Volodarsky Street is a street in the Nizhegorodsky District of Nizhny Novgorod, about a kilometer long. It starts at Maxim Gorky Street, opposite Kulibin Park, runs northeast, crosses Oshарская and Varvarskaya Streets, and ends at Semashko Street [7]. Before the Revolution, two streets occupied its site — Petropavlovskaya and Bolshaya Soldatskaya [3]. It has borne its present name since the Soviet years, when Nizhny Novgorod's streets were renamed for revolutionaries; it honors V. Volodarsky, the Petrograd Commissar for Press Affairs, who was assassinated in 1918 [6][9].
Route
The street begins at Maxim Gorky Street, at the northwest corner of Kulibin Park, makes a short jog to the northwest, and then continues northeast — past Tikhy Lane, Osharskaya Street, Tkachyov and Mogilevich Lanes, and Varvarskaya Street by Freedom Square — to Semashko Street, where it ends. Its total length along this broken line is about a kilometer, and the carriageway is narrow, with two lanes [7].
Numbering increases from Maxim Gorky Street: the houses with the lowest numbers stand beside the park, while buildings 57 and 63 lie already beyond Varvarskaya, in the last block before Semashko Street [7]. The street is neither a main thoroughfare nor a ceremonial one: it runs inside the blocks between Oshara Square and Academician Blokhina Street, and nearly every one of its intersections remembers the old city [2][3][8].
| Intersection | What was here before |
|---|---|
| Maxim Gorky Street (beginning) | Before the revolution, Polevaya Street, the city's outskirts, beyond which lay fields [8]; opposite is Kulibin Park, on the site of the Petropavlovsk Cemetery [5] |
| Tikhy Lane | An interior-block passage between Gorky and Oshara Streets [7] |
| Oshara Street | In Soviet times it was called Red Militiaman Street; later the historical name was restored [3] |
| Tkachyov Lane | Formerly Staro-Soldatsky Lane in the Soldatskaya Sloboda [2] |
| Mogilevich Lane | Formerly Novo-Soldatsky Lane in the same sloboda [2] |
| Varvarskaya Street | Nearby are Freedom Square by the prison castle and the filled-in Ostrozhny Pond [8] |
| Semashko Street (end) | Formerly Martynovskaya Street [3] |
Petropavlovskaya and Bolshaya Soldatskaya
The present street was assembled from two. Its southwestern half was called Petropavlovskaya, while the northeastern half bore the names Bolshaya Soldatskaya and Bolshaya Gvardeyskaya [3].
The southwestern end of the street leads straight to the former Petropavlovskoye Cemetery — an Orthodox graveyard that was set aside outside the city limits in 1774, when burying the dead beside parish churches was banned (according to other sources, the site was allocated a year later, in 1775) [4][5][7]. With money raised by the merchant A. I. Neudakin, a church dedicated to All Saints was built there in 1776–1782; its other name proved more popular — Petropavlovskaya, after the side chapel dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul [4]. The passage running along the cemetery fence was also called Petropavlovsky; for a long time it had no settled name: at various times Nameless, Cemetery, or Petropavlovsky Lane — it is now Granitny Lane and part of Reshetnikovskaya Street [5]. The clergy of this church lived nearby, in the clergy houses on Granitny Lane.
The northeastern end ran up against another landmark of old Nizhny. By the Ostrozhny Pond, at the end of Varvarskaya Street, stood the Soldatskaya Sloboda (Soldiers' Settlement), populated by discharged reservists and invalids; here were Staro-Soldatsky and Novo-Soldatsky Lanes and Bolshaya Soldatskaya Street — today's Tkachyov and Mogilevich Lanes and Volodarskogo Street [2]. In the 1840s the settlement was moved east, beyond Sennaya Square, to Bolshaya Pecherskaya: the city architect Kizevetter drew up the project for the new settlement in 1839 [2].
Almost nothing remains of the former neighborhood. The Ostrozhny Pond at the junction of Varvarskaya and what is now Freedom Square was filled in, like most of the city's ponds; the prison castle ceased to be a prison after the October Revolution, and the square around it was named Freedom [8]. The cemetery was liquidated in 1939–1940 and the Kulibin Park was laid out on its site; the Petropavlovskaya Church had been closed and thoroughly rebuilt even earlier, in 1938, and in 1963 the Sputnik Movie Theater rose beside it [5].
Who it is named after
V. Volodarsky is the party pseudonym of Moisey Markovich Goldstein (1891–1918). From 1905 he was a member of the Bund, then a Menshevik, and from 1913 he lived in emigration in the United States. In May 1917 he arrived in Petrograd and joined the "Mezhrayontsy" (Inter-District Group), and in August, at the Sixth Congress of the RSDLP(b), he joined the Bolshevik party; he was a member of the Petersburg Committee of the party, headed its agitation and propaganda department, and sat on the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee [6].
From November 1917 Volodarsky was Petrograd's Commissar for Press, Propaganda, and Agitation and editor of the "Krasnaya Gazeta" (Red Newspaper). He was one of the most popular party agitators among Petrograd workers and often spoke at rallies; in the Petrograd Soviet he pursued a policy of suppressing the opposition press. In June 1918 he was killed by the Socialist Revolutionary N. Sergeev; he is buried on the Field of Mars [6].
The Nizhny Novgorod renaming fell in the years when the city's streets were being given the names of revolutionaries — Figner, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, Volodarsky [9]. The change of street signs was sweeping: of the central streets, only Bolshaya Pecherskaya kept its former name at the time — it was named not after a church, but after the siege courtyard of the Pechersky Monastery [10].
Meshchanin-class housing: house 57
The street was built up as an outlying and modest one — with one- and two-story houses built to be rented out. The history of one of them, house 57, can be traced back to the early 1870s, when the plot was part of the extensive estate of Captain Beitner. In 1873 his garden plot, which faced Bolshaya Soldatskaya Street, was bought by Anna Dmitrievna Germanova, the wife of a retired private; in June of that year a design for a two-story wooden house with one-story outbuildings was approved for her [1].
The design was not carried out: that same year the undeveloped plot passed to the retired captain Nikolay Voinovich Malinovsky, for whom in September 1873 the architect N. A. Frelikh drew up a two-story wooden house on a stone foundation with wooden yard outbuildings. The house was built in 1873–1874 — the 1874 tax assessment book already listed a finished house with an annex under Malinovsky [1].
The house was built as an income property, with two apartments per floor. The five-bay facade, supplemented by an entryway addition with two entrances, a paired window above them, and staircases inside, was designed in a dry academic eclecticism: the first-floor window surrounds were plain rectangular frames, the second-floor ones had a profiled shelf-like cornice, and beneath the windows ran an applied belt course between the floors. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the decor was redone in a folkloric manner: the second-floor window surrounds were covered with fretwork carving with curved kokoshnik-shaped crowns, notches and dentils appeared along the string courses between the floors, and the wall field between the floors was filled with diamond-shaped overlays [1].
This added no individual character to the house — it remained a typical example of the mass residential building of Nizhny Novgorod in the second half of the 19th century, of the kind built for the meshchanin (townsfolk) classes, above all on the outskirts; houses similar in spirit stand on Studenaya Street at numbers 40, 52, and 53 [1]. Such wooden buildings defined the look of the street throughout the 19th century. In 1912, at the back of the plot, which then belonged to N. A. Barkhatov, another two-story wooden annex was built — house 57-A; it was demolished to make way for new construction [1].
a wooden two-story house, five windows across the front, and an annex of the same kind
House of the Suslov Sisters
In the 1880s, house 57 was owned by Prokofy Grigoryevich Suslov, a Nizhny Novgorod meshchanin (townsman) and former serf. Both of his daughters left a notable mark — one on Russian literature, the other on Russian medicine [1].
| Who | Years of life | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| Apollinaria Prokofyevna Suslova-Rozanova | 1840—1918 | Writer and memoirist. Born in Gorbatov Uyezd (district) of Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, she attended lectures at St. Petersburg University in the early 1860s and published the novella "Pokuda" ("Meanwhile"). It was then that she met F. M. Dostoevsky, with whom she traveled around Europe in 1863—1865; in 1880 she married the philosopher V. V. Rozanov [1] |
| Nadezhda Prokofyevna Suslova-Golubeva | 1843—1918 | The first Russian woman to become a doctor of medicine. A student of I. M. Sechenov and S. P. Botkin, she attended classes in the laboratories of the Medical-Surgical Academy; after women were barred from the academy, she left for Zurich in 1864, and in 1867, having defended her dissertation, she became the first Russian woman physician to receive the degree and title of doctor of medicine, surgery, and obstetrics. She later worked for many years as a physician in Nizhny Novgorod, living in her father's house, and was held in great esteem; she died in Crimea [1] |
The 1894 Meeting and the Protective Designation
In the summer of 1894, a meeting of Nizhny Novgorod Social Democrats took place in house 57, in the apartment of the sisters Anna and Nina Rukavishnikova, with the participation of Lenin: it resolved to conduct propaganda among workers for the overthrow of the autocracy. The event is marked by a memorial plaque [1].
Other participants in the movement were also connected with the house: A. A. Vaneev, one of the leaders of the "League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class," who died in Siberian exile in 1899, and Pyotr Andreyevich Zalomov, a worker at the Sormovo Plant, organizer of the 1902 May Day demonstration, sentenced to lifelong exile for it and escaped in 1905; he served as the prototype for Pavel Vlasov in M. Gorky's novel "Mother." The Rukavishnikova sisters, Anna Alekseyevna and Nina Alekseyevna, kept a stockpile of illegal literature, printed appeals to workers on a hectograph, and led sessions of a Marxist circle; both were arrested [1].
This gathering is the reason the house was taken under state protection — by decision of the Gorky Regional Executive Committee No. 599 of November 3, 1983. Fifteen years later, by resolution of the acting Governor of Nizhny Novgorod Region No. 331 of December 11, 1998, something else moved to first place in the protection wording, and the Social Democrats' meeting dropped to second [1].
the house in which Apollinaria Prokofyevna Suslova-Rozanova lived, the beloved of F. M. Dostoevsky, who served as the prototype for a number of the heroines of his works
The Street Today
The street has remained quiet and tucked inside the block. Its frontage is varied: wooden and stone houses from the century before last stand alongside Soviet apartment blocks and new buildings. House 13 holds the N. A. Dobrolyubov Library, house 56 the dental clinic of Nizhegorodsky District, and house 38A a small hotel [7].
The project to restore house 57 as a historic memorial monument was developed by the research enterprise Etnos [1]. Opposite the start of the street still lies Kulibin Park, with the grave of the mechanic Kulibin and the partially restored Peter and Paul Church, returned to the faithful [4][5].
Namesakes
In Nizhny Novgorod itself there is only one Volodarsky Street — the one in question; no other district of the city has a street named for Volodarsky [7]. In Nizhny Novgorod Region, however, the name is widespread: there is a Volodarsky Street in Arzamas, Balakhna, Bogorodsk, Bor, Volodarsk, Vyksa, Lyskovo, Pavlovo, and Semyonov [7]. The name is also borne by the town of Volodarsk with its Volodarsky District, and by the Volodarsky Settlement.
The street is easy to confuse with its neighbors in the center: Piskunova Street, Belinsky Street, and Osharskaya were also renamed several times, and old maps of the city are labeled differently from the current ones [3][8].
Sources
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — electronic periodical of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Russian Society of Historians and Archivists (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — an essay on the development of the Sennaya Square area, published by the Ethnos Research and Production Enterprise (archive)
- bibl.nngasu.ru — Library of the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering — a local history project with a table of former street names — A Living Link of Times (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — entries from A. I. Davydov's guidebook "Nizhny Novgorod Churches" (Nizhny Novgorod: Kvarts, 2011) (archive)
- opentextnn.ru — Open Text — cultural heritage site passport compiled by the Ethnos Research and Production Enterprise in 2007 — Materials of the Cultural Heritage Site Passport (archive)
- encspb.ru — Encyclopedia of Saint Petersburg — article by A. D. Margolis — Volodarsky V. (real surname and name Goldstein Moisey Markovich) (archive)
- openstreetmap.org — open map: the street's route, its intersections, building addresses, and namesake streets in the Region — Volodarsky Street, Nizhny Novgorod (archive)
- НН.РУ — city publication of Nizhny Novgorod — Telyachya, Arestantskaya, and Pryadilnaya Streets. What Nizhny Novgorod Looked Like 100 Years Ago — Where Such Names Came From (archive)
- biblmr.r52.ru — Centralized Library System of the Moskovsky District of Nizhny Novgorod — a local history tour of the city's toponymy (archive)
- nn.aif.ru — AiF — Nizhny Novgorod, a conversation with local historian Alexander Danilov — History Underfoot. How Did the Streets of Nizhny Novgorod Get Their Names? (archive)