Something about my family's history
I've been thinking for a while about writing here things about my family's history. I've been trying to remember and organize stuff, asking my mother about stuff I've forgotten or never knew... I almost left it all alone - too many things missing, too much of what I do not know, and many things I thought I knew turned out to be misremembered or kind-of-legendary.
And then I decided to try it anyway. In any such story a narrator must necessarily be a part of the story. One of the characters. This is me, remembering stories that someone remembered and told me.
The beginning of the story is something I only heard this winter, at the wake for my grandmother. It's not that ancient a story - my family's memory on both sides, gathered together, does not go further than the early 20th century. So...
... so, in the late 19th and early 20th century there was in the town of Kaluga a merchant family by the name of Petushkov. I've never been to Kaluga in my life; it's a town in central Russia, not a very big one. And the Petushkovs were prosperous enough - and had plans to become even more prosperous. The head of the family planned to marry his son, Mikhail, to a heiress with a fabric for a dowry. Only it had not turned out that way. Because Petushkovs' house also had a basement flat, and they rented it to a family of impoverished gentry. I think the name of the family was Guskov, which is a funny coincidence in itself - both Petushkov and Guskov are names based on a diminutive names for poultry; Petushok is "little rooster" and Gusyok, "little gander". (I've been wondering at the similarity in name and difference in class. I guess Guskovs at one point must have owned a village named Guskovo, and Petushkovs never owned any land).
I'm not sure how big was the Guskov family, but one thing I know for sure: they had a daughter, Elizaveta. I don't think I ever saw her photo (I may be mistaken; I'm planning to look for photos) but she must have been pretty. She played piano and presumably was good at needlework. I have her embroidery patterns; they were kept through different generations (there always was someone interested in crafts since Elizaveta) and given me for my last birthday. They're mostly letters, flowers, corners; things for decorating linen.
Mikhail fell in love with Elizaveta and married her, wrecking his father's plans for the heiress with a fabric. That made his father seriously angry, so that Mikhail was unable to have business at his native town. He moved his family - at first to Moscow. I'm not sure when exactly that was and whether they had children already. I know they had children while in Moscow, because they moved again, to St. Petersburg this time, for the reason of his second daughter's bad health. I guess a more-or-less maritime climate was considered more useful for her, though I do not know exactly what was wrong with her.
In St. Petersburg they stayed for the rest of their lives - through the revolution and change of the name. I think they lived more or less okay. Their flat on Zverinskaya became a communal flat - they were allowed to keep some rooms but had to give up others, but they had not suffered any more specific persecution, as far as I know. Mikhail (okay, Mikhail Ivanovich, he was a venerable person at this point already) had worked at something connected, I think, with logistics. A kind of commerce, in a way. Elizaveta died in 1927 from breast cancer, and he married again - I think his new wife was called Zinaida ("I remember it was some kind of an awful name", my mother says). It was on Zverinskaya that he died in 1942, during Leningrad Blockade.
Mikhail and Elizaveta had three children: Valentina, Lyudmilla and Evgeniy. Evgeniy was killed in action in 1941, I think. Lyudmilla, the one whose health required moving to St. Petersburg, had bad health through all her life. She was also the one who inherited her mother's needlework skills - and bettered them, it seems. She worked for most of her life as a seamstress in Mariinsky (then Kirov) opera theatre, doing costumes. She stayed in the city throughout the whole Blockade and survived and after the war had a daughter, Tatyana, though as far as I know she never married. (Tatyana is also quite good at needlework and knitting, and it was her who gave me Elizaveta's patterns).
Lyudmilla died in 1976. I must have seen her as a baby but, of course, I do not remember her. I once read in an astrology book that Scorpios have such strong life forces that in the time frame of around a year of a Scorpio's birth someone in the family dies. I am a Scorpio; I do not believe in astrology but for some reason this stuck with me: Lyudmilla died a year after my birth and her sister Valentina, a year after my cousin Nina, also a Scorpio, was born. I've never felt any great life force within me, but still the idea is a bit shudder-worthy.
Anyway. I do not remember Lyudmilla, but I remember Valentina quite well. She died aged 80, in 1986, when I was 11. She was my great-grandmother.
And then I decided to try it anyway. In any such story a narrator must necessarily be a part of the story. One of the characters. This is me, remembering stories that someone remembered and told me.
The beginning of the story is something I only heard this winter, at the wake for my grandmother. It's not that ancient a story - my family's memory on both sides, gathered together, does not go further than the early 20th century. So...
... so, in the late 19th and early 20th century there was in the town of Kaluga a merchant family by the name of Petushkov. I've never been to Kaluga in my life; it's a town in central Russia, not a very big one. And the Petushkovs were prosperous enough - and had plans to become even more prosperous. The head of the family planned to marry his son, Mikhail, to a heiress with a fabric for a dowry. Only it had not turned out that way. Because Petushkovs' house also had a basement flat, and they rented it to a family of impoverished gentry. I think the name of the family was Guskov, which is a funny coincidence in itself - both Petushkov and Guskov are names based on a diminutive names for poultry; Petushok is "little rooster" and Gusyok, "little gander". (I've been wondering at the similarity in name and difference in class. I guess Guskovs at one point must have owned a village named Guskovo, and Petushkovs never owned any land).
I'm not sure how big was the Guskov family, but one thing I know for sure: they had a daughter, Elizaveta. I don't think I ever saw her photo (I may be mistaken; I'm planning to look for photos) but she must have been pretty. She played piano and presumably was good at needlework. I have her embroidery patterns; they were kept through different generations (there always was someone interested in crafts since Elizaveta) and given me for my last birthday. They're mostly letters, flowers, corners; things for decorating linen.
Mikhail fell in love with Elizaveta and married her, wrecking his father's plans for the heiress with a fabric. That made his father seriously angry, so that Mikhail was unable to have business at his native town. He moved his family - at first to Moscow. I'm not sure when exactly that was and whether they had children already. I know they had children while in Moscow, because they moved again, to St. Petersburg this time, for the reason of his second daughter's bad health. I guess a more-or-less maritime climate was considered more useful for her, though I do not know exactly what was wrong with her.
In St. Petersburg they stayed for the rest of their lives - through the revolution and change of the name. I think they lived more or less okay. Their flat on Zverinskaya became a communal flat - they were allowed to keep some rooms but had to give up others, but they had not suffered any more specific persecution, as far as I know. Mikhail (okay, Mikhail Ivanovich, he was a venerable person at this point already) had worked at something connected, I think, with logistics. A kind of commerce, in a way. Elizaveta died in 1927 from breast cancer, and he married again - I think his new wife was called Zinaida ("I remember it was some kind of an awful name", my mother says). It was on Zverinskaya that he died in 1942, during Leningrad Blockade.
Mikhail and Elizaveta had three children: Valentina, Lyudmilla and Evgeniy. Evgeniy was killed in action in 1941, I think. Lyudmilla, the one whose health required moving to St. Petersburg, had bad health through all her life. She was also the one who inherited her mother's needlework skills - and bettered them, it seems. She worked for most of her life as a seamstress in Mariinsky (then Kirov) opera theatre, doing costumes. She stayed in the city throughout the whole Blockade and survived and after the war had a daughter, Tatyana, though as far as I know she never married. (Tatyana is also quite good at needlework and knitting, and it was her who gave me Elizaveta's patterns).
Lyudmilla died in 1976. I must have seen her as a baby but, of course, I do not remember her. I once read in an astrology book that Scorpios have such strong life forces that in the time frame of around a year of a Scorpio's birth someone in the family dies. I am a Scorpio; I do not believe in astrology but for some reason this stuck with me: Lyudmilla died a year after my birth and her sister Valentina, a year after my cousin Nina, also a Scorpio, was born. I've never felt any great life force within me, but still the idea is a bit shudder-worthy.
Anyway. I do not remember Lyudmilla, but I remember Valentina quite well. She died aged 80, in 1986, when I was 11. She was my great-grandmother.