. . . Winter 2003
In its year-long celebration of St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary, the University of Michigan will show with dozens of concerts, art exhibits, lectures, films, courses and student tours how Peter the Great's "Window on the West" offers those who look in as brilliant a cultural view as it offers those who look out.
Russia - specialist William G. Rosenberg, the Alfred G. Meyer Collegiate Professor of History, finds the "Window on the West" metaphor for St. Petersburg a bit irksome. "Who is looking out?" he asks. "And who is being looked at? We should see St. Petersburg also as a window in. We and others outside Russia should be looking in, trying to figure out and appreciate what Russia is all about. It doesn't do to reduce Russia or St. Petersburg to stereotypes in which we are the object of their gaze."
The hackneyed window metaphor, so common in academic, political and tourism-industry circles, often pits St. Petersburg against Moscow in a rivalry of West vs. East, Europe vs. Asia, cultural - innovator vs. cultural - conservative. The tensions and contrasts between the two great cities are hardly that simple or conflicted, Rosenberg says. "We should first note that we are celebrating the 300th anniversary of a city that was artificially founded," Rosenberg says. "Most cities evolve over time, usually as trade sites favored by geographical features or historical processes. Very few cities were created as political or cultural symbols as St. Petersburg, Washington DC, Brasilia and a handful of lesser examples were."
'Like no other Russian city' Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703 in large part because he wanted to refashion Russia into a society that would be part of the European world, distinguished from Russia's secondary capital, Moscow, and other Russian cities that evolved since antiquity. "Peter and his successors commissioned Western European architects to direct much of the work," Rosenberg says, "so the city's appearance is like no other Russian city. Peter's Summer Palace is even more brilliant than Versailles, and the city is distinctly lacking in onion-domed churches."
The buildup of St. Petersburg was remarkable during Peter's own lifetime. By his death in 1725 it had grown from a tiny, swampy settlement ceded by Sweden and occupied by about 150 persons to a city of 40,000 year-round residents. The city quickly established itself during its first 200 years as a center for wealthy aristocratic families interested in Western cultural forms. The elite built great art collections and supported music and literature, as most official capitals tend to do. "Many from the St. Petersburg elite traveled in the West and often returned to St. Petersburg with the cultural attributes of Western civilization, as Peter hoped," Rosenberg says, "but this never occurred without opposition, never consistently without resistance to these movements, not just from other areas of Russia but also from within St. Petersburg and the courts of Russia's increasingly conservative tsars. There was always the stuff of controversy, especially about what 'Russia' really was, and should be. As a result, especially in the literary area, St. Petersburg was a provocative and stimulating place, a center of intellectual and political struggle. The great writers of the 19th centuryPushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevskyall lived there, as did the great 19th century dissidents who formed the core of the Russian intelligentsia." Pushkin lived at the residence of the tsar, Rosenberg says, but despite this insider status, he "criticized St. Petersburg society as much as he celebrated it. And Gogol caricatured St. Petersburg in works like 'The Overcoat' and 'The Nose.'" Beachhead of the Enlightenment On their eastern beachhead of the Enlightenment, St. Petersburg's elite found themselves attacked from right and left. Like all autocrats, the tsars saw free-thinking, critical and democratic thought as subversive to their political power. And the nationalists saw the very premises of the European Enlightenment as alien and harmful. To some extent, "seeing St. Petersburg and Moscow as rival capitals during certain periods has some merit," Rosenberg says. "But we shouldn't ignore the fact that Moscow was also the site of great ballet companies, musical conservatories and artistic experimentation as impressive as St. Petersburg's. Before the Russian Revolution in 1917, St. Petersburg and Moscow were equal pinnacles of the performing arts, however strong their competitive feelings sometimes were. After 1917, Moscow became Soviet Russia's sole capital and hence 'official' cultural center, which some have argued gave greater artistic integrity to those who trained and performed in Peter's still-beautiful city."
St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, and in 1924 it became Leningrad. "The Stalinists exerted a brutal and regressive force on the city's culture," Rosenberg says, "and the city underwent several horrific purges provoked in part by a feeling that too many of its elite still clung to its old cultural traditions."
Victory over the Nazis After 1991, St. Petersburg again took pride in those traditions, as evidenced, Rosenberg says, "by the rapidity with which it shed the name Leningrad, despite the heroic connotations that name acquired as a result of the 900-day siege in World War II." The Nazi army decimated Leningrad during an assault that Nazi and Allied experts predicted would capture the city in a few weeks at most. But the people held out for almost three years, from June 1941 to January 1944, when Soviet troops routed the enemy. Two million Soviet civilians and soldiers died from combat, bombing, starvation and disease to save the city, and the toll on its infrastructure was equally devastating.
Today, St. Petersburg is again "a magical city," in Rosenberg's view. "True, the climate is largely inhospitablethe city lies on the latitude of Anchorage, just below the Arctic Circleand today the impressive canals drained from the surrounding swamps are often oily and smelly, and the beautiful pastel buildings smudged with soot. But in the White Nights of June and early July, when the city is light all night long, it is strikingly, almost indescribably, beautiful." For all the glamour, art and intellectual vitality associated with it, St. Petersburg is familiar with suffering, indeed it is founded on it. "When I was there last June," Rosenberg says, "I commented to my taxi driver how truly beautiful St. Petersburg was. 'Yes, it's beautiful,' he agreed, but he added, 'It is a beauty built on the bones of 100,000 serfs who died during its construction. You can hear their bones creak under every building.' He seemed to mean it literally, and perhaps he's right." Rosenberg sees the University's St. Petersburg celebration as an opportunity for students, alumni, visitors and the entire U-M community to go beyond the 300th anniversary events. "Look through this open window into the unfamiliar Russia. Go through it," he urges, "and see what's behind the facades of St. Petersburg. In a way, the presentation of St. Petersburg as chiefly a site of high cultural splendor is a defensive façade. There's a lot more edge to it. If we don't look at the city's popular culture, like the pop group Leningrad and many other contemporary examples, it would be like looking at Detroit through the Institute of Arts and ignoring Eminem." Jack Kollmann '78 PhD, academic coordinator for the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, is a historian and lecturer as well as a photographer. "The St. Petersburg window metaphor," Kollmann says, "was first employed in 1739 by Francesco Algarotti, an Italian visitor: 'this great window recently opened in the north through which Russia looks on Europe.'" 'Celebrating St. Petersburg: 300 Years of Cultural Brilliance' >> |
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