IF there is one city which has reflected the momentous changes that have been taking place throughout Russia, pre and post Soviet, it is St Petersburg. Laid down in a swamp but built like a rock, the one time capital of Russia has been praised and denigrated, destroyed and rebuilt. It has been celebrated in music, art and poetry - and has survived the transient irritation of four name changes: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and St Petersburg again. Those of its citizens, however, who were mindful of its earlier glories, continued to call it simply Peter.
In his all embracing book, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, Solomon Volkov, a Russian emigre now living in America, gives us the legend - and the story behind that legend. Peter the Great was the Cuchullain of his day: six feet and seven inches tall, he could roll up a silver plate with his bare hands and, throwing a bolt of cloth up into the air, cut it in mid flight. His table groaned beneath the weight of a whole roasted bull. A dwarf horseman was detailed to ride around the dining room, firing a pistol every time the Tsar drained his glass, and on one occasion Peter himself cut the giant pie from which emerged a female dwarf decked out only - and prophetically - in red ribbons.
Meanwhile, out in the mosquito ridden swamp, the city was growing apace, thanks to the tens of thousands of workers herded into the Neva delta who, in the absence of tools, used their own shirts and skirts to carry away excavated clay.
"How many died of starvation, disease, and exhaustion?" asks the author. No one knows because no one kept track. In 1721, 18 years after the first sod was turned, Peter declared himself Emperor of Russia.
The Italian architect, Francesco Rastrelli, darling of Peter's daughter Elizabeth, gave us - among others - Tsarkoe Tselo and the Winter Palace, and it is around these great structures and the people who both built them and inhabited them that the story of the city is told.
If grandeur and hauteur were the marks of that city, its writers, poets, musicians, painters and dancers carried themselves with the same insouciance. They were the golden people, driven by their talents and their passions, fingers firmly on the self destruct button, as doomed as their beloved city, each successive group somehow foreshadowing the next:
And if the mark of the chosen is upon you
But you are doomed to wear the yoke of the slave,
Bear your cross with the majesty of a goddess.
Know how to suffer!
Not Akhmatova but Mirra Lokbvitskaya, known as the Russian Sappho. Lokhvitskaya, at the age of 27, won the literary award of the day, the Pushkin Prize, in 1896, and was dead (from TB) by 35. Later, it was Akhmatova who who would bear her cross like a goddess and the citizens of Leningrad who would know how to suffer.
In 1965, when Solomon Volkov was 21, he travelled to Komarova with a string ensemble, to play for the 75 year old Akhmatova in her dacha. She requested Shostakovich and in the music section of his book, he pulls these strands together, telling the history of St Petersburg with the Georgian Balanchine and Diaghilev centre stage and Shostakovich the enduring presence.
The venture is an enormous one - Volkov's characters, after all, include Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Lenin, Zhadanov - and, given the author's political stance, the omissions are understandable. No mention here, for instance, of the revolutionary graphics spearheaded by people like Mayakovsky whose strong drawings and clear messages - the ROSPA windows - were easily understood by a populace light years removed from the self absorbed artists who frequented the opera, the ballet and the underground cafes but who all suffered the same fate, nonetheless.