page_title: Musin-Pushkin House (Saint Petersburg)
section_title: History of the site
hierarchical_section_title: Musin-Pushkin House (Saint Petersburg) / History of the site
caption_attribution_description: English: Mansion of Musin-Pushkin on Plan of Sent-Iler Русский: Усадьба Демидова-Мусина-Пушкина на плане Сент-Илера
context_page_description: The Musin-Pushkin House is an historic building in Saint Petersburg, located at number 104 on the Moyka River Embankment. It is also known as "A. I. Musin-Pushkin's House", and was built during the 18th and 19th centuries. The building's present appearance dates from 1848.
context_section_description: The first known owner of the site was State Councillor Anisim Semenovich Maslov, the chief procurator of the Senate. The site was later owned by Frantz Volodimerovich Gardner – a merchant who owned a rope factory in the Vyborgskaya Storona district of the city. In September 1755 the house was acquired by Nikita Akinfiyevich Demidov – a wealthy metal-industry entrepreneur who owned factories in Nizhny Tagil – from Gardner's widow. N. A. Demidov owned the estate for nearly 30 years, until 1782. In 1782 N. A. Demidov sold the house to Prince Grigory Potemkin, who immediately mortgaged it to Aleksei Musin-Pushkin. Musin-Pushkin acquired ownership of the estate in 1784 when Potemkin fell into arrears with his mortgage payments. Musin-Pushkin owned the mansion until 1798.
  The next owner of the site with all the buildings and the garden was M. A. Kusovnikov, a merchant. In the 1804 city register the plot was placed in the fourth Admiralty division of the first block. The plot was numbered 46 and valued at 50,000 rubles. By the time of the 1822 register, the estate was owned by E. V. Kusovnikova, and was valued at 65,000 rubles. The house appears in Friedrich von Schubert's 1828 plan of the city, its appearance having altered slightly after the construction of an annex near the Moyka and a building along the left border of the plot of land as seen from the Moyka river. This building extended nearly up to the end of the plot and abutted the buildings of the Lithuanian castle. Two buildings parallel to each other stretched along Ofitserskaya ulitza (Officers' Street), where building 31 is now located. By 1828 that part of the estate was owned by the provisioning department of the Ministry of War, which remained its owner until 1842. In 1834 in accordance with E.V. Kusovnikova's will her granddaughter Yelena Petrovna Varentzova became the owner of the estate. That year street numeration was introduced, and the plot was designated as number 95 on the Moyka embankment.
  In 1842, Y. P. Varentzova (Truveller) sold part of the plot to the Saint Petersburg City Duma, so that they could construct a street separating a prison building from local houses. In 1850 Y.P. Truveller made an official request asking St Petersburg's military Governor-General that the lane between her house and the Lithuanian castle be named Zamkovy (Castle lane). But the lane was named Tyremny (Prison lane) at the highest behest.
  In 1850 the house was sold to court counsellor, baron Alexander Borisovich von Vietinghoff, who presented the estate to his daughters Elizaveta and Ekaterina in 1870. In 1882 baron Rikhard Pavlovich von Vietinghoff became the owner of the whole plot, which at that time was numbered 102 on the Moyka embankment.
  The site was renumbered again in the late 1880s, becoming 104 on the Moyka embankment. In 1894 von Vietinghoff's three daughters became the owners of the house and the plot, and in 1897 one of the daughters – Alexandra-Elizaveta Rikhardovna von Einsiedel, the wife of a major in the Royal Saxon Army – became the sole owner. In 1913 she sold the whole site to the Council of the Reformed Church schools. In 1918 the houses on the Moyka embankment were confiscated "on behalf of the Commissariat of the city household due to the default in payment on the part of the owners, who hadn't paid city taxes in 1917 and 1918".
caption: The Plot of the Musin-Pushkin Residence from the Axonometric Plan of Saint-Petersburg in Years 1765-1773 (by the P. de Saint-Hilaire, I. Sokolov, A. Gorikhvostov, et al.)
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