“The architects repeat a famous phrase,
That Rome displays the labors of mankind,
While lovely Venice was by gods designed;
But he who views St. Petersburg will find
That such a pile demons alone could raise.”
-Mickiewicz

Sunday was a lazy morning. Alisa and Tania went to the Nabokov museum, but I was too tired. There’s a concert there in a week or two that I’ll probably go to though. Some of us met up and walked to a restaurant along Griboedov canal, which snakes through the city and kind of reminds one of Venice—lots of little bridges arching over the canal. Some of the bridges were really neat, having lions and griffins guarding both ends. It is interesting to think of the two cities since they are so often compared to each other (St P’s as the northern Venice)…both are full of water, air, sky, distance, picturesque views, and both suffer the anxiety of looming destruction from flooding. I think it’s possible that the constant awareness of peril has had a different effect on Petersburg—at least it seems that way when thinking about Venetians compared to Petersburgers.

Petersburg is definitely no Venice. This city is unnatural, intentional (to borrow Dostoevsky’s word), “a tyrant’s cruel whim.” As Professor Dorontchenkov explained: Venice is like walking between the pages of a book, whereas Petersburg is like walking along the blade of a Japanese sword whose perfection is unnaturally beautiful, inhuman, and deadly. I guess I can kind of see what he means about Petersburg when wandering around here in comparison with exploring the streets of Paris. It’s true that the city is spectacular, yet at the same time monotonously beautiful with its imposing neoclassical and baroque architecture, making one feel exposed and small. It’s unlikely you’ll find a little side street that leads to an isolated garden or discover a lovely nook between two buildings like in other European cities, since here everything is packed together like a wall of well-cemented yellow, blue, light pink, and white bricks along a gray, granite-encased river. Here space has full power and, according to Brodsky, the geometry of this city’s architectural perspectives is perfect for losing things forever, and there is nowhere else in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality. (Seeing an opera of Gogol’s The Nose after walking this canal only added to such a perception.)

The uneasiness this city evokes makes sense, seeing as Petersburg has had a bloody and tragic history since its inception in the mind of an unusually tall young man. A history of floods, weather, dark legends, coups, the blood of murdered tsars, of dreams and ideals. It is crazy to realize that this 300-year-young city was some abstract idea realized, to think that Peter was able to so alter the course of Russia’s isolated and dark past with this city of light and air—his window to the west.

There is an ambivalence about this city, for it was constructed on shaky ground both literally (a swamp) and figuratively (the objections of many Russians to its creation). One gets a creepy feeling when thinking about the tragedy upon which this city was built—“founded upon tears and corpses” in Karamzin’s words. One feels this way when descending into the cavernous subway system, whose tunnels had to be dug deep (about 100m) so as not to collapse upon themselves (I guess every once in a while they actually do).




I put up a picture of the subway escalator, although it fails to convey how steep and scary it is.

The other picture is of one of the Rostral columns on the strelka, where you can see both banks of the Neva. They’re over 30m high and were used as lighthouses. The woman personifies the Neva.