Pozharsky Hotel

Behind the two-story facade and the rows of second-floor windows once stood an entire roadside compound: rooms for visitors stood alongside a kitchen, stables, a carriage shed, and cellars. The new building was erected in place of a cramped old house when it could no longer hold everyone stopping on the road. Mirrors, paintings, curtains, and furniture made from expensive wood appeared in the rooms, while today exhibitions, a coffee shop, and a souvenir shop operate here.

The surname on the facade belongs to a family of Torzhok coachmen, not to Prince Dmitry Pozharsky. At the end of the eighteenth century, Dmitry Pozharsky kept an inn on Yamskaya Street. His son Evdokim turned the family business into a hotel with a tavern. The Pozharskys earned their living from people traveling between Saint Petersburg and Moscow: they fed them, gave them rooms, and took in their carriages and horses.

In eighteen twenty-six, Aleksandr Pushkin advised his friend Sergei Sobolevsky:

“At leisure, dine
At Pozharsky’s in Torzhok,
Taste fried cutlets
And set out unburdened.”

At that time, Evdokim Pozharsky was the owner. Seven years later, Pushkin wrote to his wife that he had breakfasted “at Pozharskaya’s,” where she made excellent kvass and excellent cutlets. That change of a single ending referred to his daughter, Darya. Her father handed the business over to her and explained in his will that his daughter herself had helped acquire most of the family property.

Darya wanted to receive more lodgers than the old house could hold. In eighteen forty, she petitioned the provincial road and construction commission, dismantled the former hotel, and built a two-story one in its place—the one whose appearance has been restored before us. A kitchen, stables, a carriage shed, and cellars were arranged beside the house. For the rooms, Darya bought mirrors, paintings, curtains, and expensive walnut and mahogany furniture. All of it was an investment in a single road: as long as coaches passed through Torzhok, lodgers paid for both rooms and meals.

In eighteen fifty-one, the railroad between the capitals opened, and many travelers switched to the train. At almost the same time, Darya’s relatives demanded money on promissory notes issued to them—written acknowledgments of debt. In an explanation to the police chief, Pozharskaya maintained that she had not borrowed money from her relatives and had given the notes in gratitude for their help during an illness. The relatives presented them for payment, the court declared Darya an insolvent debtor, and bailiffs inventoried the hotel property: furniture, dishes, linens, and goods from the shop.

Darya died in eighteen fifty-four without regaining the hotel. After the auction, it was acquired by her sister’s husband, the merchant Pyotr Fedukhin. The new owners added the former owner’s surname to their own and became the Fedukhins-Pozharskys.

It is now a museum complex with exhibitions, a coffee shop, and a souvenir shop; lodgers are not accommodated in the former rooms. Nor can there be a Pushkin room in the present building: Darya dismantled the old house where the poet ate cutlets at the Pozharskys’ three years after his death.