Theatre Square

Theatre Square lies in St Petersburg between the embankments of the Griboyedov Canal and the Kryukov Canal, and the streets of Dekabristov, Glinki and Soyuza Pechatnikov. It came into being in 1762 and, until the 1780s, was known as Carousel Square — in the 1760s and 1770s an amphitheatre for equestrian games, or "carousels", was set up here. Before that, the site had been called Brumberg Square, after the Dutch merchant S. Brumberg, who owned sawmills there. The square took its present name in 1812, although the alternative name Stone Theatre Square remained in parallel use until the 1890s.

In 1783 the Grand Stone Theatre was built on the square and was subsequently rebuilt several times; in 1896 the building of the St Petersburg Conservatory was erected on its site, in an eclectic style, to a design by the architect Vladimir Nikolya, with two principal façades — one facing Dekabristov Street and the other the Grand Hall, where the Theatre of Musical Drama operated from 1912 to 1919. In 1845 a wooden circus appeared on the square, and in 1847–1849 the architect Albert Cavos built a stone theatre-circus on its site, which burned down on the night of 26 January 1859. On this burnt-out site the same architect erected the building of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, opened on 2 October 1860 with a production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar.

In 1906 a monument to Mikhail Glinka by the sculptor Robert Bakh was erected in front of the Conservatory; it was moved to the small garden to the right of the building in 1925. In 1952 a monument to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, by the sculptors Vladimir Bogolyubov and Venyamin Ingal, appeared on the square. In July 2010 the tram tracks were removed from the square.

The square is surrounded by apartment blocks and mansions dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The house of F. L. Gun, on the corner with Dekabristov Street, was rebuilt in the French Renaissance style in 1874; the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold lived there from 1909 to 1914. In the mansion of Ye. T. Sokolov, the painter Mikhail Vrubel lived and worked during the winter of 1904–1905. In the house of L. M. Kharlamov met the literary and political society "The Green Lamp", which Alexander Pushkin attended in 1819–1820. In the Zhivotovsky house the poet Fyodor Glinka lived from 1819 to 1822, and it was here that members of the Decembrist "Union of Welfare" used to gather. The square also retains a public convenience of distinctive design, built in 1907 to a design by the architect Alexander Zazersky — a rare surviving example of the small-scale urban architecture of the Nicholas II era.