A deliberate city out of nothing: what St. Petersburg mythology stands on
For the book about the myths of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Ivanov chose several aspects that were particularly interesting to him from the vast variety of legends and legends that continue to grow over the mysterious and hardly fully comprehended "Peter's Creation" to this day. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Vladimir Ivanov
"Myths of St. Petersburg"
Moscow : MIF, 2026. 192 p.
According to Ivanov, the image of Peter the Great includes several very different mythological types and archetypes. Peter's function as the demiurge, to whom the city owes its existence, is discussed separately in the second chapter, "Creatio ex nihilo and the Redemptive Flood: Cosmogony and Eschatology of St. Petersburg." Anna Akhmatova's emotional eschatological note about Leningrad's extraordinary adaptability to disasters serves as a beautiful epigraph to it. Describing "a cold river with heavy clouds over it," "threatening sunsets," "an opera moon," "black water with yellow reflections of light," the poetess mentally wrings her hands: "Everything is scary. I can't imagine what disasters and troubles in Moscow look like.: It's not like there's any of that."
Following this, Ivanov quotes Dostoevsky's famous, even hackneyed phrase, which has become a commonplace in many studies of St. Petersburg mythology: "Petersburg is the most abstract and deliberate city in the world." The author explains the concept of premeditation in detail, referring St. Petersburg to those few historical cities that arose "not from the needs of society," but from considerations of political expediency, "by the sole will of a despot." In this sense, Indian Agra, the capital of the Mughal Empire, or Egyptian Alexandria, which appeared by the strong—willed decision of Alexander the Great, can be put on a par with St. Petersburg.
Ivanov clarifies that the appearance of St. Petersburg still has objective grounds, being due to "the complex processes of development of the Russian state and society in the decades preceding Peter's reforms." The beginning of urban construction is shrouded in such a thick mythological fog that one gets the fantastic feeling that the city "arose ex nihilo — from nothing, and myths are designed to somehow rationalize this miraculous appearance." However, from a sociocultural point of view, there is nothing supernatural about the appearance of St. Petersburg: according to the author of the book, since the era of Peter is the watershed between Ancient Russia and new Russia, the city created by the emperor marks this "fundamental breakdown of the previous era."
This most important mythologeme of the city, Ivanov writes, manifests itself in different variations: "first of all, St. Petersburg is not an established city. It is built on shaky foundations: "on the shore of desert waves," on marshes and swamps, on the bones of builders." The author of the book strongly and argumentatively refutes the concept of St. Petersburg as a "city on bones", which has become firmly embedded in the consciousness of the layman, with reference to an article by Ekaterina Andreeva from the journal Voprosy Filosofii: "Despite the hardships of the first years of the city's construction, it is hardly possible to talk about any incredible sacrifices among the builders. It is known that the work was carried out during the warm season — from the end of March to October, and the artels were sent to the construction site in shifts of two to three months, after which they went home." In addition, there were not enough workers because of the war, so they tried to protect them, and "the mortality rate among the first builders of St. Petersburg, averaging 6-8%, was common for that time."
Despite all the objective prerequisites for the appearance of St. Petersburg, it was still initially perceived as a city "out of context," which is why its very foundation, according to Ivanov, "becomes a cosmogony — the creation of an entire world in which Peter the Great acts as the creator-demiurge." However, Peter also has more frivolous mythological hypostases, including the trickster with his love of duplicity and masquerade disguises — sometimes as the constable Peter Mikhailov, then as the deacon of the Most Ridiculous, drunken and madcap Cathedral of Pakhoma. In this context, Ivanov, of course, cannot ignore the popular legend of Peter's "substitution", in whose place either an unknown baby from a German settlement was planted in infancy, or the enemies of Russia, the Swedes, pushed their protege into adulthood. All these legends, according to the author of the book, are clearly of folk, fairy-tale origin and fit into the great Russian utopian tradition, which is associated with numerous myths about imposture.
Following that, in the fourth chapter, "The Enchanted City: How does Gogol's Gothic Mythology Work?" the author uses Gogol's St. Petersburg stories as clearly showing the mechanics of creating an urban myth and reflecting on the "blatant sacred emptiness" of St. Petersburg, which, compared with other Russian cities, has very few sacred landscape objects traditional for folk Orthodoxy. "Religious consciousness seems to have nothing to cling to in St. Petersburg," Ivanov notes, "this is not a city of Christian mystery, but of pagan mysticism." From the sense of the "spiritual emptiness of imperial Petersburg" that was bizarrely refracted in Gogol's novels, the author proceeds to analyze the rich history of relations between St. Petersburg and Ancient Egypt (recorded in a fair number of architectural structures, as well as in the form of a statue of the goddess Sekhmet in the Hermitage). An interesting help here is Pushkin's poem "Monument", where the mention of the Alexandrian Pillar (usually identified with the Alexander Column on Palace Square) leads the researcher to reflect that for Pushkin the Alexander Column becomes the Alexandrian lighthouse, that is, a symbol of a spiritually decayed civilization, such as Hellenistic Egypt (and thus his "free poetic making" the poet opposes state officialdom).
No less fascinating twists of thought await the reader in the final chapter with the mischievous title "How the Masons made movies in Leningrad," which first deals with the craze of the Russian aristocracy for Freemasonry in the golden age of St. Petersburg, that is, during the reign of Catherine the Great, Paul I and Alexander I. Stating that St. Petersburg is a truly Masonic city, since its architecture reflects almost the entire symbolic lexicon of Freemasonry in one way or another, Ivanov decides to amuse the reader by searching for Masonic motifs even in the film "The Irony of Fate." The Masonic symbol can be found already in the cartoon prologue of the painting, where an architect builds up the entire planet with standard buildings: "When approving the project, the drawing is stamped with a seal in the form of an ancient temple: if you look closely, a radiant delta looks at us from its facade" (the same as on the portico of the Kazan Cathedral).
These playful observations give the last chapter a touch of levity, however, in conclusion, Ivanov nevertheless returns to seriousness and explains that he was simply trying to avoid "vulgar academicism", and his main goal was to show how the mythopoeic space of St. Petersburg, which initially arose as tabula rasa, gradually absorbed various mythological languages, including geographically close Karelian- the Finnish epic, but at the same time the distant Egyptian mythology: "It should be noted that openness to such absorption is not a trivial thing in itself."
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