"The Stray Dog" Art Café

The Stray Dog was a celebrated literary and artistic cabaret, a symbol of the cultural life of Saint Petersburg's Silver Age. It operated in the basement of the Zhako House on Mikhailovskaya Square — today's Square of the Arts — from New Year's Eve 1912 until the spring of 1915, and in 2001 it was revived on the same site as an art café. Today its address is listed as 4 Italianskaya Street — the corner building faces both squares at once.

The cabaret was opened around New Year's by the impresario Boris Pronin, backed by the "Society of Intimate Theatre," founded in 1909, whose members included directors Nikolai Evreinov and Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, actor Alexander Mgebrov, and writer Alexei Tolstoy. According to one version of the story, the name was born in a conversation among the group as they searched for a place to hold their New Year's gathering: Tolstoy remarked that they all resembled stray dogs looking for shelter, and Evreinov picked up on the idea as a name for the basement venue. The walls were painted by the artist Sergei Sudeikin, who also designed the evening programs and masquerade costumes.

The cabaret's idea was to bring together artists, poets, actors, and musicians under one roof regardless of their artistic movement: Futurists, Symbolists, Acmeists, and members of the "World of Art" group all came here. Above the entrance hung a sign with a humorous notice stating that all regulars were considered acquainted with one another. In the basement, people read poetry, argued, and held lectures and concerts. Over time its own customs took shape: a guest book for verses and drawings, mock honorary orders, and anthems for opening and closing the evenings.

Among the regulars of this basement were poets Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam, the Futurist Igor Severyanin, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the poet and artist Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, who would later become famous — along with dozens of other writers, artists, and actors of the era; people typically gathered here after midnight and dispersed toward morning. Akhmatova dedicated several poems to the cabaret. With the outbreak of the First World War the atmosphere changed, and in the spring of 1915 the venue was closed — officially for the illegal sale of alcohol, though other reasons were also cited, including Mayakovsky's anti-war statements and financial difficulties. Many regulars moved on to another bohemian basement, the "Comedians' Halt." During the Great Patriotic War the space served as an air-raid shelter.

The café was revived in 2001 amid a wave of public interest in the pre-revolutionary heritage of the Silver Age. Today it hosts solo exhibitions by artists, performances, concerts, and poetry evenings, and still describes its mission as uniting different art forms under one roof. Following the Saint Petersburg original, venues of the same name have appeared in other cities as well, including Kazan and Novosibirsk.

The story of The Stray Dog is a rare example of the atmosphere of a bygone era being recreated on the very same site almost a century later. The basement at the junction of Italianskaya Street and the Square of the Arts remains a reminder of the time when Saint Petersburg's bohemians gathered night after night to create their own cultural world here.