A Window On Europe

ST. PETERSBURG: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva

BY JONATHAN MILES

Pegasus, 560 pp., $29.95

WHEN RASKOLNIKOV, the antihero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, meditates on the brutal murders he has committed, he wonders whether the city in which he lives, St. Petersburg, was somehow responsible. Perhaps, without realizing it, he served as the inhuman city’s agent? In much the same spirit, the repulsive hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground attributes his psychology to it as “the most intentional city in the world.” From Pushkin to the present, Petersburg has been a symbol as much as a place.

Petersburg is “intentional” because instead of growing up organically over centuries, like Moscow, it—Finnish for swamp—was a mosquito-ridden marsh.” One English visitor suggested that the city defied the four elements: “The earth is all a bog, the air commonly foggy. The water sometimes fills half the houses, and the fire burns down half the town at a time.”