Kardavil, Kardavir (Erzya forest outpost) – a historic village in Shatkovsky District. Known from documents since 1578.
Administratively it is part of the urban settlement of Lesogorsk.
The Erzya population predominates.
A monument of urban planning and architecture – the Church of the Intercession (Pokrovskaya Church). The object is dated to 1837 (according to the "State lists of historical and cultural monuments of Nizhny Novgorod Region"; according to local historian Vladimir Bakunin, the church was built starting in 1903). Document on placement under state protection No. 286. Near the church is the Bazhenov necropolis – the burial place of the village's owners, descendants of the architect V.I. Bazhenov. See "Vasily Bazhenov and the Nizhny Novgorod land: assumptions, hypotheses, facts".
GPS coordinates of the object: N55.123738 E43.864466
The Poetics of Kardavir
Bezstuzh Anamasov, Bogdan Kistanov, Ivan Snadeyev, Uchet Cheutanov, Lapsh Anamasov, Sumorok Vasilyev, Grigory Pelyakhin – these are the names of the first settlers. It sounds unfamiliar to our ear. And that is because the village's history spans more than four centuries. The first mentions of the ancient Erzya village can be found in the Arzamas land deeds for 1578–1618.
According to local old-timers, the elders originally pronounced the village's name as Kardavir. "Vir" means "forest" in Erzya. "A post in the forest" – that is how the village's name sounds translated into Russian.
It is quite natural that over several centuries of existence in one place, the people developed for themselves certain moral values and norms of life. A great love of the forest exists in the blood of the Erzya people at a genetic level. This folk tradition is still carefully passed down from generation to generation.
Our region is wondrous in its beauty, which once again recalls the wisdom of the ancestors who chose these places to live.
Where oak groves and birches stand, And open spaces stretch far and wide, There is a village with a striking name And melodious – Kardavil.
That such a place exists The world is simply lucky, For to good people it is An ancestral nest.
Here lilac blooms every spring By the great-grandfathers' graves. Kardavil – our raft and oars, However hard the wind may storm.
Now fewer native residents remain in the village than there were first settlers. Fate has scattered many far from their native places, but the magical, hard-to-explain bond between a person and the place of their birth stays with them for life.
What can words like Nachkoley, Pechkerley, Erkeley, Lapshiley, Kirmaloley say to the uninitiated? Absolutely nothing, just a set of sounds. But for everyone who is from Kardavil, these are ravines known since childhood, each different from the others.
And the groves surrounding the village are each more beautiful than the last! In village life trees maintain a link between eras and unite the fates of different generations into one. In the labyrinth of time the memory of the village's first inhabitants gradually fades, but the groves once named by them live on to this day under their names.
Oshley and Lapkaprya are two hazel groves spreading right beyond the village outskirts; Karakshley is a bright birch grove with sturdy autumn boletus mushrooms along the slopes;
Kurilovo is a legend-shrouded, mysterious deciduous grove with marshy, damp ravines strewn in spring with the golden petals of marsh marigolds, poetically called in the local dialect "vergezyn bayakat" – wolf bells.
Right behind the active quarry, Kumbra curves gracefully (an altered form, in the local dialect, of the Erzya word "shumbra" – health). This is the third hazel grove, fringed at its edges by bird cherry and viburnum bushes.
Every hillock, every ravine, every little stream is memorable from childhood, every path has been walked, imprinted deep in the heart. It is from precisely this close attachment to native places that a sense of shared fate with one's small homeland is born.
The Kardavir Drama
Some seven years ago, perhaps more, nature itself worked a miracle and gave the residents of the village of Kardavil an unusual gift. On the gentle slope of the Kirmaloley ravine, almost unnoticed by anyone, young birches and rare fluffy pines grew up, and among them numerous strawberry and wild-strawberry meadows appeared, adorned with daisies and large forest bellflowers. Birdsong, air steeped in the scent of wild herbs, a sea of wild strawberries – a true earthly paradise ten minutes' walk from the village!
A narrow strip of forest land stretched along the entire ravine for 2–3 km, but how much joy and health it managed to bring people! Grandchildren coming for the summer to visit their relatives would disappear into the grove for whole days. The adults let them go without worry: it was impossible to get lost – on one side was the ravine, on the other, the village. The children brought the healing berries to their grandmothers and grandfathers, treating them to an elixir of longevity so they would live as long as possible. The grandchildren themselves grew physically stronger, since one must bow low to the ground for every berry. In caring for their elders, the children at the same time absorbed the life experience of a careful attitude toward nature, becoming imbued with love and respect for it. In this unobtrusive way, children were genuinely raised in the spirit of Erzya traditions.
The paradise corner, over which Nature had labored for a whole decade, was mutilated within the space of a few hours. Upturned earth, mangled trees carelessly piled into heaps, exhausted tractor drivers forced to constantly stop their tractors and with great effort pull the green crowns of living birches out of the iron machinery. Uprooted tree roots stuck out everywhere. There are no words to express what was happening in one's heart at the sight of this picture.
By way of comment
It must be acknowledged that this part of the letter is written emotionally, movingly, with great love for the native land. But the second part of the letter – some 3.5 pages of printed text, devoted to the search for those responsible for the Kardavir drama – is written aggressively, in an admonishing, instructive, moralizing tone.
Yet not a word is said about why this "paradise corner, over which Nature labored for a whole decade" arose in the first place. And it arose as a result of the cultivated land ceasing to be worked, because there was no one left to plow and sow it. The "Energetik" subsidiary farm collapsed. The farming enterprise that appeared in the village simply could not manage to cultivate the land. The villagers were content with their household plots, since the settlement is now inhabited mainly by elderly people. And so the farmland began to be overgrown with birches, pines, shrubs, berry bushes and mushrooms. And there are millions of hectares of such land in Russia.
Who is to blame? Everyone, starting with the government of the Russian Federation and ending with us, ordinary citizens, who left the village and scattered across Russia in search of a better life. And we should be grateful to those who stayed in the village, who work the land, wresting it back from the advancing forest just as was done hundreds of years ago, and support those who grow grain, potatoes, sugar beets, and produce milk and meat. One cannot live on berries and mushrooms alone.
Nowadays it has become fashionable to come to one's small homeland and tear its way of life and established order to shreds. Come back to the village, set it in order, create "paradise corners," work the land and live for your own pleasure, earn profit and superprofit. No one is forbidden to do this.
Shatki.ru, The Drama of Kardavir
The Bazhenovs. Freemasonry in Kardavil
The cultural heritage sites associated with the architect Vasily Bazhenov, who lived in the 18th century, have repeatedly become the occasion for various news items in recent years. A few years ago in Moscow, after reconstruction, two such monuments opened at once: the famous Pashkov House, which had been in a state of disrepair for 20 years, and the Tsaritsyno palace-and-park ensemble, which had stood unfinished since the time of Catherine II.
Nizhny Novgorod local historians (A. Sheikin, V. Fyodorov and others) attribute to Vasily Ivanovich Bazhenov the estate projects of the Pashkovs in the Gagino and Sechenovo districts, the Batashyov hunting lodge in Doschatoye in Vyksa District, and a number of churches across the region, including the Church of Alexander Nevsky (1791) in Verkhneye Talyzino, Sechenovo District. The Nizhny Novgorod regional public fund of cultural figures "Dat Ponyat" ("To Give Understanding"), as part of the project "Sites of Memory of Nizhny Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod Region," set out to determine whether there were grounds for these local historians' assumptions and whether the famous architect had any connection to the Nizhny Novgorod land at all. This called for a survey of his biography.
So, V.I. Bazhenov was born on 1 March 1737 (according to other sources, in 1738) in Moscow into the family of a deacon of one of the Kremlin court churches. His natural talent showed itself already in early childhood: the young artist's drawings depicting "all kinds of buildings in the ancient capital" attracted the attention of the architect Dmitry Ukhtomsky, and the churchman's son became a pupil of his famous school. From the founding of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Vasily became one of its students and its first "pensioner" sent abroad (France, Italy) to continue his studies. On returning to Russia, Bazhenov became one of the best practicing builders in Moscow and St.
Petersburg, distinguished both by the skill of his planning and by the elegance of the forms of the buildings he designed. Prince G.G. Orlov appointed him chief architect of his artillery department, with the rank of captain. In this post Bazhenov built, in St. Petersburg, the arsenal building on Liteiny Street (later the building of the judicial institutions), and in Moscow, in the Kremlin, the arsenal and senate buildings on Znamenka, the Pashkov House (later the Moscow Rumyantsev Museum), and, on the outskirts of the capital, the palace at Tsaritsyno and the Petrovsky Palace, built by his assistant Matvei Kazakov.
At the will of Catherine II, Bazhenov undertook the project to rebuild the Kremlin, in which, instead of walls serving as an enclosure for the shrines and palaces, he designed a continuous row of buildings. In 1773 a solemn foundation-laying ceremony was held for one of them, but this project was never destined to be realized: construction of the object was postponed and later abandoned altogether. The same fate befell Bazhenov's Tsaritsyno palace. Catherine, in the summer of 1785, came to the ancient capital for three days, inspected the construction work at Tsaritsyno and, finding it gloomy, ordered the building work stopped. Interestingly, folk legend "kills off" the unfortunate architect, who supposedly, "overcome by grief, hanged himself in one of the gazebos of Tsaritsyno Park." However, this is merely a metaphor: Bazhenov received no other appointment and was left without means of subsistence.
The change in his career and Catherine's disfavor are most often explained by Bazhenov's Masonic activity. The fact is that Novikov's circle instructed the "court architect" to report to Tsesarevich Paul on his election by Moscow Freemasons to the rank of Grand Master. Catherine suspected political aims in these dealings with the heir, and her wrath fell upon Bazhenov before it fell on others.
Thus, from 1785 to 1792 Vasily Bazhenov was, in the true sense, a "free mason" – or, as one might say today, a freelancer: he opened an art workshop and took up private commissions. It is therefore quite plausible to assume that among his clients of that period were the Batashyovs and the Pashkovs, who were improving their Nizhny Novgorod estates. Within this time span fall both the Church of Alexander Nevsky on the Pashkov estate in Verkhneye Talyzino (now within Sechenovo District of Nizhny Novgorod Region) and the Batashyov hunting lodge in Doschatoye in Vyksa District, which is still called the "Masonic" lodge. Notably, experts also find Masonic symbols in the décor of the Pashkovs' main manor house in Vetoshkino, Gagino District, although construction of that building began considerably later.
However, in 1792 the famous architect was again taken into service, under the Admiralty College, and moved his activity to St. Petersburg. He built a palace and church for the heir to the throne on Kamenny Island and designed various special buildings for the fleet at Kronstadt. On his accession to the throne, Paul I appointed Vasily Bazhenov vice-president of the Academy of Arts and commissioned him to draw up a project for Mikhailovsky Castle, to prepare a collection of drawings of Russian buildings for a historical study of native architecture, and to "present an explanation on the question of what ought to be done to give proper direction to the development of the talents of Russian artists at the Academy of Arts." These imperial commissions are dated to 1796, and on 22 January 1797 Paul I signed a decree by which the architect was granted lands in Nizhny Novgorod Province. Thus Vasily Bazhenov and his family became owners of the villages of Kardavil, Korino, and part of the village of Ponetayevka, together with the peasant souls living there. Today these hereditary holdings lie within Shatki District of Nizhny Novgorod Region.
Interestingly, it was precisely from 1797 that Mikhailovsky Castle in St. Petersburg was built by F.N. Brenna. This gives further grounds to suppose that V.I. Bazhenov could have gone to inspect his holdings in Nizhny Novgorod Province. At any rate, he had time to do so: he died on 2 August 1799 in St. Petersburg.
According to local historian Vladimir Bakunin, drawing on materials of the Arzamas Museum of History and Art and on A.A. Inzhutov's book "A Brief Historical Sketch of Shatki District," the village of Kardavil became the principal ancestral seat of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Bazhenovs.
Here stood the estate house, where after the architect's death his archive was kept, along with many works of art, including paintings by Western European artists acquired in Italy and Spain ("The Pilgrim," "Bathsheba in the Garden," "Cylidonia with her Father," "Cain Slaying Abel," "Lot and his Daughters," "Diana Hunting," "Herodias with the Head of the Forerunner on a Platter"). Among the authors of these canvases were the well-known Frenchmen Subleyras, with "The Nativity of Christ," and Lazzarini, with "Semiramis," and the celebrated Italian Titian, with "The Carrying of the Cross." Subsequently all these works were sold by the architect's sons, who lacked business acumen and had fallen into debt, to A.V. Stupin for his famous gallery of the Arzamas School of Painting.
In Kardavil itself – near the Church of the Intercession – stood the Bazhenov family crypt as well. Several gravestones have survived to this day.
One of the surviving slabs was placed for the famous architect's great-grandson, Alexander Vasilyevich Bazhenov (1841–1908). Some information has been gathered about this descendant of the architect – a prominent figure in the zemstvo and public life of Nizhny Novgorod Province. He began his career as a judicial investigator in Sergach Uyezd. From 1868 he was a justice of the peace of Arzamas district, and later an honorary justice of the peace. In 1881 A.V. Bazhenov was elected chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod provincial zemstvo administration. From 1895 to 1905 he was marshal of the nobility of Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, and before retiring, provincial marshal of the nobility.