the chief designer, "amazingly appearing at the right time in the right place to create the atmosphere of a 'grand style' theatre". The company, leaning towards classical works, earned cash through "lightweight" melodramas like Alexey Tolstoy's 1925 Conspiring Empress, also designed by Shchuko, that became a long-running hit. Shchuko productions of the Civil War period (1919 Don Carlos, 1920 Othello and Arvid Järnefelt's Destruction of Jerusalem) preceded the monumental stereotypes of social realism of 1930s-1940s, however, starting with the 1921 Twelfth Night he reduced the apparent size and grandeur of his stage sets. Shchuko frequently employed theatre designer Orest Allegri, famous for his inventive handling of perspective illusion. Contemporary critics rate the 1919 Don Carlos as the artist's highest mark in theatre. In 1925-1927 Shchuko also designed a series of Der Ring des Nibelungen opera shows and a ballet at Mariinsky Theatre. After relocation to Moscow in the end of the 1920s, Shchuko collaborated with Bolshoi Theatre and Maly Theatre, producing the 1937 Boris Godunov. Modernism to Stalinism Vladimir Gelfreikh, Shchuko's junior partner in the Soviet period, graduated from the same Academy class of Leon Benois in 1914. Their first extant practical work, the reconstruction of the square in front of the Smolny Institute, was executed in 1923–1924. In 1925 Shchuko designed the pedestal and architectural setting for Sergey Evseyev's iconic "Lenin on Top of an Armored Car" monument on the Finland Station square. The monument was clearly designed "to provide a counterpoint to the statue of Peter the Great, the Bronze Horseman". The Evseyev-Shchuko monument was the first one to establish a "canonical" image of Lenin and was widely repeated,; it turned out to be the architect's last notable work in Saint Petersburg. The second half of the 1920s was marked by high-profile architectural contests dominated by modernist architects. Shchuko and Gelfreikh lost the Kyiv Passenger Railway Station contest to Pavel Alyoshin and Andrey Verbitsky, but in 1928 secured a winning bid on the contest to design the Lenin Library in Moscow. The initial draft comprised a complex network of low-rise buildings facing Mokhovaya Street and a π-shaped high-rise tower of the main depository at the back of the block. Construction commenced in 1930 and was substantially complete in 1941; expansions continued into the 1970s. The built structure disposed with the complexity of the original proposal; the depository, completed in 1941, is a plain 19-floor elongated slab. Among many