Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

Postscript. St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology

332 Postscript St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology   In spite of reason, contrary to the elements. A. Griboedov, Woe from Wit Over the course of St. Petersburg’s relatively short but dramatic biography, real facts and practical problems have often become intertwined with questions of myth. Providing rich material for poets and artists and depending little on reality, the mythology has had a long life of its own. Now, after three hundred years, it lives on, sometimes inspiring architects to make provocative decisions. Here we will examine two projects presented at international competitions in St. Petersburg at the onset of the twenty-first century, both of which are connected to the “basic myth” of Petersburg’s history: the well-known myth of how the city’s founder, Tsar Peter, defied the elemental forces, both natural and human. Defying the Elements In his attempts to build a new city in the delta of the Neva River, the tsar encountered two principal opponents: the river itself and the habits of his subjects . Strictly speaking, the Neva is not a river but rather a long and narrow strait extending from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea. The strait emerged 2,500 to 3,100 years ago, making it a quite recent event in terms of geological time.1 Hence the Neva has no valley, and its water flows flush against its banks. An air of catastrophe has always hovered over the Neva: having no valley, the river would immediately spill over whenever the water rose in the Gulf of Finland, which would occur during a strong western wind.2 The city’s history began with one such catastrophe. In May 1703, under the tsar’s order, a Russian military brigade began to erect an earthen fortress on a small, low island in the delta, but in August the water rose and washed away the settlers and all that they had managed to build. But let us give the Neva its due: at first it behaved with a degree of modesty in regard to the inexperienced Russians. The water level rose “all of ” seven feet. Subsequently, however, the Neva did not hesitate to rise to the level of eleven, even fourteen feet. During the most frightening flood we know, the water rose to twenty-five feet and flooded the surrounding area for many miles. That happened in 1691, when Peter was nineteen years old. He had already ruled the country on his own for two years and had most likely heard from foreigners that the waters around the Neva delta had destroyed all the Finnish and Russian villages and Swedish villas. Ten years before the beginning of the Northern War between Russia and Sweden, the Neva used the same means once again to warn everyone that it alone, and not the king of Sweden or the Russian tsar, controlled the delta. This forewarning was meaningful inasmuch as the war, having exhausted both countries, was primarily fought for the Neva region, which belonged to Sweden. At the price of twenty years of effort, Tsar Peter achieved his main goal: he conquered the region, but there was nothing he could do with the Neva. It flooded whenever it wanted and caused great damage to the city the tsar was building in the Neva delta. Peter ordered that the ground level be raised, using soil amassed from the digging of canals, but there was not enough soil. Lore links his death with the flood at the end of 1724, when he caught a severe cold while trying to help the city dwellers. One hundred years later, after the extremely destructive flood of 1824, an elevated stone dam across the Gulf of Finland was planned to protect the city from the Baltic Sea and the Neva’s onslaughts once and for all. However, it was just as impossible to build such a barrier in the 1820s as it would be seventy years later “due to its great cost and unlikelihood of its expected usefulness ,” as the City Duma put it in an 1898 decision.3 That which the imperial capital could not accomplish, the Soviet government tried to accomplish in 1981, earmarking state funds for a gigantic dam of about fourteen miles. The Postscript 333 construction dragged on for twenty-five years and is nearing completion only now. During that time a 490-foot model of the dam was...