Currently Reading: Petersburg by Andrei Bely St Petersburg, 1905. An impressionable young university student, Nikolai, becomes involved with a revolutionary terror organization, which plans to assassinate a high government official with a time bomb. But the official is Nikolai’s cold, unyielding father, Apollon, and in twenty-four hours the bomb will explode. Petersburg is a story of suspense, family dysfunction, patricide, conspiracy and revolution. it is also an impressionistic, exhilarating panorama of the city itself, watched over by the bronze statue of Peter The Great, as it tears itself apart. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself. Considered by writers such as Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century, Bely’s richly textured, darkly comic and symbolic novel pulled apart the traditional techniques of storytelling and presaged the dawn of a new form of literature. “The one novel that sums up the whole of Russia” — Anthony Burgess
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Currently Reading: Petersburg by Andrei Bely

St Petersburg, 1905. An impressionable young university student, Nikolai, becomes involved with a revolutionary terror organization, which plans to assassinate a high government official with a time bomb. But the official is Nikolai’s cold, unyielding father, Apollon, and in twenty-four hours the bomb will explode. Petersburg is a story of suspense, family dysfunction, patricide, conspiracy and revolution. it is also an impressionistic, exhilarating panorama of the city itself, watched over by the bronze statue of Peter The Great, as it tears itself apart. History, culture and politics are blended and juxtaposed; weather reports, current news, fashions and psychology jostle together with people from Petersburg society in an exhilarating search for the identity of a city and, ultimately, Russia itself. Considered by writers such as Vladimir Nabokov to be one of the greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century, Bely’s richly textured, darkly comic and symbolic novel pulled apart the traditional techniques of storytelling and presaged the dawn of a new form of literature.

“The one novel that sums up the whole of Russia” — Anthony Burgess

BBC's In Our Time: The Building of St Petersburg

Podcast (45 minutes): Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the building of St Petersburg, Peter the Great’s showcase city for a modern, European Russia. It is a city of ideas. of progress and the Baroque, of Russian identity and Tsarist power. The building of St Petersburg is a testament to Tsarist power but it is also a city of ideas; of progress, of the Baroque and Russian identity. Beset by fire and flood, the city was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 to symbolise a new Russia, one that faced away from the Slavic East and towards the European West.

To this end Peter and his heirs imported European architects, craftsmen and merchants to fashion his new capital.The result is a grandiose European city set amidst the freezing swamps of the Baltic coast; a Venice or Rome of the North. Indeed, the Venetian art connoisseur, Francesco Algarotti called St Petersburg ‘a window through which Russia looks on Europe’. It is a city of beauty built upon the cruelty of a tyrant and to this day encapsulates many of the contradictions of Russia.

With Simon Dixon, Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History at University College London; Janet Hartley, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics; Anthony Cross, Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge

St. Petersburg: Paris of the North or City of Bones?

St. Petersburg was built as monument to the might of Imperial Russia - and the glory of the Tsar whose name it bears. Now Peter the Great’s ‘Window on the West’ plays host to this week’s G8 summit - and his vision is complete at last.

When G8 leaders sit down in St Petersburg next weekend, the ground beneath them will silently groan with the weight of the dead. Known as “the city built on bones”, St Petersburg’s foundations sit above the skeletons of the press-ganged slave labourers who toiled to erect it. Historians believe the remains of some 100,000 18th-century serfs are buried beneath its wide Parisian-style avenues and grand Italianate palaces.

Drawn from the length and breadth of the then Russian Empire, they expired from cold, from hunger, from disease, or if they were really unlucky, from the wolves. They gave their lives for the glory of then Imperial Russia and what they created, St Petersburg, stands as a monument to the single-mindedness of the Russian state.

When G8 leaders feast on caviar and quaff champagne, perhaps after discussing debt in the developing world, they are unlikely to spare a thought for the unfortunate slave labourers who built St Petersburg.

They should, for if they want to understand Russia and its complexities, once described by Sir Winston Churchill as “a riddle wrapped in an enigma”, they need look no further than St Petersburg’s incredible history. Its elegant palaces reek of European refinement and were deliberately built in a Western style in an attempt to bring Russia closer to Europe.

But more than three centuries later, it is an odyssey Russia has yet to complete, and St Petersburg is a testament to how difficult that journey has been.