Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Literature
St Petersburg's very existence, a brand new city for a brand new Russia, seems
sometimes to be the stuff of fiction. Indeed, its early history is woven into the fab-
ric of one of Russia's most famous epic poems, Pushkin's which muses on the
fate of the city through the eyes of Falconet's famous equestrian statue of Peter
the Great. In just three centuries the city's three incarnations - St Petersburg,
Petrograd and Leningrad - have produced more great writers than many cities do
over a millennium: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Akhmatova and Brodsky
are all intimately associated with Peter's city.
ROMANTICISM IN THE GOLDEN AGE
Among the many ways that Peter and Catherine the Great
brought Westernisation and modernisation to Russia was the
introduction of a modern alphabet. Prior to this time, written
Russian was used almost exclusively in the Orthodox church,
which employed an archaic and incomprehensible Church
Slavonic. During the Petrine era, it became increasingly ac-
ceptable to use popular language in literature. This develop-
ment paved the way for two centuries of Russian literary pro-
lificacy, with St Petersburg at its centre.
Four Statues of
Pushkin in St
Petersburg
Ploshchad Isskustv
(Historic Heart)
Pushkin House (Vas-
ilyevsky Island)
ulitsa Pushkinskaya
(Smolny & Vosstan-
iya)
Romanticism was a reaction against the strict social rules
and scientific rationalisation of previous periods, exalting
emotion and aesthetics. Nobody embraced Russian romanti-
cism more than the national bard, Alexander Pushkin, who
lived and died in St Petersburg. Most famously, his last ad-
dress on the Moyka River is now a suitably hagiographic mu-
seum, its interior preserved exactly as it was at the moment
of his death in 1837 ( CLICK HERE ). The duel that killed him is also remembered with
a monument on the site ( CLICK HERE ).
Site of Pushkin's Duel
(Petrograd & Vyborg
Sides)
Pushkin's epic poem Yevgeny Onegin ( Eugene Onegin in English) is partly set in
the imperial capital. Pushkin savagely ridicules its foppish aristocratic society, despite
being a fairly consistent fixture of it himself for most of his adult life. The wonderful
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