Open Book of the Museum Quarter

Juliet's balcony in Verona and the house on Baker Street, 221B in London, are modern reconstructions. But in Sarapul the entire historic center — the gymnasium, the city garden, the pier, the fire watchtower, merchant mansions — are authentic illustrations for the best novella in Russian literature about a gymnasium schoolgirl.

Lydia Budogoskaya's book "The Tale of the Redheaded Girl" immediately resembles both "Harry Potter" and "Eugene Onegin." "No letters!" cries the Dursley, stuffing the slot of the mailbox. "Give them back!" shouts Harry Potter, "they are my letters. You must not take them!" "Give them back!" echoes the clear voice of Eva Kün. "This is my letter. No one may read letters from my mother!" A pair of pince-nez with a black cord trembles on the headmistress's nose: "I announce to you: all your letters the porter will bring to me. Look here!" In the headmistress's hand, besides a blue envelope, is something else — some sheets of paper. Very crumpled — they must have been read over and over. Something familiar. Eva suddenly turns pale with horror: it is her letter to Kolya, in which she confessed her love!

The action of the story takes place in 1911–1912; it was written in 1929. But the same problems remain relevant today: parents' divorce and domestic violence, loneliness within the family and inequality in class. Modern girls have the same worries about a dress, a hairstyle, an upcoming exam and the same delighted anticipation of dances, the cinema and walks! It is just as hard to accept injustice, and one just as much longs for loyal friendship and first love. In this town there is a cult of the Redheaded Girl. Tourist routes and excursions of the Sarapul Historical-Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve are dedicated to her. There are also plays and children's festivals, scholarly publications and poems, candies and souvenirs. In the space of the Museum Quarter, opened a year ago, you can find all the addresses mentioned in the book and follow the routes of its characters.

The women's gymnasium was opened in district Sarapul in 1881. In 1904 it moved into a fine three-story building, financed by loans from the zemstvo and local merchants and built to a design by the well-known architect I.A. Charushin. It was one of the best educational institutions in the Kazan educational district: with a large ballroom and a museum, electric lighting and its own feldsher, workshops and greenhouses. Lida, the daughter of the assistant to the chief of the Vyatka Gendarme Administration, rotmistr Budogosky, graduated from the gymnasium in 1915. The future writer took courses for nurses, worked in frontline hospitals during the First World War, the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. Among the graduates of the Sarapul Women's Gymnasium are many notable figures. For example, Margarita Vorontsova, the wife of sculptor Sergey Konenkov and a friend of Albert Einstein, a Soviet intelligence operative and an activist of the American charitable organization "Committee to Aid Russia in War." The building of the Sarapul Women's Gymnasium has been well preserved and restored, and children still study there. It now houses Secondary School No. 15, notable for its museum, separate education system and, of course, the revived tradition of gymnasium balls (so thoroughly described in "The Tale of the Redheaded Girl"). Students and teachers of the school are used to crowds of tourists. They welcome them with understanding and pride at the wooden entrance doors, lead them up the ceremonial staircase and allow them to see the magnificent ballroom.

The city public garden named after Pushkin was opened in Sarapul for the poet's centenary in 1899. After a recent restoration the monument to Alexander Sergeyevich was moved to the center of the garden. The vista of the main alley revealed the old trees beneath which, in the pages of the book, Eva and Kolya have their first meeting, their declaration of love and their farewell.

The city power station, the water tower, the fire watchtower, the mansion and dacha of the town mayor Pavel Bashenin, the buildings of the zemstvo administration and the bank, the Diocesan and Nikolaev schools, the Pokrov Cathedral and the Church of Xenia of Petersburg — they are all in their places and look almost the same as the gymnasium girl Eva Kün sees them. The children's park is located on the grounds of the former Real School (now the pedagogical college), where the main character Kolya Gorchaninov and his friend Misha Wolf study. The house of the confectioner Wilhelm (Vasily) Wolf and his shop have preserved their architectural appearance. In the book Eva's most beautiful and wealthy classmate is Nadya Smagina. Her prototype was the daughter of the town mayor and merchant-philanthropist Nikolai Smagin — Militina. Smagin's house, in its preserved Art Nouveau style, remains and is the setting for the most tragic real stories and urban legends.

The house of the town mayor, merchant N.V. Smagin (it houses the intermunicipal department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs).

Over the past century the embankment of the Kama River, the river terminal and the pier have, of course, changed. In recent years they have undergone large-scale restoration and some renewal. But step away from the berths with modern riverboats — and you are again in a district town so lovingly described by Lidia Budogoskaya in her autobiographical novella. The charm of Sarapul is precisely that it is so easy to lose the sense of century while walking along streets lined with wooden houses and stone mansions, looking at the Kama through the branches of age-old trees and listening to the ringing of the church bells.