At the very beginning of Sovetskaya Street there is a large, remarkable brick house. On the door canopy you can see a monogram of two letters "R", "W". These are the initials of the owner of the house - Robert Weiss, a Baltic German who lived in our city for many years. On the first floor of the house there was a drugstore, and on the second floor - the owner's apartment. A bright, clean, really shiny apartment, about which local housewives said: "So clean, really foreign". The dining room balcony overlooked the Vorona River and the high mountain covered with oak forest behind it. Here, on the balcony, so many evenings, endless stories over a bottle of beer. Weiss was a man with an average education, but a great culture. He knew Russia, he knew foreign countries, he knew famous doctors, professors, read a lot in Russian and German. His wife Polina Yegorovna was a model wife, mother, housewife. Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who was friends with the Weiss family, compared his memories of their home to a glass of cold water on a hot, dusty day. It was a real communication, both spiritual and emotional. The Weiss family had four sons. Prince Volkonsky recalled a short episode that depicts the spiritual level at which these children grew up. Once, over tea, Volkonsky told his parents about the ring he wore on his left hand, a ring that belonged to Pushkin. There was a lottery in the house of Raevsky's great-grandfather, Pushkin put the ring down, and Sergei Mikhailovich's grandmother, Maria Nikolaevna, won. His father gave it to Sergei Mikhailovich when he graduated from high school. A few days later, they were sitting in the living room. Little Zhenya sat on Volkonsky's lap and played with the prince's ring, which he wore on his other hand - a large ring with a seal. And suddenly the boy asked: "And do you have this from Lermontov?" Later, Zhenya was a doctor somewhere in Siberia. The eldest, Karlusha, was also a doctor in the Far East. The third, Georgy, was a teacher of mathematics and German at the Borisoglebsk gymnasium: a noble man, with some kind of wild honesty - one of those whom scoundrels should hate. The last time Volkonsky saw him, he was almost a beggar in Tambov, where he, like the prince, fled from Borisoglebsk. That's the kind of family they had.