Klyachkin Hospital

The Klyachkin Hospital is a historic building at the intersection of Ostrovsky and Kavi Najmi streets in Kazan’s Vakhitovsky District, known above all as the place where the classic Tatar poet Gabdulla Tukay died in 1913. The building acquired its popular name from the physician Grigory Klyachkin, who ran a private clinic here at the turn of the 20th century.

The plot belonged to the Kazan merchant V. I. Romanov, who in 1853 built single-storey trading shops there; by the mid-1870s the property had acquired extensions and a second floor. The merchant’s son-in-law and heir, I. N. Zhuravlyov, undertook a major reconstruction in 1877, carried out to his own designs by the architect P. V. Tikhomirov — giving the house the appearance of a small palace. In 1908 the heirs sold the plot to the merchant I. P. Zobnin, who turned the building into a tenement house, while a year earlier the physiologist and neurologist Grigory Klyachkin had leased part of the premises for his own hydrotherapy clinic with electrotherapy and massage rooms.

The two-storey stuccoed mansion was built in the Eclectic style and has two equally prominent street façades. The ground floor features rusticated walls and a tall plinth with paired windows separated by pilaster strips, while the second floor has arched openings set on Corinthian half-columns. The wall sections between them are decorated with pilasters supporting a profiled frieze, and balconies with balustrades on massive vase-topped piers crown the entrances.

In February 1913, the gravely ill Tukay, who suffered from tuberculosis, was placed in a single room on the ground floor; although the clinic’s regulations forbade admitting contagious patients, Klyachkin personally took the poet under his care and invited the physicians Luria and Elinson for consultations. During his month at the clinic, Tukay managed to prepare a collection of his selected works and write his programmatic article “The First Task upon Awakening.” The poet died on 2 April 1913 at the age of twenty-six, and his funeral at the Tatar Cemetery drew, by contemporaries’ estimates, around ten thousand people.

After the revolution the building was requisitioned: in 1918 the Chuvash national theatre gave its first performance there, and later the building housed the Women’s Medical Institute and a gynaecological clinic. A memorial room in Tukay’s former ward opened in 1968, and in 1996 the building was granted the status of a regional architectural monument, though it soon fell into disrepair and was looted. Restoration work in 2003–2005 returned the house to its historical appearance, after which it became home to Tatarstan’s Ministry of Health along with a recreated museum devoted to the poet.

Today the Klyachkin Hospital remains one of the few surviving places in Kazan directly linked to Tukay’s life — a memorial plaque on the façade and a memorial exhibition in his former ward keep this memory alive, while the building itself continues to serve the city more than a century and a half after it was built.