Sunlight at midnight
Duncan Fallowell
ST PETERSBURG AND THE RISE OF MODERN RUSSIA by W. Bruce Lincoln The Perseus Press, £19.99, pp. 419, ISBN 0330487949 It is not easy to write a bad book about St Petersburg and even Bruce Lincoln, who wrote an unreadable biography of Nicholas I, has not managed it; somehow the city's peculiar glamour always comes through. But it was a near thing. His writing is repetitious, which makes its omissions even more inexplicable (no reference to Charles Cameron or Rasputin, for example). He uses unconventional transliterations which look a bit silly on the page — Tchaikovsky becomes `Chaikovskii', Nijinsky "Nizhinskir etc. He also unfor
givably perpetuates the myth that Tchaikovsky committed suicide, which has now been disproved. He is prudish — in an account of the Empress Elizabeth's love of celebrations he overlooks their most unusual feature, the transvestite balls. In fact the erotic life of St Petersburg is not dealt with at all, beyond saying that there were a lot of brothels.
He is essentially a political historian and his account of the arts is external, with a reliance on gosh-type statistics.
Each of the 48 columns that supported its four gigantic porticoes weighed over 110 tons, and its interior required 900 pounds of gold, a thousand tons of bronze, and 16 tons of rare Siberian malachite ...
This is St Isaac's Cathedral. That the Winter Palace was painted red before the Revolution is the sort of thing that's never mentioned.
More confident is his handling of economic and historical matters. There is a fascinating chapter on Nevsky Prospekt and a superb one on the siege of Leningrad, the best short account I've read. He teases out detail to inform us that Peter the Great freed women from social bondage and brought them for the first time into Russian court life; that St Petersburg had the highest mortality rate of any European capital; that the growth of
French among its upper classes was less the pursuit of gentility and more to avoid eavesdropping by servants; that jazz was an important feature of its life in the 1920s; that the sale of artworks from the Hermitage by Stalin (especially to Calouste Gulbenkian and Andrew Mellon) only ceased in the early 1930s after the Depression had wrecked the art market. It is good to be reminded that only five people were executed in the 30-year reign of the famously autocratic Nicholas I and that the epitaph for the revolution was written as early as 1921 by the local Kronstadt sailors: 'It has become impossible to breathe,' they declared, before being snuffed out. 'All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a penal colony.'
Bruce Lincoln, writing with an American Cold War mindset despite many visits to the land of his professional interest, calls Russia 'an Asiatic nation' and sees even St Petersburg as alien. For him it is a city only of enormity, which he presents in harsh, militaristic terms, like some Berlin draped in diamonds. Well, St Petersburg certainly had the most lavish court in Europe but it was not stiff-necked in the Prussian, or for that matter Viennese, way. So what I miss most in his portrait is a sense of the subtlety and intimacy of St Petersburg life, of what all who love it recognise as 'the great village', how the very scale — enormous squares, streets, colonnades — allows space for everyone to come into the room, as it were. The Russian character is by instinct inclusive and in St Petersburg cold male grandeur is never the impression. It is very much a place of pastel softness, dissolving vistas; blood on the snow, yes, but also a deep romantic quiet.
Since 1917, of course, the city's history has been particularly gruesome. How could anything have survived the revolution, civil war, Stalin's purge.s, the siege, collapsing communism? Extreme improbability characterised St Petersburg from the start and that fantastical quality is still going strong. There is something unreal, even gimcrack, about the place which is part of its stagey and ethereal deliciousness. The Germans may have systematically destroyed its outlying imperial palaces, hacking down even the trees in the parks, but that creative energy emerged by reflex in what must be the greatest restoration project ever undertaken. With their interiors perfect in every detail, those huge palaces rose again from their foundations, but rather whisperingly and magically, like a curtain rising in a dream theatre.
Duncan Fallowell's To Noto: London to Sicily is published by Gibson Square Books, £9.99.
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