When Ekaterina Vasilievna died, ‘half of Moscow’ came out in the streets to mourn. She had worried that she would look a fright in her coffin, but she looked calm and holy, with a palm branch in her hand. After four days, her body was carried across Vozdvizhenka to the Church of the Elevation. The words ‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’ were engraved on her tomb. In her world of peace, serfs all love their masters and mistresses, the Decembrists have come home to heal, there are no bomb-throwing ‘nihilist’ terrorists in the streets, ready to assassinate members of the nobility, and Napoleon, who destroyed Moscow, is of concern solely on account of his ailments.
In the final paragraphs of The Vozdvizhenka Corner House, written in 1903 (the year of Fyodorov’s death), the Count writes that the past becomes ‘clear and bright’ before his mind’s eye as he records it. The house ‘was always a refuge for our family, each of its rooms is filled with memories of far-off times of happiness’. He senses that he is not just sitting in the same house, but in the very same setting, with the same view on to the street and the Kremlin. ‘I thank God that the house is still intact’, he writes, ‘and that its view has not been built up, that the rooms are all just as they were and all the old things in them still preserved.’ The State Chamber ‘is still there, the same noise comes from the road, the same sounds of blessing and prayer rise on the morning air from the same Church of the Elevation, whose ancient tombs still grace the wide street’. The Count basks in the deep silence of the winter, seeing how the sled tracks in the snowy street shine in the sun, revelling in the bright air and the view of the Kremlin domes, ‘from where the sounds of bells spread out across stone Moscow and Holy Russia, a ringing which will only cease when Russia herself ceases’.
Count Sergei’s last great project was to have been the transformation of the Corner House into a repository for private archives. In 1918, according to his son, who was also a historian and museum curator, Count Sergei ‘willingly and almost joyfully’ handed over to the ‘new Russia’ all his palaces and estates, and thanked Lenin, without irony, for freeing him of the burden of property. He died the same year.
While our front windows frame a perfect view of the palace in which Count Sergei spent his childhood, the kitchen windows look directly across into the mews where the dvorniki who maintain the building live with their families. Since long before the Revolution, to be a dvornik has been a traditional calling of Tatars. The Tatar dvorniki in our building drink alcohol, often to excess, but on the Muslim feast of Miram-Biram one year I watched as they pulled the carcass of a cow from the back of the car and divided it into three in the dusty courtyard. Electricians, plumbers, guards and concierges work in shifts night and day, many of them living in the building, all under the command of a komendantka, who is feared by everyone in No. 3, regardless of rank. One of the plumbers is a highly educated man, who speaks beautiful English, goes three times a week to concerts at the Conservatoire on Bolshaya Nikitskaya and likes to talk about poetry; he chooses to work as a plumber, he says, for the peace it gives him for his thoughts. Every day of the year, without exception, he spends an hour sitting outside with his shirt off, ‘air bathing’ for health. Through their net curtains we can see the TV playing each evening in the mews, Putin’s tight face glowing into the room, mouthing silently. Early each morning a thin grey cat steps out through the open window and a man leans on the window ledge in his vest, smoking. One morning, an ambulance and a militia car were parked below our kitchen window. A shrouded body was carried out of the mews on a stretcher. Later the concierge said that the stepson of one of the dvorniki had come and murdered him in a drunken rage, then slit his own throat. ‘Gadost’,’ she murmured, ‘Filth’, and not a further word about the horror was ever spoken.
All the apartments in No. 3 have two entrances: one grand entrance from the street or the courtyard (there are eight main entrances); another, called the ‘black entrance’, from a caged back staircase, which in our case leads out into the space between the main house and the mews. In the past, the back staircase was used for bringing up fuel for the dutch stoves from the basement, where each apartment had its own numbered store of firewood, and for the spacious attics, which were once used for airing laundry. From her basement room between the two staircases, the concierge can hear when either the back or the front door is opened. For a long time it was understood that all the maintenance workers at No. 3 were agents of the secret police. Later, after Stalin, it was assumed that only some of them, in particular the female concierges who sit in each entryway, were obliged to report on the private affairs of the residents. The widows of Red Army commanders who still live in No. 3 tend to scoff at the notion that their homes were under constant surveillance. They prefer to reminisce about their knitting circle. The children of the house always played together in the courtyard, whether their parents were marshals, disgraced members of the Politburo or dvorniki.
From the back corridor (which is above the travel agency in the basement, Intertour Luxe) we look across at the windows of the ‘court artist’ who once painted the Politburo. To walk on Romanov he wears a green velvet frock coat, waistcoat and silk cravat, and has his own lavish state-bestowed gallery in a small palace on Znamenka Street, down the hill from the Ministry of Defence buildings, just across the road from the Pashkov House. The artist has been married more times than anyone can count. Before she and her mother were moved out to make way for a younger paramour, his little daughter, who sometimes visits, coming out to play in the courtyard in a silky ballgown, invited my children to tea. She gave them, as a gift for me, a little compact mirror with the artist’s painting of her mother dressed as a nineteenth-century devitsa, a country maiden. When the artist arrived home unannounced the little girl took fright and hurried my daughters out into the courtyard through the black entrance. His windows are the only ones in the house that the komendantka has allowed to be replaced, front and back, with PVC trimmed with fancy anachronistic arches in brass. The komendantka is an aged coquette who loathes women and children, has a preternatural sensitivity to the subtleties of nomenklatura status, and takes bribes from residents for all concessions in brown envelopes of cash and bottles of cognac.
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While Count Sergei Sheremetev was at his desk in the Corner House, creating his idyll-city of aristocracy and faith, his contemporary, the journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky, was exploring a Moscow of slum-dwellers and criminals, prostitutes, entertainers, petty traders and newspapermen. Born of Cossack stock in the northern town of Vologda, Gilyarovsky had served in the Russo-Turkish War, and hired himself out as a factory hand, a barge-hauler, a private tutor and a provincial actor before coming to Moscow to make his name as a crime reporter. A well-loved eccentric, he was known as ‘Uncle Gilyai’. He was a friend of Anton Chekhov, and the performers and directors of the Moscow Art Theatre, whom he memorialised in his book Theatre People. In Moscow and Muscovites, a fond portrait of the city and its inhabitants first published in 1926, Gilyarovsky describes the populous, gossiping, raffish city at whose existence Count Sergei’s memoirs never hint. He wanders the streets, the boulevards and public squares, narrating tales of life in Moscow’s taverns and gambling dens, its bathhouses, newspaper offices, nightclubs, theatres and student digs.