There are two conflicting statues of Tsar Peter the Great in St. Petersburg, a city he founded from scratch almost exactly three centuries ago. The first, sculpted by the Frenchman Étienne-Maurice Falconet in 1778, unveiled in 1782, and immortalized by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman, is one of the most famous of all equestrian statues. It shows the young tsar in his virile prime, easily managing the proudly prancing horse, one commanding arm raised in the direction of the Baltic Sea. The statue stands exuberantly beside the Neva River, and in its infectious energy it seems to express all that Peter intended for his city: that it should be Russia’s open door to the West, a declaration of modernity, a symbolical fresh start for a country emerging out of the fogs and forests of Asiatic medievalism.
To stand beside the Bronze Horseman now, on a day of sun and ice, while merry children slither about on the half-frozen grass and Peter’s 18th-century capital glitters all around with yellow paint and gilding—to loiter there now is to share a little of his brilliant dream and to feel that perhaps the city really has at last pulled itself clear of those smoky, clanging, bloody, and secretive centuries of the Old Russia.
The other statue of Peter offers very different symbolisms. This one, sculpted in 1991 by the Russian émigré Mikhail Shemyakin, stands a mile or so upstream, within the island fortress of Saints Peter and Paul—a place profoundly imbued with death and old tyranny. It presents a more elderly tsar, sitting stiffly in a chair, his long fingers like talons on its arms. His head is grotesquely too small for his body, his expression is one of sullen defiance, and he suggests to me a war criminal refusing to admit his guilt before some international tribunal.
In the course of the creation of his new capital, several hundred thousand of Peter’s subjects lost their lives to exhaustion and disease, and the tsar personally tortured his own dissident son Aleksey before having him put to death. But Shemyakin’s statue seems to imply more even than that. It seems to be telling us that the dark influences of barbaric Russia survived Peter the Great, and that, far from reaching out joyously toward the open seas, St. Petersburg never did overcome the pull of the Russian past, with its peasant superstitions and its executioners. You might not think it, though, if you simply wandered around the superb showplaces here—the idealization of a cultivated European city, born indeed out of despotism but apotheosized by all the artistry of 18th-century Western civilization. Cool, correct, patrician, the palaces and offices of Peter’s capital line the rivers and canals of its archipelago in majestic balance, linked by myriad bridges. Here the home of a prince, here the headquarters of a great navy or a stately ballet theater or a school for the daughters of the nobility or a stable for the horses of the tsar’s guard. St. Petersburg was to keep this imperial style and purpose until the Russian Revolution of 1917, and on the right day, in the right mood, it is still all too easy to fancy it haunted by the ghosts of its lost aristocracy.
Walk across the immense Palace Square beside the Winter Palace early in the morning, when there is nobody about. Do you not hear the stamp of guardsmen and the barked commands of Tolstoy’s young counts and princes? Walk up the grand staircase of the Russian Museum, in the former palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, and can’t you see the powdered footmen lining the stairs and hear the rustle of satin? It would be a dull visitor who did not imagine troikas dashing through the trees of Kamenny Island from one fanciful pleasure pavilion to the next, with a ringing of bells and laughter from rug-wrapped young passengers. Look at that slender woman walking across the Troitsky Bridge, with her long red military coat, her stylishly tilted fur hat, and her air of assured self-discipline. Is she not obviously the descendant of some dispossessed prince rather than a daughter of the 20th-century proletariat?
She has been walking across that bridge, one feels, for a couple of hundred years, and the view from it might have been designed specifically as a setting for her. It is one of the most truly regal prospects in all Europe—a vast watery basin surrounded on every side by buildings of well-bred scale and composure. Two slim golden pinnacles punctuate the scene, one on each side of the river, and on an island in midstream a structure like a Greek temple presides over the waters (or the ice, for several months of every year).
Nothing could look less natural than this splendid vista. It is like a celestial reservoir. Everything about it is calculated and contrived, from the majestic parade of waterfront palaces to the granite embankments that hold the Neva in check. But then, half the meaning of St. Petersburg is in its artificiality. This is not one of your organic cities, growing down the ages out of immemorial settlements. There was nothing here but marshland when Peter, allegedly grabbing a sword from one of his soldiers, cut a cross in the soggy turf and declared, “Here we will build our city!”
From the numbered lanes of Vasilevsky Island (laid out in a meticulous grid) to the boulevard of Moskovsky Prospekt (six miles straight as a die into the heart of town), all is rigid and mannered like a French classical garden. Or perhaps, more pertinently, like a minuet, for its formality is the style of a royal court. Some of the grandest of all court balls were held in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, and, as sometimes happens around an overwhelming authority, a marvelous culture of literature, art, and music flourished—sometimes in subservience to the regime, sometimes in opposition to it, but fired by the very existence of that fabulous incubus ensconced so prodigiously at the center of everything.
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