1 · Position
Opened in spring 2006 on the Shchukin stage of the Hermitage Theatre, in the Hermitage Garden at Karetny Ryad 3 — ground that had held Moscow’s theatrical life since the nineteenth century, when it belonged to the merchant V. Ya. Shchukin. It was the permanent successor to a run of seasonal club projects — Leto, Osen, Zima — by Alexey Gorobiy and Sinisa Lazarevic. Gorobiy had begun with raves and the democratic Penthouse in the same garden in the 1990s, and opened Shambala on Kuznetsky Most in 2001, which the Russian press calls the founding house of Moscow glamour.
2 · ⚑ It was built to be a theatre, and that is the entry
Royal boxes were hung above the dance floor in the manner of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; the walls were painted baroque; a lift carried guests to the upper tiers; there was a full stage for live performance. The bars sold no beer. Contemporary reporting concluded that the place read less as a nightclub than as an actual theatre — and one account describes it as built to be something between a theatre and a circus. The register holds no other nightclub designed as a playhouse for an audience that came to be the performance.
3 · ⚑ What it was for
The Russian press is unusually direct about it: the decadence of nouveaux riches who wanted to feel like aristocrats. Gold lavatories in the box cloakrooms, a cable car under the ceiling. Enrique Iglesias, Shakira and Christina Aguilera appeared; so did the Forbes list. The Library records the description because it is the sharpest statement in this Part of what a room can be sold as — and because the house’s own city wrote it, not a foreign observer.
4 · The fire
On 7 February 2008 a fire was reported at 11.30 in the morning; by 11.40 it was given the third of five grades of difficulty. About 1,500 square metres burned — timber walls and the floors between storeys of the historic Shchukin stage. Fifteen appliances attended with a K-32 helicopter and a water-discharge unit, and the emergencies minister Sergei Shoigu came to the scene. One person was hurt and nobody was killed. The cause is given as a probable short circuit in the basement wiring. A tea house, a coffee house and a second club, Parisian Life, shared the building.
5 · ⚑ It was going to close anyway
RBC reported that closure of the project had been planned for April of that year. The fire came in February. A Russian account puts it plainly: Dyagilev burned in 2008 and thereby ended the era of Moscow glamour in one sentence — but the record shows the era was already scheduled to end six weeks later, and the Library keeps both facts in the same paragraph rather than the tidier one alone.
6 · Candour
⚑ The date of the fire is given as 7 February in four accounts and as 8 February in one; the Library carries the earlier, which the emergency-service times support. Sources disagree on whether one person was injured. ⚑ Alexey Gorobiy is not in Part IX and on the register’s own test he belongs there: a promoter who made a category of room that a city then copied is an author. Nothing here establishes what stands on the site now, or who owned the club.