One of the first books I read in my efforts to excavate Romanov was Year of Victory, the memoir of Marshal Konev, which I borrowed from Molotov’s collection for a day and brought downstairs to our apartment, in which he had once lived. Twice hero of the Soviet Union, once commander of the First Ukrainian Front, famed as a master of military surprise, camouflage and the art of encircling cities, the Marshal lived in No. 3 from 1947 until his death in 1973. (The year Konev moved into apartment 59 was the year Marshal Zhukov fell out of favour with a jealous Stalin. Zhukov’s apartment in No. 3 was searched by the secret police, and every item of furniture was noted.) As I read Konev’s memoir, I tried to conjure an image of the comfortable old survivor of Stalin, sitting in his study, sharing my view, as he recollected the race to take Berlin. But ghosts have no flesh and no dimension, so all I could imagine was the broad-jawed granite hero on the street façade beneath the bedroom window. I tried to superimpose on my urban view Konev’s surreal description of a snowy Polish battlefield swarming with Red Army tanks camouflaged in white tulle requisitioned from a nearby factory. ‘I see in my mind’s eye’, he writes, ‘the standing chimneys of Silesia, the gun flashes, the grinding caterpillar tracks, the tulle-covered tanks …’ Long after these images had dissolved, I was told by an acquaintance who knew the Marshal’s daughter that my study had been her bedroom, and that the long corridor leading to it had been lined with trophy art in heavy gilt frames brought back after the Soviet victory from the ransacked castles of east Prussia.
Before long the view from my study window began to change. I lost the birch tree, my view of the Voentorg and most of the sky. Construction workers began to raise a new building for the Moscow City Government’s dubiously titled Department of Extra-Budgetary Construction Policy on the land next door. The building site was theatrical as well as cacophonic, a rising stage on which workmen moved about all winter long in padded jackets, felt boots and canvas helmets laced at the back like old-fashioned corsets. Night and day for months they worked, shouting, grinding, crashing, raining showers of sparks over the brick wall. As the new building went up, the Corner House, which had been allowed to decay in the Soviet period, underwent kapitalny remont, complete renovation. In the gutted stucco shell of the house, shadow workmen moved about at night on a wooden scaffold, lit by naked bulbs hung from the rafters. For a few weeks I could see in through the back windows and out the other side. The house was quite hollow, no wall or floor or ceiling left intact. ‘What are you muttering, midnight?/ … Parasha is dead, The young mistress of the place …/ Incense streams from every window, the beloved lock has been cut,/ And the oval of her face darkens’, Akhmatova wrote in a draft of Poem without a Hero, her great attempt to arrange past time through poetry, when she was living in another Sheremetev Palace in what was then Leningrad. Her ‘Parasha’ was Praskovia, the serf girl who married Russia’s richest bachelor, lived briefly in the Corner House and died in childbirth, and who by the late nineteenth century had become a sentimental heroine of folklore, a paragon of charity and innate gentility.
When the renovation of the Corner House was almost complete, the interior was closed from view. Then the palace was painted deep yellow. A relief of classical heads set in medallions was coloured bright blue to match the PVC window frames, the pipework and the stripes on the City bureaucrats’ smart new building. Ruched nylon curtains were hung in the windows, which radiated nothing now but fluorescent light. The courtyard was paved and fitted with a shlagbaum, an electronic barrier, and with it came a detail of thickset guards with their own booth. Beneath the iron railings, up against the wall of No. 3, an ornamental garden was laid, a stiff arrangement of evergreen shrubs, white gravel and a rococo plaster water feature.
To appreciate the beauty of Moscow, one must settle down and live here, the art critic Pavel Muratov wrote in 1909. Moscow’s ‘genius of place’ lies not in the extrovert, premeditated beauty of grand public spaces or harmonious architectural ensembles, but in its haphazard, intimate, muddled beauty, a beauty made by people and their money, not by the state. There is nothing one can do to unify Moscow, Muratov said, it is always ‘incoherent, disconnected, inconsistent’. To learn to love the city is to become familiar with its little lanes and side streets. Its charms can be discovered either through careful study, or quite by chance, at the very moment when one’s attention strays. Yet to learn to love Moscow is also to become familiar with a certain kind of grief, for it is not a city whose authorities are much given to its conservation. Moscow advances architecturally in sudden rushes of new prosperity or state ideology after bursts of frenzied destruction, from without or within, or long periods of stagnation and neglect, leaving all those who love ‘old Moscow’ to their quiet laments. I wanted to melt away the accretions on the Corner House, to replace them with an image of some absolute Moscow, beautiful and undefiled, so I crossed under Vozdvizhenka, through the dank pedestrian tunnel lined with kiosks that in those days still ran from one side of the street to the other from the foot of the Voentorg, and went to the library.
I leafed through the 1917 city directory, All Moscow, the last telephone book to be published in imperial Russia. How would this thick book, with its lists of names and numbers that will never ring, fit into librarian Fyodorov’s scheme for resurrection of the dead through books? Beside No. 8 Vozdvizhenka, the address of the Corner House, is the name Count Sergei Dmitrievich Sheremetev. Among the many civic affiliations listed after his name, the Count includes his membership of a committee dedicated to the establishment of a museum of 1812, the year in which Moscow was saved, by its own destruction, from Napoleon’s dream of conquest.
I ordered the writings of the Count. The slender books that the librarians cranked up from the stacks two hours later appeared to have been little touched in the century since their writing. In their pages, I found the city that I had searched for in the hollows of the Corner House. ‘All these buildings of the “New Moscow” are without a future,’ the Count wrote defiantly in the summer of 1902 in Moscow Recollections, as though on one appointed day the new buildings would disappear and give him back the vistas he had once loved and owned. ‘Old Moscow’ will survive them, he promised, for without it there could be no Russia. In an orgy of ‘intoxicated capitalism’ in which the city no longer knew itself nor called itself by its own name, the heart of Moscow was being transformed, filled up with ‘shameful’ and ‘degenerate’ new buildings hiding from view its ancient churches, which were left to fall into ruin.
Count Sergei was in late middle age when his native city began to change from the feudal city of noble estates, ancient monasteries, churches and Eastern-style bazaars into a European-style capitalist metropolis. It was in his time, the age of the ‘investment property’, the dokhodny dom, that Sheremetev Lane was transformed from a loosely arranged set of palaces and attendant buildings facing in different directions into a modern street of apartment houses for rent. The Count’s family had been the wealthiest in serf-owning Russia, giving rise to the expression ‘rich as a Sheremetev’. Yet by the late nineteenth century Russia was no longer the possession of the aristocracy. Money reshaped the city.
Count Sergei served in the Cavalry Guards during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, a conflict with the Islamic Ottomans over ‘sacred’ lands and the rights of Christian Slavs in the Balkans which aroused a crescendo of heartfelt public patriotism and pan-Slavic Orthodox nationalism. After the war the Count retired from military service to devote himself to history. He was an antiquarian and a conservationist, a curator of his family’s and his nation’s past. He was made an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, published historical journals and pamphlets, headed cultural commissions, established learned societies and museums in Moscow and St Petersburg, and supported traditional Russian arts and crafts, such as the decorative painting of small lacquer boxes.