A statue of the militant yet angelic Alexander on top of Auguste de Montferrand’s Alexander Column in Palace Square under snow.
The column and cathedral were among the last sizeable imperial additions to a capital which ‘greatly disappointed’ a visiting Englishwoman. After reading of Petersburg’s magnificence, she found that a half-hour drive was all it took ‘to pass through all the best parts of the city’.28 In fact, the capital was growing independently of the court, which – as Belinsky observed – formed ‘a city within a city, a state within a state’.29 Much of the expansion was in the poorer quarters, which were still little more than a congeries of shanty towns or villages. In 1844, the Ukrainian poet and essayist Evgeny Grebenka identified the Petersburg Side as the poorest area of the capital. It was home to retired clerks and down-at-heel artists and performers, who lived in long, narrow streets of wooden houses with miserable front yards. Without taverns or entertainment, the quarter contained cheap canteens where the inhabitants could get a meagre meal before returning to their dismal rooms.30
A government commission visited 1,000 dwellings occupied by Petersburg workers in the early 1840s and found nearly three-quarters of them to be overcrowded, with up to nineteen workers crushed into a single space.31 The editor and early champion of Dostoevsky Nikolai Nekrasov wrote ‘The Petersburg Corners’, a documentary text that penetrated the ugly spaces festering behind the city’s grand façades. When Nekrasov enters a yard, he is greeted by ‘unbearable smells’ and ‘all kinds of crying and banging’. Searching for a room, he realises the yard is not purely residential, for there are signs advertising second-hand clothes, a midwife, a coffin-maker and a boarding school of questionable standing. Nekrasov negotiates pigs, puddles and dogs and finds an inner courtyard full of heaped-up refuse. He dodges the waste raining down from above, and attempts to ignore the stench of rank water and rotten cabbage. He takes a room in this slum, in which he finds a welcoming committee of insects keen to inspect his face. In and around his building there is a bulge of pregnant women and down-and-outs, raging drunk.32 Outside the property there are beggars, flower girls and a lemonade-vendor, selling from a single cup, which is handed-on, unwashed, from customer to customer. In winter, tea-sellers circulate their kettle kept hot in swaddling bands and a row of glasses hanging from their neck in a leather rack. Impoverished peasants —obliged to pay dues to their old estate while living precariously in the city – could be seen huddled in sunken tea-houses, sluicing hot liquid through lumps of yellow sugar trapped between decaying teeth.33 Meanwhile, Peter’s city encouraged such lowly inhabitants to turn their backs on simple Russian pleasures in pursuit of imported novelties. Vissarion Belinsky noted that the taste for coffee percolated down to the peasants living on the fringes, and that humble girls forgot Russian dances in their enthusiasm for the French quadrille.34
Despite the poor quarters and the over-hasty implementation of inappropriate architectural procedures, which necessitated incessant repair work, it is easy to overdo the ‘unfinished’ or ‘under-developed’ aspect of the capital in the mid-nineteenth century. In many aspects, St Petersburg was not so very different from the much older cities of Europe. In Camille Corot’s 1833 oil of Paris’s Île de la Cité,35 there are sandy river banks without granite cladding right in the heart of the French capital. In the early 1850s, Charles Dickens evokes London as a mire of mud and manure, its centre barely visible through impenetrable fog. In his novel Bleak House, pedestrians lose their footing at street corners ‘where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke)’.36 Indeed, Nicholas I favourably contrasted the ordered discipline of his capital with the squalor of older cities.37
The main thoroughfares in the centre of St Petersburg were occupied by different classes at different times of the day. A typical winter’s morning would see the labourers on the streets first. Imperfectly protected from the early hour’s icy chill by worn sheepskins, they were heartened by the aroma of hot bread and pastries from the bakeries around which the destitute clustred, hoping for yesterday’s stale, unsold bread. Next on the street were the favour-seekers, people fallen on hard times who were on their way to beg for help from high officials or noblemen. Then came the scribes and copyists, the army of ‘little men’ who were beginning to assume such an important place in the city’s literature. They scurried in their thousands through the dwindling darkness, making haste to reach their uncomfortable high-stools in the countless cluttered copying offices of innumerable government departments.
The late morning was the time for hectic business – everybody frantic to get everything done before they dined. People, desperate ‘to kill the day’,38 became ‘sick’ with feverish activity.39 They were always late, always falling short of their concocted aims. They had become ‘modern’ men. Pavements were a congestion of conflicting purposes, and carriages thundered about, ‘dancing’ – as Alexandre Dumas had it – over cobblestones, each as big as a baby’s head.40 In clement weather the frenetic tempo gave way to a more leisurely rhythm, as members of the nobility and the families of high officials, having completed their morning rides, came out to be seen strolling along the tree-bordered wooden walkways of the Nevsky Prospekt. On that most fashionable avenue – amid the extravagant vanity of moustaches, uniforms, frock coats, hats and furs —people shopped. To make the passage smoother for the carriages delivering customers to the doors of boutiques, wooden runways had also been set into the road.
After the frenzy of the morning and the fashionable parade of the forenoon, people dined – either at the increasing number of restaurants lining the Nevsky, such as Talon’s where Onegin ate, or at home, at an hour that varied according to the occupation or nationality of the host. Such differing habits allowed itinerant guests to partake of several dinners in one afternoon. Having eaten, some stayed, playing cards until a late supper arrived. After feasting, they trundled home in their clattering carriages during the early hours of the morning, ‘their stomachs fevered with the richest food’. Once home, they went directly to sleep in ‘bedrooms where an artificial heat, like that of a hot-house’ fermented ‘their digestion, leaving them at waking, pale, languid and spiritless’.41
Those who did not stay on after lunch were out and about. Along the Nevsky, the hours between one and three in the afternoon were among the busiest. Merchants dined early in order to be ready for the new onslaught of shoppers. By mid-afternoon, civil servants in their green uniforms swarmed about – everyone eager to see and be seen.42 Belinsky observed that the denizens of the capital were so smug and vain, so preoccupied with the trivia of fashion, that they would notice if a button was about ‘to fall off one’s waistcoat’.43 As for the Nevsky itself, it was well turned out. Théophile Gautier called it a ‘show street’ and likened it to the rue de Rivoli in Paris or London’s Regent Street.44 He observed that nowhere, except in Berne, were the signboards so luxurious. Nowhere – without exception – were they painted in so many languages. Cyrillic characters jostled with Roman letters, signifying the riches of the commercial world in a plethora of European languages. There were jewellers, parfumeries, confectioners, Buchhändlerin, chocolatiers, barbieri, librairies, lithographers, hatters and tailors. Words arced invitingly across awnings over doorways. But if the strangeness of the language proved bewildering, painted images on the glass windows depicted what was on offer inside. There were toy shops selling rocking horses, puppets, drums and Cossack caps. Hairdressers advertised therapeutic bleeding, or phlebotomy, along with their tonsorial activities.45
The Nevsky was, increasingly, the place where things happened. Engelhardt House was a popular venue for concerts and masked balls. Mikhail Lermontov’s 1835 play, Masquerade, was set there. Not performed until 1852, it was banned by the censor for – among other things – sullying the reputation of an institution run by the celebrated aristocratic Engelhardt family. At the Wolff & Béranger café on the corner of the Moika, an informal lite
rary circle gathered, which included Lermontov, Pushkin and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It was there that Pushkin met his second before his fatal duel.
Along the Nevsky, people were propelled through an endless onslaught of transitory impressions with such velocity that it was difficult for them to glean the truth. Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg Tales turned the city into an active and important protagonist.46 The tales centred on the Nevsky, where information distorted and mutated as it passed from person to person. It offered a glimmer of possibility, an alternative. Yet although it proposed hope, so often it delivered despair.
In Gogol’s story ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, Lieutenant Pirogov goes blundering after the wife of a German craftsman, while the artist hero, Pishkarev, falls for a woman who sends his world reeling. Pishkarev’s sensation of the animated street acts as a vehicle for his emotional excitement. ‘The pavement rushed away beneath his feet . . . the bridge expanded and split at the arch, and houses turned upside down.’47 But after the hallucinogenic intensity of his experience, the ideal beauty turns out – like so much on this thoroughfare – to be ‘for sale’. Unable to reconcile his vision with the fact that she is a prostitute, Pishkarev takes to opium and eventually slits his throat: ‘Nevsky Prospect always lies.’
In 1835, the year in which Gogol wrote this startling short story, Vasily Sadovnikov, the son of a household serf and selftrained engraver, produced a fifteen-metre panorama of this avenue, recording the measured elegance of the buildings lining the smart segment of the avenue closest to Palace Square. Unlike his contemporary, Gogol, Sadovnikov displays a gentle sophistication akin to Regency London or Jane Austen’s Bath. Nevertheless, Petersburg writers such as Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky were intent on identifying and creating what we call ‘the modern’. Moving through their seemingly over-determined yet actually incoherent city, they experienced the collisions of the incompatible, and the desperate confusions and clashes of urban life. They were the direct progenitors of the modernist chroniclers of twentieth-century cities, whose vivid and fractured visions have made such an important contribution to the way we see our world. Andrei Biely in his 1916 novel Petersburg, James Joyce in his epic wander through Dublin in Ulysses, John Dos Passos in his 1925 engagement with New York in Manhattan Transfer, and Alfred Döblin’s interwar exploration of the Weimer capital in Berlin Alexanderplatz are all heirs of the Nevsky Prospekt.48
Walking up the Nevsky Prospekt, away from the palace and the Admiralty, is to head for the lower depths. Custine noted that as soon as you venture ‘away from the centre of town, you are lost in a waste land, bordered by huts . . . sheds or warehouses’ – the ‘splendid prospekt . . . disappears in a horrible confusion of booths and workshops’ and ‘vast shapeless open spaces’.49 An Englishwoman who visited in the middle of the nineteenth century was quick to realise that even the elegant portion of the Nevsky Prospekt was suspect. Like ‘everything Russian, the showy façade only hides what is mean behind’.50 This deceptive avenue presented the latest kind of ‘Potempkinisation’ and, from the 1830S onwards, writers were refusing to be fooled. Petersburg literature, which began by using outworn forms to extol its architectural wonders, was being rescored amid the commercial flotsam of imported dreams. In this alien city, writers began to assert their Russianness, and their literature darkened.
Born into Ukrainian petty nobility in 1809, Nikolai Gogol settled in St Petersburg and worked briefly as a teacher, before becoming a government clerk – a post that offered him considerable insight into the Petersburg malaise. His story ‘The Overcoat’ concerns Akaky Akakievich, one of the myriad unseen copying clerks who labour away and struggle to cope with the growing pressures of modern urban life. Victims of a system intent on resisting change, such ‘little men’ were miserably paid – in the low hundreds of roubles per year. The Russian administration under Nicholas I was so opaque that, by comparison, the ineffectual Court of Chancery in Dickens’s Bleak House appears transparent. Documents generated documents and, by 1850, the Ministry of the Interior dealt annually with up to 165,000 sheets marked ‘Urgent’. A simple sale of land spawned 1,351 separate certificates. Any tiny mistake necessitated recopying. It is alleged that it could take months even for the tsar to obtain a response to a routine enquiry, and the backlog of requests by the early 1840s was well over three million.51 It is hardly surprising that when Gogol arrived in the capital at the end of the 1820s, he commented that ‘people have been spreading false rumours’ about a city in which, ‘everyone is drowned in his trivial meaningless labours at which he spends his useless life.52 Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich struggles to purchase a splendid new coat, observing that a man ‘is esteemed by his overcoat’. With a salary of between 250 and 400 roubles a year, his choice is necessarily humble, and the coat becomes the object of contempt – the very antithesis of what Akaky desires. Maliciously, the overcoat is stolen from him and, after his death, rumours spread that, as a ghost out for revenge, Akaky rips coats of all qualities off assorted backs as he terrorises his tormentors. This tale of repression, madness and revenge was provocative – Joseph Brodsky later noted that ‘all Russian writers “came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”’.53
While authors were beginning to engage with the street, there were painters who began to explore everyday life. Aleksei Venetsianov treated rural Russia, and led the way for succeeding generations of painters. Pavel Fedotov was a social satirist with an eye so keen that he was considered dangerous enough to be banned from official exhibitions. However, the work of three painters in particular demonstrates that the Academy still played an important role in the artistic life of the capital during the reign of Nicholas I. Karl Bryullov, Fedor Bruni and Alexander Ivanov studied at the Academy, served the establishment and produced large-scale academic works touched by Romanticism. As young painters, they found themselves in an insular world – Bryullov, whose father taught woodcarving, was instructed by Ivanov’s father. But all three attempted to escape the Petersburg Academy by travelling. Bryullov knew Ingres in Italy, and Ivanov and Bruni came into contact with the pseudo-medieval circle of German painters known as the Nazarenes.
The most forward-looking of the three was Alexander Ivanov, who damned the Academy as a relic of the eighteenth century. His small Italian landscapes looked forward to Impressionism, while his large work The Appearance of Christ to the People (1833-57) was conceived as a celebration of the moment when the world threw off all forms of slavery – a potent theme in a country much preoccupied with the need to renounce serfdom. However, the long gestation period of the painting meant that Ivanov became prey to the mounting religious scepticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Worried about the state of Russia, lonely, homosexual and searching for an art that could appeal to people from all walks of life, Ivanov died – perhaps of cholera, perhaps by his own hand – in St Petersburg in 1858.54
Less innovative than Ivanov’s Appearance of Christ were Bruni’s Death of Camilla and the stagey disaster painting that won the Grand Prix at the Paris Salon of 1834, Karl Bryullov’s Last Day of Pompeii, painted between 1828 and 1833.’55 Alexander Herzen saw behind this painting’s sensational effects a potent reflection of the state of Russia: ‘Groups of terrified figures are crowded in confusion . . . They seek in vain for safety . . . They will be overwhelmed by savage, senseless, ruthless force . . . Such are the images inspired by the Petersburg atmosphere.’56
At the Winter Palace, disaster struck in December 1837 while Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, were attending a performance of Dieu et la Bayadère. The tsar slipped home to assess the damage. Luckily, the fire had been slow to spread from its source in a chimney between the Throne Room and the Field Marshals’ Hall. The tsar evacuated his sons, then returned to supervise guards and servants who were struggling to contain a blaze which would rage for several days and gut the first and second floors of the palace.57 Water was pumped from the Neva and the Moika, while servants dumped what they could rescue from the flames into the deep snow in Palace Square. Al
though newspapers boasted that there was no pilfering, it emerged that 160 pieces of the Sèvres Cameo Service given by Catherine II to her favourite, Potempkin, had gone missing, and in 1865 it became known that the London dealer John Webb was offering for sale more than a hundred items from the service. Alexander II managed to buy back most of these, although six pieces found their way into London’s Wallace Collection.58 As for the Hermitage, the imperial picture collection was saved by guards who worked feverishly to destroy connecting passages and build a barrier between the palace buildings.
A huge reconstruction and restoration project got under way and resulted in an interior that survives to this day. Auguste de Montferrand – whose carelessness some held responsible for the fire – rebuilt the Field Marshals Hall. The architect Alexander Bryullov, brother of the painter of The Last Day of Pompeii, designed both the Malachite Hall and the Alexander Hall, and remodelled the rooms facing Palace Square. Director of this vast operation was Vasily Stasov, who restored the main state rooms.
Fire guts the Winter Palace, December 1837.
While Stasov sought to reproduce Rastrelli’s interiors faithfully, on the imposing Jordan Staircase he replaced the original gilded bronze handrails with white marble, and the old pink columns with polished grey granite. Rastrelli had taken eight years to build the palace.59 Reconstruction was completed within eighteen months by a workforce of 8,000 men working in shifts around the clock. Custine reported that even when it fell to – 30° outside, these builders and decorators worked in extreme temperatures in order to dry the plaster on the walls speedily. They covered their heads ‘with a kind of ice-cap, so that they could preserve the use of their senses in the baking heat’.60 Even then, some died.
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