Peredelkino

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House-museum of Boris Pasternak in Peredelkino

Peredelkino is a dacha complex situated just to the south-west of Moscow. The settlement originated as the estate of Peredeltsy, owned by the Leontyevs (maternal relatives of Peter the Great), then by Princes Dolgorukov and by the Samarins. After a railway passed through the village in the 19th century, it was renamed Peredelkino. In 1934 Maxim Gorky suggested to hand over the area to the Union of Soviet Writers. Within several years, about fifty wooden cottages were constructed in Peredelkino to Soviet writers by German designs.

Among the litterateurs who settled in Peredelkino were Boris Pasternak, Korney Chukovsky, Arseny Tarkovsky (all three buried at the local cemetery), Ilya Ehrenburg, Veniamin Kaverin, Leonid Leonov, Ilya Ilf, Isaak Babel, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolay Zabolotsky, Boris Pilnyak, Lilya Brik, Konstantin Simonov, Alexander Fadeyev, and Mikhail Bakhtin. More recently, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, and Zurab Tsereteli moved into the area as well.

It is supposed that the village was satirized by Mikhail Bulgakov as Perelygino, a writers' colony described in his novel The Master and Margarita. The village also featured prominently in the John le Carré spy novel The Russia House.

In 1988, the cottages of Chukovsky and Pasternak were proclaimed memorial houses, while the area of Peredelkino was designated a "historical and cultural reservation". A decade later, the dacha of Bulat Okudzhava was also opened to the public as a museum. After the collapse of the USSR, Peredelkino was taken over by the Russian new rich. Many new apartment buildings were constructed in Novo-Peredelkino district nearby.

As of 2005, the most eminent resident of Peredelkino is Patriarch Alexis II, whose summer residence of Lukino (originally built in the delightful Russian Revival style for Baron de Bodé) adjoins a 17th-century church of the Saviour's Transfiguration.

The territory of the complex is divided between three administrative formations: its eastern portion is located in jurisdiction of Western Administrative Okrug of Moscow, its northwestern portion—in jurisdiction of Odintsovsky District of Moscow Oblast, and its southwestern portion—in jurisdiction of Leninsky District of Moscow Oblast.