Cracks in the Wall By Georgia Zacks

We navigated the rectilinear streets of the planned city of St. Petersburg, walking along the Moika River just off Nevsky Prospect, seeking a boat at the number 43, but it was nowhere to be found. Lost souls wandered past us, dragging hard on Russian cigarettes and muttering americanka. We are tourists in a Russian city and there is no denying it (or hiding it -- despite my new chopped and banged Lila Brik haircut). We are doing the quintessential tourist activity: the boat trip through the canals. Number 43 was down some steps and under a bridge. As we all filed into the boat, the tour guide counting heads as we passed, a memory passed through me...I was 7 years old and boarding another wooden boat on the Wild River ride at Disneyland; it slowly jerked down-river, yielding mechanical Wild West scenes at every bend. Even as a kid, the ride bored me—the Wild West figures were lame! Of course, I am infinitely more mature now and St. Petersburg provided an infinitely richer view than Disneyland, but, nonetheless, I was about to tour Peter the Great’s fantasy land: the canals he dreamed up and the baroque architecture he commissioned from brilliant Italians.

As we rode down the canals, the view was spectacular; the sun sank a little lower in the sky but the streets were still alive with people. We passed gorgeous building after gorgeous building, many in the process of being restored. The weather in Petersburg is so harsh that apparently the buildings have to constantly be touched up to keep their outward appearance looking like the regal, European capital that Peter had so desired. I thought about the rot that must exist underneath the surface of the those appearances, the inner rot that comes along with satisfying the wishes of a long-gone ruler in the face of the forces of mother nature. We passed the backside of the Mariinsky Theater and the weather had thoroughly eroded its minty green facade, exposing a rotting underbelly. It was merely the backside, so why bother with restorations? It was much like in the land of Disney where “no one has ever died,” a façade maintained by banning medics from pronouncing visitors dead until they have left the walls of Disneyland.

Instead, I thought of Baudelaire and Rilke, the beauty of natural decay, and how it looks when the elegance of a thing naturally fades, like a former model who has decided against injecting mountains of collagen into her face. Or when life fights through artificiality, like on a vine-covered English Tudor or like blades of grass sprouting through a crack in the pavement.

People kept waving at us from the bridges. I thought about the Wild River ride again, only to realize that these were real people to whom I was waving, not Mickeys and Minnies, and Peter the Great had not forced them to wave at me, or at least not directly. These real people are living in a city that was the fantasy-land of one man – a westernized Russian city.

A while back, Joan Didion wrote an article about a planned community in Southern California. The article started at a human level. There had been a gang rape in this community. I can’t remember the name of the place but it was something like Smithstown let’s say, but anyways, the members of the community were outraged.

“How could this happen? And here! Smithstown is the ideal American community and to think that my son plays baseball with those boys!” said one mother, a character left unnamed by Didion as well.

Smithstown was founded by a steel mill corporation and built in concentric circles. The town was arranged so that the inhabitants could work in the factories on the outside ring, live in the pre-packaged cookie-cutter houses in the inner ring and consume in the center of town, where the company generously included a large shopping center. But the factory went under. Smithstown shows what can happen when a deep crack arises in a perfectly calculated dream. Once the steel industry faltered, the corporation that founded Smithstown had no investment in keeping up the American dream and the city crumbled, taking its inhabitants down with it. Peter the Great’s ghost has done the opposite: commanded armies of painters to keep up the Western façade. Over 300 years after his death, the city is still without a crack.

How does a city progress when its roots are all in one headstrong man? How can it evolve? Petersburg seems like such a strange hybrid of a city now. Before coming here, the only image I had was of Dostoevskian archetypes wandering in tattered frock coats, but obviously that’s not the case. It’s a modern city left in the shell of its past, a city of museums with fetuses floating in jars of brine and baroque buildings cryogenically frozen like ice queens. Through ordinances and rulings, it has succeeded in preserving the exteriors of its dream, a dream that was realized on some level by producing world-renowned literature and housing European designers on Nevsky Prospect. But the city will never be one with the rest of Russia for the people did not will it: it is the city now that does the willing. A dazzling maze of circus mirrors and mist rising from Neva River seduce all who enter.

Peter’s goal of westernizing Russia failed because St. Petersburg is a Western city in a Slavic land. A city where dreamy peasants transform into dandies and their former selves are taken out of city limits to be buried. Rather than modernizing Russia, St. Petersburg created a physical manifestation of the nation’s schism, where ghosts of the Slavic crawl out from under the rug and wander the streets of the city’s white nights.