The Entrance
The main vestibule of the building was spacious and had bas-relief decorations on the walls. On the right hand side was a modernist style stained-glass door: the entrance to the owner’s apartment. Runners covered the floors of the entrance hall and staircase up to the 4th floor. Many of the apartments did not have a private telephone, but instead used a shared one downstairs.
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 Main vestibule of the building |
Dernov's apartment entrance |
At the main entrance the occupants and visitors would be met and taken up by elevator by doorman Pavel, dressed in livery as was customary in eminent Petersburg apartment buildings. But early in the morning, when Ivanov's guests left the building, he got up to open the door in a jacket and bare feet in overshoes, humbly accepting the modest tipping that the bohemia could afford.
According to an inhabitant of another Petersburg apartment house, the doormen were paid by each resident two rubles a month. But poet Mikhail Kuzmin, a frequent visitor of the Ivanovs and later resident of the building, suffered from recurrent financial problems and needed sometimes to borrow some coins from the doorman in order to get a horse cab.
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Johannes von Günther, a German writer, recollects his arrival to Petersburg in 1908: "Первым делом я отправился к Вячеславу Иванову на Таврическую 25. ... Швейцар Павел в длинном синем одеянии, усеянном металлическими пуговицами (не то шинель, не то пальто, не то халат), отворил мне дверь. "Господа дома", – сказал он, поднес руку к козырьку и – дабы оказать мне особую честь – поднялся вместе со мной на лифте и высадил меня между пятым и шестым этажами." |
| (Click here for an English translation of the text.) |
When artists at Ivanov's put on a theatre play, Pavel's children assisted and performed the roles of Moors, faces blackened with soot.
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In 1910 the inhabitants and visitors of Bashnia performed Pedro Calderón de la Barca's (1600-1681) play Devotion to the Cross. The director was Vsevolod Meyerhold, staging and costumes were by Sergei Sudeikin. Note also the doorman's sons as Moors. |
