ARBAT - THE BEGINNING

"Night. Street. Lantern. Pharmacy...".

A. Blok

Arbat. Here – on the corner – we can see the old Pharmacy, and its door handle keeps the warmth of my hands. And there, to the right, - Denezhny Pereulok (Monetary Drive), the former Vesninych Street, the name which replaced the old one – Denezhny Pereulok, and was replaced by this old name again…. Things are coming to their source… So, on this street, a little further, was a foreign bookstore, and there – I think, it was early 80th – one could buy a foreign book, published in a Western country, which was impossible before. The books in foreign languages, which were sold in Soviet Union, were published only in our country, and it was only a few of them. We could buy some books published in so-called Socialists Countries – i.e. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and others, so-called “countries of Warsaw Treaty), and, of course, in Polish, Czech, Slovak and other Slavic languages, but not English.

In this building, # 55, Andrey Bely, the great Russian poet-symbolist, lived. One of his contemporaries wrote how he, “with the turquoise eyes” rushed like a “cloud” along the narrow sidewalks. By the way, Andrey Belyj – it is a pen name; his real name was Boris Bugayev, and his father was the professor of Moscow University.

Our great poet, Marina Tsvetaeja, wrote an essay dedicated to Andrey Bely – “The Silver Pigeon”.