The great survivor among cities
David Caute
PETERSBURG PERSPECTIVES edited by Frank Althaus and Mark Sutcliffe, with photographs by Yury Molodkovets Fontanka, with Booth-Clibbom Editions, .02, pp. 320, ISBN 1861542607 THE COMPANION GUIDE TO ST PETERSBURG by Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes Boydell & Brewer/Companion Guides, £14.99, pp. 430, ISBN 1900639408 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union St Petersburg has seized the moment to command Western attention: repudiating the entire communist experience by jettisoning the name Leningrad, Petersburg left Moscow floundering during the Yeltsin era, a capital of gangsters, collapsing banks, drunks frozen to death on pavements, angry old ladies in headscarves calling Stalin back from the dead. Petersburg's Maryinsky (aka Kirov) ballet and opera has supplanted Moscow's Bolshoi on Western stages, and now the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's imperial grand design offers a further opportunity for self-promotion. The two very different books here under review confirm that there is much worth promoting — indeed Russia can virtually boast two capital cities.
Despite Stalin's grandiose architecture, Moscow may be likened to a growth of wild mushrooms and gaudy onions out of the hard soil and soul of ancient Rus; by contrast Petersburg is a model of calculated artificiality, the work of ardent Westernisers determined to hurry Russia into military, industrial and cultural modernity the better to reinforce autocracy and serfdom. Diderot. Voltaire and the Walpole paintings were for the new libraries and museums, not for democracy. The self-conscious classicism of the city, its rigorously oppressive symmetry, seems calculated to foster awe not love; in the alleys and courtyards behind the grand facades squalor and disease lay in wait. Despite its plethora of waterways and the prancing equestrian statues dear to doges and tsars, Petersburg is distinctly less the 'Venice of the North' than Edinburgh is the Athens. Pushkin, author of the celebrated poem 'The Bronze Horseman', wrote to his friend Vulf, 'I long to spit on St Petersburg.'
Kyril Zinovieffs Companion Guide to St Petersbuty cannot compete with Yury Molodkovets' lavish feast of colour photography in the large-format Petersburg Perspectives, but while the bigger book whets the appetite and excites the imagination, The Companion Guide will be easier to handle while walking the streets, tackling the vast Hermitage, or heading for the Peterhof Palace and Tsarskoye Selo. This said, the guide is likely to be less userfriendly sur le champ than, say, Lonely Planet's Moscow; the pages and inside margins are too narrow for a text of such length, leading to inevitable stress on the binding and the traveller's temper.
Petersburg Perspectives is clearly in love with its subject, a beguiling meeting of Russian and English sensibilities, a celebration without sentimentality. Illuminating historical and architectural narratives by Alexander Kushner, Yury Arabov and Yury Piryutko are matched by a masterly overview from Orlando Figes, with the added delight of a short story by Charlotte Hobson, Tushkin's Letter' — an unexpected gem almost perfectly illuminating the tragedy of a great culture beset by material poverty, mould, swamp mud and disease. But here again I quibble about the design; too tall, with over 50
lines of print to the page, the book is more considerate of the viewer than the reader. Even so, the picture captions in this impressive production are models of elegantly condensed information.
Kyril Zinovieff can claim descent across five generations from the plotters who brought Catherine the Great to the throne by murdering her husband. He is old enough to have caught sight of Rasputin on a sledge; three-quarters of a century later he witnessed a traffic jam caused by the arrival of Putin. His retelling of the city's history is amusing and idiosyncratic yet fulfils the tourist's basic needs. Here one may read about the history of the Maryinsky Theatre (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky and the ballerina whose sexual relationships with royalty would have entitled her to call her memoirs from exile Sixty Years Under the Romanovs).
Despite his aristocratic lineage, emigration to England, service with the British army, and literary work as Kyril Fitzlyon, Zinovieff is never other than illuminating about the years of communist rule. Geography, the sea, the seat of government, the mutinous navy and the new industrial working class of Petersburg (at that juncture Petrograd) conspired to seize the revolutionary initiative, leaving Moscow in the shadows until Lenin decamped there in March 1918. The Bolshevik revolution is brought alive from the moment the cruiser Aurora fired its fatal shots at the Winter Palace — or were the 'shots', as legend has it, a single blank cartridge? Sergei Eisenstein quipped that more extras died in recreating the assault on the Winter Palace for his film October than during the real event. Guided by Zinovieff, we follow Lenin hurrying through the streets in disguise and looking as if he'd suffered a bad visit to the dentist.
Lenin was soon to prove himself the demon dentist, extracting lives like rotten teeth. Zinovieff explores the tormented history of the Hermitage Museum, the modernist art seized from the bourgeois collectors, then buried in cellars, the secret sales of masterpieces to Andrew Mellon and Calouste Gulbenkian in the era of five-year plans. He charts in painful detail the agony of the city during the Nazi siege (1941-44), the final tally being 800,000 dead, 620,00 remaining, 1,376,000 evacuated. Finally, Zinovieff conducts his readers to the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery where 470,000 victims are buried in 65 acres.
Zinovieff moves on to Stalin's punishment of post-siege Leningrad and the enforced closure of the memorial museum, whose director was sent to Siberia. Stalin distrusted the city of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, the satirist Zoshchenko and the poet Akhmatova, imposing brute rule through his henchmen Kirov and Zhdanov; unforgettable are Akhmatova's descriptions of standing in line with other women in a vain attempt to discover what had become of her arrested son. Arguably Shostakovich's seventh symphony was less about the heroic resistance to Hitler than the agony imposed on the city — and on the young composer himself — by Russia's own vindictive and capricious dictator. Today St Petersburg is free to reconstruct its own enchantments.
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