Photograph by Catherine Karnow
Few have immortalized the awesome impression made by the city of St. Petersburg as passionately as the poet Alexander Pushkin: “I love thee, city of Peter’s making, I love thy harmonies austere, And the Neva’s sovereign waters’ breaking, Along your banks of granite sheer.” The power of the relationship between this “capital of the north” and the forbidding nature of its site is unique. An emphatic testament to the man whose vision St. Petersburg was, Tsar Peter the Great, the city is a planned microcosm of modern, cosmopolitan Russia. It is built on 42 Neva Delta islands that were essentially swamps until its creation in the 1700s. Inspired by Amsterdam and compared with Venice, its thoroughfares comprise a mix of broad embankments, scything avenues, gridiron streets, and curving canals. The combination of the imperial and cultured, refined and rugged, traditional and advanced, give it an aura all of its own. Those who experience it, wrote author Lev Lur’e, “witness buildings that seem like stage decorations from a previous century and feel that they have become characters from some novel or play rather than being real people here and now.”
