I can't remember much about the late evening; no doubt we had our usual take-out supper from"Micky D's" and sat at the window overlooking Nevsky Square. And then passed-out on the beds. After our usual breakfast buffet in the crowded hotel dinning hall, Anatoly showed up with car and driver (car=black, driver= Alex or Dmitri) to give us a tour of the Pavlovsk Palace and Park. Pavlosk was just a few kilometers south of Pushkin, and the palace itself was quite beautiful.
The statue in front is of Tsar Paul I, son of Catherine II; his father was either Peter III or Count Orlov. (Considering Paul's weird behavior, my guess would be Peter III.) Hardly life-size -- he was short of stature and weak in fortitude, it shows us an effete and pompous man; he was the least popular of all the Tsars and Tsaritsas (you may remember that he was the only Tsar left-off the Millennium Monument in Novgotod).
Pavlovsk Palace was originally built in 1782 by Catherine II's favorite architect, Scottish-born Charles Cameron; later interiors were designed by Jacomo Quarenghi and Carlo Rossi, two famous Italian architects who did great work in and around St Petersburg. While the Catherine Palace in nearby Tsarskoe Selo is sumptuous and extravagant Baroque, Paul's palace is reserved and classical, more like the Roman Villa of some wealthy Senator than a Tsar's palace. But then, Paul never could reconcile with his mother or her tastes. Paul's wife, Maria Fyodorovna contributed a great deal to the palace's ornamentation. Here is a nice 'homey' touch at the entrance steps.
Once you enter the building, you are struck by its classic beauty...
The interior furnishing are exquisite; if they look like real Classical Antiquities, that's because they ARE. (Paul and Maria Fyodorovna purchased them in Italy the year before the palace was begun)...
Paul ascended the Russian Throne in 1796 on the sudden death of Catherine. Disfigured by Typhus as a child, and mercurial and suspicious by nature, Paul had all of her personal papers destroyed, for fear that she had intended to leave the throne to her grandson, Alexander. He also dug up the grave of Catherine's lover Potemkin and had the remains scattered away. Off to a bad start, he angered most of the nobility by insisting on a model of Western Medieval Chivalry; he angered the populace of Petersburg by enforcing a strict arbitrary dress-code; he angered the military by bizarre spurious alliances with France to take Malta back from the British, and by sending Cossacs to fight against the British in India. No surprise that he suffered a fate similar to his father at Catherine's hands -- in 1801 he was assassinated by a group of military officers; his son, Alexander succeeded him. His wife, Maria, remained popular with the people, and she was allowed to live in the upstairs of the Pavlovsk Palace for over thirty-years.
These are her quarters, and her furnishing -- not classical, but a combination of Empire and Art Nouveau done in karelian wood.
And here is a famous painting on her wall: the Russian Troika racing through the snow, echoing the words of Gogol: "Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes--only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!
Outside, the view from the gentle slope to the Slavyanka River was quite beautiful...
Leaving the town of Pavlovsk, Anatoly stopped to let us take a picture of what-I-called "Motel 1800", made to look like an old Russian wooden village -- "We'll leave the candle on for you!"
Anatoly looked like the proto-typical Russian Revolutionary: short, stocky, curly graying hair, salt-and-pepper beard, a gruff gravely voice. As a matter of fact, he related, he had been in the middle of the uprisings in the early 1990s in Petersburg that brought about the end of the Soviet era. But with us, he was receptive, friendly and humorous. We asked him if he could go a bit off-the-path and show us the famous Chesme Church designed by Yuri Felton. He agreed; the driver avoided the Imperial Highway and took us into the city the back-way.
And there was the stunning peppermint-candy boz near Moskovsky Place (sorry about the car door opening at the wrong time)
This skyward view, on a spectacular cloudless sunny day, highlights the juxtaposition of a 21st Century airliner's con-trail above an 18th Century architectural masterpiece...
To the left of the Church, near an apartment building was a concrete bunker with '1945' on it. "What's that?" I asked Anatoly. "A tomb for those who died in 1945, during the Siege of Leningrad." he replied. "Names unknowm. Either from freezing or starvation. There are many such structures in the city." There was nothing I could think of to say.
