A photo: Roman Kuznetsov - This is an old house, built in 1902. My wife Marina and I know both the builders and the foreman on archival documents - it was built by the same people as the neighboring dacha to Academician Speransky. Before the revolution, the house was owned by the family of an influential priest. According to legend, somewhere here a jar of silver with a treasure is buried. His other previous owners were looking for: their grandmother always stood and watched if the workers were digging the earth. Marina also dug under the old stove in the extension, but found only a ring and a horseshoe.
The magic "Dzhulbars"
— After the clergy, this house was given awayto a peasant who sold it to composer Vasilenko, who wrote the music for the film "Dzhulbars". He bought it with the royalties from the film, and the house was called "Dzhulbars". Then his children and descendants lived here, who found it hard to leave. The house is magical. Once we had a psychic visiting us who said that it did not need to be cleaned, and that you could even meditate on it. You know the proverb: the horse did not roll around. In the old days, they would let a horse out on the ground, and where the horse rolled around, they would build a house. And our house is in the right place, here the horse definitely rolled around. It has good energy, and people become attached to it. Once an old man who lived here came, walked through all the rooms and died: he came to say goodbye to the house. We will never part with it. And we got it like this. Once in 1983, my wife and I were driving from Dmitrov to Moscow, and our friends were sitting in the back. And they offered us to rent their dacha on Trudovaya Street, which was constantly robbed in the winter. And we rented from them for three years in a row. It was a whole generals' settlement that arose when Stalin after the war allocated two hectares of land to the marshals, and one hectare to ordinary generals, and captured Germans built houses from parts taken from Germany. Everything was done very well, in the German style, there were even fences with traces of our bullets. We looked at the price, and it turned out that you need to live 500 years to earn money for such a dacha. To buy it, I sold all the furniture in Moscow, and also borrowed money, and on our wall we had a list of more than 20 people to whom to return it. I even sold my library of Soviet poetry, which I had collected for a very long time. But still, this money was not enough. And then my friend tells me that he found a stunning house in the village of Dedenevo. My wife Marina asked if there was a place to swim there. And he said that there was - the Moscow-Volga Canal. We decided to go at least for a swim, went into this garden, walked along the path, I turned around and felt that my wife was shocked, and I wanted to give her this house. Its price was many times less than that of a proper German estate. But this was the wrong house: neglected, we had to fight our way through the forest to get to it. We could not buy it right away, since there were difficulties with registration, but here we were lucky: a law was just passed that abolished these difficulties. On August 21, 1985, on my 50th anniversary, we signed a contract to buy a dacha. The owners offered to take a dog, who had an old two-story kennel: depending on which way the wind blew, it lay down in one direction or another. We agreed, although I was afraid of dogs (I was bitten by one as a child, and the fear remained) and especially this one, who was chained, growling and attacking. And then I boldly took the documents and showed them to Thomas that the house was ours, and she was ours. And now we have Jessica, she is 9 years old, she is a puppy to us.
Everything was decided by the house
— The house was repainted several times in a morecheerful yellow-brown colors. Initially, it was a gloomy green color, and all the walls were in curtains, pictures. The owners left us some furniture, because we were all in debt and we had no money to buy our own. They left a desk, sofas that my wife reupholstered herself, and this huge chic table that extends to the entire room. Then we added something, and the house itself decided what to do with the interior. We picked up antiques in consignment stores. - There are three floors here. The upper one has an exit to the roof. The lower one is the kitchen, bathroom and bathhouse. Previously, there was a small room with a stove where nuns lived, who helped around the house. At first, my wife believed that she should match the lifestyle they led. Marina began to pickle cabbage, make liqueurs, she had a vegetable garden behind the garage, where she planted everything. Our main rooms are on one floor: a dining room, a living room, a dressing room, our son’s room, a study and a kitchen. All the pictures were painted by our son Lenya. — Something is always blooming: first one lilac, then another, a Persian one, now jasmine. And all of this is very old: both trees and bushes. Periodically I have to cut them down, which I really feel sorry to do. Old birches are especially dangerous. Maples are sown endlessly and new ones grow. If we had potatoes growing here, I would not have gotten married and would not have bought a dacha – I’m tired of Antoshka already! Something grew here, but I forbade it, because our heroes live here – like the Water Spirit in the thicket. — The house is warm. There used to be six Dutch stoves here. Now there is only one left in the living room. At first Marina heated these stoves herself with wood, but she had to run around the whole house, she got tired, some of the stoves did not work, and when they started to redo everything, they installed a boiler, which she heated with coal. And she stoked the fire for about five years, so that she started to have a stoker's cough. There was no gas in the village, but there was a pipe buried on the main street, and I went to the gas trust to ask if they could bring gas to me alone, since there was a pipe. They allowed it, but for money. And I worked for two or three months, found a specialist in this matter, who taught me what to do. We gave the last bribe to the boss to turn on the gas. The pipes became warm, and it was an incredible joy. We all got drunk, and I even sang with joy: "Steppe and steppe all around..." My soul sang.
