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St. Petersburg
Nothing at a smallish, Soviet-era style airport in St. Petersburg could prepare us for the exquisite beauty of the city we were just about to enter.
A fleeting resemblance to Amsterdam (Peter the Great’s original model for urban planning), Venice, Vienna and Paris all wrapped in one? Parallels are deceptive: in its beauty, St. Petersburg (or ‘Peter,’ as its inhabitants call it) is like no other city in the world. The imperial opulence of Hermitage easily exceeds that of Versailles.
Historical centre of the city is a museum under the open sky, each building, now freshly painted, a work of art. (Luckily, Putin spares no funds for his home town – the major face-lift performed by the time of the city’s 300th anniversary.) We were staying in a lovely, centrally located, mini-hotel Herzen House, named after a celebrated dissident writer –Voltaire of the 19th century, as he was called– who lived in this house before immigrating to London. A costumed welcome, with traditional bread and salt, was only part of the truly cordial atmosphere of the place. Unlike Moscow, St. Petersburg initiated transforming its former communal apartments into intimate, feel-home mini-hotels. Inhabitants of St. Petersburg are known for their unobtrusive and dignified demeanor. The stuff–some were PH.D students–embodied that attitude. Herzen House became the starting point of our exploration. Being interested in just about everything, and open to whatever experience might come our way, we had, however, several focal points to our journey: literature, art and people.

Literary Destinations:
Only two blocks away from Herzen House (at Bolshaya Morskaya, 47) stands an impressive fourstory mansion, Nabokov’s birthplace, where the writer spent the first 18 years of his life before leaving Russia for good in the aftermath of Revolution. This is the place Nabokov nostalgically recreated in his Speak Memory, Speak; Mary and other works. In the paucity of Nabokov’s authentic belongings (scanty pieces of furniture, some books from the family library), the idea of showing a filmed hour-long interview with Nabokov during his American years created a welcome illusion of the writer’s living presence in his old home. “I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things,” we heard Nabokov saying, “perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest
attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth.”

Dostoyevsky’s apartment had more artifacts on display. Out of 22 different addresses associated with forever impoverished and indebted Dostoyevsky it was his last apartment that was turned into a Museum. You can count on every Russian literary museum for exhibiting at least two things: a writer’s desk, and a bed– usually narrower than what we call single–on which the writer was either born or died. Most of the furniture collected in the six-room apartment was just an imitation of the style of the period. However, the narrow sofa in Dostoevsky’s study with his cherished copy of Rafael’s Sistine Madonna hanging over it, is preserved for the posterity as an authentic object on which the writer passed away. A rather stern ‘research worker’ who adamantly objected my guiding us through the Museum, pointed to a clock stopped at the time of the writer’s death; to Dostoyevsky’s authentic hat (what ideas, what thoughts it crowned!); to pictures of his devoted wife and two children. There is something uncanny about the ordinary-looking objects once touched by the hands of a genius. To me they emphasize rather than bridge the distance between him and us, the mortals. Tables and chairs do speak of the great writer’s humanity: look, he ate and slept and made children just like you, they intimate, leaving the mystery of the genius even lore elusive.