The Crumbling Kalitin House in Oryol and the State of the City's Literary Sites

“A bright spring day was drawing towards evening; small rosy clouds stood high in the clear sky and seemed not to drift past but to sink into the very depths of the blue. Before the open window of a handsome house, in one of the outlying streets of the provincial town of O... (the events took place in 1842), two women were sitting...”. So begins Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk. And the photograph shows how it continues in our own day. A listing ruin: according to local tradition, the very house of the Kalitins, which one can now regard only with a bitter foreboding of its imminent final collapse. Oryol, one of the literary capitals of Russia, cannot, alas, boast of well-preserved and well-tended literary museums and memorial sites connected with Turgenev, Leskov, Leonid Andreyev, Fet, Tyutchev, Prishvin, Bunin and Apukhtin. You can see for yourselves what the historical and landscape park Dvoryanskoye Gnezdo (The Nest of Gentlefolk) looks like. The potential of the territory is enormous, the heritage colossal, the people mindful and sensitive, the condition deplorable.