In 1874, Olga Nikolaevna Kozlova, married name Rukavishnikova, became the owner of the Vyra estate. The estate was purchased in her name by her father, Nikolai Illarionovich Kozlov, president of the Medical-Surgical Academy and the future great-grandfather of the famous writer Vladimir Nabokov. The new mistress’s husband was merchant Ivan Vasilyevich Rukavishnikov — owner of the neighboring estate in the village of Rozhdestveno. In 1897, the Vyra estate was given as a dowry to Ivan V. Rukavishnikov’s daughter, Elena Ivanovna, who married the lawyer Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a neighboring landowner from the Batovo estate. After Olga Nikolaevna’s death in 1901, E.I. Nabokova became the mistress of the estate. Vladimir Nabokov, born in 1899 in St. Petersburg, essentially grew up on this estate and rightly considered Vyra his true childhood home. On the banks of the Oredezh River, the young man, enchanted by the beauty of the local nature, began composing his first poetic lines, which later brought him fame and recognition…

Under the Rukavishnikovs, the estate completely changed its appearance: the old manor house was thoroughly renovated and rebuilt on the old foundation, connected by a gallery to the wing and the outbuildings, and the park expanded its boundaries. It is no coincidence that V.V. Nabokov in his autobiographical works divides it into the Old Park and the New Park. At the same time, the Vyra estate acquired a new “family” name — “Our Vyra.”

With the arrival of spring, young Vladimir Nabokov would begin the eager anticipation of meeting Vyra. And years later, when not only Vyra but all of Russia would be lost to him forever, he would write: “...give me, on any continent, a forest, a field, and air reminiscent of the Petersburg province, and then my whole soul will turn. How it really was to see Vyra and Rozhdestveno again, I find hard to imagine, despite much experience.” The Nabokovs lived in Vyra during the summer, with only the winter of 1905 as an exception, when they spent the winter in the village. In the novel “Other Shores”, Nabokov describes some details of the Vyra house in detail:

“The old, greenish-gray wooden house, connected by a gallery to the wing, cheerfully and calmly looked with the colorful eyes of its two glass verandas at the edge of the park and at the orange pretzel of garden paths winding around the variegated black-earth patches. In the living room, where white furniture stood and on the tablecloth embroidered with roses lay marble volumes of old magazines, the yellow parquet spilled from the tilted mirror in an oval frame, and daguerreotypes on the walls listened as the white piano came to life and rang.”

Life at the manor in “Our Vyra” was typical, filled with all the charms of the landed gentry’s lifestyle and social entertainments of the time: hosting guests and riding bicycles, horseback riding and playing lawn tennis, gorodki, croquet, fishing on the Oredezh, walks in Rozhdestveno and other nearby estates. “Picnics, plays, lively games, our mysterious Vyra park, charming grandmother’s Batovo, magnificent Wittgenstein estates — Druzhnoselye beyond Siverskaya,” Nabokov recalled with a sense of bitter loss in his novel, “all this remained an idyllic engraved background in memory, now finding a similar pattern only in very old Russian literature.” Elena Ivanovna’s favorite pastime was mushroom picking. “In the drizzling rain, mother would set off alone on a long hike, armed with a basket forever stained purple inside from someone’s blueberry picking” (“Other Shores”). Vladimir Nabokov himself, an indefatigable connoisseur of all the cherished paths and secluded corners around Vyra, recalling his native homestead in distant exile, could never forget “the path from our Vyra to the village of Rozhdestveno, on the other side of the Oredezh: the reddish road — first passing between the Old Park and the New, then a colonnade of thick birches, past uncut fields…”

At the Vyra estate, Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first poem.

“To restore that summer of 1914, when the numbing frenzy of poetry first seized me, it is enough to mentally picture one gazebo. There, a lanky fifteen-year-old young man, as I was then, found shelter during a thunderstorm — there were an extraordinary number of them that July. My gazebo haunts me at least twice a year... Wine-red, bottle-green, and dark-blue diamonds of stained glass gave the latticed frames of its casement windows the appearance of a chapel. It is exactly as in my childhood — a sturdy old wooden structure over a fern-covered ravine in the old, riverside part of our Vyra park.”

In Vyra, Nabokov wrote his poems inspired by the beauty of those places. The writer himself was quite critical of his poetic work, especially his youthful poetry. “Like a pale dawn, my verse is quiet.” His contemporaries clearly undeservedly called V. Nabokov’s poetry archaic, overly restrained, incomparable to his innovative prose. But time put everything in its place. Nabokov’s poetry did not get lost against the backdrop of the extraordinary flourishing of Russian poetry in the 20th century. In 1930, Nabokov wrote prophetic lines in the poem “To the Reader”:

“I am here with you. You cannot hide.

I rushed to your chest through the darkness.

Here you feel a chill; a draft

From the past... Farewell then. I am content.”

Indeed, it is impossible not to feel the mystical “chill” when reading poems filled with delight at the happiness and possibility to live and love on the land of one’s ancestors.

“I imagine the chirping

Sixty-nine

versts from the city, from the building

Where I stumble locked inside,

And the station, and the slanting rain

Visible on the dark, and then

The station lilac flood,

Already roughened by the rain,

And further the tarantas apron,

In trembling streams, and all

The details of the birches, and the red

Barn to the left of the highway.”

This is the joy of a man who escaped the stone giants of Petersburg to the old park, to the ancient Oredezh River, to the Gatchina lilac. The station sixty-nine versts away is Siverskaya. And then one had to travel by horses harnessed to a tarantas (a type of carriage). It is interesting whether the barn still exists? Probably Nabokov had the gift of foresight — in exile in 1919 he wrote:

“The house is burned and the groves cut down,

Where my spring was misty.”

The subsequent history of this memorable place is tragically sad. In 1918, a nationalized Nabokov estate became an agricultural commune, and from 1922 — a school for working youth with its own subsidiary farm. Later, the manor house housed a veterinary technical school preparing personnel for collective and state farms of the Krasnogvardeysky district.

From 1937, the technical school was headed by Petr Andreevich Semiryagin, former secretary of the Rozhdestveno party organization.

During the fascist occupation, one of the departments of the 18th Army was stationed in the former estate. The manor house burned down in 1944; it was shelled by our artillerymen after they learned that the German headquarters was located there, although the Germans had already left. To this day, fragments of the Vyra park remain, the hill “Parnas,” ruins of former outbuildings, a greenhouse with a magnificent wooden facade done in Art Nouveau style, cellars, and an icehouse. On the foundation of the house lost to fire, shrubs and young trees have grown wildly.

Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/100071519725718/posts/177523224015682/

https://www.petersburg-bridges.ru/lenregion/pamyatniki/usadba-vyra.html