46

VENICE OF THE NORTH

There is a legend that the city of St. Petersburg was completely constructed in the airy blue heavens and then lowered in one piece onto marshes of the Neva. Only thus, the legend explains, can the presence of so beautiful a city on so bleak a site be accounted for. The truth is only slightly less miraculous: The iron will of a single man, the skills of hundreds of foreign architects and artisans, and the labor of hundreds of thousands of Russian workers created a city which admiring visitors later described as the “Venice of the North” and the “Babylon of the Snows.”

The building of St. Petersburg began in earnest in the years after the 1709 victory at Poltava had, in the words of its founder, “laid the foundation stone” of the city. It was spurred the following year by Russia’s capture of Riga and Vyborg, “the two cushions on which St. Petersburg now can rest in complete tranquillity.” Thereafter, although Peter was absent from his “paradise” for months at a time (and sometimes a year or more), construction never ceased. Wherever he was, whatever else was demanding his attention, Peter’s letters were filled with questions and orders relating to the building of embankments, palaces and other buildings, the digging of canals, the design and planting of gardens. In 1712, although no decree on the subject was ever issued, St. Petersburg became the capital of Russia. Autocratic government centered on the Tsar, and the Tsar preferred St. Petersburg. Accordingly, government offices transferred themselves from Moscow, new ministries sprang up there and very soon the simple fact of Peter’s presence transformed the raw city on the Neva into the seat of government.

In the first decade of its existence, St. Petersburg grew rapidly. By April 1714, Weber reported, Peter had taken a census and counted 34,500 buildings in the city. This figure must have included every possible dwelling with four walls and a roof, and even then it was doubtless exaggerated. Nevertheless, not only the quantity but the quality of the new buildings in St. Petersburg was impressive. Architects from many countries had arrived and gone to work. Trezzini, the first Architect General, had been in Russia for almost ten years; he was succeeded in 1713 (although Trezzini remained and continued to raise buildings) by a German, Andreas Schlüter, who brought with him a number of his countrymen and fellow architects.

In 1714, the nucleus of the new city was still on Petrograd Island, a few yards east of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The center was Trinity Square, which faced the river embankment near Peter’s original three-room log cabin. Around the square, a number of larger structures had been erected. One was the wooden Church of the Holy Trinity, built in 1710, in which Peter attended regular services, celebrated his triumphs and mourned his dead. The main building of the State Chancellery, the Government Printing Office (where Bibles and scientific and technical books were printed on type and presses imported from the West) and the city’s first hospital were on the square, along with the new stone houses of Chancellor Golovkin, Vice Chancellor Shafirov, Prince Ivan Buturlin, Nikita Zotov (now created a count) and Prince Matthew Gagarin, Governor of Siberia. Nearby, the famous Four Frigates Tavern continued to offer a comfortable retreat where government officials including the Tsar himself, foreign ambassadors, merchants and decently dressed people from the street could stop in and refresh themselves with tobacco, beer, vodka, wine and brandy.

Not far from Trinity Square stood the city’s single market, a large, two-storied wooden building enclosing three sides of a wide courtyard. Here, in hundreds of shops and stalls, merchants and traders of a dozen nations displayed their wares. All of them paid rent to the Tsar, who preserved his monopoly on trade by allowing no selling of goods in any other part of the city. Close by, in another large wooden building, was the market for food and housewares, where peas, lentils, cabbages, beans, oatmeal, flour, bacon, wooden utensils and earthen pots were sold. In the back streets, the Tatar flea market, a hodge-podge of tiny stalls, offered used shoes, pieces of old iron, old rope, old stools, used wooden saddles and hundreds of other items. In the congested mass of humanity, elbowing and pushing each other around these stalls, pickpockets found rich plucking. “The crowd is so dense that one has to take real care of one’s purse, one’s sword and one’s handkerchief,” wrote Weber. “It is wise to carry everything in one’s hand. I once saw a German officer, a grenadier, return without his wig and a lady of quality without her bonnet.” Tatar horsemen had galloped past, snatched off both wig and bonnet and then, to the laughter of the crowd, offered the stolen objects for sale still within sight of their bareheaded victims.

Once Poltava had dissipated the Swedish threat, the city spread from its original center east of the fortress to other islands and to the mainland. Downstream, on the north side of the main branch of the Neva, lay the largest island of the river delta, Vasilevsky Island, whose leading inhabitant was Prince Menshikov, the city’s governor general, to whom Peter had given most of the island as a present. In 1713, on the embankment facing the river, Menshikov had begun construction of a massive stone palace three stories high, with a roof of iron plates painted bright red. This palace, designed by the German architect Gottfried Schädel, remained the largest private house in St. Petersburg throughout Peter’s life, and was richly decorated with elegant furniture, ornate silver plate and many articles which, the Danish ambassador commented dryly, appeared “to have been removed from Polish castles.” Its spacious main hall was the principal site of the city’s great entertainments, weddings and balls. Peter used Menshikov’s palace much as he had used the large house built earlier in Moscow for Francis Lefort, preferring himself to live more simply in houses with no chamber sufficiently large for mass entertaining. Sometimes, when Menshikov was receiving for the Tsar, Peter would look across the river from his own smaller house, see the lighted windows of Menshikov’s great palace and say to himself with a chuckle, “Danil’ich is making merry.”

Behind Menshikov’s house were the Prince’s private church, with a bell tower and a soft chime, and a large, formal garden with latticed walls, hedges and a grove of trees, houses for his gardeners and a farm with chickens and other animals. Being on the north side of the river, the garden made the most of the southern exposure, and, shielded from the wind by trees and hedges, produced fruits and even melons. The rest of the island contained a few wooden houses and grazing fields for horses and cattle, but most of Vasilevsky Island was still covered with forest and bushes.

Always, the heart of the city was the great river, a deep torrent of cold water sweeping silently and swiftly down from the inland sea of Lake Ladoga, past the fortress, past Menshikov’s great red-roofed mansion and out through the islands, flowing so vigorously into the Gulf of Finland that the current was still visible a mile from shore. The tremendous surging power of the current, the pressure of winter ice and the crunch of ice floes in springtime all would have made it difficult to build a bridge in Peter’s time; but these were not the reasons that no bridge was built. Peter wanted his subjects to learn seamanship and sailing, so he insisted that they cross the Neva by boat—without oars. For those who could not afford a private boat, twenty government-authorized ferryboats were permitted, but the boatmen, most of them ignorant peasants, were often confounded by the rapid current and by strong gusts of wind. Only after the Polish ambassador, a major general and one of the Tsar’s own doctors had drowned in successive sailing accidents did Peter relent and allow the ferrymen the use of oars. For the general population, crossing remained risky; if a storm came up, people might be detained on the wrong side of the river for several days. In winter, citizens could easily walk across the ice, but in summer when there were storms, in autumn or spring when the ice was forming or melting, the people on the islands in the Neva were virtually cut off from the rest of Russia. (In April 1712, Peter devised a way to cross the river without much danger from falling through the thinning ice: he had a four-oared rowboat put upon a sled and he sat in the boat; horses and sled might go through the ice, but boat and tsar would float.)

Because of this isolation, government buildings and private mansions began to spring up along the south bank of the river, which was the mainland. The largest of these was the thirty-room palace of General-Admiral Apraxin, which stood next to the Admiralty on a corner of the site now occupied by the 1,100-room Winter Palace built by Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth. Upriver along the southern embankment were the houses of Attorney General Yaguzhinsky, Vice Admiral Cruys and the Winter Palace of Peter himself, standing on the ground which Catherine the Great’s small Hermitage occupies today. Peter’s palace was made of wood, two stories high, with a central building and two wings, but, except for a naval crown over the doorway, it was undistinguished from other mansions along the river. The Tsar felt ill at ease in spacious chambers and preferred small, low-ceilinged rooms, but in order to present a symmetrical line in the façades of the palaces along the river, he was forced to make each story of his own house higher than he liked. His solution was to install a false lower ceiling beneath the upper one in all the rooms he inhabited. The first Winter Palace was torn down in 1721 to be replaced by a larger structure of stone.^*

In 1710, a mile upstream from the Admiralty, at the point where the Fontanka River flows into the Neva, Trezzini began to construct a beautiful Summer Palace, with wide-latticed windows looking out over water on two sides, with two solid Dutch chimneys and a steep gabled roof crowned by a gilded weathervane in the form of St. George on horseback. Peter and Catherine lived here together, and its fourteen light and airy rooms were divided equally between husband and wife, Peter occupying the seven rooms on the ground floor and the seven rooms on the floor above belonging to Catherine. His chambers reflected his own modest taste and practical interests; hers displayed her desire to frame herself in royal luxury and grandeur. The walls of Peter’s study and reception room, for example, were covered to window level with hundreds of blue Dutch tiles, each depicting a view of ships or a nautical or pastoral scene. The ceilings of his reception room and small bedroom were decorated with paintings of winged cherubs celebrating “The Triumph of Russia.” On the Tsar’s desk was an ornate ship’s clock and compass of brass and engraved silver, presented to him by King George I of England. Peter’s canopy bed, covered with red cut velvet, was large but not large enough for the Tsar to stretch out on; in the eighteenth century, people slept propped up by pillows. The most interesting room on Peter’s floor was the Turning Room, where the Tsar kept lathes to use in his spare time. Against a wall of this room stood the carved wood frame, twelve feet high, of a special instrument made for Peter by Dinglinger in Dresden in 1714. Three large dials, each three feet in diameter, showed the time and, by means of rods connected to the weathervane on the roof, the direction and force of the wind. Peter’s dining room was large enough only for his family and a few guests; all public banquets were held at Menshikov’s palace. Peter’s kitchen walls were covered with blue tiles with different floral designs. Water was brought to its black marble sink by the first system of water pipes in St. Petersburg. Most important, a window from the kitchen opened directly into the dining room; Peter liked hot food and hated those large palaces in which food grew cold wending its way from the oven to the table.

On the floor above, Catherine had a reception room, a throne room and a dancing room as well as a bedroom, a nursery with a crib carved as a boat, and her own kitchen. Her rooms had painted ceilings, parquet floors, walls hung with Flemish and German tapestries or Chinese silk wallpaper woven with gold and silver thread, drapes, carpets, furniture inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl, and Venetian and English mirrors. Today, this little palace, superbly restored and filled with original or period objects, decorated with numerous portraits of Peter’s family and lieutenants, is—along with the little pavilion Mon Plaisir at Peterhof—the place where one can most intimately sense the lingering presence of Peter himself.

In 1716, another foreign architect arrived in St. Petersburg to leave a permanent mark on Peter’s “paradise.” This was the French architect Alexandre Jean Baptiste LeBlond. A Parisian and a pupil of the great Le Notre who had designed the gardens at Versailles, LeBlond was only thirty-seven, but was already well known in France for his buildings in Paris and for books he had written on architecture and formal gardens. In April 1716, LeBlond signed an unprecedented contract to come to Russia for five years as Architect General at a guaranteed salary of 5,000 roubles a year. He was also to be given a state apartment and permission to leave Russia at the end of his five-year term without having to pay duty on any of his possessions. In return, LeBlond promised to do his best to pass along his knowledge to the Russians who would work with him.

En route to his new appointment, LeBlond passed through Pyrmont, where Peter was taking the waters, and the two men talked about the Tsar’s plans and hopes for his new city. Peter was delighted with his new employee and, on LeBlond’s departure, wrote enthusiastically to Menshikov in St. Petersburg:

Welcome LeBlond in a friendly manner and respect his contract, for he is better than the best and a veritable prodigy, as I could see in no time. Besides he is an energetic and intelligent man and highly respected in the ateliers of France, so that we can, through him, engage whomsoever we wish. Therefore, all our architects must be told that from now on they are to submit all their plans for new construction to LeBlond for approval, and, if there is still time, carry out his instructions for correcting the old ones.

Armed with his title of Architect General, his princely contract and the glowing commendation of the Tsar, LeBlond arrived in Russia intending to take charge. In his train, he brought not only his wife and six-year-old son but several dozen French draftsmen, engineers, joiners, sculptors, stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters, locksmiths, chiselers, goldsmiths and gardeners. Immediately, he established a new Chancellery of Building, an administrative office through which all plans for building would have to pass for his approval. Then, on the basis of his talks with Peter, he began to draft an overall plan which would dictate the major development of the city for years to come.

The most ambitious part of this new scheme was to be the creation of a city of canals, modeled after Amsterdam, on the eastern half of Vasilevsky Island. This would be a rectangular grid of parallel streets and intersecting canals cut through the low-lying marshy ground. Two main canals would run the length of the island and twelve smaller canals would cross it, and even the smaller canals would be wide enough for two boats to pass. Every house was to have a courtyard, a garden and a dock for the householder’s boat. In the center of this great watery checkerboard, the Tsar was to have a new palace with an extensive formal garden.

LeBlond began as soon as he arrived in August 1716, using poles driven into the marshy ground to mark the outlines of his new town. That autumn and the following spring, digging of the canals was begun and the first new householders, sternly commanded by Peter’s order, commenced construction of their dwellings. All did not go well, however. In wielding his new power, LeBlond had impinged on both the prerogative and the possessions of an even more powerful Petersburger, Menshikov, who was both governor general of the city and the owner of a large part of Vasilevsky Island, some of which was to be taken for LeBlond’s new city of canals. Menshikov did not dare oppose directly a plan which Peter had approved, but the Tsar would be away for many months and in the meantime the Governor General would be in overall command of every activity in the city—including the new construction. Menshikov’s retaliation came in a typical way. The canals were built, but they were narrower and shallower than LeBlond had called for; two boats could not pass each other, and soon the shallow waterways began to silt up with mud. When Peter returned and went to look at the new construction, he was pleased to see the new houses rising along the canals, but, noticing the dimensions of the waterways, he was astonished and enraged. LeBlond, who by this time knew better than to challenge Menshikov directly, remained silent. With his architect beside him, Peter walked across the island and then, turning to LeBlond, asked him, “What can be done to carry out my plan?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “Raze, sire, raze. There is no other remedy than to demolish all that has been done and dig the canals anew.” This, however, was too much, even for Peter, and the project was abandoned, although from time to time Peter would go to Vasilevsky Island to look at the canals and come home sorrowfully without uttering a word. On the south bank, however, LeBlond built the city’s main boulevard, the great Nevsky Prospect, cutting straight through two and a half miles of meadows and forests from the Admiralty to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The Nevsky was constructed and paved by gangs of Swedish prisoners (who were also ordered to clean it every Saturday) and soon became the most famous street in Russia.

LeBlond also made a remarkable contribution to another famous St. Petersburg landmark, the Summer Garden. Even before Poltava, Peter had begun the garden, which spread over thirty-seven acres behind his Summer Palace at the junction of the Neva and the Fontanka. At the height of his worry about the Swedes, the Tsar constantly issued orders about the garden. Moscow was commanded to send “seeds and roots, together with thirteen young lads to train as gardeners.” Books on the gardens of France and Holland were sought. Trees were ordered to line the avenues: lime and elm trees from Kiev and Novgorod, chestnuts from Hamburg, oaks and fruit trees from Moscow and the Volga, cypresses from the south. Flowers arrived from everywhere: tulip bulbs from Amsterdam, lilac bushes from Lübeck, lilies, roses and carnations from other parts of Russia.

LeBlond’s contribution to the Summer Garden was water. “Fountains and water are the soul of a garden and make the principal ornament of it,” he had written. He pumped water from the Fontanka (the name derives from Fountain) into a new water tower, from which elevation the pressure would cause his new fountains to jet and spray. There were fifty fountains scattered through the garden: grottoes, cascades, plumes of water spouting from the mouths of dolphins and horses. In the basins beneath these fountains, creatures real and mythical—stone gargoyles, real fish and even a seal—swam or splashed. Nearby, rare birds sang in cages shaped like pagodas, a blue monkey chattered and a porcupine and sables stared morosely back at human sightseers.

Using the lessons he had learned from Le Notre, LeBlond created for Peter a true French formal garden. He traced parterres of flower, shrubs and gravel in intricate curving lines. He pruned the crowns of trees and shrubs into spheres, cubes and cones. He built a glassed conservatory and installed orange, lemon and bay trees and even a small tree of cloves. Italian sculptures were placed at the intersections of all the walks and along the avenues; eventually, sixty white marble statues depicting scenes from Aesop’s fables were set in place along with other sculptures titled “Peace and Abundance,” “Navigation,” “Architecture,” “Truth” and “Sincerity.”

When Peter was in St. Petersburg, he came often to the Summer Garden. There the Tsar would sit on a bench and drink beer or play draughts with his friends while Catherine and her ladies walked along the paths. The garden was open to the public, and society came to stroll during the afternoons, or to sit by its fountains during the long white nights of June and July. In 1777, a terrible flood wreaked fearful damage on the Summer Garden, uprooting trees and shattering the fountains, and afterward, Catherine the Great reconstructed the garden on different lines, preferring the less formal English garden to the French style; she did not rebuild the fountains, and the trees and shrubs were allowed to grow normally. But the Summer Garden maintained its charm and appeal. Pushkin lived nearby and often came to walk there; Glinka and Gogol were constant visitors to Peter’s Summer Garden. As old as the city itself, the Summer Garden still renews itself every spring and remains as young as the newest leaf and the tenderest bud.

Menshikov was increasingly jealous of LeBlond’s favor with the Tsar and used the Summer Garden as another means of striking at the Frenchman. In 1717, he wrote to Peter that LeBlond was cutting down the Summer Garden trees of which he knew the Tsar was extremely proud—in fact, LeBlond had only lopped some branches to improve the view and shape the trees according to French concepts. When Peter returned and encountered LeBlond, he flew into a rage, thinking of his lost trees. Before he knew what he was doing, he had struck the architect with his cane, sending LeBlond to bed with shock and fever. Peter then went to see the garden and realizing that the trees had only been trimmed, hastily sent apologies to LeBlond and instructions that the Architect General should be specially cared for. Soon after, the Tsar met Menshikov on a stairway. Seizing him by the collar and pushing him up against the wall, Peter shouted, “You alone, you rascal, are the cause of LeBlond’s illness!”

LeBlond recovered, but a year and a half later he contracted smallpox. In February 1719, at thirty-nine, he died, having spent only thirty months in Russia. Had he lived and continued to wield the great power of Peter’s favor, the face of St. Petersburg would have been far more French. Oneglorious example of this architecture-that-might-have-been actually exists. Before his death, LeBlond had chosen the site, prepared the drawings and laid out the gardens for the fabled summer estate and palace by the sea that is known as Peterhof.

Peterhof was conceived long before LeBlond came to Russia; its origins were linked with Kronstadt. In 1703, within a few months of his conquest of the Neva delta, Peter sailed out on the Gulf of Finland and first saw Kotlin Island. Soon afterward, he decided to build a fortress there to protect St. Petersburg from the sea. Once work was under way, the Tsar visited the island often to observe its progress. At times, and especially in autumn when there were frequent storms, he could not sail directly from the city. On these occasions, he went by land to a point on the coast just south of the island and made the shorter journey by boat, and there he built a small landing wharf and a two-room cottage on the shore where, if necessary, he could wait until the weather improved. This cottage was the genesis of Peterhof.

Once the victory at Poltava had ensured possession of Ingria, Peter divided the land along the south coast of the Gulf of Finland outside St. Petersburg into tracts which he distributed among his chief lieutenants. Many built palaces or mansions along the fifty- or sixty-foot ridge which ran about a half-mile from the shore. The largest and finest of this semicircular row of great country houses looking out on the gulf belonged to Menshikov, for whom Schädel erected an oval-shaped palace, three stories high, which Menshikov named Oranienbaum.

Peter’s first summer house by the gulf, built at a place called Strelna, did not rival the magnificent palace of the Serene Prince. Strelna was only a large wooden cottage whose most distinctive feature was a treehouse which the Tsar could reach by ladder. In the evening, Peter would smoke his pipe and gaze out contentedly at the boats on the bay. Eventually, he wanted something grander, and it was to LeBlond that he entrusted the task of building a palace to rival Oranienbaum, a Versailles-by-the-Sea: Peterhof.

LeBlond’s grand palace, a large, two-storied structure handsomely decorated and furnished, opened onto a wide, formal French garden behind the palace. But it was far smaller and less ornate than either Versailles or the enlarged and remodeled palace which Rastrelli was to create for Empress Elizabeth on the same site a generation later. The glory of Peterhof—and it is LeBlond’s masterpiece—is in the use of water. Water soars high in the air at Peterhof; it plumes and sprays from dozens of imaginative fountains; it splashes over statues of men and gods, horses and fish and unidentifiable creatures which neither man nor god has ever seen; it glides in mirror-like sheets over the edge of marble steps; it runs deep and dark in basins, pools and canals. The great cascade in front of the palace flows down giant twin marble stairways which flank a deep grotto, opening out into a wide central basin. Along the stairs, gilded statues flash in the sunlight; in the center of the basin, bathed in the jets of myriad water spouts, stands a dazzling golden Samson prying open the jaws of a golden lion. From the basin, the water flows toward the sea through a long canal wide enough to bring small sailing ships up to the foot of the palace. Cutting straight through the center of the lower garden, the great canal is flanked by more fountains, statues and rows of trees. The water to supply these fountains came not from the gulf but through wooden pipes from a source on higher ground thirteen miles away.

In this lower garden, between the palace and the sea, crisscrossed by avenues and paths, studded with fountains and white marble statues, LeBlond also created three exquisite summer pavilions which stand to this day—the Hermitage, Marly and Mon Plaisir. This Hermitage is a tiny, elegant structure surrounded by a little moat over which a drawbridge leads to the single door. It is two stories high, the ground floor being occupied by a kitchen and an office, the upper floor by a single, airy room with tall windows opening onto balconies. This room was used solely for private dinner parties. In the center of the room, a huge oval table, seating twelve, incorporated a spectacular French mechanical surprise: When the host rang a bell between courses, the central part of the table was lowered to the first floor, where dishes were removed and the next course was served, after which the table would rise back into position. In this way, the diners were never embarrassed by the presence of servants.

Marly was named after the private retreat of Louis XIV, but it “in no way resembles Your Majesty’s,” the French ambassador reported to Paris. Peter’s Marly was a simple Dutch house with oak-paneled rooms and Dutch tiles, set at the edge of a quiet lake.

The most important of these pavilions was Mon Plaisir, which Peter preferred to all his other country houses. It is a one-story red-brick house in Dutch style, perfectly proportioned, set right by the sea, and in its way it is a second jewel to match the Tsar’s small Summer Palace in the Summer Garden. Tall French windows made it possible to step directly from any room onto a brick terrace a few feet above the water. Inside, a central hall and reception room is lined with dark oak in the Dutch fashion, with paintings of Holland, especially Dutch ships, set in the panels. The ceiling is painted in gay French arabesques, while the floor is set with large black and white tiles to form a human-sized checkerboard.

Today, Mon Plaisir is almost as it was when Peter lived there. The furniture, decorations and household articles are period, if not actually the Tsar’s possessions. On one side of the central hall is Peter’s study overlooking the gulf, his desk covered with nautical instruments, the walls facedto window level with blue Dutch tiles depicting ships, and wood-paneled above. The next little room is Peter’s bedroom, and from his bed he could watch the sea. On the other side of the hall is the blue-tiled kitchen, only one step from the dining table. A curiosity is the elegant little Chinese room, completely decorated in red-and-black lacquer. Each side of the house is flanked by a handsome gallery with tall, wide windows, those in front opening onto the sea, those in back onto a garden filled with tulips and fountains; between the windows, more Dutch paintings, mostly seascapes, were mounted. Peter loved this little house and liked to live here even when Catherine was in residence in the Grand Palace on the ridge above. From here, he could look at the water or lie in bed by an open window and hear the waves. More than anywhere else, in the later part of his life the restless monarch found tranquillity at Mon Plaisir.

* The second Winter Palace also vanished, and today it is the fifth Winter Palace which occupies the site and, transformed into the Hermitage Museum, has become the city’s center.