What Was the St. Petersburg Window on Europe?
The phrase “window on Europe” (okno v Evropu) was coined by the Italian writer Francesco Algarotti, who travelled to Russia in 1739 and published a book of his impressions under the title Il Newtonianesimo per le dame, ovvero dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori and a related travel account. Algarotti’s phrase, in the second half of the eighteenth century, was taken up by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who made it the central image of his 1833 poem The Bronze Horseman. The phrase, in this sense, is a long-standing European reading of Peter the Great’s programme for the new Russian capital of St Petersburg, founded in 1703 (see Bethea, The Shape of the Sublime in Russian Poetry, 1993).
The founding of St Petersburg
The site of St Petersburg was strategically important. The land at the mouth of the Neva River had been taken from Sweden in the Great Northern War, and the new city was to be the Russian gateway to the Baltic. The site was, however, unhealthy: vast swamps, frequent flooding, and an almost complete absence of the building materials and labour required for a great city. Peter ordered the construction to begin in 1703, when the first stone of the Peter and Paul Fortress was laid, and the city was to be the new Russian capital. The construction required the labour of tens of thousands of workers, and the mortality rate was extraordinary. Estimates of the total number of workers who died during the construction range from 30,000 to 200,000, and the figure is unknown. The city was, in its first decade, the most unhealthy capital in Europe (Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, 1998).
Peter’s instruction to his officials, when he ordered the construction of the new city, was reported by Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman and by Catherine the Great in her Notes on Russian History: “We must, at all costs, take the Baltic from the Swedes; we need a foothold on the sea. The Neva is the most important of our rivers; we must build a city on it.” The decision to build the new city at the mouth of the Neva, against the strongest practical objections, was a personal decision of Peter, and the new city was a monument to his vision of Russia as a European power (Massie, Peter the Great, 1980).
The city as European capital
St Petersburg was built on the European model. The new city was designed by the Italian, German, and French architects whom Peter had brought to Russia: the master plan was drawn by the French architect Jean-Baptiste Le Blond, and the principal buildings were designed by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the French architect Alexandre Le Blond, and the German architects Georg Johann Mattarnovy and Andreas Schlüter. The city was, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the centre of Russian European culture: the Russian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1724), the Imperial Academy of Arts (founded in 1757), the Russian Academy (founded in 1783), the Imperial Public Library (founded in 1814), and the Hermitage Museum (founded in 1764) were all St Petersburg institutions.
The “window on Europe” idea was, accordingly, a working programme. St Petersburg, as the Russian capital from 1712 to 1918, was the principal point of contact between the Russian and the European cultural traditions, and the Russian cultural life of the period was a St Petersburg cultural life. The Russian classical music tradition — the St Petersburg Conservatory (founded in 1862), the Mariinsky Theatre, the Imperial Russian Musical Society — was a St Petersburg tradition. The Russian literary tradition — Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok — was, in large part, a St Petersburg tradition. The Russian scientific tradition — Mendeleev, Lobachevsky, Pavlov, Kurchatov — was, in large part, a St Petersburg tradition (Figes, Natasha’s Dance, 2002).
The critique of the “window”
The “window on Europe” idea was, however, contested. The Slavophile movement of the 1830s and 1840s — in particular, Aleksey Khomyakov, Ivan Kireyevsky, and Konstantin Aksakov — saw the new capital as a foreign imposition, a German-style city built on Russian land. The Slavophile critique was developed by Pyotr Chaadaev, whose “First Philosophical Letter” of 1829 and the subsequent 1836 letter, which led to the tsar declaring him insane, presented St Petersburg as a symbol of Russia’s dislocation from its own tradition. The “Petersburg” myth of the Russian literary tradition — in particular, in Gogol’s Nevsky Prospekt and in Dostoevsky’s White Nights — was, in many respects, a Slavophile myth: a city that looked European but was, in some deeper sense, not Russia (Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1982).
The “window on Europe” idea was, in this sense, a contested image. To its defenders, it represented Russia’s legitimate aspiration to participate in the European tradition; to its critics, it represented a foreign imposition that destroyed the traditional Russian life. The two readings were, in turn, carried into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Westernisers of the 1860s-1870s, in particular the writers and scientists of the St Petersburg cultural establishment, defended the European orientation; the Slavophiles and the populist writers of the 1870s-1880s attacked it. The debate was, in many respects, the debate about what kind of country Russia was to be (Figes, 2002).
The legacy of the city
St Petersburg remained the Russian imperial capital until 1918. The city’s name was changed to Petrograd in 1914, in the wave of anti-German sentiment at the start of the First World War; the city was renamed Leningrad in 1924, after the death of Lenin. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, a popular referendum restored the original name of St Petersburg. The city, in the post-Soviet period, has been the centre of a major restoration of the imperial architectural heritage, and the city remains one of the great cultural centres of Russia and of the world.
The “window on Europe” idea, accordingly, remains a central image of the Russian cultural tradition. The city’s architectural heritage — the Winter Palace, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Admiralty, the St Isaac’s Cathedral, the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Nevsky Prospekt — is the most concentrated architectural heritage of any Russian city, and it is the most visible symbol of the European orientation of the Russian imperial tradition. The image of the city as a “window” has been, in turn, an important theme of Russian literature, Russian painting, and Russian music: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Akhmatova, Brodsky, and many others have used the image as a central figure of their work (Bethea, 1993).