by Glen Chilton
I finished poking and measuring the duck and put him back in his box. After the gentlest of hints, Loskot generously offered to give Lisa and me a tour of the public galleries. They proved a most startling contrast between the wealth of their contents and the shabby, third-rate way in which they are displayed. On offer were three mammoths, one of which had been excavated from the frozen wastes of Siberia in 1902, some 44,000 years after it had died. Other displays included dioramas of penguins and northern seabirds, and a particularly good grouping of ungulates with corrugated noses.
Despite this wealth, the displays themselves were horrid. The lighting was poor, the wooden bases crude, paint flaked everywhere, and the cheap glass in the displays was rippled. Old cardboard labels read “CCCP,” even though the Soviet Union had dissolved fourteen years earlier. By chance, we had arrived on the sixty-fourth anniversary of the start of the war between Russia and Germany. These hostilities were commemorated by the glass panels of a display, still perforated by bullet holes. Further along, a display of skeletons of whales and seals was oddly perforated by a giraffe skeleton. The whole area was in a state of repair, disassembly, construction, disintegration, or demolition; difficult to say which. Clear sight lines were a thing of legend. The floor was erupting everywhere, and if the museum were in America, it would be closed immediately for fear of a major lawsuit.
However, to describe the museum as a dump would have been uncharitable, callous, and a gross misrepresentation. This is a great museum that has the misfortune to be situated in a country that can’t afford to keep it up to a high standard. The displays were much better attended than those in some of the far fancier museums I have seen in richer countries. The museum hosts between 700,000 and 900,000 visitors each year. On the day of our visit, several young people used the exhibits to practice their painting and sketching, with an albatross being rendered in ink and a petrel in pastels. Much like Russia herself, the Zoological Institute is stationed somewhere in the abyss between here and there.
When I had first contacted Loskot about my visit, I had offered to take him and his wife, Vera, out for a meal. On the day, they showed incredible hospitality by hosting lunch in the room outside Loskot’s office. The room spoke of a day when natural history museum research was a priority. Cabinets were filled with great volumes of ornithological study. Whether they belonged to the institution or to Loskot wasn’t clear. Beside the window perched an old record player of the same vintage as the telephone in the entrance foyer. Vera served us well-steeped tea which was then diluted with hot water, a Russian tradition. We were offered rye bread, ham, tarts, and chocolate-covered biscuits. As we ate, we chatted and discovered many common interests. We found that Vera studies the taxonomy of parasitoid flies, not so far from my interest in fleas. I found that Loskot and I share a passion for the song dialects of birds and jazz music. He showed me his directional microphone and digital recording machine, which, quite frankly, is a hell of a lot nicer than my dingy old analogue equipment. Lisa and I pulled out our Russian phrase book to try out a couple of the simpler expressions, but, regrettably, for those raised on English, some Russian syllables are nearly impossible to pronounce.
I pulled out a letter that Loskot had sent me ten years before in response to my inquiry about the duck in St. Petersburg. Vera described me as “dangerous” for keeping all my old correspondence. Could this reflexive caution be a holdover from the former Soviet era? Is caution still ingrained even in the most welcoming of people? With a twinkle in her eye, Vera also described me as “difficult” for turning down the offer of more food. Before we left the museum, Vera and Loskot warned us sternly about pickpockets and Romany thieves, and reminded us about the hazards of drinking tap water. After saying good-bye to Vera, Loskot guided us back through the dusty tunnel system to the museum entrance. He clasped my right hand firmly in both of his and wouldn’t let go until he could think of the proper English phrase. He said, “Please write.”
BACK OVER THE Neva River, we purchased bottles of drinking water from a street vendor, which were cheap by anyone’s standards. We did as we had been told, checking that the bottle had an intact seal; cheap is one thing, but heavy-metal poisoning is another. In the warmth of midsummer, vendors like her might be the only thing keeping the residents of St. Petersburg alive.
We walked broad boulevards and thought the streets resembled something more North American than typically European. With many other pedestrians, we waited at a major intersection for the walk light to turn green. The automobile traffic was continuous. After a period, a uniformed man with a walkie-talkie descended from a kiosk to stop the traffic. We all started to cross. “Nyet!” he shouted, and waved through a police escort and a couple of limousines flying diplomatic flags. Having seen the entourage pass, we resumed our crossing along with fifty or sixty other pedestrians. Again he shouted, “Nyet!,” ordering us all back to the sidewalk so that the traffic could continue unimpeded, spoke into his walkie-talkie, and climbed back into his kiosk. Surely this abuse of privilege is the sort of thing of which revolutions are made.
Given Peter’s particular choice of geography, St. Petersburg requires an extensive system of canals. We chose to proceed west along the Moyka Canal. Crossing one bridge after another, we were amazed at the number of tour boats that plied the canal. At one point, near a large yellow building, the Yusupov Palace, every passing boat seemed to provide its patrons with a commentary. We heard the spiel in Italian, French, German, and Russian, but not in English, and so we had to pull out our guidebook. In the early twentieth century not everyone was entirely pleased with the influence that peasant Grigory Rasputin had over the Russian court. With the promise of a party, Rasputin was lured to Yusupov Palace on the evening of December 17, 1916. There he was poisoned. Leaving nothing to chance, Prince Yusupov then shot Rasputin. Checking back later, Yusupov found that Rasputin was still alive and after a brief struggle shot him three more times. Not satisfied with that, Yusupov had Rasputin’s corpse beaten and tossed into the river. An autopsy, performed after his body was discovered three days later, showed Rasputin was still alive when dumped in the river and that he eventually died of drowning. Out came The Beano, and Lisa took another photograph.
Cutting south along the Kryukov Canal, peeping at every exotic building on offer, we found that the drone of tour-boat commentary resumed in front of St. Nicholas’ Cathedral. Built around the same time as Yusupov Palace, the cathedral is a beautiful structure of pale blue and white, topped by golden domes. At St. Nicholas’, it all came down to weddings, christenings, and other religious services—pretty typical cathedral stuff. The guidebook didn’t mention anyone famous being poisoned, shot, beaten or drowned. Certainly very pretty; the camera came out again so Lisa could snap another picture of me and The Beano.
THE NEXT MORNING, arriving at the square around the Hermitage and Winter Palace at 10:00, thirty minutes too early for the opening, we watched workers rolling up acres of sod that had been put down the day before as part of a commemoration of the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, when Hitler’s forces had attacked. I brought out my camera and had Lisa snap a photo of me holding up The Beano in front of the Winter Palace.
First we queued to enter the Hermitage, and then found ourselves in the line to buy tickets. It became clear pretty quickly that Lisa and I did not have the proper temperament to deal with Russian line-ups. In St. Petersburg, stature and pushiness are inversely proportional. At the head of line I held up two fingers and tried a gruff Russian accent on the word “дBa,” but I think it was the wrong genitive singular, and so had to pay the foreigner’s rate—three times as much as for small pushy Russians.
In contrast to the austerity of the Zoology Institute, the Hermitage had weathered Russia’s stormy transition to a free-market economy. Its floors were inlaid with the finest woods in intricate geometric patterns, and skirting boards were done in marble. Galleries featured great towering ceilings with high windows that allowed the most subtle filtered light to p
ass through. Walls were finished in red or blue or cream or gilt. Great urns and bowls had been created of marble, malachite, and jasper, the result of a competition to see who could use more construction material.
I discovered an interesting painting by Matthias Withoos (1627–1703) that featured a hedgehog, a frog, and two mice partying under a thistle. Interesting, but not particularly good. Paulus Potter (1625–1654) had chosen to paint the backside of a bull, although I cannot imagine why. Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638) had created a piece called Lot and His Daughters. The quality was good, but it left me asking why Lot’s daughters were naked, and why Lot was copping a feel. Michelangelo’s sculpture Crouching Boy may be the only piece by the artist in Russia, but it isn’t a particularly good piece, having been knocked off while Mike was waiting for the pub to open. For all of the Hermitage’s fame, Lisa felt the housing outpaced the contents.
After a lunch of sandwiches and ice cream, Lisa and I headed off down Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main artery. Once named the Street of Tolerance, it is a promenade of churches, palaces, businesses, and retail opportunities. A must-see for any visitor, the avenue runs southeast from the city’s core, where all well-dressed and soon-to-be-well-dressed citizens stroll, and where pickpockets are drawn to tourists like a pride of lions to a zebra with a hangover.
A left turn off Nevsky Prospekt at the Kanal Griboedova revealed the quintessential image of Russia. It was the church I would paint if I had any talent as a painter. And some paint. The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood was constructed on the spot where Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1831. A riot of mosaic enamel tiles and swirling domes and carved marble and gaudy colors, the ornamentation emphasized the pastel tone of the remainder of the city. The church also seemed as much a tribute to the nation’s mourning over the loss of Alexander as a celebration of Christianity. Out came the camera, and Lisa snapped another quick one of me and The Beano. Hawkers around the church offered quick sketches, bottled water, toilet opportunities, and nested Russian dolls. Not all of these dolls followed the theme of traditionally garbed women, instead featuring Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Harry Potter, and even Michael Jackson, although he was labeled “John Lennon.”
SOME WORDS TRANSLATE from Russian to English fairly easily, but most do not. On a menu, for instance, you might be willing to guess that ordering the OMлeT would result in the eventual appearance of an omelet, and you wouldn’t be disappointed—unless you really didn’t like omelets. Similarly, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to squeeze the words Coca-Cola out of Кoкa-Кoкa. However, no amount of hard squinting could turn the word шпиHaT into “spinach” as my phrase book suggested.
The prime difficulty isn’t so much that Russian is a foreign language, as that it uses an alphabet that I just couldn’t wrap my noodle around. Invented in the ninth century by a monk named Cyril, Cyrillic has, at least in a nominal sense, only seven more letters than English, but these include г, ж, and я, none of which are pronounced like they look. On top of that, Cyrillic includes a bunch of diphthongs, like юй. Regrettably, after you learn a few of the simpler letters, you find that vowels and diphthongs sometimes, but not always, change pronunciation depending on whether or not they are stressed. “Stress in Russian,” claimed my phrase book, “is irregular.” And after all that, Russian is one of only a hundred languages in Russia. We prayed that we didn’t get into a cab with a driver who spoke only Nivkh or Vespian.
My Russian phrase book was remarkably frank in the section entitled “Making Friends.” It included some of my favorite expressions, including Tы пpeкpaco Bыглялишb! (You look hot!), BaM пpиHecTи чTO-Hибyдb пиTb? (Can I get you a drink?), MOжHO Teбя пoцeдOBaTb? (May I kiss you?), XoTиTe пOйTи V OTeлb (Let’s go back to your hotel), and MOжHO c дpyгOM? (May I bring a friend?). If you can’t have fun in St. Petersburg on a Friday night with those five expressions, it’s time to check your pulse. Of course, that sort of fun should always be mixed with a degree of caution. Russia can claim two unfortunate statistics. It is at, or near the top of, the world’s chart in terms of an increasing incidence of HIV. It also has a terribly high number of huge boyfriends with no sense of humor.
IN LATE JUNE the sun shines on St. Petersburg almost continuously. With all that warmth and the city’s proximity to the sea, it isn’t surprising that St. Petersburg is sultry around the clock. If I wanted to go running, the only real option was the early morning. The community moves at a very different pace at 6 a.m. Most of my fellow pedestrians were still up, not already up. I ran upriver, past a series of old, refurbished agricultural tractors towing water tanks to wash down the streets. I passed old, refurbished army trucks, now fitted with brushes to whisk up the newly washed rubbish. I crossed paths with a young lady in a short red skirt, vodka bottle in hand, dancing and thrusting to a song that only she could hear. Several young men tended fishing poles. It made me wonder how edible the fish would be if even the drinking water was contaminated with heavy metals. An older fellow in a 1970s-style Adidas track suit ran by on the opposite side of the street, but I spotted him only as he stopped waving at me. I then passed another runner, and squeezed a smile out of her by saying “Дoбpoe yTpo,” pronouncing it “Dobraye ootra.” By the end of my forty-five-minute run, the homeward-bound populace had been largely replaced by the workplace-bound.
Even though the city is encased in ice for a fair swack of the year, the Neva receives its fair share of ships. To allow shipping during the clement months, all bridges across the Neva are drawbridges, opening in the wee small hours. No small number of homeward-bound party-goers find themselves on the wrong side of a bridge. We took to Vasilevskiy Island by crossing the Neva via the Most Leytenanta Shmidta, named after a sailor who led some uprising or other. Peter’s original plan was to make Vasilevskiy Island the administrative center of the whole shebang. This didn’t work out as well as hoped because of the island’s nasty habit of flooding, and the difficulty of building stable bridges to it. On the island’s south shore, just in front of the Academy of Arts, we found two great bronzy sphinxes, dating from the fourteenth century BC. Lisa, a fan of Egyptology, was a little ticked that she couldn’t figure out which pharaoh they were based on. Regardless, they must be a big hit on the organized coach tours, as throngs poured out to photograph them. It didn’t seem like a Beano moment.
From there we took a zip around the well-treed grounds of St. Petersburg’s university, always trying to keep to the shade and ever vigilant for a bit of breeze. We crossed the Birzhevoy Most, and then the Kronverskiy Most, finally arriving on the Island of Nearly Naked Women, also known as the Fortress of Peter and Paul. Lying on the beach along the island’s south side and nestled into every patch of long grass were delightful examples of the female form, most of them in advanced stages of undress. I didn’t spot a single lady who had removed absolutely all of her clothing, although I might have tried harder if Lisa hadn’t been with me. Oh, yes, and there were also a lot of nearly naked men.
To be flippant about all the exposed flesh is to largely miss the point of the Fortress of Peter and Paul. For all intents and purposes, its initiation in 1703 by Peter the Great represented the founding of St. Petersburg. Many workers died in its construction and many political prisoners were interrogated, sentenced, and tortured within its walls. Despite being considered one of St. Petersburg’s great literary heroes today, even Dostoevsky spent some very unpleasant time there. Circling the south walls, we took to the fortress through Neva Gate, also known as the Death Gate. Prisoners leaving the fortress through this gate were on their way to exile or execution, which frequently amounted to the same thing.
Visitors are welcome to wander the island for free, but to take in the myriad exhibits requires a single all-inclusive ticket. When Russia’s war on tourism is over, it will do well to end the practice of charging foreign visitors much more than residents. Again, admission was three times as costly for foreigners. At the ticket window, I tried to sneak
in for the lower price by looking dour and holding up two fingers rather than saying “дBa.” It didn’t work any better than it had at the Hermitage, and we had to pay the full 240 roubles. Lisa found that only 10 roubles was required for access to a toilet with no toilet seat but that provided unlimited toilet paper. This is much better than the deal offered by most of the city’s portable toilet operators, who charge 20 roubles and dispense paper by the square.
Just nine years after founding the fortress, Peter set architects to work on the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. For the next 250 years, the cathedral’s spire was the tallest structure in St. Petersburg. I suppose that we all develop an image of what a church should look like. This wasn’t mine, and a small voice told me that it might not be God’s, either. The ceiling was painted with innumerable cherubs, and I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that God doesn’t like cherubs any more than I do. The cathedral, with way too much gilt on the outside, and way too many crystal chandeliers on the inside, is the resting place of most of Russia’s czars. For most of those interred, the sarcophagi were comparatively simple, just big blocks of white marble. But not everything is as it appears. Soaring pastel marble columns turned out to be simpler stone, painted to look like marble. A small army of attendants tut-tutted to dissuade those who might touch, and a few uniformed officers sported holsters, which, presumably, contained guns. Big on gilt and chandeliers, but not so very big on God, I was rather surprised to cross paths with a priest.
