Lyakhovo — a village in Prioksky District Nizhny Novgorod. Borders the neighborhood Shcherbinki.
In the second half of the 19th century, the owner of this village was a well-known writer and local historian Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky, who did a great deal of research to uncover the history of his family estate.
Pavel Ivanovich noted that in the 18th century, Lyakhovo belonged to Lieutenant S.I. Letitsky of the Life Guard. In 1792, Lyakhovo was sold to Elena Fyodorovna, the wife of Second Major Karl Maksimovich Rebinder, chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod court, and was passed on to their daughter as part of her dowry. The new owners, the Zapolskys, managed their affairs so poorly that in the 1820s, Lyakhovo was seized for debts and repurchased by Rebinder. This time, he bequeathed it to his great-granddaughter, E.A. Rubinskaya, who later married the civil servant P.I. Melnikov—the future writer and author of the well-known novels *In the Forests*, *In the Mountains*, and others.
Theories about the origin of the name
The name of this village is both a toponym and a geographical name. Perhaps no other village has as many theories about the origin of its name as this one.
First version There are theories related both to the history of settlement in this area and to specific historical events. Let’s start with how Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, the owner of Lyakhovo, explained the origins of his estate. There are several versions. Here is one of them. In the past, Lyakhovo was the ancestral estate of a certain Lyakhov, from whose surname the Village derived its name.
This theory seems quite convincing, especially in light of a document dating from the reign of his son Ivan the Terrible Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich.
From Moscow in Nizhny Novgorod A tsarist decree was issued instructing local authorities to resolve the question of who should own the village of Lyakhovo in the Nizhny Novgorod Uyezd, Berezopolsky Stan, which had been left without an owner following the death of its former owner, and the late owner held the title of “pan.” It is known that in Russia, people of Polish descent were called “pans.”
Second version, proposed by Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, is less convincing, although it is better known than the first, since in this case there are references to numerous sources devoted to a significant event in Nizhny Novgorod’s history. This refers to a battle that took place not far from these places in 1608. Here is what the participants in these events—the Nizhny Novgorod voivodes Prince Repnin and Alyabyev—wrote in a letter to the residents of the city of Muroma: “On the 5th day of December, a band of outlaws from Nizhny—including Nizhny Novgorod residents and Arzamas residents, boyars’ sons, Tatars, Cheremis, and all manner of tax-paying people—arrived at Nizhny…Voivodes Andrei Semyonovich Alyabyev, together with the nobility and the boyars’ sons, the chief streltsy, the Lithuanians, and the Nemtsovs, and the Nizhny Novgorod residents, the townspeople, the hunters, and all manner of service men—defeated all the bandits near Nizhny, captured more than 300 prisoners, and routed those bandits over a distance of fifteen versts and beyond.”
As a reminder, the situation in Russia in 1608 was very complicated. The country was ruled by two tsars: Vasily Shuisky in Moscow, and in the village of Tushino near Moscow, the “Tushino Thief”—a puppet of the Polish King Sigismund—False Dmitry II. False Dmitry’s opponents referred to his supporters either as “thieves” or, equating them with the Poles, as “Lach.”
In his analysis of the document cited above, P.I. Melnikov determined that on December 5, 1608, the Lyakhs were routed at Sluda, and subsequently, many prisoners were killed at the site where the Village of Lyakhovo was located. It is noteworthy that Pavel Ivanovich linked the origin of the Village’s name, Lyakhovo, to the events of 1608, while his son, Andrei Pavlovich—who, incidentally, was also a renowned local historian from Nizhny Novgorod—attributed the origin of the place name “Lyakhovo” to the name or nickname of the landowner Lyakhov. Which of these versions is more convincing? It seems that the son is correct, since if we already encounter the name “Lyakhovo” in documents from the late 16th century, then events from the early 17th century could not have influenced the name of the settlement. Incidentally, there are quite a few villages on the map of the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast with names related to people who came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.