There are several interesting mysteries regarding Zoshchenko’s date and place of birth. The first is the discrepancies in the birth date and city where Zoshchenko was born. There exists a metric book of the house church of the Holy Martyr Queen Alexandra in Petersburg, which states that Mikhail Zoshchenko was born on July 28, 1894. However, the writer himself, in a questionnaire found in the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St. Petersburg, indicates August 10, 1895, and the place of birth as Poltava. This is also stated in his passport, which is one year and one day later than the date recorded in the metric book. Why this confusion occurred remains a mystery. There is a legend attributed to the words of the writer’s great-granddaughter that these were two different children, the first died, and the second, a younger sibling, was given the same name.

Next, regarding where the writer’s family lived at the time of his birth, in all official materials—open almost any official material on the author’s history and you will read: “Zoshchenko was born in 1894 on the Petersburg side, in house No. 4, apt. 1, on Bolshaya Raznochnaya Street and spent his childhood on the Petersburg side.” However, the house was built 15 years after his birth. Some authors, seeing this obvious contradiction, write “Zoshchenko was born in the house that stood on this site,” but still indicate the apartment number.

In the long list of addresses where the Zoshchenko family lived in Petersburg, there is indeed such an address, but it dates to 1913. That year, Zoshchenko graduated from gymnasium, received his certificate, and entered the University. All these events required specifying the exact residential address in documents. Thus, the mention of this address remained in the writer’s archive. But this address was registered as the Zoshchenko family’s residence for only a few months, which can easily be established from the same address books. Before that, since 1911, the Zoshchenkos lived at 11 Ropshinskaya Street, and from autumn 1913 until 1918 at 17 Bolshaya Zelenina.

So what was on the site of the house at 4 Bolshaya Raznochnaya in 1894-1895? The owner of this land plot was Feodosia Vasilievna Divova. On her plot stood a wooden house where she lived. It was not called an income house, and there were no apartment numbers. She was not related to any of the Zoshchenko-Surins in a way that could explain their presence in her house.

The traditional place of residence for artists at that time was Vasilievsky Island, since the Academy of Arts was located there. Moreover, Mikhail Zoshchenko’s father worked in the Mosaic Workshop of the Academy, located on the 3rd line of Vasilievsky Island. This suggests that he lived nearby. After all, his means, like those of his colleagues, were quite limited. The relatives of his wife, in whose apartment he lived until 1893, lived on Vasilievsky Island. What could have forced the young, low-income artist family of Zoshchenko to change their residence to a place no less expensive and at the same time very inconvenient for them?

In the research by Ekaterina Yukhneva ("Petersburg Income Houses"), it is proven that “the overwhelming majority of poor tenants at that time usually rented apartments in close proximity (no more than 5 blocks) to their workplace. They walked to work. This social stratum did not own a carriage and could not regularly afford a cab. They used public transport only in summer, if they lived at a dacha.”

The head of the young family, Mikhail Ivanovich Zoshchenko, was, as is known, an artist. Before marriage, he studied at the Academy of Arts and lived on Vasilievsky Island.

In 1888-89, he rented a room in the apartment of the mosaic academician Pavel Semenovich Vasiliev and met his stepdaughter Elena Iosifovna Surina. In 1890, they were already married. By that time, Mikhail Ivanovich Zoshchenko had only completed the basic course at the Academy and was not a class artist. He had no official job and no significant earnings. Soon their first daughter was born, and two years later the second. He had to support the family.

Apparently, through the patronage of his wife’s stepfather, this young artist on March 16, 1893, entered as an apprentice in the Mosaic Department. He still listed his residence in documents as the apartment of P.S. Vasiliev — 59 Middle Prospect, V.O. (corner of 15th line, 38). It seems that his two older daughters were born in this apartment. But by the time of the birth of his first son Mikhail, he already had his own address: 41 10th line, V.O.

This house on the 10th line (as well as the two neighboring ones) belonged to Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi — a well-known Petersburg artist and patron of impoverished young colleagues.

Here is how artist K.Ya. Kryzhitsky (a classmate of Zoshchenko’s father at the Academy of Arts) wrote about this house and Kuindzhi’s patronage in his memoirs: “As V.L. Kuindzhi told me, the house — or rather three entire houses, plus outbuildings (on the 10th line near Malyy Prospect) — was in an extremely neglected state: only one-third of the apartments were inhabited, the rest cried out for repair... The house was filling with tenants. But many did not pay, and the owners long lacked the courage to evict the non-paying tenants.”

“He was especially sensitive to the needs of his fellow artists — painters, and among them, of course, primarily to the truly bitter fate of most young beginners.”

“Learning through friends that so-and-so was having a hard time, he would give money, saying: ‘Give this to him, he needs it, he has none... I don’t know him, I feel awkward, so you... You give it to him.’”

It was in this house, owned by Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, that the young Zoshchenko family settled, expecting their third child. By that time, the head of the family worked as an apprentice mosaic artist with a salary of only 25 rubles. However, Mikhail Ivanovich Zoshchenko was a member of the Society of Artist Illustrators (which provided work in magazines) and exhibited his paintings at exhibitions, but this brought in a small and irregular income.

Only in 1896 was M.I. Zoshchenko confirmed as a junior mosaic artist in the Mosaic Department at the Imperial Academy of Arts and began receiving housing allowance, meaning he could reliably provide housing for his family. In 1896, another daughter, Yulia, was born to the family. From the following year, the family began regularly spending summers at their dacha in the village of Peski.

The Zoshchenko apartments changed annually. But this was then the norm for the life of the poor intelligentsia. Apartments were usually rented for 7-9 months (from October to April), then they moved to the dacha, where life was much cheaper. In autumn, they looked for another apartment if the previous one was rented out. However, they rented it not far from the previous place, as they valued established relationships with the shopkeeper, laundress, milkmaid, water carrier, etc.

The first three Zoshchenko children were baptized in a church literally 5 minutes from both house No. 41 on the 10th line and the house where the Vasilievs lived — the Church of St. Martyr Queen Alexandra, at the House of Charity for the Poor of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (55 Middle Prospect). Finding in the metric books of this church records of the baptisms not only of Mikhail but also of Elena, Valentina, and later Tamara Zoshchenko, I concluded that this church was the family’s parish church, which confirmed the assumption of their living nearby.

Thus, the head of the Zoshchenko family worked on Vasilievsky Island, all his wife’s relatives lived nearby, she herself was born and raised in this area (she also worked in the theater here before marriage) — this was a familiar environment for their family, where their parish church was located.

And the future writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was apparently born in house 41 on the 10th line of Vasilievsky Island. Although it is not excluded that this happened in the house of his grandmother and godmother — Darya Vasilievna Vasilieva, where his older sisters were also born.

But where did the assumption about the writer’s birth at 4 Bolshaya Raznochnaya St., apt. 1, which entered the “chronological fabric” of Tomashevsky and from there migrated into all Zoshchenko biographers’ books, come from?

The first to take up the description of Zoshchenko’s biography was his wife, Vera Vladimirovna Zoshchenko (née Kerbits), but unfortunately, only after his death. She was guided by the advice of her gymnasium friend — the granddaughter of N.G. Chernyshevsky, who served as director of her grandfather’s museum in Saratov. Vera Vladimirovna did much to preserve her husband’s legacy and memory, but far from the thoroughness of a museum worker.

By that time, no direct relatives of Zoshchenko who knew the truth about his childhood were alive. In the surviving family archive of the writer, this address was the earliest in time. In her letters (now kept in the Manuscript Department of IRLI), Vera Vladimirovna asked her husband’s childhood friends about his early years. But they could hardly help her, as they met Mikhail Zoshchenko in 1911, when the Zoshchenko family settled on the Petrograd side at 18 Ropshinskaya St., apt. 2.

His friends — students of the Historical-Philological Gymnasium — certainly knew that the future writer studied at the 8th gymnasium on Vasilievsky Island, but nothing more.

It was under the impression of his childhood on Vasilievsky Island that his charming stories about “Lelya and Minka” (“The Christmas Tree,” “Don’t Lie,” “Thirty Years Later,” “Golden Words”) were later born. Some of the Vasilievsky addresses he also describes in his main book “Before Sunrise.”

In Vera Vladimirovna’s own family, where there were only three children, there was a different level of wealth and different traditions. They lived in one place for a long time and kept their apartment during the summer when they moved to the dacha. Apparently, she assumed that the Zoshchenkos lived the same way. And, having designated the Petersburg side as the writer’s birthplace, she erased his Vasilievsky childhood from his life. It was from her words that this address was indicated as Zoshchenko’s place of birth.

Sources:

Elena Romashova, Mysteries of Zoshchenko. Chapter: Where was Mikhail Zoshchenko born