Peter's Vision Of His Western City example essay topic

History has it that the United States capital city of Washington D.C. was designed with the intention of intimidating visiting foreign heads of state. The creation of this city had purpose and reason; neither of which are very natural or human. St. Petersburg was viewed by the Russian people in this context. Typically a city grows from a small town to a massive metropolis with years and years of expansion outward.

The Russian people already plagued with xenophobia, could not accept Peter the Great's new city designed with Western ideals and made by Western minds. Peter the Great sought to bring his country into the modern and more western world. By means of taxing old dress, and creating a table of ranks by which upward mobility is possible and higher education institutions. Through his travels throughout Europe Peter, yearned to update and facilitate Russia as a respected power and as a modernized country.

In order to westernize Russia a physical connection had to be established between the Old World Russia and the rest of Europe. The only way to accomplish this feat, was to create trade and travel routes between the West and Russia. After securing his borders, the next task "of expanding Russia's contacts and territory, especially in ways that would liberate Russia from its long isolation as a landlocked country". (Thompson 98) Contact with the west was limited because of Russia's lack of access to warm water seaports where trade and travel between Russia and the West could take place. The need for warm water seaports therefore shaped Peter's foreign policy. Peter attempted to gain access to the Baltic Sea by defeating Sweden, the most powerful force in north central Europe.

War with Sweden raged on for twenty-one years during which Pete gained enough access in the Baltic to establish a city he named St. Petersburg, his "window to the West". (Thompson 98). Indeed Peter's efforts helped create a window to the Western Europe but like all windows the rest of Europe could look into Russia as mush as Russia could look out to Western Europe. Peter wanted to create a city that showed Europe Russia's prestige. The premeditated creation of the city, through Peter's will to carve for himself a "window on the West" overshadowing the old capital of Moscow and steering the country away from its cultural and religious traditions, led to the notion that the city's life had a rootless, unreal quality. Leiter 5 Petersburg was seen as an unnatural city to many of the Russian citizens.

Physically situated upon a march on the Neva River, the plan of the city was planned and created according to the plan of Peter's. "The terrain on which St. Petersburg rose was a marshy coastal plain divided into many islands by the branches of the Neva". (Shvidkovsky 20) This site, for all of its obvious flaws, should have never been developed into a city making the physical plan of the city unnatural. Culturally and socially Peter planned the city also, not allowing the inhabitants choose to come to the new city, as all other cities usually became occupied. "Peter issued a decree stipulating that a 1000 noble families, a 1000 merchant families, and a 1000 artisan families were to emigrate" to his new capital and only the "best candidates should settle. The urban planning was not so much for aesthetic principle as a means of social organization".

(Shvidkovsky 22) Peter planned the city from its culture, its inhabitants, its architecture and its economics before construction even began. Being a country consumed with xenophobia, most Russians saw the construction of St. Petersburg as unnatural to their nation also. "The architectural aspect of Petersburg was entirely the work of foreign architects. At that time there was not a single Russian master capable of shaping the city's style" (Shvidkovsky 24) according to Peter. Yet he felt that his people were good enough to slave over the construction of the city and die laboring for his cause. It was not uncommon for a building to be designed by an Italian, under the supervision of a Dutchman, continued by a German and so on until its completion.

Each of these workers contributed their own racial and national characteristics to each of their roles in building the city. Peter wanted his capital and "window" to be laid out and built along the lines of a great Occidental capital. The Russians saw this development of a Western capital in their Russia as an abandonment of their past and as an invasion of the West; consequently, St. Petersburg was not accepted and feared by the rest of Russia". [St. Petersburg] had to be as different as possible from the old metropolis which symbolized Old Mother Russia, and which the plebeian classes still considered their capital".

(Voyce 12) The capital of Russia commonly was seen as overly Western and could not effectively and accurately represent Russia as a nation. Not only were so many Russian lives were taken by the city in its construction. But the graves that lay underneath the pillars supporting the city were remembered and martyred, so much so that some Russians believed that the city was built upon the destruction of Russia and its people. Peter's vision of his Western city was at the expense of many of the Russian citizens involved in the physical dangers of building the city, and the dangers of living in the city.

Annually the city of St. Petersburg commonly succumbed to floods of the river Neva. The Slavophile view of the city was that of an accursed monument to the impending destruction of Russian culture. (Leiter 34) The inhabitants of the capital were often victimized by this natural disaster, contributing more to the mythology of Petersburg as an unnatural and evil city. This was also how Pushkin, the author of The Bronze Horseman, a work seen as "the greatest poem in Russian History", (Lavr in 114) felt about "the dark-hued, unreal city". (Leiter Preface) Pushkin's main character, Evgeny, represents the beguiled and exploited occupants of St. Petersburg's wrath. In Pushkin's introduction he explains the history of the city, in which he sets his tale.

Peter's campaign to westernize Russia, the decline of the old capital of Moscow and its Old Russian values in lieu of the rise of Petersburg as the new capital with its new values and culture. As the introduction comes to a close, Pushkin addresses the inhuman aspect of the city when he states, "Even the elements by your hand / have been subdued and made surrender". (Pushkin 120) Pushkin's reference to the elements is pertinent to this story, for he is referring to St. Petersburg survival of the flooding of the Neva river while human life cannot survive. Pushkin's account of the flood is coupled with the internal story of the fate of Evgeny, the "little man". Evgeny, a penniless man, witnesses the damaging effects of the flood, and, more importantly, we learn that the flood has swept away "a widow and his dream, her daughter, / Parsha". (Pushkin 124) These floods plaguing the capital were seen by the Russians as the wrath of the Westerners.

Peter built the city for the soul purpose of establishing a "window to the West" and these floods were seen as the West once again attempting to destroy Mother Russia. "Fear of the sea was perhaps to be expected among an earthbound people whose discovery of the sea coincided with their traumatic discovery of the outside world". (Billington 368) After the natural attack ceased, "The purple radiance of the morning had covered up the dire event", (Pushkin 126) and the rest of Petersburg woke to rebuild what they had lost and to go on with the happenings of everyday life; however, Evgeny, who puts himself before the state, cannot do so. As St. Petersburg endures, Evgeny cannot continue on with everyday life; Petersburg and its wrath have defeated him. "Spare some pity / for my poor, poor Evgeny, who / by the sad happenings in the city / had wits unhinged". (Pushkin 126-7) Evgeny takes the streets of the city as his new residence.

After months of assaults by children, bouts of hunger, and other demoralizing attacks by the city, Evgeny is demoralized to the point that he exists as "neither beast nor man-/ not this, nor that - not really living / nor yet a ghost". (Pushkin 127) Life continued in this such way until a fateful night when Evgeny began to stare "with an insensately / wild look of terror on his face" (Pushkin 128) at the bronze statue of the city's founder. After Evgeny's life comes unraveled, he curses the bronze statue of Peter for building the city near the Neva river in the wake of danger. The statue of Peter the Great, in Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, represents both the city of Petersburg and its founder, "has a supernatural, unfathomable power". The statue also becomes "an incarnation of some spirit or demon" (Jakobson 5) and "an enduring symbol of both the majestic power and the impersonal coldness of the new capital".

(Billington 232) "In his sudden madness Evgeny clairvoyant ly perceives that the real culprit is the guardian of the city". (Jakobson 7) After Evgeny is through with his threats and curses, the statue comes to life. "The animated statue leaves his block and pursues Evgeny". (Jakobson 7) Evgeny attempts to flee the mounted Tsar, "but hears behind him, loud as guns / or thunderclap's reverberation, / ponderous hooves", (Pushkin 129) behind him chasing after him. This pursuit continues throughout the night: Evgeny running from the figure "one arm stretched" of the "Bronze Rider, / after him clatters the Bronze Horse".

(Pushkin 129) Wherever Evgeny goes following him is the incessant sound of the galloping Tsar. Evgeny days and nights following the personification of the statue, become entrenched with loneliness and even more so, fear. And from then on, if [Evgeny] was chancing at any time to cross that square, a look of wild distress came glancing across his features; he would there press hand to heart, in tearing hurry, as if to chase away a worry. Pushkin 129 Eventually Evgeny perishes at the shores of the Neva, that brought him so much pain and suffering. "Mad Evgeny there they found... / His cold corpse in that same-self ground".

(Pushkin 130) Evgeny eventually "became the model for the suffering little man of subsequent Russian fiction- pursued by natural and historical forces beyond his comprehension, let alone his control". (Billington 332) Although the flood managed to destroy Evgeny's life, it only momentarily set back Petersburg, for the city, although damaged, remained long after the death of the little man. Petersburg was unnatural in its existence, because of this ability. The human aspect of the city did not exist; its indestructible yet, murderous ability was regarded as evil to all of the little men of Russia. The "little man" represents the Russian people and the culture and values of Old Russia. With the death of Evgeny, so comes the death of Old Russia.

With this passing of the old system of values and culture, comes Westernized and unnatural Russia. In The Bronze Horseman Peter, embodied through the Bronze Horseman created "the image of the poem as of the city and destiny"; (Bayley 128) his city and he victimize, abandon, exploit, terrorize, and kill "the little man" in Evgeny, and all the little men of Russia. Bayley, John. Pushkin: A Comparitve Commentary.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Jakobson, Roman. Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth.

Trans. John Burbank. Paris: Mouton & Co., 1975. L arvin, Jan ko.

Pushkin and Russian Literature. New York: Macmillan Company, 1948. Leiter, Sharon. Akmatova's Petersburg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pushkin, Alexander.

"The Bronze Horseman". An Anthology of Russian Literature from the Earliest Writings to Modern Fiction. Ed. Nicholas Rzhevsky. New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996.118-31.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitri. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars. Trans. John Goodman. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996. Simmons, Ernest J. Pushkin.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937. Thompson, John M. Russia and the Soviet Union: An Historical Introduction from the Kievan State to the Present. 4th ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 1998. Voyce, Arthur. Russian Architecture: Trends in Nationalism and Modernism.

New York: Greenwood Press, 1948.