Hidden St. Petersburg

Trying to write about

“the hidden St. Petersburg” is a much harder task than it was during the heady days of the early 1990s, when the city was still something new, hidden and exotic to foreigners.

Today, St. Petersburg is a more or less mainstream tourist destination.

And yet, there are still plenty of aspects of the city which are off the beaten track and which can give an insight into St. Petersburg’s individual nature.

the performing arts

St. Petersburg is without a doubt the cultural capital of Russia, and its capital of the performing arts in particular. This can be seen during the annual Golden Mask awards, which honor Russia’s arts community, where St. Petersburg’s opera, ballet and theater companies regularly walk away with over half of the prizes on offer.

The Mariinsky Theater is the unquestioned monarch of St. Petersburg opera and ballet. However, two small opera companies with much in common provide an evening’s entertainment at a high professional standard, and in a less formal, more relaxed atmosphere than the glitz and glamor of the Mariinsky Theater—not to mention the fact that neither employs the Mariinsky Theater’s policy of charging foreigners more than Russians. They are the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera and the Zazerkalye Theater.

The St. Petersburg Chamber Opera was founded by former Mariinsky stage director Yury Alexandrov in 1987, as what he termed an “opera laboratory,” to test out new ideas in a lower-pressure environment than the cauldron of the Mariinsky. Until this year, the company has had no permanent home, performing at venues such as the Hermitage Theater and the tiny Yusupov Palace Theater. In May 2003, however, it was due to move into an aristocratic mansion at 33 Galernaya Ulitsa that used to belong to a certain Baron von Dervis. Like most buildings in the center of St. Petersburg, the building has a rich history; in this case, an appropriately musical one. Legendary director Vsevolod Meyerhold staged studio productions in the building at the end of the 19th century; after it was turned into a concert hall, luminaries including the bass Fyodor Shalyapin performed there.

The company’s repertoire is small, including just 15 productions, ranging from traditional favorites like Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” and “Yevgeny Onegin,” to the 18th-century comic operas that are its strength. It is particularly renowned for its revivals of obscure or forgotten works, from Gaetano Donizetti’s “The Bell” and “Rita” to “The Secret Marriage” by Domenico Cimarosa, an Italian who worked in St. Petersburg at the court of Catherine the Great, to works by Dmitry Bortnyansky, a Ukrainian by birth who became known as the “Russian Mozart.” Director Alexandrov’s experimental leanings often lead to somewhat radical reinterpretations of the works—some of the staging in “The Queen of Spades,” for example, is mesmerizing—and this tendency won St. Petersburg Chamber Opera a Golden Mask in 1998 for “The Lay of the Life and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke,” an adaptation of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1923 prose-poem.

Like the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera, the Zazerkalye Theater was founded in 1987. Unlike its counterpart, however, Zazerkalye Theater was set up as a children’s theater, on the model of the Natalya Sats Children’s Theater in Moscow, according to its co-director Pavel Bubelnikov. In line with this, the theater also runs a studio for children aged 6 to 17 that is an important source of talent for its stage. Like the
St. Petersburg Chamber Opera, the Zazerkalye Theater is still run by the people who set it up; in this case, Bubelnikov, previously a conductor at the Mussorgsky (Maly) Opera and Ballet Theater for a quarter-century, and stage director Andrei Petrov. The Zazerkalye Theater also began life as a vagrant, before eventually finding a permanent home on Ulitsa Rubinshteina, opposite the Maly Drama Theater/Theater of Europe.

The Zazerkalye Theater’s repertoire is larger than that of the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera, with 35 works, many of which fall into its traditional focus of productions for children. Of its adult productions, particular mention should be made of its “La Boheme,” which won two Golden Masks in 2002, and the recent “Porgy and Bess,” which, according to Bubelnikov, was the first performance of Gershwin’s opera in St. Petersburg since he conducted it at the Mussorgsky (Maly) Opera and Ballet Theater in 1971. Also worth a look is its take on Jacques Offenbach’s classic comedy “The Tales of Hoffmann,” the first production of the opera in St. Petersburg, and Johann Strauss’ “Der Fledermaus.”

Today, both the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera and the Zazerkalye Theater have a staff of about 40 singers—soloists and members of the chorus—and a similar number of orchestral musicians. Inevitably, perhaps, the success of both operations has seen their star performers tempted away by bigger setups. Former St. Petersburg Chamber Opera tenor Vladimir Galusin is now a regular at the world’s top stages, renowned as one of the foremost interpreters of roles like Verdi’s “Othello” and Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot,” while international star soprano Yelena Prokina started out at the Zazerkalye Theater. The Mariinsky Theater has also benefited, gaining bass Edem Umerov and baritone Yevgeny Ulanov from St. Petersburg Chamber Opera, in addition to Yevgeny Akimov, a lyric tenor from the Zazerkalye Theater. (Akimov, incidentally, returned to his alma mater to pick up a Golden Mask for best male operatic performance in the theater’s “La Boheme.”)

Like everyone else in the city, both the St. Petersburg Chamber Opera and the Zazerkalye Theater are preparing special productions to mark St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, and both are based on its history. The St. Petersburg Chamber Opera will give the modern-day world premiere of a rediscovered Donizetti opera, “Peter the Great,” that was first performed in Venice in 1819 but subsequently considered lost, until Alexandrov, an arvid Donizetti fan, managed to track down a score. The director has said that the “new” opera has ensemble scenes that resemble music from perennial Donizetti favorite “L’elisir d’amore.” The Zazerkalye Theater, meanwhile, has commissioned a work set in the times of Catherine the Great, from local composer Gennady Banshchikov. Both should be well worth seeing.

Some of St. Petersburg’s non-musical theaters should also not be ignored. Away from the ‘big three’ —the Alexandriinsky Theater (the Pushkin Theater), the Bolshoi Drama Theater and the Maly Drama Theater/Theater of Europe—quality productions can be seen at establishments like the Lensovet Theater and the Theater on Liteyny, both of which have been nominated for and won Golden Masks in the past. This year’s big hit has been the Theater on Liteyny’s adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex,” which has received multiple nominations for this year’s Golden Masks, as well as high critical praise.

There are also some original, independent theater companies that provide an interesting evening’s entertainment. A couple of these perform mainly at Baltiisky Dom Festival-Theater, a cavernous Stalinist ensemble five minutes walk from Gorkovskaya metro station. Farces Theater was set up by noted local stage director Viktor Kramer— who is in charge of stage managing some of St. Petersburg’s official 300th-anniversary-celebration events—and specializes in small-scale productions often heavily reliant on black comedy and irony. As well as adaptations of works like Hamlet for chamber theater, the company also has its own productions, like the popular “Six Characters Waiting for the Wind,” and “Following Your Trail of Blood in the Snow,” the latter based on works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Its mini-seasons at Baltiisky Dom are usually sold out.

Potudan Theater is an unusual project run by recent Drama Academy graduate Ruslan Kudryashov that specializes in puppet-theater productions. The company, which only presented its first production, an adaptation of Andrei Platonov’s novel “Potudan River,” in 2000, has already garnered itself a sizable following and acclaim from the critics. Its most recent production, an adaptation of Gogol’s short story “Nevsky Prospect” that manages to capture the phantasmagorical, nightmarish qualities of the original, has been nominated for a Golden Mask this year.

the visual arts

St. Petersburg is not known as a center of contemporary art. Its visual-arts profile is dominated by the twin behemoths of the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, neither of which is known for its cutting-edge approaches or exhibitions, although this is changing; for example, the Russian Museum’s Marble Palace, just by the Field of Mars, recently hosted a British Council-sponsored exhibition of work by contemporary British video artists. However, the city does have some establishments that provide an opportunity for local artists—as well as artists from elsewhere in Russia and, occasionally, from abroad—to show their works.

The foremost of these is the legendary Pushkinskaya 10 Free Arts Foundation. The original Pushkinskaya 10 was a 16,000-square-meter bohemian paradise at which worked prominent local artists such as Timur Novikov, who set up his New Academy of Fine Arts there; Dmitry Shagin, the central figure of the Mitki artists group; artist, musician and filmstar Sergei Bugayev, otherwise known simply as Afrika; and Kirill Miller. The place underwent expensive repairs in the mid-1990s and, when it reopened in summer 1998, the artists’ section had been reduced to 4,000 square meters, with the remainder turned into apartments and offices. However, the artists now had reliable electricity, heating and water, and a roof over their heads that wasn’t likely to crumble in on them. Now, the complex consists of a number of galleries and artists’ studios, working in media ranging from traditional paint-and-easel to video. Novikov’s New Academy of Fine Arts is still working, despite its founder’s death in 2002, and is one of the central attractions. The quality of the exhibitions can be hit-and-miss, and the different opening times of the various galleries are often frustrating, but Pushkinskaya 10 is still an essential part of the city’s progressive, often weird, arts scene.

There are also a number of small, private galleries hosting exhibitions that change on a regular basis. One of the best is Marina Gisich’s Private Art Gallery, run by Marina Gisich, a former reserve member of the Soviet Union’s rhythmic-gymnastics team who organized several exhibitions of contemporary Russian art abroad before setting up on her own in 2000. As well as showing work by local and other Russian artists, Gisich’s gallery also brings hip foreign art to the city, such as the recent exhibition of black-and-white photographs by French artist and gym trainer Herve Lewis.

Also of interest is the highly unusual INK Club, although it can not really be classed just as an art gallery. Like Gisich’s gallery, INK Club is the idea of one person, in this case Igor Kalinauskas, a.k.a. Igor Silin, a self-described “theater director, actor, writer, publisher, psychologist, artist, singer and ‘game master.’” As its founder’s range of interests suggests, INK Club does not confine itself to art exhibitions; it also hosts concerts, usually of the more eclectic variety, fireside chats about philosophy, and mystery plays. There’s also a library and bookshop, largely stocked with works by Kalinauskas and other artist-philosopher-psychologists (of whom there are a surprising number in St. Petersburg), most of which are printed upstairs on the club’s own
printing press.

museums

Away from the museums that nearly every visitor to St. Petersburg knows, the city also has a lot of smaller places. While many of these suffer from a lack of funding, and can therefore be quite dry and academic, there are some that, while not in the same bracket of world importance as the Hermitage, the Russian Museum or the Peter and Paul Fortress, are still worth visiting. One caveat is that the lack of English-language materials in most places often necessitates a good knowledge of Russian, although it is possible to get by without it.

Particularly interesting for the little-known history it documents is the Museum of the Artic and Antarctic. Housed in a rococo temple-like building on Ulitsa Marata, the museum details the history of primarily Soviet exploration of the world’s two polar regions. The scale of Russian involvement in those areas, especially the Artic, and the dedication of the personnel who worked there are quite incredible, and the museum creates a real impression of the sacrifices that the country and its inhabitants have made. There is also an impressive section of background material on the climate, flora and fauna of the Artic, including kid-friendly items such as a stuffed polar bear.

Based in the Psychoanalysis Institute on the Petrograd Side, the Museum of Freud’s Dreams is a currently modish place dedicated to the great Austrian psychiatrist. The museum is housed in two small rooms, the first of which gives a brief overview of Freud’s life and work, especially in the field of dream theory, while the second is a dimly lit chamber in which visitors are supposed to “discover themselves.” Although the second room smacks of pseudo-scientific hippydom—all it would need for this is a burning incense stick and a Grateful Dead tape playing in the background to compliment the mirror fragments, statuettes and quotes from Freud and others contained in the cabinets that line its walls —the first room gives a good concentrated introduction to Freud’s work and the influences on it.

The city’s Hygiene Museum dates back to 1919, set up by then Public Education Minister Anatoly Lunacharsky. Although, for funding reasons, many of the exhibits are now very old, it still represents a thought-provoking—often outright frightening—visit. The items on display include lungs blackened by years of chain smoking, decalcified bones that can be tied in knots, and lots of material on the dangers of alcohol. One Soviet-era poster on display gives some terrifying statistics, under the headline “Alcohol Is Devastating The Country!” on alcohol consumption in Russia in 1927: “In 1927, citizens of the U.S.S.R. consumed 32 million buckets [approximately 12 million liters] of vodka, 15 million buckets of samogon [moonshine], 32 million buckets of beer and 5 million buckets of wine, on which they spent 1,200 million rubles, enough to build 720,000 tractors.” Many of the museum’s visitors are schoolchildren, taken there as part of health education in schools—the museum’s guides run up to ten tours per day—or by concerned parents; the kids often leave vowing to lead a clean and healthy life.

Some of the city’s smaller museums are highlighted in the annual festival Contemporary Art in a Traditional Museum, usually organized by the Pro Arte Institute in July.

on foot

“Walking has a special importance in this city. Drive around St. Petersburg, and you will see only what you expect to see: beautiful palaces, breathtaking views along canals and rivers, great collections of art, funny-looking people in heavy coats and fur hats. But walk—take to the streets on foot, surrender yourself to the intricacies and intimacies of the city’s geography—and you will find yourself in a different world.”

John Nicolson, The Other St. Petersburg

John Nicolson’s 1994 tract, “The Other St. Petersburg” has assumed classic status among writings by foreigners on the city. Read now, it seems more like a requiem for a semi-mythical Golden Age (primarily one of cheap alcohol) but, nonetheless, much of it is still valid. The quotation above sums up one of the greatest of St. Petersburg joys—walking. St. Petersburg is a great city for pedestrians (at least if you’re not trying to cross a major thoroughfare), but what makes it really fun is the process of discovery.

Come out of Tekhnologichesky Institut metro station, for example, cross Zagorodny Prospect and then Moskovsky Prospect, and you will find yourself in front of a monument to the chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev, and the institute that bears his name and houses a museum devoted to him. Now look up at the wall of the building to your right, and you will see a massive reproduction in color of Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table. The amazing thing is that no-one even glances as it as they pass.

Another point made by Nicolson in his book is the importance of dvori, or courtyards, in St. Petersburg. As he wrote, “If the classical architecture ensembles of the street fronts are St. Petersburg’s elegant face, an arch with a pedigree expensively imported from abroad, the dvori are its hidden soul, the point at which St. Petersburg becomes intimate and approachable.”

An example. Come out of the Summer Garden and turn right along the river. Cross the bridge across the Fontanka River, and turn right again. Turn left into the first courtyard you come to, and look at the building ahead of you and slightly to the right, the Malaya Akademiya Iskusstv, or Small Academy of Art. The whole of the building is covered in a wonderful mosaic, and very few people ever see it—even though thousands of people swarm through the gates of the Summer Garden, barely 100 meters away, every year.

The abundance of interesting, startling and sometimes bizarre phenomena crowding the city necessitates a guide with encyclopedic knowledge of the city, and probably the best person to whom to talk to is Peter Kozyrev. Kozyrev has been running walking tours around St. Petersburg for the past seven years, although his company, Peter’s Walking Tours, was officially established only this year. He describes himself and his four fellow guides as “cultural conductors.” The basic idea of Peter’s Walking Tours is to provide a comfortable way for English-speaking visitors to get to know St. Petersburg. All the firm’s guides are experienced travelers, and all speak fluent English.

The tours that the firm operates are far from the traditional, staid, Soviet-type tours that many visitors endure. Instead, they are relaxed and informative on all aspects of the city—from arts and culture to history, politics and society— and, importantly, fun. Kozyrev still runs a version of the first tour he ever gave, now called Peter’s Original Walking Tour, but now also has a broad selection of walks based around various aspects of the city, including a Raskolnikov pub crawl, along the route taken by the antihero of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to murder the old pawnbroker, and a blockade tour that details the history of the siege of Leningrad.

after-hours relaxation

As befits a city of five million inhabitants, St. Petersburg has plenty of distractions for when all the culture and walking takes its toll. A good way to relax and literally to cleanse oneself of the dirt accumulated during the day is the Russian banya, or public bath house, a tradition as old as the country itself. Several of St. Petersburg’s bani are architectural
monuments in their own right, for example the one at
82 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki, according to local historian, translator and Writers Union member Igor Bogdanov.

Bogdanov points out a number of unusual features of the banya, which was built by local architect Count Pavel Suzor and opened in June 1871: A special type of cement was used that is impervious to dampness, and only becomes more solid in a damp atmosphere; the walls were covered in ship-building boards; it had three marble swimming pools; and there was an artesian well to make sure the banya had the cleanest possible water, and a water reserve with a capacity of some 10,000 buckets. The banya was regularly visited by grand dukes and other members of the aristocracy, and was furnished accordingly, with 300 bronze gaslamps, a women’s section furnished in Louis XVI style, and a stuffed bear to “guard” the entrance.

Today, most of the banya’s former splendor has gone, although there are still a few remnants, such as the tiles on the walls bearing inscriptions in Old Church Slavonic. There are actually three banyas in the yard at 82 Reki Fontanki; to find the historic one, go through the first yard, pass under the sign advertising “Bani No. 43” and turn to the right. Go up the narrow, winding metal staircase—which conjures up something of a 19th century atmosphere—and through the door at the top. The banya is clean, spacious and well-equipped (there’s a pool room and a bar, for example), and also has its own “specialists” to give visitors the “authentic Russian steam experience,” according to the banya attendant.

For those in search of a drink, St. Petersburg is also Russia’s beer capital—which came as a surprise to a German friend of Bogdanov, who asked him “Is there such a thing as Russian beer?” The top local breweries, such as Baltika and Bochkaryov, all produce high-quality lagers, reflected in the purchase of Baltika by European brewing giant Heineken in 2001.

St. Petersburg’s more underground bars also provide an opportunity to explore the city’s bohemian scene. Some knowledge of Russian will help if you want to get to know people, but it’s not essential. Good places to meet some of the city’s more leftfield types are the bars Cynic and Fish Fabrique.

Cynic has already achieved legendary status in certain circles, despite having only been open since 2000. It was thrown out of its original location, a ramshackle old building by Moscow Station, and is now tucked away in a basement (like many good things in St. Petersburg) just off St. Isaac’s Square. It’s a low-ceilinged, laid-back hangout that gets packed on weekends; non-smokers should give it a miss, though, as sometimes you can’t see the bar for smoke.

The city’s original bohemian hangout, Fish Fabrique, is housed in the Pushkinskaya 10 complex. Cynic’s popularity has taken some of its clientele, but it still has one of the best live-music programs in the city, along with underground rock club Moloko. It’s open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; St. Petersburg, like New York, never really sleeps.  RL