Wherever you go in St. Petersburg today you are reminded of the emperors and princes, but you are never far from the artists, either. Pushkin went to his fatal duel from what is now the Literary Cafe, on Nevsky Prospekt. Dostoyevsky languished in the prison fortress of Saints Peter and Paul. Turgenev and Tchaikovsky both stayed at the Grand Hotel. Chekhov ran humiliated from the Aleksandrinsky Theater when its audience jeered The Seagull. Nijinsky and Pavlova learned to dance at the Imperial Ballet School.
The characters of classic Russian novels also frequent these streets: sallow-faced youths who might conceal bombs beneath their threadbare coats, tight-buttoned petty bureaucrats, suspicious landladies peering out of curtained windows, raffish intellectuals lively with vodka in cellar cafés. When one day I slipped on the ice and fell headlong into the slushy mud of Sennaya Square, I comforted myself with the knowledge that only a few yards away the murderer Raskolnikov had knelt to kiss the filthy ground in rapture.
On line for a ticket at the Hermitage Museum one morning, an elderly Russian woman asked me if I would look after her granddaughter while she went with some urgency to the lavatory. The little girl and I shared hardly a syllable of common language. Sixty-five years of history divided us, and several degrees of latitude. But all around us is Europe, the style of the courtly memories, the great names of art and literature, the common references that make an encounter with an educated stranger—or, by association, the grandchild of such a stranger—in St. Petersburg hardly a meeting with a foreigner at all. As Grandma disappeared hastily into the crowd, the girl and I smiled shyly at each other. Old Peter might have been gratified by our rapport.
To my mind there is just one thing that mars that spectacular view from the Troitsky Bridge: When the tide is high it can look as though the whole wide Neva basin is about to overflow—a certain vulgar excess of effect that is not at all in keeping with the restraint of that passing princess. It is an excess symptomatic of Peter’s city. He overdid everything (being over seven feet tall himself), and the taste for gigantism survived him.
If there is too much water in the Neva, there is too much of almost everything else here. The palaces are too big, and there are too many of them. The vistas are too grand. There are too many rooms at the Winter Palace, where in the heyday of the Romanov tsars several thousand guests used to waltz the night away at imperial balls. There are too many gaudy onion domes at the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. There are specimens of 15 million species in the Zoological Museum and 800,000 items in the Naval Museum. St. Isaac’s Cathedral can hold over 10,000 people, and the Hermitage Museum possesses 17,000 paintings, 12,000 sculptures, 600,000 drawings, and 300,000 items of applied arts. One could almost say that this city, the very epitome of royal privilege, shows some of the prime characteristics of the nouveau riche.
But no, not quite. It is not mere jumped-up grandiloquence. Something deeper and profounder swells the personality of this terrific place and makes it rise above the fripperies of monarchy. Something that shows in that second statue of Peter the Great, in the old fortress where the remains of all but two of the tsars lie in their tombs, where generations of revolutionaries wasted away in windowless dungeons or were marched through the Nevsky water gate to dreadful exile. There is nothing graceful about Shemyakin’s Peter. His fingers claw the chair in a predatory way, and his coarse face stares, expressionless, ahead, as though to face down his accusers. He looks less the pioneering builder-king of legend than a vengeful troll—a disturbing personification, in fact, of the same Old Russia he sought to supersede.
They call this a city of light, and its set pieces are indeed airy exhibitions, almost levitational—floating there above the mists of autumn or winter’s icy glitter. But between and behind its luminosity, shadows are murky. Step away from the picturesque canals and the boulevards, venture along any potholed backstreet, sidle through some shabby, peeling gateway into the rubbish-strewn courtyard beyond, and it is there that the second Peter awaits you. Persecution, oppression, war, exile, sacrifice and heroism, starvation, cruel deceptions, and hard, hard labor—these are the real stuff of St. Petersburg behind the fairy-tale façades. Even the most heavenly civic views are, somewhere in the background, marred by factory chimneys smoking or dockyard cranes swinging. And around the city the ranked tenement buildings of Communism stand like gloomy ramparts.
Pushkin saw the Bronze Horseman not only as a symbol of hope and excitement but also as an awful image of authority. In the very square in which it stands, the aristocratic revolutionaries known as the Decembrists were gunned down in 1825 so mercilessly by the forces of a later tsar that, as was said at the time, “you could hear blood streaming along the streets.” On and off, blood was to stream down the St. Petersburg gutters for another century, reaching a ghastly flood tide in 1941, when the Nazis fruitlessly besieged the city for 900 days, killing or starving to death 660,000 of its people.
At heart, this is a grim, terrible, and heroic city, not a courtly place at all, not a place for tulle and court chamberlains but rather for Shostakoviches, Raskolnikovs, commissars, and unbending generals. Nowadays the trendy names of capitalism are splashed along Nevsky Prospekt—the best-known street in all Russia and one of the great thoroughfares of the world—but the sturdy crowds that swarm and saunter up and down the prospect are crowds no European city sees. Faces of Finns and Mongols; fur-capped, greatcoated soldiery and squat, thuggish policemen; babushkas in head scarves and wrinkled leather boots; slinky entrepreneurs with mobile telephones; beggarwomen clutching obscenely prettified poodles; street artists and pie sellers; jazz buskers and peddlers of kittens and puppies. It is hardly what Peter the Great had in mind when he created his open door to the West, and to the world.
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