Very shortly we were in what she called the better part of town, on the Nevski Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The traffic moved as rapidly as modern cars and was far more alarming. We descended at a tram-stop half-way up the Nevski. Olga, her hands in her muff, told me we should be crossing to look in the windows of a great shopping arcade opposite. Beneath the shadows of its columns were windows full of glittering goods. Something else attracted me, a mechanical toy being demonstrated, and so I set off across the Nevski and was almost knocked down by speeding troikas and motor-cars. There was a whistle from behind me but I could not stop. In a panic I moved through the traffic and jumped to the far kerb, panting. The glove of a ‘blue archangel’ (a Petersburg gendarme) fell upon my shoulder. A white truncheon tapped my arm. This huge bearded old man shook his head in admonition. ‘There are less public ways of committing suicide.’ Olga came up. She explained to him I had only just arrived in the city. He accepted her explanation. The gendarme continued on his way while I moved towards the arcade and stood beneath its canopy, looking at the displayed brass steam-locomotives. Olga shook her head and said I was lucky the archangel had been in a good mood.
The day was bright. The Nevski was emptier than I had expected. There was nothing but officers and ladies going past in carriages. And there were far more policemen than I had seen either in Kiev or Odessa. Olga showed me the main avenues and places of interest: the great Winter Palace of the Tsar, the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Isaac’s and all the other buildings still to be found in the guidebooks. However I was irritated by the scale of everything which made me feel even more insignificant. It was as if Peter had deliberately built his city for gods rather than men. We saw the famous shops of Fabergé and Gratchef, the Field of Mars, where ceremonials were held, the monuments and museums of the main Spasskaya district. Few of these interested me since I was more disposed towards the future than the past. Indeed, the city depressed me. Not because it was a collection of grandiose buildings surrounded by slums (most capitals are that) in which riches and poverty were contrasted to a degree which would be found crude in a novel by Zola, but because it was an artificial place, having no real function save to administer the rest of the country and to glorify its rulers. Like Washington, it was the product of naive, eighteenth-century minds, imitating the fashions then prevalent in France and England. Both cities were named after the ‘modern founders’ of their nations, but had no natural geographical ascendancy or place in the main lines of commerce (as New York or Moscow have). What marked them chiefly was the soullessness of everything save that of which they are rightly ashamed, their slums.
The scale of these public buildings is grandiose and cold, the product of unsophisticated architects employed to rival the glories of ancient Greece by building everything at twice its proper size. Simultaneously both cities have a poverty of detail: they are like sets for some fabulous Hollywood film; Washington with its cherry-blossoms, Petersburg with its lilacs. They are the embodiment of nouveau-riche bad taste, built at a time when their planners were all too conscious of the inferiority, the youth, the very barbarism of their nations. In Washington the inside of the Capitol is decorated with atrociously naive paintings by, I understand, an Italian immigrant. In Petersburg, similar naive painting, in the form of ikons and gold-leaf portraits of Romanoffs and their predecessors, was everywhere imposed upon the French-influenced palaces and cathedrals. It was all too big and the embellishments were all too bad. Both cities, moreover, had regulation designs for housing, much of it very elegant, yet those elegant houses had frequently become appalling tenements for the very poorest! No wonder that envy leads swiftly to crime and that the threat of revolution looms most menacing when it is closest to the seat of power. No wonder the rich build themselves sanctuaries, as Howard Hughes built himself a sanctuary high above the streets of Las Vegas. Someone once suggested that Las Vegas was not a sinister, cynical venture, erected to fleece the American public of its money, but the epitome of what an enriched Italian peasant would build to please his mother. Thus the nature of the popular entertainment, the forms of gambling, and the preponderance of pink and gilt one discovers everywhere, reflect the taste of some beaming mama, of some proud son of Sicily.
