Vnukov's three-story house. Tavern "Crimea" and people's house on Pipe Square
This story was born out of confusion. It intertwined the fates of three Moscow houses at once, located on Trubnaya Square, near Tsvetnoy Boulevard: the Hermitage restaurant (known to ordinary people by the name of its founder, the French chef Olivier), the Crimea tavern (Vnukov’s three-story house) and the tavern of a certain Alexander Ivanovich Kozlov.
This story was born out of confusion. It intertwined the fates of three Moscow houses at once, located on Trubnaya Square, near Tsvetnoy Boulevard: the Hermitage restaurant (known to ordinary people by the name of its founder, the French chef Olivier), the Crimea tavern (Vnukov’s three-story house) and the tavern of a certain Alexander Ivanovich Kozlov.
Previously, the Neglinka flowed here, the banks of which were “strewn” with monastery gardens (Rozhdestvensky girls’ garden and Sretensky men’s garden) and arable lands. Silence and space. The river communicated with Moscow through a hole made especially for it in the fortress wall - a wide arch with an iron grating. Therefore, there were no gates here, but only this “Pipe”. However, Moscow expanded, and already in the 16th century, craftsmen who tore millet settled in this area, outside the city; in the 17th century, printers of the Printing House and craftsmen who made “rooks” - special projectiles - settled in this area. The memory of the settlements remains in the names of the streets - Pechatnikov Lane, Drachikha, also known as Grachikha and Grachevka. The latter is now known as Trubnaya Street.
The two settlements apparently explain why Trubnaya Street is called in old books either Drachikha - Drachevka, or Grachikha - Grachevka. It seems that until the 20th century Muscovites used both names equally often.
In the upper reaches, the river was especially leisurely, and a pond was formed on the site of the current Tsvetnoy Boulevard. Neglinka was called Samoteka for its congestion and laziness. In 1789-1791, a “communication canal with swimming pools” was built from Samoteka to the city center along the Neglinnaya River, which you can read about in Sytin. At the end of the 18th century, the pond was improved by making a pool with trees planted along the banks, and after the war with Napoleon and the confinement of the river into an underground pipe, they even planned a park on the site of the pond. The place of the pool was taken by Samotechny, also known as Trubny Boulevard, which later, due to the flower trade, became Tsvetnoy.
By the way, the ancient old women who live in the alleys between Tsvetnoy and Rozhdestvensky, who bask in the sun in the summer, remember well that the flower shops on the boulevard were destroyed only after the Great Patriotic War. But they won’t remember the old name of Trubnaya Street. But, with pleasure remembering the stories of their grandmothers, they tell what a hot place Trubnaya and the surrounding area were.
In the 19th century, you could put the night you spent on Tsvetnoy on the list of your most daring and reckless actions. The monastery gardens and blissful silence are long gone. And there are slums, brothels and numerous taverns. Robbery, carnal pleasures and gambling. Between Trubnaya Street, Tsvetnoy Boulevard and the vacant lot on the site of Trubnaya Square stands a huge, long gloomy three-story house of Vnukov - one of the heroes of our history. So, the middle of the 19th century. Only visitors don’t know about the Crimea tavern. And everyone will tell you about what is happening there. Moreover, he will add on his own behalf, widening his eyes to heighten his fear. Actually, it is not so much the tavern itself, which occupies two floors of the house, the second and third, that is surrounded by legends, but the large basement floor, which is hidden under the shops and shops huddled on the first floor. "Hell".
“A man is sitting on a bench on Tsvetnoy Boulevard and looking out into the street, at Vnukov’s huge house. He sees about five people walking along the sidewalk past this house, and suddenly – no one! Where did they go?... He looks - the sidewalk is empty... And again, out of nowhere, a drunken crowd appears, makes noise, fights... And suddenly disappears again.” (V. Gilyarovsky, “Moscow and Muscovites”)
“Hell” was in charge, as it should be, “Satan”. Only no one has ever seen this man. Between him and random people who wandered in there were always the barman and the bouncers. But, move on, the common, drunken and smelly hall is not yet hell. The heart of “Hell” is deeper and only a select few can get there. “The Underworld” occupies half of the dungeon, all entirely of corridors and closets, which are divided into “hellish forges” and “devil’s mills.” This is where big games are played and fortunes are lost. There are no days off here, money rules here. Once you come here, you can disappear forever. If you chase the offender, you will never find him - he will leave through one of the many underground passages.
The assassination attempt on Alexander II was forged in the “hellish forges”. Students who decided to actively fight the tsarist government found shelter here. The Ishuta people, having conceived the regicide, did not think long about the name of their group - “Hell”. The attempt was unsuccessful, nine “hell men” were sent to hard labor, and the shooter Karakozov was hanged. Their unsuccessful attempt was the beginning of the end of “Hell”; the police were forced to take on the underworld...
“Deposits are beneficial to you” - this sign decorated a house on Tsvetnoy Boulevard in the 1970s. Nobody even remembered about “Hell”. After the abolition of serfdom, Moscow revived, unable to cope with the influx of visitors eager to squander the contents of their heavy wallets. The vacant lot was bought for inexpensively and soon, diagonally from “Crimea”, on the other side of the square, the most elegant “Hermitage Olivier” - the second hero of this story - grew up. Unprecedented success: a columned hall, separate offices, a French chef, exquisite delicacies and wines from abroad, fabulous prices. But the proximity of the rollicking, unrestrained “Crimea” was very confusing. True, not that long. At the beginning of the 20th century, “Crimea” no longer existed on Trubnaya Square. Vnukov’s house came into the possession of the merchant Praskovya Stepanovna Kononova, who set up a trade in alabaster and building materials in the former tavern. And she rented part of the house to Nikolai Dmitrievich Chernyatin to organize a manufacturing store. In general, everything is orderly, profitable and decent. No robberies - just a kit, and no students with a revolutionary consciousness.
And modernity connected “Olivier” and “Crimea”. One of the journalists, having read Gilyarovsky’s phrase “long before the Hermitage restaurant, the riotous tavern “Crimea” was located in it,” taken out of context, decided that the tavern and the restaurant were located in the same building. Which is what he convinced many of. Although a careful reading leaves no doubt that this is not the case.
But there is a third participant in this story: the house that stood across the road from “Crimea”, on the corner of Rozhdestvensky Boulevard and Trubnaya Street and had the even number 2. The Safatovs’ private house belonged to Dmitry Mikhailovich Shishkin, and at the beginning of the 20th century the building housed a tavern , whose owner was Alexander Ivanovich Kozlov. This house, unlike the violent “Crimea,” was not convicted of anything sinful and was only a silent witness to what was happening in the square. But its even number ruined its reputation after the demolition. He allowed it to be confused... again with “Krym”, which had an odd number on Trubnaya Street, but an even number, second on the boulevard.
Neither “Crimea” nor Kozlov’s tavern opposite, across the road on Trubnaya Street, no longer exist. And there is only this construction site. December 2004. Of the three houses on Trubnaya Square, only the Hermitage survived. “Crimea” was demolished in the 1980s, and in its place grew a massive socio-political center of the Moscow City Committee of the CPSU, subsequently the Parliamentary Center of Russia (which in itself is a curiosity in the context of the story being told) and a center for training in electoral technologies of the Federation Council. The center is already about to be demolished. According to a recent decision of the Moscow government, a “multifunctional complex of administrative and residential buildings” will appear here. Everything would be fine if all the design work did not provide for an even greater increase in the volume of the building, and in some cases - giving it an official centric composition like the Congress building in Washington.
In the mid-1990s, Kozlov's tavern (Trubnaya, 2/3/2) was also demolished. One after another, architectural projects for the development of the resulting wasteland were replaced, each subsequent one higher and more terrible than the previous one. At first there was supposed to be a 2-4-story hotel, now it seems there are offices. Moreover, the building on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard will rise to the same level, or maybe one floor higher, than the neighboring constructivist building. Visually it "bans" the prospect of the street. Rozhdestvenka will finally hide the view from Pechatnikov Lane to the bell tower of the Petrovsky Monastery, which has not been spoiled until now, unlike the views from Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, which were destroyed by the construction of an office and hotel center in the 1990s. There is also construction going on on the other side of the square. In general, practically nothing remains from the development of Trubnaya Square. And mass demolitions give birth to stories in which one house merges with two others. Our memory is successfully destroyed by an excavator. And in place of “Hell” the Parliamentary Center appears...
The radial-ring principle of planning of ancient Russian cities is a feature of the development of ancient Russian cities and Moscow in particular. From the center of the settlement, the expanding city was surrounded by ever new defensive walls. This was precisely the prerequisite for the emergence of many, including Trubnaya.
Pipe Square: history of origin
“The Underworld” is the second part of the complex, accessible only to “initiates”. It consisted of small rooms - "forges" and large rooms - "devil's mills".
There was also an underground part - the "Hell" tavern, where a very dangerous public gathered. Here they played cards for money and life, drank drinks common among exiles and convicts, and resolved issues displeasing to the government.
It is with Trubnaya Square that important events in the political life of the city are connected: an assassination attempt on the Tsar was being prepared, and there was also a mass death of residents of the capital going to the funeral of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
Monument on Trubnaya
In 1994, a stele “Grateful Russia to the soldiers of law and order who died in the line of duty” was unveiled on Trubnaya Square in Moscow. This event sums up everything said above. After all, this square is a bloody place in the capital, where not only citizens died, but also guardians of the law who tried to restore order in the most gangster corner of Moscow. The authors of the stele are A. V. Kuzmin and A. A. Bichukov.
The monument is made in the form of a Roman triumphal column, the trunk of which is cast in bronze. The column is installed on a granite stepped pedestal, the base is decorated with bas-reliefs. One of them depicts a Mother grieving over the body of her deceased son.
On the column is a figure of St. George the Victorious, killing a serpent with a spear. The symbolism of the sculpture is obvious: St. George the Victorious personifies the warrior of Law and Order, and the snakes represent the criminals with whom he fights and invariably wins. It should be noted that the image is different from the canonical one - St. George the Victorious is depicted not as a horseman, but as a standing warrior trampling the enemy snake with his foot.
The height of the column reaches 32.5 m, which is 15.5 m lower than the famous Alexander Column in St. Petersburg.
Every year, a Memory Watch is held near the monument, where Moscow police officers gather and lay flowers - a tribute to the memory of the fallen defenders of law and order.
Sights of Trubnaya Square
At the corner of Trubnaya Square and Neglinnaya Street there is a historical building that houses the School of Contemporary Play. Previously, on the site of this building there was a tobacco stall, and in the 19th century, according to the design of D. Chichagov, this building was built, intended for the fashionable “Hermitage”, which attracted the entire aristocratic elite of Moscow. It was here that the famous chef-inventor Lucien Olivier shone with his art.
This restaurant is also associated with the name of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who signed a contract here with the famous book publisher Suvorin to print the complete collection of his works.
But the house on the corner of Bolshoi Golovin Lane has the historical name “House with Pregnant Caryatids.” It housed one of the most popular brothels in aristocratic Moscow.
Nearby, on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, is the famous Yuri Nikulin Circus.
How to get to Trubnaya Square? The most convenient way to travel is the Moscow metro: to the Trubnaya Ploshchad or Tsvetnoy Boulevard stations.
And in order not to confuse anything, we suggest that you look at the photo of Trubnaya Square in advance.
Have a nice trip and unforgettable impressions!
The square was planned in 1795, but it finally appeared on the city map in 1817 - when it disappeared.
The people called this place “pipe”, and the market under the walls of the White City was called Trubny. Here there were forges near the water, and under the fortress wall there was a bast market, where you could buy logs, boards, frames and doors, carts and other forest products.
In the 1840s, the poultry market was moved from Okhotny Ryad to Trubnaya Square. And of course, poultry farmers had their own tricks. For example, they sold specially trained pigeons, which, at the first opportunity, returned from the new owner to the old one for a new sale. And in order for customers to come for purchases more often, they used the “sale at Vagankovo”: when transplanting the sold bird into a cage, it was imperceptibly squeezed under the wings, which caused internal hemorrhage, and after a few days it died.
Nevertheless, the poultry market operated here until 1924 and was very popular. Muscovites even had a custom: to come to Truba on the day of the Annunciation, buy a bird and immediately release it into the wild.
In the middle of the 19th century, a horse-drawn horse was built along the Boulevard Ring. On Trubnaya Square, an additional pair of horses was harnessed to it in order to pull the carriage up the steep rise of Rozhdestvensky Boulevard at the site of the steep bank of the Neglinnaya.
And in 1851, in the northern part of the square, near modern Tsvetnoy Boulevard, they began to sell flowers, seeds and seedlings.
There are hens with chicks, turkeys, geese walking along the street, and sometimes you will happen to see a fat pig walking with her piglets. At least, I have met these interesting animals more than once not only on Truba, but even on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard.
But soon Trubnaya Square gained a bad reputation. The fact is that on the site of house No. 2 on Tsvetnoy Boulevard stood Vnukov’s three-story house, where the Crimea tavern appeared on the ground floor in the mid-19th century. It had the reputation of a hangout where the city’s “bottom” gathered. And its basements were called “Hell” and “Hell.”
On the third floor of the tavern, there were traders, sharpers, swindlers and all sorts of crooks, relatively decently dressed. The audience was consoled by songwriters and accordion players. The mezzanine was decorated brightly and roughly, with pretensions to chic. In the halls there were stages for the orchestra and for the gypsy and Russian choirs, and a loud organ was played alternately between the choirs at the request of the public... Here merchants who had been on a spree and various visitors from the provinces were consoled. Under the mezzanine, the lower floor was occupied by commercial premises, and below it, deep in the ground, under the entire house between Grachevka and Tsvetnoy Boulevard, there was a huge basement floor, entirely occupied by one tavern, the most desperate place of robbery, where the underworld, flocking from the hangouts of Grachevka, the alleys of Tsvetnoy Boulevard, and even from the “Shipovskaya Fortress” itself, the lucky ones came running after particularly successful dry and wet affairs, betraying even their hangout “Polyakovsky tavern” on the Yauza, and Khitrov’s “Katorga” seemed like a boarding house for noble maidens in comparison with “Hell” "
In the 20th century, the Crimea tavern was closed, and a store was located in Vnukov’s house. In 1981, Vnukov’s house was demolished. In its place appeared the House of Political Education of the Moscow State Committee of the CPSU. In 1991 it was transformed into the Parliamentary Center of Russia, and in 2004 it was demolished. Now there is a complex of administrative and residential buildings.
The legendary Echkinsky rooms with the Dog Market tavern have not survived either. In their place stands the Neclay Gallery.
A huge block located between Trubnaya Square and Neglinnaya Street was occupied by the furnished rooms of the Echkin coachmen, known in Moscow for their cleanliness, cheapness and the “ability” of the owners to wait for a long time for rent from the most numerous category of guests - students of Moscow University. In the courtyard of the Echkin rooms there was a depot for stagecoaches and city cabs, as well as the Echkin residence itself...
At the corner of Neglinnaya Street and Nizhny Kiselny Lane near the Echkins, Nikiforov’s “Dog Market” tavern was located in the house, where hunters and nature lovers gathered... In this tavern a meeting took place, no less important than the meeting in the “Slavic Bazaar” of V.I. . Nemirovich-Danchenko and K.S. . One day, two lovers of birds and bergamot tobacco, Lucien Olivier and Yakov Pegov, got into a conversation here. They bought tobacco for one kopeck at Truba so that it would always be fresh. And while discussing tobacco products, they decided to build a special restaurant for lovers of dog racing, birdsong and other regulars of the Bird Market on Truba. Which was soon accomplished.
And in the early 2000s, during the reconstruction of Tsvetnoy Boulevard, a memorial “Grateful Russia - to soldiers of law and order who died in the line of duty” was installed in the northern part of Trubnaya Square. At the top there is a pedestrian, striking the Serpent. The central bas-relief uses the theme of the Pieta - a mother mourns her dead son. The monument was opened on Police Day.
They say that......the artist Perov found sitters and subjects for paintings on Truba. For example, he painted “The Drowned Woman” with a certain Fanny, an inhabitant of one of the brothels. Perov even left perhaps the only description of such an institution among his contemporaries: he visited the brothel together with his teacher from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, who was looking for a model.
...March 6, 1953, during the farewell to the body of I.V. Stalin in the Hall of Columns there was a massive stampede in the crowd that had accumulated on Trubnaya Square. The number of deaths was not inferior in scale to the Khodynka disaster of 1896.
...there are still precious trinkets lying around in the Pipe dungeons that the bandits accidentally dropped during their escape.
There are two known legends about the origin of the name of the area, and both of them are associated with women. According to the first version, the area was named after the wife of boyar Fyodor Goltai, who owned these lands at the beginning of the 15th century. Allegedly, his wife, Marya, was a woman of extraordinary beauty. Another version says that a gang of robbers led by Atamansha Marya lived in this grove.
The most plausible version of the origin of the name, as always, is the most prosaic: after the Time of Troubles, the Maryino settlement appeared here, from which the grove received its name. However, until the beginning of the 18th century, Maryina Roshcha was part of a forest area where robbers actually operated.
Oddly enough, this area became famous thanks to the cemetery. In the second quarter of the 18th century, the house of God was moved here - a place where suicides were buried and unidentified corpses found on the streets of the city were buried. There was such a tradition: on the day of Semik, Thursday in the seventh week after Easter, to bury all unidentified bodies. Many Muscovites gathered on this day at church houses in the hope that their missing loved ones were buried here.
After the memorial services, the townspeople went to a nearby grove, where the secular commemoration continued, with songs and round dances.
Such meetings in Semik became a tradition and soon turned into real folk festivities. The dense grove was conducive to this, and soon enterprising Muscovites set up booths and taverns here.
Reproduction from a painting by an unknown artist of the mid-19th century “Festivities in Maryina Roshcha.” State Historical Museum/RIA Novosti
At the beginning of the 19th century, local peasants began to rent out their huts to Moscow summer residents. The proximity to the city and the beautiful Maryina Grove decided the matter, and this place began to attract high society. Celebrations in Maryina Roshcha became a real attraction of Moscow; they were always mentioned in guidebooks.
“How strange it is, in Moscow the most favorite festivities of the common people are Vagankovo and Maryina Roshcha,” noted writer Mikhail Zagoskin. — Vagankovo is a cemetery behind the Presnenskaya outpost, Maryina Roshcha is also an old cemetery a stone’s throw from the Lazarevskoye cemetery; in a word, this place of the most riotous fun, drunkenness and gypsy songs is surrounded on all sides by cemeteries.
In this Maryina Grove, everything is seething with life, and everything reminds of death.
Here, among the ancient graves, a riotous choir of gypsies thunders; there, on the gravestone, there is a samovar, bottles of rum and Russian merchants are feasting.”
However, in 1851, progress and an iron monster burst into the beautiful green grove: the Nikolaev Railway was built through the area. Spreading trees and shady coolness gave way to rare birch trees and deafening whistles of steam locomotives. By the end of the century the area had become industrial. In 15 years (from 1897 to 1912), its population grew fivefold due to the influx of workers. Most of the inhabitants of Maryina Roshcha were forced to rent housing. At this time, criminal elements often found shelter here: thieves, robbers and buyers of stolen goods. From a prestigious dacha area, Roshcha turned into a factory, criminal outskirts. So, for example, the expression “In Maryina Roshcha, people are simpler” appeared. In 1912, a correspondent for the Moskovsky Leaf newspaper wrote: “There is no sewerage. The cleaning of sewage is carried out in a primitive way - carts of “golden diggers” drag out the sewage, spreading an impossible stench.”
Khitrovka: labor exchange and shelters
Khitrovka was considered the most dangerous place in Moscow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is interesting that since the 17th century, Russian nobility lived on the site of the Khitrov market, which would later become a famous refuge for beggars and criminals. The noble estates burned down in 1812, and 12 years later Major General Nikolai Khitrovo bought the land. Having cleared this place and built shopping arcades with residential courtyards here, the benefactor donated the new square to Moscow. After his death, shopping arcades appeared on all four sides of Khitrovskaya Square.
Notoriety came to this place after Khitrovskaya Square was turned into a labor exchange.
After the abolition of serfdom, thousands of freed peasants went to the city to earn money. There was little qualified labor, and people had to look for a job for weeks. Someone never found him and sold the last of their belongings to feed themselves.
Glutton at the Khitrov market. Photo: pastvu.com
All these people who came to look for work lived in shelters. “The two- and three-story houses around the square are all full of such shelters, in which up to ten thousand people slept and huddled. These houses brought huge profits to homeowners, wrote Vladimir. — Artels of visiting workers came to the square directly from the train stations and stood under a huge canopy, specially built for them. Contractors came here in the mornings and took the hired crews to work. After noon, the shed was put at the disposal of the Khitorov residents and traders: the latter bought up everything they could get their hands on. The poor people who sold their clothes and shoes immediately took them off and changed into bast shoes or props instead of boots, and from their suits into “changes up to the seventh generation”, through which the body is visible.”
The image of Khitrovka, a place where ordinary people are denied entry, attracted many writers, actors and directors. For example,
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko in 1902 came to one of the night shelters, put vodka and sausage on the table and feasted with the tramps,
and at the same time they studied the life of the urban “bottom” to stage and create the scenery of Gorky’s play “At the Depth”.
During the revolution, Khitrovka began to destroy itself. Gilyarovsky described it this way: “In 1917, the Utyug shelters, one and all, flatly refused to pay the apartment tenants for an overnight stay, and the tenants, seeing that there was no one to complain to, abandoned everything and fled to their villages. Then the shelters first of all broke down the tenants' closets, lifted the floor boards, where they found entire warehouses of bottles of vodka, and then heated the very walls of the closets in the stoves. Institutions came for the shelters and everything made of wood, up to the roof bars, was also taken away for firewood. The most rabid people continued to huddle in houses without roofs, windows and doors.”
In the 1920s, the Moscow City Council decided to “clean up” the Khitrov market. The Soviet government “swept away this ulcer, incurable under the old system, and in one week in 1923 cleared the entire square with the centuries-old dens surrounding it, in a few months converted the recent slums into clean apartments and populated them with workers and office people,” wrote Gilyarovsky.
Trubnaya Square: “Hell” and “Hell”
No matter how dangerous Khitrovka was, there was a district in Moscow that definitely surpassed all others in the reputation of the most disadvantaged places. Since its appearance in the city, Trubnaya Square has been a place where ordinary people gathered. Since 1590, the wall of the White City ran along one side of the square. At the bottom of one of the towers there was a hole made with a grate, from which the Neglinnaya River flowed; this hole was popularly called a “pipe”. This is where the name of the area came from.
During the reconstruction of Moscow after the fire of 1812, part of the Neglinka was enclosed in a brick chimney. But the pipe could not cope with the spring flood, so
Every year the river burst to the surface in powerful streams, so much so that, according to eyewitnesses, “it poured like a waterfall into the doors of shops and into the lower floors of houses.”
Trubnaya Square and Neglinnaya Street suffered the most from the floods.
But this is not the only thing that tarnished the reputation of Moscow Square. In the middle of the 19th century, the “Crimea” tavern, famous throughout the city, opened in a three-story building located between Tsvetnoy Boulevard and Trubnaya Street. The establishment quickly became a gathering place for cheaters, swindlers and gamblers who were ready to squander all their money on cards. Moreover, among the players one could also meet rich merchants.
Although “Crimea” was considered a hot place, it was only a “purgatory”. The real underworld was located under the house, in a huge basement that occupied the entire space between Tsvetnoy Boulevard and Trubnaya Street. If “Crimea” was noisy with a cheerful Hungarian choir, laughter and shouts, then the “Hell” tavern was silent. Even the entrance to it - a wide door in the wall below the level of the sidewalk - could not be found by everyone.
Pipe area. Photo: pastvu.com
In addition to “Hell”, the dungeon contained the “Three Hells”. It was no longer a tavern, but a real meeting place for criminals of various kinds. There was forgery of documents, thieves' division of loot, card games for large sums - the bill ran to thousands of rubles - and much more. It was quiet here, the bouncers kept order, and only their own people were allowed in, those whom the barman, the owner of “Hell” or the bouncers themselves knew.
The “Three Underworld” was a complex network of corridors, within the walls of which there were closets: “hellish forges” and “devil’s mills.”
These corridors were underground passages that remained from the water supply network installed under the house at the end of the 17th century. Thanks to such holes, all visitors to “Hell” and “Hell” could quickly escape the raid. Knowing the futility of trying to catch any of the authoritative thieves on their territory, the police did not look into the “Underworld” for a long time.
The revolutionaries also took advantage of this circumstance. In 1863, in the dungeons of Hell, revolutionary Nikolai Ishutin and his accomplices developed a plan to assassinate Alexander II. On April 4, 1866, Dmitry Karakozov, Ishutin's cousin, shot the Tsar. The monarch survived, but the “Three Hells” did not. Karakozov was hanged, Ishutin was sentenced to lifelong exile, and the Moscow police finally turned their attention to all the most dangerous places. The “hellish” dungeons have been cleared. “Crimea” lasted on Trubnaya Square a little longer. At the beginning of the 20th century, the merchant Praskovya Kononova began to own Vnukov’s house. In the premises of the former tavern, she set up a store where they sold building materials, and the second part of the house was occupied by a textile store. So Trubnaya Square gradually “corrected” and turned into a civilized area of the city.
Grachevka: prostitutes as a prototype of the Mother of God
If Trubnaya Square in the 19th century was a gathering place for sharpers, gamblers and drunkards, then debauchery flowed into the narrow alleys and cramped dirty courtyards of Trubnaya Street. At that time it was called Grachevka or Drachikha and was a Moscow red light street. “Here lived women who had completely lost their human form, and their “cats” who were hiding from the police, those for whom it was even risky to enter the shelters of Khitrovka,” Gilyarovsky wrote about this area.
There were women standing near the entrances and along the walls, inviting potential clients and simply drunk people in Russian and illiterate French,
who came here by accident. Once the clients were lured inside, they were robbed by the “cats,” the lovers of the prostitutes. The dirtiest and cheapest dens were located in the courtyards of Grachevka; they were not illuminated by red lamps, and their windows were curtained from the inside. These establishments were most often owned by runaway criminals and thieves, although “in public” their mistresses (former prostitutes) acted as hostesses. In the 80s of the 19th century, the establishments flourished and enjoyed the connivance of the police and the security department, since they were not considered potentially dangerous to the authorities: all efforts were concentrated on finding revolutionaries.
Vasily Perov “The Drowned Woman” (1867)
In the late 70s - early 80s of the 19th century, a young medical student named Chekhov, who came to Moscow from Taganrog, lived on Drachikha. Subsequently, the writer will talk about his impressions of this area in the story “The Seizure”.
In one of these establishments, one of the more decent ones, overlooking Grachevka itself, in the 60s of the 19th century lived the prostitute Fanny. We know about her from the story “On Nature. Fanny at No. 30,” which was written by the artist. Teacher Perov was looking for a model in order to paint the image of the Mother of God in the church, on the wall behind the throne.
In search of a “good female figure,” he and his student went to one of the brothels on Grachevka.
There they found a young girl, Fanny: “Her personality was the most ordinary, only dark red hair, sort of like Titian’s Magdalene, caught the eye. She looked to be about twenty years old.”
For three days Fanny posed for the artist (in exchange for payment at the usual rates - this was the condition of the “mama”). One day during a break, when the artist was talking with his model, the girl asked who he was painting from her. Having learned that the Mother of God was being painted from her, the girl “turned into a marble statue of fear.” “From me... From me... mother... of God!!!.. Are you crazy, or what?!” - this is how Fanny reacted then, calling herself “a lost, despicable and depraved woman for whom there is no salvation.”
A few years later, Perov, having conceived the painting “The Drowned Woman,” went to the morgue to copy the image of a drowned woman from the body of a young girl. Without looking, he chose one of the bodies, number 30. It was Fanny, who had died a few days earlier from consumption.
Trubnaya Square got rid of the reputation of a “bad” place by the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was more difficult to drive crime and prostitution out of Grachevka. In 1907, the street was renamed Trubnaya, but the spirit of Drachikha remained on it until the 1920s, when the brothels were demolished by the Soviet authorities.
