Thomas Eaton

St. Petersburg: Off Nevsky Prospect

<em>Thomas Eaton</em> experiences a Russian immersion

View from the belfry of Smolny Cathedral. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 16 November 2013

‘On the shore of desolate waves / he stood, full of lofty thoughts / and gazed afar.’ So begins Pushkin’s epic poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, with the legend of Peter the Great founding his new city in 1703. A remote and inhospitable swampland in north-western Russia was transformed into his ‘window on the West’, a Baroque and neo-classical masterpiece.

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