Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  And soon the islands flooded lay.

  Madder the weather grew, and ever

  Higher upswelled the roaring river

  And bubbled like a kettle, and whirled

  And like a maddened beast was hurled

  Swift on the city. And things routed

  Fled from its path, and all about it

  A sudden space was cleared; the flow

  Dashed in the cellars down below;

  Canals above their borders spouted.

  Behold Petropol floating lie

  Like Triton in the deep, waist-high!

  A marble plaque marking the level of the flood of 1824 is flush with the wall of the building where Dostoyevsky’s young criminal lived. The Neva, like the weather, and like Petersburg’s two most notorious butchers—Peter the Great and Raskolnikov—will always haunt the city, wrangling to expiate their crimes. Even Stalin’s determined reconstruction of the city after it withstood Hitler’s brutal nine-hundred-day siege is still trying to cover up what the city can’t forget.

  * * *

  I came to St. Petersburg to stroll on Nevsky Prospect. Then as now, one strolls or one drifts along; one shops or stops for a meal or to drink coffee somewhere. The avenue is named after Prince Alexander, who was given the name Nevsky after defeating the Swedes at the Battle of the Neva in 1240. Here the rich and the wannabes ambled up and down, to see and be seen, in all seasons and all garbs. Here, also, people always heard French and English spoken and came to purchase the most luxurious wares from all parts of Europe. In Garnett’s prose, Gogol’s uncanny and biting descriptions are inimitable:

  There is nothing finer than Nevsky Prospect, not in Petersburg anyway. It is the making of the city. What splendor does it lack, that fairest of our city thoroughfares? I know that not one of the poor clerks that live there would trade Nevsky Prospect for all the blessings of the world. Not only the young man of twenty-five summers with a fine mustache and a splendidly cut coat, but even the veteran with white hairs sprouting on his chin and head as smooth as a silver dish is enthusiastic over Nevsky Prospect. And the ladies! Nevsky Prospect is even more attractive to the ladies. And indeed, to whom is it not attractive? As soon as you step into Nevsky Prospect you are in an atmosphere of gaiety … This is the only place where people put in an appearance without being forced to, without being driven there by the needs and commercial interests that swallow up all Petersburg … All-powerful Nevsky Prospect.

  Gogol lists how Nevsky Prospect changes aspect by the hour. Nevsky Prospect in the morning, at noon, at two in the afternoon, at three, at four:

  Let us begin with earliest morning, when all Petersburg smells of hot, freshly baked bread and is filled with old women in ragged clothes, who are making their raids on the churches and on compassionate passers-by.

  Gogol’s most lyrical and Baudelairian brushstroke comes in his final description of Nevsky by twilight:

  But as soon as dusk descends upon the houses and streets and the policeman covered with a piece of coarse material climbs up his ladder to light the lamp, and engravings which do not venture to show themselves by day peep out of the lower windows of the shops, Nevsky Prospekt revives again and begins to stir. Then comes the mysterious time when the streetlamps throw a marvelous alluring light upon everything.

  For about two hours during my five nights in late June—called “white nights,” because the sun never sets during that time of the year—Gogol’s evening lights on Nevsky were the view from my window. The lights are totally unnecessary during high summer, but they still cast a beguiling incandescence on the emptied avenue. Today, although the gas jets studding the sidewalks have long since been replaced by electric streetlights, the imaginary trace of glowing old lanterns on Nevsky Prospect all the way to the Admiralty hasn’t disappeared.

  Nevsky Prospect, which has four lanes leading to the Admiralty and four heading in the opposite direction, is no different from any other major city’s shopping strip: high-end boutiques, fancy restaurants and cafés, department stores, Pizza Huts, KFCs, McDonald’ses, buses, trolley buses, and tramways; and, wedged in between larger stores and abutting porticos to courtyards that have seen better days, are the usual assortment of rinky-dink cellular telephone stores and currency exchange windows. The buildings along the avenue are extravagant—some indeed majestic—built in the floral, Italianate style favored by the Romanovs. Most have been restored (at least externally), though some garrets on the top floors, which can’t be seen from street level, remain in deplorable condition. Restoration has always been the byword in St. Petersburg. After the floods, after the German siege, after near-intentional neglect by the Soviets, at twilight, as if to echo Gogol’s gaslit world, many of the buildings and hotels along Nevsky, with their façades illuminated, sneak back into the past.

  When I walk during the day, I want happenstance. So it is by happenstance—and therefore miraculously—that, while strolling, I discovered a glass-vaulted arcade at 48 Nevsky Prospect and, almost on a fluke, decided to step into its two-tiered gallery. It rivaled the tinier remaining galleries in Paris, London, and Turin, though it was not as large or as open as the Galleria in Milan or the GUM gallery facing Red Square in Moscow. Still, as I stepped into this nineteenth-century shopping mall, which Dostoyevsky described in The Double and “The Crocodile” and which had been entirely restored to suit twenty-first-century tastes, I spotted one store that sold a product you find in every gift shop in St. Petersburg: colorful, high-end matryoshka dolls. The painted wooden dolls of increasing size nested one inside the other provide a metaphor for everything here: one regime, one leader, one period nested in the other, or, as Dostoyevsky is rumored to have said, one writer coming out of another’s overcoat pocket.

  Just across the arcade, between 25 and 27 Nevsky Prospect, stands the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. The external colonnade is clearly modeled after that of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, but inside, to my complete amazement, it is not exactly a tourist attraction, though tourists do throng around the nave and the transept. It is a place of worship, the way Saint Peter’s is not.

  Outside the cathedral stands the statue of Nikolai Gogol, erected in 1997. His presence there is not exactly an accident, since Gogol was a pious man. But it should be noted that this is also the church outside of which the nose from Gogol’s eponymous tale, after escaping from Kovalyov’s face, is seen riding in a carriage on Nevsky Prospect, wearing, of all things, the gold-braided uniform of a state councilor. Kovalyov, of course, is eager to get ahold of his nose and put it back where it belongs, on his face. It has long been a subject of ribald speculation among Gogol’s fans whether the body part in question here was something other than a man’s nose.

  The cathedral was closed after the Communist revolution and was turned into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. Soviet propaganda notwithstanding, religious fervor went underground—the way so much has always gone underground here. Faith would soon return, however, even in a country that had appropriated one of its most imposing religious edifices to house the history of atheism. This, after all, is the capital of things that never go away: they just go underground for a while.

  Nowadays, there is such scant evidence of the seventy years of Soviet life in St. Petersburg that one must suspect that the population had either never taken to Marxism or that Marxism itself has gone underground. One of the telltale signs of the return to pre-Soviet times is that the tsarist names of many of the streets and avenues have returned, not least of which is the name of the city itself, which reverted to St. Petersburg in 1991 after being named Leningrad shortly after Lenin’s death in 1924. One is always free to speculate in what buried chamber old Soviet street signs are being stored. Seeing the power of the current Putin regime, one has to ask what, precisely, about the Soviet regime actually did go underground.

  Not too far to the west of the cathedral, at 35 Nevsky Prospect, is the Gostiny Dvor, built in 1757, the oldest and largest shopping center in St. Petersbur
g, its infinitely long arcade circling the huge block and echoing similar arcades on rue de Rivoli in Paris.

  At number 21 is an art nouveau wonder, a structure built by Mertens Furriers in 1910 and now a Zara clothing store. Across from it, at number 28, is the art nouveau domed turret of the Singer sewing machine company’s building, now a large bookstore with a café overlooking Nevsky Prospect. Much farther to the west, at 56 Nevsky Prospect, is another glorious art nouveau building, which at one time housed the Eliseyev (or Elisseeff) Emporium and still bespeaks the luxury that must once have existed on this thoroughfare. After many permutations, the emporium has now been turned into a gourmet food shop.

  The wealthy Eliseyevs lived in the Chicherin House at 15 Nevsky Prospect, a building that went through several hands before they acquired it in 1858. Here, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Nikolay Chernyshevsky, and the inventor of the periodic table, Dmitry Mendeleyev, were guests. Later, after the Eliseyevs fled the revolution, the writers Blok, Gorky, Mayakovsky, and Akhmatova would gather here until part of the building was converted into the Barrikada cinema—where a young Shostakovich played the piano for silent films.

  But the Eliseyevs are also famous for once owning a large collection of Rodin statues in Russia. This collection was nationalized after the revolution and is now housed in the Hermitage. The Soviets were notorious for “requisitioning” and “expropriating” or—to use a more appropriate term—looting private art collections. The wealthy cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin had developed a strong relationship with Matisse, which explains why the Hermitage holds a large collection of Matisses and Picassos as well as many works by Cézanne, Derain, Marquet, Gauguin, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, and van Gogh. Like Shchukin, Ivan Abramovich Morozov also fled the revolution, thus allowing his collection of works by Bonnard, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley to end up in the hands of the Bolsheviks. Both Shchukin and Morozov eventually managed to leave Russia, although not without first undergoing deplorable Doctor Zhivago–esque conditions in their own homes. Needless to say, and for all of Russia’s proclaimed de-Sovietization, these priceless art collections are seldom allowed to travel outside Russia, because the inheritors of the Shchukin and Morozov estates, living abroad, always threaten to sue in local courts to repossess what is rightfully theirs. The same is also true of Otto Krebs’s art collection at the Hermitage: works by Cézanne, Degas, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh.

  Unless the paintings were purchased by the state commission of experts or given as gifts—and these represent a minuscule fraction of impressionist, post-impressionist, fauvist, and modern French paintings at the Hermitage—with very minor exceptions, the Hermitage does not possess French work painted after 1913. This is when time stopped. Coincidentally enough, 1913 was the very year when the United States first opened its doors to modern European art at the famous New York Armory Show.

  Come to Nevsky Prospect today and you cannot help but feel the three hundred years of Russian history and culture crammed into this one street. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Bely, Nabokov—these figures never leave. We come to Nevsky Prospect hoping to run into them, or to catch a glimpse of their shadows, or to happen upon some private space that is our projection of who we think they are, which may in the end say more about us than about them, though we need their ghosts to feel the pulse of that unfathomable organ we still like to call the Russian soul.

  * * *

  I’ve been walking up and down Nevsky Prospect the whole day. On this night, I decide to take a bus up Nevsky and head to the Admiralty, facing the river, to see the Dvortsovaya palace bridge open at 1:00 a.m. Very, very few people can give you directions in English. When you ask whether someone does speak English, everyone in St. Petersburg answers with the same two words: “a leettl”—which is really less than a little. But Russians are magnificent and munificent, especially when three or four individuals on the bus have watched you struggling to get directions and become determined to take charge of you and make certain not to let you step off at the wrong stop. Suddenly I realize that I should have mastered at least a phrase-book knowledge of Russian, if only to say pozhaluysta, for please, skol’ko for how much, and spasibo for thank you. Such beautiful words and such frank, unguarded glances from strangers.

  By then it’s already nearing one in the morning, and I am probably on the last bus. I get off at the Hermitage. Like so many buildings here, the Hermitage is illuminated. I walk to the riverbank, where a large crowd has already gathered to watch the opening of the bridge, which is supposed to be raised for three hours, until 4:00 a.m., to allow the larger boats through on the Neva.

  The crowd at the head of the bridge keeps swelling, and people with all manner of sophisticated cameras and video equipment are getting prepared. Individual flares, launched ever so softly from the left and right of the bridge, begin wafting in the air, hovering way above the ground like distant kites, eventually dropping into the water as gingerly as they’d been released, one down, two up, three up, one down. The crowd cheers.

  Across the river, another crowd has also gathered on the artificially created sand beach by the Peter and Paul Fortress. There is still a lot of traffic crossing the bridge. Groups of younger pedestrians are running back and forth, almost taunting the security personnel on the bridge. There is laughter in the huge crowd, and there’s music, and a festive atmosphere prevails as people bide their time, everyone already sharing in the good cheer. People love to party in June.

  By 1:20 a.m. a clamor ripples through the crowd, and traffic authorities begin attempting to stop cars, but no one seems to pay much heed, and the cars keep racing across the bridge. Minutes later, bridge workers begin to order everyone off. Some yell, and people applaud. Meanwhile, a flotilla of small and midsize boats has gathered in the middle of the Neva, sitting still in the water, waiting for the chance to pass.

  Then it happens. Cell phones light up everywhere, mottling the twilight from both sides of the bridge, while cameras click and flash frantically, as if members of a famous rock band have just arrived and are about to step out of their limousine. There are astounded gasps and cries, as a loud hoorah races through the crowd, down to the park area by the Admiralty, where yet more people, I only now realize, are gathered. Finally the bridge starts to open.

  This is the moment everyone has been waiting for. The crowd applauds yet again. Then all manner of tourist boats begin to pass under the opened bridge, cars honk, a police-boat siren wails half in greeting and half as a warning, and the Hermitage still glows in the backdrop, its floodlit front reflected on the Neva. And it suddenly occurs to me that I need to come back here to watch the exact same thing tomorrow night. Who wouldn’t come back for this? So many people, so much joy, not even the shadow of a policeman on the ground, not one person becoming a public nuisance or going rogue, nothing loutish anywhere, and so much mirth everywhere.

  This was my very first white night. I’ve been waiting to see this ever since reading Dostoyevsky’s story “White Nights” as a very young man.

  * * *

  And it is precisely because I’ve begun thinking of “White Nights” again that I do not wish to head back to my hotel. Instead, I want to put off going to sleep, knowing I’ll be up in a few hours because of jet lag. So I keep walking to experience St. Petersburg during one of those sunlit day-nights that occur for such a brief spell every year. But I have another agenda. I want to visit the very spot where the Kryukov Canal meets the Griboyedov Canal. I want to go back to the place where the unnamed narrator of “White Nights”—the solitary, bookish dreamer—sees Nastenka along one of the deserted embankments, “leaning on the canal railing … with her elbows on the rail.” She is crying. The two talk. Eventually they must part. But they meet on the same embankment the following night, and the night after that, and one more night after that as well, which is when she finally decides to accept the narrator’s love. Yet no sooner is she about to pledge herself than someone suddenly brushes by the pair. It’s her old flame
, who has come back as promised. The old lovers are reunited and leave together, while our anonymous narrator is left alone, startled and forlorn.

  The tale is sentimental to the core, but on nights such as this, especially when, in Gogol’s words, “the streetlamps throw a marvelous alluring light upon everything,” nothing could be more real than the tremulous colloquy of two strangers on a bridge.

  When I get back to the hotel, I do not wish to lie down and end up sleeping through the whole day. So I sit around, turn on the TV for a while, and, rather than wait for breakfast in the hotel, decide to step out and walk. I don’t get lost, though I don’t know where I’m going. I think of having breakfast in the bookstore café located right under the dome of the Singer House, but I’ve had coffee already once there and wasn’t impressed. Instead I find a side street off Nevsky Prospect and, thinking it’s a shortcut to a place I’ve passed by earlier on Gorokhovaya Street, find myself walking on Rubinstein Street.

  And there it is.

  The sidewalk café is bathed in sunlight, its white chairs and tables gleaming. A couple is sitting in one corner; another is chatting with the waiter. A third table is occupied by someone who seems a regular, dressed in swanky clothes, obviously coming back from a party and having breakfast before heading home. This, it occurs to me, is a neighborhood restaurant-café. In another corner, three women and a man rocking a baby stroller with his foot are laughing and talking. Because the air can be cool sometimes, especially in the evening or early morning, restaurants regularly provide shawls for their customers; these are folded on every chair. Two of the women in the group of four near me are wrapped in pure white blankets that bear the emblem and name of the café in golden filigree: Schastye.

  When I ask one of the four, in English, if I might bum a cigarette, two readily produce their packs. I apologize, saying I had long ago stopped smoking but that watching them all smoking and enjoying it makes it difficult to resist. One thing leads to another. Where do I live? New York. Where do they live? Upstairs. I laugh. They laugh. Perfect camaraderie. I was going to leaf through the day’s English-language paper but decide otherwise. Everyone is happy on this quiet Sunday morning. I order coffee and soft-boiled eggs, and, because the waiter speaks perfect English, I ask if I can have my Americano before the eggs. Of course. Three-minute eggs? I ask, making sure they aren’t going to be hard. Of course. There is something wonderfully snug with a touch of understated chic about both the café and its clientele, the whole thing without pretense and perfectly décontracté. I begin to wonder whether their lives upstairs correspond with what I am seeing here or whether they still live in cramped, Soviet-style homes. But I put the thought away. This, I realize, is the new St. Petersburg. Happy to be what it is and totally un-Dostoyevskian. Not a trace of heat, no crowds, no dust, no drunks or hawkers jostling their way about. I am seeing something altogether unexpected. This is a lovely place, the weather is perfect, and I want to enjoy every moment of it before heading out that morning to discover my new St. Petersburg. I just want to get as far away from myself as I possibly can—forget what I know, drown out the noise in my head, stop being such a bookish tourist for once, and finally see what’s right before me.