| Saint Petersburg was planned and built to be the Imperial
Capital, as a project "from the Center". When Peter the Great founded
it, on territory newly conquered from the Swedes, in the empty marshes
of the Nevá river delta, its expressed (and achieved) purpose was
to "beat a window through to Europe". This was achieved metaphorically,
by modelling the new city on the great European capitals. In accordance
with Enlightenment ideals, the city was laid out on a regular, concentric
plan – over a number of large, flat islands, bounded by the Great Nevá
and its many subsidiary branches. Smaller branches were consolidated
into a few regularly spaced concentric canals, even the narrowest of which
is straighter and wider than the major canals of Venice. The larger
branches crossing these are swift-flowing granite-walled rivers.
The hub of the concentric structure is the original Petrine nucleus, erected
as a governmental, commercial, and military center, on Vasílevsky
Óstrov, Petrográdskaya storoná, and several smaller
islands, at the main branching of the Nevá's widest arms.
The size of the river here is impressive, particularly in early winter,
when the powerful current has not yet frozen over completely, and great
sheets of snow-burdened ice surge downstream, while ribbons of steam rise
from the flowing water. Flooding is a constant threat, with major
inundations occurring in 1777, 1824, 1890, 1897, 1898, 1924, 1955, 1973,
1975, and 1986. The second (and most serious) of these is immortalized
in the most famous poem to this much-sung city, Aleksandr Pushkin's Médny
vsádnik (The Bronze Horseman), where the indomitable dream
of the Tsar confronts the overflowing river, and the little man perishes
in their struggle. If you imagine soldiers in the early 1700's crossing
the river in mid-December in small boats, you will realize that this was
a city built in defiance of nature, which has not even today succeeded
in conquering it.56 In the early years of our century, only four
permanent bridges crossed the Nevá – a fifth, the Palace Bridge,
was erected on boats and removed in the winter, when roads were laid over
the ice at many points. Even today, in summer, a reminder of the
river's power over the city that guards it is given every night, when the
bridges are raised for several hours, laying inter-island traffic dead
for the duration.
Across the river to the South of the Petrine city lay a large tounge of marshy mainland, around which the Nevá swept, first northwards, then to the West, before branching into its delta. Here Peter built his first shipyard, and here it was planned that the metropolis should stand. On the river-bank itself were erected the Winter Palace and Hermitage, and facing these, away from the river, the vast semi-circle of Palace Square, bounded to the South and East by the curved facade of the General Staff building. Along the outer wall of the General Staff, running just North of West, at an approximate 45-degree angle to the Nevá shore, stretched Névsky Prospékt, which cut South-East for almost five kilometers across the mainland peninsula, till it met the Nevá again further upstream. At this end of Névsky lay the Aleksándr Névsky Lávra monastary, founded few years after the city itself. At its westernmost extreme, after passing the General Staff, Névsky came to an end, just as a view opened up to the right onto Palace Square. Straight ahead lay the Admiralty (Admiral’téystvo), whose golden spikelike spire was visible from along the entire length of Névsky after its one and only bend at Moscow Station. Névsky Prospékt was one of three spokes in a wheel-like street pattern with its hub at the Admiralty spire. But this symmetrical plan seems to have been given up at an early stage, since the two other "spokes" were far narrower than Névsky and carried neither its prestige nor its traffic. True, the Voznesénsky prospékt (Prospékt Mayórova, in Soviet times) led South through a rather up-grade area; but the Úlitsa Gorókhovaya (Úlitsa Dzerzhínskogo) lost itself almost immediately in the underclass districts around Sénnaya plóshchad' (Plóshchad' míra) that have been immortalized by Dostoevsky. |