Barmaleeva Street evokes in every person an association with the famous fairy-tale character. There is a story described in Leo Uspensky's "Notes of an old Petersburger". Once Korney Chukovsky and his friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky were walking in the Petrogradsky district of St. Petersburg and turned onto Barmaleev Street. The artist suddenly asked who this man was, after whom the street was named. Chukovsky suggested that he might well have been some important foreigner named Bromley and have a house in the area. So the street was named Bromleeva, and then it was rebuilt into Barmaleeva, more euphonious for a Russian.
This explanation did not suit Dobuzhinsky. He immediately began to draw something on a piece of paper, and then solemnly showed it to Chukovsky with the words: “Not true! I know who Barmaley was. He was a terrible robber. This is how he looked …”This is how the antagonist of the good doctor Aibolit Barmaley appeared.
But how did this name actually appear?
Meanwhile, its name appeared long before 1926, when a poetic tale by Kornei Chukovsky was first published in the Raduga publishing house. Or rather, at least one hundred and twenty-eight years, since for the first time under this name it was indicated on the plan of 1798.
It is on her. He settled in a small wooden house in the middle of the 18th century. But not Barmaley, but Andrei Ivanovich Barmaleev. Chief of Police Ensign.
As the researcher of St. Petersburg Larisa Broitman found out, he lived here in his house with his wife Agrippina Ivanovna and their children Vasily, Ivan and Anisya. In the confessional painting of the church of St. Matthew, to which the street, sometimes called Perednyaya Matveyevskaya in the 18th century, practically went, mentions another son of Andrei Ivanovich - Tikhon. Most likely, the name Barmaleeva stuck to the street at a time when the sergeant-major Tikhon Barmaleev already owned the house.
Where the Barmaleevs lived, now there is house No. 5, built at the beginning of the 20th century according to the project of Hermann Grimm. The architect Grimm is the namesake of the famous storytellers, but the coincidence - that he put the house on the place where Barmaleev lived, who, thanks to his unusual surname, contributed to the creation of another image of the fairy-tale hero - is very symbolic!
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Where did such an unusual surname come from? In the "Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language" by Vladimir Ivanovich Dal there is a verb "barmolit", that is, "mutter, lisp, lisp, speak indistinctly." A person with indistinct diction could well have received the nickname "Barmolei", but due to the fact that in the 18th century the unstressed "o" often turned into "a", and his surname could be written "Barmaleev".
The Barmaleevs lived on the City Island in the first half of the 19th century - this is recorded in address books. Then, when they left here, their surname was forgotten, that's why in the 1920s they were able to fantasize, to the delight of the kids, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Korney Chukovsky.