How did it happen that music, the least descriptive of the arts, turned out to be a far more truthful, albeit troubling, mirror of life in Petersburg than poetry, painting, or the other arts? The answer lies in the uniqueness of Petersburg’s existence—there, the external image and the inner content often do not coincide.
Externally Petersburg of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be seen as a triumph of rationalism. Formed by the baroque and neoclassicism, the Russian capital was considered both by its inhabitants and by foreign observers the epitome of architectural harmony. Innumerable paintings, watercolors, drawings, engravings, and lithographs by such skilled artisans as Fyodor Alexeyev (1755-1824), Andrei Martynov (1768-1826), Stepan Galaktionov (1779-1854), and Vassily Sadovnikov (1800-1879) depicted it that way. Sadovnikov’s fame was based upon his popular lithographic panorama of the Nevsky Prospect, advertised this way: “The buildings are copied from nature with astonishing fidelity, with not a single sign omitted.”3
All these pictures, often notable for their mastery and accuracy, nowadays impart a sense of too many things left unsaid: meticulously drawn, solitary, somehow lost little human figures are merely props against a background of Petersburg’s fabulous but emotionally neutral classicist buildings and huge squares. These works convey neither the real face of Petersburg nor its soul; neither its majesty and propriety nor its spirituality. Artists, accurately depicting the city’s various sites, did not convey or explain its magical attraction or repugnant cruelty. Compared to the later Nevsky Prospect by Gogol, Sadovnikov’s hugely successful lithographs, which were sold in two long rolls, are a mere curiosity.
Much more interesting is the Magic Lantern; the full title is “Magic Lantern, or A Spectacle of St. Petersburg’s Traveling Sellers, Masters, and Other Folk Craftsmen, Depicted with a True Brush in Their Real Clothes and Presented Conversing with One Another, Commensurate With Each Person and Title,” a monthly anthology of hand-colored lithographs with extended dialogue captions that appeared at the same time as Sadovnikov’s panorama.
Leafing now through the pages of Magic Lantern, one is struck by the variety of wares and services offered to customers on the streets of early-nineteenth-century Petersburg. The colorfully dressed characters depicted with understanding and sympathy in the touchingly angular lithographs—besides Russians, there are Germans, Frenchmen, a Finn, a Jew, and even a man from Central Asian Bukhara—sell Dutch honey cakes, French bread, rolls, buns and blini, oranges, apples, nuts, prunes, baked pears, candy, hot sbiten (a spiced tea and honey drink), kvass (a fermented soft drink), milk, veal, beef, hot dogs, pike, perch, game, flowers, dishes, watches, combs, needles, pins, brooms, wax, shawls and scarves, magazines and newspapers, and even plaster busts of Homer, Democritus, and … Charlotte from Goethe’s Young Werther.
The simplicity of both the drawings and the dialogues in Magic Lantern is equally appealing. But the gap between the best pages of Physiology of Petersburg, which came out under Nekrasov’s editorship three decades later, and the engravings that accompany them is obvious and sometimes depressing. The text depicts real emotion, while the illustrations are still clumsily conventional, albeit more naturalistic than in the Magic Lantern. The artists were clearly lagging behind the writers, both in the discovery of the “new” Petersburg and in the radical literary change in attitude toward the “old” one.
Perhaps only one painting of that period conveys the true majesty and horror of the Petersburg mythos, and it is not overtly related to the Petersburg theme. Entitled Last Day of Pompeii, it is a huge canvas depicting the destruction of the ancient city by lava from Mount Vesuvius, as described by Pliny the Younger. It was begun in Rome by Karl Briullov, a Russian painter of the Petersburg-Italian school, in 1827 (that is, seven years before the publication of Lord Bulwer-Lytton’s famous novel on that theme) and completed by him in 1833.
