Saint Petersburg

“ At first sight this city did not strike me as so very much different from New York or London, and meeting, as I did, so many refined gentlemen in high places, I had come to think St. Petersburg was after all very much like Paris, or Berlin, or Rome. But it is different, and the difference makes itself subtly felt, just as the air in some coast towns of Britain is relaxing, and in others bracing. In these towns a man doesn’t notice the effect at first, but later on he begins to feel it, and so it is here in St. Petersburg. Great numbers of workmen pass down our street. ”

“ All the stoves on earth cannot make a St Petersburg winter endurable by any thing but a fish or a marmozet; while Moscow offered a glorious climate, unlimited space for a capital city, a fertile country, a fine landscape, a central position for the head of an empire, with Europe in its front, and Asia at its back.
The choice of St Petersburg has probably cramped the growth of Russian power. Even Poland has only given her a desert, a kingdom scantily cultivated, scantily peopled, discontented serfdom and a broken frontier. Yet all may be for the best. ”

“ Petersburg might have been burned, like another Moscow, by its own hands, rather than it should have fallen into those of an invader,—our steamer glides on what becomes a summer sea of smoothness. The few passengers begin to appear on deck and stretch their vision for the first glance at the imperial city. Upon the right, snug amidst its royal greenery, lies the town of Peterhoff and its domes, minarets, and imperial palace, with its splendid woods and waters. Our time is opportune for a glorious sight, for it is sunset, and the sun goes down here at a discreet hour. ”

“ From Novogorod to Petersburg, you see scarcely anything but marshes, and you arrive in one of the finest cities in the world, as if, with a magic wand, an enchanter had made all the wonders of Europe and Asia start up from the middle of the deserts. The foundation of Petersburg offers the greatest proof of that ardor of Russian will, which recognizes nothing as impossible: everything in the environs is humble; the city is built upon a marsh, and even the marble rests on piles ”

“ This tall spire, shooting upwards like a lance, is the crowning glory of Russia's great State prison, and Russia's Imperial tomb of kings, the grim fortress of Petropavlovsk. It is a familiar sight to Petersburg's populace, as they pass to and fro across the Troitski Bridge, or linger in the spacious Boulevard-park, which is never empty, and through which the dwellers on the Petersburg side go in and out to their homes. ”

“ Yes, Russia was a hell upon earth; and Petersburg was the centre and epitome of it, I said in my soul, as I loitered on one of the bridges that afternoon, and looked on the swift flowing river, on the splendid buildings, gleaming white, as the gilded cupolas and spires of the churches gleamed fire red, under the brilliant sunshine. A fair city outwardly, a whited sepulchre raised over a charnel-house. A city of terror, wherein every man is an Ishmael, knowing—or suspecting—that every other man’s hand is against him. ”

“ Petersburg is handsome, grand, impressive. Moscow is beautiful, poetic, sympathetic, and pervaded by an atmosphere of ancient Russia, which is indescribable, though it penetrates to the marrow of one's bones if he tarry long within her walls. Emperor Peter's new capital will not bear comparison, for originality, individuality, and picturesqueness with Tzar Peter's Heart of Holy Russia, to which the heart of one who loves her must, perforce, often return with longing in after days,--"white-stoned golden-domed, Holy Mother Moscow." ”

“ Whoever has seen our Metropolitan City only under the balmy atmosphere of a soft May-day, or under the smoky sultriness of a tropic August—who has known our encompassing rivers only as green arms of sparkling water, laughing under the shadows of the banks, and of shipping—would never have known the Petersburg of a place into which our passing winter has transformed the whole. ”

“ Petersburg is a fine city, and when you see how the sun glitters on all the ice palaces, and how the Russians, wrapped in their bearskins, drive furiously through the streets in their sleighs with four reindeers abreast, you feel as if your heart was laughing within you with delight, and you must go into the nearest shop to take a good glass of gin. ”

“ The innumerable carriages and sledges, marshalled in a long line by the gensdarmes, closed the procession; the soldiers presented arms to the dead. Yet all his riches and nobility could not free the proud Prince L. from Nature’s heavy debt, nor prevent him from treading the same dreary path as yon poor friendless wretch.
St. Petersburg never looks so beautiful as on a summer’s night; the buildings are then seen to great advantage. ”

“ Petersburg, with its aspect more imposing than that of any other city on the globe, but bearing in its bosom the elements of its own destruction, the moment it is freed from the control of the iron will, which created and now maintains it:—a fitting type and representative of the Russian Empire.
The whole enterprise of founding and maintaining St. Petersburg was and is a struggle against nature. The soil is a marsh so deep and spongy that a solid foundation can be attained only by constructing a subterranean scaffolding of piles. ”

“ Petersburg, on the southern shores of the bay of Cronstadt. It is now the St. Cloud of Russia, the favorite rural retreat of the Russian tzars. This palace, which has been the slow growth of ages, consists of a pile of buildings of every conceivable order of architecture. It is furnished with all the appliances of luxury which Europe or Asia can produce. The pleasure grounds, in their artistic embellishments, are perhaps unsurpassed by any others in the world. Fountains, groves, lawns, lakes, cascades and statues, bewilder and delight the spectator. ”

“ Later, our officers began to return from foreign service to Moscow. Men who had served in former days with my father in the Guards and had taken a glorious part in the fierce contest of the immediate past, were often at our house; and to them it was a relief from their toils and dangers to tell them over again. That was indeed the most brilliant epoch in the history of Petersburg: the consciousness of power breathed new life into Russia; business and care were, so to speak, put off till the sober morrow, and all the world was determined to make merry to-day and celebrate the victory. ”

“ Like the fortifications of Paris, it is designed not so much to defend as to control the city.
St. Petersburg is certainly the most imposing city, and Russia is the most imposing nation in the world—at first sight. But the imposing aspect of both is to a great extent an imposition. The city tries to pass itself off for granite, when a great proportion is of wood or brick, covered with paint and stucco, which peels off in masses before the frosts of every winter, and needs a whole army of plasterers and painters every spring to put it in presentable order. ”

“ Petersburg. The traveler who first sees the city under a summer sun is always struck with amazement. Its public places are so vast, its monuments so numerous and imposing, its quays so magnificent, and its edifices, public and private, so enormous, and constructed apparently of materials so massive and enduring, that he is ready to pronounce it the most magnificent city upon earth. ”

“ Petersburg is the finest city in the world; neither London nor Paris nor any other European capital which I have visited has sufficient pretensions to enter into comparison with it in respect to beauty and grandeur. Many of the streets are miles in length, as straight as an arrow and adorned with the most superb edifices. ”

“ Petersburg has an air of great regularity both in the arrangement of its streets and the uniformity of the buildings. Moscow forms a marked contrast to the younger capital, as there is little attempt at uniformity and regularity. ”

“ There lives no true-born and loyal Russian who is not bound by conscience, if not by oath, to report to Petersburg anything that may seem to him suspicious, or amiss, in any of his fellow-countrymen. It may be only a word, a look, a letter, a handshake, nothing is too trivial, because out of trivialities have grown the great revolutions of the world. ”

“ Nowhere in all Russia is the fact of that crash so completely evident as it is in Petersburg. Petersburg was the artificial creation of Peter the Great; his bronze statue in the little garden near the Admiralty still prances amid the ebbing life of the city. Its palaces are still and empty, or strangely refurnished with the typewriters and tables and plank partitions of a new Administration 19which is engaged chiefly in a strenuous struggle against famine and the foreign invader. Its streets were streets of busy shops. ”

“ He drove the nobility into this quagmire city, and drew the bureaucracy up to its unstable ground. To-day, St. Petersburg is a city of a million and a half of inhabitants, but if the Russian Czars should choose to reconstitute Moscow their permanent capital, St. Petersburg would again become a wilderness, [Pg 186] a waste of marshy islands, desolate and bare. It is the hot-house plant of autocracy. There is no natural reason for it to exist. ”

“ Petersburg and Moscow. Its position is well chosen on the banks of a small river, the Kazanka, which joins the Volga six versts away. On a high bluff stretching into a plateau in the rear of the city and frowning defiantly toward the west, its position is a commanding one. On the edge of this bluff is the Kremlin, with its thick and high walls enclosing the governor’s palace and other public buildings, all overlooked by a lofty bell-tower. Every part of the city gives evidence of wealth. ”

“ Petersburg he must go, the capital of talent, of aspiration, of hope, where are published the magazines so eagerly devoured in the days gone by,—to the capital, where dwell Zhukofsky and Pushkin. There his talents shall be recognized, and an appreciating world shall receive the new-comer with open arms. The arms of the world do indeed open on his arrival at St. Petersburg, but it is the cold embrace of want, of friendlessness. In St. Petersburg begins for him a struggle for existence which well-nigh ruins him forever. Bread is not easily earned. ”

“ Petersburg who has no means of escaping to the country for the summer, all contributed to irritate the young man's already excited nerves. The reeking fumes of the dram shops, so numerous in this part of the city, and the tipsy men to be seen at every point, although it was no holiday, completed the repulsive character of the scene. ”

“ Petersburg, without being onerous or vexatious, are quite as good as those of any large city in Europe. When men are deprived of their political liberties, the least that can be done for them is to let them enjoy as much municipal freedom as may be consistent with public peace. I should never have suspected, from any thing I saw in the city or neighborhood of St. Petersburg, that I was within the limits of an absolute despotism. If one desires to satisfy himself on this point he must visit the interior. ”

“ Petersburg, all was logical, conservative, Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the oldest source of all civilisation in Europe, and had kept none for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase, which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth. ”

“ Petersburg were fermented by some medium in which every impulse is propagated with furious speed. And people have an incredible amount of time for politics in St. Petersburg. People in Russia have in general more time than we hurrying Westerners can conceive. ”

“ Petersburg lacks the historical interest that invests the old capital, and it will be long before it displaces the holy city in the affections of the Russians, who one and all have a kind of superstitious reverence for Moscow. The Czars also hold the old city in high esteem, and are said to regard the Kremlin as the focus and ultimate asylum of their power. ”

“ Petersburg streets with no pomp and no attendants, yet in as great pride as ever Despotism gave a man. At his approach, nobles uncovered and looked docile, soldiers faced about and became statues, long-bearded peasants bowed to the ground with the air of men on whose vision a miracle flashes. For there was one who could make or mar all fortunes,—the absolute owner of street and houses and passers-by,—one who owned the patent and dispensed the right to tread that soil, to breathe that air, to be glorified in that sunlight and amid those snow-crystals. ”

“ From the beginning to the end of an evolution which lasted centuries the centre of gravity of the disjointed, scattered, and floating forces of ancient Russia perpetually changed its place. Thus the creation of St. Petersburg was nothing but the working out of a problem in dynamics. The struggle with Sweden, the conquest of the Baltic provinces, and the yet more important conquest of a position in the European world naturally turned the whole current of the national energies and life in that direction. Peter desired to perpetuate this course. ”

“ Petersburg, the European, the civilian, is seemingly merely tolerated. The city belongs to the functionaries, soldiers, officials, and chamberlains, to the Cossacks, Circassians, and, above all others, to the police. More intimate acquaintance reveals that a goodly portion of the uniformed persons in St. Petersburg are ordinary students, technologists, professors, etc., and that these uniformed persons do not equally represent the state. ”