“St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva”, by Jonathan Miles

560 pages, Pegasus Books, ISBN-13: 978-1681776767

I may, in future, have to reconsider buying histories of cities, as for some reason they never quite live up to whatever expectations I may have for them. In December 2017 I reviewed a history of Berlin and determined that, amongst other things, “not so much a history of the city of Berlin as a history of Germany from a Berliner’s (or Berlinerin’s) perspective” (is it pretentious to quote yourself?). So anyway, I find much the same with St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva by Jonathan Miles, a history of one of the world’s most improbable places: built on swampy ground (much like Washington, D.C., another improbable place), it is “damp, foggy, rainy, snowy, and fraught with agues, catarrhs, colds, quinsy [and] fevers of every possible species and variety” (thanks, Dostoevsky). It has been the site of devastation and suffering and has spawned monstrous ideas and monstrous people, but it has endured, if improbably, and has even attained a certain majesty.

Author Jonathan Miles likens the city to New York in being a gathering place of strangers, foreigners and people who wouldn’t easily fit anywhere else. The author also uncovers a few ironies, such as the fact that some of the city’s most impressive monuments were built by a French veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who “submitted twenty-four different proposals in every known style, so it is hardly surprising that he won the commission”. Chronicling shifting cultural styles, including Czar Alexander III’s interest in making a more Russian city of his Russian capital (closing the popular Italian opera in the bargain), Miles turns in some familiar tales as well, populated by stock characters like Rasputin and Lenin. But perhaps not so familiar after all, since, as the author writes, the modern St. Petersburg is the city of the young, people for whom “the gulag is a distant epoch” and who are at home in the globalized era even if the Putin regime keeps them from realizing their potential. Well, the tyrants come and go, the philosophies morph and change, but the oppression just kind of sticks around, doesn’t it?

Miles also delivers architectural details along with lurid tales of orgies on ice and other debaucheries of court life, while futilely attempting to tally the denizens who succumbed to disease, cold, and political terror. Throughout out all he juggles three themes: the “murderous desire” of St. Petersburg’s elite; a ruthless succession of secret police organizations; and the city’s compromised cadre of musicians, dancers, artists, and writers; some of the latter – including Andrei Bely, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Nikolay Nekrasov – exposed the deprivation beneath the city’s gilded cupolas. But Miles’s lens is primarily that of an outsider and his analysis is simplified and colloquial. He describes in depth the opinions of foreign ambassadors, businesspeople, and tourists, yet the native Russians tend to blend into an undifferentiated mass. Miles visited the city in the 1990s and again two decades later, and goes so far as to suggest that the modern city is “in danger of sinking into the mire”. Unfortunately this work comes across as more empty hype than history.