At the very beginning of Sovetskaya Street there is a large, remarkable brick house. On the door canopy you can see a monogram of two letters "R", "W". These are the initials of the owner of the house - Robert Weiss, a Baltic German who lived in our city for many years. On the first floor of the house there was a drugstore, and on the second floor - the owner's apartment. A bright, clean, really shiny apartment, about which local housewives said: "So clean, really foreign". The dining room balcony overlooked the Vorona River and the high mountain covered with oak forest behind it. Here, on the balcony, so many evenings, endless stories over a bottle of beer. Weiss was a man with an average education, but a great culture. He knew Russia, he knew foreign countries, he knew famous doctors, professors, read a lot in Russian and German. His wife Polina Yegorovna was a model wife, mother, housewife. Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky, who was friends with the Weiss family, compared his memories of their home to a glass of cold water on a hot, dusty day. It was a real communication, both spiritual and emotional. The Weiss family had four sons. Prince Volkonsky recalled a short episode that depicts the spiritual level at which these children grew up. Once, over tea, Volkonsky told his parents about the ring he wore on his left hand, a ring that belonged to Pushkin. There was a lottery in the house of Raevsky's great-grandfather, Pushkin put the ring down, and Sergei Mikhailovich's grandmother, Maria Nikolaevna, won. His father gave it to Sergei Mikhailovich when he graduated from high school. A few days later, they were sitting in the living room. Little Zhenya sat on Volkonsky's lap and played with the prince's ring, which he wore on his other hand - a large ring with a seal. And suddenly the boy asked: "And do you have this from Lermontov?" Later, Zhenya was a doctor somewhere in Siberia. The eldest, Karlusha, was also a doctor in the Far East. The third, Georgy, was a teacher of mathematics and German at the Borisoglebsk gymnasium: a noble man, with some kind of wild honesty - one of those whom scoundrels should hate. The last time Volkonsky saw him, he was almost a beggar in Tambov, where he, like the prince, fled from Borisoglebsk. That's the kind of family they had.
The main house (pharmacy) is a two-story building with a semi-basement, made of facing brickwork. The rectangular volume on the courtyard side is complemented by two risalits of stairwells - in the center of the facade and from the east. There are 2 balconies on the main and western facades. The laconic decorative solution of the facades is made in the North German brick style. The floors are divided by a raised cornice. The window sills of the first and second floors embrace the building from the south, west and east. The single-axis sections flanking the main facade are raised, their corners are highlighted with rustication. The windows are rectangular in rusticated platbands, on the second floor of the main facade - with straight sandriks. The piers of the first floor are also rusticated. The windows of the stairwells (on the northern facade) are large with gently sloping arched lintels. Above the main entrance, a metal gable canopy on openwork brackets and with an openwork tympanum has been preserved. The rapport of the brackets and the pediment includes spirals, as well as the owner's monogram. The balconies rest on the same brackets.
Inside the building, a load-bearing wall separates the front and trading halls (from the street side) from the service and living rooms (from the courtyard side), and transverse load-bearing walls limit the stairwells in the eastern and central parts of the building. In the semi-basement, there are reinforced concrete wavy floors.
The laboratory building is rectangular in plan, brick, with a figured mansard roof, built in 1914. It is located perpendicular to the main house. The decorative finish is laconic. The southern entrance part of the western facade is highlighted by blades, turning into an arch at the top. With the exception of this part, the entire building is covered by a frieze with square panels. The windows are large, rectangular. The interior space is divided by transverse walls into three groups of rooms: the entrance, production halls and rooms.
The warehouse building is rectangular in plan, two-story, brick, with a mansard roof, stands parallel to the pharmacy. The half-timbered system is used in the construction of the walls of the second floor: wooden load-bearing beams, in the spaces between which, probably, brickwork was later included. The openings are rectangular, an extension ladder leads to the second floor. Inside, on the first floor there are a number of storage rooms, and the second floor is a single space.
Now the main brick building houses the Borisoglebsk Historical and Art Museum. Its halls house a modern interactive exhibition, “Siberian Corridor,” a story about the famous Decembrist Volkonsky and his grandson, a world-famous cultural figure who left a bright mark on the history of the city.