St. Petersburg, Russia: Take-aways

In St. Petersburg, nothing could be built higher than the Winter Palace.  That reminds me of Philadelphia, where nothing could be built higher than William Penn’s hat, on the statue atop City Hall.  (Anecdote, although skyscrapers finally broke that rule in March 1987, a small version of William Penn was ultimately mounted on the final and highest beam of the Comcast Center, currently the tallest building in the city.  So even today, nothing is higher than William Penn’s hat.)

The Neva

As far as the layout of St. Petersburg is concerned, it was evidently the work of a Frenchman:  Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond (in 1716).  Just as Washington, D.C. was laid out by another Frenchman:  Pierre Charles L’Enfant (in 1791).  It seems that, even back then, or maybe especially back then, France had a recognized flair for knowing how to make a city beautiful.

One question remains unanswered: where are the blacks, the  Arabs, the Asians?  I was told afterwards that the era of subsidies for students from developing countries is over.  And aside from that, there was no great influx of immigrants either during the tsars or the Soviet days.  That would explain it.  The only non-Caucasians I saw during the entire trip were those tourists in the Korean exhibit at the Hermitage.

Out of 22 channels on the hotel’s TV set, one was encoded, one was in Chinese and the remaining 20 were in Russian.  Of all the places I’ve been, including the motel along the Volga, that is the only time that ever happened.

A word to the wise:  Russian showers work the opposite of American or French showers. Toward the left is cold; to the right is hot.  I remembered that from last year, after the puzzlement but before the cursing started.

The Winter Palace

I spotted only a few dogs over the five days - I could count them on the fingers of one hand.  But then again, I was downtown and not in a residential area, so perhaps that’s normal and not a sign of a dislike of pets.  Of the four or five dogs I saw, two were wearing raincoats!

From the House of Fabergé

I found that Pushkin had a decidedly mulatto look to him, something that surprised me because I’d actually never seen his face.  The mystery was solved when I found this on the British Library’s On-line Gallery, written by Mike Phillips, who started by describing Pushkin’s great-grandfather:

Pushkin Café

       “According to his son-in-law and first biographer, Abram (or Ibrahim) was the son of a ruler in Africa: possibly Chad, possibly Abyssinia.  At an early age he was either abducted or sent to the court of the Turkish Sultan in Constantinople.  Bought from the Sultan, Abram arrived in Russia and was baptised with Tsar Peter standing as his godfather.  Peter visited France in 1717, and at the same time Abram was sent to study there.  He returned with the conventional skills of an officer of artillery, but he had also acquired a new surname, Hannibal (in Russian, Gannibal), and the name had significant echoes of republican defiance.  A respected military engineer, he was promoted under successive rulers and lived on into the reign of Catherine the Great.  There is no reliable likeness of Gannibal.  Hugh Barnes, in his book Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg (2005), has shown that this portrait, long thought to be of Gannibal, cannot be of him.
        "Gannibal's third son (of 11) by his second marriage, Osip Abramovich, married Marya Alexeevna Pushkin, and their daughter was Pushkin’s mother Nadezhda.  Pushkin’s father Sergei Lvovich Pushkin came from a family of boyars (nobles) whose fortunes had declined under Peter the Great.  Sergei Lvovich inherited the family estates, and had the reputation of being idle, frivolous and miserly.  He was also a fluent French speaker and had a large library of French literature and philosophy, both of which offered Pushkin a solid grounding for his later education.  Pushkin’s mother inherited the family estates from her father Osip, but he had left it so heavily encumbered with debt that, during her lifetime, the income went into paying it off.  She was beautiful and elegant, but Pushkin was no closer to her than he was to his father.”

Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood