Delvig House

Where Zagorodny Prospekt meets Shcherbakov Lane, its corner facing Vladimirskaya Square, stands a modest early nineteenth-century house known in the city's history as Delvig House. Today it is protected by the state as a monument of regional significance — one of the few genuine buildings of ordinary St Petersburg housing of that era to have survived to our day without alteration.

The building was erected in 1811–13 to commission from the merchant Tychinkin, with the architect Mikhail Ovsyannikov as the author of the design. Simple in form, the town house was never substantially rebuilt and survived every war the city endured, remaining a rare example of genuine ordinary housing from the early nineteenth century. Twice, in 1961 and in 1990, the house was repaired, with the historic appearance of the facade preserved throughout.

The building takes its name from the poet and publisher Baron Anton Delvig, a schoolfellow of Alexander Pushkin at the Lyceum, who moved in here in November 1829. It was here that Delvig conceived and launched his Literary Gazette, a publication that brought together the whole of Pushkin's literary circle. On Wednesdays and Sundays a literary and musical salon met in the house, its regulars including Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Vladimir Odoevsky, Ivan Krylov and Pyotr Pletnyov. On 14 January 1831 Delvig died in this house, little more than a year after moving in.

In the mid-1980s the house came under threat of demolition owing to the construction of the Dostoevskaya metro station. In 1986 a public campaign arose in its defence — one of the first such actions of perestroika-era Leningrad: a group of activists calling themselves "Salvation" arranged press publications and television and radio broadcasts, gathered thousands of signatures and appealed to the ministries of culture of the USSR and the RSFSR. The campaign culminated in a rally on Vladimirskaya Square on 19 October, the anniversary of the Lyceum's founding. Under public pressure, the city authorities announced their decision to preserve the building, and the metro builders found a technical solution that allowed the station to be built without destroying the historic house.

In 2014 the building underwent major repairs, with the external appearance of the facades fully preserved, and today it houses the offices of a business centre. A memorial plaque recalling its famous resident has been restored to the building.

Having survived the threat of demolition and found a second life as a monument to the history of literature, Delvig House remains one of the symbols of civic activism in late Soviet Leningrad and a reminder of the Pushkin era at the very heart of the modern city.