Catherine brought a new style of architecture to Petersburg. From fanciful baroque, so beloved by lighthearted Elizabeth, it switched to an imitation of antiquity and started to acquire its now famous neoclassical look, somewhat analogous to European architectural fashion but undeniably Russian, with drama and grandeur. Catherine, herself German, spoke Russian with a thick accent. Her architects were French, Italian, and Russian; but Petersburg already had obtained its own set of stylistic rules, filtering and transforming foreign influences. We could even say the city did not really change but that its successive builders had to adjust to it somehow, as clever servants adjust to the caprices of a haughty master.
Under Catherine, twenty-four miles of the Neva’s banks were “dressed in granite” (Pushkin) from Finland. These severe monumental walls with their numerous stairs leading down to the water became as important a symbol of Petersburg as the stone bridges that spanned the Neva and the city’s canals at the same time.
Vainglorious Catherine wanted to be popular not only in Russia but in Europe as well. Ten days after ascending the throne she proposed to Denis Diderot and other French
These extravagant purchases and the other bold and generous acts of the new empress quickly became the talk of Europe, as she had intended. Invited by the publicity-hungry Catherine, the first fellow travelers, mostly French, came to Petersburg to learn—under the gaze of the empress’s keen gray eyes—more about this progressive city and then to relate to the civilized world the thrilling news: Russia had every right to call itself a European state. Following Voltaire’s example—unlike Diderot, he never reached Petersburg but, for a generous fee, wrote
One of Catherine’s wisest cultural decisions was to invite to Petersburg—at the suggestion of Diderot—Etienne Falconet, the Parisian sculptor, to erect an enormous equestrian monument to Peter I. Fifty-year-old Falconet arrived in the Russian capital in 1766 with his seventeen-year-old student, Maria Callot, and twenty-five pieces of luggage, to spend the next very difficult twelve years there. Falconet’s voluminous correspondence with Catherine—though they were both living in the same city!—contains ample evidence of the obstacles he encountered: the nervous and touchy sculptor constantly complained, expressing outrage and disgust over countless problems—red tape, sloppy workers, the absence of supplies and materials—faced by any foreigner trying to build something in the Russian capital. The empress, in typical Russian fashion, tried to reason with him and calm him down.
From faraway Paris, Diderot advised Falconet how to approach his task. The sculptor, Diderot suggested, ought to surround the statue of Peter, in the spirit of the era, with symbolic figures of Barbarism (dressed in fur skins and gazing fiercely at the emperor), Love of the People (extending her arms to Peter), and the Nation (enjoying tranquillity while comfortably reclining on the ground). Understandably irritated, Falconet shot back from Petersburg, “The monument will be realized with utmost simplicity. It will not have Barbarism, Love of the People, or the symbol of the Nation.”11 The sculptor’s own model of a horseman who had just galloped up on a cliff, his right hand extended, had already been approved by Catherine.
Curious Petersburgers flocked to Falconet’s studio in droves. Accustomed to the critical reactions of Parisians, the sculptor could not understand why the Russians would scrutinize the model of the statue, then leave without a word. Did their silent attentiveness indicate disapproval? He calmed down only after long-term foreign residents of Petersburg explained that restraint was the main characteristic of the capital’s populace. The city, which had recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, had already developed a particular psychological type: “all buttons buttoned,” unsentimental, tending to irony and sarcasm—characteristics that remain valid to this day.
