Anatoly let us off on Nevsky Prospekt, in front of the Hotel Grand Europe; we were to meet our next guide, Anna, in the lobby of the hotel at 2:30 PM. I'd found her name on the web for St Petersburg back in April, shortly after i'd found Elena's for Moscow. What we didn't know was that Anna and Elena had been good friends and school mates in Tver. It was not yet half-past, so we waited in the lobby. Inside, the hotel had a great deal of Alexandrine elegance: velvet drapes, potted palms, marble and malachite columns, gilded crystal chandeliers.
We recognized Anna as she approached, although we had never met her before. Like Elena in Moscow, she was tall and self-assured; she did not have the stunning Slavic beauty that one sees in the movies -- rather a quiet and unintimidating attractiveness. Her hair was a sandy blonde, while Elena's had been auburn. Both of them could've passed for Scandinavian or German. While Elena considered herself a citizen of the world and loved to travel, Anna, from the time she first visited Petersburg at the age of 10, had wanted to live here and be a guide. She was certainly good at her chosen profession.
Outside, opposite the hotel, she showed us the small statue of one of the heroes of the Siege of Leningrad: a stone cat sitting atop a cornice on a commercial building. Without them, the rats would've spread disease and havoc on top of the horrors already inflicted on the population during those 900 days.
Our first destination, on foot, was the fantastic Church of the Resurrection of Christ the Savior, known better as The Church on the Spilled Blood'. I found it to be the most beautiful churche in all of Russia (but then neither I nor anyone else alive or dead, has ever seen
all the churches in Russia)
Inside, the beauty simply took one's breath away...
This beautiful structure marks the exact spot were the second of three revolutionary bombers from the predecessors of Communism, the People's will Party, assinated Tsar Alexander II in March of 1881. Note the red Porphyry around it, the same used on his tomb at the Peter & Paul Cathedral...
This is the top of the Memorial. Note the quality of light coming from the window behind, lending a supernatural quality to the scene...
Twenty years before, Alexander had emancipated the serfs, and reformed the land and courts system. And the very day he was murdered, he was on his way to the Winter Palace to draft a document that would make Russian a Constitutional Monarchy. The proverb says "No good deed goes unpunished." As for Revolution, Napolean said it well: "The more things change, the more they remain the same!" This picture tries to capture the glory of the afternoon sun inside the church...
Here is a mosaic rendering of Christ before Caiphas done by Mikhail Vrubel, Art Nouveau master.
Finally, here is the back of the church, as seen from Griboyedov Canal. The church was designed by Alfred Parland (still another foreign architect thriving in Ruussia) in 1883, and completed in 1897; it is dome in the style of medieval Russia, inspired by the extravagence and splendour of St Basil's in Moscow. The brisk exterior, with impressed tiles showing the coat-of-arms of over 400 Districts all over Russia that donated monies to the project. Despite the vicuousdness of the revolutionaries, Alexander II was much-loved by the Russian people. On the left, you can see how the embankment juts out into the canal -- because the original embankment sidewalk where the Tsar was murdered is now incorporated into the church...
About 6 weeks before this tragedy, another one took place not far from this spot. Another famous Petersburger would depart forever; this one not quite as important to Russia as the Tsar-Liberator, but certainly more well-known to World Literature. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, an admirer of Alexander II, and the most conservative of Russia's great 19th Century novelists. We were now on our way, through the Haymarket area he knew so well, to his last apartment in St Petersburg, where he spent the last 3 years of his life, and where he died in late January of 1881. Dostoevsky lived in many apartments in this city, but he always insisted on one that had a side-street entrance, on the second floor, with a good view from the front windows, and within sight and sound of the bells of a church. The apartment at 4 Kuznechny Pereulok, now the Dostoevsky House/Museum, certainly fills these requirements. As you come up the steps, you see his famous hat (a 19th Century gentleman never went anywhere without his hat) on a stand.
The glass cover is not original, of course, but is there to deter young people from doffing it in hopes that some of the genius that once resided under it will be transferred to the new wearer...
Anna confessed that when she first arrived in St Petersburg, she used to imagine she saw that hat bobbing through the back streets and courtyards of the city. Easy to see why, because his writings make the city come alive for so many of us (even for myself who was born, not in Russia, but in New Jersey.)
This is the children's room; The rocking chair is where Dostoevsky would sit, entertaining them. He was a doting father, and his wife, Anna Snitkina, often chided him for spoiling them by assenting to their ecery wish (particularly going out to get them sweets).
This is Anna's desk, where she took care of the household accounting and kept-up with publishing matters and correspondence -- an amazing young woman (she was 25 years younger than him): wife, mother, confidant, manager, secretary.
And here, in Dostoevsky study, is his desk -- where he completed
The Brothers Karamazov, wrote his famous Pushkin speech, and began the notes for his never-written final book
The Life of a Great Sinner.
A pen fell and rolled under the desk; Dostoevsky got down on the floor to retrieve it, and when he tried to get up, he was stricken by a fatal lung hemorrhage. His body, weakened by years of Epilepsy and severe Depression, and bouts of Emphysema, could not recover and he died a few days later, despite several doctors' interventions. Phoebe remarked that his apartment was not-at-all what she expected: something tiny, dark and dilapidated where Raskolnikov or The Underground Man would hang-out. Similarly, some critics failed to separate the Writngs from the Man: seeing him as his very characters: an axe-murderer, a pedophile, a profligate, a parricide, a revolutionary. Indeed, how convincing was his writing.
Finally, here is the dining room table. As was customary in the Russia of those times, everything was removed and the body was laid-out there, stripped, and cleaned, and prepared for Burial. As this was being carried-out, Anna answered a knock at the door. It was a uniformed military officer, presenting to her a document from Tsar Alexander II (destined to be struck-down just a few weeks later( granting a generous life-long pension. Excited, she rushed back to the dining room, exclaiming "Fyodor, at last, our financial problems are solved!"
Only Anna would use the pension. Fyodor Dostoevsky was buried at the Master of Arts Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery; it is said there were forty-thousand people, mostly young people and students, in the funeral procession. Anna Snitkina Dostoevskaya would live to be 72, dying in 1918, with the Soviets in power. But not even they would dare to ban his writings; in 1972, his complete collected works were officially published in St. Petersburg, the city he knew so well.
