Where Pushkin is buried ...

Mikhailovskoye - an estate owned by Alexander Pushkin's mother, Nadezhda Osipovna Pushkina, in the nees of Hannibal. Not far from it is located the place where Pushkin is buried. Mikhailovskoye is a small, cozy and quite poor estate, consisting of several small villages and a large abandoned park with shady alleys and a dark forest lake, lost among thick bush and tall fir trees. A small and very modest externally manor house stands on the steep bank of the Sorot River. From the terrace opens a wonderful panorama, as if created by a painter's brush. Two lakes, meadows and fields on the other shore, a dense forest stretching along Lake Bolshoy to the neighboring Petrovskoye estate, owned by a great-uncle, mother's uncle, Peter Abramovich Hannibal. These lands in the Pskov province were once granted to the great-grandfather of the poet, the famous Arap Peter, Abram Petrivich Hannibal.

The pedigree of Pushkin is interesting and atypical for a Russian nobleman. On the line of his father, he belonged to the old noble Pushkin family, once sufficiently influential and rich, and along the line of the mother was a descendant of the black Abyssinian princes, whose small offspring was captured and presented to the Russian tsar as a "souvenir". Tsar Peter 1 brought up the boy as a Russian nobleman, gave him an education and endowed him with considerable lands, and, in order to finally consolidate the position of the stranger on Russian soil, he married a representative of an ancient boyar family. So, thick and hot Abyssinian blood was firmly mixed with the northern Russian.

Pushkin loved Mikhailovskoye very much. A cozy small estate, wonderful neighbors, with whom he maintained friendly relations, and also very beautiful, as if by order created by the surrounding nature, inspired to creativity. The shelter of works and pure bliss became for the poet this corner of the earth. Here, not far from the walls of Svyatogorsky Monastery, is the place where Pushkin is buried. The poet selected the land for his burial himself and bought it in 1836, when he last visited these places. Telling this to his friend P. Nashchokin about it, Pushkin half-jokingly stated that he had bought for himself a wonderful place with a good soft sandy earth, in a quiet and secluded corner, away from the "hustle and bustle" of urban cemeteries.

Near the place where Pushkin is buried, there is the grave of his mother Nadezhda Osipovna and her younger brother, who died in early childhood. A small family cemetery is located really in a convenient place, under a canopy of trees, next to the main monastery cathedral, where the poet was singing in the winter of 1837. Recently the Svyatogorsky monastery was returned to the church, it is again functioning, but access to the poet's grave is not obstructed. Here stretches an endless chain of pilgrims and admirers of his work, who pay tribute to love and eternal memory to the poet. It is very significant that in the place where Pushkin is buried, there is no pompous monument, a magnificent tombstone. The keepers of the museum in Mikhailovskoye and the graves of the poet in Svyatogorye decided to leave the tombstone that the widow Natalia Nikolaevna had installed. This is a modest, but tasteful, low white stela, towering over a small pedestal with a semicircular grotto. Perhaps, the only decoration of her are fresh flowers, constantly lying next to each other.

Another great poet of Russia, the fate of which in some mysterious way interwoven with its similarity with Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, also found his rest away from the city bustle. After the tragic death in a duel, the ashes of the poet were transported to the estate of his grandmother Tarkhany near Penza. The place where Lermontov is buried is the family crypt of the Arseniev family, the family to which the poet's mother belonged. There is something special and unusual about this that the two great men of Russia are not resting in public places, under heavy pompous tombstones, but in quiet country villages, next to their families.