How pleasant it is to receive unexpected kind surprises, and all the more so from old friends… For many years the museum-reserve has maintained scientific, creative and simply good trusting relations with Irina Vasilievna Pozdeeva, a well-known expert in Old Russian and medieval book culture and much else, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University. For decades she has provided invaluable assistance in the study of our collections, helping to identify, understand and publicly present the value of Sloboda rarities.
Marina Konstantinovna Rybakova, acting director of the Alexandrovskaya Sloboda museum-reserve, says: "The other day Irina Vasilievna called me and shared an interesting find. The thing is that her son has been living in the United States for a very long time, practically all the time. She decided it would be appropriate to tell him about the well-known people whose meetings life had given to Irina Vasilievna, and who had given her something as a memento. Among such people was Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Pavlovich, a writer-poet and a woman of astonishing fate… While going through the archive, Irina Vasilievna saw a small collection titled 'Thoughts and Memories' with a dedication from the author. Flipping through the pages of the book, she found a poem dedicated to Alexandrovskaya Sloboda and immediately called me, for which I am immeasurably grateful to her..."
And we also thank her for bringing back from the distant past, for arousing moving emotions with the story of a love and the lines about the Sloboda written by an extraordinary woman. Below we will give in full the poems of N.A. Pavlovich. But first — a few words about her.
She was born in 1895 in Latvia. In 1912, having finished the Pskov gymnasium, she began publishing her first poems in the city newspaper. She continued her studies in Moscow at the historical and philological faculty of the Higher Women's Courses; it was then that she became acquainted with the high poetic bohemia: V. Bryusov, A. Bely, Vyach. Ivanov, S. Yesenin, B. Pasternak and others. Nadezhda Aleksandrovna herself also regularly appeared in print. In 1920 Pavlovich came on business to Petrograd and met Alexander Blok there. The meeting soon developed into a confidential relationship and, as contemporaries and witnesses noted, Nadezhda Pavlovich became the famous poet's last love.
In 1921, after Alexander Blok's death, having experienced a severe crisis, she withdrew from public and literary life and for many years went to the Optina Monastery. Only many, many years later did the remarkable woman recover from her loss, devoting her life to poetry and to "doing good" for the people around her.
And now the poems about the Sloboda. Nearly 60 years ago Nadezhda Pavlovich dedicated them to a man in whose memory, with gratitude and admiration for what he had done in the tsar's capital of the Terrible, museum staff recently opened the exhibition "At the Printing Yard."
THE SECOND PRINTER ANDRONIK NEVEZHA
The tsar's printer in this sloboda
Lived about eighteen years under Ioann
Snow... snow... a little horse pulls the sleigh
Along a deeply cut rut.
The Kremlin gleams above the white river,
Snow whitens... the crimson sunset threatens:
In the chambers — a feast; in the cellars blood and moans,
And the heart is clenched with fierce anguish.
The first printer fled to Lithuania
From slander, denunciations and arson,
But he remained, unafraid of the prison
And brushing off the foolish rumor.
Oprichnina and the tsar's masks,
Executions without number... Just give him time!
There in the sloboda, in a hut, by splinter-light,
All night Andronik's press clacks away.
You hear the time: the chronicle scroll
Is completed and will be rolled up forever,
But the letters that the wondrous master punches —
They run like flowing water.
And each one is like a little flame,
Like a faint lamp, yet it is alive,
It burns above the ancient snows,
And now the words are already forming.
Having stood against executions and discord,
Outstripping the bloodstained age,
A stern, silent man walks along the paths and slopes.
1965
