tikhvin 3

The cemetery reconstruction project concentrated the representatives of each type of art together, with even monuments that had been in the Tikhvin originally being moved to fit the new organisational scheme. 

Composers and musicians were reburied mainly on the 'Composer's path', near the northern boundary of the cemetery. Painters and sculptors were placed in the western part, while those who in their lifetimes had been associated with Pushkin were placed close to the eastern section, near the cemetery entrance. 

Some of the older monuments from the removed graves were retained to serve as decorative ornaments, such as columns placed at the intersection of avenues. The decoration of the park-necropolis was to be enhanced by the construction of one large and four small fountains, and the installation of granite benches. 

The Tikhvin Church was slated [gepland] for demolition to improve the access direct from Alexander Nevsky Square. 

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The organisers were faced with the problem that despite designating the cemetery to be the artists' necropolis, historically the Tikhvin had primarily been the burial ground of statesmen, military leaders, scientists, and composers. 

There were relatively few graves of writers, who had tended to prefer the Smolensky Cemetery, or artists, who had traditionally chosen the Nikolskoe or Novodevichy Cemetery. This necessitated the transfer of a large number of burials and monuments, which took place in two main periods, from 1936 to 1941, and from 1948 to 1952.

During the Second World War and the siege of Leningrad, the museum worked to provide protection and shelter for monuments. Only a single gravestone was damaged, that of the actress Varvara Asenkova. 

The monument, designed by Ivan Sosnytsky, consisted of a granite canopy over a pedestal with a verse epitaph and bronze bust of the actress by Ivan Vitali, and had been transferred along with the actress's remains from the Smolensky Cemetery in 1936. It was destroyed by a direct hit from a bomb in 1943. 

In 1955 the museum installed a marble replica of the bust made by D.A. Sprishinym. Other monuments were stored in the Lavra's Annunciation Church.

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Restoration work began immediately after the end of the war, with the necropolis-museum opening in August 1947. The programme of moving and installing monuments resumed after the war and continued until the mid-1950s. 

There were also several burials of prominent Soviet citizens, as the cemetery gained the status of an urban pantheon. Those buried here included the scientist Sergey Lebedev in 1934, artist Mikhail Avilov in 1954, and actor Nikolay Cherkasov in 1966. 

In 1972 the remains of the composer Alexander Glazunov were transferred from Paris. In 1968 Fyodor Dostoevsky's wife Anna Dostoevskaya was reburied next to her husband, while theatre director Georgy Tovstonogov was interred in the cemetery in 1989. 

So far Tovstonogov's has been the last burial to take place in the cemetery.

[bron]