Khatskel Meerovich Lishnevsky (1868–1942) was born in 1868 into a Jewish family. After successfully graduating from the Odessa Drawing School, he was sent to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which he completed in 1894 with a gold medal. In the same year, the architect married Sara-Sophia Abramovna Varshavskaya, and both converted to Orthodoxy.
Alexander Lvovich was unable to stay and work in the capital, so he went to Elisavetgrad (now the city of Kropyvnytskyi) in Ukraine, where he obtained the position of city architect. In this role, he significantly influenced the city’s appearance, among other things erecting the building of the girls’ gymnasium and rebuilding the main synagogue.
In 1901, the architect returned to Saint Petersburg and began participating in architectural competitions. This helped him not only to refine his skills but also to earn money: prizes could amount to several thousand rubles.
“Over four decades of work in Petersburg, Alexander Lishnevsky managed to accomplish a great deal: from the House of City Institutions (Sadovaya St., 55–57) to one of the city’s symbols — the Ioffe House at Five Corners (Zagorodny Ave. 11). The architect proved to be incredibly industrious: by 1917, he had created more than 100 projects. At the same time, he always sought to integrate the building into the urban space so that the viewer would feel that all elements of the structure were balanced,” said Alexander Chepel, one of the authors of the book about the architect.
Unfortunately, unlike many other Petersburg and Leningrad architects, Alexander Lishnevsky did not gain widespread recognition among the city’s residents. However, in the fall of 2015, his name became known not only to specialists: vandals knocked down a bas-relief from a building he designed on Lakhtinskaya Street, 24. The stucco figure depicted an “anthropomorphic folkloric creature with bat wings,” which many recognize as Mephistopheles (or the Demon), although there is no exact confirmation.
Alexander Lishnevsky was a professional in his field and a true “universal soldier” of architecture. He was capable of building for various purposes and in many different styles, equally fluent in the language of Art Nouveau, eclecticism, and neoclassicism.
Lishnevsky’s story is unique: in the 1930s, when many architects lost their jobs because they could not fit into Soviet reality, he remained one of the most sought-after architects, without losing his distinctive style and continuing to add interesting decorative details to the functional buildings of that era. Lishnevsky had the opportunity to emigrate but did not do so. “How can I leave my houses — after all, they are my children,” he said, recalls Lishnevsky’s great-great-granddaughter Elena Turkovskaya. The architect did not accomplish everything he intended — he died in 1942, almost immediately after evacuation from blockaded Leningrad.
