The little streets between Moscow's two most important thoroughfares, Tverskaya Street and the New Arbat, give the visitor an idea of what the city looked like in earlier centuries. Closer to the Arbat side their names echo the occupations of those who serviced the Kremlin in the old days before the Tsarist capital moved to St Petersburg.
Cooks Street, Tablecloth Lane and Bread Lane are self-explanatory, but the origins of Molchanovka Ulitsa (literally the Silent Street) are obscure. The street is hardly ever silent nowadays, with the roar of traffic on the New Arbat usually to be heard. It is, however, a typical example of Moscow's rare charm. To find this charm, one needs to look closely; to avoid the superficial. It lies in the contrast between the modern city and the thread of ancient buildings that winds its way through it.
There are few more striking contrasts than that found on the Silent Street. On one side stands the rear entrances to the vast skyscrapers of the New Arbat. They do not present a pleasant prospect. On the modern high-rise side of the street, lorries queue to take away refuse while delivery vans line up to replenish the ground-floor shops.
Across the narrow roadway stands a two-storey wooden house painted in pink and representing the old Moscow. In this house lived a great writer of prose and poetry of foreign origin but Russian and romantic to the core.
The story begins with the siege of the fortress of Bielaya in 1613 when Russia was at war with Poland. During the siege of the fortress of Bielaya two companies of mercenaries, one Irish and one Scottish, took the Russian side. Among the Scots was George Learmont, who later Russified his name to Yuri Lermontov.
His descendent, Mikhail Lermontov, lived in the two-story pink house on the Silent Street for part of his short life. The house is now a museum dedicated to the memory of the young man who succeeded Pushkin as the national poet of Russia and whose prose brought the Russian language to exceptional heights in his novel Geroi Nashego Vremeni (A Hero of Our Time).
But he died away from home in the southern city of Pyatigorsk, like his hero, Pushkin, in a duel. The pink house on Silent Street is now a museum in his memory. In the style of Russian museums it is under the care of a team of fastidious old ladies who insist that the visitor ties tapockhi, a type of Russian slipper, over one's shoes to guard the floors against the summer dust and the winter slush.
The interior of the pink house is in the Old Russian style. A large, white-tiled, 18th-century heating stove demands wall space in every room. Other walls carry water-colours by Lermontov himself, including portraits of the Decembrists, those aristocratic revolutionaries whose spirit he shared.
The large salon has a harpsichord and a violin, instruments which the writer played. There too is Lermontov's copy of Dante's Divina Commedia as well as notebooks in the author's hand containing drafts of his poetry. Above, in the mezzanine rooms, remnants of his personal library, with books in Russian, French, German and English, display his erudition.
His genius was such that his legacy to literature was significant even though he died at the age of 27 in July 1841.