Samson Fountain

Peterhof's highest jet bursts from a lion's mouth and rises almost twenty meters above the bronze figure at the center of the Grand Cascade. The biblical strongman pries open the lion's jaws, and the subject links the victory at Poltava with Saint Sampson's feast day: contemporaries saw this hero in Peter the First, while the lion repeated the symbol of the Swedish coat of arms. Under the pressure of water, the lead sculpture lost its shape and was replaced with bronze. Fountain workers still start the water jet by hand from the western side of the cascade.

After Peterhof was liberated, museum staff saw an empty pedestal at the center of the Grand Cascade. The heavy bronze Samson had not been evacuated before the occupation: it was surrounded with sandbags and covered with boards. In the autumn of nineteen forty-two, the sculpture was taken away. Its subsequent fate is unknown; most likely, the bronze was melted down.

The vanished figure was one in which every movement formed part of a historical code. Samson and Saint Sampson the Hospitable are different people. The Battle of Poltava took place on Saint Sampson's feast day, while Peter the First was compared by his contemporaries to the biblical Samson, who defeated a lion. The lion appeared on the Swedish coat of arms. These three coincidences were brought together in one group: a man pries open an animal's mouth, and Peterhof's highest jet bursts from it. In seventeen thirty-five, the sculptor Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli made Samson from lead. The lead gradually deformed under the water, and in eighteen oh two Mikhail Kozlovsky replaced it with a bronze figure. It was this figure that disappeared during the war.

Its restoration was entrusted to Vasily Simonov, a professor who taught sculpture and headed the department at the Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Design. His task was almost impossible: to recreate the famous three-meter statue without the original, precise measurements, or complete images from every side. Any mistake would be visible in the most prominent place in the entire cascade, and it would be judged as the work of a department head.

Simonov studied Kozlovsky's drawings and his other works, but this was not enough to establish the exact pose. Then newspapers and radio broadcasts asked residents to send in prewar photographs and postcards of Samson. People took pictures from family albums—most often amateur snapshots made while walking in the park. Simonov selected successful angles, transferred the figure's outlines onto transparent sheets, and overlaid them on an image of his model. If the lines did not match, he reworked the clay. That is how other people's vacation photographs became a measuring tool.

In less than a year, he made sketches, a life-size clay figure, and then a plaster model. At the beginning of August nineteen forty-seven, it was delivered to the Monumentskulptura Plant. Only a few weeks remained before the scheduled opening; casters and chasers worked eighteen hours a day. Simonov himself considered the statue unfinished, but the deadline was not postponed.

The bronze group, weighing about five tons, was transported to Peterhof standing on an open platform. The route was supposed to run along side streets, but the vehicle came out onto Nevsky Prospect. Police officers stopped traffic, passersby gathered around, and soldiers saluted the statue. At the basin, workers raised the figure onto the pedestal with hand-operated hoists. The water was turned on September fourteenth.

Fountain workers still start this water jet by hand from the western part of the Grand Cascade. The jet from the lion's mouth rises about twenty meters above Samson, which Simonov had not had time to finish to his own standard of completion. Kozlovsky's figure vanished; since nineteen forty-seven, a bronze silhouette, checked against photographs from family albums, has stood in its place.