THROUGHOUT THE eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, St. Petersburg and Moscow served not only as cultural centers, each with its distinctive configuration of cultural institutions and sets of mores, but also as symbols, as cultural landmarks or signposts indicating deep issues at the very basis of Russian culture as a whole. Every capital city is in a sense a theatrical setting for the drama of power as the founders of the capital as capital would like to see it staged. Every capital city is in a certain sense a New Jerusalem, with its seat of power ensconced at an elevation located on a straight vertical line, the axis mundi, with that of the powers that rule the cosmos. Domestic subjects and foreign visitors alike must be awed by the exalted elevation and must somehow be made to see, in an imagery rendered visible and even palpable, the cosmic centricity of the axis on which the city turns. The architecture and the “grid” of each New Jerusalem is laid out with the plan of the cosmos, the idea of a very special destiny—at least as the local powers-that-be conceive it—very much in mind.¹

Russia, as befits its divided soul, had two capital cities. In Russian literature, there is a certain tendency for those who see the one as Jerusalem to regard the other as Babylon, though there are Russian writers who regard them both as Babylon. It is almost as though the cities were made to be contrasted with each other, as Gogol suggested:

Moscow is feminine, Petersburg masculine. Moscow is all brides, Petersburg all bridegrooms. . . . Petersburg is an accurate, punctual kind of person, a perfect German, and he looks at everything calculatingly. Before he considers giving a party, he’ll look into his pockets. Moscow is a Russian nobleman, and if he’s going to have a good time, he’ll go all the way until he drops, and he won’t worry about how much he’s got in his pocket. Moscow doesn’t like halfway measures. . . . Petersburg likes to tease Moscow for her awkwardness and lack of taste. Moscow reproaches Petersburg to the effect that he doesn’t know how to speak Russian. . . . Russia needs Moscow; Petersburg needs Russia.²

Belinsky, on the other hand, and all of the Westernizers, though for a variety of reasons, insisted that it was Petersburg above all that Russia needed.

During most of the nineteenth century, growth favored St. Petersburg. Begun in 1703, active as the prime capital from about 1710, Petersburg did not become, in palpable mass of buildings and population, recognizably a city of European scale until the second half of the eighteenth century. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the overall population of both cities was about the same—somewhere in the vicinity of a quarter million inhabitants. By 1811, Moscow had 275,000 people, Petersburg 300,000. As a result of the evacuation and burning of Moscow—the Napoleonic invasion—that city’s population dropped precipitately to 161,000 by 1814, at which time the population of Petersburg, swelled by a large immigration from Moscow, was more than twice that. In 1830, as a result of the cholera epidemic, the population of Moscow dropped from 305,000 to 261,000, while the population of Petersburg declined relatively little, from 448,000 to 445,000. The difference is to be accounted for not only in terms of the higher death rate from the disease in Moscow, but probably also by the relative fluidity of the Moscow population, with a larger proportion of the noble, artisan, and other classes maintaining close ties with their family origins in the countryside. By mid-century, Petersburg passed the half-million mark, while Moscow supported a population of 350,000.³ It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century that Moscow began to catch up, and only in the twentieth century did it surpass St. Petersburg. Today, Moscow has about twice the population of Leningrad.

Contrary to Gogol’s notion of Moscow being “all brides,” the male population, as in all Russian cities, was heavily preponderant. But where the male-female ratio was almost 2:1 in Moscow, it was almost 3:1 in Petersburg. This preponderance of males reflects the presence of peasant-artisans and workers with unsevered village connections who were either unmarried or had wives and families still in the countryside. In Petersburg, it reflects as well the presence of thirty to fifty thousand soldiers. After the reign of Nicholas I and the Crimean War, with the diminution of the garrison, the ratio tended to decrease somewhat. Reflecting the abnormally high ratio of wifeless males, Petersburg always supported an exceptionally large population of prostitutes, with the attendant problems for public health and moral atmosphere.⁴ Every reader of Crime and Punishment will, of course, remember not only the heroine, Sonia, but also the whore with the black eye who kept her post outside the Crystal Palace.⁵

Moscow supported an unusually large merchant population, somewhere around 5 percent, equal to and at times surpassing the noble population of the city. Between 1814 and 1852 the artisan population increased in relation to the population as a whole from 11 percent to 18 percent. This growth, along with the strong merchant presence, reflects the growth of the textile industry in Moscow, the strongest component of Russian industrial production before the major industrialization drive of the 1890s.⁶ Among merchants and artisans, the Old Believers were well represented. There were sizable Old Believer colonies in and around Moscow, in contrast to St. Petersburg, which Old Believers avoided like the plague.

As one would expect, a much higher proportion of the Petersburg population consisted of civil servants and the military. One should add to this a cosmopolitan cast—only 85 percent of the Petersburg population consisted of Great Russians. Not that the rest were all “foreigners”—along with the foreign residents, there were other peoples of the Russian Empire, especially from the Baltic. The cost of living in Petersburg had always been high relative to Moscow, and during the first half of the nineteenth century the cost of living doubled, making residence in Petersburg on a “Russian noble” scale truly an extravagance.⁷

Anyone who has read a Russian novel knows that St. Petersburg had the worst climate in the world, and that it was, during the nineteenth century, a kind of capital of tuberculosis—that symbolic disease against the romanticization of which, along with cancer, Susan Sontag has recently released the full power of her literary indignation.⁸ Moscow’s depredations from cholera in 1830 and 1848 have, however, left no comparable literary trace. The bad climate, the far northern location with its tricks of light (long hours of winter darkness and summer light, including the “white nights”), the periodic floods, the watery setting provided by the gulf, the five rivers, and the canals—the element of dream, revery, and hallucination—have entered into the stuff and substance of Russian literature. In the midst of this “natural” setting, there is a certain appropriateness to the nature of the city itself, which Dostoevsky called “the most intentional [umyshlennyi] city in the world,”⁹ with its aspirations to symmetry and uniformity, its angular streets and deliberate perspectives, its “architectural ensembles” and immense squares, its horizontality, its lined-up façades, its stone and stucco buildings, its rococo parks, palaces, and government offices, its monuments and ornaments (four equestrian statues, including the famous Bronze Horseman, by the end of the nineteenth century, where most European capitals had one or two; the horses rampant, the griffons, lions and eagles, all symbols of political power), and above all its foreignness, into which the style russe of the Church of the Blood, commemorating the assassination of Alexander II, was introduced as a kind of Disneyland old-Russian exoticism.

Moscow, on the other hand, has a relaxed, unbuttoned amplitude. It is “bol’shaia derevnia,” an overgrown village. There is no clear pattern to the streets, though the tendency is toward concentric rings with the Kremlin and Red Square at the center. The jackdaws sit on the crosses in the churchyards. The houses are largely dark and wooden, especially in Zamoskvorech’e. It is a “family” kind of place, and the accent is on domesticity. It is the marriage mart for daughters of the landed nobility (it was here that Pushkin’s heroine and muse, Tatiana Larina, was brought by her family after her unhappy involvement in the countryside with Evgenii Onegin, to be married off finally to the old general who whisked her off to Petersburg). Bol’shoi svet—high society—exists much more on a family basis; there is no public world around which it can organize itself. The accent is on private life, the inclination inward. The houses have fences or walls around them; they are walled in, in the oriental manner. There are no cafés; life is lived not in the streets but at home. There are myriads of churches and churchyards, and though some, like those within the Kremlin walls, were designed and built by Italian architects, their style is in the Russian manner and redolent of old Rus’. Parks and palaces exist, but they are not lined up in massive ensembles. Everything runs higgledy-piggledy.

Moscow as a cultural symbol is the ideological home of the Slavophiles. It is linked to the past. Although some of its monuments are not very old, like the statue to Minin and Pozharsky in Red Square, it commemorates the patriotism of the seventeenth century that saved Moscow from the foreign invader during the Time of Troubles. Although much was lost in the fire of 1812, some buildings and monuments that linked the nineteenth-century city with the medieval past remained, and then there was the memory of the Napoleonic occupation itself—Rostopchin’s speeches, the emptying out of the city, the great fire.

Most characteristic were the churches—at least one for every day of the year—and the ringing of the church bells. For the Slavophiles, Moscow was also a center of the church’s activity, and reminiscent of the role Orthodoxy had played in Russia’s past. It was the home of the Metropolitan of Moscow—for a good many years, the formidable Filaret—and not only did its churches and monasteries look like Russian religious establishments were supposed to look, but also it was a constant reminder of the merging of religion with policy, of a supreme political role the church might yet play in Holy Russia.

Slavophile ideology doted on the family, too. Not only were the Slavophiles bound together as a group by close ties of kinship, but the family and the clan were central to their thinking. Scions of traditional Russian landowners, with estates in the heartland of Russia and houses in Moscow, they looked back on the old dvorianstvo (the Russian gentry) as a rod or clan, or a group of closely linked clans, and contrasted the family ways of the rod (as in rodina, or native land), with its warm, spontaneous patriarchal ways, to the cold and inhuman legal-bureaucratic, rigidly hierarchical administrative systems associated with the West. Some of the Slavophiles, like Khomiakov, were learned in the law, and some, like Samarin, were experienced and effective administrators. “Hierarchy” and “rationalization,” rather than “law” or “administration,” were the keys to their dislike of Petersburg—these elements were tokens of its foreignness, exemplifying the imported flavor of the central administration, in contrast to the spirit of sobornost’, or communality, that characterized the idealized institutions of their beloved Rus’. For the Slavophiles, the patriarchal-familial spirit of old Rus’ had its capital in Moscow.¹⁰

Traditional, patriarchal customs, like the wearing of the beard, persisted in Moscow to a much greater degree than in Petersburg, which, with its male population of civil servants, soldiers, foreigners, and court followers, tended to be clean shaven or fashionably mustachioed. Above all, the merchants and artisans of Zamoskvorech’e sustained the wearing of the beard and traditional Russian garb. Apollon Grigoriev, not exactly a Slavophile, but like one an admirer of Moscow, sang praises too of the old Russian ways and dissoluteness—gypsies and the seven-stringed guitar. Aleksandr Ostrovsky, a severe moral critic of the obscurantism and tyranny often manifest in the ways of Zamoskvorech’e, nevertheless chronicled and dramatized those ways with poetic love of detail and a certain loyalty. Dostoevsky, on the contrary, though close to the spirit of the Slavophiles in many ways, and clearly regarding Petersburg as the Babylon of uprooted intellectuals and romantic dreamers, never seriously considered living anywhere but on the Neva.

For the Slavophiles, Moscow provided not only a link with the past, an idealized church-family town where they could link past and future in their vision of Russian national destiny, but also, in practical terms, a sanctuary. The Muscovite institutions that served them in this regard were the university and the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The latter provided them with a way of earning a living that did not require their presence in St. Petersburg. The university was the oldest and best in Russia and provided an atmosphere of learning and intellectual intercourse that was both a good deal freer and less shallow than that of its counterpart in Petersburg.¹¹

More than three decades before the Slavophiles “discovered” Moscow, and even before the French invasion, the poet-classicist Konstantin Nikolaevich Batiushkov, a preromantic steeped in Mediterranean culture, wrote his “Stroll About Moscow” (1811). This essay assumes the form of a letter written to a friend, accommodating random observations, descriptions, and comments on local customs in a fairly common form for the description of the life of a city. It begins with a description of the city in the late afternoon sun, as seen from the Kremlin. “He who stands in the Kremlin and can look out with cold eyes upon the gigantic towers, upon the ancient monasteries, upon magnificent Zamoskvorech’e without taking pride in his fatherland and without blessing Russia for it (and I say this boldly) is alien to all that is great, for he has been sadly deprived by nature from his very birth.” In addition to the grandeur of the monuments and the view, there is the representativeness of Moscow, and for “representative” one may read as well “symbolic.” Moscow symbolizes Russia. “Moscow is a signboard or an animated picture of our fatherland.” Not only are there “crowds everywhere,” but the crowds and the scenes display an extraordinary variety and the most dramatic contrasts.¹²

Descriptions of the variety and contrasts of big city life were to become a topos on nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. One thinks of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Des Vetters Eckfenster,” Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect,” and the famous description of early morning St. Petersburg in the first canto of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin—the latter two indicating that in Russian literature such descriptions were to become far more typical of Petersburg than of Moscow. Indeed, contrast and variety were topoi of metropolitan description even in the eighteenth century. Some of the contrastive pairings might occur in the context of a description of any large city—rich and poor, for instance, or new and old—yet some have a Muscovite-Russian particularity that is worth dwelling on:

A strange mixture of the ancient and the most modern buildings, of poverty and wealth, of European morals with the morals and customs of the orient! An amazing, incomprehensible confluence of superstition and vanity, and real glory and magnificence, of ignorance and enlightenment, of humaneness and barbarism. . . . Look: here, opposite the gap-toothed towers of ancient Kitai-gorod stands a charming home in the most recent style of Italian architecture. Into that monastery, built in the reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich, there enters a certain man in a long caftan, with a full beard, but there towards the boulevard, someone is making his way in a fashionable dress-coat. And I, seeing the traces of ancient and modern times, remembering the past, comparing it with the present, say quietly to myself: “Peter the Great accomplished a lot, but didn’t finish anything.”¹³

While Petersburg was to be viewed by some as insubstantial, hollow, an “unreal city,” it never suggested to a writer that Peter the Great “didn’t finish anything,” although Belinsky did point out that “any one of Peter’s successors might have condemned Petersburg to death.”¹⁴ And it becomes clear from the rest of Batiushkov’s essay and his major emphasis that what he has in mind here that Peter “didn’t finish” is less in the realm of architecture than in that of manners and morals.

The essay contains a series of satirical sketches, some of them verging on the grotesque, that form an interesting link between the works of eighteenth-century satirists like Fonvizin and Aleksandr Sergeievich Griboedov’s masterpiece, “Woe from Wit,” also set, and not by chance, in Moscow. The subject may be the standard stock-in-trade of the satirist: an affectation to refined (or fashionable or foreign) manners, overlying an absence of morality, a cupidity, greed, and selfishness, barbaric appetites that are tokens not so much of the “old ways” as of a kind of Levantine uprootedness, a moral never-never land. The country bumpkin, investing his passion and his purse in the merely modish, in the superficial emblems of foreign taste, the nobleman who pretends to high culture while his acts betray his heartlessness and indifference to those around him, the careerist who pursues his way up the ladder of success with the most barbarous indifference either to duty or to what lies humanly in his way—the discrepancy between manners and morals becomes part of the Moscow literary setting. Batiushkov and Griboedov, who were in hostile literary camps and professed to dislike each other, each lighted instinctively on this theme. It was Aleksandr Ostrovsky who later in his plays created the Muscovite type of the samodur, the patriarchal domestic tyrant who, basing himself in obscurantist fashion on the traditional ways of old merchant Russia, attempted to extinguish “the ray of light in the kingdom of darkness.”¹⁵

Three years after his “Stroll about Moscow,” Batiushkov wrote “A Stroll to the Academy of Fine Arts,” a sketch composed in the same format but set in St. Petersburg. It may be one of a number of Petersburg sketches by Batiushkov, but it is the only one that has survived. Whereas the Moscow sketch stresses the coarseness of Muscovite manners and byt (everyday life), its Petersburg twin focuses on esthetics—esthetic theories and criteria relevant to the Academy of Fine Arts but also the esthetic splendor of Peter’s city itself. For, while in his private correspondence he sometimes complained of the hardships of Petersburg (“It is an abyss that swallows up everything,” he wrote his sister about the cost of living there¹⁶), in his formal work, he was the city’s (and its founder’s) panegyrist. Peter, he wrote, “having held the fate of half the world in his hand, took comfort from this great thought, that on the shores of the Neva, the tree of science would flourish hard by the vestibule of his power, and that sooner or later it would bring forth new fruits and mankind would be enriched thereby.”¹⁷ In general, it was Peter’s activity on behalf of high culture, and the esthetic purity of Petersburg, in contrast to “ancient Paris” or “smoke-dimmed London” — its purity of style as the setting of progress — that Batiushkov admired. “Whoever’s not been in Petersburg for twenty years will certainly not recognize it,” he wrote. “He will see a new city of new people, new customs, new morals.” Or, again: “How many wonders we see before us, and wonders created in so short a time, a century—in one brief century!”¹⁸

If the Slavophiles, from their point of view of proper Russian piety, tended to see Moscow as Jerusalem and Petersburg as everywhere betokening the city of the Antichrist, the Westernizers clearly preferred Petersburg, though with varying emphases, and for somewhat different reasons. Batiushkov, who long preceded the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy (belonging in its first form to the 1840s) may in a certain sense be said to have been a Westernizer, and with him it is “taste,” esthetics, and its relationship to manners, and more profoundly to manners and morals, that inclined him to Petersburg, though he signed himself “a Muscovite.” Both Aleksandr Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky, for somewhat different reasons, both preferred Petersburg, though Belinsky, with an odd twist for a Westernizer, makes a remarkable effort to redeem Moscow, while Herzen’s preference for Petersburg is couched in his most sardonic manner.

While there is nothing original in Petersburg, Herzen writes, in Moscow, “everything, from the stupid architecture of St. Basil’s to the taste of kalachi,” is of extreme originality. Petersburg differs from the other cities of Europe only in that it is like all of them, and even the Russian churches there “have a Catholic look about them.”¹⁹ In Moscow, however, “you hear Orthodoxy in its copper voice.” And, yes, there is something Babylonian, or at least Romish, in the Slavophile-apocalyptic sense, about Petersburg. It is in this sense that Briullov’s famous painting of The Last Day of Pompeii, with its “terrible image of a mute and savage power that is ushering in destruction upon people” (cf. Bowlt, fig. 6.3), has something “Petersburgian” in its inspiration. “Nowhere,” Herzen writes,

have I had so many doleful thoughts so often as in St. Petersburg. Oppressed by heavy doubts, I used to wander along its granite and was close to desperation. I am obliged to Petersburg for those moments, and I have loved it for them, just as I have ceased loving Moscow for the fact that it does not even know how to torment and oppress. Petersburg will prompt any honorable man to curse this Babylon a thousand times. In Moscow, you can live for years and, except for near the Uspensky Cathedral, never hear an oath. That is why it is worse than Petersburg.²⁰

The joy of Petersburg, in other words, is that it incites to rebellion, whereas for a well-heeled Moscow nobleman, that old Russian city whispers only peace and acquiescence, and for that, the revolutionary Herzen hates it. In his memoirs, written much later, Herzen also acknowledged the worth of the relative latitude and freedom of expression in the noble-intellectual salons of Moscow, the Slavophile sanctuary. Undoubtedly he felt more at home there.

Belinsky, on the other hand, while redeeming Moscow, indicates clearly why he prefers to reside in Petersburg. He writes a fine appreciation of Moscow’s quaintness and domesticity, its “impulse to family comfort,” its crooked and narrow streets, its “patriarchal family life,” and its fenced-in, huge courtyards overgrown with grass and surrounded by outbuildings:

The poorest Muscovite, if he’s married, cannot go without a storage-cellar. If he rents an apartment, he worries more about the cellar where he’ll keep his food supply than about the rooms where he’ll live. . . . Or his own little house may be a hovel, but he will have his own yard, a few chickens, maybe a calf. The main thing is still the cellar. One finds such houses even on the best streets in Moscow. And one finds fine houses even on the worst streets. Anyone who has lived in Petersburg is as astonished by Moscow as a foreigner would be.²¹

Family ties are of the essence. Everyone has relatives, and the Muscovite has to remember the birth-and name-days of a hundred and fifty people. Moscow has an aristocratic character, established by the dignitaries who fled the rigors of Peter’s presence and enhanced during the “golden age” under Catherine. Entertainments are lavish, and on the scale of the Thousand and One Nights.

Oriental splendor has its counterpart in a certain oriental somnolence and inwardness, with the emphasis more on comfort than on splendor or taste, even in the “great houses.” Everyone, Belinsky writes, “lives in his own yard and walls himself off from his neighbor”—curtains on the windows, gates locked, a chained watchdog, everything somnolent; a fortress prepared to withstand a long siege, yet with the accent on family life everywhere, and the city as such almost invisible. Remarking on the splendid views, Belinsky introduces yet another comparison reminiscent of the Middle East: “If there were minarets instead of churches, one might think oneself in one of those oriental cities that Scheherazade used to tell about.”²²

Not all of Moscow, for Belinsky, is backward-oriented. He does point out that the city’s outskirts are surrounded by mills and factories that supply all of Russia with cloth. Since Moscow is centrally located, and railroads in Russia a thing for the future, Petersburg cannot compete. Here, little by little, Belinsky sees the spirit of the new stirring.

He dwells also on the university, Russia’s oldest and best. Thus, the Petrine reforms have made Moscow at once “Oxford, Manchester and Rheims.”²³ Scholarship, art, literature, education—in all of these Muscovite taste is superior. There is more space in which to grow. Yet promising young people either leave Moscow or lose their promise. Petersburg is the only arena for action, even literary action. In Moscow, the “talk about literature” is better than anywhere else, but they do not produce any there.

Petersburg, for better or for worse, is a city, while Moscow is not. The Petersburger rarely knows or cares who lives beside him. All are occupied with their own affairs. The street and public places, on the other hand, are alive in Petersburg as they are not in Moscow. And news matters. In Moscow, Moskovskie vedemosti comes out three times a week, and the Muscovite subscriber will pick up all three on Saturday—something unthinkable in Petersburg.²⁴ For the Muscovite merchant, a stout and stately horse and a stout and stately wife are the greatest blessings life has to offer. Petersburg, on the other hand, is always concerned with the fine points of tone and manner. Petersburg merchants are very different from their Muscovite counterparts. The mixing of European and Russian dress so often practiced by Moscow women would seem out of place in Petersburg. The Petersburger talks seriously only about “the service.” The Muscovite, on the other hand, tends to think that the more serious man is, the less he talks in general, and the happier he is. In Moscow, the officials are still prikaznyi—in appearance, that is to say, there is nothing at all “official” about them. Petersburg, true to its concern for mode and style, true to its seriousness about officialdom, takes great pains to appear official even when it is not.

Petersburg has no “historic” monuments, yet it is in itself a monument, more like the cities of North America than like Moscow. Russian development is quite contrary to the European; that is, it proceeds from the top down, not from the bottom up. The surface has a much higher significance, a greater importance, than is commonly believed. In this sense, Petersburg cannot be dismissed as “superficial” or “hollow.” Lomonosov imitated foreign modes, but Lomonosov led to Pushkin.²⁵ It appears foreign and superficial, like the wearing of Western clothes, and there is struggle against it. Yet everything that lives is the result of struggle. And why is it, Belinsky asks, “that the only people in Russia who study anything, who read, who have a taste for the fine arts, dress in the European fashion?”²⁶ Petersburg is a model for all of Russia in everything that has to do with “form,” from fashion and social tone to ways of piling bricks, to the finer points of architecture, from typographical fine points in printing to the substance of the Petersburg journals, which, for better or for worse, are the only ones in Russia that hold the public’s interest. Above all, Petersburg demands action. “Petersburg,” Belinsky concludes, “is fated always to work and do; and Moscow, to educate the doers.”²⁷

In nineteenth-century European fiction, the great metropolitan city is the magnet for the ambition of characters who tend to mirror the biography of Napoleon—i.e., the gifted provincial who arrives there to enact his dreams, his “great expectations,” like Dickens’s Pip or Balzac’s Rastignac, only to find himself caught in the vanity of vanities, the pursuit of a will-of-the wisp whose substance becomes the more elusive as its outward glitter becomes more intensely present. As a scene for the realization of the ambitions of the provincial fledgling, Moscow plays scarcely any role at all in classical Russian literature. For the golden age of the Russian novel, Moscow, in this properly literary sense, is not a city at all. St. Petersburg is the only real city.

There all the standard themes are enacted: ambition fulfilled and unfulfilled; dissociation of sensibility; intellect and affect running different ways; schizophrenia; hallucination; talent corrupted and innocence led astray; mysterious underground networks that parallel the labyrinth of streets; bodies and souls bought and sold; the whore with a heart of gold and the golden beauty with the heart of a whore; the parade of contrasts—rich and poor, innocent and corrupt, old and new, beggar become king and king turned beggar. Moscow, on the other hand, remains, like the countryside, a family locale.

In almost every novel, story, and poem of major significance in Russian literature written from the 1830s on, whatever the theme, whatever the characters, whatever the particular talent of the author involved, the character of Petersburg remains remarkably the same. It is Babylon. It is a place whose role in cosmic history is clearly to be subsumed, the city of the Apocalypse, hollow and empty for all its outward splendor, the city of the Antichrist.

In the eighteenth century, on the other hand, at least as far as formal, printed literature is concerned, St. Petersburg was the very promise of heaven. From Buzhinsky, who wrote the first formal ode to St. Petersburg still in Peter’s lifetime, in 1718, to the spendid poems of Derzhavin celebrating “Felitsa” and her capital city, the topoi of such poems became quite standard, very much in the spirit of the laudes Romae of the Latin poets, and their Latin and vernacular imitators throughout the Middle Ages, though with one or two distinctive touches.²⁸ The city was a triumph of nature and art, a tribute to its founder, whom it personified. Where once there had stood an empty wilderness, now half the world came to pay tribute. Where once there had been an empty swamp, now proud palaces greeted the eye. Et cetera.²⁹

The oral and manuscript folk literature contained quite a different picture of St. Petersburg, however. There the curse of Peter’s first wife, shut up by him in a nunnery, that “Petersburg be empty,” found its echoes and elucidations. The whore of Babylon, city of the Antichrist, place of the last end, curse of Satan: a haunted, illusory, hallucinated place, vanity of vanities, destined to vanish in smoke, or (more appropriately perhaps) under the wave. St. Petersburg is haunted by the political trial of the Tsarevich Aleksei, who died in the Peter-Paul fortress under torture, under suspicion of having taken up his mother’s curse on Petersburg and of having conspired and consorted with those among the clergy and nobility who resisted the Petrine reforms.³⁰

With Pushkin as a kind of transitional figure, and from the time of the appearance of Gogol’s Petersburg stories, the printed literature takes up the folk motif and sustains it through the period of the symbolists, or at least until the turn of the twentieth century, when a new notion, introduced first through criticism of the architectural and visual arts, suggests not so much the negation of Babylon as the presence in Babylon of a certain cultural depth, richness, solidity—a dimension of human life that is to be respected and valued.

Perhaps the most startling turn that has taken place is a recent one. I would like to end by calling attention to a prose-poem written by Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s, called “City on the Neva.” Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn is considered by many, and I think to a large degree rightly, to be a Slavophile, and therefore one who might be expected to treasure Moscow for its traditionalist, conservative, religious, patriotic associations, and to despise St. Petersburg. It should be pointed out that Solzhenitsyn, who is from Rostov and native to neither city, visited Leningrad, from Moscow, probably for the first time shortly before he wrote this piece. In good Slavophile tradition, what appeals to Solzhenitsyn is that Leningrad, unlike Moscow, has not changed: “What a blessing that no new building is allowed here. No wedding-cake skyscraper may elbow its way onto the Nevsky Prospect, no five-story shoebox can ruin the Griboyedov Canal. There is no architect living, no matter how servile and incompetent, who can use his influence to build on any site nearer than the Black River or the Okhta.” What of its foreignness? “It is alien to us, yet it is our greatest glory! . . . All this beauty was built by Russians—men who ground their teeth and cursed as they rotted in those dismal swamps. . . It is suffering that somehow redeems the “city built on bones,” that somehow makes of it a capital again, symbolic of the country as a whole: “And what of our disastrous, chaotic lives? What of our explosions of protest, the groans of men shot by firing squads, the tears of our women: will all this too—terrible thought—be utterly forgotten? Can it, too, give rise to such perfect, everlasting beauty?³¹ The spiritual capital and the seat of power have changed places now; they are still not one.

NOTES

1. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976); Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), especially chapter 12; Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1954).

2. N. V. Gogol, “Petersburg Notes for 1836,” quoted by V. G. Belinskii, “Peterburg i Moskva” (“Petersburg and Moscow”), in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works; hereafter cited as PSS), vol. 8 (Moscow: Akademia Nauk, 1955), p. 411.

3. Ocherki istorii Leningrada (Essays on the History of Leningrad), vol. 1 (Moscow-Leningrad: Akademia Nauk, Institut istorii, 1955), pp. 506-49; Istorila Moskvy v shesti tomakh (History of Moscow in Six Volumes) (Moscow: Akademia Nauk, 1952-57), vol. 3, pp. 43-46, 292-306, vol. 4, pp. 161-73.

4. Ocherki istorii Leningrada, vol.1, pp. 447-505.

5. N. K. Antsiferov, Peterburg Dostoevskogo (Petrograd: Brokgaus-Efron, 1923).

6. Istorila Moskvy, vol. 3, pp. 198-230.

7. Ocherki istorii Leningrada, p. 509.

8. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978).

9. The familiar phrase about Petersburg is from Notes from Underground. On the imperial sculpture of St. Petersburg, see V. V. Nesterov, L’vy steregut gorod (Lions Watch the City) (Leningrad: Khudozhnik, RSFSR, 1972).

10. On the Slavophiles, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952); Abbott Gleason, European and Muscovite (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972); S. Lukashevich, Ivan Aksakov, 1823-1886 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965); P. K. Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Russian Slavophilism (The Hague: Mouton, 1961); A. Gratieux, Le mouvement Slavophile (Paris: Congar, 1953).

11. Istorila Moskvy, vol. 3, pp. 478-502.

12. K. N. Batiushkov, Socbineniia (Works) (Moscow: Izd. Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1955), pp. 308-309.

13. Ibid., pp. 307-308.

14. Belinskii, PSS, vol. 8, p. 388.

15. This is the title of one of Ostrovsky’s best-known plays.

16. Batiushkov in a letter to his sister, April 18, 1810, quoted by N. V. Fridman, Prozo Batishkova (Batiushkov’s Prose) (Moscow: Nauka 1965), p. 109.

17. Quoted by Fridman, Proza Batiushkova, p. 107.

18. Ibid., p. III.

19. A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Collected Works in Thirty Volumes) (Moscow: Akademiia Nauk, 1954), vol. 2, p. 37. In My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 389-425, Herzen is much kinder to Moscow, and appreciative of the relatively free spirit of its aristocratic tradition.

20. Ibid., p. 41.

21. Belinskii, PSS, vol. 8, p. 390.

22. Ibid., p. 391.

23. Ibid., p. 405.

24. Ibid., p. 398.

25. Ibid., p. 395.

26. Ibid., p. 396.

27. Ibid., p. 413.

28. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), pp. 157-59.

29. See N. K. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (The Soul of Petersburg) (Petrograd: Brokgaus-Efron, 1922; reprinted Paris: YMCA Press, 1978).

30. See the haunting twentieth-century novel on this subject by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Peter and Alexis (New York: Putnam, 1906).

31. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Stories and Prose Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), pp. 252-53.