The Companion Guide to St Petersburg
Kyril Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes
Excerpts from this Guide
On seeing Rasputin:
My sister and I may be two of the last people still alive to have seen Rasputin. It must have been just before his death. It was winter. We were going for a walk with our nurse. And, since we lived at the time on the Moika Embankment, I suspect that it must have been somewhere near the
Krásny most (Red Bridge). A cab on runners came trotting slowly past us. There were two men in it. One of them seemed to me very large with a big beard. His hat was off and his head thrown back in uproarious laughter and I could see his teeth gleaming between his black moustache and his black beard. My nurse said: 'Do you know who that it?' We didn't, of course. 'Well that is Rasputin, that's who it is.' 'Oh!' I said, 'And who's that?' I cannot, for the life of me, remember her answer nor can I imagine how she knew.
Chapter 11, The Embankments of the Moika and the Neva, p. 277
On the foundation of the city by Peter the Great: A giant built it; lacking stones
Peter was, indeed, a giant and he was short of stones. But there is hard evidence - for example, from the lists which survive of conscripted and volunteer workers employed on the Fortress of SS Peter and Paul - that mortality in the workforce was not abnormal for the period and that many names recurred for years.
The Memorial to those who died in the Blockade
Working conditions were undoubtedly bestial. As well as the normal eighteenth- century hazards of disease, ill-treatment, overwork and inadequate food there were Northern Europe's particular scourges of extreme cold and hungry wolves. (The Petersburg wolves were peculiarly persistent and voracious, hunting in vast packs.) So the legend spread - in songs and poems and letters, until it was held to be an incontrovertible historical fact - that the building of St Petersburg was costlier in human lives than any building project anywhere else. Typical are the much quoted lines of the Russian nineteenth-century poetaster Mikhail
Dimitriev:
He paved the swamps with human bones.
Chapter 1, The Foundation of the City, p.3
The Jordan staircase in the Winter Palace:
In Catherine's day, the staircase was used by foreign ambassadors attending Imperial audiences and so was known as the Ambassadors' Staircase. Later it was renamed the Jordan Staircase because it was the route by which the Emperor led his family to attend the annual service of the Blessing of the Waters on 6 January in commemoration of Christ's Baptism in the river Jordan. On these occasions, a temporary pavilion was set up on the ice of the Neva at a point opposite the northern (and now the main) entrance to the Palace. The Metropolitan of St Petersburg dipped a cross in a hole made in the ice and referred to as 'Jordan'. A small cup was then lowered into the hole and presented to the Emperor who took a sip of the water and handed the cup back to the Metropolitan. Charles Heath, former tutor of the last Emperor, Nicolas II, was English and Protestant and had no belief in the purifying power of a church service. He found the ceremony repellent and warned his ex-pupil against it on grounds of hygiene. But his well meant advice was ignored and no ill effects apparently followed the drinking by the Sovereign of the Neva's undubitably polluted water. After the water had been blessed, the Imperial family returned to the first floor by the way it had come.
Chapter 6, The Hermitage, p.125
Sixteen years after the blockade was lifted, on 9 May 1960, the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery -
Piskaryóvskoye Memoriálnoye Kládbistche (architects Ye. Levinson and A. Vasilyev) - was formally opened. Four hundred and seventy thousand, more than half all those who died during the Blockade of Leningrad, are buried here. Mass graves have an ugly ring about them; yet the architects, the poets, the gardeners, the relatives of the dead have created, with extraordinary reticence, a mass grave for nearly half a million people which is, if anything could be, completely appropriate - sixty-five acres of mounded grass surrounded by a girdle of limes and poplars, with a distant view from the raised entrance over the long, unmarked mounds that spells both peace and desolation. It is, strangely, a great monument, which relies neither on religion nor architecture for its effect. The people involved in its creation had suffered with the people who were buried there and this must be what it relies on: a catastrophe shared in common between the living and the dead.
Chapter 14, The Blockade, p.173
Sample Images
1 - Interior of the Hermitage Theatre
2 - Pushkinskaya Metro Station
3 - Tsarskoye Selo: The Cameron Gallery
4 - The Maritime Cathedral of St Nicholas
click on the images to enlarge
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