But the main reason for this sentiment is the sea itself. Oddly enough, for all the naval might that Russia has amassed today, the idea of the sea is stiU somewhat alien to the general population. Both folklore and the official propaganda treat this theme in a vague, if positive, romantic fashion. For the average person, the sea is associated most of all with the Black Sea, vacations, the south, resorts, perhaps palm trees. The most frequent epithets encountered in songs and poems are "wide," "blue," "beautiful." Sometimes you might get "rugged," but it doesn't jar with the rest of the context. The notions of freedom, open space, of getting the hell out of here, are instinctively suppressed and consequently surface in the reverse forms of fear of water, fear of drowning. In these terms alone, the city in the Neva delta is a challenge to the national psyche and justly bears the name of "foreigner in his own fatherland" given to it by Nikolai Gogol. If not a foreigner, then at least a sailor. In a way, Peter I achieved his goaclass="underline" this city became a harbor, and not only literally; metaphysically, too. There is no other place in Russia where thoughts depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of St. Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence.
However true it might be that Peter was planning to have a new Amsterdam, the result has as little in common with that Dutch city as does its former namesake on the shores of the Hudson. But what went, in the latter, up, in the former was spread horizontally; the scope, however, was the same. For the width of the river alone demanded a different scale of architecture.
In the epochs following Peter's, they started to build, not separate buildings but whole architechual ensembles, or, more precisely, architectural landscapes. Untouched till then by European architectural styles, Russia opened the sluices and the baroque and classicism gushed into and inundated the streets and embankments of St. Petersburg. Organ-like forests of columns sprang high and lined up on the palatial fa,.ades ad infinitum in their miles-long Euclidian triumph. For the last half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this city became a real safari for the best Italian and French architects, sculptors, and decorators. In acquiring its imperial look, this city was scrupulous to the very last detaiclass="underline" the granite revetment of the rivers and canals, the elaborate character of every curl on their cast-iron grilles, speak for themselves. So does the decor of the inner chambers in the palaces and country residences of the Czar's family and the nobility, the decor whose variety and exquisiteness verge on obscenity. And yet whatever the architects took for the standard in their work—Versailles, Fontainebleau, and so on—the outcome' was always unmistakably Russian, because it was more the overabundance of space that dictated to the builder where to put what on another wing, and in what style it ought to be done, than the capricious will of his often ignorant hut immensely rich client. When you look at the Neva's panorama opening from the Trubetzkoy bastion of the Peter and Paul fortress, or at the Grand Cascade by the Gulf of Finland, you get the odd sensation that it's not Russia trying to catch up with European civilization but a blown-up projection of the latter through a laterna ^gica onto an enormous screen of space and waters that takes place.
In the final analysis, the rapid growth of the city and of its splendor should be attributed first of aU to the ubiquitous presence of water. The twelve-mile-long Neva branching right in the center of the town, with its twenty-five large and small coiling canals, provides this city with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable. Reflected every second by thousands of square feet of running silver amalgam, it's as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images. No wonder that sometimes this city gives the impression of an utter egoist preoccupied solely with its own appearance. It is true that in such places you pay more attention to facrades than to faces; but the stone is incapable of self-procreation. The inexhaustible, maddening multiplication of all these pilasters, colonnades, porticoes hints at the nature of this urban narcissism, hints at the possibility that at least in the inanimate world water may be regarded as a condensed form of time.
But perhaps more than by its canals and rivers, this extremely "premeditated city," as Dostoevsky termed it, has been reflected in the literature of Russia. For water can talk about surfaces only, and exposed ones at that. The depiction of both the actual and mental interior of the city, of its impact on the people and their inner world, became the main subject of Russian literature almost from the very day of this city's founding. Technically speaking, Russian literature was born here, on the shores of the Neva. If, as the saying goes, all Russian writers "came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat,'" it's worth remembering then that this overcoat was ripped off that poor civil servant's shoulders nowhere else but in St. Petersburg, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The tone, however, was set by Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman," whose hero, a clerk in some department, upon losing his beloved to a flood, accuses the mounted statue of the Emperor of negligence (no dikes) and goes insane when he sees the enraged Peter on his horse jumping off the pedestal and rushing in pursuit to trample him, an offender, into the ground. (This could be, of course, a simple tale about a little man's rebellion against arbitrary power, or one about persecution mania, subconscious versus superego, and so forth, were it not for the magnificence of the verses themselves—the best ever written in praise of this city, with the exception of those by Osip Mandelstam, who was literally stamped into the ground of the empire a century after Pushkin was killed in a duel.)
At any rate, by the beginning of the nineteenth cen^ry, St. Petersburg was already the capital of Russian letters, a fact that had very little to do with the actual presence of the court here. After all, the court sat in Moscow for centuries and yet almost nothing came out of there. The reason for this sudden outburst of creative power was again mostly geographical. In the context of the Russian life in those days, the emergence of St. Petersburg was similar to the discovery of the New World: it gave pensive men of the time a chance to look upon themselves and the nation as though from outside. In other words, this city provided them with the possibility of objectifying the country. The notion of criticism being most valid when conducted from without enjoys a great deal of popularity even today. Tien, enhanced by the alternative—at least visually—utopian character of the city, it instilled those who were the first to take quill in their hands with a sense of the almost unquestionable authority of their pronouncements. If it's true that every writer has to estrange himself from his experience to be able to comment upon it, then the city, by rendering this alienating service, saved them a trip.
Coming from the nobility, gentry, or clergy, all these writers belonged, to use an economic stratification, to the middle class: the class which is almost solely responsible for the existence of literature everywhere. With two or three exceptions, all of them lived by the pen, i.e., meagerly enough to understand without exegesis or bewilderment the plight of those worse off as well as the splendor of those at the top. The second attracted their attention far less if only because the chances of moving up were far smaller. Consequently, we have a pretty thorough, almost stereoscopic picture of the inner, real St. Petersburg, for it is the poor who constitute the main body of reality; the little man is always universal. Furthennore, the more perfect his immediate surroundings are, the more jarring and incongruous he looks. No wonder that all of them—the retired officers, impoverished widows, robbed civil servants, hungry journalists, humiliated clerks, tubercular students, and so forth— seen against the impeccable utopian background of classicists porticoes, haunted the imagination of writers and flooded the very first chapters of Russian prose.