Russians in France in the 20th century are one of the most dramatic and vivid pages of our culture. And, first of all, this concerns the capital of France.
In Paris, there are a number of unique churches and the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, through which all Russian emigration passed. To this day, icons of the White Guard units are kept in the cathedral, the Russian tsar visited here, Picasso married his Russian wife here, and princes, counts, poets, writers, artists, and military were buried here…
The Montparnasse district is no less significant for Russian emigration. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Alexei Tolstoy met in its restaurants with those who did not wish to live in the USSR, in those very restaurants where Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were seen not long ago… In the painting schools of Montparnasse, one could meet Marc Chagall, Zinaida Serebriakova, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova… Evenings of Ivan Bunin, Vladislav Khodasevich, Boris Zaitsev were held in one of the most fashionable hotels… To this day, descendants of Grzhibin, Benois, Rachmaninoff, and many others live in Montparnasse….
During a journey through the streets located in the 8th and 16th districts, you are literally haunted by memories related to our compatriots. Here is the theater where Ivan Bunin was honored with the Nobel Prize, the street where the famous Onegin lived, here they tried to revive the traditions of Russian opera, here Savenkov built his plans to fight the Bolsheviks, in this house Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius gathered for famous literary evenings, and here is a commemorative plaque in honor of Ivan Bunin who lived here…
The central districts of Paris are no less connected: the murder of Petlyura, the first Diaghilev Seasons, the addresses where Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam lived… Names, events, dates, destinies – all this is inscribed in the enchanting beauty of the city, which is over 23 centuries old…
