a literary and historical phenomenon, is not worthy of having his memorial place put on a par with the memorial places of Turgenev and Tyutchev, Tolstoy and Nekrasov, Lermontov and Pushkin, Polenov and Chekhov, and that the village of Aksakovo can be only a literary monument of local significance, on the balance sheet of a collective farm, district (or even a region!), then it is better to immediately stop all talk about it, all correspondence, decisions, resolutions, survey reports, projects and estimates. The long and fruitless history of conversations, projects, decisions, acts and estimates confirms the correctness of this sad conclusion.
My trip to Aksakovo, apparently, could not end without one poignant motive related to nature. This happened when the train had already started moving. I stood at the window in the aisle of the carriage and looked at the hills and valleys running past. By the way, it was still autumn, the direct and frank breath of winter was still not heard, but the train (long-distance, Karaganda) arrived at the Buguruslan station with snow-covered steps, and this snow no longer melted. Through the golden autumn lands of the western Orenburg region we carried the fine, corrosive snow of the Karaganda steppes on the steps of the train to Moscow.
Then a fellow passenger stopped next to me near another window. We stood at two different windows, but looked in the same direction.
- Aksakov places! - a fellow traveler told me. - Here he did all his hunting and all his fishing.
- There was a lot of game, and various animals, but now it has diminished.
- There are fewer animals and game everywhere. The twentieth century. But do you know what miracle happened in Aksakov last year?
- Well?
- There were a couple of swans on a pond in Aksakov. They arrived in the spring and stayed here to raise their chicks. What brought them here? Maybe some kind of distant memory. Was anything passed on through these... genes? Maybe their ancestors once lived here, and the memory of this place awoke in the blood of their descendants. But if they had hatched chicks, the chicks would have flown here the next year as if they were home. They would definitely come. So, you see, swans would take root here. They would decorate the pond and the landscape in general, so to speak. It's beautiful if wild swans swim on the pond! And Aksakov, too, would have had a kind of memory, as a connoisseur and singer of nature.
