130 kilometers northwest of Moscow is the small town of Yaropolets. Here you can visit the Goncharov estate, which with some assumption is called the Pushkin Museum. This estate belonged to Natalia Goncharova`s mother. After his marriage, Pushkin`s relationship with his mother-in-law did not work out, but he visited her estate in Yaropolets twice.
Alexander Pushkin in Yaropolets
Alexander Pushkin came to the Goncharov estate in Yaropolets twice. He visited here for the first time on August 23-24, 1833 on his way from St. Petersburg to Orenburg. In a letter to his wife, the poet wrote: "I arrived in Yaropolets late on Wednesday: Natalia Ivanovna met me as well as possible. I spent Thursday at her place. She lives very secluded and quiet in her ruined palace and cultivates vegetable gardens over the ashes of her great-grandfather Doroshenka, to whom I went to worship. I found an old library in the house, and Natalia Ivanovna allowed me to choose the right books. I have selected about three dozen of them, which will come to us with jam and liqueurs. Thus, my raid on Yaropolets was not in vain at all."
Alexander Pushkin visited Yaropolets for the second time on October 9-10, 1834. He stayed here for one night on his way from his estate Bolshoe Boldino to St. Petersburg. The mother of Pushkin`s wife, after the madness of her husband, Nikolai Goncharov, and the ruin, constantly lived in Yaropolets, and not in a Linen Factory. She became very religious and often visited the Iosifo-Volotsky Monastery. In 1848, she died during one of her trips to the monastery. She was buried there in the monastery, but the grave was not preserved.
Thus, Pushkin himself spent only two nights at the Goncharov estate, but his wife Natalia Goncharova often lived here as a child, so over time the Pushkin Museum was formed here.
The history of the Zagryazhsky-Goncharov Estate in Yaropolets
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Yaropolets was a small village, however, two luxurious noble estates were located here. The origin of these estates is associated with the hetman from Ukraine, Peter Doroshenko. The lands in Yaropolets were granted to him by Sophia Alekseevna in 1684, when she ruled as regent under the young Peter and Ivan.
Peter Doroshenko lived here his old age and died in 1698. In Yaropolets, a chapel over his grave has been preserved. Hetman`s granddaughter Ekaterina Alexandrovna married Lieutenant General Alexander Artemyevich Zagryazhsky, a relative of Prince Potemkin.
He received a manor house with wooden buildings in Yaropolets as a dowry. Prince Potemkin and Empress Catherine came to visit him in Yaropolets. And after that, Alexander Zagryazhsky decided to start building a luxurious stone manor here, in accordance with the architectural traditions of the 18th century.
A large manor house with a colonnade and two wings was built in the Yaropolets estate. There is a square in front of the house, around which there are outbuildings. The Church of John the Baptist was built next to the manor house in 1771. In 1808 it was rebuilt in the classical style, and in this appearance it has survived to this day.
Natalia Zagryazhskaya - Natalia Goncharova`s mother
Alexander Zagryazhsky had a son, Ivan Alexandrovich. He served in the cavalry, distinguished himself in the wars with the Turks and rose to the rank of lieutenant general. He was married to Alexandra Stepanovna Alekseeva, with whom he had four children: Alexander, Sophia, Elizabeth and Ekaterina.
In 1782, Ivan Zagryazhsky`s regiment was stationed in Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia). At the ball, he met a dazzling beauty, Baroness Ulrika von Passe. They fell in love with each other. Ulrika left her husband and fled with Zagryazhsky to Russia. At first, the fugitives lived in Pskov, but then the Zagryazhsky regiment was transferred to Tambov. As a result, Ivan Zagryazhsky sent his mistress, who was expecting a child, to Yaropolets. At that time, his official wife Alexandra lived there. She received the Baroness in the house, and they lived without quarrels. Daughter Natalia was born in 1785, and in 1791 her mother Ulrika died.
Alexandra Zagryazhskaya, with the help of influential relatives, legalized the birth of Natalia, gave her the right to inheritance and raised Natalia as her own daughter together with her children.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Natalia Zagryazhskaya became a lady-in-waiting to Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna, at the court of Emperor Alexander I. There, a cavalry guard Okhotnikov fell in love with her, who was in a love affair with the Empress herself. In this situation, Empress Elizabeth decided to urgently marry Natalia Zagryazhskaya and remove her from the palace.
The Empress found her a groom, Nikolai Goncharov, the only son of Afanasy Goncharov, the owner of a Linen Factory in Kaluga. A magnificent wedding in 1807 was played at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, where the entire imperial family was present. After that, the Empress demanded the immediate departure of the newlyweds from the palace. They went to Kaluga. From 1811 to 1814, Nikolai`s father Afanasy Goncharov went on a long trip to Europe and Nikolai took management of the plant into his own hands.
You can read more about the life of Natalia Goncharova (Zagryazhskaya) in the Linen Factory in the description about the Linen Factory Estate. Here we just note that her daughter Natalia, who later married the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, was born in 1812, but not in the Manor house of the Linen Factory, but in the Tambov estate Karion, where the whole family was sent during the war with Napoleon.
The marriage of Pushkin and Natalia Goncharova
In December 1828, at the ball of the dance master Yogel, Pushkin met Natalia Goncharova for the first time. For the first time he wooed her mother in 1829 through Fyodor Tolstoy, but the answer was vague, although there was no refusal. Natalia was 16 years old at the time, and Pushkin was 30. Her mother said she was too young to be married.
Upset, Pushkin left for the Caucasus, but returned a year later and in 1830 again asked for the hand of Natalia Goncharova. Since there were no other suitors, the mother agreed to marry, but even then there were conflict situations between Pushkin and his future mother-in-law.
However, Natalia Goncharova did not have a dowry. Father Nikolai Goncharov had already gone mad by that time. The mother managed the factory as best she could, but she could not save a dowry for her daughters. Pushkin mortgaged the village of Kistenevka in his father`s estate Bolshoe Boldino and gave his future mother-in-law 11 thousand rubles to borrow to buy a dowry. She never returned the money to him afterwards.
The Goncharov estate in Yaropolets in our days
The name of Alexander Pushkin saved the Goncharov estate in Yaropolets from destruction and now it is to some extent a Pushkin Museum. The rich estate of the Chernyshevs, which was located next door, is in ruins today.
In Soviet times, different organizations were located in the estates of the Goncharovs and Chernyshevs, but both houses suffered greatly during the WWII. The authorities decided to restore the Goncharov Estate in its former appearance and transfer it to the MAI Institute to create a recreation center for employees. This recreation center still exists today, but in an extremely neglected state.
In the room where Pushkin spent the nights, the staff of the recreation center made the Pushkin Museum, where materials dedicated to Pushkin`s stay in Yaropolets are collected. The landscape park, which belonged to both estates, has been preserved, but nowadays it looks more like a forest. Only the skeleton of the Chernyshevs` estate has been preserved, which continues to collapse.
Next to the estate is the famous small Yaropoletskaya hydroelectric power station, built in 1920. This is the first rural hydroelectric power station that Lenin and Krupskaya visited. There is a small museum of rural energy here, and the hydroelectric power station and the dam itself have become a great location for tourists to walk.
