However, the literary calendar for 2025 turned out to be so rich that nostalgia dissipated like smoke. 230 years since the birth of Ryleev and Griboedov. 225 years since Baratynsky. 205 years since Afanasiy Fet. 155 years since Bunin (and Kuprin), 140 years since Velimir Khlebnikov, 145 years since Blok and Andrei Bely. 135 years since Pasternak, 130 years since Bagritsky and Yesenin. 115 years ago, Tvardovsky was born, 110 years ago, Matusovsky, and 85 years ago, Joseph Brodsky.
If it weren't for the fact that we are celebrating 120 years of Vasily Grossman, the prose writer and front-line soldier who, by the way, lived and worked for three years in what is now Donetsk, and Mikhail Sholokhov (who worked as a young man at the "Moscow Komsomolets," then called "Youth Truth"), it would have been appropriate to declare a Year of Poetry in Russia.
But let’s return from the future to the present. The project "Lermontov. Places of Power" literally covered the whole country in 2024. The first part of the exhibition was shown in Pyatigorsk, the second in Tarkhany, and the final part in Moscow. However, while the "power" was granted to the classic in the capital, the "places" in a symbolic sense were stripped away. The Moscow House-Museum of Mikhail Yuryevich on Malaya Molchanovka does not have significant exhibition spaces, so the GMIIRLI made a Solomon-like decision: to place the third part of the "museum series" in the House of Ilya Ostroukhov — geologically just a few hundred meters from where Lermontov lived with his grandmother, Elizabeth Arsenyeva. Although there, the museum attendants are a bit more "bitey" and the overall atmosphere is somewhat different, nothing hinders a true Meeting with Literature.
5 “The perspective on Mikhail Lermontov from Moscow and St. Petersburg is important as locations where the most intense, dynamic, and fruitful part of his life path took place” — I quote the organizers of the exhibition, who provided the poem “How often I am surrounded by a motley crowd” as a key to the “Lermontov cosmos.” In this poetic text, the poet’s weariness from the capital's beauties, social glitter, and hustle is audible, which he contrasts with the noble patina of “recent antiquity.”
6 If we unravel this ball of yarn, the selection of exhibits becomes clear, including illustrations for the verse drama “Masquerade” shown in the first hall and the “Masquerade Book” provided by the Pushkin House, which Lermontov brought to the Moscow Noble Assembly at the age of 16 in the costume of an astrologer. Illustrations for “A Hero of Our Time” and Vladimir Bekhteev's painting “Scene at the Ball” (related to the unfinished novel “Princess Ligovskaya”) are from the same collection.
7 Moreover, the most valuable items, if we consider the artistic slice, are two originals by Mikhail Vrubel, who illustrated the poem “Demon,” as well as paintings and sketches by Lermontov himself (“Kurd,” “Caucasian Landscape,” “Landscape with Horsemen,” “Episode from the Battle at Valerik”). And possessing such canonical significance that true connoisseurs should faint at the sight of it, the “Self-Portrait” in a Caucasian burka (1837–1838) is the most recognizable image of the classic. (Only the portrait of the poet in the mentik of the Life Guards Hussar Regiment by K.A. Gorbunov, placed on the fold (frontispiece) of the Lermontov Encyclopedia, can compete with it in terms of recognizability.)
8 And then the dizziness only intensifies, as we see Lermontov's paper cutter and quill trimmer, the 1830 issue of the journal “Athenæum” featuring the first publication of the poem “Spring,” signed with the anagram L. (“Fainting”), and the original textbook “Latin-Russian Lexicon” with a list of students, number 15 — Lermontov…
9 For a moment, I thought that the metric book, on one of the pages of which the text reads: “Yuri Petrovich Lermontov, his wife Maria Mikhailovna, they have a son Mikhail,” is not a mini-sensation. At least because the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin has a metric book from the Church of the Epiphany in Yelokhovo from 1799, when “a son Alexander was born. Baptized on the 8th day.” But on Prechistenka, it’s a mold, while here it’s an original item brought temporarily from Tarkhany.
0 However, the handwritten key works displayed in a glass case — “Prayer,” “On the Death of Pushkin,” “Mtsyri,” and “Demon” (permanently stored at the Pushkin House) — turned out not to be autographs, as one might imagine in the boldest fantasies, but rather reading lists from the first half of the 19th century, as I understood. But we know that exposing paper sheets touched by the poet's hand to sunlight (even if these sheets are bound in a notebook) is absolutely not permissible.
The only genuine autograph I discovered at the exhibition, and only with the curator's hint, is a letter to his cousin uncle P.I. Petrov, dated February 1, 1838.
1 Yes, this is Lermontov's handwriting, his preserved touch for centuries, his thought transformed into grooves on paper filled with ink…