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.
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.
But for me, in the year 2003, it is one of the most moving, most interesting of city highways, and that is perhaps because after so many years of harsh experiment the people of this city have reconciled themselves to synthesis. The two Peters are not, in the end, in conflict. The cruel and the courtly coexist here, and the children, at least, recognize no contradiction. If they scamper, slither, and skateboard around the Bronze Horseman, they are just as much at home with the dour despot on his chair in the fortress. Comfortably perched on his metal lap, they pose for their parents’ cameras and play affectionately with the old monster’s bony and murderous fingers.
Where It’s Happening in St. Petersburg
Where
to Stay
Grand Hotel Europe (Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa 1/7; 011-7-812-329-6000; from $350) Truly grand, with some of the largest bathrooms you will ever bathe in and the splendid Europa restaurant.
The centrally located Hotel Astoria (Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa 39; 011-7-812-313-5757; from $230) houses the elegant Davidov’s Restaurant.
Hotel Moskva (Alexander Nevsky Ploshshad 2; 011-7-812-274-3001; from $110) A Soviet-era monolith, the Moskva has been upgraded to a comfortable midrange hotel. Its Salt and Pepper restaurant serves delicious borscht.
A less pricey option is the 45-room Hotel Matisov Domik (Naberezhnaya Pryazhka Reza 3/1; 011-7-812-318-5445; from $80).
Where to Eat
Restaurants close to the famous Mariinsky Theater, home of the Kirov opera and ballet companies, include Dvorianskoye Gnezdo (Dekabristov Ulitsa 21; 812-312-3205), with excellent pre- and posttheater dining; Nikolay (Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa 52; 812-311-1402) and the Literary Cafe (Nevsky Prospekt 18; 812-312-6057), both serving classic Russian dishes (though be aware that the atmosphere is better than the food); and the small 1913 (Voznesensky Prospect 13; 812-315-5148).
St. Petersburg is celebrating its tercentennial all this year. For more information, visit russia-travel.com or call 877-221-7120.