March sunshine (2024) Photography by Ekaterina Kastalskaya

The picture was taken by photographer Ekaterina Kastalskaya on March 3, 2024 in the town of writers in Peredelkino near Moscow on SFL T-42 ISO 400 film, aka Tasma Type-42 aerial film.

You can see on the photo the veranda of the second floor of the Dom Tvorchestva Peredelkino (The House of Writers' Creativity in Peredelkino).
The building of Dom Tvorchestva was built in 1955, and in 1966-69 a glass case with an assembly hall, a library, a large dining room and spacious balconies was added to it. The photo shows the second floor of this building.

🟦 At one time or another Peredelkino became home to Boris Pasternak, Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Alexander Fadeev, Valentin Kataev, Korney Chukovsky, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Lilya Brik, Fazil Iskander, Yuri Mamleev, Bulat Okudzhava, Vasily Aksenov, and Arseniy Tarkovsky.

Many prominent writers, poets, translators, playwrights, literary critics would come to stay at Dom Tvorchestva, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova, Viktor Shklovsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginzberg.

✔️ The decree of the Council of People's Commissars "On the construction of the City of Writers" was issued on July 19, 1933.

Lists of the first residents - at first only 30 dachas were built - were discussed a lot before approval. They were Pasternak, Pilnyak, Pavlenko, Poor, Ivanov, Malyshkin, Gladkov, Leonov, Erenburg, Panfenov, Shaginyan, Bakhmetyev, Babel and other famous writers of the time.

It was decided that the dachas built with state money would be assigned to the writers for life. And six months after the death of the owner, a meeting would decide on a new tenant.

Now not every house is open for excursions, some have people living in them. But you can look into the house-museums of Chukovsky, Pasternak, Okudzhava, the gallery-museum of Yevtushenko.

✔️ Envisioned as a place of temporary residence where Soviet writers could engage in their work, Dom Tvorchestva was a major landmark in Peredelkino. Back in the Soviet times, Dom Tvorchestva belonged to the Literary Fund of the USSR Writers' Union. The main building was built in 1955 and a decade later Dom Tvorchestva was expanded to include a new glass building with a cinema hall, a bar, and a library. In the 1990s, Dom Tvorchestva was abandoned, then the main building briefly served as a boarding house, while the other became a mediocre restaurant.

In August 2020, Dom Tvorchestva experienced a renaissance: the once-famous club with a cinema hall, library and reading room reopened. Now Dom Tvorchestva hosts literary events, concerts, lectures and readings. The park is being reconstructed along with a 1930s dacha designed by Ernst May, a German architect and a pioneering figure in urban planning.

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