Natasha's Dance
A Cultural History of Russia
By Orlando Figes
Picador USA
Copyright © 2003
Orlando Figes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0312421958
Chapter One
On a misty spring morning in 1703 a dozen Russian horsemen rode
across the bleak and barren marshlands where the Neva river runs
into the Baltic sea. They were looking for a site to build a fort against
the Swedes, then at war with Russia, and the owners of these long-abandoned
swamps. But the vision of the wide and bending river
flowing to the sea was full of hope and promise to the Tsar of landlocked
Russia, riding at the head of his scouting troops. As they
approached the coast he dismounted from his horse. With his bayonet
he cut two strips of peat and arranged them in a cross on the marshy
ground. Then Peter said: `Here shall be a town.'
Few places could have been less suitable for the metropolis of
Europe's largest state. The network of small islands in the Neva's boggy
delta were overgrown with trees. Swept by thick mists from melting
snow in spring and overblown by winds that often caused the rivers to
rise above the land, it was not a place for human habitation, and even
the few fishermen who ventured there in summer did not stay for long.
Wolves and bears were its only residents. A thousand years ago the area
was underneath the sea. There was a channel flowing from the Baltic sea
to lake Ladoga, with islands where the Pulkovo and Pargolovo heights
are found today. Even in the reign of Catherine the Great, during the late
eighteenth century, Tsarskoe Selo, where she built her Summer Palace
on the hills of Pulkovo, was still known by the locals as Sarskoe Selo.
The name came from the Finnish word for an island,
saari.
When Peter's soldiers dug into the ground they found water a metre
or so below. The northern island, where the land was slightly higher,
was the only place to lay firm foundations. In four months of furious
activity, in which at least half the workforce died, 20,000 conscripts
built the Peter and Paul Fortress, digging out the land with their bare
hands, dragging logs and stones or carting them by back, and carrying
the earth in the folds of their clothes. The sheer scale and tempo of
construction was astonishing. Within a few years the estuary became
an energetic building site and, once Russia's control of the coast had
been secured with victories over Sweden in 1709-10, the city took on
a new shape with every passing day. A quarter of a million serfs and
soldiers from as far afield as the Caucasus and Siberia worked around
the clock to clear forests, dig canals, lay down roads and erect palaces.
Carpenters and stonemasons (forbidden by decree to work elsewhere)
flooded into the new capital. Hauliers, ice-breakers, sled-drivers,
boatsmen and labourers arrived in search of work, sleeping in the
wooden shacks that crowded into every empty space. To start with,
everything was done in a rough and ready fashion with primitive hand
tools: axes predominated over saws, and simple carts were made from
unstripped trunks with tiny birch-log wheels. Such was the demand
for stone materials that every boat and vehicle arriving in the town
was obliged to bring a set tonnage of rock. But new industries soon
sprang up to manufacture brick, glass, mica and tarpaulin, while the
shipyards added constantly to the busy traffic on the city's waterways,
with sailing boats and barges loaded down with stone, and millions of
logs floated down the river every year.
Like the magic city of a Russian fairy tale, St Petersburg grew up
with such fantastic speed, and everything about it was so brilliant and
new, that it soon became a place enshrined in myth. When Peter
declared, `Here shall be a town', his words echoed the divine command,
`Let there be light.' And, as he said these words, legend has it that an
eagle dipped in flight over Peter's head and settled on top of two birch
trees that were tied together to form an arch. Eighteenth-century
panegyrists elevated Peter to the status of a god: he was Titan, Neptune
and Mars rolled into one. They compared `Petropolis' to ancient Rome.
It was a link that Peter also made by adopting the title of `Imperator'
and by casting his own image on the new rouble coin, with laurel
wreath and armour, in emulation of Caesar. The famous opening lines
of Pushkin's epic poem
The Bronze Horseman (1833) (which every
Russian schoolchild knows by heart) crystallized the myth of Petersburg's
creation by a providential man:
On a shore by the desolate waves
He stood, with lofty thoughts,
And gazed into the distance ...
Thanks to Pushkin's lines, the legend made its way into folklore. The
city that was named after Peter's patron saint, and has been renamed
three times since as politics have changed, is still called simply `Peter'
by its residents.
In the popular imagination the miraculous emergence of the city
from the sea assigned to it a legendary status from the start. The
Russians said that Peter made his city in the sky and then lowered it,
like a giant model, to the ground. It was the only way they could
explain the creation of a city built on sand. The notion of a capital
without foundations in the soil was the basis of the myth of Petersburg
which inspired so much Russian literature and art. In this mythology,
Petersburg was an unreal city, a supernatural realm of fantasies and
ghosts, an alien kingdom of the apocalypse. It was home to the lonely
haunted figures who inhabit Gogol's
Tales of Petersburg (1835); to
fantasists and murderers like Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment (1866). The vision of an all-destroying flood
became a constant theme in the city's tales of doom, from Pushkin's
Bronze Horseman to Bely's
Petersburg (1913-14). But that prophecy
was based on fact: for the city had been built above the ground.
Colossal quantities of rubble had been laid down to lift the streets
beyond the water's reach. Frequent flooding in the city's early years
necessitated repairs and reinforcements that raised them higher still.
When, in 1754, building work began on the present Winter Palace,
the fourth upon that site, the ground on which its foundations were
laid was three metres higher than fifty years before.
A city built on water with imported stone, Petersburg defied the
natural order. The famous granite of its river banks came from Finland
and Karelia; the marble of its palaces from Italy, the Urals and the
Middle East; gabbro and porphyry were brought in from Sweden;
dolerite and slate from lake Onega; sandstone from Poland and Germany;
travertine from Italy; and tiles from the Low Countries and
L|beck. Only limestone was quarried locally. The achievement of
transporting such quantities of stone has been surpassed only by the
building of the pyramids. The huge granite rock for the pedestal of
Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great was twelve metres
high and nearly thirty metres in circumference. Weighing in at some
660,000 kilograms, it took a thousand men over eighteen months to
move it, first by a series of pulleys and then on a specially constructed
barge, the thirteen kilometres from the forest clearing where it had
been found to the capital. Pushkin's
Bronze Horseman turned the
inert monument into an emblem of Russia's destiny. The thirty-six
colossal granite columns of St Isaac's Cathedral were cut out of the
ground with sledgehammers and chisels, and then hauled by hand over
thirty kilometres to barges on the gulf of Finland, from where they
were shipped to St Petersburg and mounted by huge cranes built out
of wood. The heaviest rocks were shifted during the winter, when
snow made hauling easier, although this meant waiting for the thaw
in spring before they could be shipped. But even then the job required
an army of several thousand men with 200-horse sleigh teams.
Petersburg did not grow up like other towns. Neither commerce
nor geopolitics can account for its development. Rather it was built as
a work of art. As the French writer Madame de Stakl said on her
visit to the city in 1812, `here everything has been created for visual
perception'. Sometimes it appeared that the city was assembled as a
giant
mise-en-schne - its buildings and its people serving as no more
than theatrical props. European visitors to Petersburg, accustomed to
the
milange of architectural styles in their own cities, were particularly
struck by the strange unnatural beauty of its ensembles and often
compared them to something from the stage. `At each step I was
amazed by the combination of architecture and stage decoration',
wrote the travel writer the Marquis de Custine in the 1830s. `Peter the
Great and his successors looked upon their capital as a theatre.' In a
sense St Petersburg was just a grander version of that later stage
production, the `Potemkin villages': cardboard cut-out classic structures
rigged up overnight along the Dniepr river banks to delight
Catherine the Great as she sailed past.
Petersburg was conceived as a composition of natural elements - water,
stone and sky. This conception was reflected in the city panoramas
of the eighteenth century, which set out to emphasize the artistic
harmony of all these elements. Having always loved the sea, Peter
was attracted by the broad, fast-flowing river Neva and the open sky
as a backdrop for his tableau. Amsterdam (which he had visited) and
Venice (which he only knew from books and paintings) were early
inspirations for the layout of the palace-lined canals and embankments.
But Peter was eclectic in his architectural tastes and borrowed what he
liked from Europe's capitals. The austere classical baroque style of
Petersburg's churches, which set them apart from Moscow's brightly
coloured onion domes, was a mixture of St Paul's cathedral in London,
St Peter's in Rome, and the single-spired churches of Riga, in what is
now Latvia. From his European travels in the 1690s Peter brought back
architects and engineers, craftsmen and artists, furniture designers
and landscape gardeners. Scots, Germans, French, Italians - they all
settled in large numbers in St Petersburg in the eighteenth century. No
expense was spared for Peter's `paradise'. Even at the height of the war
with Sweden in the 1710s he meddled constantly in details of the plans.
To make the Summer Gardens `better than Versailles' he ordered
peonies and citrus trees from Persia, ornamental fish from the Middle
East, even singing birds from India, although few survived the Russian
frost. Peter issued decrees for the palaces to have regular fagades in
accordance with his own approved designs, for uniform roof lines and
prescribed iron railings on their balconies and walls on the `embankment
side'. To beautify the city Peter even had its abattoir rebuilt in
the rococo style.
`There reigns in this capital a kind of bastard architecture', wrote
Count Algarotti in the middle of the eighteenth century. `It steals from
the Italian, the French and the Dutch.' By the nineteenth century, the
view of Petersburg as an artificial copy of the Western style had become
commonplace. Alexander Herzen, the nineteenth-century writer and
philosopher, once said that Petersburg `differs from all other European
towns by being like them all'. Yet, despite its obvious borrowings,
the city had its own distinctive character, a product of its open setting
between sea and sky, the grandeur of its scale, and the unity of its
architectural ensembles, which lent the city a unique artistic harmony.
The artist Alexander Benois, an influential figure in the Diaghilev
circle who made a cult of eighteenth-century Petersburg, captured this
harmonious conception. `If it is beautiful', he wrote in 1902, `then it
is so as a whole, or rather in huge chunks.' Whereas older European
cities had been built over several centuries, ending up at best as collections
of beautiful buildings in diverse period styles, Petersburg was
completed within fifty years and according to a single set of principles.
Nowhere else, moreover, were these principles afforded so much space.
Architects in Amsterdam and Rome were cramped for room in which
to slot their buildings. But in Petersburg they were able to expand their
classical ideals. The straight line and the square were given space to
breathe in expansive panoramas. With water everywhere, architects
could build mansions low and wide, using their reflections in the rivers
and canals to balance their proportions, producing an effect that is
unquestionably beautiful and grandiose. Water added lightness to the
heavy baroque style, and movement to the buildings set along its edge.
The Winter Palace is a supreme example. Despite its immense size
(1,050 rooms, 1,886 doors, 1,945 windows, 117 staircases) it almost
feels as if it is floating on the embankment of the river; the syncopated
rhythm of the white columns along its blue fagade creates a sense of
motion as it reflects the Neva flowing by.
The key to this architectural unity was the planning of the city as a
series of ensembles linked by a harmonious network of avenues and
squares, canals and parks, set against the river and the sky. The first
real plan dates from the establishment of a Commission for the Orderly
Development of St Petersburg in 1737, twelve years after Peter's death.
At its centre was the idea of the city fanning out in three radials from
the Admiralty, just as Rome did from the Piazza del Popolo. The
golden spire of the Admiralty thus became the symbolic and topographical
centre of the city, visible from the end of the three long
avenues (Nevsky, Gorokhovaia and Voznesensky) that converge on it.
From the 1760s, with the establishment of a Commission for the
Masonry Construction of St Petersburg, the planning of the city as a
series of ensembles became more pronounced. Strict rules were
imposed to ensure the use of stone and uniform fagades for the palaces
constructed on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. These rules underlined
the artistic conception of the avenue as a straight unbroken line
stretching as far as the eye could see. It was reflected in the harmonious
panoramas by the artist M. I. Makhaev commissioned by the Empress
Elizabeth to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the city
in 1753. But visual harmony was not the only purpose of such regimentation:
the zonal planning of the capital was a form of social ordering
as well. The aristocratic residential areas around the Winter Palace
and the Summer Gardens were clearly demarcated by a series of canals
and avenues from the zone of clerks and traders near the Haymarket
(Dostoevsky's Petersburg) or the workers' suburbs further out. The
bridges over the Neva, as readers who have seen Eisenstein's film
October (1928) know, could be lifted to prevent the workers coming
into the central areas.
St Petersburg was more than a city. It was a vast, almost utopian,
project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European
man. In
Notes from Underground (1864) Dostoevsky called it `the
most abstract and intentional city in the whole round world'.
Continues...
Excerpted from Natasha's Dance
by Orlando Figes
Copyright © 2003 by Orlando Figes.
Excerpted by permission.
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