St. Petersburg Further reading 

St. Petersburg's place in Russian culture

Petersburg reminds the lover of Russian literature of many scenes from the past, recalling Pushkin and the Decembrists, Nekrasov and Saltykov-Shchedrin, Alexander Blok and the poets of the silver age. There are, however, many other reminders of an abundant creativity in this city, when one thinks of the ballet, the composers, the orchestras, the painters, the scientists who have made their mark here, under whatever name - St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and now once more St-Petersburg.

Over the 150 years, sparkled by this reign of Catherine the Great. Saint-Petersburg became the host to Russia�s Golden Age and a Mecca to some of the world�s greatest composers, dancers, artists, and writers. As the catalyst for Russia�s renaissance, Petersburg flowered in the music of Tchaikovsky, Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov; in the ballets Russes of Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova; in the arts and crafts of Repin, Benuas and Faberge; and in the literature and poetry of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Pushkin. St. Petersburg�s noble spirit was founded on beauty, innovation and progress.

Great names of Russian literature

By 1734, in the reign of the empress Elizabeth, Petersburg had already become the home for Russia's first 'modern' poet, Mikhail Lomonosov. Born a poor fisherman�s son near Archangel, his career was an illustration of the radical effect of Peter�s reforms on life in Russia. After being sent abroad from the capital to study science in Marburg, he returned to become professor of chemistry at Petersburg, while undertaking the reform and revitalization of the Russian literary language. With Catherine the Great's accession in 1762, writers received encouragement from a ruler who was herself a considerable author.

The comedies of Denis Fonvisin (originally von Wisin) satirized many ills of the time, while Gabriel Derzhavin was appointed poet laureate to the empress. The last seven years of Catherine�s reign were overshadowed by the French revolution, to which she responded by drastically tightening censorship and imprisoning Alexander Radishchev, who dared to attack the evils of serfdom in his book, 'A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow'. The anti-liberal policies of the aging empress were reinforced by her successor against 'revolutionary infusion' from abroad. The 'window on to Europe' was to be slammed and bolted. At the end of the century, however, it was 'Letters of a Russian Traveler' by Karamzin - with Vladimir Shukovski, the joint heralds of the romantic movement in Russian literature which opened readers' eyes to the nature of Western Europe and its society. In the hopeful atmosphere at the start of the young Alexander I�s reign, Karamzin published a monthly magazine, the European 'Vyestnik' or 'Messenger', which kept Russian readers abreast of the latest that was going on in the West.

A sense of nationality had been fostered by Poland, Hungary and other parts of central and Eastern Europe. The events which led Russian armies across Europe as far as Paris left their mark on educated members of the officer class, as they experienced for themselves the Europe they had read about in Karamzin. These were men who in 1815 were returning home inspired by ideals of humanity, education and freedom. But a change had come over the Tsar, and Alexander spent the last ten years of his reign campaigning against all forms of change, reform or innovation. The response of the progressives was to form secret societies that would work in favor of change in Russia. Poets friendly with Alexander Pushkin, like Ryleyev, Bestuzhev, Kuchelbecker and others kept him in the dark about the activities of these organizations, so as not to risk incriminating him. After the death of Alexander 1 in December 1825, young officers in Petersburg staged a doomed rebellion against his successor, Nicholas I.

This cost Ryleyev and four others their lives, and many others their freedom or domicile. In the course of the ensuing coronation ceremony, the new Tsar asked Pushkin what he would have done on that December day had he been in Petersburg at the time. If he had been able to answer honestly Pushkin would have had to admit that he should have been standing alongside the insurgents on the Senate square. His whole previous life pointed that way. While still 21, Pushkin was ordered away to south Russia on account of the 'over-free tone' of his poems, and later banished to his mother's estate.

Although allowed to return to Petersburg in 1827, and to attend the imperial court at Moscow, he was placed under the personal supervision of the tsar. Between now and 1831, he began publishing the eight parts of the novel-in-verse, 'Eugene Onegin', vividly descriptive of contemporary life and manners in the capital and the countryside. Pushkin's later works, among them the play of 'Boris Godunov', the 'History of Pugachov's Uprising' and 'The Captains Daughter', were also published in Petersburg. His influence on the development of Russian as a literary language was immense, and he was worshipped like a hero by a huge readership. He began work on a biography of Peter the Great, whose inner contradictions he scotched out in the poem, "The Bronze Horseman. His descriptions of Petersburg there and elsewhere are magnificent. He died of wounds from a duel in which he had been embroiled through gossip at the imperial court. The loss of Pushkin inspired the powerful and bitter work by Mikhail Lermontov, 'Ode on the Death of Pushkin', on account of which the young poet was dispatched from his regiment to serve in the Caucasus. There, in 1841, aged 27, Lermontov in his turn died in a duel. His works, among them 'The Demon', The Novice' and A Hero of Our Time', rank him next to Pushkin as Russia's greatest poets.

Pushkin's circle in Petersburg had included Nikolai Gogol, the master of Russian prose, and the playwright Alexander Griboedov; both of whom portrayed the social life of the capita). Another contemporary resident was Krylov of the 'Fables', making this the golden age of Russian poetry. Severe censorship and personal interference by both the tsar and the head of police, Benckendorf, led many writers during the 1840s and the early 1850s to prefer life in Moscow to living close to the center of power at Petersburg. The Tsarist system suppressed all forms of political activity, and literature took the place of politics as the field in which lively minds could engage with the social issues of die time. At this time - with the split between 'Slavophiles' and 'Zapadniki' or �westernizes� two conflicting streams of" thought about Russia's future emerged.

From the end of the 1840s, the literary role of Petersburg was upheld in the face of all restrictions by the most-read critical magazine 'Sovrimmenik' ('The Contemporary'), through the writings of Nikolai Nekrasov, the journalism of Vissarion Belinsky and the criticism of Nikolai Dobrolyubov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Nekrasov mirrors for us in verse the widely felt public responses to the changes that followed the death of Nicholas I in 1855- Of all the Great Russian novelists, none was more intimately identified with Petersburg than Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who described intimately the city he lived in. To this day, the actual locations in his novels 'Poor Folk', 'White Nights', 'Crime and Punishment' and others are pointed out to visitors.

Other writers living in Petersburg around the same time were the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, the lyric poet Fyodor Tyutchev and the author of unmatched descriptions of everyday Russian life, Nikolai Leskov. The years from the end of the nineteenth century up to the First World War were a silver age of Russian writing in Petersburg, Whether to damn of to glorify Peter the Great's creation, there were Dmitry Merezhkovski and Zinaida Hippius, Alexander Blok and Andrei Beliy, Alexei Tolstoy, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Osip Mandelshtam. The period was one in which a relatively mild political atmosphere bred tolerance, a lively involvement with cultural developments in the test of Europe and an outbreak of simultaneous creativity in all forms of art.

Several new avant-garde movements were proclaimed, such as Symbolism, Acmeism, and even something called Ego-Futurism (Igor Severyanin). The emigration of so many intellectuals and writers From Petrograd after the Revolution or during the civil war gave rise to a nostalgic literature-in-exile in which a sense of loss was consoled by picturing Petersburg / Petrograd as it had been in the old days. Those writers who stayed behind had to put up with guidance' and 'coaching' by the Party. Many fell foul of the secret police, the best known being Mandelshtam, who died in the Gulag, Sergei Esenin, who committed suicide in the city, and Anna Akhmatova. The latter not only evoked pre-revolutionary Petersburg but recorded the suffering of the years of Stalinist repression. During the long wartime siege of Leningrad, the 'voice of the dry', Olga Berggolts, regularly reading her own verse on the radio, helped to raise the spirits of the population. When Stalin and Zhdanov launched the campaign against intellectuals in 1946, two of the first victims to be targeted by the Party were Anna Akhmatova and the popular satirist, Mikhail Zoschenko.