Old postcards Pushkin Reserve

Dating from 1964, this is the earliest of the literary estate sets in the section. The Pushkin Reserve opened as a museum in 1922, when Mikhailovskoye, Trigorskoye and the poet’s grave at the Svyatogorsky Monastery were declared a state monument; in 1936 the whole monastery and the Petrovskoye estate were added. Mikhailovskoye, granted in 1742 to Pushkin’s maternal great-grandfather Abram Gannibal, was where the poet lived in exile in 1824–1826.

The cards follow the same sites. Mikhailovskoye is shown by Lake Malenets, Petrovskoye by an alley of dwarf lime trees. Trigorskoye, the estate of Pushkin’s friends the Osipov-Wulf family, gets the most cards: the house museum, the park seen from the bank of the Sorot River, a corner of the park and “Onegin’s Bench”.

Another thread is history and memory. The Voronich hillfort is captioned as the remains of an ancient Russian fortress: in the 14th–16th centuries Voronich was a fortified outpost guarding Pskov from the south-west, and it was destroyed in 1581. At the Svyatogorsky Monastery the cards show the old Assumption Cathedral, a garden in the great monastery courtyard with a bust of Pushkin at its centre, and the grave of the poet, buried here in 1837.

Collectors get the reserve in its mid-1960s state, scanned from the original Soviet postcards rather than reprinted.