Malaya Posadskaya St., 8, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 197046
On July 5th, 1955, Yevgeny Lvovich moved into a new apartment on Malaya Posadskaya Street, on the second floor of house 8, apartment 3.
– I lived for twenty-one years in the old apartment by the Griboyedov Canal. And all the while I was waiting for something. Here it’s twice as spacious. Three rooms, so Katyusha has her own, I have mine, and in the middle is the dining room. Strangely enough, for some reason I don’t regret the old apartment…
“I live as if in Athens!.. Haven’t you seen me in the morning? In sandals, in a toga, with a scroll in my hands, adorned with a laurel wreath, I marched between the columns and argued with the cynics from ‘Lenfilm’ — their name is legion.” This is how the “kind storyteller” Yevgeny Shvarts joked about these “Greek” columns when he met one of his friends and neighbors — literary critic Alexander Dymschitz from the 4th floor — by the perpetually non-working elevator. There was someone to share a successful metaphor with here — apartments in the Litfond building were only given to members of the Writers’ Union, so in 1955, during the mass move-in to the newly built house, at the main entrance, dragging wardrobes and pianos, longtime colleagues and friends — writers, poets, literary scholars — met. Joining the housewarming was the neighboring 4th building, inhabited by workers of “Lenfilm” — filmmakers and screenwriters, who already socialized closely and now were separated by just a couple of walls. The 59-year-old writer Shvarts could now walk every day with the 50-year-old director Kozintsev along the unchanged route from this house to the Kirov Bridge (now Troitsky) and then left to the Chinese lions, discussing the writer’s new plays (“An Ordinary Miracle”), joint films (“Don Quixote”), and life in the quarter of the creative intelligentsia of the gloomy Petrograd side.
Shvarts and his wife quickly got used to their “Athens,” looking out from those very second-floor windows onto the platform from which massive columns rose upward, inspiring countless fantasies in the writer.
I lived for twenty-one years in the old apartment by the Griboyedov Canal. And all the while I was waiting for something. Here it’s twice as spacious. Three rooms, so Katyusha has her own, I have mine, and in the middle is the dining room. Strangely enough, for some reason I don’t regret the old apartment…
The second day in the new apartment, new to me… on the Petrograd side. In the morning I went out, established that there was an intercity telephone booth nearby… Walked through the square, which looks more like a park with old trees, toward the Peter and Paul Fortress. The scent of clover. Sunday crowd. The house still feels unfamiliar.
Again I lie down… Coronary vessel spasm. I walked too much in the city… In the evening at home they put leeches “on the heart area”… They smeared me with sugar syrup… My sister took out with tweezers from a jar labeled “cherry” five black little creatures and placed them on my chest, on the syrup.”
Shvarts’s upstairs neighbor, 48-year-old Panteleev, who after Stalin’s death began preparing for the reissue and revival of his once popular “Republic of SHKID,” and his wife, the beautiful Georgian Eliko, secretly prayed in their apartment, hiding icons from visiting guests and from their daughter soon to be born within these walls. Presumably, they did the same on the eve of 1956, when they invited the seriously ill Shvarts and his wife to come up to their place to quietly celebrate the holiday together.
The neighbor next door — also having regained work and reputation after Stalin’s death — was 70-year-old literary scholar Boris Eikhenbaum, anticipating the housewarming: “We will have a wonderful apartment on the second floor, three rooms, four built-in wardrobes, a kitchen with a window and a garbage chute (shared with the Shvarts, who will be next door).”
Just as there were no random residents in this house in the 1950s, there were no random establishments either. On the first floor, from the time of construction, a fashion atelier was designed to serve only the families of Writers’ Union members and some artists (it still exists today and, although now open to all, preserves traditions — sewing stage costumes for “Lenfilm”).
The last witness of the Litfond era of this house and a contemporary of its famous residents was Daniil Granin, who lived here for more than half a century and whose death two years ago marked the end of the building’s glory as a home to “living classics.”
Source:
Evgeny Mikhailovich Binevich, “Yevgeny Shvarts. Chronicle of Life”
