St Petersburg

(Right) The Petersburg mythos would not have existed without Alexander Pushkin, who transformed what had been no more than a monument to the great emperor—though an awesome one—into the very emblem of Petersburg, a sign of its majesty and endurance, and also into the symbol of the awful fate and terrible suffering that were to befall the city. Self-portrait of the poet, 1829.

(Above) The Bronze Horseman pursues poor Yevgeny: in Pushkin’s poem the statue represents not only Peter the Great and the city he founded but also the state itself. What is more important—the individual’s happiness or the city’s and the state’s triumph? Illustration by Alexander Benois for Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, 1916.

(Right) Mikhail Glinka, “a kind of Russian Rossini”: his Valse-Fantaisie, in which erotic longing acquires an almost spiritual tone, was the wellspring of Petersburg music.

(Below) Imperial Petersburg in winter: view of the Neva River and St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Lithograph of the mid-nineteenth century.

(Left) Nikolai Gogol shattered the image of imperial Petersburg, creating his own obsessive vision in which the capital is not really a city at all, but a land of the living dead. Drawing by Nathan Altman, 1934, for Gogol’s Petersburg Tales.

(Below) Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect: “It’s all deceit, all dreams, it’s all not what it seems!”

(Above left) Fyodor Dostoyevsky on St. Petersburg: “I’m sorry, I don’t love it. Windows, holes—and monuments.” Wood engraving by Vladimir Favorsky, 1929.

(Above right) Dostoyevsky’s spectral Petersburg will exist as long as there is Russian literature. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s illustration, 1922, for Dostoyevsky’s White Nights creates an atmosphere of quiet despair.

(Right) Modest Mussorgsky, who created “Dostoyevskian” operas, died of acute alcoholism. This portrait was done by Ilya Repin in Petersburg’s military hospital just ten days before the composer’s death in 1881.

(Above) Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty, set to Tchaikovsky’s music, inspired the unprecedented re-evaluation of the Petersburg mythos: it was transformed from sinister to benign, from dour to luminous. An 1890 photograph, taken after the ballet’s premiere at the Maryinsky theater.

(Left) Marius Petipa endowed his ballets with a vision of Petersburg’s grandeur and sense of architectural harmony and classical purity.

(Left) Peter Tchaikovsky’s music was a forewarning for Petersburgers of the coming collisions and catastrophes.

(Below) Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, based on Pushkin, brought its listeners “the poison of Petersburg nights, the sweet mirage of its ghostly images.” Design for the 1931 production by Vladimir Dmitriev.

(Top) A group portrait of Mir iskusstva (World of Art) by one of its members, Boris Kustodiev. This dynamic collective changed the course of Petersburg arts and crafts, but many of its members ended in exile after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917.

(Above left) Alexander Benois, guiding spirit of Mir iskusstva, became one of the most influential makers of the Petersburg mythos at the turn of the century. Portrait by Leon Bakst, 1898.

(Above right) The organizational genius and impeccable taste of Sergei Diaghilev brought Petersburg art, music, and ballet into the world arena. Portrait by Valentin Serov, 1908.

(Top left) Michel Fokine, who choreographed the first plotless ballet, Les Sylphides, died in exile in New York in 1942.

(Top right) Igor Stravinsky, for whom St. Petersburg was dearer “than any other city in the world,” helped create, along with Vladimir Nabokov and George Balanchine, a powerful new vision of Petersburg in the West. Portrait, 1933, by Vassily Shukhaev, an émigré who returned to Leningrad and spent ten years in Stalin’s labor camps.

(Opposite bottom) Petrouchka, a collaborative effort by Stravinsky, Benois, and Fokine, was the first work to offer the Western audience an idealized image of Petersburg. This is Benois’ sketch for the 1911 Paris premiere.

(Top left) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, founding father of the highly influential school of composition to which Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich—three of the most popular composers of the twentieth century—belonged.

(Top right) Sergei Prokofiev’s music ranged from neoclassicist to futuristic, reflecting the vitality of the artistic scene in prerevolutionary Petrograd. Portrait by Alexander Benois.

(Right) During Alexander Glazunov’s tenure as director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, that institute produced some of the greatest performers of the century. Photo of Glazunov with youthful violinist Nathan Milstein, 1923.