Church of St Nicholas on Posad and Pilnyak House

This church has two names. The main altar is consecrated in honor of the Resurrection of Christ, but the people of Kolomna gave the church the name Church of St Nicholas on Posad. Nikola is an old Russian form of the name Saint Nicholas of Myra, a Christian bishop venerated as a wonderworker. The lower side chapel is dedicated to him. Posad was the name for the district of merchants and craftsmen beyond the Kremlin wall. Its residents built the stone church at their own expense in seventeen sixteen. It is now home to an Old Believer community.

A one-story wooden house has survived nearby. In nineteen eighteen, Boris Pilnyak, a young prose writer who had decided to make his living by writing, rented it from a priest. The writer's real surname was Vogau; he had been signing himself Pilnyak for several years already. His wife, the zemstvo doctor Maria Sokolova, and his young daughter Natalia moved in with him.

Pilnyak had to support his family in years when a writer's earnings could not be considered reliable. He bought a cow, obtained hay, planted potatoes, and tried to protect the harvest from theft. From the window he could see funerals at Church of St Nicholas on Posad, bell ringing divided the day into church services, and several streets away institutions and people's fates were changing. Pilnyak gathered this material: he went out for bread, questioned the people of Kolomna, and recorded the collision of the old urban way of life with revolutionary times.

On December twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty, he finished the novel The Naked Year here. The final lines of the manuscript were the place and date: “Kolomna, Church of St Nicholas on Posad.” Maxim Gorky recommended the novel to the publisher Zinovy Grzhebin; the book came out in nineteen twenty-two and quickly brought Pilnyak to the forefront of new Russian prose. He was still seeking his fee from this house—in letters, he admitted that he was without money and waiting for payment from the publishing house.

The writer turned the name of the neighboring church into his literary address. He used it to mark letters and stories, and when he began publishing his own collected works, the title page of the first volume gave the place of publication as: “Church of St Nicholas on Posad, Moscow Governorate.” The name of a church side chapel was printed where Moscow or St. Petersburg would usually appear.

In the spring of nineteen twenty-four, Pilnyak left his family and moved to Moscow. Maria Sokolova and the children remained in this house. The wooden building on Arbatskaya Street has survived and remains residential; a memorial plaque hangs on its facade. And at the end of The Naked Year, the address still stands, only a few steps from the house to Church of St Nicholas on Posad.