The most “intentional” city in the world—that is Dostoyevsky’s famous and final condemnation of Petersburg. That “intendedness,” that is, artificiality, the total absence of national roots, is an intolerable flaw and sin in Dostoyevsky’s eyes. That built-in lack of national sentiment in the Russian capital is, according to the writer, the cause of Petersburg’s constant hostility toward the true Russian personality.
Dostoyevsky had been to London, Paris, and Berlin. Those metropolises had horrified him, and he was disgusted to find similar traits in Petersburg. He hated bourgeois Europe, and so he rejected the necessity of a “window into Europe,” as Petersburg’s apologists portrayed it. It was a window, Dostoyevsky said, through which the Russian elite looked at the West and saw all the wrong things.
A city like that certainly had no right to exist. It had to vanish. And here Dostoyevsky enthusiastically picked up the folklore tradition prophesying the destruction of the city that came into being unrightfully. As we recall, Petersburg was supposed to be deserted (the “curse of Tsaritsa Eudoxia”), flooded, or destroyed by fire. Dostoyevsky invented his own, more fantastic version, which at the same time seemed in its striking simplicity to be the only possible version for the disappearance of Petersburg.
Dostoyevsky let his beloved idea come from the lips of the hero of
A hundred times amid the fog I had a strange but persistent dream: “What if, when this fog scatters and flies upward, the whole rotten, slimy city goes with it, rises with the fog and vanishes like smoke, leaving behind the old Finnish swamp, and in the middle of it, I suppose, for beauty’s sake, the bronze horseman on the panting, whipped horse?”
Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg mythos, incorporating the discoveries of French writers (Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert), the German Hoffmann, the English Dickens, and the American Poe, in its turn substantially altered the perception of Western metropolises by their residents. Raskolnikov the Petersburg student began to wander the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London. Nietzsche admitted (in
Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg became part of the Western cultural and spiritual experience even more than Gogol’s Petersburg, because in general Dostoyevsky’s novels, which were rightly labeled “ideological” by Russian critics, do not suffer significantly when their verbal tissue is transplanted to another language—unlike the virtuoso works of Gogol, often built on pure wordplay, or even more so, the works of Pushkin, whose writings are almost naked in comparison with those of both Gogol and Dostoyevsky. Western audiences accept on faith the perfection of Pushkin and his Petersburg creations. But at least part of Pushkin’s renown in the West paradoxically rests on the popularity of three Russian operas based on his works:
The paradox is made all the greater by the fact that Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky, for all their enormous respect for Pushkin, moved far from his style and emotions in their music. The artistic and psychological strivings of both composers—who differed so markedly from each other in their lives and work—coincided with the ideas and emotions of their contemporary, Dostoyevsky.
Parallels of this sort are inevitably tentative. Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky each created his own highly idiosyncratic and enormous world with clearly marked boundaries. Nevertheless, their works are so closely entwined with Dostoyevsky’s artistic ideas and produce an effect that so remarkably resembles that created by reading some of his more troubled outpourings that a comparison between the writer and the two composers becomes unavoidable. All the more so, since Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky contributed to the Petersburg mythos—the former with a few extraordinary compositions, the latter with a long line of his principal works.
