«Petersburg balances on the border between worlds. In the evening it is suffused with dusky green light, there are always long twilights, with endless winter nights and boundless summer days. In Russia cities such as this – that combine a spirit of unfettered creativity and the aesthetic of eternal decay – no longer exist, and I encounter them rarely outside the country. Only in Petersburg do the granite and marble so haughtily confront the clammy wind and cold waves»
12. THE BIG FISH
The Moscow SPb restaurant is advertised as “a taste of St. Petersburg and leisurely northern romanticism”. It is fashionable, expensive and features four floors, nine dining rooms and a French chef. Its seasonal specialty is fresh smelt delivered every six hours from St. Petersburg. So come to Moscow as soon as you can and allow the French chef, who has a Michelin star and a leisurely, northern Gallic, romantic manner, to offer you some simple smelt at sky-high prices. The idea of flying the fish over was a hit – a successful deciphering of a city’s cultural code. The drunks soaking in the Leningrad pub Zhiguli on Vladimirski Avenue would have had a good laugh about it, smelt, affectionately nicknamed cuke, being their favorite snack to follow up shots of vodka.
That is one of many beliefs about St. Petersburg’s King Fish – fresh smelt tastes a lot like cucumber. The city’s visitors can’t begin to fathom Petersburger’s attraction to the strange-tasting smelt. There’s something metaphysical about it, as is proven by the many myths about smelt (suborder Salmonoidei, family Osmeridae, genus Osmerus, Eperlanus) going around the city. Under Peter the Great, smelt was served before sturgeon at the royal table, and the Emperor, before making an important government decision, would always down a shot of vodka and take a bite of smoked smelt. Smelt is to the Neva and the Gulf of Finland what coral is to the Red Sea, hence the proverb in Vladimir Dal’s dictionary: “There are but two fish in St. Petersburg: smelt and whitefish”. Smelt is a type of salmon, and yet it’s also related to trout, but at the same time it’s not altogether a fish, because it’s part vegetable. Smelt produces both red and black caviar, and sometimes it spawns while flying over the water, though it flies low and quite slowly.
Though small and unremarkable, the smelt spreads itself across huge territories, spawning not only in the lower Volga and upper Neva but also in the Indian Ocean.
Beyond Leningrad smelt loses all its nutrients and becomes mortally toxic. Bred in captivity smelt doesn’t reproduce and becomes inedible, containing no fats, proteins or carbohydrates, only cellulose. This makes it excellent for making paper, but economically unprofitable. Among the three hundred ways of preparing smelt known to the hosts of St. Petersburg’s annual smelt feast held on the opening day of the tourist season, two are especially remarkable – smelt à l’Anglaise and Livonian smelt soup. This must mean that this ancient St. Petersburg fish has long been eaten all over the world and isn’t included in the complex fish soup bouillabaisse only by some sad error. In any case, recent ethnographic research has shown that traditional Marseille seamen recipes specify the soup be made on a base of smelt bouillon.
Among Petersburg-dwellers smelters form a separate group. Every year come winter’s end, for their own unfathomable reasons, these stern and mysterious men set out to fish for smelt in the Gulf of Finland, spreading their nets over an ice sloe and doing their best to get torn away by the current and blown away by the wind. The simpler smelters line up in April along the main fishing spot – the Arsenal Quay. According to the “laws of freshwater fishing” established in Soviet times citizens fishing smelt during it’s spring descent aren’t allowed to go downstream lower than the Liteynii Bridge or upstream higher than the Ohta river, and their nets mustn’t exceed one meter in diameter. Smelt crowds to the Neva to spawn when the water warms up to eight degrees Celsius.
“Fishing for smelt is very interesting but demands much skill and endurance”, experts and handbooks maintain. And indeed, just imagine – the break of dawn, the river calm and as far as the eye can see flooded with trash and oil spills.
But true Petersburgers love smelt not only for its cucumber taste but also for its tenacious hold on life. Smelt is a groundling, and during spawning season doesn’t eat anything at all, frightened by both the fuel stains on the river’s surface and the turbid water. Despite its small size, smelt is the main game-fish in the Gulf of Finland and the Neva, from the river’s delta to the Kronstadt, the so-called Marquis’s puddle. People say that professionals earn as much fishing for smelt as they do from all the other fish combined. They’d earn even more if they used trawls to catch whole shoals at a time, but trawling is forbidden in the gulf. So they fish for smelt in long boats, setting up net-fences, called stakes. The stakes don’t capture the fish, but guide them towards long underwater scoop-nets. The net necks are attached by anchors to the sea-bottom and the tails are supported by floats. A good day’s catch can amount to two hundred kilos of fish; one crew can check fifteen to twenty stakes per shift. Before reaching the store counter the smelt is resold up to seven times and its cost increases by some one hundred percent. Selling smelt can be difficult since it easily turns to mush if frozen and defrosted.
Smelt is at its best fried. Each small fish, no bigger than a child’s palm, is cleaned, gutted, rolled in flour and deep-fried. Now, look and see: the dorsal fin is short and positioned on the mid-body, there are also an adipose fin and an air bladder. Large scales, big mouth, silvery flanks, brown-green back. This is a smelt. Osmerus eperlanus. St. Petersburg’s King-Fish.
13. DIFFERENT WORLDS.
According to popular belief, St. Petersburg is a mystic city, where not only life is mesmerizing but death too holds a certain fascination as a sort of farewell parade. St. Petersburg seems to hover somewhere on the margin between different worlds. In the evening the city is flooded with dim green light, the city twilight is always long and the winter nights are as endless as the summer days. No other city in Russia combines creative freedom with the aesthetics of perpetual decay; even outside Russia this combination is rare. And surely only in St. Petersburg granite and marble stand up to the biting wind and frigid waters with such arrogance. Nowhere else does the grey watery sky spread so low over the steely water.
This isn’t Sweden, this is Nevsky of an evening, / Fingers crossed, the passerby is gloomy, Svetlana Surganova was the first to sing these words, but that thought had surely occurred to many people before her. Out of my mind there’s emptiness / glasses are brimming with ash on the stairwells/ Purity lives amidst all of this filth, Yuri Shevchuk growled it out first, but wasn’t the first to feel it. Melancholy is common in St. Petersburg, the city isolates people from life, drives them inside themselves, into depression, shrouds them in solitude. And when death finally arrives here, it is often met by a sort of stupefied horror and hysterical laughter. Once, browsing the news in the Internet, I entered the search words “death in St. Petersburg” and the first link to pop up was absurdly, quintessentially Petersburgian: “Man killed by folding couch. Rescue Service unable to help.” It is a city that spawns chimeras. If a genius dies in St. Petersburg, his death is of such a mysterious and ambivalent nature that for decades it continues to disturb his compatriots.
On December 28, 1925, Sergey Esenin’s corpse was discovered in a suite on the second floor of Leningrad’s Hotel Angleterre. The thirty-year-old poet had hung himself from a high ceiling pipe, barely a day after completing his last poem: There's nothing new in dying now / though living is no newer…. The poet Anna Akhmatova responded: “He lived a dreadful life and died a dreadful death.” “Hundreds of people asked me why he did it,” wrote Anatoly Mariengof in his memoirs. “In another time and place I read the biography of a 15th century Scottish princess. If I remember rightly, her name was Margaret. The princess’ dying words were: ‘I do not care for life!’ She was nineteen years old… Esenin’s tragedy is actually quite simple. Doctors pronounced him hopeless. He himself in his poem ‘The Black Man’ confessed: ‘Alcohol strips my brain’.” Esenin’s death generated much debate, and still does. At the request of the Esenin Committee, a federal investigation was conducted into the cause of his death. The committee came to the same conclusion, namely suicide, but speculation about the possibility of murder persists to this day.
Three decades before Esenin’s death, on the second floor of 13, Malaya Morskaya Street, a seven minute walk from the Angleterre, on October 25, 1893, Pyotr Tchaikovsky died. He was officially diagnosed with cholera, but people were no more inclined to believe than they were to believe that the famous poet committed suicide. There were rumors that the fifty-four-year-old homosexual had been having an affair with the young relative of a palace courtier (according to another version – with the son of the famous doctor Nikolai Sklifosovsky). And that Tchaikovsky, pressured by government officials or by the sentence of a court run by his former classmates from the elite School of Law, had poisoned himself (or had willingly infected himself with cholera). There is little evidence to support these theories, at the same time they cannot be rejected out of hand. However, one fact is undeniable. In Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.6 ‘ Pathetic’, which premiered in St. Petersburg a mere ten days before the composer’s demise, the theme of death is strongly felt. Notes to the symphony contribute to this theme: “Finale – death – result of destruction”.
The Russian Modernist artist Mikhail Vrubel died of pneumonia on April 14, 1910, in a psychiatric clinic on the Old Peterhof highway. Biographers are still wondering whether this death too wasn’t really suicide.
Vrubel had spent ten long years, tottering on the brink of insanity; some of his last canvases, such as The Six-Winged Seraph and the cemetery scenes from Romeo and Juliet, were created between bouts of mental illness. As his affliction deepened, Vrubel began to think himself a sinner and a criminal, he felt he was being punished for painting both Christ and Faustus, both an Angel and a Demon. Four years before he died, Vrubel went blind, so when death finally came it was a deliverance. He made attempts to starve himself, stood purposely before open windows on frosty days. At his funeral the poet Alexander Blok called Vrubel “a herald of other worlds”.
Sometimes, these “other worlds” seem very close to St. Petersburg. It is a mystic city, a “black hound”.
“This beast never hurries anywhere./This night never invites anyone”.
21. UP TO THE SKY ABOVE THE WATER
A dear friend of mine and a professional Petersburger, a man of very refined artistic tastes, claims that there is no more picturesque view in his city than that of the Neva at sunset – if seen from behind the cast-iron balustrade of the Troitsky Bridge. I took a look, and indeed, this angle offers an impressive panorama of the river’s expanse, pierced by the Rostral Columns. On the right is the Peter and Paul Cathedral surrounded by the fortress walls and surmounted by the fly-sized golden glint of the Angel-Crusader. To the left is the elegant embankment and the Winter Palace and Marble Palace.
A mass of curious information about the Troitsky Bridge has accumulated in the century it has existed. For instance, the Pulkovo meridian passed along the axis of the bridge – the starting point and principal meridian for all maps of Russia until Greenwich Mean Time was instated. According to legend, the famous Communist pilot Chkalov once daringly flew under the Troitsky Bridge in an effort to conquer with this feat the heart of his beloved. Some are inclined to doubt that this ever happened; they say the story was created by the director Mikhail Kalazotov, who in 1940, after Chkalov’s death, staged the flight with the help of the stunt-airman Yevgeny Borisenko. There is no doubt, however, that in 1903, the 200th anniversary of his capital Nikolas II himself pressed the button that activated the engine that powered the drawbridge and thus sent the Troitsky Bridge into action for the first time. It is possible that the emperor himself enjoyed the view of the river from atop the bridges hump. Take a moment to picture the spring festivities of 1903. Behind his Majesty is the Liteyny Bridge (at the time it was called The Alexander II Bridge). This bridge used to be drawn open by hand, eight serfs would rotate an immense reel, dragging the moveable portion of the bridge out into the river like a wicket. In front of his Majesty is the Nikolaevsky Bridge ( nowadays called the Blagoveshchensky Bridge, and a little while back The Lieutenant Shmidt Bridge). The very bridge from under which, in 1917 the Aurora cruiser would fire a shot full of ominous meaning for the Emperors family. The Nikolaevsky Bridge was engineered and built under the command of another Nikolas, the First, by Stanislav Kerbedz, a Polish military engineer, who, they said, was promoted after every support span he built. By the time the bridge, three hundred meters long with eight support spans, was completed, it was the longest bridge in Europe and the shrewd Kerbedz was a general.
In the 20th St. Petersburg’s main canal was spanned by three stone bridges (these were a replacement for the plaatschuit bridges, supported by large flat-bottomed boats). But by the time the last Tsar was overthrown, their number had doubled, in part thanks to the status that the Dvorcovy Bridge had acquired with time and water under the bridge. Who doesn’t recognize this picture-postcard image: the black Petersburg sky, the lampposts’ golden globes, and the seven-ton support spans jutting up into the sky, supported by the force of an engine, gears and counterweights…
A drawbridge is nearly as complex as a rocket to design and it’s also instructive in a philosophical sense, being an example of both Russian craftsmanship and the complete opposite. For example: the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge (previously the Peter the Great Bridge) required only minor repairs through six decades, from 1911 to 1971, thanks to its quality construction. Whereas the Alexander Nevsky Bridge, a little farther up the Neva, built during the socialist boom, was constructed with so many errors that very soon the steel cables snapped and the bridge had to be closed to all traffic except for trolleybuses; and after a seventeen-ton counterweight collapsed into the water, it became evident that ferries were the only solution.
A layer of existential meaning was added to the Petersburg motto “to the sky above the water” in the summer of 2010 thanks to a daring performance by the street-art group Voina (War). On the night of July 14 Voina drew an immense phallus on the asphalt of the Liteyny Bridge, which, as the bridge was pulled up into the bleak night, rose and stood erect right across from the headquarters of The Federal Security Service (the FSB). The whole episode was reffered to, fittingly, “the captive member of the FSB”. The obscene image, 65 meters high and 27 wide was created in just twenty three seconds, by 40 people spraying phosphorous paint straight from the can. Unsuccessful attempts to erase the graffiti were made that night using fire engines’ water jets – but the phallus continued to glow till dawn. The episode created a stir and Voina received an Innovation award for this and some other projects. The award was for achievements in the field of contemporary art.
There are over a dozen different types of moveable bridges – starting with antique drawbridges over fortress moats and ending with the huge trap-like Gateshead Millenium Bridge crossing the Tyne River, a pedestrian bridge that tilts up its huge concrete arch. The extendable passageway that connects an airplane to a terminal is also a type of drawbridge and is called a jet bridge. The most famous (though not the oldest or largest) moveable bridge is in England: the London Tower Bridge across the Thames not far from the London Tower. The bridge’s sections weighing hundreds of tons are drawn up with amazing speed – in under a minute. Only Amsterdam can compete with St. Petersburg for the number of its drawbridges (the Neva has ten). Three and a half centuries ago the Amstel River was crossed by the Magere Brug, now one of Amsterdam’s tourist attractions. Its puny carcass folds in on itself every twenty minutes, like a pen-knife. This sight, however entertaining, is no match for the majestic Neva, it can’t live up to the might of the Liteyny bridge, or the high arches of the Dvorcovy Bridge. And then of course neither the Tower Bridge nor the Magere Brug has ever displayed erect penises on their liftable sections. It’s at times like this that you realize that far from being a simple crossing point a drawbridge is more like a stairway to the sky.
29. SELECTED LETTERS.
Every once in a while I receive a bit of correspondence from friends and acquaintances in reply to my rants and ramblings about St. Petersburg. I communicate through the Internet with people from all over the world, of different ages, professions and tastes. The only connection we actually have is our birthplace and a mutual affection for it. But it does appear that for St Petersburg natives and non-natives alike, Petersburg is important culturally, unlike, say, chaotic and haphazard Moscow. Some of my friends were born and raised in Petersburg, some moved here as kids and stayed, some revisit it every once in a while with pleasure and nostalgia and some don’t even like it at all.
I asked my correspondents for permission to use excerpts from their e-mails. Here are some of them:
Yulia: Petersburg can make you fall in love with it, like any other city. When you’re in love you don’t notice any flaws. Whoever says Petersburg doesn’t respond to feelings is either missing something or just doesn’t feel it. I feel I’m home the moment I step off the train. Sometimes it just takes a walk around the center to get rid of the most terrible mood and realize that everything’s not as bad as it seems: Petersburg can be so reassuring.
Marina: I always feel as though the city even on the sunniest summer days is a damp dark underworld. The cold stone, raw wind and gloomy faces: it’s all so dreary and comfortless. It’s a lifeless image in a pompous frame, this damned Russian reproduction of Western life, and nobody knows what to do with it.
Yan: Petersburg is a just-around-the-corner kind of city, everything’s a stone’s throw away – be it the nearest pub or Europe. It’s a ministerial city, laid out in a logical, masculine manner. Living in Russia can only mean living here…
Yelena: The sky in St. Petersburg shines with a green light in wintertime. This light drives everyone a little crazy, makes them a little high – spouting energy and then listless. I always can tell from the light in St. Petersburg what’s going on – whether people are feeling good or bad. During the noughts this feeling got a little less sharp, but in the nineties it was very acute.
Aleksei: There’s this old donut shop on Bolshaya Konyushennaya Street, some sing its praises, some poke fun at it. It was this Soviet-type bistro, where you could buy crumpets with powdered sugar and drink coffee ladled into your cup from a big steel vat with the word ‘coffee’ on it in red letters. The locals were really proud of this shop, as though nothing more worthwhile existed. Some may say that this is when the real Petersburger shows his face – not a European face, but a Finnish one. Or, on the other hand, some say it’s all the other way round. Just like in Moscow: there’s the Arbat and then there are its backstreets, all the nooks and crannies that a Muscovite shows his guests as proud as a Parisian…
Alla: I breathe freely here. Petersburg is built like Amsterdam or New-York, since Manhattan is built like Amsterdam. Only Petersburg has a spontaneous lively air about it. Even the bridges here are something fateful, life-changing, and not routine like in Amsterdam. You never know where you’ll be when the bridges are lifted, if you don’t make it to your side in time, which can only mean new adventures…
Sofia: Returning after a year’s absence Petersburg surprised me the way new flashy photographs would in a dusty family photo album. I really hope the city won’t be scrubbed and polished away, since its soul is in a certain artful carelessness, a certain disregard for clothes and interiors: take Pushkin, who would stroll through the Summer Garden in slippers and pajamas…
Oleg: I lived several years in one of the boroughs on the city’s outskirts and crossed the industrial area on my way to work every day. Twice a day for forty minutes I had the pleasure of seeing Russia’s prime tourist attraction from inside a bus – the obtuse fences, trash strewn commons, the multiple story hutches. It’s hard to believe your eyes…
Yelena: Petersburg is one of the important points where civilization is touched by God’s holy might. This might is felt in the city’s architecture. One day in the dusty afternoon sunlight I saw a distant church’s taupe silhouette and some budding shrubs separate from their physical shells and underneath the reality of our senses a strong other world appears, black stars and holes.
It seems as though for my friends, or maybe, for everybody, who’s ever been here St Petersburg is connected in some unfathomable way with love. Love for the city (not the country), for the atmosphere; ordinary everyday love like in “St. Pete FM” or tragic love like in Dostoyevsky. Or non-love – love’s negative image, the denial of love and so also love in a way. A rock-bard once sang with hate and admiration: Sir Leningrad, I fell head over heels for your iron-grey eyes. Every time I visit the city I remember my first boyhood trip to St. Petersburg in the late seventies. A chance acquaintance once said to me: “Everything comes late here – the mornings are long, and so is the twilight. In mid-July the lilacs are still blooming and the jasmine hasn’t even begun.”
I still remember those words. Now, whenever I’m visiting in the summer, I always check to see if the lilacs and the jasmine are blooming.
