The Path for Everyone to See...

The estate Shakhmatovo in the Moscow Province was one of Blok's favourite places of his motherland. There the poet wrote his best verses about Russia.

Time did not spare the poet's old house, and the ruins of the estate have been grown with trees and bushes. Nevertheless, the unique local landscape breathes Blok's poetry. Today Shakhmatovo has become a place of pilgrimage for many lovers of poetry. Festivals of poetry are held there every year.

Near Solnechnogorsk, in the row of picturesque Klinsko-Dmitrovsky hills situated on high slopes of the valley where the river Lutosnya flows into Volga, are two forest-grown hills over which soars the memory about outstanding contributors to Russian culture whose work and inspiration are inseparable from this corner of the Moscow region.

In 1865 the great Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev bought an estate in the Klin uyezd of the Moscow Province, in which he lived and worked every summer until 1906.

Nine years later, following Mendeleyev's advice, Andrei Beketov, his friend and Blok's grandfather, bought the modest estate Shakhmatovo. A.N.Beketov was an outstanding botanist and a progressive political figure, a professor and Rector of the St. Petersburg University and the founder of the High School for Women. From 1765 the Beketov family spent every summer in Shakhmatovo.

Alexander Blok was born in St. Petersburg in November 1880, and in the  summer of the following year, when he was an infant of six months, he was brought to Shakhmatovo. From that time St. Petersburg and Shakhmatovo were inseparable in the poet's life. The poet's unusual attachment to one place was a rare case in the history of literature: Blok visited the estate every year during thirty six years on end (from 1881 till 1916). Shakhmatovo became not only his favourite and adored place of rest and work, a place where he wrote a great number of his verses, but also a constant theme of his private and creative life, a continuous line of his biography.

It was in Shakhmatovo that Blok made his first steps in literature and theatre; it was there that he met his bride Lyubov Mendeleyeva who became his wife. It was there that he wrote his inspired verses and poems about Russia. In 1921 Blok wrote in the draft sequel to the poem "Retribution": "The Russian land shines with the beauty of spring..." (a variant: "The Moscow land...") That land became the prototype of "Blok's Russia" to a great extent.

Answering the question in a family questionnaire "The place where you would like to live", seventeen-year-old Blok wrote: "Shakhmatovo". He remembered the scented atmosphere of that forlorn corner in the environs of Moscow and he was confident that "...there was no place there where I would be unable to walk at night or with closed eyes". Among "the main factors of my life and creativity", the poet names also the following: "St. Petersburg winters and wonderful nature of the Moscow Province". He wrote at the time when he stopped visiting the estate: "I saw Shakhmatovo in my dreams...."

The poet lived in the focus of Russian social life in St. Petersburg, but even there Shakhmatovo was always with him. He returned to the shores of the Neva River, enriched by knowledge of popular life and Russian nature, while St. Petersburg, this embodiment of great Russian cultural traditions, accompanied him when he stayed in Shakhmatovo. The poet's main idea was maturing at the point of fusion and confrontation of these impressions.

It was in Shakhmatovo that Blok's Russian theme found its complete expression for the first time: "I am embarking on a path for everyone to see..." This line is from the verse "The Evening Freedom" marked "July 1905. The Rogachev Highway". The first Russian revolution opened "a broad immense" to the poet.

In 1908 in Shakhmatovo he began writing the verse "Russia" completed by him in St. Petersburg. In this verse he formulated poetically his faith in the people and the country: "Thus the impossible is rendered possible, and easy is the heavy path..." In the summer of the same year he began writing the cycle of verses entitled "On the Kulikovo Battle-field" about his Motherland's heroic deed: "The eternal battle! We only dream of rest..."

The manuscript of the poem "The Retribution" is marked "Begun in July 1910 on a stone near Runovo". Runovo was not far from Shakhmatovo... In the same year Blok wrote the verse "On a railway". This list is easy to prolong and hard to cut.

It is only natural that Shakhmatovo "hues" are so important in works with which Blok responded, passionately and joyfully, to the call of Love for Motherland and for Woman...

"Shakhmatovo was Blok's second spiritual home, the native land of his spiritual self-awareness", wrote the oldest literary critic P.A. Zhuravlev who visited Shakhmatovo in 1924.

Places connected with Blok are situated mainly in the territory of the Klin, Solnechnogorsk and Dmitrov districts of the Moscow region.

The young city of Zelenograd, not far from the station Kryukovo... Blok was in Kryukovo in 1917 when he visited his mother in a health resort. In his young years Blok stayed in the estate Dedovo which belonged to Mikhail Sergeyevich and Olga Mikhailovna Solovyov, a few kilometers off Kryukovo. These people, connected with the world of literature and art, promoted Blok's poetic debut.

Solnechnogorsk... The building of the railway stations Podsolnechnaya, erected before the revolution, from which the poet departed for St. Petersburg is still there. Blok's verse "On the Railway" is biographically connected with Podsolnechnaya.

Not far from the lake Senezh we turn off the Tarakanovo Highway along which Blok traveled to Shakhmatovo every year. "The painted wheels are bogged in road mud..." Of course, everything has changed beyond recognition here. Close to the highway is the school named after Blok with the poet's bronze bust (sculptured my I. Alexandrova), the only monument to Blok thus far, in teh garden. Blok's personal things from Shakhmatovo are kept in the school museum.

Blok recorded the legend connected with the lake Bezdonnoye ("Bottomless") situated in the thin forest near the village Sergeyevka. Local peasants insisted that this lake had no bottom and "opened into the ocean" and that from time to time boards with inscriptions in foreign languages, remnants of wrecked ships, rose to the surface". Blok mentioned this legend in his article "Elements and Culture" in which he wrote also about other local beliefs, for instance, that "when the wind bends rye at night, it means that "She" (an unknown mysterious force) runs on rye". Popular mythology was reflected also in Blok's article "Poetics of Spells and Incantations" and in his verse "Russia". Blok saw the environs of Shakhmatovo in a halo of the mysterious.

The hill on which the village Novo (a local legend associates events resembling the plot of Tolstoi's "The Resurrection" with the former manor house Nekhlyudovka) is visible from the hill of the village Sergeyevka. The other side of Novo are villages whose names are reminiscent of those mentioned in Nekrasov's poetry: Bedovo, Merzlovo, are situated. In 1924 P.A. Zhurov found part of Beketovs' and Blok's Shakhmatovo library there and made its description. Over time this description will be instrumental in restoring the library in the poet's study in Shakhmatovo.

Neaer Sergeyevka a landscape specific for Blok begins. It seems that nobody has described it better than Andrei Bely who visited Shakhmatovo in 1904-1905: "The landscape changes sharply, becoming more beautiful, less comfortable, wilder, with thick forests and numerous hills... Strife, exclusivity and tension are felt here... There is something here, in the environs of Shakhmatovo, resembling Blok's poetry; maybe even, his poetry is truly that of the place, borrowed from the landscape; uneven hills covered with forests rise; the soil has strained itself and dawns have cut in"; "the landscape scents of Blok's verses"; "these woods and fields look like his study". We find also the following description in Bely's memoirs: "Fields and sunsets in Shakhmatovo are the genuine walls of his study".

This "study" where Blok worked are seen on all sides from the village Tarakanovo and the pond near the church. It becomes especially clear here that the white-walled church of Archangel Michael, built in the 18th century, in which Blok and Lyubov Mendeleyeva were married in 1903 was something like the architectural centre of this locality. Now the old building of Blok's times, the former Tarakanovo public school, accommodates a library bearing the poet's name and a standing exposition devoted to Blok's life and poetry.

To the left, far away on the other bank of the river Lutosnya, is a huge dark hill over which the Sun sets. The village Boblovo is situated there. "A toothed wood spread there, on Your lofty hill." This hill seems to be bathing in waves of Blok's "Verses about the Fair Lady". Lyubov Mendeleyeva lived there...

Right in front of us, over the Aladyina Hill, also one of the highest in that place, "the path for everyone to see" begins. Blok wrote about this place: "The endless distance, the highway, and the same impossible, heart-rending turns of the road..." There his "Russian theme" began.

At our back, about three kilometres off, is another grandiose hill called Runovo. There Blok began writing "The Retribution". There he found words on which both the verse "Russia" and the conclusion of the Article "Apollon Grigoryev's Fate" were based: "...all this is so magnificent and solemn that tears well up in the eyes: this is ours, this is Russian".

On the right is a path leading to Shakhmatovo which is two or three kilometres away. We walk along the brink of a chalicelike depression surrounded by forests, in view of hills and villages on the other bank of the river Lutosnya. It seems to us that this is the best monument to the poet. Vladimir Soloukhin called the surroundings of Shakhmatovo, including forests and fields and land reaching the horizon with blue skies over it, "The Big Shakhmatovo". Therefore the short path leading to the village is called "the path to Blok".

By Alexander Hudoleyev