Stray Dog Café

Stray Dog Cafe ((Podval Brodyachy Sobaki)) (aka 'Stray Dog Cellar', 'Stray Dog Cabaret' and the 'Society for Intimate Theatre') is located at Ploshchad Isskustv, Square of the Arts up to Summer Gardens, St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Stray Dog Café was a meeting place for famous writers and poets during the early 20th century. The Acmeist poets (Nikolay Gumilyov, Mandelshtam, Mikhail Kuzmin, etc.) gathered there to discuss theories of literature, give poetry readings, and perform theatre. They considered themselves "'stray dogs' shunted aside by proper aristocratic society" which led to the name. The cafe was in disrepair for many years and reopened in 2001. [ [http://www.frommers.com/destinations/stpetersburgrussia/D56456.html Frommer's review] ]

Run by proprietor Boris Pronin, out of the cellar of the Dashkov mansion. It opened New Year's Eve, 1912 and was shut down by authorities in 1915. Its closing was linked to the start of WWI. A key locale for the followers of the emerging acmeist and futurist literary movements, the Stray Dog clientele rejected the symbolist school of thought.

The previous salon for St. Petersburg poets had been the Tower. This was the apartment of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, who was also responsible for influencing Meyerhold's use of theatre. Many of these poets later became patrons of the Stray Dog.

Poets/performers at the Stray Dog Café included Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolai Gumilev, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Esenin, Mikhail Kuzmin, Osip Mandelstam, and Alexander Blok.

External links

References

2. "The Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems", Translated by Paul Schmidt, Edited by Catherine Ciepiela and Honor Moore, New York Review Books, New York, 2007, [http://www.nyrb.com]