Bekhterev House

On the embankment of the Malaya Nevka, not far from Kamenny Island, stands the mansion where the neurologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev lived and worked for nearly a decade and a half — the founder of one of the world's first research centres for the comprehensive study of the human being. Today the building has the status of a regionally significant cultural heritage site.

The house was built in 1914 to the scientist's own commission: the design was developed by the architect Mikhail Devishin, and Bekhterev took a direct part in planning the layout of the future dwelling. The building was executed in the neoclassical style, using half-timbered construction — a wooden frame with infilled walls. In the autumn of that same year Bekhterev moved into the new house with his family and lived there until the end of his life, in December 1927; in his memory, the embankment was even briefly renamed in his honour in the 1950s.

The building retained its original half-timbered appearance for several decades, but in the 1950s the architect Galperin completely rebuilt the house in stone, trying to preserve the former proportions and stylistic features of Devishin's construction. It was within these walls that the scientist wrote his scholarly articles, received patients, and rested from his intensive work at the city's institutes and clinics.

Bekhterev was born in 1857 in the Vyatka village of Sarali, graduated from the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg, and at just twenty years of age went as a volunteer medical orderly to the front of the Russo-Turkish War. He later headed the relevant academic department responsible for the study of nervous and mental disorders, and worked as a professor in Kazan, where he founded a society of neuropathologists and psychiatrists. Decades of research culminated in fundamental works on the conducting pathways of the brain and the three-volume "Objective Psychology." In 1907 in St Petersburg he founded the Psychoneurological Institute — the world's first institution to unite the study of psychology, psychiatry, and neurology as a single science of the human being; a private Petrograd University later grew out of it.

In 1918 Bekhterev succeeded in establishing a special institute for the study of the brain and human mental activity, which he headed until his death. In 1923 he was twice invited to consult on the gravely ill Lenin. The scientist died suddenly in Moscow on 24 December 1927, during an all-Union congress of neuropathologists; the official cause was given as food poisoning, but medical circles long discussed a theory of poisoning after Bekhterev had diagnosed one of the Soviet leaders. The scientist's brain was preserved in formalin for further study, and the urn with his ashes was buried at Literatorskie Mostki only in 1970.

The mansion on the Malaya Nevka embankment remains one of the few surviving memorial addresses in St Petersburg directly linked to the name of Bekhterev — a witness both to scientific discoveries and to the tragic circumstances of his final years.