An ancient manor that gave its name to the street. In the second half of the 17th century, the chambers of the Volkonsky princes were built in the depths of the courtyard. In the 18th century there was a lane behind them. The difference in the relief of the street and the alley was such that the first floor of the facade of the chambers along the alley was covered with earth. The walls and vaults of the basement are made of white stone, and the main floor is made of eagle brick.
In the middle of the 18th century, the Volkhonka drinking house was located in the chambers. In 1788 the building became residential again. Another house was built along the Volkhonka line, connected to the chambers by an end building. It received a classic façade with a pediment in the center above three windows with semicircular windows. At the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, the property belonged to the Moscow vice-governor Efim Efimovich Rinkevich. In 1802, his son Alexander, a Decembrist and member of the Northern Society, was born here. In the fire of 1812 the property was greatly damaged. Rinkevich managed to receive government assistance in the form of bricks from state factories to restore the estate.
In the middle of the 19th century, ownership passed to the merchant of the first guild, hereditary honorary citizen and shareholder of the Russian-American Company, the Greek Christopher Dmitrievich Spiridonov. In the early 1890s, the house was rented by the Society of Art and Literature, founded in Moscow in 1888, A.F. Fedotov, F.P. Komissarzhevsky and F.K. Sologub.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the house was owned by Olga Alekseevna Olenina, and in the 1910s the estate was bought by the owners of the neighboring Volkhonka estate, 10 - “Trading house G. Volkov with his sons.” Gavrila Volkov, the founder of the famous banking house, was a serf of the Golokhvastov landowners. Thanks to Prince N.B. He received his freedom from Yusupov. According to legend, the bookseller Gavrila came to Moscow on foot and, crossing the river, sat down to rest on the porch of a house on Volkhonka. Later, having become rich, he bought two houses on Volkhonka in memory of the beginning of his Moscow life. One of his sons, Pyotr Gavrilovich Volkov, was a responsible commission agent and appraiser at the Moscow Armory Chamber. The house housed a stationery store, a bookstore and a girls' school.
From 1927 to 1932, the building housed the presidium of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AHRR), the largest and most powerful of the creative groups of the 1920s, the forerunner of the Union of Artists of the USSR. It included outstanding artists I. Brodsky, A. Arkhipov, F. Malyavin and others.
In 1934, they wanted to demolish the house when laying a tunnel for the first metro line. But it was difficult to evict the tenants so quickly, and the house was abandoned. Now the foundation of the house is the covering of the subway tunnel.
In 2013-14, the house was reconstructed, the second stage of the buildings of the Museum of Personal Collections, which is part of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after. A.S. Pushkin (Pushkin Museum).
The history of the house on Volkhonka, illustrated with both historical drawings and modern photographs.
This estate (No. 1/14) in the 17th century. belonged to the boyar Boris Gavrilovich Yushkov, in 1738 it was owned by Admiral General Prince M.I. Golitsyn. The plan of the estate, taken in 1759, shows stone chambers on the site of the modern house. They were rebuilt in 1761. (the decoration was completed in 1766). Until recently, the authorship of this palace was attributed to two architects: S. I. Chevakinsky and I. P. Zherebtsov, but new research has established that the remodeling project was carried out by S. I. Chevakinsky alone, an outstanding architect, the author of such famous Baroque buildings in St. Petersburg, like the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral and the palaces of Sheremetev and Shuvalov. Zherebtsov participated only in the interior decoration of the Golitsyn palace, which was completed by 1766. The beautifully crafted front gate with an openwork monogram - “PMG” - (which means Prince Michail Golitzin) - one of the owners of the house of Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich dates back to the same time. Golitsyn.
In 1774, the Golitsyn mansion, like the neighboring houses of Dolgorukov (Volkhonka, 16) and Lopukhin (M. Znamensky, 3), was adapted for the stay of Catherine II, and between them, on the place that is now occupied by a gas station for government cars, built according to the design of M. F. Kazakov an extensive wooden palace with a large - area of about 775 sq. m - two-height throne room.
The writer and scientist A. T. Bolotov recalled that “despite all the cold and winter of that time, this structure was completed with great haste and thousands of hands worked on it day and night.” The church at the palace was consecrated on December 16, 1774 in the name of St. Andrei Pechersky, and on December 31, 1774 (obviously, the order was given to finish it necessarily this year, just like in blessed Soviet times), the head of the Kremlin expedition M. M. Izmailov reported on the completion of construction.
The English traveler William Cox, who was in Moscow at that time, noted that “the building, constructed with lightning speed, turned out to be so beautiful and convenient that the material from which it was constructed was subsequently used to build the imperial country palace, standing on a small hill in the vicinity of the city" - we are talking about the palace on the Sparrow Hills.
However, Catherine remained dissatisfied with the Cossack construction - she wrote to Baron Grimm: “You want to have a plan of the house where I live. I will send it to you, but identifying yourself in this labyrinth is a difficult task: two hours passed before I found out the way to my office, constantly falling into the wrong door. There are many exit doors, I have never seen so many of them in my life. Half a dozen have been sealed according to my instructions, and yet there are twice as many of them as are needed."
At the beginning of the 19th century. the house belonged to Prince S. M. Golitsyn, in whose house church, consecrated in the name of the Nativity of Christ and located in the northern part of the building, A. S. Pushkin intended to get married. But Metropolitan Philaret ordered that the wedding ceremony be held in the bride’s parish church at the Nikitsky Gate, so as not to deprive the local clergy of income. This church, like all house churches, was closed under the Bolsheviks, but for a long time a beautiful iconostasis remained there.
In 1925, a member of the presidium of the Communist Academy, V.P. Milyutin, urgently demanded that the iconostasis be removed from the church premises, since it was, as he reported, “...occupied by the histological department of the Brain Institute, and therefore the iconostasis is extremely obstructive to work.”
In 1834, S. M. Golitsyn was appointed chairman of the investigative commission in the case “of persons who sang libelous songs,” as the case fabricated by the police was called, in which Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Ogarev and their comrades were arrested and sentenced to various punishments. The sentence of the convicts was announced in this house on March 31, 1835. “A solemn, wonderful day,” wrote Herzen. “Whoever has not experienced this will never understand. 20 people were united there, who should be scattered directly from there, alone in the casemates of the fortresses, others in distant cities."
The prince's house was set up on a grand scale; it was served by an unprecedented number of servants, even then, who were headed by a certain Persian, whom everyone knew under the name of Mikhail Sergeevich, who sported "...across the stacks of white stone, despite the bitter frost, in unspeakable white calico and high lambskin hat." After the death of the prince, his entire fortune passed to his nephew M. A. Golitsyn, an art lover, bibliophile and collector. Having spent many years at various diplomatic posts abroad, he collected a large collection of books, paintings and various rarities - porcelain, bronze, jewelry.
After the death of the collector, these collections formed the so-called Golitsyn Museum, opened in January 1865. It exhibited paintings by famous European artists of the Italian, French, and Dutch schools: Cima da Conegliano, Caravaggio, Veronese, Titian, Canaletto, Rubens, Poussin, and many others . The collection of rarities included valuable objects of ancient culture - marble busts, vases, bronzes, carved stones, animal figurines, works of jewelry, furniture, medieval sculpture from Europe and the East.
The museum's library contained twelve thousand volumes, among which were incunabula and rare examples of typographic art. The museum operated for about twenty years and was popular in Moscow. In 1869, meetings of the first archaeological congress in Russia were held there. However, over time, the collector’s son, Prince S. M. Golitsyn, lost interest in the museum - he was more interested in horse racing. According to the memoirs of P. I. Shchukin, the curator of the museum’s collections, K. M. Gunzburg, spoke of him this way: “Unsere Furst ist keit Bucherfreund, sondern ein Pferderfreund” (“Our prince is a friend of horses, not books”).
In 1886, the museum was sold to the Hermitage and the Public Library for 800 thousand rubles, and the house began to be rented out to various institutions and residents.
In 1888 - 1892 the private school of I.M. Khainovsky was located; in 1894 - 1898 During the reconstruction of the house on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, classes of the Moscow Conservatory were located here. The famous composer R. M. Glier recalled: “The conservatory was then temporarily located in a building opposite the Cathedral of the Savior, and my first memories are associated with this picturesque place, from where both the Kremlin and the Moscow River were visible. Many small alleys were located around the then conservatory: and her students settled closer so as not to waste time walking. Here, on Volkhonka, I took the entrance exam."
Along with the conservatory, the Golitsyn mansion housed the Russian Choral Society, whose concerts were held in the hall of the main house.
In 1903, the estate changed owners - it was acquired by the Moscow Art Society, which included the famous school of painting, sculpture and architecture. The society began to rent out premises here to various institutions - a trade school, L. N. Gromoglasova's women's gymnasium, L. A. Shanyavsky University (its physical laboratory, as well as laboratories of experimental biology and physics), Higher Women's Agricultural Courses, etc. In Soviet times the house was occupied by the Golitsyn Agricultural Courses, after them - the Forestry Institute and Technical School, the Brain Institute, the editorial offices of several magazines, and from 1925 - the Communist Academy. It was for her that they built it in 1928 - 1929. ancient building, grossly distorting its proportions.
In 1936, the Communist Academy was abolished, and several scientific institutes remained in this building that worked in the system of the Academy of Sciences - institutes of history, Slavic studies, history of material culture, economics, world economy and world politics, art history, etc. Memorials are placed on the building plaques in honor of the historian B. D. Grekov and the economist K. V. Ostrovityanov.
In the right wing of the estate there was an editorial office of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Now this building houses the Institutes of Philosophy, Management and Human Resources. The restored right wing of the estate is occupied by the departments of the Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1882, B.I. Chicherin rented an eight-room apartment on the ground floor of a Golitsyn house and lived there for six winters (in the summer he went to his Tambov estate Karaul). In 1881, Chicherin was elected mayor of Moscow, but two years later, for a very vague hint about the possibility of constitutional freedoms in Tsarist Russia, he was fired by order of Alexander III himself. In this house, Chicherin worked on such major works as “Property and the State” and “History of Political Doctrines.”
Also on the ground floor in an apartment whose windows faced southeast, the great Russian playwright A. N. Ostrovsky spent the last years of his life. He moved here on October 4, 1877 from Nikolovorobinsky Lane, where there was, as he admitted, “a quiet corner.” Ostrovsky really liked the new apartment in Golitsyn’s house, and he was worried about having time to rent it: “Since the caretaker of the house seriously told his wife that before concluding a condition, they would collect certificates about the moral qualities of the person to whom they were renting the apartment, then they can inform he knows some of my advantages, not major ones (so as not to impress), for example, that I am not a drunkard, not a brawler, I will not start a gambling or dance class in the apartment, and so on.” Instead of his house in Vorobin, Ostrovsky hoped to find a good apartment: “...if I see that the apartment can be heated to a constant temperature of +14o (on the Reaumur scale, which is equal to 17.5oC - Author), then I am ready to conclude a contract for at least 10 years. The absence of dampness and cold is the most important issue for me - everything else is not worth much discussion." The apartment was rented for 1,000 rubles a year (which was quite cheap for her), and the Ostrovskys lived in it for 9 years. L. N. Tolstoy, P. I. Tchaikovsky, I. S. Turgenev, D. V. Grigorovich, and many actors visited Ostrovsky here. “The Dowry”, “The Heart is Not a Stone”, “Talents and Admirers” and other plays were written in this house - Ostrovsky worked hard, exhaustingly. In 1886, Ostrovsky was appointed head of the repertoire of Moscow theaters and was supposed to occupy a government apartment. While she was getting off, he moved to the Dresden Hotel on Tverskaya (in the modern house No. 6 on the corner with Tverskaya Square there are remains of the old building). From here he, already ill, left for his estate Shchelykovo, Kostroma province, where he died on June 2, 1886.
In the same year, 1886, several more tenants left the Golitsyn house: Moscow University zoologist S. A. Usov and poet and public figure I. S. Aksakov died. S. A. Usov put a lot of work into the creation of the Moscow Zoo, he was the author of several works on zoology, but not only - he was seriously interested in history and archeology - in particular, he owned a work on the history of the Moscow Assumption Cathedral. One of the founders of the Slavophil movement, I. S. Aksakov, enjoyed great fame as a defender of the oppressed Slavic peoples, and was one of the leaders of the Moscow Slavic Committee; published several newspapers, which, as a rule, were closed by the tsarist government for independent opinions and criticism. I. S. Aksakov settled in Golitsyn’s house in September 1885 and lived only about six months - he died in his office while editing the next issue of the newspaper “Rus” on January 27, 1885: in the obituary in the magazine “Russian Archive” it was said, that “...on Volkhonka, in a modest room with windows facing the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, at the 63rd year of his life, Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov died on January 27, 1886.”
In the last quarter of the 18th century, the Mansion on Volkhonka was part of the famous Prechistensky Palace - the temporary residence of Empress Catherine II in Moscow. The reason for her arrival was the celebration of the peace treaty concluded with the Ottoman Empire on July 10 (21), 1774 “in the camp near the village of Kyuchuk-Kainardzhi.”
Magnificent celebrations at the end of the protracted but successful Russian-Turkish War (1768-1774), which, among other things, gave Russia the right to have its own fleet in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, should have overshadowed the difficult impressions of military losses and the terrible plague epidemic of 1770-1770. 1772, which claimed many lives and the associated plague riot, as well as from the horrors of the Pugachev uprising - two weeks before the arrival of the Empress in Moscow, Emelyan Pugachev was executed on Bolotnaya Square.
For various reasons, Empress Catherine did not want to stay in the Kremlin. In a letter dated August 6, 1774, Catherine addressed a question to M.M. Golitsyn:
“... is there a stone or wooden house in the city in which I could fit in and the yard accessories could be placed near the house... or... is it possible to whip up a wooden structure anywhere?” .
In response to M.M. Golitsyn, of course, offered his house. This location seemed suitable for a number of reasons: nearby there were three more large estates and a large undeveloped area, and nearby was the Kalymazhny yard, where horses and carriages could be comfortably accommodated. The house itself was located not far from the Kremlin, on Volkhonka Street, then called Prechistenka. The Empress willingly agreed to stay with her court in the house of Prince Golitsyn, rented for this purpose by the Palace Department. In addition to Golitsyn’s house, the neighboring house of Lopukhin, located nearby, was also rented, in which at that time the mother of Prince Potemkin, the empress’s favorite, lived. As for the Mansion - at that time it belonged to the Dolgorukov family, not long before this the house was bought by order of the Empress, who had previously planned to make a generous gift to Count Pyotr Rumyantsev, who received the “designation” of Transdanubia after the victory in the Russian-Turkish War.
The execution of the palace project, later named Prechistensky, was entrusted to the young architect Matvey Kazakov, for whom this work served as the beginning of a brilliant career.
“I ordered Izmailov to buy the house of Prince Dolgoruky on Prechistenka and remodel it according to the plan confirmed by me.”
The Empress writes to Prince M.N. Volkonsky. Such a plan was actually developed by the young Matvey Kazakov, who signed it as “architect”, that is, assistant to the architect, but due to the extremely short construction time of the Prechistensky Palace, it was not possible to implement the planned alteration of the house: on the general plan of the palace, developed by the same author, the configuration of the plan of Dolgorukov's house remains the same.
The area around the estate of M.M. Golitsyna demanded a large-scale restructuring. M.F. Cossacks took measurements of all rented buildings and made several plans for reconstruction, two of which reached the empress’s desk. The first of them was rejected, and the second was approved by Catherine after M.F. himself arrived from St. Petersburg. Kazakova. The construction of the Prechistensky Palace had to be completed in an urgently short time, so other architects Alexey Baranov, Moisey Medvedev, Ivan Morshchinov, Ivan Vetter, Vasily Yakovlev, Christian Rosberg, and students: Nikolay Matveev, Alexey Khodov and Rodion Kazakov were involved in work on the palace , who later became the chief architect of the Kremlin Expedition. “The construction and strengthening of the rafters on the main wooden structure” was carried out by the architect Karl Blank and his assistant Vasily Mikhailov. The construction of the palace was led by the head of the expedition of the Kremlin building M.M. Izmailov, decoration by master of the horse I.M. Morsoshnikov.
The main compositional idea of the Prechistensky Palace, according to the project of Matvey Kazakov, came down to the development of the courtyard space between the main houses of three large estate complexes with a rectangular volume of the palace structure, made completely, right down to the pile foundations made of wood, decorated luxuriously, but in a hurry for temporary stay and construction festive receptions: the plank walls were covered with canvas painted with oil paint, the main staircase was upholstered in red cloth. The roof, which was leaking everywhere, was constantly being repaired as leaks appeared. The courtyards of the Prechistensky Palace were paved with stone pavement. The empress and her court were supposed to live in the main manor houses - stone capital structures: so in the Golitsyn house there were the chambers of the empress herself, and in the house bought from the Dolgorukovs, the chambers of the heir and future Emperor Paul I. The stone buildings were connected to the new palace and, accordingly, between themselves, through cold wooden passages. The temporary structure included: a large throne room surrounded by a colonnade, a palace church in the name of Anthony and Theodosius of the Pechersk Wonderworkers, a hall for receiving foreign ministers, and a large hall.
Construction continued in the summer and autumn of 1774, finishing work continued in 1775. The external and internal appearance of the palace can be partly judged by what has been preserved in the GNIMA named after. Shchusev's drawing of a longitudinal section of the main wooden building - here were the ceremonial double-height halls for receiving ambassadors and holding balls. The left part of the drawing shows a fragment of the main facade of Dolgorukov’s house - this is the first reliable view of the Mansion for the period of the 18th century, made by M. Kazakov based on exact measurements of the building.
A drawing of the iconostasis of the palace church in the name of Anthony and Theodosius has also been preserved, giving an idea of the richness of the interior decoration and the architectural tastes of the era.
The French envoy Marie Daniel Bourret de Corberon described the Prechistensky Palace as follows:
“The present palace, recently built, is a collection of many separate, wooden and stone houses, very skillfully connected. The entrance is decorated with columns; the entrance hall is followed by a large hall, and after this another, where Her Majesty receives foreign ambassadors. Then follows an even larger hall, occupying the entire width of the building and divided by columns into two parts: in one they dance, in the other they play cards.”
The palace had a throne room with high windows and a throne under the canopy. All rooms, including the church, were double-height.
Despite all the efforts of the architects, the empress did not like the built palace: in winter the rooms were cold, and in summer the smells of the Kolymazhny yard burst through the open windows. The Empress was annoyed that in her office she had to sit between “three doors and three windows.” Catherine expressed her attitude towards the construction in a letter to Baron F. Grimm:
“Do you want to have a plan of my house? I'll send it to you, but it's not an easy thing to identify in this labyrinth. I stayed here for two hours and could not manage to accurately find the door to my office, this is a triumph of confusion. I have never seen so many doors in my life; I already ordered half a dozen to be destroyed, and yet there are twice as many of them as required.”
The hostility towards their main residence was expressed in the fact that the empress and the court spent part of the summer in Kolomenskoye.
During the magnificent festivities, Catherine showered favors on Count Pyotr Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky, who conquered Azov and part of Crimea from the Turks: the city of Kerch and the Yeni-Kale fortress (the rest of Crimea was annexed to Russia 9 years later - in 1783) and provided Russia with access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, to the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. Among other things, before leaving, the Empress presented the count with the Dolgorukovs’ house, which had been bought for this purpose, and many other gifts.
Despite everyday inconveniences, Catherine spent almost the entire year of 1775 in the Prechistensky Palace. Soon after the departure of Catherine II, it was decided to dismantle the palace, which, however, was carried out only in 1779, when the Golitsyn family was able to return to their home. The wooden building was transported to the Sparrow Hills and placed on the foundations of the old Vorobevsky Palace, built in the 16th century by the father of Ivan the Terrible, Vasily Ivanovich.
Old wooden palace on Vorobyovy Gory. XVIII century. From the book by N. Naydenov “Moscow Photographs from views of areas, temples, buildings and other structures”, volume II (1886).
It was a wooden palace on a white stone foundation. Peter the Great ordered a birch grove to be built behind the palace, but this place never became a place for frequent visits by crowned heads; by the second half of the 18th century, the palace fell into disrepair and the wooden structure was dismantled. By the end of the 1770s, the basement also fell into disrepair. In 1778, the head of the expedition of the Kremlin building M.M. Izmailov reported on the case of the transfer of the Prechistensky Palace to Vorobyovy Gory:
“... not a single contractor took on this work, and according to the architect’s estimate it will cost up to 50,000 rubles.”
At the new location, the palace was completely assembled in the 1780s under the supervision of architects Matvey Kazakov and his namesake Rodion Kazakov. It is interesting that the dismantled structures of the Prechistensky Palace were not transported, but floated on barges along the Moscow River. They traveled from Prechistensky Spusk, where Lazy Torg had a pier, to Vorobyovy Gory.
These newly built parts of the Prechistensky Palace were named the New Vorobyovsky Palace, in memory of the Old one, and were first noted on the general plan of Moscow in 1789. The throne room was moved here from the palace on Volkhonka, in which ambassadors’ receptions could again be held.
The move of the palace from the center of Moscow to the village of Vorobyovo did not breathe new life into it: Catherine never stayed in it after perestroika. From 1796 to 1800, it temporarily housed classes of the architectural school of M.F. Kazakov.
