Equivocality

St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite right. The streets are a little too empty. Stucco crumbles off the side wall of the cathedral, the one you can’t see from the street.

Maybe it’s the weather. St. Petersburg is the northernmost city of a million people or more. For three weeks in mid-summer you get the famous White Nights, where the sun doesn’t make it far enough below the horizon for the sky to darken. The price for those are the dark days of mid-winter, when the sun barely rises. It’s November now, and I haven’t seen any trace of the sun for a week. It’s grey. It’s cold. Sometimes it rains, and then night falls early, and the headlights of the dirty cars illuminate the slush. Walking down the street in the evening it’s very hard to imagine optimism, green meadows and blue seas, free and simple pleasures.

Inside, paint peels from the stairwell walls. Brown fabric wallpaper is worn near the light switch. The linoleum floors glint with painful ordinaryness under the bare bulb. It feels utterly real. The toilet doesn’t flush; we have to use a bucket of water, and this is considered pretty normal. I drink my tea at night, look at that floor and think: this is what the floor looks like after someone died, and you came home from the hospital to find the rest of your life still there. This is the unrelenting here and now.

The subway system is overbearing. One of the deepest in the world, I’m told, and the descent on the longest escalators I’ve ever seen is like a dismal daily ritual. Underground, the halls and platforms astonish with marble, chandeliers, carvings and friezes. There is a grandness to all of it unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a transit system. But beauty’s not the point. There’s nothing graceful or even human about the underground splendor. You’re meant to be awed, overwhelmed, reminded of the awesome power of the public state. I was fined 100 rubles for taking my photographs.

And yet, there is life in the city. As always, it finds the little warm crevices and thrives there. There are museums and theatres here, some of the best in the world, but I’m not talking about those. They are not the mundane, the routine, the life as lived every day. Instead, one has to look in the cracks. Down an alley, a three-story building holds cafes, galleries, and art spaces, while stencil and graffiti art betray the existence of street culture. Those streets are often empty, but if you know where to look you can duck into a café and find live music, or go out to a club and see the beautiful decked out in some sort of cosmopolitan style. It’s cheaper, shallower than New York or Paris, but still they’re here. People are living here, even if they’re hiding and shivering most of the time, smiling weakly at one another over tea, staring at the cracked linoleum of their shared flats.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Blog-like, Nonfiction, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.