Such was the frequency with which these characters appeared on paper and such was the number of people who put them there, such was their mastery of their material and such was the material itself—words—that in no time something strange began to happen to the city. The process of recognizing these incurably semantic reflections, loaded with moral judgment, became a process of identification with them. As often happens to a man in front of a mirror, the city began to fall into dependence on the three-dimensional image supplied by literature. Not that the adjustments it was making were not enough (they weren't!); but with the insecurity innate to any narcissist, the city started to peer more and more intently at that looking glass which the Russian writers were carrying—to paraphrase Stendhal— through the streets, courtyards, and shabby apartments of its population. Occasionally, the reflected would even try to correct or simply smash the reflection, which was al the easier to accomplish since nearly al the authors were residing in the city. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, these two things merged: Russian literature caught up with reality to the extent that today when you think of St. Petersburg you can't distinguish the fictional from the real. Which is rather odd for a place only two hundred and seventy-six years old. The guide will show you today the building of the Third Section of the police, where Dostoev- sky was tried, as well as the house where his character Ras- kolnikov killed that old money-lending woman with an ax.
The role of nineteenth-century literature in shaping the image of the city was all the more crucial because this was the century when St. Petersburg's palaces and embassies grew into the bureaucratic, political, business, military, and in the end industrial center of Russia. Architecture began to lose its perfect—to the degree of being absurd— abstract character and worsened with every new building. This was dictated as much by the swing toward function- alism (which is but a noble name for profit making) as by general aesthetic degradation. Save for Catherine the Great, Peter's successors had little in the way of vision, nor did they share his. Each of them tried to promulgate his version of Europe, and did so quite thoroughly; but in the nineteenth century Europe wasn't worth imitating. From reign to reign the decline was more and more evident; the only thing that saved the face of new ventures was the necessity to adjust them to those of their great predecessors. Today, of course, even the barrack-like style of the Nicholas I epoch may w^m a brooding aesthete's heart, for it conveys well the spirit of the time. But on the whole, this Russian execution of the Prussian military ideal of society, together with the cumbersome apartment buildings squeezed between the classical ensembles, produces rather a disheartening effect. Then came the Victorian wedding cakes and hearses; and, by the last quarter of the century, this city that started as a leap from history into the future began to look in some parts like a regular Northern European bourgeois.
Which was the name of the game. If the literary critic Belinsky was exclaiming in the thirties of the past century: "Petersburg is more original than all American cities, because it is a new city in an old country; consequently it is a new hope, the marvelous future of this country!" then a quarter of a cenhiry later Dostoevsky could reply sardonically: "Here is the architecture of a huge modern hotel —its efficiency incarnate already, its Americanism, hundreds of rooms; it's clear right away that we too have railroads, we too suddenly became a business-like people."
"Americanism" as an epithet applied to the capitalist era in St. Petersburg's history is perhaps a bit farfetched; but the visual similarity to Europe was indeed quite startling. And it was not the facades of the banks and joint-stock companies only that matched in their elephantine solidity their counterparts in Berlin and London; the inner decor of a place like the Elyseev Brothers food store (which is still intact and functioning well, if only because there is not much to expand with today) could easily bear comparison with Fauchon in Paris. The truth is that every "ism" operates on a mass scale that mocks national identity; capitalism wasn't an exception. The city was booming; manpower was arriving from all ends of the empire; the male population outnumbered the female two to one, prostitution was thriving, orphanages overflowed; the water in the harbor boiled because of the ships exporting Russian grain, just as it boils today as the ships bring grain to Russia from abroad. It was an international city, with large French, German, Dutch, and English colonies, not to speak of diplomats and merchants. Pushkin's prophecy, put into his Bronze Horseman's mouth: "All flags will come to us as guests!" received its literal incarnation. If in the eighteenth century the imitation of the West didn't run deeper than the makeup and the fashions of the aristocracy ("These Russian monkeys!" cried a French nobleman after attending a ball in the Winter Palace, "how quickly they've adapted!
They're outdoing our courtl"), then the St. Petersburg of the nineteenth century with its nouveau riche bourgeoisie, high society, demimonde, etc., became Western enough to afford even a degree of contempt toward Europe.
However, this contempt, displayed mostly in literature, had very little to do with the traditional Russian xenophobia, often manifested in the form of an argument as to the superiority of Orthodoxy to Catholicism. It was rather a reaction of the city to itself, a reaction of professed ideals to mercantile reality; of aesthete to bourgeois. As for this business of Orthodoxy versus Western Christianity, it never got very far, since the cathedrals and churches were designed by the same architects who built the palaces. So unless you step into their vaults, there is no way of determining what denomination these houses of prayer are, unless you pay attention to the form of the cross on the cupola; and there are practically no onion domes in this city. Still, in that contempt, there was something of a religious nature.
Every criticism of the human condition suggests the critic's awareness of a higher plane of regard, of a better order. Such was the history of Russian aesthetics that the architectural ensembles of St. Petersburg, churches included, were—and still are—perceived as the closest possible incarnation of such an order. In any case, a man who has lived long enough in this city is bound to associate virtue with proportion. This is an old Greek idea; but set under the northern sky, it acquires the peculiar authority of an embattled spirit and, to say the least, makes an artist very conscious of form. This kind of influence is especiaUy clear in the case of Russian or, to name it by its birthplace, Peters- burgian poetry. For two and a half centuries this school, from Lomonosov and Derzhavin to Pushkin and his pleia< (Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Delvig), to the Acmeists—Akh matova and Mandelstam in this century—has existed unde: the very sign under which it was conceived: the sign o classicism.
Yet less than fifty years separate Pushkin's paean to tht city in "The Bronze Horseman" and Dostoevsky's utteranci in Notes from Underground: "It's an unhappy lot to habi tate Petersburg, the most abstract and the most pre meditated place in the world." The brevity of such a spai can be explained only by the fact that the pace of this city': development wasn't actually a pace: it was acceleratioi from the start. The place whose population in 1700 wa: zero had reached one and a half million by 1900. Wha would take a century elsewhere was here squeezed int< decades. Time acquired a mythic quality because the mytl was that of creation. Industry was booming and smoke stacks rose around the city like a brick echo of its colon nades. The Imperial Russian Ballet under the directior of Petipa starred Anna Pavlova and in barely two decade: developed its concept of ballet as a symphonic structure— a concept which was destined to conquer the world. Abou three thousand ships Hying foreign and Russian Hags bustlec annually into St. Petersburg harbor, and more than a dozei political parties would convene in on the floor of th< would-be Russian parliament called the Duma, which ir Russian means "thought" (its achievements, in retrospect make its sound in English—"Dooma"—seem particularly ominous). The prefix "St." was disappearing—gradual!) but justly—from the name of the city; and, with the outbreak of World War I, due to anti-German sentiment, the name itself was Russified, and "Petersburg" became "Petro- grad." The once perfectly graspable idea of the city shone less and less through the thickening web of economics and civic demagoguery. In other words, the city of the Bronze Horseman galloped into its future as a regular metropolis in giant strides, treading on the heels of its little men and pushing them forward. And one day a train arrived at the Finland Station, and a little man emerged from the carriage and climbed onto the top of an ^rnored car.