In a quiet corner of historic Petersburg, on the embankment of the Pryazhka River, stands house No. 50. Two centuries ago, in this yellow mansion on the corner with Myasnaya Street, lived Samson Xenofontovich Sukhanov, an outstanding Russian sculptor and stonecutter. Today, his name is half-forgotten. Yet without Sukhanov, there would be neither the Exchange building, nor the Rostral Columns, nor the Isaakievsky and Kazansky Cathedrals.
Upon closer inspection of the house, unusual details catch the eye. It turns out that the entire plinth of the building, the bases of the four columns on the facade, and even the balcony consoles on the bel étage are made of granite. To a connoisseur of Petersburg architecture, this may seem strange — after all, granite began to be widely used in building cladding here about a hundred years later, only in the era of Northern Modernism. Even stranger, though beautiful in its own way, is the house’s entrance hall. Today, you can freely enter it: under the arch and to the left. The cramped chamber vaults, authentic marble windowsills, a round, almost spiral staircase, limestone landings, and steps made of that same red granite. The same granite from which the Alexander Column or the columns of Isaakievsky are made.
Even the simple steps in this house are granite. Granite, actively used in the architecture of the Northern Capital at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, can be seen either in the “parade” parts of palaces or in official buildings and structures. For example, on the embankments of the Neva, Fontanka, Moika, and Kryukov Canal. But in this case, granite was the favorite and most important material for the house’s owner, and it is quite likely that the outstanding builder of Petersburg himself carried out part of the work in his own house.
Samson Sukhanov was born in 1767, in the village of Zavotezhitsa (now Arkhangelsk region), in the family of a local shepherd. The parents of the future stonecutter lived very poorly; at one time, his mother and little Samson even begged for alms. At the age of nine, he became a hired laborer. Five years later, young Sukhanov went to work as a barge hauler, where he learned the basics of seamanship — traveling along the Volga and Northern Dvina rivers. Most of his earnings he gave to his elderly mother and father. From 1783 to 1793, Sukhanov engaged in fur hunting in the North, visiting Spitsbergen with his comrades, or as the Pomors called it, Grumant. At that time, Samson had an encounter with a polar bear, which left a scar across his face — from forehead to cheek. He also worked onshore — he was good at all kinds of work. He installed water wheels at mills, sewed boots, felled trees, carved spindles and spoons, and worked at the Yakorny factory. He married in Arkhangelsk. From the barge haulers he traveled with on the Volga, Samson heard a lot about Saint Petersburg. The Pomors also liked to tell stories about it. And it turned out that a relative of his wife, a brother-in-law, worked in that city. Samson was drawn to see the capital. On a summer day in 1797, he joined a merchant convoy and went with them to Saint Petersburg.
At that time, Samson was thirty-one years old. He had already tried many kinds of work over the years and, of course, did not think he would find his main calling in the capital. Not immediately, but he found his brother-in-law. He worked at stone quarries. Near the Summer Garden, the stern Mikhailovsky Castle was being built. A lot of stone was needed for its construction, and many stonecutters, as they were called then, were required. The brother-in-law, the craftsman Grigory Kopylyov, who got him into the team, quickly noticed the extraordinary talent of his protégé and made Samson a contractor. Interestingly, even then the craftsman showed entrepreneurial talent: he invested his earned fees in onion trading and multiplied them.
For the next seven years, Sukhanov worked on the construction of the Kazansky Cathedral. Here he was already appointed a state overseer — his diligence was noted by the emperor himself. To this day, we can admire the magnificent colonnade of Kazansky, consisting of 138 columns of Pudozh stone, made by Sukhanov’s team. The interior decoration of the temple, made of 56 granite columns, was also carried out by them.
Samson Sukhanov also invented a new method of granite extraction, allowing the stone to be quarried in whole blocks. Previously, deposits were blasted with gunpowder charges, but Sukhanov’s manual method not only saved gunpowder (which was more needed during the 1812 war) but also avoided unnecessary cracks and chips. The capital’s press was amazed: how could some man, who could neither read nor write, come up with something that was beyond the best engineers of his time!
The house was purchased by Samson Xenofontovich in 1807, when the successful and respected head of the artel became a merchant of the 2nd guild (which, among other things, meant the right to interregional trade). The original project of the building is attributed to Gotlib Christian Paulsen, also known for the project of the Finnish Church of St. Mary on Bolshaya Konyushennaya. However, Sukhanov almost immediately began remodeling the building.
Besides the abundance of granite details, the profession of the house’s owner is also reflected in the lion’s head located right above the arch. Of the numerous Petersburg lions, it most resembles the lion heads on the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island — probably, at the time of building his own quarters, Sukhanov considered the Spit ensemble his key achievement. And since he himself was the son of a simple village shepherd and had no family coat of arms for the pediment, the craftsman placed a lion’s head above the arch, testifying to his main success. By the way, similar beasts can still be found in some places in Vologda and Pomorye, where Samson Sukhanov was from — in the paintings of old wooden houses.
After 1820, luck began to abandon Sukhanov. He remained a brilliant craftsman, but the fashion for instant construction had passed, and the stonecutter’s business worsened. Also, the treasury was careless in paying for completed orders. He was demoted to a merchant of the 3rd guild, and then even reduced to a common townsman. The house on Pryazhka had to be mortgaged.
At that time, Sukhanov was working on the pedestals of monuments to Russian commanders Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly, which we can still see in front of Kazansky Cathedral. The granite had already been quarried — and was being transported across Lake Ladoga to Petersburg. But disaster struck: a strong storm on Ladoga sank the barge with all its contents.
From this shock, Sukhanov’s business never recovered. There were no insurances then, and he quarried and transported granite for new pedestals at his own expense. After that, the charming mansion on Pryazhka had to be sold, facing the sunset. In 1827, Samson Sukhanov left the house where he had spent the 20 most productive years of his life and moved to a modest apartment in the then remote Narva district. In his last years, the outstanding stonecutter became so impoverished that he had to pawn even the commemorative gold medal and the caftan from the tsar’s shoulder, once bestowed upon him by Alexander I. Otherwise, he could not feed his family. In 1840, already a townsman and no longer a merchant of the 2nd guild, Sukhanov asked the state for help. Nicholas I ordered to give the old man a thousand rubles in banknotes. Apparently, even this large sum did not help Sukhanov get out of financial trouble; he died in poverty around 1844. Unfortunately, we still do not know the exact place of Samson Sukhanov’s burial, nor even the year of his death.
The old stonecutter must have felt bitter about such a contrast: if in the 1810s he was called almost a “national hero” in society (rightly so) and newspapers and entire magazine articles were dedicated to him, then in his old age everyone forgot about him.
Since 1827, the old house on Pryazhka has had other owners: first, it belonged to commercial counselor Zherbin, and later to the Skryabin merchant family. After 1917, the mansion became an ordinary residential building.
There is no memorial plaque on the house dedicated to Samson Xenofontovich Sukhanov. No monument to the stonecutter has been erected on the banks of the Neva either. However, the best monuments to him remain the Isaakievsky and Kazansky Cathedrals, the Spit ensemble, Mikhailovsky Castle, Kryukov Canal, the Alexander Column, and, of course, his own house.
Sources:
https://luna-info.ru/discourse/samson-home/
https://ardexpert.ru/article/4739
