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St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad—and Piter to Russians—is the world’s ultimate literary stage set. Must-visit sites include the equestrian statue of Peter the Great on Decembrists’ Square, immortalized in Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman; the Summer Garden, where Russian writers congregate to commune with Pushkin’s ghost; and the golden spire of the Admiralty, celebrated by pretty much every Russian who ever wrote. You can explore the city’s darker side at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Dostoyevsky was imprisoned in 1849, and the infamous Soviet Kresty jail, described in Anna Akhmatova’s tragic Requiem.

See:
Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fountain House
Entered through a somewhat hidden courtyard off Liteiny Prospekt, this communal apartment was Akhmatova’s home for three decades, beginning in the 1920s. Among the countless bone-chilling testaments to the horrors of totalitarianism is a letter she wrote to Stalin pleading for her son’s release from the gulag. The museum has informative English-language handouts and a nice small shop for souvenirs.
Sheremetyev Palace
Liteiny Prospekt, 53
78-12/579-7239
akhmatova.spb.ru

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Memorial Museum
Dostoyevsky’s final residence has been recreated according to memoirs and original plans, with memorabilia, manuscripts, and period objects on display. Do drop by the Kuznechny Market down the street to admire the homegrown edibles, and take a sample of sauerkraut offered by vendors. Also stroll along Fontanka River and Griboyedov Canal embankments, which figure prominently in Dostoyevsky’s novels.
Kuznechny
Pereulok, 5–2
78-12/117-4031
md.spb.ru

Pushkin Apartment Museum
The elegant 1830s interior of the poet’s last flat is filled with his personal effects, including a 4,000-book library. The adjacent 17-room literary annex (separate admission) perfectly illustrates Russia’s cultural golden age—with English audio.
Moika River
Naberezhnaya, 12
78-12/311-3531
museumpushkin.ru

Pushkin’s Lycée at Tsarskoye Selo
Often overlooked in favor of nearby Catherine Palace, this is the legendary progressive boarding school that Pushkin attended from 1811 to 1817. (His class reads like a who’s who of 19th-century Russian culture.) Especially memorable is Pushkin’s cell-like room and the examination hall where Gavriil Derzhavin, the father of Russian poetry, anointed the teenage poet as his successor. It’s all very moving, even to a non-Russian.
Pushkin,
Sadovaya Str., 2
78-12/476-6411
museumpushkin.ru

Vladimir Nabokov Museum
Nabokov lived in this ornate mansion near St. Isaac’s before emigrating in 1917. Fans will have a field day with his butterflies and his Scrabble set. English information is scant, but most items are self-explanatory.
Ul. Bolshaya
Morskaya, 47
78-12/315-4713
nabokovmuseum.org

Stay:
Angleterre
Olga Polizzi designed the guest rooms at the luxe Angleterre (and the Astoria, its sister and neighbor) in signature classic-contemporary style, here featuring acres of creamy Volga linen and splashes of Constructivist red. Prize rooms face the massive dome of St. Isaac’s, another landmark dear to Russian writers.
Ul. Malaya
Morskaya, 24
78-12/313-5787
RATES: $300–$500
angleterrehotel.com

Astoria
The 1912 grande dame, a Rocco Forte hotel, retains a faded, neoclassic elegance. Tea is served in the mint-green salon from fanciful blue-and-white china by the Lomonosov Imperial Factory. Vladimir Lenin, writer Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as H.G. Wells and John Reed, all slept here.
Bolshaya Morskaya
Ulitsa, 39
78-12/313-5757
RATES: $390–$640
thehotelastoria.com

Eat:
Chekhov
Anton Chekhov—the least Petersburgian of all Russian writers—lends his name to this rapturously delicious new spot. In a room that recreates the nostalgic feel of a 19th-century dacha, locals go loco for house-made pickles, potatoes fried with porcini mushrooms, and rich stews in adorable earthenware pots.
Petropavlovskaya
Ulitsa, 4
78-12/234-4511

The Literary Cafe
Ground zero for Pushkinphiles, this café—formerly Wolf and Berange—was the writer’s last stop en route to that fateful duel. His kitschy wax figure greets you in the little downstairs lobby. Though service can be infuriatingly slow, raise a glass of spiced mead to the national poet as locals gossip about his love life.
Nevsky Prospekt , 18
78-12/312-6057

Stolle
Piroghi—pies—are the theme at this neo-vintage café decorated with black-and-white images of the city. Line up by the counter for slabs of fluffy yeast dough filled with cabbage, rabbit, or apples and lingonberries.
Konyshenniy
Pereulok, 1–6
78-12/312-1862

Stray Dog
In the Silver Age 1910s, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, and Mayakovsky all performed at this vaulted cellar, then the city’s preeminent literary cabaret. Now there are historical photographs in the back rooms and a fetching collection of dog objects made by various artists up front. Refuel with Slavic staples like pelmeni (Siberian dumplings) or borscht.
Ploscahd Isskustv, 5–4
78-12/303-8821

U Gorchakova
In the former mansion of Prince Gorchakov, Pushkin’s lycée friend, this merry, stylized place has a menu written in doting 19th-century prose. The kitchen ably covers all the basics, and the thick, bracing soups are especially fine.
Bolshaya
Monetnaya , 17–19
78-12/233-9272

Tour:
It would be reckless to navigate Russia’s arcane visa bureaucracy and social rituals without assistance; Exeter International, efficient and passionate travel agents, will help book your dream trip.
800/633-1008
exeterinternational.com

Read:
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)
His prime Piter works: narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, novel in verse Eugene Onegin, and Gothic short story “The Queen of Spades.”

Nikolai Gogol (1808–1852)
St. Petersburg Tales, Nevsky Prospekt, and The Overcoat present the city as a haunted, phantasmagoric place.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
Key St. Petersburg works: White Nights, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment.

Anna Akhmatova (1888–1966)
Requiem and Poem Without a Hero are her monuments to the city.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
Speak, Memory: memoir of his Russian past.

Andrei Bitov (1937–)
Densely layered Leningrad-set Pushkin House is a bit Proustian, a little Nabokovian.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)
In Less Than One, read the tribute to Akhmatova and the meditation on Piter titled “A Guide to a Renamed City.”

Moscow Modern

Life is full of roads not taken, and I missed the chance of a lifetime to explore the rich legacy of Constructivist architecture during a two-week stay in Moscow in 1974. I was there as an official guest, selecting movies for presentation at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and on my first free day I wanted to see some of the city. After the obligatory tour of the Kremlin and other historic landmarks, I asked my translator for a personal recommendation and she took me to the Museum of Architecture. We were the only visitors, and I was able to leaf through scrapbooks of work by modernist pioneers of the 1920s. Their names were unfamiliar, but the buildings and unrealized designs were astonishing. Each of the books ended abruptly in the early 1930s—around the time that Stalin decided that modernism was too rarefied for the masses and lacked the pomp and ceremony to glorify a dictatorship. Progressive ideas in all the arts were brutally suppressed, and most of the architects died in obscurity.

In the car, the driver (probably a KGB agent) was plainly upset by this detour from the familiar itinerary, and when I asked to see Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin apartments, a forgotten masterpiece of 1930, I hit a wall: “Nyet! So sorry, not possible. We return now to hotel.” The next weekend, we flew to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I saw a building—the Ministry of Highways—that took my breath away. Cantilevered wings spread wide from a hillside. It looked like a visionary design of 1924 but was newly completed, the last gasp of Constructivism in this remote republic.

The Lost Vanguard:Russian Modernist Architecture 1922–1932, the title of a recent exhibition of Richard Pare’s photographs at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a sumptuous book from Monacelli ($85), intensified my regrets that I didn’t sneak off one evening in Moscow and summon a taxi to savor these forbidden fruits. A few greenbacks would have taken me anywhere— though I hadn’t a clue about addresses. Pare spent 10 years traveling through Russia and the former Soviet republics, documenting what survives from a decade of idealism and experimentation. Many of the buildings have been despoiled, neglected, or, in recent years, demolished.

Oil wealth has sparked a construction boom. Moscow is being redeveloped on a grand scale, and ordinary Russians want to erase bitter memories of the past. Why save a rumbling block of workers’ apartments when big money can be made on a glittering mall? Who cares about the trophies of a revolution that led straight to the gulag and three quarter’s of a century of hardship and oppression?

Pare shows why Russians and everyone else should care. His images make me want to take the next flight to Moscow. The best of these buildings are even more inventive than those of the West European avant-garde. Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn built in the Soviet Union and came away with fresh ideas. Zaha Hadid—one of the most exciting talents working today—was inspired by the Constructivists to forge a new language of architecture.

There’s an urgent need to cherish and restore these modern landmarks, and at least one Russian has promised to set the lead. Sergey Gordeev, a young billionaire developer, bought the Melnikov house and is restoring that fragile composition of two interlocking cylinders in the hope of opening it as a museum. It’s the least typical and, arguably, the most significant work of its era. Konstantin Melnikov was the golden boy of the 1920s, designing a succession of adventurous workers’ clubs (Gordeev has saved one of those, too) and the giant cylinder of the Gosplan garage. He was allowed to spend months in Paris in 1925, designing the brilliant Soviet pavilion for the legendary decorative arts exposition. The organizers were as shocked by its undecorative wood skeleton as they were by Le Corbusier’s white cube. Melnikov was tempted to stay on and build a bridge–cum– parking garage over the Seine but chose to return to Moscow. In gratitude, the authorities permitted him to build a house studio for his family in the Arbat district at a time when everyone else lived collectively in well-policed apartment blocks.

Preservationists are praying that Gordeev will follow through on his pledges and buttress floundering efforts to save more buildings. Meanwhile, I’ve got my trip all mapped out. Pare’s book includes addresses and shows me what to expect. Standouts include a radio tower that was the first major structure completed after the revolution. From within, it resembles a spider web of steel and cables, a dizzying sculpture that any museum would covet. Then the Rusakov Workers Club, with its auditorium made up of three jutting bays of seats, and the MOGES power station across the river from the Kremlin, with its faceted glass bays and flared chimneys. And much more. “On my quest, the sense of discovery was always present and vivid” is how Pare describes his 10-year odyssey, and I can only hope for a taste of that in a crowded week.

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