Dear Diary,
Happy birthday to me. I am on my way to St Petersburg. I am homesick again and I don’t practically know how to explain how I am feeling because it all sounds clichéd… I’d love to quote Dorothy and say there is no place like home and tap my ruby slippers three times and be home, but it sounds too much like a fantasy book… I guess there are no words for some emotions. Actually there are no words for most emotions…
I have timed it so that Billie will turn twelve on the train from Moscow to St Petersburg and that she will spend her birthday in the city that used to be my favourite in the whole world (the whole world of course being limited to the Soviet republics, as I had never travelled abroad). Like Billie, I was twelve when I first came to St Petersburg (still Leningrad then) with my mum. This trip was by far the best vacation experience of my childhood and adolescence. No school, my beautiful, fun, kind Mamma all to myself, St Petersburg’s breathtaking beauty seen for the first time – there are no words for some emotions. Actually there are no words for most emotions… ‘Euphoria’ is one word. The sensation of the trip being blessed in every way. And central to it all the connection with my mother: strong, comforting and liberating. My mother away from work, stove, my father, and my sister. My mother without a care in the world. My mother not having to say once, ‘No, not now, not possible.’ And this city, this magnificent city so unlike other Soviet cities, so unlike poor old Kharkov where we lived, which looked by comparison like a purpose-built container for factories, institutes and drafting departments. St Petersburg was a city as an ideal, pure form. A city first and a place of residence second. We were there during the famous white nights – a few weeks in summer when darkness never comes; the night is banished and the city streets are filled with people at all hours.
Neither my mum nor I had ever seen anything like this in our lives – we were awe-stricken and gloriously insomniac, synchronised with the city.
I told Billie a lot about St Petersburg as she was growing up – how beautiful it was, how unique, the history, the white nights, how before we left for good I desperately wished we lived there. I told her the wonderful words of BG’s song about a better place, which I always imagined as his native St Petersburg: a place of green trees… gold over blue. I told her about my friend Marina, who I met on my trip with Mum, and who has remained a dear and loyal friend to me right to this day despite us living in different cities and, then, on different continents. I wanted Billie to spend her twelfth birthday with Marina and her family, to spend it in St Petersburg. If anything was going to help her weather the homesickness, the likes of which she had never felt before (Was she too young to feel it on our earlier trip? Was much less at stake for her then?) it would have to be this place. I did not want Billie to see St Petersburg when she was thirty. It would be too late then. And, no, I was not trying to plunge into the same river twice, this time as a mother not a daughter. Such ventures usually end disastrously, even I know that. But I needed the symbolism. This was our family history, all broken up and fragmented, but, despite it all, it had its axes of symmetry, moments and experiences recurring through generations, leitmotifs of some kind. Our history was cyclical as much as it was linear and in it, in different decades, my daughter and my mum got to walk the same streets with me by their side, giggling and intoxicated.
8
ST PETERSBURG
ALTHOUGH I FELL HEAD over heels for St Petersburg the first time I saw it, in theory at least my feelings could have gone either way. Just as there are ‘cat people’ and ‘dog people’, so there are ‘St Petersburg people’ and ‘Moscow people’. ‘No other city in Russia has inspired so much abuse,’ the renowned philologist Vladimir Toporov wrote of St Petersburg. ‘So many condemnations, reproaches, hurt feelings, regrets, lamentations, so much disappointment.’ There it sits on the country’s north-west border, facing out across the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia, a city that on maps looks as though it has defiantly turned its back on the rest of Russia and its face towards Europe, which in a way is exactly right. Its construction on an estuarine swamp, a site utterly unsuited for a large human settlement, let alone for a capital of Empire, has been called a tragic mistake. Peter the Great created the city in 1703 as an hommage to his favourite European cities, pronouncing it the new Russian capital and insisting that his entire court move there, which is how the whole Moscow versus St Petersburg thing started. To a nineteenth-century descendant of those nobles, one of St Petersburg’s most illustrious sons Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the city was a ‘Finnish swamp’ – a rotten, slimy place.
Toporov died in 2005, but it is safe to say that the opposition between St Petersburg and Moscow lives on, and will for a long time. Within this opposition St Petersburg is a doomed abstraction, an artificial, profoundly non-Russian city built in a mosquito pit and uniquely unsuited to human life, while Moscow is warm, organic, vital, real, embedded in its location, a deeply authentic Russian urban centre. Or Moscow is a semi-Oriental village, good for commerce and little else; and St Petersburg is a unique haven of civilisation and culture, one of the great European cities. Numerous fans of Moscow naturally object to these sorts of exceptionalist claims for their rival city. In fact, St Petersburg poet Elena Shwartz probably summed up the truth best when she wrote of how she had fondly imagined her hometown as a unique country – ‘West thrown into East, encircled and alone’ – only to discover that ‘St Petersburg has long since been flooded by Russia’.
It is summer holidays. I am fourteen and staying in St Petersburg with my friend Marina. This is essentially my farewell tour; in a few months my family is leaving the country, unless something goes terribly wrong with our plans. My first independent trip ever, this should be the absolute pinnacle of everything, but neither Marina nor I are able to forget for long why I am really here. In my teenage head I secretly fantasise that I was born in this city where seemingly everyone I’ve ever really admired came from – my literary idols, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam; my rock ‘n’ roll heroes, Boris Grebenshikov and Yuri Shevchuk. ‘Russia’s offspring who looks nothing like his mother. Pale, skinny, Europeaneyed passer-by.’ This is what Shevchuk, ripping through words and sounds as always, sings about his hometown, Marina’s hometown.
Yes, it’s true I am jealous. Marina takes me around this place with such an air of easy confidence, and I can’t help but wish that I were the one ushering her around, pointing far and wide, in the interstices of reverent silences brilliantly quoting everyone from Pushkin to Nabokov to Brodsky (I already know them all by heart). Brodsky said that the strongest emotions of his childhood and adolescence were inspired by Leningrad’s sky and by the idea of infinity that the city embodied. Despite the overwhelming imposition of architectural form – grand, geometrically overdetermined, and assertively European – from certain vantage points St Petersburg seems to him to be closer in essence to an ocean or a steppe. The city feels unbounded and uncontained, as if round any corner an empty vista full of possibilities might open up before me. Brodsky said that Petersburg’s spaces and their interrelationships had made his head spin. My head is spinning too, even more than it did on that first visit to the city with my mother.