For most of my childhood, Leningrad was, in my imagination, the city of my mother. It was she who told the stories, who described the romance of the gray metropolis where she and my father had met, and where my relatives resided. As I grew up during the Cold War with a Russian father, both the relatives and the city were things it seemed I was never destined to meet.
But then Gorbachev opened a tiny wedge, and we moved to Soviet Moscow, and I finally got to meet my grandmother and visit the Leningrad of my father’s childhood. At the time, I was still a young girl halfway under the wings of my parents and other relatives, unable to experience the city without hovering adult protection. This situation lasted until I was almost 30. No matter how independent I became, or how much I wanted to experience the city — now back to the name of its Imperial Russia beginnings, St. Petersburg — my aunts, uncle, and cousin stood lightly by my elbow wherever I went, translating both language and impressions.
It was only when I spent 2 weeks there attending the Summer Literary Seminars that I finally got to develop a relationship with St. Petersburg on my own. During that short time, when I was renting my own apartment and guiding my own feet, I shed my mother’s stories and my relatives’ viewpoints and got to know Peter, as the locals call it, for myself.
For me, it became, finally, the city of my father. And I also fell completely, ridiculously in love with it.
It is probably because Moscow was my first introduction to Russia that I had always had a preference for it, despite its noise and dirt and crime-riddled everyday life. It was my city. That was until I spent two weeks tramping the canals and islands of Petersburg on my own, map in hand, during its most beautiful season: White Nights in July.
White Nights is a time for celebration. I was there once during Soviet times, when the entire populace wandered the city’s streets all night long, drinking the slightly alcoholic kvass and eating soft ice cream from paper-like cones. To say St. Petersburg has changed since then is like saying the Industrial Revolution really changed the West. It’s not a different city, but it’s certainly a cleaner one, and a brighter one, and a wealthier one.
While my relatives still live in the same apartments they’ve inhabited since the 1960s, and live in the same modest style, you would never guess people like them inhabit the same place as the youth flaunting their high fashion and high heels on the catwalk known as Nevsky Prospect.
Even the ice cream has changed: from state-run soft ice cream stands (vanilla only, and a cardboard-like vanilla at that), to freezers full of a variety of Nestle bars every block or so.
Peter the Great built St. Petersburg as a planned city to rival the European capitals he’d lived in during his youth. The Soviets, shedding the glory-hungry past of the tsars, searched for their own glory in making Leningrad one of the industrial capitals of Russia. That’s how my engineer grandparents ended up there. It’s probably, also, why my first impressions of the place were overwhelmingly gray.
Now, you walk along the repainted and refurbished buildings facing the River Neva, including the massive Hermitage museum, and it’s like you’ve dropped into an Alice in Wonderland type Easter basket, full of buildings instead of eggs. Even the sunlight hitting the canals at midnight seems warmer, brighter, more beautiful. St. Petersburg is like Paris in the quality of its light, and the way the soft sky picks out the graceful buildings and church domes.
But some things haven’t changed. The bridge where my daredevil father used to illegally jump into the river with his friends is still there, and boys probably very similar to him hang onto its posts to dive for watery treasure. The grassy area where he used to sunbathe and pick up girls is still covered in people sunbathing, and likely doing plenty of picking up either way.
There might now be a Lexus dealership next to the apartment building he grew up in, where he lived in exactly one room with his brother, sister, parents, and grandmother, and they shared a kitchen with three other families. The building is still there, although when I visited it was gutted and, like much of the city, being refurbished.
St. Petersburg isn’t the sort of city you can change easily. You can add to it, and destroy some of its old imperial buildings (which luckily the Soviets neglected to do), but it’s hard to get rid of the canals, and harmony Peter the Great worked so hard to create in his city plan.
Even with Gazprom’s new proposed phallus (also known as a glass skyscraper , but that’s just semantics) dominating the city’s skyline, you can’t change the fundamental beauty of St. Petersburg. It is a place I have grown to hanker for, with its proud history and complex people. They are, after all, my people, and after finding my father’s place in St. Petersburg, it has become my place and my people, too.
