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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Growing up, the future Russian tsar who would be called Peter the Great studied geography on a globe taller than a man. The globe showed what was known about the earth's surface at the time--the late seventeenth century--with rivers and coastlines in good detail. Peter was a tall boy who would become a six-foot-seven-inch man. I imagine him striding around the globe on his long legs acquainting himself with it, paying particular attention to the vast expanse his dynasty ruled, the great curve of Russia going halfway around and ending in the unexplored vagueness of the North Pacific and Asia. When, as tsar, Peter wanted a new capital for his empire, I imagine him consulting this globe or another. He looks at the empire's far northwest corner and sees a swampy river mouth where his landlocked people can pop through to the Baltic and the sea lanes of Europe and the world. The spot is where the Neva River empties into the Gulf of Finland; technically, it belongs to Sweden, but never mind. His long, bony finger descends and hits it, emphatically: "There."
Dostoyevsky, who lived most of his life in the capital Peter called into being, said that St. Petersburg was the most premeditated city in the world. Probably no other city, and certainly no national capital before in history, existed first as a theoretical point indicated on a map. St. Petersburg is a wide-angle city of sea-level horizontals beneath a sky like a drive-in movie theatre screen stretching infinitely upward. Sometimes, when I'm walking in the city, Peter's index finger is almost palpable, coming down again ("There!") through that ceilingless sky.
Peter founded St. Petersburg in 1703. He crushed tens of thousands of people and made his country groan getting it partly built. Serfs requisitioned from all over Russia labored on it, carrying earth in their hands or in their shirts. They drove wooden pilings into the marshy ground for the city to rest on, laid out avenues, dug canals. During the work, unknown numbers of them died. By 1710, Peter's military victories over the Swedes had secured his claim to the mouth of the Neva, and he moved his court from Moscow to St. Petersburg. He ordered merchants, carpenters, tradesmen, and many noble families to move there, too. They obeyed, though building new houses on the banks of a flood-prone river was not their idea.
It all could have turned out horribly. And in fact the city has had plenty of floods, fires, and outbreaks of disease in its three hundred years, not to mention the even worse catastrophes caused by man. Its drinking water has never been safe, and remains unsafe today. But Peter, besides being a brutal despot, was also a genius, with energy, enterprise, and good taste. The city he made is a work of art, one man's willed vision, to which countless other gifted people, famous and otherwise, have added through the centuries. Even the Bolsheviks, who moved the capital back to Moscow in 1918, helped preserve by their neglect this city they renamed Leningrad. Today, the center of the city, with its canals and its granite-encased Neva River shoreline--"like a vessel, so full that its brim disappears under the water, which is ready to flow over on every side," in the words of a Frenchman who saw it in 1839--still expresses the big picture that Peter had in mind.
Oceanic light continues to pour through this opening he crowbarred into the corner of Russia, just as he intended. To get the full effect of his vision, though, it's best to ride in one of the tour boats that take visitors along the city's canals. As the boat winds through, what you see is a few feet away, in all the intricacies of the canal-side buildings whose histories the guide describes. But at the end of the canal the boat emerges, unexpectedly, into the Gulf of Finland, and the view that had been up close enlarges to a seascape with its horizon many miles in the distance. This instant acceleration of imaginative reach is the geographic reason for the city. Emotionally, the response is a sensation of possibility, as if you were a suddenly unhooded falcon.
Since 2000, I've been going to St. Petersburg to do research for a book. I love to go there. Of course, I know the city only in its post-Soviet version; my Russian friends who grew up there and now live in America still call it Leningrad. In other Russian places I've been, the surroundings sometimes make me disoriented and dizzy, and I have to take to my bed for a while. St. Petersburg is more familiar and comfortable, somehow. The predictable American brand names glow along its thoroughfares, as in any big target of our globalism. The music on the radio and in stores and restaurants is often American Top Forty oldies, some of them remakes sung phonetically. The billboards for American rock bands soothe me, too, because usually the groups they promote, now forgotten in America, were popular when I was just out of high school. If you've wondered what happened to Alice Cooper or King Crimson, you could see them in St. Petersburg.
Another reason that I feel at home in St. Petersburg is literary. So many books I admire...
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