Anthem to the great city

St. Petersburg-315 years old

Vasily Surikov. “Type of the monument to Peter I on Senate Square in St. Petersburg”, 1870 Photo: RIA Novosti

When the Rossiya train, the following route Petersburg - Vladivostok, departs from the platform, the melody of the composer Glier “Anthem of the Great City” sounds. Cold, perfect, silver sounds. And you involuntarily recall the Pushkin’s “Copper Horseman”: “A hard-hard rock on the shocked pavement.” Shocked Rus', shocked by Muscovy, shocked asian quagmire. Autocracy, atheism, westernization.

Three hundred years of this strict European beauty among the Self, sweet, sprinkled Muscovy, and a century and a half do not subside: whether this city, built, of course, was built by a tyrant and a son -in -law, are these reforms and will there be, as happened once, according to Yesenin? Will the peasants driven from all over Russia once again returned once again, to the Nevsky shores, which were buried from all over Russia? “We will come, come! We will take our work. We will scoop up the nobles and bald ones with them, outweigh on the lampposts! ”

Maybe Petersburg is such a variety of the white -shit of the 18th century? But no one needed the channel, there was no channel, there were only cigarettes, and there are no nobles, almost everyone was destroyed. And Petersburg stands, and “the Admiralty Needle” is bright, and the blood was washed off by a cold Neva. And if this is North Venice, then the same Venice, South, was also not always a tourist paradise. Who else remembers Byron, “Marino Faliro, Rain of Venetian” and “two foskari”? I stood under the bridge of sighs, and I remembered not carnivals, but battles, executions and coups. And on San Marko Square, pigeons did not always graze, there was a crow.

Petersburg is eternal, and even when the stones begin to crumble, it will remain on the pages of Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol and Mandelstam. This is the only European city of Russia, gilded by time, and this is the most visible evidence of a rude, hasty, cruel, superficial, but such urgent wisternization of the country.

So he lives between the Senate Square, where they rebelled, by the Semenovsky parade ground, where they hung up, and a saving-on-blood on the Catherine Canal, where the king Alexander II was killed and remembered in the stone. Koni Klodt jumps, a persistent angel from the Alexandria pillar carries the shift, the two -faced Janus grins and the engineering castle hid gloomily. Like in the song of Sergey Nikitin to the verses of Galina Bukalova, a sort of urban resume:

“Honor to you, Petersburg sorcerer, the generation of granite and waters. Slender, marvelous, cobblestone, drinking, with a wet cabinet at each gate. The honor of you, leaning the sky on a lamppost, tar, flour, sweetly smelling of morning bread and pitching night ... Honor, you are great and homeless, under the cover of night darkness, where the shadows of the shadows of those who you sucked over the outskirts of the shadow of those who you sucked ”...

First published in NT No. 5 of February 18, 2013