Before you is the once-famous "Nightingale House" in Moscow, which stood at the corner of Vozdvizhenska and Nikitsky Boulevard and was demolished in 1997 during the Luzhkov era. Why was it called "Nightingale"? In the 19th century, it housed rehearsal rooms for the Bolshoi and Maly Theaters, where performances featuring Mikhail Shchepkin and Pavel Mochalov took place. The house also hosted a musical salon of the star of the Russian stage, Maria Lvova-Sinetskaya, frequented by notable figures such as Griboedov, Pushkin, and Goncharov. The popular composer of that time, Alexander Varlamov, lived here and created 85 romances within these walls, including "The Lonely Sail is White," "Mountain Peaks" to the words of Lermontov, "Tell me, why did you come," "What has clouded you, bright dawn," and "Why do you sit until midnight?" Each of his works became an event. Franz Liszt also visited this house, and Mikhail Chekhov had a theater studio here.

The two lower floors of the building on Nikitsky Boulevard were built in the late 18th century, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was expanded. Originally, the house belonged to Prince Yakov Shakhovsky, the author of the famous "Notes." In the early 19th century, the new owner, Prince Sergey Golitsyn, opened a literary salon here, where Konstantin Ryleev read his "Thoughts." In the 1820s, the house was owned by Fyodor Kokoshkin, the director of the Imperial Theaters.

The name "Nightingale House" appeared very early, but true theater lovers preferred to call it "Kokoshkin Academy." The house miraculously survived the fire of 1812. Wide gates from Kalashny Lane led to a courtyard filled with state and private carriages. From the large house, the wings of the outbuildings curved around the burial site of the Church of Boris and Gleb, while the bells of the neighboring Cross Exaltation Monastery rang. 1996 became the last year in the history of the Nightingale House. Evicted and surrounded by a solid fence, it waited for its fate for several more years and was demolished two hours before Boris Yeltsin's arrival for the laying of a new chapel in front of the Ministry of Defense building. This was done "as part of the improvement of the territory," as stated in the reports. None of the future researchers will be able to glimpse its undisclosed secrets, restore the interiors of the Pushkin, Griboedov, and even Catherine's times, or hold onto the fleeting shadows of Pushkin's acquaintances.