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. The following is part of our World in Paint series. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.On 16th May 1703, Peter the Great stood upon the swampy marshland that flanks the mouth of the River Neva, and said: “Let there be a city here.”1 In the three centuries since, the city named after the Apostle Saint Peter has been called St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and then St. Petersburg again.
The warm-water port, built on the Gulf of Finland at the cost of thousands of lives, was intended to encapsulate the Tsar’s vision for the nascent Russian Empire in city form. Ever since, the great writers and artists that have emerged from that cultural powerhouse have imbued the icy Venice with an almost mythical significance. Something of the “Russian soul”, both the glorious and grotesque, is embodied in dear Piter.
I love the sun, especially the setting March sun in St Petersburg on a clear frosty evening. The whole street is suddenly bathed in brilliant light. All the houses glow. For a time, the grey, yellow and dull green facades lose their drabness; there's a sense of euphoria, of awakening, as though someone had poked you in the ribs. A new vista, new ideas... marvellous what a single ray of sunshine can do to a man’s soul!
1. St. Petersburg - Galleon on the docks — Ivan Aivazovsky (1850)
2. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from The Insulted and Humiliated (1861)
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!... Speaking of capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who “everyone” was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was…
3. Ice-Breakers on the Frozen Neva in St. Petersburg — Ivan Aivazovsky (1877)
4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “White Nights” (1848)
Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog — to the left, to the right, above, below — a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog — heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing — round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown.
5. Schlittenfahrt über die Neva — Joseph Andreas Weiss (1866)
6. Yevgeny Zamyatin, from The Dragon (1968)
Everything can change in Petersburg except its weather. And its light. It’s the northern light, pale and diffused, one in which both memory and eye operate with unusual sharpness. In this light, and thanks to the directness and length of the streets, a walker’s thoughts travel farther than his destination...
7. Moonlit Night on the Neva River — Lev Lagorio (1898)
8. Joseph Brodsky, from Less Than One (1981)
Do you know that, maybe, I shall leave off grieving over the crime and sin of my life? For such a life is a crime and a sin. And do not imagine that I have been exaggerating anything — for goodness’ sake don't think that, Nastenka: for at times such misery comes over me, such misery… Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and easily scared, the slave of shadows, of the idea, the slave of the first cloud that shrouds the sun, and overcasts with depression the true Petersburg heart so devoted to the sun — and what is fancy in depression!
9. View of the Chain Panteleimonovsky Bridge across the Fontanka River — Karl Beggrov after Wilhelm von Tretter (1824)
10. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “White Nights” (1848)
It seemed as though Petersburg threatened to become a wilderness, so that at last I felt ashamed, mortified and sad that I had nowhere to go for the holidays and no reason to go away.
11. The Gallery of the History of Ancient Painting, New Hermitage — Eduard Hau (1859)
12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “White Nights” (1848)
Our capital, so much the younger, Makes ancient Moscow seem faded, As beside a new tsarina, A widowed empress seems jaded. I love you, Peter’s creation, I love you, gracious and austere; The Neva’s powerful libation, Twixt granite banks, so pure and clear; Your cast-iron patterned railings; Your pensive nights of moonless light, Transparent dusk’s endless evenings, When, lamp-less, I yet read and write, While the sleeping buildings show Still, pale, above the streets below, The Admiralty spire still bright; While, granting one half-hour tonight, One half-light yields to another, Refusing to allow the dark Those last gilded clouds to smother, And brightening still the silent park.
13. Smolny as seen from Bolshaya Okhta — Alexey Bogolyubov (1852)
14. Alexander Pushkin, from The Bronze Horseman (1837)
Only skeletons, not people. What will become of us?
15. Defence of Leningrad — Aristarkh Lentulov (1942)
16. Ivan Savinkov, in his diary during the Siege of Leningrad (1941-4)
And Petersburg was left without Akakii Akakievich, as though he had never lived there. A being disappeared, and was hidden, who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, who never even attracted to himself the attention of an observer of nature, who omits no opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly, and examining it under the microscope...
17. Marble Palace in Saint Petersburg — Joseph-Maria Charlemagne-Baudet (1860)
18. Nikolai Gogol, from The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (1836)
Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and I often wander like a shadow, aimless, sad, and dejected, about the streets and crooked lanes of Petersburg.
19. First Snow — Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy (1910)
20. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “White Nights” (1848)
The quickest way from St Petersburg to Kamchatka in furthest Siberia is still often westwards via New York.
21. Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo — Aleksej Gornostaev (1847)
22. Sara Wheeler, from Mud and Stars (1997)
‘A city shall be built to thwart Our haughty neighbour, dwelling near. Nature has destined her to be A window on Europe, while we Shall stand, as firm, beside the wave; And flags of every land shall fly, Offshore, and know the land thereby, That these long-unknown waters lave.’
23. View of the Fontanka River from the Grotto — Grigory Kachalov after Mikhail Makhaev (1753)
24. Alexander Pushkin, from The Bronze Horseman (1837)
That day, he had been ordered to assume supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East. This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father’s flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in his sheepskin coat. He asked my father for a light. The next moment each recognized the other. I hope old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point. What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904–05, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over the frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.
25. View of the Anichkov Bridge and the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace — Joseph-Maria Charlemagne-Baudet (c. 1850s)
26. Vladimir Nabokov, from Speak, Memory: An Autobiography (1951)
For a number of Russian writers and poets, St. Petersburg is a mythical city; to Irène Némirovsky it was nothing more than a collection of dark, snow-covered streets, swept by the icy wind that rose from the disgusting, polluted canals of the Neva.
27. St. Petersburg, Blick auf den Newskiprospekt, Newa und Isaakskathedrale — Franz Kopallik (c. 1889)
28. Introduction to 2004 edition of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (1942)
The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out of town in summer—all worked painfully upon the young man’s already overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed the revolting misery of the picture.
29. View of St. Michael’s Castle — Giacomo Quarenghi (1801)
30. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from Crime and Punishment (1866)
Once [the Senator’s] brain has come into play with the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really does exist: he will not disappear from the Petersburg prospects while a senator with such thoughts exists, because thought, too, exists. And so let our stranger be a real live stranger! And let my stranger’s two shadows be real live shadows! Those dark shadows will follow, they will follow on the stranger’s heels, in the same way as the stranger himself will directly follow the senator; the aged senator will pursue you, he will pursue you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forth you will never forget him!
31. Fire in the Winter Palace 17 December 1837 — Boris Green (1838)
32. Andrei Bely, from Petersburg (1913)
Crimea may have been a senseless war, but it rearranged Europe’s balance of power. Nicholas died in 1855, reputedly of shame over Crimea, to be succeeded by Alexander II (1855–81), a comparative liberal who conceded the final abolition of serfdom. This coincided with an outburst of Russian creativity, as if defeat had induced Russia to join Europe’s cultural community. Tolstoy fought at Crimea and brought the vastness of Russia into the drawing rooms of Europe. Dostoevsky brought its moral complexities. Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgski and Borodin and, soon after, the dramatist Chekhov were among Europe’s most inventive and popular artists. Alexander’s Moscow did not become a second Rome, but St Petersburg (Russia’s capital from 1712 to 1918) became a second Paris.
33. Saint Petersburg (Russia) — Э. И. Бушман (1880s)
34. Simon Jenkins, from A Short History of Europe: From Pericles to Putin (2018)
It ended by my almost believing (perhaps actually believing) that this was perhaps my normal condition. But at first, in the beginning, what agonies I endured in that struggle! I did not believe it was the same with other people, and all my life I hid this fact about myself as a secret. I was ashamed (even now, perhaps, I am ashamed): I got to the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, acutely conscious that that day I had committed a loathsome action again, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnawing, gnawing at myself for it, tearing and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and at last—into positive real enjoyment! Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment! I insist upon that. I have spoken of this because I keep wanting to know for a fact whether other people feel such enjoyment? I will explain; the enjoyment was just from the too intense consciousness of one’s own degradation; it was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
35. Universitetskaya Embankment — Joseph-Maria Charlemagne-Baudet (c. 19th century)
36. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “Notes from the Underground” (1864)
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career.
37. Interiors of the Winter Palace. Avantsalle — Konstantin Ukhtomsky (1861)
38. Pat Conroy (c. 21st century)
For over two centuries (or so historians tell us), it was from the St. Petersburg salons that our country’s culture advanced. From those great rooms overlooking the Fontanka Canal, new cuisines, fashions, and ideas all took their first tentative steps into Russian society.
39. Arch of General Stuff Building — Vasily Sadovnikov (1838-1845)
40. Amor Towles, from A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)
The road that brought Gogol from the depths of Little Russia intersected with Nevsky Prospect, “all-powerful Nevsky Prospect,” in the heart of the capital. His art was born at that crossroads. It had the provinces in its blood, as Andrei Sinyavsky puts it, in two senses: because Little Russia supplied the setting and material for more than half of his tales, and, more profoundly, because even in Petersburg, Gogol preserved a provincial’s “naive, external, astonished and envious outlook.” He did not write from within Ukrainian popular tradition, he wrote looking back at it.
41. Nevsky Prospect — Ludwig Bohnstedt (1850)
42. Richard Pevear’s “Introduction” to Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol (1835)
Petersburg, Petersburg! Wrapping yourself in fog, you have haunted me with a cerebral game. Cruel tormentor and restless phantom! For years you have attacked me: I fled on the terrible prospects, to enter in one leap on this glittering bridge…
43. View of the Kazan Cathedral — Maxim Vorobiev (1810)
44. Andrei Bely, from Petersburg (1913)
Petersburg was more than a city. It was a vast, almost utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man.
45. Palace Square, Saint Petersburg — Vasily Sadovnikov (c. 1847)
46. Orlando Figes, from Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (2002)
In his Petersburg world people were divided into two quite opposite sorts. One — the inferior sort: the paltry, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people who believe that a husband should live with the one wife to whom he is married, that a girl should be pure, a woman modest, and a man, manly, self controlled and firm; that one should bring up one’s children to earn their living, should pay one’s debts, and other nonsense of the kind. These were the old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another sort of people: the real people to which all his set belonged, who had above all to be well-bred, generous, bold, gay, and to abandon themselves unblushingly to all their passions and laugh at everything else.
47. Interiors of the Winter Palace. Concerthall — Konstantin Ukhtomsky (1860s)
48. Leo Tolstoy, from Anna Karenina (1878)
…in St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city in the entire world.
49. Sailing boat at sunset on the gulf of Finland — Ivan Fedorovich Choultsé (1916)
50. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “Notes from the Underground” (1864)
Or so the story goes; it’s probable that he wasn’t even present when the city was founded.
It is interesting to see how many traces of Peter’s city could be found during our visits almost 30 years ago. When we toured the museum exhibit of life sized dioramas of the WW2 defense of the city I was realized that I had stood on the very spot in the city now recreated in the room I had just entered.
It is so strange to read the russian words I grew up with in English. Thank you for sharing!