The apartment of the actress of the Sklifosovsky TV series is decorated with details with a story: toys by her daughter, a poster from her father, pictures of her stepfather, a mirror from Rome and a chandelier from Florence.
February 6 2018
– I was born on Herzen Street, now Nikitskaya, and I cannot imagine my life without a center. We had an old house, a large apartment. When I was sent to Leningrad to the Vaganov Choreographic School, my mother and grandmother (Anna’s mother is the director of the Stanislavsky Theater Olga Velikanova, the grandmother is the actress of the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya Elena Dmitrieva. – Approx. “Antennas”) decided to leave. My grandmother moved to a cooperative of playwrights near the Aeroport metro station, and my mother made a surprisingly strange choice – she found an apartment in Tekstilshchiki. I returned to Moscow and instead of Nikitskaya ended up on the outskirts, in a completely different, unfamiliar life.
– I spent a lot of time in Tekstilshchiki, but I never accepted the area. My husband Alexei and my daughters (the eldest, Anastasia, 28 years old, the youngest, Marusa, 21 years old. – Approx. “Antenna”) lived opposite my mother’s house. The children went to school in the center, I worked in the theater. This morning driving through terrible traffic jams got so tired that one day I simply said: I can’t take it anymore! Of course, it was very difficult for me to leave my mother, but I made a strong-willed decision to return back to the center. It was necessary to sell an apartment in Tekstilshchiki and meet the sum, and housing prices in a residential area and in the center at that time were also incomparable. May God bless my friends, who helped out and lent us money. First, we paid a deposit for an apartment on Gilyarovskogo Street. But the next day they called us and said that the deal was canceled. This housing has not yet been sold, apparently something is wrong with it, and God took us away. And our three-ruble note on Prospekt Mira was found in one day. My husband saw that a new apartment had appeared on the street adjacent to Gilyarovsky. We entered here, and I realized that I would live here. There was no doubt, because this house from the thirties resembled the one where I was born, my childhood. When we had already bought it, I arrived alone with the keys, entered, and then the bells of the church at the hospital, which is located nearby, began to ring, and my soul felt so good. We have been living here for ten years. I don’t regret a second, I love old Moscow very much.
“It was a traditional three-room apartment, which we turned into a four-room apartment with a large living room and three small bedrooms. My late stepfather, Alexander Alexandrovich Oparin, who was the chief artist of the Stanislavsky Theater, helped to reconstruct everything. Many of his works were taken by the Bakhrushin Museum, but some still lifes and paintings still hang in our living room. Here on the sofa there are toys, they were made in childhood by the eldest daughter Nastya, she is also an artist, now she is engaged in clothes. All her dolls were very strange, wonderful, funny, I call them anti-humans. Among them there is a rat that Nastya sewed for her younger sister Marusya, because she was born in the year of the Rat.
I made the kitchen according to the principle of “fit into the square”. I came up with a separate niche in the wall for the refrigerator, so as not to build it into the furniture, and put the set itself only along one wall. It turned out to be a mini, but comfortable and functional kitchen with a stone countertop in my favorite Provence style. There are also clocks and paintings that I bought in Montmartre in Paris, plates from an antique shop on Prospect Mira. They were brought there by my grandmother, who just needed to live on something. They are all signed with excerpts from some French musical theater. So I have my own little France in my house. I don’t like empty walls, but I don’t buy anything on purpose, things come by themselves.
Now my husband and I live in this apartment together, our girls are already adults, scattered. With their departure, Alexei got a separate bedroom, now the husband gets high here, because he is an early person, but I can read something, teach until morning, but I don’t interfere with him. Recently we also have a house, which we have been building for a long time. I fell in love with suburban life, but my busyness does not allow me to be there all the time. So I have two lives: one in the suburbs, where I rest, and the center one, in my apartment, where I feel protected, like in a bunker.