of a sense of duty? Or because of those two children and three helpless old women? Or simply because she ‘belonged’ to the place, as thousands of others had stayed on for precisely the same reason? And at heart she certainly liked the Nevsky far better than the Corso Umberto.
3
St. Petersburg – Leningrad
The next day was that in which I fully realised that the shell was still the same, but that this was a very different city from what I had known it to be. St. Petersburg, Petrograd had gone for ever. This was Leningrad. It had inherited many things from the other two, but it had its own substance, its own personality. Leningrad was not just a new name for St. Petersburg; it was a name that meant a hundred things that the other did not. Similarly, there were hundreds of things that belonged to St. Petersburg which could not be found in Leningrad. Perhaps this distinction was not so sharp three years ago, but today Leningrad had acquired the same distinctive personality as Stalingrad. One no more felt like calling Leningrad ‘St. Petersburg’ or ‘Petrograd’ than one felt like calling Stalingrad ‘Tsaritsyn.’ Perhaps, in the course of years, when thoughts of the siege and the blockade fade in people’s memories, they may again colloquially refer to the city by its own name; but it was significant that throughout my stay not one person should have called the city Petrograd or St. Petersburg, though everybody without exception continued to call the principal streets and most of the others by their old names. It was always the Liteiny, and the Nevsky, and the Morskaya – never the Volodarsky Avenue, or the October Twenty-fifth Avenue, or Herzen Street. 1 People had not accepted these artificial innovations; they had, however, accepted the city’s new name – a name full of new associations. St. Petersburg now belonged to literature, and to history, but no longer to real life. And nothing convinced me more of this than the curious personal experience I had that day of revisiting the house where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life, and which I had not seen for more than a quarter of a century.
Dangulov wakened me and pulled aside the blackout curtains. There was a drizzle outside. I could see through the window, on the other side of the street, a beautiful classical baroque building, with long tall windows, rounded on top, and walls of salmon-pink stucco, and flat white semi-pillars. Funny; looking out of a window in Rome one might have seen something very similar. Europe, Europe! it occurred to me. Great French and Italian architects (who were paid fabulous sums by the Tsars and Empresses) and their Russian pupils had really given the city its essential character – this city which had grown and perhaps still remained the western half of Russia’s soul. 2 Would I find any traces of ‘westernism’ in Leningrad today, I wondered. In the days that followed I was to find them, unmistakably.
Anna Andreievna, as bright and chatty as on the previous night, produced a sumptuous breakfast, with a lot of zakuski, including pickled minogi, a Leningrad speciality, a tough little eel-like fish which you were supposed to eat complete with its spine. The zakuski were followed by fried eggs and piping-hot black coffee. At the mention of minogi our colonel laughed heartily, and digging Dangulov in the ribs, produced a ‘real Caucasian charade’ which was even more untranslatable than unrepeatable. ‘Didn’t they teach you that one at school in Tiflis?’ he laughed. Dangulov said he didn’t come from Tiflis but from Armavir. To the Russian the Caucasian is what the Scot is to an Englishman, an object for friendly leg-pulling.
Then the two majors arrived, accompanied by a man called Baranov, wearing a semi-military tunic. He was the chief architect of the city of Leningrad, and was going to take us round the city and escort us to some of the places I had asked to be shown. ‘It may be a good thing
3
St. Petersburg – Leningrad
The next day was that in which I fully realised that the shell was still the same, but that this was a very different city from what I had known it to be. St. Petersburg, Petrograd had gone for ever. This was Leningrad. It had inherited many things from the other two, but it had its own substance, its own personality. Leningrad was not just a new name for St. Petersburg; it was a name that meant a hundred things that the other did not. Similarly, there were hundreds of things that belonged to St. Petersburg which could not be found in Leningrad. Perhaps this distinction was not so sharp three years ago, but today Leningrad had acquired the same distinctive personality as Stalingrad. One no more felt like calling Leningrad ‘St. Petersburg’ or ‘Petrograd’ than one felt like calling Stalingrad ‘Tsaritsyn.’ Perhaps, in the course of years, when thoughts of the siege and the blockade fade in people’s memories, they may again colloquially refer to the city by its own name; but it was significant that throughout my stay not one person should have called the city Petrograd or St. Petersburg, though everybody without exception continued to call the principal streets and most of the others by their old names. It was always the Liteiny, and the Nevsky, and the Morskaya – never the Volodarsky Avenue, or the October Twenty-fifth Avenue, or Herzen Street. 1 People had not accepted these artificial innovations; they had, however, accepted the city’s new name – a name full of new associations. St. Petersburg now belonged to literature, and to history, but no longer to real life. And nothing convinced me more of this than the curious personal experience I had that day of revisiting the house where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life, and which I had not seen for more than a quarter of a century.
Dangulov wakened me and pulled aside the blackout curtains. There was a drizzle outside. I could see through the window, on the other side of the street, a beautiful classical baroque building, with long tall windows, rounded on top, and walls of salmon-pink stucco, and flat white semi-pillars. Funny; looking out of a window in Rome one might have seen something very similar. Europe, Europe! it occurred to me. Great French and Italian architects (who were paid fabulous sums by the Tsars and Empresses) and their Russian pupils had really given the city its essential character – this city which had grown and perhaps still remained the western half of Russia’s soul. 2 Would I find any traces of ‘westernism’ in Leningrad today, I wondered. In the days that followed I was to find them, unmistakably.
Anna Andreievna, as bright and chatty as on the previous night, produced a sumptuous breakfast, with a lot of zakuski, including pickled minogi, a Leningrad speciality, a tough little eel-like fish which you were supposed to eat complete with its spine. The zakuski were followed by fried eggs and piping-hot black coffee. At the mention of minogi our colonel laughed heartily, and digging Dangulov in the ribs, produced a ‘real Caucasian charade’ which was even more untranslatable than unrepeatable. ‘Didn’t they teach you that one at school in Tiflis?’ he laughed. Dangulov said he didn’t come from Tiflis but from Armavir. To the Russian the Caucasian is what the Scot is to an Englishman, an object for friendly leg-pulling.
Then the two majors arrived, accompanied by a man called Baranov, wearing a semi-military tunic. He was the chief architect of the city of Leningrad, and was going to take us round the city and escort us to some of the places I had asked to be shown. ‘It may be a good thing
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