Block. Shakhmatovo. Continuation

“What have you done for culture today?” - this was the traditional question that the literary critic and book publisher Stanislav Lesnevsky asked his sister - a businessman, the creator of the REN TV channel and the founder of The New Times magazine (in the 2007 version) Irena Lesnevskaya.

Lesnevskaya, in addition to being engaged in television, which her brother considered a one-day thing that prevented her from engaging in eternal, that is, Russian culture, financed the Continent magazine, Samizdat collections and numerous book projects of her brother (Progress-Pleyada publishing house), whose passion was poetry and Alexander Blok as one of its pillars. In 1969, Stanislav Lesnevsky arrived in Shakhmatovo (it is located 80 km north of Moscow), where the estate of Blok and his wife Lyubov Mendeleeva (daughter of the great chemist, creator of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements Dmitry Mendeleev) used to be. In Shakhmatovo, Blok wrote more than 300 works, but then came 1917 and the revolution, followed by the Civil War and devastation: the locals first plundered the estate in Shakhmatovo, and in 1921 they burned it to the ground. Stanislav Lesnevsky wrote a book - “Russian distance. Chess. Prologue ”: for more than 40 years he was engaged in the restoration of Blok’s small homeland.

First, Blok’s poetry holidays began to take place here every first Sunday of August, then the Soviet government decided to create a museum-reserve and restore the estate (it was in 1984), and after some 17 years, in 2001, the museum-reserve opened its doors for fans of Russian culture.

But this was not enough for Lesnevsky: he dreamed of building a library here - to replace the one that was burned down during the Civil War. It did not happen: Stanislav Lesnevsky left in 2014 - he was 83 years old, leaving behind a colossal archive - an extensive correspondence with the first names of Russian poetry from Akhmatova to Yevtushenko and 35 thousand volumes of books. “What have you done for culture today?” - Irena Lesnevskaya asked herself the question of her brother, which had already irritated her before, and began to build a library in Shakhmatovo. It turned out to be more than 700 m2 of total area, three floors, a conference room, a hotel with two rooms for researchers and everything else that should be in a library, including a staff of five people. Last Thursday, May 18, on International Museum Day, museum workers from all over the country came to look at the rarity, the rarest for our Fatherland - a private library. And the New Times photojournalist was among them.

Irena Lesnevskaya donates the library to the Alexander Blok Museum-Reserve for free use. “It is impossible that everything that my brother has been doing all his life has gone into the sand. Everything that Stasik had, I give to people, ”Lesnevskaya told an NT correspondent.

Blok's poetry festival, as always, will take place on the first Sunday of August. Now - in the library of Stanislav Lesnevsky.