Uspensky N.V. (1885-1947), founder of the Necropolis Museum

Categories / Science. Education/Personalia
USPENSKY Nikolay Viktorovich (1885-1947), museum worker. He studied at the Higher Phototechnical Institute in the 1920s and worked as a researcher at the Russian Museum from 1926 to 1932. He was a member of Stary Petersburg Society. He founded the Necropolis Museum in Alexander Nevsky Lavra in 1923 to become its first director, curator, and chief of the memorial department in 1939. The museum was opened in 1932 and renamed the Museum of City Sculpture in 1939. Uspensky completed an inventory of the museum's collections with over two thousand monuments inventoried. In the course of his archaeological researches, over 100 stone and cast-iron tombs dating to the first half of the 18th century were found, as well as the headstones by sculptors I. P. Martos and F. G. Gordeev that were thought lost. During the campaign launched to demolish old cemeteries in the 1930s, he undertook the transfer valuable headstones and reburies the remains in necropolises, thus, contributing to the preservation of many headstones and historical graves. The Necropolis of Artists and Pushkin's Friends now known as the Necropolis of Artists was Uspensky's project implemented on the territory of Tikhvinskoe Cemetery of Alexander Nevsky Lavra in 1935-37. He stayed in Leningrad during the siege. Uspensky's Diaries, kept in the Museum of City Sculpture, are an important source for studying St. Petersburg's cemeteries. He was buried at Literatorskie Mostki.

Reference: Пирютко Ю. М. Первый хранитель Пантеона // ЛП. 1987. № 10. С. 37-38.

Y. M. Piryutko. Gordeev Fedor Gordeevich
Martos Ivan Petrovich
Uspensky Nikolay Viktorovich
Пирютко Ю. М. Первый хранитель Пантеона // Ленингр. панорама, 1987 University of Cinema and Television, St. Petersburg State
Russian Museum, State
Old Petersburg, Society
Necropolis of Artists
Siege of 1941-44
Literatorskie (Literary) Mostki, the museum-necropolis