The account of his father’s death is also controversial - one version says he died of typhoid, the other that he was fighting for the White Movement in the Russian Civil War, then turned Bolshevik, was taken hostage and executed by Admiral Kolchak.
An account provided by Kholin’s relatives says that the poet’s grandfather owned a ballet school in Moscow, on Tverskaya street, and that his father married a country girl despite the will of the family.
Kholin was then transferred to a different orphanage in Ryazan that was located in a former monastery, where children were sleeping in bedrooms with murals depicting martyrs’ sufferings, such as the beheading of John the Baptist.
In a library in Lianozovo he once borrowed a book by Alexander Blok, which surprised a local librarian, who turned out to be Evgeny Kropivnitsky’s wife.
She introduced Kholin to her husband, who was a leader of a group of poets, writers and artists, among which were the young Genrikh Sapgir and Oscar Rabin, Kropivnitsky’s son-in-law.
In the beginning of 1970s Michail Grobman, a friend of Kholin’s, introduces him to antique trade, which not only enriched the poet’s knowledge of Russian art, both past and contemporary, but also kept bringing him a modest income for the rest of his life.
From 1972 to 1974 Kholin was in a relationship with Irina Ostrovskaya, a friend of Yelena Shchapova, Eduard Limonov’s legendary wife, to whom the latter dedicated his book “It’s me, Eddie”.
An important part of Kholins personal papers can be found in the archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa).