Nikolai Ostrovsky’s house was built in 1936. Having settled in his Sochi dacha, the writer noted with gratitude: “Everything has been done so that I can work calmly. I feel in this the caring and gentle hand of my Motherland.” In 1937, this house opened its doors as a museum, which celebrated its 85th anniversary last year. By the way, there are three Ostrovsky museums in Russia: in Sochi (the first to open), Moscow and Novorossiysk.
It should be noted that the Ostrovsky house-museum in Sochi is visited by 45,000 guests a year, and 70 percent of the visitors definitely want to see with their own eyes the conditions in which Nikolai Ostrovsky lived and wrote. Especially the writer’s work is revered by the Chinese.
“A few years ago, just before the pandemic, the chief judge of the People’s Court of China came to us, thin, modestly dressed like a Soviet pioneer,” recalls Lyudmila Zyumchenko, director of the NA Ostrovsky Literary and Memorial Museum in Sochi. Ella-ella She looked at the exhibition with interest, and then, as a token of gratitude, sent fifty different Chinese editions of the novel “How Steel Was Tempered” over the past ten years.
As of today, large-scale repair and restoration work has begun at the Ostrovsky Memorial Museum, an object of the cultural heritage of the peoples of the Russian Federation at the federal level. The contractor was a construction company from Krasnodar, which is licensed to carry out restoration work.
The Ostrovsky house-museum was completely freed from furniture and now looks unusually empty. But now in a spacious building it is easier to notice “traces of fatigue” – cracks and peeling paint on the walls and a rickety floor. According to Lyudmila Zyumchenko, the main thing is to restore the foundation, repair the roof and restore the parquet.
“The last time repairs were done here was in 1980,” she says. – The cost of the current restoration was estimated at 46 million rubles, the money was allocated from the city budget, since this object belongs to the municipal ones, – explained the director of the museum. – It is too early to talk about the timing of the completion of the restoration, but this year the memorial museum will definitely not open.
By the way, the furniture in the Ostrovsky house does not need to be repaired, only the piano; during the preliminary inspection of the musical instrument, experts calculated that it would take about 150 thousand rubles.
Once the commemorative exhibition closed, they decided to recreate the interiors of the writer’s house in the exhibition rooms of the literary part of the museum. From February 2, visitors will be able to see the writer’s office and fragments of the exposition of the family half of the Ostrovskys’ house.
The central place is occupied by Ostrovsky’s bed from the bedroom-study of the house-museum, in which there was a desk; the writer did not want his room to look like a patient’s room. Two devices lie on a high bed with white sheets: a bell for calling relatives from neighboring rooms, as well as a staff, the end of which is wrapped in a bandage so that the writer can independently wipe sweat from his forehead and smooth himself. The hair. or scare away insects – Nikolai Ostrovsky only waved his hands.
