The courtyard on the Povarskaya. Rozhdestvenskaya E.R.

This book is about one Moscow address - st. Vorovsky, 52. There, next to the Central House of Writers, a raw and dark communal apartment at the Club of Writers, my great -grandmother with children in the 20s of the last century arrived in the basement, where my mother was born, I was born there.

In this round court, behind the forged gates of the former Sollogubov estate, a special life was going on by their own rules and strange and amazing people lived. There were dates and funerals, booze and war, birth and madness. There are still young people there are still fifty -eighty - sixties will become later, arranged readings of their poems under the gloomy gaze of the bronze Tolstoy.

This is the courtyard of my childhood, my first address.