Spontaneous revival of small towns in Russia has begun In Borovsk, a provincial town that since ancient times settled on the banks of the Protva, which flows through the Kaluga lands not far from the borders of the Moscow region, a strange thing happened. By...

Spontaneous revival of small towns in Russia has begun

IN

Borovsk, a provincial town that since ancient times settled on the banks of the Protva, which flows through the Kaluga lands not far from the borders of the Moscow region, a strange thing happened. According to rumors that reached me through an artist I knew, one languid summer evening, a drunk driver at dusk at full speed drove into a picture painted on the wall of the house and depicting the continuation of the very street on which the ill-fated wall faced.

Once I myself lived for ten years in Borovsk, but for some reason I don’t remember any pictures on the walls. However, I haven’t been for a long time: everything somehow turns out to be on the wrong path. And not by chance. This is how the city is located - away from tort roads, caravan trade routes. There is an interesting historical evidence: when in the nineteenth century the "cast iron" was brought from Moscow to Kyiv, its original route was planned to be through Borovsk. And having learned about this, the local merchants, shaking their purse, collected a huge amount of money for a bribe to bureaucratic Moscow in order to pay off "this misfortune," as they believed, and paid off: they moved the branch back as much as twelve miles.

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somehow modern, right? And it even seems something wild that the people of an entire city live away from the movement of life, which the modern generation is increasingly associated with the movement of goods and money.

However, this is how people lived for hundreds of years - in the peaceful silence of an almost rural life. In the merchant Borovsk, every more or less prosperous city dweller considered it his duty and sought to put the "church" - for eternal remembrance for himself and his family. So they stood like white swans over Protva, on a high hilly shore, in bends and coastal tracts, like ships caught on land by a sudden retreat of the sea.

During Soviet times, Borovsk, known not only for its temples and ancient Old Believer traditions, but also for the memorable connection with it of Tsiolkovsky and Nikolai Fedorov, gradually turned from an original small Russian town into an ordinary provincial backwater, unremarkable, erased.

What kind of wall painting is there at a time when people freeze to batteries in winter and do not expect to find at least some work. And I decided to go and see what kind of paintings they were and where they came from in the outback with the still indispensable Lenin-with-outstretched-hand on the central square - the usual monumental "decoration" of all our cities and towns.

With Vladimir Alexandrovich Ovchinnikov - the author of the notorious murals was found - they agreed to meet in the very center, "on the corner" of the cathedral square, exactly opposite the city hall, in order to walk around the city together from picture to picture. Approaching hurriedly down the descent, I saw on the wall of the house opposite, which looked out from behind the cathedral, how the bald-headed school teacher Tsiolkovsky sat down on a bench, and a little lower, nearby, on the edge of the sidewalk, a thin figure in black and gray hair from a distance, a conspicuous person: “Hello Sorry for the minute delay."

Immediately, without overclocking, he begins to explain how lucky he was to find a facsimile of a letter in the archives, in which Tsiolkovsky, mentioning his stay in Borovsk, connects with him his first thoughts about the sky, about space. Here are the lines next to the image, transferred by the artist from a famous photograph to the white lime wall.

“Wait, wait,” I say, and I’m in a hurry to take pictures, “but how did this idea come about?

- This is all Chernikov (famous book designer. - O. Ch.). He was here at one time for architecture. And he has a lot of ideas. Somehow, in a light conversation, he mentioned old photographs of the views of Borovsk. It would be nice, he says, to transfer them to the walls as a living history. I say I can try. Came at five in the morning, put up a ladder and began to draw. People began to gather for work, the authorities arrived, and half the picture was ready. Don't quit in the middle. And people liked it. And it went.

- What about power?

“Our mayor, Yegerev, is trying to help. The treasury, of course, is poor. For all the time they gave a thousand rubles for brushes, for paint. But he publishes our books and looks for sponsors. Again, he defended me from the collision of architecture and the protection of monuments.

— What happened?

— How. A local architect has filed a complaint that I am destroying the historical image of the city. It got to the point that she applied to the traffic police with a request to ban it, otherwise the drivers would not take the picture for a real continuation of the road. Then the whole city made fun of her - the article was printed in the newspaper.

So this is a joke? And then they told me...

We walk together through the city, on the streets of which its own history has come to life. Here is a ragged boy knocking at the back door of the merchants for alms. Right there, the city is above the steep from such an angle that no photograph can cover - a painting by the famous artist Shubin.

- At the same time, the house was put in order, re-plastered, again the mayor ordered that there be something to write on. Indeed, in the past, a shabby hut, having been updated, began to play, it looks apart.

We approach the very first picture, the one that began with a ladder attached, on the wall of a private lyceum. Yes, it’s really just right to crash a car here ... The same street on the wall as next to it in kind, only a hundred years earlier. The crossroads of history is like in science fiction novels: here time has split in two.

- Here I reproduced the church of the Ascension, demolished, and the house of the merchant Shokhin. This small house on the right was demolished during the construction of a modern recreation center. By the way, one person from Moscow writes about him in a letter to the mayor’s office: “Who should be the architect of the city if he is against the murals, on which, for example, I find the demolished house of my ancestors ?!”.

I walk through the city, which I seem to know so well, quietly, so as not to frighten away the shadow of History that has appeared through time. Next to the man who managed to turn back time.

Yes, I haven't been here for a long time. What has changed over the years in Borovsk - a town that until recently was mercilessly spent by time?

Yes, yes, something is happening. Small - but previously unimaginable. And, having just started, it returned the town from the forgotten outback to the channel of the river of eternity flowing through time.

How did this happen, who did it? Good Russian people who, perhaps, are just now beginning to wake up from the cold sleep of general indifference and restlessness.

In Borovsk, I saw, I felt: people remember with agony that they are the masters of their land, the descendants of their forgotten ancestors. Ivans, remembering their relationship. I think: maybe this is our hope?