The same pharmacy, street, lantern ...

Thanks to one advertisement that conquered viewers in the mid-zero years, almost every resident of our country knows the main lines of two Quatrains of the Block:

Night, street, lantern, pharmacy,
Meaningless and dim light.
Live another quarter century
Everything will be so. There is no outcome.

If you die, you will start over again,
And everything will be repeated, as old:
Night, icy ripples of the canal,
Pharmacy, street, lantern.

But few people know that in St. Petersburg there really is that same pharmacy, on the same street, next to the same lamp. It remains only to come here at night ...

Many people mistakenly take for the “same” another pharmacy no less important for the poet. It was located at: Dekabristov street, 57, immediately adjacent to the author’s former home. He constantly went there for his medicines, and he described her image in another work, also dedicated to the problems of suicide - "Dance of Death":

Empty street. One fire in the window.
Jewish pharmacist groans in a dream.

And in front of the cabinet with the inscription Venena,
Economically bending the creaky knees,

A skeleton wrapped in a cloak to the eyes
Looking for something, grinning with a black mouth ...

Found ... But inadvertently tinkled with something,
And the skull turned ... The pharmacist grunted,

Got up - and on the other side fell ...
And the guest, meanwhile, is a treasured bubble

Two women wearing a cloak from under a cloak
On the street, under a whitish lamp.

Now the hasty reader will shout: "Glory, stop writing about another pharmacy for us! We want about that one!" So, on the first of October, after a heated family drama, Blok went out for a walk when he left the house, his legs carried him the other way, not by the usual route, but to Mariinsky. There, near the world-famous theater, he saved the sailor who had gathered to drown, who he pulled out of the canal and brought to the nearest pharmacy. Contemporaries and eyewitnesses say that this incident prompted the poet to compose his work, and perhaps at that moment some lines of the future hit came to his mind.

In those years, it was a new pharmacy, Novo-Mariinskaya, still smelling of wood, located in the house at number twenty-seven on Officerskaya Street (now the Decembrists), so it became the main character of an immortal work. According to the Russian Medical List, it was opened in 1910, and its owner was Yakov Mandelstam, I foresee your question, but it’s not like a relative, but the “icy ripple of the canal” refers to the canal located nearby. More than a century has passed, the owner of this pharmacy has changed, but the house remains, and there is a pharmacy in it, and for some reason I want to shout with the voice of Kramarov: “There it is - a tree.” Although it will be more true: "and here he is - a lantern!"

He’s right - again a lantern, a pharmacy,
Neva, silence, granite ...
Like a monument to the beginning of the century,
This man is standing there -
When he is to the Pushkin House,
Saying goodbye, waved his hand
And took mortal languor
Like undeserved peace.