— I was born on Herzen Street, now Nikitskaya, andI can’t imagine my life without the center. We had an old house, a large apartment. When I was sent to Leningrad to the Vaganova Choreographic School, my mother and grandmother (Anna’s mother is the director of the Stanislavsky Theater Olga Velikanova, and her grandmother is an actress of the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya Elena Dmitrieva. — Ed. “Antenna”) decided to separate. My grandmother moved to the playwrights’ cooperative near the Aeroport metro station, and my mother made a surprisingly strange choice — she found an apartment in Tekstilshchiki. I returned to Moscow and instead of Nikitskaya, I found myself on the outskirts, in a completely different, unfamiliar life.
From the outskirts to the center
— I spent quite a lot of time in Tekstilshchikitime, but never accepted this area. My husband Alexey, our daughters (the eldest, Anastasia, is 28, the youngest, Marusya, is 21. — Antenna's note) and I lived opposite my mother's house. The children went to school in the center, and I worked in the theater. This morning drive through terrible traffic jams was so annoying that one day I just said: I can't do it anymore! Of course, it was very hard for me to leave my mother, but I made a strong-willed decision to return back to the center. I needed to sell the apartment in Tekstilshchiki and keep within the amount, and the prices for housing in the residential area and in the center at that time were also incomparable. God bless my friends who helped us out and lent us money. At first, we paid a deposit for an apartment on Gilyarovsky Street. But the next day they called us and said that the deal was off. This apartment has not been sold yet, apparently there is something wrong with it, and God helped us. And our three-room apartment on Prospekt Mira was found in one day. My husband saw that a new apartment had appeared on the street next to Gilyarovsky. We walked in, and I realized that I would live here. There was no doubt, because this house from the thirties reminded me of the one where I was born, my childhood. When we had already bought it, I arrived alone with the keys, walked in, and then the bells of the church at the hospital, which is nearby, rang, and my soul felt so good. We have been living here for ten years now. I do not regret a second, I love old Moscow very much.
Little France
- It was a traditional three-room apartment,which we turned into a four-room apartment with a large living room and three small bedrooms. My late stepfather, Alexander Alexandrovich Oparin, who was the chief artist of the Stanislavsky Theater, helped to reconstruct everything. Many of his works were taken by the Bakhrushin Museum, but some still lifes and paintings still hang in our living room. There are also toys on the sofa, they were made by my eldest daughter Nastya when she was a child, she is also an artist, now she makes clothes. All her dolls were very strange, wonderful, funny, I call them anti-people. Among them is a rat that Nastya sewed for her younger sister Marusya, because she was born in the year of the Rat. I made the kitchen according to the principle of "fitting into the area". I came up with a separate niche in the wall for the refrigerator, so as not to build it into the furniture, and I placed the set itself only along one wall. It turned out to be mini, but convenient and functional kitchen with a stone countertop in my favorite Provence style. Here hang the clocks and paintings that I bought in Montmartre in Paris, plates from an antique shop on Prospekt Mira. My grandmother brought them there, she just needed something to live on. They are all signed with excerpts from some French musical theater. So I have my own little France in my house. I don’t like empty walls, but I don’t buy anything special, things come by themselves. Now my husband and I live in this apartment together, our girls are already grown up, they flew away. Alexey got a separate bedroom after they left, now my husband enjoys it here, because he is an early person, and I can read or study something until the morning, and I don’t bother him. We recently got a house that we built for a long time. I fell in love with country life, but my busy schedule doesn’t allow me to be there all the time. So I have two lives: one in the Moscow region, where I relax, and the central one, in my apartment, where I feel protected, like in a bunker.
