Kirke, Hanna and I spent most of our time in Saint Petersburg walking around on the wide, windy streets.
I don’t know how many times we walked up and down Nevsky Prospekt, the main street of Saint Petersburg. Our hotel was basically at one end of it, and the Hermitage was at the other. And it’s lined with palaces and 19th century malls and stores and churches, beautiful all of them, bridges over pretty canals. But you get full, after a while, walking around in this city. Things eventually stop surprising you. The extravagance of it all. Every single house facade decorated as if it was a palace. Statues on the roofs, and all the pretty colors.
It is beautiful, it truly is, but it is also hard. Almost no trees, anywhere, except in the few little parks – and these parks. Completely flat, with trees growing in rows. Nothing organic about it. I started getting so tired – and I rarely get tired walking around cities, I spent a whole month walking around the big cities of central and eastern Europe two years ago, and I didn’t get tired until the very end. But here. It’s so hard and dusty, with all that stone and I miss uneven shapes and growing things.
Walking around here, it became so obvious that Russia was an enormous country. Huge, but also incredibly unequal. (It still is, of course, but not in the same way as in the 18th century, when St Petersburg was founded.) Only a very large, very unequal country can muster up such a large number of wealthy people, and make them spend all that money on extravagant architecture in one city. Conditions were more or less the same in most other European capitals, they just didn’t have the same enormous mass of land to gather up all that wealth from. As a consequence, the extent of imperial show-off architecture hasn’t grown as extensive as here. It’s fascinating, and kind of frightening.
I liked Saint Petersburg. But a weekend was enough. I can only handle the hardness for so long. I’d love to go back some other time, though. For a couple of days. See the rest of the Hermitage. Cross the Neva. Go to a ballet. Saint Petersburg is like a rich cake. Decadent and all-consuming, and best in small, controllable doses.
Katja Malmborg 