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St. Petersburg the Great1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
The Hotel Europe stretches from the Nevsky Prospekt to Arts Square, spanning the full block of Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa. Tchaikovsky spent his honeymoon at the Hotel Europe, and Bernard Shaw dined here with Maxim Gorky. Dostoevsky and Strauss were frequent visitors. It is a haven of luxury and provides a bevy of services, among them luxury cars for journeys about town. This was immensely useful when we were leaving for our fourth trip to the Mariinsky Theatre – we were late; we’d been at the Hermitage again – though the concierge apologized because the hotel was only able to provide the BMW 500 series and not the larger 740 line. Gazing out at the suddenly sooty city from the sedan’s air-conditioned interior – this being the privilege of oligarchs – it occurred to me that the car was directly descended from the ornate golden carriage of Catherine the Great that sits in the Hermitage. Ours was an atavistic Russian privilege. Formerly the Winter Palace, the Hermitage is the apogee of St. Petersburg’s cultural ambition, the celebrated museum having continued to augment the acquisitions that Catherine the Great first made in 1764. I recalled how in the room of Van Dycks, the French windows were open and a humid breeze was blowing in (so much for conservation techniques). Hundreds of seats and cordons were being erected in the massive Palace Square, where the gentry once rode their carriages. Preparations were being made for a concert to be given that evening by Elton John – the camp English singer, truly an Alexandrine Russian manqué in his extravagant costumes. Inside, a museum administrator was directing three women with mops as they washed the bitumen-sealed roof beyond the open windows and arranged chairs for the evening’s VIPs. Catherine the Great erected two enormous mountains of food in this square, each topped with flowing wine, her court watching from these very windows as the poor waited for her signal to eat. Behind me, the hordes of Russians continued to traipse through the museum’s myriad rooms and marvelled at what history had bequeathed them. It was hard to decide whether St. Petersburg’s complicated beauty was proof that even the worst dictators are eventually forgiven their excesses or if the lesson is that, in time, all great art ends up back in the hands of the people who made it. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
