Benois considered the renaissance of the cult of Petersburg one of his most important goals. He always stressed that he was by no means a Russian nationalist (“I never did mature enough to become a real patriot”), but he never missed an opportunity to declare his love for Petersburg. He said he lived with the imperative “Petersburg über Alles.”
In Benois’s inner world the St. Petersburg of the past was always present, the city of Peter the Great and the empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, a city of architectural beauty and stirring military parades, colorful carnivals, and folk festivities, but also the city of solitary dreamy walks in the Summer Garden and assignations by the Winter Canal. That is why, the artist had insisted, “I had had a presentiment since childhood of the music of
The article was a groundbreaking event in the transformation of the mythos of Petersburg in the twentieth century. As if issuing a manifesto Benois proclaimed, “I don’t think there is a city in the whole world which enjoys less sympathy than Petersburg. What names hasn’t it been called: ‘rotten swamp,’ ‘ridiculous fancy,’ ‘impersonal,’ ‘bureaucratic department,’ ‘regimental office.’ I could never agree with all that.”95
Benois complained bitterly, “the opinion that Petersburg is ugly is so firmly fixed in our society that none of the artists of the last fifty years turned to the city for inspiration, disdaining this ‘unpicturesque,’ ‘stiff,’ and ‘cold’, place…. None of the major poets of the second half of the nineteenth century defended Petersburg.”96
Aspiring to change all that, the immensely erudite Benois wrote a series of elegantly argued articles defending the city, which symbolized for him all that was great, truly spiritual, and promising in Russian culture. In some (“The Architecture of Petersburg,” “The Beauty of Petersburg”) he enthusiastically drew the readers’ attention to the grandeur, balance, and beauty of the capital’s neoclassical buildings. Asserting that “we broke the records in European architecture” in the first third of the nineteenth century, Benois maintained that there wasn’t a building in Western architecture of that period that could rival the Admiralty, for instance, and that next to the monumental Triumphal Gate erected in Petersburg in 1838 to commemorate the victories in the Russo-Turkish War that ended a decade earlier, Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate looked like a pathetic toy. In other articles (“The Agony of Petersburg” and “Vandals”) Benois protested the uninformed renovations of many unique buildings of old Petersburg and called urgently for “a renaissance of an artistic attitude toward neglected Petersburg.”
As usual, Benois’s writings were supported by indefatigable Diaghilev’s energetic actions. Through Diaghilev’s efforts, art shows were mounted one after another, all cleverly propagandizing the old Petersburg. In 1903, for the two hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding, the capital’s residents beheld an important collection of lithographs of Petersburg, artfully exhibited. As one enchanted viewer recalled, “one could see how much of Petersburg’s street life still remained from the old days.”97
In the following years the number of exhibits emphasizing the beauty of the city and its art increased steadily. Many books about Petersburg appeared, and magazines also were devoted to it, such as
