Monument to Ivan Turgenev

The monument to Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev stands in a small square between Manezhnaya Square and Italyanskaya Street in the center of St. Petersburg. The bronze figure of the seated writer became one of the few monuments in Russia dedicated to the author of Fathers and Sons and A Nest of Gentlefolk, a man whose life was closely tied to the Neva capital.

The garden itself appeared on this spot as early as 1838 as a landscape garden enclosed by a wrought-iron fence with gates decorated with the city's coat of arms and the date of the fence's later remodeling — 1871. Until the end of the 20th century a concrete sculptural group, "Mother with Children," created in the 1950s, stood here. At the turn of 1998–1999 a new upscale residential building appeared nearby, and the garden's layout was renewed to designs by the architect Galina Sholokhova. That same year, on 2 November 1999, a competition was won by a team of authors — the architect Gennady Chelbogashev together with the sculptors Yan Neiman and Valentin Sveshnikov; it was on this day that the memorial stone for the future monument was also laid. Work on the sketches continued for about a year and a half, and to achieve an accurate likeness the authors consulted Turgenev's death mask.

The granite pedestal was installed on 10 July 2001, and the bronze sculpture was cast at the Monumentskulptura foundry. The official unveiling took place on 14 August 2001 in the presence of the city's governor. The writer is depicted seated: one hand rests on his knee, the other leans on a walking cane, a coat is draped over his shoulders, and his face is turned to face the viewer directly, without the academic detachment typical of many literary monuments. The bronze figure stands 3 meters 15 centimeters tall, and the polished grey granite pedestal 1 meter 44 centimeters; the pedestal was produced by the enterprise Vozrozhdeniye.

The site for the monument was not chosen by chance: its authors regarded Manezhnaya Square as a kind of center of "Turgenev routes" through the city. Nearby, on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Street, once stood the hotel "Demut's Inn," where, according to legend, the writer met the singer Pauline Viardot, who would largely determine the course of his later life. Turgenev visited St. Petersburg on numerous occasions, was published in the city's journals, and kept up acquaintances with its literary figures, although he spent most of his life abroad and at his family estate of Spasskoye-Lutovinovo.

Today the monument remains a quiet corner of literary memory in the very heart of the city, amid the residential and office buildings of the Palace District. The square preserves its historic boundaries and its 19th-century fence, and over the decades the sculpture itself has become part of the familiar cityscape for residents of the surrounding streets and for tourists interested in the literary topography of St. Petersburg.

The monument to Turgenev is a rare example in the city of a monument dedicated not to a statesman or military commander but to a writer whose work has long entered the school curriculum and the classics of world literature. Modest in scale, it fits organically into the ensemble of the historic center and recalls the many-sided ties between the author and St. Petersburg.