St Petersburg

A Cultural History

Solomon Volkov

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781451603156
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The definitive cultural biography of the "Venice of the North" and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy, written by Russian emerge and acclaimed cultural historian, Solomon Volkov. Long considered to be the mad dream of an imperious autocrat—the "Venice of the North, " conceived in a setting of malarial swamps—St. Petersburg was built in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's gateway to the West. For almost 300 years this splendid city has survived the most extreme attempts of man and nature to extinguish it, from flood, famine, and disease to civil war, Stalinist purges, and the epic 900-day siege by Hitler's armies. It has even been renamed twice, and became St. Petersburg again only in 1991. Yet not only has it retained its special, almost mystical identity as the schizophrenic soul of modern Russia, but it remains one of the most beautiful and alluring cities in the world. Now Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre and acclaimed cultural historian, has written the definitive cultural biography of this city and its transcendent artistic and spiritual legacy. For Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky, Petersburg was a spectral city that symbolized the near-apocalyptic conflicts of imperial Russia. As the monarchy declined, allowing intellectuals and artists to flourish, Petersburg became a center of avant-garde experiment and flamboyant bohemian challenge to the dominating power of the state, first czarist and then communist. The names of the Russian modern masters who found expression in St. Petersburg still resonate powerfully in every field of art: in music, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; in literature, Akhmatova, Blok, Mandelstam, Nabokov, and Brodsky; in dance, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and Balanchine; in theater, Meyerhold; in painting, Chagall and Malevich; and many others, whose works are now part of the permanent fabric of Western civilization. Yet no comprehensive portrait of this thriving distinctive, and highly influential cosmopolitan culture, and the city that inspired it, has previously been attempted.

CHAPTER 1

describing how the great city of St. Petersburg was built, how the mythos of this wonder was created, and how classical Russian literature from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky boldly and brilliantly interpreted the image of the city and, in the end, profoundly changed it.

Alexander Pushkin was nervous and angry. The poet was in the second week of his self-imposed exile in Boldino, the small steppe estate of his father some six hundred miles from Petersburg. Pushkin’s purpose in coming here was to write poetry, in solitude and peace, far from the bustle of the capital. But the verse, spitefully, wouldn’t come. His head ached, his stomach hurt; could it be the heavy Russian diet—potatoes and buck-wheat groats?

He was worried about his substantial debts. The only way to get rid of them was to hope for inspiration from God, to produce something significant, and then sell that “something” profitably to his Petersburg publisher. But it was difficult for Pushkin to concentrate on poetry; he was tormented by jealousy, obsessed with worry about his young wife, who remained in Petersburg. The famous beauty, Natalya, was flattered by the attentions of the social lions, while the temperamental Pushkin naturally climbed the walls. He crudely berated his wife in a letter from Boldino: “You’re pleased that studs chase after you like a bitch, their tails stiff up in the air and sniffing your ass; nothing to be happy about! … If you have a trough, the pigs will come.”1

The dreary autumn weather would have plunged anyone into deep depression. But Pushkin, despite his African ancestry, loved the northern clime. He hoped that the Russian autumn would bring him inspiration, as it always had. It tormented him first, then paid off; verse finally came. The happy poet awoke at seven in the morning, worked in bed until three in the afternoon, then rode horseback in the mud for two hours, cooling off his head, overheated with ideas.

“I started writing and have already written tons,”2 he announced proudly to his wife in a letter to Petersburg dated October 30, 1833. The next day at dawn, in his quick but beautiful hand, he finished the fair copy of his narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman. We know that because of the notation on the final page: “five after five a.m.” (that is, contrary to his habit, the poet had worked all night).

Pushkin rarely documented his work with such accuracy. Apparently, even he, who never underestimated his genius, understood that in those twenty-six October days he had achieved something unique and extraordinary. (Which may also be why he asked five thousand rubles from his publisher upon returning to Petersburg, an unheard of sum in those days.) The poet’s intuition did not fail him: The Bronze Horseman is still the greatest narrative poem written in Russian. It is also the beginning and at the same time the peak of the literary mythos about St. Petersburg.

The Bronze Horseman, subtitled by the author “A Petersburg Tale,” is set during the flood of 1824, one of the worst of many that has regularly befallen the city. But the poem begins with a grand and solemn ode honoring Peter the Great and the city he founded, “the beauty and marvel” of the north. Then Pushkin warns, “Sorrowful will be my tale,” though previously he had treated the flood of 1824 frivolously, noting in a letter to his younger brother, Lev, “Voilà une belle occasion à vos dames de faire bidet.”3

Then there is a sharp change in the protagonist, point of view, and mood. From Peter the Great and the early eighteenth century the action of Pushkin’s poem jumps to his contemporary Petersburg, where the poor clerk Yevgeny dreams of happiness with his beloved Parasha. A storm begins and rages into a flood. Caught in the center of the city, in Senate Square, Yevgeny saves himself by climbing onto a marble lion. Before him, towering above the “outraged Neva,” is the statue of Peter, “an idol on a bronze steed,” the Bronze Horseman himself.

The waves that cannot reach Peter, “the powerful master of fate,” who had founded the city in such a dangerous location, threaten to engulf Yevgeny. But he is more worried about the fate of his Parasha. The storm recedes and Yevgeny hurries to her little house. Alas, the house has been washed away and Parasha is missing. Her death is unbearable to Yevgeny, who loses his mind and becomes one of Petersburg’s homeless, living on handouts.

It is a plot typical of many a romantic tale. If Pushkin had ended it there, The Bronze Horseman, imbued with resounding verse that is at once ecstatic and precise—to date no translation has fully captured its brilliance—would not have risen to the philosophical heights at which it still serves as the most powerful expression of the ambiguity and eternal mystery of St. Petersburg’s mythos.

No, the culmination of this “Petersburg Tale” is still ahead. Pushkin brings his hero back to Senate Square. Yevengy once again faces the bronze “idol with outstretched hand / The one, whose fatal will founded the city beneath the sea.” So Peter the Great is at fault for Parasha’s death. And Yevgeny threatens the “miracle-working builder.” But the madman’s attempted rebellion against the statue of the absolute monarch on his rearing steed is short-lived. Yevgeny runs away imagining that the Bronze Horseman has come down from his pedestal to pursue him. No matter where the panicked Yevgeny turns, the cruel statue keeps gaining on him, and the terrible chase continues through the night under the pale Petersburg moon.

Thereafter, ever since that night, whenever Yevgeny makes his way through Senate Square, he proceeds cautiously; he dares not look up at the triumphant Bronze Horseman. In imperial Petersburg no one may rise up against even a statue of the monarch; that would be blasphemy. The life of the now completely humiliated Yevgeny has lost all meaning. In his wanderings he comes across Parasha’s ruined little house, washed up on a small island, and he dies on its doorstep.

This brief retelling of the comparatively short poem (481 octosyllabic lines) might create the impression that Pushkin’s sympathies are fully with poor Yevgeny, who became the prototype for an endless line of “little people” in Russian literature. But then the mystery of The Bronze Horseman would not have puzzled Slavic scholars the world over for the last one hundred fifty years and given rise to the hundreds of works approaching it from literary, philosophical, historical, sociological, and political points of view.

The mystery lies in the fact that while the reader’s first emotion is acute pity for the poor Petersburger, the perception of the poem does not end with that; new emotions and sensations wash over the reader. Gradually one understands that the author’s position is much more complex than it might at first have seemed.

The Bronze Horseman in Pushkin’s poem obviously represents not only Peter the Great and the city he founded but also the state itself and just about any form of authority—and, even more broadly, the creative will and force, upon which the society depends, but which also clash inevitably with the simple dreams and desires of its members, the insignificant Yevgenys and Parashas. What is more important—the individual’s fate or the city’s and the state’s triumph? It is Pushkin’s genius that he does not present a clear-cut answer. In fact, the text of his poem is open to opposing interpretations and so compels each reader to resolve its moral dilemma anew.

The opening lines of The Bronze Horseman, depicting Peter the Great as he decides to found Petersburg, are perhaps the most popular in Russian poetry. Every year millions of Russian schoolchildren memorize them: “On the shore of empty waves He stood, filled with great thoughts, and stared out.”

This is a mythologized image, of course. But almost everything having to do with the founding of Petersburg is surrounded by legends, great and small. According to one of them, on May 16, 1703, on an island (which was called Zayachy, “Hare”) in the estuary of the Neva River, chosen because of its access to the Baltic Sea, Peter tore a halberd from a soldier’s hands, cut out two sections of peat, laid them crosswise, and announced: “The city will be here!”4 Then, tossing the halberd aside, Peter picked up a shovel and work began. This was the start of the six-towered fortress with the Dutch name Sankt Piterburkh, named by the tsar not after himself, as the popular misconception has it, but after his patron saint, Apostle Peter.

Another legendary image recorded in the manuscript entitled “On the conception and construction of the Ruling city of St. Petersburg,” which appeared shortly after Peter’s death, presents the eagle that suddenly appeared over Peter’s head as the foundation of the fortress was being laid. The anonymous author stressed that this was exactly what had happened when Constantinople was founded by the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great. Peter buried in the foundation a golden ark with a piece of the remains of Holy Apostle Andrew, the first to bring Christianity to Russia.

Contemporary historians are skeptical about these legends, justly noting their propagandistic character. In 1703 Peter already was planning to proclaim the Russian Empire, which he did in 1721, taking the title “Great” along with Russian Orthodox Emperor. So imperial symbols and parallels, particularly the traditional Russian historical analogy with the “New Rome”—Constantinople—were very important to him.

In fact, Peter was not even on Zayachy Island that fateful day when the city was founded. The initial work on the small piece of land—about 750 meters long and 360 wide—was directed by Alexander Menshikov, one of Peter’s most trusted lieutenants and the future first governor of Petersburg. Prosaic facts also contradict Pushkin’s grand lines cited earlier: the area wasn’t all that “empty.” The Swedish fort of Nienschanz stood nearby and a populous fishing village was situated on the opposite shore.

One thing is absolutely clear, though—Zayachy itself was uninhabited, a miserable swampy place that would never have become the site of the future imperial capital if not for the will and vision of Tsar Peter.

What moved him? What led to that strangest of choices, later resented and dismissed by hordes of critics? And their argument was sound—that for geographical, climatic, strategic, commercial, and nationalistic reasons, the mouth of the Neva was no place for the new capital of Russia or any large city.

The answer is probably rooted as much in Tsar Peter’s psychology as in the complex political and economic reality of early-eighteenth-century Russia. Peter was born in 1672, the fourteenth child of Tsar Alexei of the Romanov dynasty, and was eventually crowned in 1696 in Moscow, then the capital of all Russia, inheriting an enormous, relatively backward country. He believed it needed radical perestroika or “restructuring” and, therefore, maximal increase in contacts and trade with the West. In many ways, Russia was already prepared for the rule of a reform-minded tsar. It simply did not expect that the new autocrat would be a person with Peter’s extraordinary character and habits.5

Peter grew up to be tall (over six feet seven inches) and strong. He could easily roll up a silver plate or cut a bolt of cloth in the air. He was tireless in all his pursuits, businesslike, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He longed for sea air. This was exactly what Russia needed as well. Let’s not forget it had long struggled to gain access to the sea, with its tempting promises of lucrative trade with foreigners. But few of the Russian boyars—mostly the old noble councillors who surrounded the young tsar—expected Peter to take up the work of perestroika with such passion, demolishing along the way all the proprieties and customs of his ancestors. Muscovite tsars were supposed to sit enthroned majestically in the Kremlin, not imitate—as Peter soon began doing—the crude manners and habits of Dutch or German skippers and craftsmen.

Peter turned out to be an amazing monarch, and not only by Russian standards. He seemed to know everything and be able to do anything. As a young man he had mastered fourteen trades, including woodworking, carpentry, and shoemaking. He considered himself a good surgeon. They say Peter left a whole sack of teeth he had pulled; he loved to practice dentistry, terrorizing his courtiers. But the tsar prided himself particularly on being the best shipbuilder in the land. The launching of every new ship was also an excuse for a great drinking bout. Usually stingy, Peter spared no expense on these occasions.

As no Russian monarch before or after him, Peter was full of contradictions and paradoxes. On occasion he could be merry, gentle, and kind. But more often he was horrible in his wrath, frighteningly unpredictable, and needlessly cruel, personally torturing his enemies in hidden chambers. Of course, he had to fight for power and sometimes for his life. Barbaric incidents like the Moscow uprising of the Russian irregular army in 1682, when soldiers with fearsome pikes speared many of Peter’s relatives and tore them apart before his eyes, must have greatly influenced his character and behavior. Still, his dominant trait was unlimited confidence in his own righteousness. As a true Russian autocrat, he considered himself the absolute sovereign whose subjects were deprived of every right. By providential design, he could not be wrong; therefore his every wish had to be obeyed, no matter what the cost.

At times Peter seemed to be a simple, sincere, and accessible man. But he also perceived himself as a demiurge, a kind of divine actor whose stage was not only Russia but all Europe and more. Not for nothing did the chancellor, Count Golovkin, upon bestowing the honorific “the Great” on Peter speak glowingly of a Russia that had “come out of the Darkness of Ignorance onto the Theater of Glory of the whole world” under the emperor’s leadership. Peter was challenging, demanding, deliberately outrageous. This love of the grand gesture marked all his actions. A dramatic change of form was no less important than a change of content as far as Peter—the actor on the world stage—was concerned. In fact, he was apparently convinced that the form often determined the content. This conviction of Peter’s was to become an integral part of the entire future Petersburgian culture.

Despite the opinion of many later historians Peter loved Russia, its talented people, its colorful language, the country’s rituals and its food, particularly shchi (cabbage soup). But he hated Russian filth, indolence, thievery, and the fat, bearded boyars in their heavy clothes. He hated Moscow, too, the ancient Russian capital where he was almost murdered, and its rebellious soldiers, whom he constantly suspected of conspiracies against him.

So Peter started with a vengeance to change Russia’s traditions and symbols. He ordered the boyars’ beards to be cut (and at the same time the beards of the rest of the population, save the clergy and the peasants) and forced them to dance minuets at the Parisian-style “assemblies” he instituted. He gave his army a new uniform (and, of course, new weaponry) of the Western type, a new banner, and new orders, and he modernized the Russian alphabet. All these mostly symbolic transformations signaled in no uncertain terms the coming of the new age for Russia.

But the greatest expression of Peter’s sovereign willfulness, his Russian maximalism, and his addiction to the supersymbolic gesture was, ultimately, the founding of St. Petersburg. Retrospectively, this feat became loaded with a multitude of interpretations and explanations; but the idea of establishing a new city just then and on just that spot seemed in fact to be no more or less than the act of an incredibly rich, reckless, and sometimes lucky gambler risking it all in one supreme wager. Peter wanted to astonish Russia and the entire civilized world, and he succeeded.

In fact, this seemingly crazy idea had developed gradually. The first impulse toward a concept of a city that would be completely novel, even avant-garde, for Russia came to young Peter back in Moscow. There he would sneak off into the foreign settlement, where German, Dutch, Scots, and French craftsmen, merchants, and mercenary soldiers lived, to enjoy their company and friendship.

A clearer image of his ideal city, one that had nothing in common with the muddy, dangerous Moscow, where Peter’s enemies could hide in the crooked streets, formed during the young tsar’s trips to Europe, particularly to Holland. First Peter started to fantasize about a place like Amsterdam: clean, neat, easily observable and therefore controllable, on the water, with rows of trees reflected in the city’s canals. Then Peter’s vision grew much grander: His city would soar like an eagle: it would be a fortress, a port, an enormous wharf, a model for all Russia, and at the same time a shopwindow on the West.

Yes, a shopwindow, and not an ordinary one. The comparison of Petersburg with a window into Europe belongs not to Peter but the Italian traveler Count Francesco Algarotti, who used it in his Lettera sulla Russia in 1739. Peter would not have come up with this metaphor, if only because his attitude toward the West, like everything else with him, was ambivalent. Peter often repeated, “We need Europe for a few decades, and then we must show it our ass.” The proud autocrat probably would have preferred the way Pushkin put it a hundred years later: “Russia entered Europe like a launched battleship—accompanied by the hammering of axes and the thunder of cannons.” This desire to speak with Europe on equal terms, even if accompanied by cannon fire, is also very typical for subsequent generations of Russian writers, including the more Western-oriented like N...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Notes
• About the Author
• Index
• Photo Section