How a Moscow SKYSCRAPER became writer Lermontov's ‘home’
Her mother insisted that the deeply pregnant Marya Mikhailovna Lermontova move from the family estate of Tarkhany to Moscow. The grandmother of the future poet believed that a woman in poor health needed competent doctors and good care.
So, a rented apartment was chosen in the house of the former Moscow chief of police at Krasnye Vorota – the small two-story mansion was then located quite far from the city center, which was badly damaged by the fire of 1812. There, the poet was born in the Fall of 1814. However, he did not live there for long. As a baby, he was taken back to the family estate.
In the late 1930s, during the reconstruction of the area, the mansion was demolished and, a decade and a half later, one of the famous Moscow skyscrapers was built next to this site. And, in 1964, a memorial plaque appeared on the “Russian skyscraper”: “On this site once stood the house where great Russian poet Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was born on October 3 (15), 1814.”