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Thursday 4 December 2008

St Petersburg and the British: The City Through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents

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St Petersburg and the British: The City Through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents
by Anthony Cross

To early English visitors St Petersburg seemed an ‘abstract’, artificial city with no roots in the past. It was the creation of one man, Peter the Great, determined to replace Moscow as the capital of his empire by a new city on the banks of the Neva ‘where there was nothing to be seen but marsh and water’. By 1774, for Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, the first tourist to publish an account of St Petersburg, a settlement of mean wooden houses in 1703 had been transformed into ‘one of the most magnificent cities on earth’.

Anthony Cross, formerly Professor of Slavic studies at Cambridge, gives us a learned history of St Petersburg as seen through British eyes. His witnesses range from English governesses to Nancy Astor, from Oxford dons and divines to diplomats’ wives, from Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole to Colin Wilson and Alan Sillitoe. St Petersburg’s permanent British residents were the merchants whose letters Cross uses. A community at its height in the 19th century numbering some 500 families, they built their houses along the English Quay, bringing the comforts of the Victorian home to a cold climate. The prosperous sent their sons to minor public schools; the less affluent married and settled down with local girls.

His quotations from these diverse sources provide Cross with his long set-pieces: the eccentric Empress Anna who in the 1730s built an ice palace where even the playing cards were made of ice; Catherine the Great’s banquets, private affairs during which servants were confined to the kitchen, sending up food to the tables by an ingenious device. For the curious there are snippets: ice hills built to provide winter sports in a flat country; the flaccid breasts of Russian women displayed in public bath houses.

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