The Kirsanov Local History Museum houses an inkstand that belonged to Elena Mikhailovna Boratynskaya.

Throughout the 19th century the inkwell played an enormous role in everyday life. It was not only children at school who had to handwrite. Adults did it as well — a lot and for different occasions: they drew up and copied business papers and dinner menus, kept diaries, composed poems and letters. In a noble manor house, the inkwell was part of an inkstand, which was heavy and magnificent, with inlaid and sculpted ornamentation.

Such a utensil contained a dozen of accessories: an inkwell itself (a solid, copper, bronze or crystal one, covered with a lid protecting against flies and ink drying out), a sand shaker (a container similar to a salt-cellar with holes in the lid: clean sand was sprinkled on the written work to make the ink dry faster), a paperweight (to blot the written work and press the papers together). An inkstand could also include a seal with the owner’s coat of arms, pencil-cases, book-holders, trays for stamps, boxes for sealing-wax and writing paper. All this multitude of things was arranged around the inkwell. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin dedicated a poem to his inkwell.

Inkwells endured in everyday life for a very long time: old-fashioned thick glass spill-proof inkwells with a fountain pen attached to them could be found in offices as late as the 1970s. Then they went extinct as well. Nowadays inkwells and other writing utensils can be more often seen in museums or private collections. One of such evidences of the old era — the inkstand which used to belong to Elena Mikhailovna Boratynskaya — is on display in the Kirsanov Museum of Local History. The stand is decorated with intricate patterns of roses and painted with bright colors. It served not only practical purposes, but was a real adornment of its owner’s desk.

Elena Mikhailovna Boratynskaya (1880–1968) was the daughter of Mikhail Andreevich Boratynsky, nephew of the poet Evgeny Boratynsky. Mikhail Andreevich owned an estate in the village of Ilyinovka in Kirsanov District, where Elena Mikhailovna lived as a child. Most of Elena’s life was connected with Kirsanov land. Since 1918 and until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War she worked as a midwife in the Olkhovsky medical station, after the war — as a paramedic in a district hospital in the village of Gavrilovka 2.