Poles left a significant mark on the architecture of St Petersburg in the mid-19th - early 20th centuries. On Nevsky Prospekt alone, the city's main thoroughfare, there are more than a dozen buildings whose creators or co-developers were Polish architects. One of them was the professor of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts Rudolf Zheleziewicz - the author of the design of the "Passage", a modern glazed shopping mall that also served as a cultural and entertainment centre, a unique solution for the time.

Modern department store
Two connected plots of land, located between Nevsky Prospekt (No. 48) and the parallel Italiańska Street, were purchased in 1845 by Count Yakov Essen Stenbock-Fermor for the construction of the Passage, a new type of department store modelled on similar buildings in London and Paris. The design was entrusted to a Pole, Rudolf Zelaziewicz. The building was constructed between 1846 and 1848, with two 180-metre-long, symmetrically located three-storey galleries. The passageway between them was covered by a steel and glass roof, integrating the interior and also being a source of light. Shops occupied the two lower floors, the third floor was used for flats, and the ground floor was used for warehouses and foodstuffs. The main façade on the prospect side was in the Neo-Renaissance style.

The dozens of shops mainly traded in expensive clothing, jewellery and other luxury goods. Due to the exorbitant prices of women's clothes, imported straight from Paris, the name "Death to Husbands" was attached to the "Passage". This was no ordinary department store. According to the owner's idea, the Passage became a centre of cultural and social life. What wasn't there - not only restaurants, cafés, the Credit Lyonnais bank (the only foreign bank operating in Russia at the time), but also a hotel, a cinematograph, exhibition halls, a cabaret, an anatomy museum, a cabinet of wax figures. A concert hall was set up on the side of Italia Street, where the most eminent Russian and European artists performed. Prominent composers performing in the Passage included Ferenc Lehár, Alexander Glazunov and Stanislav Moniuszko, as evidenced by a plaque on the façade of the building.

Cultural functions
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, public lectures, readings and discussions began to be organised in the concert hall. Literary evenings were also held. The first of these was opened by Ivan Turgenev on 10 January 1860. Subsequent participants included: Nikolai Nekrasov, Alexander Ostrovsky, Taras Shevchenko and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The latter made the Passage famous by setting the plot of a satirical short story entitled, in Polish translation, Crocodile: An Unusual Occurrence or Accident in the Passage, a true story of how a certain gentleman was swallowed alive, whole, without remainder, by a crocodile in the Passage and what ensued (translated by Władysław Broniewski).

The address Nevsky Prospekt 48 also has other literary connotations. It entered the history of St Petersburg in the first half of the 19th century as the home of Georges d'Anthès, the man who took the life of Alexander Pushkin in a duel.

The original design of the "Passage" has not survived. The building was rebuilt by Sergey Kozlov in 1898-1900, with one floor added, the façade redesigned in the spirit of eclecticism and faced with sandstone from the Radomsko area. In 1902, the concert hall was converted into a theatre. Today it is the home of the V.F. Komissarzevskaya Academic Drama Theatre. "Passage" still functions as a luxury shopping mall today.

Architect Rudolf Żelaziewicz
. The creator of the edifice, Rudolf Zheleziewicz (1811-1874), was born in Warsaw and was an architect of the department of military settlements in the Kingdom of Poland. He then moved to St Petersburg, where he taught, among other things, the theory of building art at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He went down in the history of Russian railways as the author of the model stations along the St Petersburg-Moscow railway line. Together with the eminent architect Konstantin Thon, he was the creator of the Moscow (former Nikolaevsky) railway station building, erected between 1844 and 1851. In St Petersburg, Zhelezievich also designed the building housing the police station with jail and fire station at Fontanka quay in the Fourth Admiralty (Kolomna) district and the headquarters of the Pavlov Institute for Orphaned Girls on Uprising Street.