Portraitist of the provincial city: writer Alexei Pisemsky and Kostroma

Writer Alexei Feofilaktovich Pisemsky was born on March 10, 1820 in the estate of Ramenskoye Chukhlom district of Kostroma province.

The name reminded that this ancient family is local, buoyant, from the river Letters. The estate ended up under Chukhloma. There were a lot of such, well-born, but seedy nobles. But in the middle of the XIX century, poverty became unfashionable. The writer was proud that his grandfather walked in paws and plowed the earth himself. This did not prevent him from graduating from Kostroma Gymnasium and Moscow University, where he met a student of another faculty, Alexander Ostrovsky. Their friendship continued until the end of Pisemsky’s life.

Then came the dreary bureaucratic service. Provincial Secretary of the Kostroma chamber of state property, then the Moscow chamber, where in 1846 he rose to the assistant mayor. He was enough for six months, resigned “due to upset health and home circumstances.”

The “circumstances” consisted in the fact that on October 11, 1848, the writer married the beautiful daughter of Pavel Svinyin, Catherine. The family had to be fed, and therefore had to return to the service - a junior official of special assignments in the Kostroma provincial government.

And here we are lucky. The fact is that Pisemsky did not try to soar above the Kostroma realities. At the turn of the XIX and XX centuries, local historians compared fragments of his works and archival documents, reports of the official Pisemsky. Artistic display differed little from actual events. So the pictures of the province, reflected in plays and novels, can be considered almost documentary. So, in the novel “A Thousand Souls” in 1858 Kostroma guesses in every detail. Here is the “literary portrait” of the Kostroma drama theater of that time:

It must be said that the theater was placed not like all the theaters in the world, on the surface of the earth, but under the ground. It was remade from the tannery, and still retains the smell of the tannin principle, which impregnated its walls. Our visitors, in order to get to the stalls, had to go down at least two sazhens.”

The same can be said about the novel “Masons”. Here is a fragment about the Kostroma noble assembly:

“This year’s nobility elections were more solemn than before. This happened because the new house of the noble assembly was finally built and finished. The provincial leader, who was in charge of the building together with the architect, made every effort to make the meeting hall look like the hall of the All-Russian Moscow Nobility Assembly. Of course, this remained only an attempt and was limited to the fact that at the top of the halls very comfortable choirs were arranged, supported by rather beautiful columns; all the walls were made under marble; but for the province, it would seem, this was enough, but there were evil tongues that began to condemn, ridicule much in the newly built house, and the first ladies in this case rose up, especially those who had adult daughters, they were horrified by the openwork staircase that led to the hall.
- But how are we women going to walk up this ladder? - There will probably be footmen under it!
When it came to the provincial leader, he hastened to go around all these ladies and announced that the lackeys would not be allowed to be under the stairs and, moreover, a carpet would be laid all over the stairs. The ladies calmed down, but then some of the men, mostly Bacchus fans, began to cry out about the buffet:
- “Damn it,” they said, “a buffet is less than a chicken coop.” Where shall we sit? Is it not in the dance hall to stand behind our spouses? I'll be glad to see it at home!
About the ladies' bathroom was even composed by someone quatrains. The fact is that Venus was rather skillfully painted on the ceiling of this restroom, scattering flowers, which, as it were, were supposed to fall from the ceiling on the ladies adjusting their toilet and even more decorate them - an idea in itself is beautiful, but the trouble in the restroom was hung up for lighting a chandelier, the hook of which fell on the middle of the abdomen of Venus, as a result of which the said poem read: "The provincial leader is stupid, screwed Venus into the navel." Decency does not allow me to finish the other two verses.
But in any case, despite such bewilderments and unjust ridicule, the works of the provincial leader were appreciated, because when he gathered the nobles who had come to the ballot in a new house and introduced them to the dance hall at once, almost everyone expressed delight and began, coming one by one, to thank him: to submit addresses, and even more approvingly clap, it was not yet accepted. In response to the expressed gratitude, the provincial leader, raising his head, said:
- Mainly, gentlemen, I wish you to draw your attention to the economical nature of the construction I have produced and to look with confidence at the report I have presented on this subject! At the same time, he took out of his pocket a report written in advance on postal paper and wanted to hand it to one of the nobles; but at this moment a loud cry was heard from the persons standing near him:
- We do not want your report. We don't want to count you. We believe you...”

The prototype of the provincial leader, Sergey Kupreyanov, was then convicted of abuse, but the beautiful building serves the Kostromas to this day.

Then Pisemsky again resigned and returned. It was especially difficult for him when he published the novel “The Sea of Trouble”. It was a sharp critique of nihilism and nihilists, cynical promoters of progress and cold dealers of post-reform times. All the “progressive forces” were offended. Left without journalistic earnings, from 1866 to 1872, Pisemsky served in the Moscow provincial government, retired as a court adviser.

The writer never treated abstainers, and the suicide of his son finally knocked him down. In the winter of 1881, a little before his sixtieth birthday, he died.

“He died alone: his memory was devoted to restrained cold obituaries, he was buried without noisy funeral honors. Bury the writer, “swimming against the tide”, buried the author of “Tomorrowed Sea”. The memory of the novelist who feuded with the progressive camp of the era of “great reforms”, the memory of the publicist who encroached on the “Holy of Holies” of the sixties, survived the memory of his bright literary exploits, wrote in 1901 journalist Vladimir Shulyakov.

Twenty years after his death, he recalled that “there were days when Pisemsky’s name was pronounced with the same respect as the names of Turgenev or Goncharov, when his talent was considered a first-class talent, when advanced literary critics, not excluding the author of “Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature” and the the theorist of the “thinking proletariat”, spoke most flatteringly about the author of “Tufyak” and “Thousand souls”. The mentioned but unnamed critics are Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev. They were the idols of the sixties of the nineteenth century.

In the Soviet years, for disapproval of “progressive tendencies”, Pisemsky was not included in the writer’s pantheon and, as a result, in the school curriculum. Only a hundred years after his death, on March 23, 1981, a memorial plaque was opened in Kostroma at the intersection of Gornaya and Ivanovskaya streets, and in 1996 a monument designed by Vladimir Zaitsev was opened. Kostroma owed a debt to her writer.

Monument to Alexei Pisemsky included in the blue route of author's excursions "Kostroma at 15:15.".

According to the materials of the scientific consultant of the project “Kostroma at 15:15” candidate of cultural studies Larisa Sizintseva.