The waters of the Neva, the color of a sage lozenge, glisten like foil on the way to the Gulf of Finland; the clouds have the matte hue of old silver. “The most beautiful thing about Saint Petersburg is the sky,” says Anna. “Every day it is different, every imaginable shade of gray. Sometimes there are purple tones in it, sometimes more yellowish. When I leave the office in the afternoon, I often simply look up and enjoy the beauty.”
She works on the administrative side of a pharmaceutical company, is twenty-nine, and wears a black leather jacket over a black dress, with a black handbag, black tights, and black shoes. For balance she has blond hair and a white cell phone, which is always in her hands. Her eyes resemble an evening sky in Saint Petersburg in fall—melancholic blue-gray.
“For me this sea symbolizes freedom; it’s like the waiting room to the world of the gods,” she says half an hour later as we dock at Peterhof Palace. A pier, a wild natural coastline, cliffs, and dark sand. Anna teaches me the meaning of the word chandra, a kind of weltschmerz, or noble melancholy. This is the perfect place for it. “You’re feeling good, you have everything you need, but you’re tired from being happy, tired from all this carefreeness, you need a rest,” is how she describes the feeling. “Chandra is an important part of the Russian soul.”
The view of the sea reminds me of an episode of the Russian cartoon series Masyanya. The main character, a neurotic twentysomething philosopher, sits in front of her TV, depressed, and says, “How bad everything is. War everywhere, death, stupidity. And what do we do? Just drink.” Then she gets on her bike, rides to the seaside, sings a sad song out of tune, and the blues vanish. The sea helps; maybe “V Pitere Pit’” isn’t the only solution to problems.
On the grounds of Peterhof Palace a few yards inland, every hedge is clipped, every grassy area mown; gilded sculptures glow as if in competition with the freshly painted palace facade. It feels as if the czar has just popped down to the pub for a quick drink and could be back at any moment.
A good three hundred years ago Peter the Great broke from the traditions of his predecessors in many ways. He traveled extensively through Europe, commissioned Russia’s first warship, and moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, although the swampy land to the north made the building work a grind. Sometimes he was a little overzealous with his reforms; for instance, he allowed his subjects to grow beards only if they paid a beard tax. He had Peterhof Palace built as a summer residence; the extensions were added by a number of his successors, but mostly by Czarina Elizabeth, a Baroque fan. During World War II, the Germans caused appalling damage here, and then Stalin had the city bombed to prevent the Nazis from using its rich symbolism for victory celebrations. In the meantime, most of the buildings have been reconstructed to be true to the originals.
Palaces, fountains, and sculptures: the typical requisites of rulers, as found at Versailles or Sanssouci. But no other palace in the world offers the Peterhof mixture of sea-view chandra and rascally humor: to wit, there are booby traps for visitors here. You’ll be sitting peacefully on a bench and suddenly a jet of water comes at you. Even sauntering down what seems to be an innocent-looking pathway you can become unexpectedly wet. You have to imagine Peter was a mischievous czar.
Anna’s favorite fountain is free of trickery, a cascade some sixty feet long with four steplike plateaus made of chessboard-patterned marble; right at the top there are three fearsome green water-spitting dragons. “It’s good to know that some things don’t change,” she says. “When I was a kid I was happiest here, and that’s still true today.” Behind the dragons there is a closed wooden door set into an angular stone wall. “When I was young, I was convinced that dwarves lived there. Kids nowadays are too clever, they don’t believe such things.”
THE EVENING, BACK in the city, is dedicated to another of Anna’s childhood memories. As a seven-year-old, she saw Swan Lake for the first time in the Mariinsky Theatre. Posters in front of the foyer boast that the world-famous theater is running its 234th season this year. Maybe Czar and Czarina didn’t go to the pub but slipped out of Peterhof for an evening of culture.
The auditorium has hardly changed over the years. Painted cherubs on the ceiling dance around the huge chandelier; the golden balconies have creaky wooden floors.
What unfolds on the stage over the next three hours evokes impressions you’ll rarely find in news stories about Russia: airiness, beauty, and elegance. The music is cozy, creating a feeling of euphoria that calms the soul. Movement and sound harmonize completely. All around us, people begin to sob quietly when Odette and the Prince dance at the end of the second act without noticing that the evil sorcerer, Rothbart, is watching them. “That is the Russian souclass="underline" melancholy and beauty,” Anna whispers to me, rummaging in her handbag for tissues.
That was easy. There are supposedly people who have spent decades searching for this elusive Russian soul. And all the time the shy thing was hiding in the Mariinsky, maybe in a crease in the curtain or under a loose plank in the orchestra pit. Lonely, hidden, always on the run from the cleaning ladies or stagehands, and always waiting until the end of the second act of Swan Lake to quickly dash onto the stage.
YEKATERINBURG
Population: 1,350,000
Federal District: Ural
YELTSIN
FROM A GEOGRAPHICAL viewpoint Europe ends at the Ural Mountain range, 870 miles east of Moscow and some 25 miles from Yekaterinburg. So a whole lot of Russia is part of Europe, and yet we normally only think of the Balkan states, Romania, and Poland when we speak of Eastern Europe. Among geographers the eastern border is contentious; for the locals it’s fairly irrelevant, as the whole Ural region was always considered Russian.
Europe. In Russia’s history the “old continent” was time and again an object of comparison. Sometimes as model and yardstick, sometimes as competitor that needed to be outdone. In the recent past, within a very short period of time, attitudes toward Europe have changed drastically, according to Lev Gudkov, director of the prestigious sociological research organization Levada. While in 1991, 71 percent of Russians considered themselves European, by 2008 the figure was only 21 percent. And after the Crimean crisis, Russia’s relationship to the West and identification with its values reached rock bottom. We should drop the illusion that Russia wants to head toward “Westernization,” which some people believe is almost a predetermined natural law when a nondemocratic system collapses. Russia is seeking its own way.
I have spoken to many Russians about Europe and was surprised by some of their observations. I never had the impression of living in the midst of a dynamic entity on its way to reinventing itself, but many Euroskeptic Russians perceive a great deal of recent change: a shift away from traditional values like family (“Help! Homosexuals!”) and from their own culture (“Help! Muslim refugees!”). Besides that, some regard Europe as an ice-cold power construct without morals or passion which, despite its own lapses, has a strong tendency to lecture others in the name of humanity. Many people disapprove of the close links between Europe and the U.S.; some greatly overestimate America’s influence. “Is it true that Angela Merkel gets her orders directly from the White House?” one host asked me. A number of times I was invited simply to move to Volgograd or Novosibirsk to escape the life-threatening refugee crisis in Europe. People in the simplest of mini-apartments, living on US$230 a month and not knowing if they would have hot water the next day, felt sorry for me because of my background. Because they know from their TVs how bad things apparently are in Germany.