Description of the attraction
In the year of the 200th anniversary of the capture of the Vyborg fortress in 1908, Emperor Nicholas II turned to the military commandant of the city with a proposal to erect a military cathedral in honor of this date and erect a monument to Peter I in Vyborg.
The project of the monument was commissioned to develop the sculptor L. A. Bernshtam. The opening took place on June 14, 1910. The figure of Tsar Peter was installed on a 3-meter pedestal made of a monolithic lump of pink granite brought from Vakhkalahti. The name of the king is engraved on it. Peter stands at the cannon, his left hand is on the hilt of the sword, in his right hand is the plan of the siege of the Vyborg fortress. There is an illusion of movement in the figure - the floors of the uniform seem to be blown up by the wind.
The contemporaries of the sculptor L. A. Bernshtam said that he strove to give his works the maximum resemblance to the original or to the image of a person and tried to avoid sharp-character features.
L. A. Bernshtam devoted a lot of time to working on the image of Tsar Peter in sculpture. The Vyborg monument is not his only work dedicated to Peter. In 1919, the monuments to the tsar in front of the eastern and western pavilions in the Admiralty in St. Petersburg were declared "anti-artistic" and were dismantled. One of the statues was called "Tsar Carpenter". Exactly the same monument from 1911 to the present day is located in the central square of Zaandem in Holland. The second monument depicted Peter rescuing the Lakhta fishermen. It is known that the king after that incident caught a cold and died.
The sculptor Leopold Adolfovich Bernshtam was born in Riga in 1859. He successfully graduated from the famous St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. Bernshtam received recognition after he was able to create 30 busts of great cultural figures of Russia in a very short time. Beginning in 1885, Bernshtam lived in Paris. He was commissioned for sculptural portraits by G. Flaubert and E. Zola. He lived in Paris all his life. L. A. Bernshtam died in 1939.
When, in the 30s of the 20th century, the construction of a museum of arts and a school of painting was completed on the Panzerlax bastion, the monument to Peter was sent to the opened museum.
On the site of the monument in December 1927, in honor of the 10th anniversary of Finland's independence, a monument to Independence was erected by the sculptor T. Finne - a lion figure with a shield, which depicts the coat of arms of Finland. This monument was destroyed under unexplained circumstances in 1940. At that time Vyborg was already one of the cities of the USSR, and it was decided to restore the monument to Peter. It was installed on a temporary basis. However, when in August 1941 the city was occupied by the Finnish troops, bronze Peter was dismantled again.
There are archival photographs in which the dumped monument is viewed by Marshal Mannerheim, President of Finland R. Ryti and others. Since the head of the statue was cast separately, it fell off when it fell. According to some reports, the headless sculpture of 1942 was sent for storage to the Vyborg Castle. What happened to the head of the monument is known from the memoirs of the mayor of Vyborg at that time, Major of the Finnish army Arno Tuurn. He picked up the head and kept it on his desk in his study. The mayor's residence was on the current Podgornaya street in the Bishop's House. Once, during a reception, when Tuurn left for a few minutes, one of the visitors stole his head. It was only after Tuurn threatened to take serious action against the kidnappers that she was returned. It was in the mayor's office that the head of the sculpture was found by the soldiers of the Red Army, when the city was again taken by our troops in 1944.
During the Great Patriotic War, the bronze Peter was badly damaged. The sculpture was sent for restoration to Leningrad at the Monumentskulptura plant. The work was supervised by the sculptor N. Volzhukhin. The former pedestal was gone. A new pedestal made according to the project of A. A. Draghi, above the original.
In 1954, in August, the third unveiling of the monument to Peter I took place. Bronze Peter then once again left his pedestal, but only in order to undergo another restoration.
