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Tikhvin Cemetery () is a historic cemetery in the centre of Saint Petersburg. It is part of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and is one of four cemeteries in the complex. Since 1932 it has been part of the , which refers to it as the Necropolis of the Masters of Art ().
Opened in 1823 after the monastery's first cemetery, the Lazarevskoe, had become overcrowded, the cemetery was initially called the "New Lazarevsky". It acquired its name after the building of its cemetery church, consecrated to the icon of the Tikhvin Mother of God. It soon superseded the Lazarevskoe Cemetery and became a popular and prestigious burial ground. The first literary figure, Nikolay Karamzin, was buried in the cemetery in 1826, followed in 1833 by Nikolay Gnedich, an associate of Alexander Pushkin. Several other friends of Pushkin were later buried in the cemetery. Particularly significant interments were those of Mikhail Glinka in 1857, Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1881, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin in the 1880s, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1893.
During the Soviet period the cemetery was earmarked for development into a museum necropolis, envisaged primarily as a landscaped park, with strategically placed memorials to important figures of Russian history. With several notable artists having already been buried in the cemetery, it was decided to designate it as the "Necropolis of the Masters of Art". During the 1930s many important Russian composers, painters, sculptors, writers and poets were exhumed from their original resting places across the city, and brought, with or without their monuments, to be reburied in the Tikhvin cemetery. At the same time the monuments of those figures deemed not in keeping with the artistic theme of the cemetery were removed or destroyed. Several more burials of particularly important artists took place during the Soviet period, as the cemetery established a role as a kind of national .
By the beginning of the 20th century the Tikhvin cemetery contained 1,325 monuments of various designs and sizes, including monumental crosses on pedestals, sarcophagi and . There were several family plots with chapels and large crypts of granite and marble.
the Tikhvin cemetery and the Literary Walk in ... after the reconstruction will be turned into necropolis parks of a remarkable and revolutionary culture, with the appearance of parks. Freed from ordinary graves, they will not be of a graveyard nature at all, but will actually represent extensive, architecturally decorated green spaces, sometimes decorated with certain monuments standing on the graves above these wonderful people.The short timeframe allowed for completion of the work led to the hasty and unsystematic demolition of a number of monuments, with the bulk of the work only being completed by August 1937, with remedial work continuing for many years afterwards.
The reconstruction radically altered the nature and appearance of the Tikhvin cemetery. With the intention being to create an "artists' necropolis", graves of those from other sections of society were removed. Fewer than a hundred of the original monuments were preserved. Some were transferred to the neighbouring "Necropolis of the XVIII century", the former Lazarevskoe Cemetery, while others, including those of Aleksandr Gradovsky, Anatoly Koni and Viktor Pashutin, were transferred to the other museum necropolis being established in the Volkov Cemetery. Meanwhile, the remains of prominent artists, sculptors, composers and musicians were reburied in the cemetery. Among them were personal friends of Pushkin, including Konstantin Danzas, Anton Delvig, and Fyodor Matyushkin. Some remains came from cemeteries earmarked for demolition, such as the , , and ; and others from those that were intended to be kept open, such as the Smolensky, Volkovo Cemetery, Novodevichy, and Nikolskoe cemeteries. The necropolis was created during an ongoing anti-religious campaign, therefore monuments with religious symbols were often replaced by monuments made by the museum.
The cemetery reconstruction project concentrated the representatives of each type of art together, with even monuments that had been in the Tikhvin originally being moved to fit the new organisational scheme. Composers and musicians were reburied mainly on the "Composer's path", near the northern boundary of the cemetery. Painters and sculptors were placed in the western part, while those who in their lifetimes had been associated with Pushkin were placed close to the eastern section, near the cemetery entrance. Some of the older monuments from the removed graves were retained to serve as decorative ornaments, such as columns placed at the intersection of avenues. The decoration of the park-necropolis was to be enhanced by the construction of one large and four small fountains, and the installation of granite benches. The Tikhvin Church was slated for demolition to improve the access direct from Alexander Nevsky Square. The organisers were faced with the problem that despite designating the cemetery to be the artists' necropolis, historically the Tikhvin had primarily been the burial ground of statesmen, military leaders, scientists, and composers. There were relatively few graves of writers, who had tended to prefer the Smolensky Cemetery; or artists, who had traditionally chosen the Nikolskoe or Novodevichy Cemetery. This necessitated the transfer of a large number of burials and monuments, which took place in two main periods, from 1936 to 1941 and from 1948 to 1952. During the Second World War and the siege of Leningrad, the museum worked to provide protection and shelter for monuments. Only a single gravestone was damaged, that of the actress Varvara Asenkova. The monument, designed by , consisted of a granite canopy over a pedestal with a verse epitaph and bronze bust of the actress by Ivan Vitali and had been transferred along with the actress's remains from the Smolensky Cemetery in 1936. It was destroyed by a direct hit from a bomb in 1943. In 1955 the museum installed a marble replica of the bust made by D.A. Sprishinym. Other monuments were stored in the Lavra's Annunciation Church.
Restoration work began immediately after the end of the war, with the necropolis-museum opening in August 1947. The programme of moving and installing monuments resumed after the war and continued until the mid-1950s. There were also several burials of prominent Soviet citizens, as the cemetery gained the status of an urban . Those buried here included the scientist Sergey Lebedev in 1934, artist Mikhail Avilov in 1954, and actor Nikolay Cherkasov in 1966. In 1972 the remains of the composer Alexander Glazunov were transferred from Paris. In 1968 Fyodor Dostoevsky's wife Anna Dostoevskaya was reburied next to her husband, while theatre director Georgy Tovstonogov was interred in the cemetery in 1989. So far Tovstonogov's has been the last burial to take place in the cemetery.
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