House-Museum of Mikhail Prishvin, Moscow, Russia

The Mikhail Prishvin Memorial Museum was opened in 1980 at the behest of the widow of the writer Valeria Prishvina. The museum exposition consists of the restored rooms of the writer: a dining room, an office, rooms of the writer’s wife and a veranda, as well as a library.

Biography
Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (January 23 (February 4), 1873, Khrushchev-Levshino, Solovyov Volost, Yelets Uyezd, Orel Province, Russian Empire – January 16, 1954, Moscow, USSR) – Russian writer, prose writer and publicist. In his work, he studied the most important issues of human life, reflecting on the meaning of life, religion, the relationship of man and woman, on the relationship of man with nature. Prishvin defined his place in literature as follows: “ Rozanov is the afterword of Russian literature, I am a free application. And that’s all… ”

Life Is A Journey
Prishvin’s life is organically linked to his love of travel, from which he brought a travel diary, photographic films and the understanding that “writing is a journey to oneself”.

Once away from home, breaking away from everything familiar, Prishvin began his personal journey through Russia, which has always been for him “an unknown country where he travels”. Discovering the new in nature and human life of the region, which artistically lived in, he also discovered an unknown writer in himself. And I never knew what story about his journey will be born this time. Five journeys were made by the writer before the revolution – the remaining six after. And although these were literary trips around the country that have become widespread since the beginning of the 1930s, Prishvin, who never traveled in a group, always alone or with his son, turned business trips from a magazine or newspaper into real trips. But it all began in childhood.

“When I gained confidence in the journey that some huge world exists outside of me, that I was a witness to it, then both thoughts and the original language appeared in the works.”

Prishvin more than once recalled how in 1885, as a gymnasium student of the Yelets gymnasium, he and his three friends made his first journey – an escape “to the land of unspooked birds.”

“Two days later they were caught up and returned to the gymnasium. However, this event was a turning point in his fate. He recalled how his geography teacher, writer Rozanov, praised: “It was asked to draw the borders of America. And when he drew and memorized the names, suddenly the same names came from The Headless Horseman. I went to the board. And not seriously, but out of mischief I began to talk about America some mixture of Mine Reed and a textbook. “You’re done, you’ll be a famous traveler.” And he set five. ” Twenty-one years later, in the summer of 1906, Prishvin made a real journey to the North with an ethnographic expedition. The travel diary was the first book of a novice writer, entitled “In the Land of Frightened Birds.”

“Travel is always the discovery of the world. In his journey through the world of an experienced person, he finds himself as the only unprecedented one.”

The first three trips – to the Olonets province in 1906, to Karelia and Norway in 1907, and to the Kerzhensky forests to the Bright Lake in 1908 made Prishvina the author of three books published one after another.

Vygovsky Territory. 1906
In the Olonets province, he not only records fairy tales, epics and songs, but also discovers life, a life untouched by civilization, a virgin nature that has attracted him since childhood.

Karelia and Norway. 1907
The trip was conceived without any purpose: he wanted to spend three months as a forest tramp. But he secretly hoped to remember that country without a name and territory where he had tried to escape as a child.

Bright Lake. 1908
At this point, he is already the author of two books and a participant in debates at meetings of the St. Petersburg religious and philosophical society. It is hoped that a trip to the Kerzhensky forests on Svetloe Lake, to the country of schismatics and sectarians, meetings with wise old men will help him sort out the religious search, to which something responded to it.

Zairtysh steppe. 1909
A chance meeting on the train with Maximilian Voloshin and his story about the Central Asian desert becomes the reason for Prishvin’s trip to the Zairtysh steppes and his strangest journey, made unknown for some reason, from the ordinary side “nonsense, stupidity, madness.”

Crimea. 1913
In February, Prishvin went to the Crimea – on a trip that feels like a holiday – for the first time in his life he goes to the South in the winter after the beginning of spring, to where the almonds bloom, and anticipates a wonderful long spring and how he will fly with flying birds along with spring North.

Uralmash. 1931
Our Achievements magazine sends Prishvin to build the Uralmashzavod. The writer for the first time realizes the scale of construction, an unprecedented desire to lead the “iron people” leading the construction site, and sees peasants living in dugouts who are driven here by need. Stunned by what is happening, Prishvin, however, feels the magic of construction, realizes that “they can build.” For the first time, he cannot write anything on the impressions of a trip.

Far East. 1931
On June 24, 1931, Prishvin signed an agreement with the Izvestia newspaper on a trip that determined his writer’s fate. He goes to the Far East, where all the signs of the violent organization of life are also evident. But he is shocked by the pristine nature: the sika deer rush recreates a world full of life-creating, the Chinese who gather the root of life preserve the myth of ginseng. “Eros of life” fills the region living in the rhythm of the ocean surf with meaning and returns the writer to creativity.

Belomorsky Canal. 1933
The trip to the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, Solovki and Khibiny lasted from July 24 to August 25, 1933. Prishvin returned to his first voyage. Everything has changed: the Bears lived on Bear Mountain, the OGPU base for the construction of the Belomorsky Canal is located on Em Mountain. This is the third trip from which Prishvin brings not only notebooks, but also photographic films.

Pinega. 1935
In May 1935 Prishvin went on a business trip from the newspaper Izvestia to the northern forests of Pinega. He is sailing along Sukhon, Dvina, Toyme, watching a rafting along the northern rivers. On foot, in a punt, riding a horse with a guide, he hopes to get to the Thicket of the Ship, “to see a forest that has not seen an ax.” After 18 years, Prishvin will describe this journey in a story that he will finish in the last month of his life, and this will be the “Ship Thicket”.

Kabardino-Balkaria. 1936
The trip to Kabarda was for Prishvin a return to the Caucasus. In 1894, he, a student at the Chemical and Agronomy Department of the Riga Polytechnic, “went to earn extra money in the service of an investigator, phylloxera in the vineyards”. In Gori, among revolutionary youth, he first heard the arguments of the Narodniks and Marxists, began to translate Bebel, read Marx’s Capital: “ So Stalin’s homeland became the homeland of my Marxism, which later caused me a lot of trouble.” He remembered and loved the Caucasus: “The Caucasus was the cradle of my sense of nature, which made me a writer.” After the trip, Prishvin writes several stories, united in the cycle “Caucasian Stories”.

Small Rivers near Kostroma, 1938
The body of a lorry written off at some publishing house, which Prishvin acquired for the fee and called “Mazay”, he and his sons turned into a “motor home”, where there was a study, a darkroom and a corner for dogs. On this machine, he Prishvin traveled to “Nekrasovskie” places during the spring flood to check whether it is true that in the flood you can save the hares. Based on the materials of the trip, the book “Unfounded Spring” was written.

Light Artist
Already the first book – “In the Land of Frightened Birds” – Prishvin illustrated with his photographs taken in 1906 during a campaign in the North with the help of a cumbersome camera belonging to a fellow traveler .

In the 1920s, the writer began to seriously study the technique of photographing, believing that the use of photographs in the text would help to complement the author’s verbal image with the author’s visual image: “ I will add photographic invention to my imperfect verbal art ”. In his diary appeared entries about the order in 1929 in Germany of a Leica pocket camera. In the library of the Dunin house, two books with numerous notes by the writer are preserved – “ Photoreception and Photo Reference Book ” (B. Evdokimov – Leningrad, 1928) and “ Photographic Practice ” (1931, in German).

Prishvin wrote: “ Photography, or what is commonly called photography, differs from the great arts in that it constantly cuts off the desired as impossible and leaves a modest hint of a complex plan that remained in the soul of the artist, and, most importantly, some hope that that someday life itself, in its original sources of beauty, will be “photographed” and everyone will get “my visions of the real world”. ”

The writer brought to automaticity all the techniques of instant shooting recorded for memory in the diary:

put on a pince-nez on a cord – extend the lens – set the depth of field and shutter speed (” speed “) – adjust the focus with the ” movement of the ring finger ” – cock it – reset the pince-nez and press the shutter – put on the pince-nez – record the shooting conditions, etc.

Prishvin wrote that since he started the camera, he began to “ think photographically ”, called himself “the artist of the world ” and was so carried away by hunting with the camera that he could not wait until “ bright morning again ” came. Working on the cycles of ” photo recordings ” of the Gossamer, Drops, Kidneys, and Spring of the Light, he took close-up shots in different lighting conditions and angles, accompanying each photograph with comments. Assessing the resulting visual images, Prishvin wrote in his diary on September 26, 1930: “Of course, a real photographer would have shot better than me, but a real specialist would never have the idea to look at what I’m shooting: he will never see it. ”

The writer was not limited to filming in nature. In 1930, he took a series of photographs about the destruction of the bells of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.

In November 1930, Prishvin concluded an agreement with the publishing house “Young Guard” for the book “ Hunting with a Camera ”, in which photography was to play a major role, and appealed to the People’s Commissariat of Trade of the USSR with a statement: “ In view of the fact that at present it is in general order you can’t get permission to import the camera from Germany, I draw your attention to the special circumstance of my literary work at the present time and ask me to make an exception in obtaining a currency-free license to get a camera… My foreign photos paid attention Itsey and editors of Die Grüne Post, in the hunting department of which I collaborate, is ready to provide me with the most advanced Lake apparatus with three variable lenses. I need this apparatus all the more because my device has become completely unusable due to hard work… ”Permission was given and on January 1, 1931, Prishvin had the desired camera with numerous accessories.

During the war, Prishvin went to the surrounding villages, took pictures of children and women to send photographs to the front to husbands and fathers.

For more than a quarter century, Prishvin did not part with cameras. The writer’s archive has more than two thousand negatives. In his memorial office in Dunino – everything you need for a home darkroom: a set of lenses, a magnifier, cuvettes for the developer and fixer, a frame for cropping photos.

The knowledge and experience of photography was reflected in some of the innermost thoughts of the writer who wrote in his diary: “Our republic is like a photographic dark room, into which not a single ray is transmitted from the side, but everything inside is illuminated by a red flashlight.”

Prishvin did not expect to publish most of his shots during his lifetime. Negatives were stored in separate envelopes glued by the writer with his own hand from tissue paper, in boxes of sweets and cigarettes. After the death of the writer, his widow Valeria Dmitrievna retained the negatives along with diaries.

For the past six months, the writer has had stomach cancer. Mikhail Prishvin died at 2 a.m. on January 16, 1954, the day he met his beloved. He was buried at the Vvedensky cemetery in Moscow. The sculptor S. T. Konenkov, a friend of Prishvin, in a short time created a grave monument, which contains the idea of the immortality of the writer. Sirin bird is a symbol of happiness. “Each line of Prishvin will forever give people happiness.” – so Konenkov thought, carving a stone monument.

Music in Prishvin’s life
Since childhood, the writer was very musical and in his youth played the mandolin. “In my opinion,” Prishvin wrote, “the genius of a person did not steal fire from heaven, but directed music at first to facilitate work, and then the work itself, to which the musical rhythm extends, made through this a pleasure.”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mikhail Prishvin, a student of the philosophy department of the University of Leipzig, experienced a great passion for the music of the composer Richard Wagner. The opera Tannhäuser shocked the young Prishvin so much with the titanic struggle of passion and self-denial that in two years he listened to it 37 times!

Among musicians, Prishvin had many true friends and admirers. F.I. ChaliapinApril 12, 1912 wrote to Maxim Gorky: “The Russian song smells good, oh, how good, and the color (if I may say so) of it is warm, bright and unfading. And Prishvin!.. As it is written, “Cool Lake”, huh? – choked up! Wonderful!”. The writer himself met several times with the great singer. He especially remembered the meeting with Chaliapin on the night of the New Year of 1915. “Gorky asked me after what my impression of Chaliapin was,” Prishvin recalled. “I replied that I saw God, some kind of, maybe, field or forest, but a genuine Russian god.” Prishvin often recalled Fedor Chaliapin. On April 13, 1953, he wrote in his diary: “They handed Chaliapin to bad records, but I’m still the same about him that I always think. “He is a miracle to me, affirming my love in the homeland and faith in myself.”

In the 1930s, having settled in Moscow, Prishvin again got the opportunity to join classical music. He listens at the conservatory of Brahms, Wagner, Chopin, Liszt, and especially Beethoven. He writes: “I begin to leave more and more often for music: this is an area where you can leave, leave, travel without restrictions from the gross interference of the new into the old.” In the Diaries for November 4, 1943 there is such an entry: “At the 8th symphony Shostakovich… Shostakovich himself is a little man, from afar, like a high school student of the 6th grade, a capricious child of our time, who has incorporated all the hell of life with the dream of going to heaven. But it will be when people wake up! “The audience, it seems, did not really like the symphony, maybe it has not yet figured it out and was at a loss.”

In 1949, in the writer’s apartment in Lavrushinsky Lane, a magnificent Isbakh piano appeared, which was acquired by the writer for his wife Valeria Dmitrievna. The wonderful conductor Evgeny Mravinsky often played on it. M. M. Prishvin had a real friendship with E. A. Mravinsky. Arriving in Moscow, Mravinsky necessarily went to visit the writer. Prishvin himself did not attend friend’s concerts, only if he was sick. On his last visit on the eve of the death of the writer, Mravinsky did not play the piano, but with his friend listened to his voice recorded on the disc.

House of Mikhail Prishvin
The museum is located 30 km from Moscow, near Zvenigorod, on the picturesque bank of the Moscow River, and is of interest as a historical and cultural monument and nature reserve.

“The house is a two-story mixed house covered with iron, of which there are three arshins with a brick bottom and a log top. Capital internal walls, painted cornices and platbands with carved decorations, primed external walls, black floors and ceilings, pine and winter pine and winter window and window frames painted with oil paint with varnish devices. Below are two living rooms and cellars, and above are three rooms, a front and a kitchen. Adjacent: an octagonal two-story terrace covered with iron, on stone pillars with wooden floors and ceilings and Italian windows. Canopy wooden covered with iron with an external porch. ” This is how the house of Maria Yulievna Oswald was described in an insurance certificate issued on April 29, 1901 by the Moscow Fire Insurance Company to the buyer of Concordia Vasilievna Kritskaya. Known that the house of the “Finnish native” owner of the Moscow pharmacy R.A. Oswald was built quickly: work began on March 8, 1900 and completed on June 28, 1901. “The country house was bilt on the high bank of the Moskva River, and an impressive panorama of the river valley and its surroundings opened from the terrace. Then the layout of the park area was carried out. The estate was named Milovidovo. ” The house that Mikhail Prishvin acquired in 1946 did not change much: the lower terrace disappeared, and the upper one was not glazed, which Prishvin really liked.

And he called the terrace a veranda.

Prishvin in Dunin
After the war in May 1946, Prishvin bought a house from Lebedeva-Kritskaya and until the last year of his life tried to come to Dunino in April-May and not to leave longer in the autumn.

“Walls, from which the cladding has already begun to disappear, the foundation gaping with holes, a veranda hanging in the air with almost no floor and supporting pillars. Burnt partitions, partially doors, floors and ceilings. Window openings are already without frames. The roof in many places is torn off by someone. Only the stove, cleverly invented to quickly heat the entire house, rose victoriously and indestructibly. ” This is the description of the house of Valery Dmitrievna Prishvin, bought for 50 tons, the wife of Mikhail Mikhailovich. In 1941, the house had a military hospital. And by the end of the war, an empty house was on the verge of extinction. But Prishvin, finding himself in Dunin, saw a manor house with linden and spruce alleys, the remains of an apple orchard, a forest starting right behind the house, a field outside the village, the bank of the Moskva River very close by. I saw an old manor house – and was inspired by my childhood, the Khrushchev estate near Yelets, which he remembered in his dreams. Despite obvious difficulties, Prishvin decided to buy a country house. Surprisingly, the archetype of the House in the art world of Prishvin, a hunter and a traveler, occupied a very important place. He understood that his search for a home was connected with the common paths of the entire Russian intelligentsia: with the tragedy of emigration, with suffering at home, with the search for his place in the post-revolutionary life. The fate of a Russian person in the Diary of a writer is related to the gospel parable of the prodigal son, and returning home is associated with the idea of life creation. Prishvin is sure: the House is inscribed in the cultural context of the era, the metaphysical meaning of which is the return of the “prodigal son” home. that his search for a home is connected with the common paths of the entire Russian intelligentsia: with the tragedy of emigration, with suffering at home, with the search for his place in the post-revolutionary life. The fate of a Russian person in he Diary of a writer is related to the gospel parable of the prodigal son, and returning home is associated with the idea of life creation. Prishvin is sure: the House is inscribed in the cultural context of the era, the metaphysical meaning of which is the return of the “prodigal son” home. that his search for a home is connected with the common paths of the entire Russian intelligentsia: with the tragedy of emigration, with suffering at home, with the search for his place in the post-revolutionary life. The fate of a Russian person in the Diary of a writer is related to the gospel parable of the prodigal son, and returning home is associated with the idea of life creation. Prishvin is sure: the House is inscribed in the cultural context of the era, the metaphysical meaning of which is the return of the “prodigal son” home.

For the first time I managed to make a house for myself as a thing: it gives me the same satisfaction as the poem “Ginseng” in its time.

In the literature of my house, an important role is played by the fact that all his matter came out of my writings, and there is not even a single nail in it that is not made up.

The house is like a museum
Valeria Dmitrievna told how she arrived in the first summer after the death of Mikhail Mikhailovich, when she saw a note at the door, how, having read it, she realized that she was not alone: his readers had already visited Dunin…

Then the house was being cleaned: windows were opened and washed, furniture covers were removed, people were carried out to ventilate things on the veranda. And the note lay on the table as a harbinger of the future fate of this house. The next morning, Valeria Dmitrievna pasted it into Prishvin’s last diary notebook, which Mikhail Mikhailovich managed to number (D No. 121) and try to see if the ink diverges: “But what if diary entries are made in this notebook, they will be blurred or not… I think well, they won’t… “The notebook became a” book of reviews “: people walked and walked in Dunino, Valeria Dmitrievna accepted them. The house gradually turned into a museum (as they used to say, “on a voluntary basis”), a circle of assistants was formed, memorable dates were established, a style of communication with visitors was formed with conversations around the samovar on the Dunin estate. No one suspected that at the same time, the house is deciphering and reprinting the secret diary that Prishvin kept or 50 years (1905-1954). In this status, the house of the writer lasted 25 years until the death of Valeria Dmitrievna in 1979. According to her will, the house was transferred to the state and, by decision of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR, became a department of the State Literary Museum.

House museum now
In search of a cottage, Prishvin never crossed Peredelkino’s mind. He chose a semi-marginal lifestyle to freely conduct a daily conversation with himself and with a future reader in a diary.

The exposition of the Prishvin House Museum presents the intravital setting of a summer cottage, the writer’s library, personal items, hunting and photographic accessories, and a car. For many years, the exhibition remained a repository of cultural memory, testifying to the life and work of the writer, about the works written here, creative plans, lifestyle, about friends at home. However, in 1991 we started publishing the Diary, and the image of the “singer of nature” gradually disappeared, and the tragic split personality of the writer became a characteristic of both his work and the era as a whole. The publication of the Diary not only deepened the image of the writer, but also changed the current image of the Dunin house, which is now recognized as a cultural object of the Soviet era with all its paradox and complexity. And the Diary, which was kept here, gives the house universal significance. The exposition is complicated, the impression of comfort and peace is misleading. Everything becomes ambivalent, controversial and complex: a strange museum in which nothing froze in memorial stillness, in which there are more questions than answers: why Prishvin did not suffer during the Soviet years? why does he always write about himself? why does he write so much about nature? where is his man, where are the heroes? The house-museum responds to the challenges of modern times, testifying to the writer’s unique attempt to preserve inner freedom in a non-free world. The museum is being revised and invades modern life, being a remake of the long-standing Prishvin Museum. than answers: why Prishvin did not suffer during the Soviet years? why does he always write about himself? why does he write so much about nature? where is his man, where are the heroes? The house-museum responds to the challenges of modern times, testifying to the writer’s unique attempt to preserve inner freedom in a non-free world. The museum is being revised and invades modern life, being a remake of the long-standing Prishvin Museum. than answers: why Prishvin did not suffer during the Soviet years? why does he always write about himself? why does he write so much about nature? where is his man, where are the heroes? The house-museum responds to the challenges of modern times, testifying to the writer’s unique attempt to preserve inner freedom in a non-free world. The museum is being revised and invades modern life, being a remake of the long-standing Prishvin Museum.

Dunino
Prishvinskoe Dunino, the military line of 1941 on the banks of the Moskva River, together with the archaeological complex form a new cultural space in demand by visitors to the museum. Everyone can follow the Prishvinsky trail and see the places described by him.

Prishvin worked always and everywhere, never parting with his notebook, therefore there are so many memorable places on the estate related to his writing. What can we say about the surrounding forests, which he came with a gun and dogs, traveled to his Moskvich, in which he knew all the mushroom and berry places, where he was repeatedly seen sitting on a stump and noting something in a notebook… All this comes to life in his Dunin diary and in his photographs: the bank of the Moscow River, the distant rivers, sunrises and sunsets, his favorite paths, his favorite trees. In recent years, Prishvin’s attitude towards nature has changed. The Dunin chronotope becomes the chronotope of the writer’s life: earlier – far, now – close; earlier – a feeling of running time, “in a hurry, afraid to be late,” now – a feeling of the eternal in time, “of what constantly happens.” The position of man in the world is changing: “I have become, and the world around me has gone.” The nature of central Russia turned out to be v ry close to the writer’s soul and just as quickly became a reality of his inner life, like the Dunin house. The landscape of nature outside Moscow and the landscape of the soul of the writer create a unique cultural landscape that grows with new meanings for every person who visits the museum. These are those unknown readers whom Prishvin turned to and who are becoming more and more.