around center city

One of my greatest feared-regrets regarding my semester (read: something I was worried I would fail to do and then would regret later) was the failure to learn the city in which I live. I know that it’s very possible to live in a big city, tell yourself you’ll see all the important things later, travel to other cities on weekends, and then end up with a tragedy akin to leaving Paris without seeing the Louvre.

I have taken active measures to avoid this situation, which means (a) I have only left St. Petersburg once since getting here, but (b) I have spent many, many hours walking around the city. I don’t feel like I know the city, but I know the city well enough to know that I don’t know it—if that makes sense. Soon to follow is a list of places I’ve seen in and around the historical center of St. Petersburg, along with a few perhaps-enlightening comments.

Despite the fantastically long time it takes, I’m going to attempt at uploading a few pictures to go with this post. (Update: okay, two. Two will have to do.)

1. Leningrad Blockade Street Museum. This is not the official Blockade Museum (we are going there on an official excursion later in the semester). For the 70^th anniversary of the fall of the Blockade, they set up a “live street” with machinery, poetry, propaganda posters, etc, related to the blockade.
   
2. Alexander Nevsky Lavra. It’s a monastery + cemetery… where lots of famous people are, incidentally, buried. We visited the church (huge!), tried to buy monastery bread (they were out), and began to enter the cemetery (after seeing the price to get in, we decided to come back when we had our student IDs).
3. The Hermitage. Of course we’ve been there. It was our first stop after we got our student IDs! Hurrah! I tried to make it a weekly thing (Hermitage Tuesdays, right?), but many various things have gotten in our way, and we’ve only made it twice. So now I’ve seen like 3% of the museum.
4. Church on Spilled Blood. You all know this one. It’s iconic. It’s gorgeous on the outside, and the inside isn’t bad… the problem is that almost none of its church-y-ness has been preserved. There are plaques about the history of the building, and there’s a shop where you can buy religious trinkets.
   
5. St. Isaac’s Cathedral. You can climb 270-something steps to the top, and on a clear day you’ll be able to see the whole city. Unfortunately, a day that is clear both weather-wise and schedule-wise has not yet come to us. The inside has been turned into a very interesting museum—and certain parts have been restored to actually look like a church. The walls are covered with gorgeous Romantic-era-looking paintings. Apparently, the restoration of these paintings began during the Soviet era (after they moved the Museum of Atheism to another building). I’m shocked that they went ahead and did that, because all of them are very obviously religious.
6. Bronze Horseman. Yes, it’s a statue. But it’s the statue of St. Petersburg. It’s that guy who founded the city, after all (Peter 1). I like it because you have your typical Messianic imagery (his horse is trampling a snake’s head) in a way that is sneakily practical… the back of the snake is supporting the weight of the horse’s tail.
7. Dostoevsky Apartment Museum. What a wonderful little place. He only lived there for like 3 years, but who’s counting. It was one of 8 places he lived in Petersburg, I think. Those authors moved around a lot. Downstairs of his flat, there are some rooms dedicated to his works. They were substantially less interesting without the audio tour (because most of the objects did not have any sort of plaques), but I was still happy. There’s a Dostoevsky bust positioned right overtop of his Bible, open to Matthew 3, with his notes in the margins!
8. That Place Where Dostoevsky Almost Died. So he was sentenced to death for some crime related to his writing, but at the last moment was “pardoned” and sent to Siberia instead. The moment before death is one that shows up in almost all of his writing, so I wanted to visit the square where it happened. There is no special marking in the place noting the event.
9. Yusupovsky Palace. This is the place where Rasputin slightly more than almost died. (Okay, so he actually died in a river, but whatever.) It looks more like a fancy Italian house than a proper palace from the outside, but inside it’s gorgeous. Aside from the creepy wax figurines of Rasputin and his murderers, anyway.
10. Nabokov Mansion Museum. The video in the museum notes that Nabokov had the happiest life in Russia of any Russian writer. It’s probably true. Dostoevsky has an apartment museum? Psh. The first floor of the place where Nabokov grew up is his museum; the other two floors now have people living in them. And that first floor is bigger than D’s whole apartment. It holds a selection of Nabokov’s butterfly collection, first editions of all of his books, his personal Scrabble board, three pencils he liked, one of his ties… all sorts of knick-knacks. Too much? Maybe. But maybe not.

I have been working hard for my title of “экскурсовод” (excursion director). Just kidding. Usually I plan things here like I plan them at home… decide what I want to do, let other people know I’m doing it, and invite them to join me if they want. And then end up running late for whatever it is I planned. Heh. But I think we’ve seen a good number of interesting Peterburgian things over the past 7 weeks, and a good amount of the inside of a trolleybus to boot.