The essay addresses the aspects of heritagization of St. Petersburg history, analyzing the myth of the city’s foundation from the perspective of the role of emotions and mind in the production of its urban space. I turn to the guidebooks published in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth- to early twentieth centuries to explore the paths that the heritagization took in order to construct the narrative and the image of the former Russian capital.

In this essay, I reflect on a strategy of the renaming of urban spaces and of their architectural objects, which was widely used by the young Soviet state after the 1917 Revolution. On one side, renaming was an old tradition used around the world to commemorate the appropriation of new lands. On the other, Bolsheviks applied an innovative approach to the use of this tradition in order to introduce the heritage of the defeated past as an achievement of their succeeded present. I focus specifically on the destiny of St. Petersburg, the former capital of the Russian Empire, which name had been changed several times throughout the twentieth century. St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a “window to the West,” taking the course to the Europeanization of Russia. From the start, St. Petersburg claimed its hospitality to international entrepreneurs who, since the city’s early years, had been settling on the banks of the Neva River, building factories and plants, boosting the technological development of the Russian Empire. After the Bolshevik Revolution, all private industries in Russia were nationalized, and previous owners were deprived of their rights to ownership. The state re-named each and every inherited industrial object to erase any records of their origins and their history to re-introduce them as the products of the new regime.

The present article aims at giving a brief introduction to the Nobel family’s living in Russia and to the generally unknown architectural heritage in St. Petersburg that Nobels had left before fleeing the country after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and that still exists in a rather neglected state. This heritage resembles and symbolises many Nobel’s technological and social inventions that were complexly applied to the overall improvement of the average peoples’ everyday life through the development of the new type of housing for the workers – the so-called Nobel’s worker’s town.

I touch upon the themes of creativity and intelligence, fantasies and materialisation of utopian dreams that were defining features of several generations of the Nobels through the case of the family’s Russian period. To think on where fantasies of the seemingly pragmatic entrepreneurs and serious scientists had brought them and how their heritage had become a subject to oblivion on one side and an object of universal appreciation on the other, I trace the destiny of Nobels’ architectural heritage formed in St. Petersburg by Swedish and German architects. This urban heritage is a part of the creative outcome of intellectual work ongoing within the family and a bitter symbol of efforts to materialise their “fantasy” of developing the system of “social responsibility”, which, as they believed, could sustain and revitalise another fantasy – the successful existence of the so-called “fair capitalism.