Tolstoy House

On Rubinstein Street, stretching between house No. 15–17 and the Fontanka Embankment, No. 54, stands the apartment house built for Count Mikhail Tolstoy — one of St Petersburg's most recognisable residential buildings, known as the Tolstoy House. Built to designs by Fyodor Lidval in the Northern Art Nouveau style between 1910 and 1912, it has housed dozens of notable figures of culture and science among its tenants over more than a century.

Since the early 19th century the plot had changed hands several times — from the merchant's wife Nikulina to the state councillor Gustav Frank and Countess Yekaterina Ignatieva, from whom the land was bought in the early 1900s by Count Mikhail Tolstoy, a veteran of the defence of Shipka Pass and great-nephew of a hero of the war of 1812. Lidval completed the design of the house by 1910 together with architects Dmitry Smirnov and Richard Kitner; construction took three building seasons and was finished in 1912. Tolstoy died in Lausanne in 1913 without ever seeing the house occupied, and his widow, Olga Vasilchikova, became its owner.

Because of the plot's irregular shape, Lidval designed three interlinked courtyards forming a kind of inner street, which residents informally call Lidval Architect Street. The main decorative feature is a set of triple Renaissance-style arches of dressed limestone with pilasters and obelisks; because the plot's axis bends, they do not open into one continuous vista but reveal themselves one after another. The building boasted an unprecedented level of technical equipment for its time: drainage, some fifteen passenger lifts plus four goods lifts, ventilation, electricity, telephone lines, ten coal-fired boiler rooms, laundries and a gymnasium — apartments of varying size were designed for tenants of different means.

After the revolution the house was nationalised and turned into communal flats, and during the Siege apartment No. 106 was converted into a pillbox with a machine-gun embrasure; 329 residents died in besieged Leningrad. The writers Arkady Averchenko and Alexander Kuprin, the violinist Miron Polyakin and the singer Eduard Khil all lived here, and it was in Galina Kremshevskaya's flat that Anna Akhmatova typed out her poem “Requiem”. Prince Mikhail Andronikov, who lived in the house until 1916 and entertained Grigori Rasputin, gained scandalous notoriety — one of the plots against Rasputin's life was reportedly hatched here. Lidval's courtyards were later used as a stand-in for London streets in a Soviet television film about Sherlock Holmes.

Since 1970 the house has held the status of a regional architectural monument within the protected zone of St Petersburg's historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2008 the residents formed a homeowners' association, and since 2010 the courtyards have been closed to tourists. The load-bearing structures have survived in good condition, but the façades and decorative finishes are worn; only the main arch and part of the stucco mouldings were restored in 2012. A museum devoted to the history of the house opened in the basement in 2021.

The Tolstoy House remains a living monument of St Petersburg Art Nouveau — not a frozen museum set piece but a densely populated building with a complicated history of communal living, the Siege, and countless human fates. Lidval's carefully considered courtyard architecture, together with the rich cultural memory of its tenants, makes the house one of the most compelling spots on the map of the city centre for guided tours and film shoots.