Bolshaya Nikitskaya, Building 48 The oldest section of Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street—from Manezhnaya Square to the Nikitsky Gate—developed at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries along the Volotskaya (Novgorod) Road. During the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible, the Oprichny Court was located here, but by the 18th century, the street had become filled with boyar and noble estates. It's no surprise that the famous Goncharov family settled on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street in the first half of the 19th century. Their rather large wooden house stood on a plot now numbered 48 and was registered in the name of Ekaterina Andreyevna Goncharova (Natalia Goncharova's great-grandmother). The estate burned to the ground in the Moscow fire of 1812, but was soon rebuilt. Eight years later, a wooden, one-story house with a gable roof and a mezzanine was erected on a stone foundation. To the right of the building stood a gate and a long, solid fence, separating the courtyard containing the outbuildings from the street. It was in this house that Natalia Goncharova, the future wife of Alexander Pushkin, spent her formative years. As is well known, the poet first saw the 16-year-old girl at a ball hosted by the dance master P.A. Yogel in the Kologrivovs' house on Tverskoy Boulevard and was literally smitten by her beauty. "Pushkin, having fallen in love with Goncharova, asked Count Tolstoy, an old acquaintance of the Goncharovs, to visit them and ask permission to bring Pushkin... Pushkin was allowed to visit. He visited constantly," Natalia Nikolaevna's youngest brother, Sergei Nikolaevich Goncharov, later told the poet's biographer P.I. Bartenev. The rooms on the first floor of the Goncharov house were rented out as shops, and one of them was occupied by a certain German undertaker and his wares. It was likely the sign of this "establishment," constantly flashing before Pushkin's eyes, that inspired the plot of his novella "The Undertaker." Alexander Sergeevich placed the character in his story right at the Nikitsky Gate. It is unknown exactly when the two buildings (No. 48 and No. 50) appeared on the site of the large estate, but it was clearly no earlier than 1880, as the building occupied it before the 1917 Revolution. The property later became associated with the name of Faina Georgievna Ranevskaya. The actress settled here after moving to Moscow from Taganrog, and later recalled: "I lived in Natalie's house on Bolshaya Nikitskaya for more than thirty years. The large rooms there were divided into communal rooms, and I lived in the servants' quarters." Since the 1950s, the mansion on Bolshaya Nikitskaya has been under the management of the Main Administration for Service to the Diplomatic Corps of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs (now the GlavUpDK of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs). To provide comfortable accommodation for the embassy staff, a thorough renovation was carried out: the stove heating was replaced with central heating; the courtyard was given a solid fence with a gate; and a tall street lamp was added. Today, an elegant stone mansion stands on the site of the Goncharovs' former estate. The windows, symmetrically arranged along the façade, are decorated with Renaissance-style architraves and cornices. The entrance to the building, framed by a semicircular cast-iron canopy, is on the right. It currently houses the residence of the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.