The exhibition features a photograph of Khristina Sergeyeva-Tsenskaya (née Naumova). The photo was taken in the Feldschuler studio in Yalta in 1926.

The writer’s future wife was born on February 19, 1889, in the town of Boguchar, the Voronezh region. Khristina Naumova studied in Moscow: she graduated from the Higher Courses for Women and went to a conservatory. Naumova first married an engineer named Nikolay Bunin. They lived in Yekaterinoslav (currently known as Dnepr, Ukraine) and raised their daughter Maria. She worked as a teacher and was acquainted with the family of the painter Mikhail Sapozhnikov, a friend and neighbor of Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky.

She came to Crimea with her daughter after her husband’s tragic death. And since the Russian Civil War broke out right during their trip, the mother and daughter were not able to go back home.

Khristina Naumova and Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky got married in 1921.

Khristina Sergeyeva-Tsenskaya was more than just a muse for the writer — she was his devoted friend and partner. She always accompanied Sergeyev-Tsensky on his trips and took care of all his interactions with the outside world, so that the writer was not distracted from his work: she took over contacts with publishing houses, all technical details connected with the manuscripts and household chores.

After Sergeyev-Tsensky’s death, Khristina Sergeyeva-Tsenskaya was supported by the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Commission on the Literary Legacy of Sergeyev-Tsensky, headed by the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, in establishing the literary and memorial museum dedicated to the writer in Alushta. As the chief curator of the museum, she often communicated with visitors, delivered speeches at literary nights, advocated for the erection of a monument to Sergeyev-Tsensky in Alushta, planned to create a memorial study of the writer in his Moscow apartment on Lavrushinsky Lane, published his works, and arranged the archives, which were then donated to the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of the USSR.

During her last business trip to Moscow in November 1964, Khristina Sergeyeva-Tsenskaya had an accident and sustained an injury, which resulted in complications. She died in the Botkin Clinical Hospital on 16 January 1965, at the age of 76. She was cremated. The urn with her ashes is buried in the same crypt where Sergey Sergeyev-Tsensky is buried.