buildings-in-st-petersburg

"Built and named for the , Pavlovsk began as a convenient way of getting the then Grand Duke out of his mother's sight. was anything but fond of her only legitimate son, and getting him out from underfoot was well worth the price of a palace, so, in 1777, she gave him a large estate 17 miles south of and three miles from the royal resort of , and four years later building on the house was begun. As it turned out, however, the person who supervised every detail of the construction and the decoration was Paul's wife, the Grand Duchess, and later Empress, . This civilized and artistically inclined German-Alsatian princess knew just what she was doing. The house was finished in 1796 and modified somewhat after a fire in 1803; as it stood at the time of her death in 1828, it was probably the finest (and certainly the most complete) palace in Europe."

"Built during the era of the and the , the palace contains many motifs from antiquity, beginning with the Egyptian Vestibule (Yegipetskiy vestibyul) on the first floor, which is lined with pharaonic statues and zodiac medallions. From here, visitors are ushered upstairs to the second floor State Rooms via the main staircase, designed by with martial motifs to pander to Paul's pretensions. The northern parade of rooms reflect his martial obsessions, the southern ones the more domesticated tastes of Maria Fyodorovna. The striking thing about the rooms, though, is their relatively human scale — you could just about imagine living there — unlike those of the Great Palaces of and . At the top of the stairs, to the right, the domed Italian Hall (Italyanskiy zal) rises into the palace's central . Its decor, intended by to evoke a , is uniformly , with rich helpings of trompe l'oeil and s and s shaped like s."

"It was one of the most comfortable houses of the early twentieth century, a "city in the city" for 250 apartments, with advanced engineering communications, a power station, a boiler house, and garages, etc. The complex was serviced by twenty janitors. In Soviet times, the "fathers" of Leningrad lived here, beginning with Sergei Kirov. A composer Dmitri Shostakovich lived here as well, whose bust is installed in an open courtyard from the side of Kronverkskaya street. The courtyards of the House of Benoit represent a real maze, there are more than ten of them, from the grand Courtyard to the St. Petersburg "wells" with bizarrely curving arches. Turning into the next gateway, you never know to which of the four streets you will get."

"After the revolution of 1917, many apartments in this house became communal. Some of the apartments have been given to the Party and government leaders. In April 1926, Kirov started to live in a service apartment number 20 in the house 26/28 on the Krasnyh Zor’ (Red Dawn) street (former Kamennoostrovsky Avenue). Sergei Mironovich Kirov was head of the Communist party organization in Leningrad. There he lived with his wife, Maria Lvovna Marcus until the last day of his life, up to December 1st 1934. In 1955, the apartment became a museum."