The Brusnitsyn Mansion

On Kozhevennaya Line on Vasilyevsky Island stands the mansion of the Brusnitsyn merchant family — a half-abandoned merchant's house that preserves one of the most complete surviving ensembles of genuine late-19th-century St Petersburg eclectic interiors. The building is closely tied to the history of the leather-tanning trade that gave the street its name, and today it is used chiefly for filming and guided tours rather than as a permanent museum.

The house dates from 1844, when it was acquired by Nikolai Mokeevich Brusnitsyn, a man of peasant origin from the Tver region. Three years later he opened a small leather-tanning workshop here employing ten workers, and the business quickly prospered: an illiterate but enterprising peasant became a merchant, and the workshop grew into a factory with six hundred workers. In 1857 the architect A. S. Andreev added a western wing of three window bays to the house, and later enlarged the ground-floor windows and raised the height of the second storey. In 1882 the mansion passed to the founder's three sons — Nikolai, Alexander and Georgy — who two years later commissioned the architect Anatoly Kovsharov to carry out a large-scale reconstruction of their parents' house.

It was the 1884 reconstruction that gave the building its present appearance and its comb-shaped plan: a wing was added on one side for a grand staircase, a winter garden was created in the courtyard, and the façade was raised to a common cornice richly decorated with stucco mouldings and ornate window surrounds. The formal rooms are arranged in an enfilade along the eastern half of the house. Among the surviving interiors are a dining room in the late-Renaissance manner, with a coffered ceiling and carved oak panelling; the White Hall, a ballroom in the Louis XV style with a marble fireplace; a smoking room in Moorish style with Arabic calligraphy on the walls; and a drawing room with rococo elements, its walls still covered with silk more than a century old.

After the revolution the brothers Nikolai and Georgy emigrated, while Alexander remained to manage the enterprise as chief engineer. In the spring of 1919 he was arrested by Cheka officers right in his factory apartment, and it was only thanks to petitions from the factory's workers and the Moscow Political Red Cross that he was released a year later. The mansion passed to the Radishchev leather factory and became its administrative building, and in the 1920s–1930s a vestibule with a checkpoint was built on the site of the former gates.

In 1993 the White Hall and the formal dining room were restored, though most of the interiors had by then been irretrievably lost. In the 21st century the surviving rooms have been rented out for filming period costume dramas and music videos: Rustam Khamdamov shot his film 'A Bag Without a Bottom' here, and the band Korol i Shut recorded a video for the song 'The Magician'. The mansion is now under private lease, some of its halls are gradually being restored, and regular guided tours are held for visitors.

The Brusnitsyn mansion remains a rare St Petersburg example of a merchant's interior ensemble that has survived to the present day almost without alteration in Soviet times. The house's history — from an illiterate peasant's leather workshop to a filming location for movie-makers — reflects the fate of the industrial mansions on the outlying parts of Vasilyevsky Island.