Cornerstone local history – Newspaper Kommersant No. 240 (7441) dated 12/24/2022

In one of the brightest branches of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, the Museum of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde (Matyushin’s House), the exhibition “Aptekarsky Island. XX century. Small, seemingly very specific and even narrowly thematic, it is good both in material and in the approach itself. Tells Kira Dolinina.

In principle, the structure and idea of ​​the exhibition are quite standard. One district of the city is taken (Aptekarsky Island, located between the Karpovka, Malaya Nevka and Bolshaya Nevka rivers), one period is selected (the most important for the development of this territory is the 20th century), the show goes through facts, documents and, as always with the Matyushin House, excellent selection visual material, since the funds of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg are rich, including excellent graphics by Leningrad/Petersburg artists.

Aptekarsky Island also plays the role of the protagonist of the exposition with honor. This is one of the oldest districts of St. Petersburg, from the very beginning it has its own identity and never looks like the neighboring ones. On the maps of the XIV-XVII centuries it was called Korpisaari. The Finnish word “korpi” in translation means both “wilderness”, and “dense forest”, and “raven”. Hence the various names of the island in Russian – Dikiy, Voronii, Lesnoy. The island was also called Spruce because of the predominance of a dense spruce forest, which the first inhabitants of the new capital cut down for firewood for the surrounding gunpowder factories. By decree of Peter I of 1714, only pharmacists were allowed to settle on Aptekarsky Island, and it was intended for cultivating an “apothecary garden” in the southeastern part of the island. Now this territory is occupied by the Botanical Garden, and the old name has taken root.

Under Paul I, the “Apothecary Garden” was still adjacent to the forest, but already under Alexander I, the fashion for dachas gradually captured these territories, and at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, the central artery of the island completely turned into an exemplary building area of ​​the era of industrial explosion: Kamennoostrovsky the avenue in its “pharmaceutical” part is the embodiment of the utopia of a big city with its amenities and luxuries. The best of the best worked to create this brave new world – in the houses of the architects Shchuko, Lyalevich and Lidval in this area they are still taught the ability to create an ideal space for the life of representatives of the big bourgeoisie. However, the stone of Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt did not drive the dachas off the island. The most famous was in 1906 the state-owned dacha on Aptekarskaya Embankment, where on August 12 the Social Revolutionaries tried to kill Pyotr Stolypin.

The “islands” of St. Petersburg Blok are most often others, following the Aptekarsky, Kamenny, Elagin, Krestovsky, more private, more riotous, with restaurants and trendy viewing platforms. However, the built system of bridges, avenues and embankments made all four small Petersburg islands of the Neva Delta a single zone. And for Blok in 1909, the generalization of the islands is completely logical: “No, with the constancy of a geometer // I number each time without words // Bridges, a chapel, the sharpness of the wind, // The desertedness of the low islands.”

The Soviet government significantly strengthened the separateness of Aptekarsky Island. Not only factories and numerous educational and scientific institutions appear here, but also housing complexes for Soviet bosses – first of all, such a textbook example as the First House of the Lensoviet (architects Levinson and Fomin, 1935), in which neoclassicism of the Soviet era covers up the completely undemocratic filling of the building . Further – more, exemplary Palace of Youth, a television center with a television tower, and so on. Now new housing developments and the gentrification of huge Soviet industrial complexes should again make the island a particularly pleasant and attractive place.

The image of the Aptekarsky Island in the visual “Petersburg text” somewhat contradicts this optimistic image. On the other hand, this whole “text” is a conversation about a strange, deserted space, gray sky and gray river waters flowing into non-existence.

Why suddenly such a small-regional exhibition is relevant? It seems that we are returning to those times when local history in the old-new capital becomes a haven for permitted scientific free-thinking. This road was actively trodden by local historians of the 1970s, whose brilliant team worked in the same museum. Fortunately, the history of this strange, gloomy, fictional city, many times almost destroyed by various rulers of the world, allows us to think that even in such a place, even after a long wait, the sun rises.