A full-day field trip to the Nabokov family estates in the Gatchina area near St. Petersburg (about 50 miles from the city) will take you to the villages of Rozhdestveno and Vyra. Vladimir Nabokov spent almost all summers and some winters in the Vyra estate that belonged to his mother, paying frequent visits to his uncle’s Rozhdestveno and to his grandmother’s Batovo. The locale formed the setting for his novels “Mary”, “The Defense”, “The Gift”, and “Ada” as well as his short stories. Nabokov lovingly wrote about the area, with its beautiful scenery and special landmarks, in his autobiography “Speak, Memory” (Ch 3):
”Diagrammatically, the three family estates on the Oredezh, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, may be represented as three linked rings in a ten-mile chain running west-east across the Luga highway, with my mother’s Vyra in the middle, her brother’s Rozhdestveno on the right, and my grandmother’s Batovo on the left, the links being the bridges across the Oredezh (properly Oredezh’) which, in its winding, branching, and looping course, bathed Vyra on either side.”
The guided tour will begin from the middle of the three rings, Vyra. You will visit the site of the Nabokovs’ house on the bank of the Oredezh River. The house did not survive World War II, but some minor structures, formerly belonging to the estate, remain. And so do some of the old trees –“a certain spot in the forest, a footbridge across a brown brook...” From there we will take you to the Roshdestveno Estate, “with its white-pillared mansion on a green, escarped hill and its two thousand acres of wildwood and peatbog.”
Nabokov inherited this country estate in 1916, after the death of his uncle. The restoration of the Rozhdestveno mansion, which was almost destroyed by fire in 1995, is now coming to its end. After a tour of the grounds and a picnic lunch, we will go inside and see the spaceous rooms and some of the exhibits set up by the staff of the Rozhdestveno Estate Museum. You will be able to get a spectacular bird-eye’s view of the area from the top-floor Rotonda.
After a visit to the Rozhdestveno church, and the family vault where Vladimir Nabokov’s grandparents were buried, you will go by bus to the Postmaster Museum in the village of Vyra. This literary museum is also called Samson Vyrin’s Museum after a character from “The Postmaster,” a story from Alexander Pushkin’s “Belkin’s Tales”, which Nabokov esteemed highly. The exhibits lovingly recreate a 19th-century postmaster’s house. At the end of the trip, you may have dinner at the Samson Vyrin Cafe down the road.
Length of trip:7-8 hours. Costs:
• 30 euro per person (for a group of 5 and more), including admission to the Rozhdestveno House and tickets to the Samson Vyrin Museum.
• Dinner at Samson Vyrin’s Cafe, about 10 euro per person. (Only Russian currency (rubles) is accepted there)
