Images & Citations

"Petersbourg has been created for walks : it’s like a park, or a hall. A hall and a park. But, the weather…
Water, snow, ice, hoar-frost…steam, mist, drizzle, rain, a cloudburst…
If one were to list all the states of water, then you would have to add one more – Petersbourg.
It has space, but not volume. Facades and water alone. Imagining the inner or rear aspects of a building can be difficult. Do people live there? Who? Petersbourg is populated by literary characters, and not by people. Petersbourg is a text, and you are a part of it.
Petersbourg…In this city, everything correlates to something that preceded it: The Northern Venice, the Northern Palmyra, the second Paris…but not the second Moscow…Here I learnt to work on the second biggest square in Europe (Palace Square), to see the largest cathedral after St.Peter’s (St.Isaak), and to observe one of the largest mosques (this time, for some reason, not the second largest, but the third largest in the world)…in short, PETERSBOURG, in wich “perhaps I too was born,” in which Pushkin lived, which Peter founded, the Petersbourg in which Classicism and Baroque would be that little bit more precise, a touch more classical and a touch less baroque, a city in wich the drive to catch up would mean a suppressed urge “to overtake”.
And there’s a feeling that this invented city, forced upon Russia, is eternal, that its temporal youth doesn’t tally with it (a mere two or three centuries).It’s eternal not by virtue of its antiquity and vitality, as is the case with Rome – it was designed to be “eternal”, it was already
eternal in Peter’s mind, even before the first axe began work on its construction: its immovable within the consciousness. For that reason, a visitor doesn’t arrive in the city of his imaginings – the city of Peter or of Pushkin. He finds himself in exactly the same, eternal city that the people that brought it fame inhabited – “and you too shone within it”. From the human point of view,Petersbourg is not the city of Peter or Pushkin, but the city of Yevgeny and Akaky Akakievich – the great scenery inspires you with the same feelings that moved the souls of those literary characters, just as, we must imagine, they moved the minds of their authors, though we are not their equals. In that, whether its squares and ensembles rank second or third, Petersbourg is finally, and forevermore, the first and only city.
The riddle set by Peter went unsoleved by Pushkin and remains unsolved to this day,
because there is no solution to it."


ANDREY BITOV "A stealing gaze".