Literary Café (Literaturnoye Kafe)

At the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika Embankment stands a building whose ground floor houses the Literary Café — an establishment linked to the names of nearly every great Russian writer of the golden age. It was from here, on 27 January 1837, that Alexander Pushkin set off for his fatal duel with d'Anthès, a fact that to this day makes the café one of the city's most visited memorial sites.

The history of the building goes back to the early 18th century, when a wooden house belonging to Vice Admiral Cornelius Cruys stood on the site. In 1741 the plot was taken over by the tailor Johann Neumann, for whom the architect Mikhail Zemtsov built a stone house. The building later belonged to the merchant Kotomin, and in 1812–1815 the architect Vasily Stasov substantially rebuilt the façade, adorning it with a portico and loggias on half-columns. The ground floor was traditionally let out as retail premises, while flats occupied the upper storeys. It was here, in the early 19th century, that the Swiss confectioners Solomon Wolf and Tobias Beranger, who had come from Davos, opened a confectionery shop that quickly gained a reputation as the finest in the capital.

In 1834 the owners redecorated the establishment in an oriental style and renamed it the "Chinese Café": the interior was adorned with porcelain bearing Chinese motifs, paper lanterns were lit in the evenings, and figures of bowing Chinese men stood by the shop window. The confectionery quickly turned into a club for writers and journalists, who came to read the latest press, argue, and arrange meetings. Among its regulars were Pushkin, Lermontov, Shevchenko and Chernyshevsky.

The most famous episode is linked to the last day of Pushkin's life: before his duel with d'Anthès, the poet waited here for his second, Konstantin Danzas, and, according to eyewitnesses, drank a glass of water. Townspeople later flocked here hoping to learn the outcome of the duel. A few years afterwards, within these same walls, Fyodor Dostoevsky met Mikhail Petrashevsky, an acquaintance that would later send the writer to penal servitude. The confectionery closed in 1877, and a few years later the entrepreneur Fyodor Leiner opened his own restaurant on the same spot — a place frequented by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Fyodor Chaliapin; according to contemporaries, the composer drank unboiled water here shortly before his death from cholera.

The present-day Literary Café opened on the historic site in 1985 and occupies two floors of the building: the lower one recreates the atmosphere of the 19th-century confectionery, while the upper floor is arranged as a restaurant salon with live music in the evenings. The walls are hung with portraits of Russian writers, and at one of the tables in the lower hall visitors are greeted by a wax figure of Pushkin. On the façade, the sign of the Wolf and Beranger confectionery has been restored. Some of the original interior fittings, letters and personal belongings of patrons were taken to Switzerland by the founders' descendants — today they are kept in the local history museum of Davos.

The Literary Café remains not merely a restaurant, but a living monument to St Petersburg's cultural history: a place where the poets of the golden age once met continues, nearly two centuries later, to keep their memory alive.