Stray Dog Café

The Stray Dog was a cafe located at Mikhailovckaya Ploshchad, 5, Square of the Arts up to Summer Gardens, St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Stray Dog Café was a meeting place for writers and poets between 1911 and 1915. The Acmeist poets gathered there to discuss theories of literature, give poetry readings, and perform theatre. They considered themselves "'stray dogs' shunted aside by proper aristocratic society", which led to the name. The cafe was in disrepair for many years and reopened in 2001.Run by proprietor Boris Pronin, out of the cellar of the Dashkov mansion, it opened New Year's Eve, 1911 and was shut down by the authorities in 1915. Its closing was linked to the start of World War I. A key locale for the followers of the emerging acmeist and futurist literary movements, the Stray Dog clientele rejected the symbolist school of thought.