'LITERATORSKIE MOSTKI' CEMETERY

A branch of the Museum of Urban Sculpture
30 Rasstannaya ulitsa 192007 St. Petersburg
Open: 11 am - 5pm (November - March), 11am - 7pm (summer)
Closed: Thursdays
Tel. 166-2383
Nearest metro station: Ligovsky prospekt

The Volkovo Cemetery, located on the outskirts of the city in the 18th century, was mainly used as a burial place for poor people. In 1802 the disgraced writer Alexander Radishchev was buried here (the grave no longer exists) and, in 1848 and 1861, the publicists and literary critics Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Dmitry Pisarev were laid to rest in the cemetry. After the burial of the writer Vsevolod Garshin in 1888, the planked footway (mostki) leading to their graves came to be known as the Literatorskie Mostki. At a later date the footway gave its name to the entire surrounding territory as, by a gradually established tradition, men of letters, scientists, statesmen, cultural and public figures were interred in the cemetery. It is a veritable pantheon of Russian literary and cultural luminaries.

The tombs of the writers Ivan Turgenev, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Ivan Goncharov, Nikolai Leskov, Alexander Kuprin, Vsevolod Garshin, Leonid Andreyev, Alexander Blok, Mikhail Lozinsky, Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky and Olga Bergholz are all to be found in the Literatorskie Mostki Cemetery. Here one can see the graves of revolutionary populists and social democrats, including Nikolai Mikhailovsky, Herman Lopatin, Vera Zasulich and Georgy Plekhanov, the burial place of the Ulyanov family, the graves of the illustrious scholars Dmitry Mendeleyev, Ivan Pavlov, Nikolai Miklukho-Maklai, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Popov, Yuly Shokalsky, Nikolai Kachalov, Abram Loffe, Ignaty Krachkovsky, and eminent Russian artists such as Nikolai Akimov, Isaac Brodsky, Alexander Briantsev, Leonty Benois, Agrippina Vaganova, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Arkady Rylov and Nikolai Simonov.

The tombstones to be found in the cemetery are the work of Ilya Ginzburg, Mark Antokolsky, Mikhail Anikushin, Matvei Manizer, Leonid Sherwood and other well-known sculptors. The Church of the Resurrection, the oldest building in the cemetery erected in the second half of the 18th century, houses an exhibition devoted to the writers, scientists and public figures buried in the Literatorskie Mostki Cemetery.