St. Petersburg: “Marooned on the Neva's Marsh Delta”
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Giblett, Rod. "St. Petersburg: “Marooned on the Neva’s Marsh Delta”." Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 125–142. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474269858.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 21:45 UTC. Copyright © Rod Giblett 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 8 St. Petersburg: “Marooned on the Neva’s Marsh Delta” St. Petersburg is another marsh metropolis and an icon of modernity. St. Petersburg for Amery and Curran (2006: 15) is “one of the most celebrated and legendary cities in all of Europe.” Certainly it is one of the most cel- ebrated and legendary cities in modern Europe, and is arguably the mod- ern European city par excellence as most of the other major European cities had medieval or ancient beginnings as we have seen with Paris, Venice, and London. Founded in 1703, it achieved this status precisely because it was “situated unnaturally in a swamp,” or “on inhospitable marshes,” or “over swampland” as Lehan (1998: 125, 146, 147) variously puts it. St. Petersburg represents the triumph of a modern city over premodern wetland. Like Venice and Boston, St. Petersburg was built on piles. Even with its piles, Th oreau (1982: 276) relates in Walden how “it is said that a fl ood tide, with a westerly wind and ice in the Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.” Or in the terms of Michel Serres (1995: 16) of the city as plaque, as excrescence on the face of the earth, this catastrophic conjunction of tide, wind, and ice, a disastrous combination of the elements of air and water, and of the solid, liquid, and gaseous, would flush the plaque of the city from the “mouth” of the river in the marsh, and from the body of earth. Th e very ele- ment of water that the city excluded in order to be created could come back to destroy it in a return of the geographical and historical repressed. St. Petersburg for Amery and Curran (2006: 15) is also “Peter the Great’s version of a European paradise forged from the swamps” in the delta of the Neva River. Amery and Curran are implying that swamps are not paradise, 126 Cities and Wetlands but are a wasteland as they go on to suggest when out of “such wastes . where the saturated ground . [was] shrouded in the mists . a new Russia [was] born.” St. Petersburg was “born fully grown” for Smith (2012: 44) as a monumental brainchild out of patriarchal Peter’s brain box. St. Petersburg was also born out of the womb of the maternal and monstrous marsh with human labor and labor pains, all of which were largely ignored and forgotten. Th e union between patriarchal brain and maternal marsh womb produced a monument and a monster, a monumental and monstrous city. St. Petersburg for Billington (1966: 181) was “the most impressive creation of his [Peter the Great’s] turbulent reign . In 1703 Peter began building his new city at the point where the Neva (‘Mud’) River disgorges the water of Lake Ladoga out through swamps.” In other words, the river vomits the water of the mud river up through its throat (one sense of “gorge”) and out through its swampy mouth, hardly an auspicious place for a city and hardly a wetland- friendly metaphor for a swamp. Billington is implying that the land was regurgitating liquid and solid matter, rather than digesting and excreting dead matter and procreating new life through the fertile cloaca of its delta. Deltas are the most fertile of all ecosystems. Th ey are at the bottom of the digestive and reproductive systems, not at the top. Deltas are not located at the “ mouth of the river,” but are to be found at the other end of the body, at the bottom of the river catchment whose head is at the top. Th e conventional nomenclature of the mouth of a river is a misnomer as water and solid matter fl ow out at this point, and not in. Th is is a mistaken view of anatomy, and so it should be called by the name for the other end of the body. Seagoing and ocean- faring explorers always say that they entered the mouth of a river as it would not be gentlemanly to say that they entered the rectum of the river, let alone to use other more vernacular and vulgar terms. Th e mouth of a river is, in fact, at the opposite end of the earthly ali- mentary canal or digestive tract of the river in conventional nomenclature of the head of the catchment. Th e conventional nomenclature of the “mouth of the river” inverts the rectum and the mouth in order to occlude the excretory functions of the river and to hide the fact that the exploratory journey up the river is a journey up the rear and inner passage entering through the rectum rather than a journey down the upper and inner passage entering through the mouth (see Giblett, 2011: chapter 10). St. Petersburg 127 More recent nomenclature of the head of the catchment is at odds with the traditional terminology of the mouth of the river as they are at opposite ends of the river but both are at the same end of the human body. Th ese geographic metaphors of “the head of the catchment” and “the mouth of the river” con- tinue to be used uncritically without considering the politics of language, the body, and the earth that they are engaged in and in which they engage their users. Th e founding father, such as Tsar Peter, of a city, such as St. Petersburg, in or at the mouth of a river, or at least at the point where a river, such as the Neva, disgorges (though this preserves the throat and mouth metaphor) and so more precisely defecates into the sea, such as the Baltic Sea, was in fact establishing the city at the opposite end of the digestive tract. Th e beginnings of St. Petersburg as what Berman (1988: 176) calls “the city in the swamps” has grown up into what Amery and Curran (2006: 16) call “the mythology of St. Petersburg” and into what Volkov (1995: xiii) calls “the Petersburg mythos,” which for him was “fully formed in the second half of the nineteenth century.” Th e mythos “included the offi cial legends of the miracu- lous appearance of the lovely city in a marsh” as if the city sprang fully formed out of the head of Tsar Peter, like Pallas Athene being born out of the head of Zeus. Just as Zeus swallowed the pregnant Metis in order to appropriate the maternal function of giving birth, so Peter consumed the labor of workers and the fertility of the maternal marsh “teaming [ sic ] with wildlife” according to Amery and Curran (2006: 16) in order to give birth to St. Petersburg out of his own brain box as both monumental and monstrous city, monumental not least for the monuments erected in it and monstrous for its greedy consump- tion of human labor and laborers and of the monstrous marsh. Th e city did consume immense amounts of human labor befi tting the despotic Tsar Peter. Dluhosch (1969: xxi) relates how, “within three years[,] the new city devoured an army of one hundred and fi ft y thousand work- ers.” Th e human cost of building such a city in the swamp for Billington (1966: 181) was “probably greater than that involved in building any other major city in Europe.” As Ellul (1970: 29; emphasis in the original) puts it, “ our cities need no foundation sacrifi ce, for by their very existence they swal- low up and destroy vital forces, both material and spiritual, of the millions of men sacrifi ced to them . Th e city devours men,” not to mention women and children, marshes and swamps. Th e city is an orally sadistic, greedy monster. 128 Cities and Wetlands St. Petersburg is monstrous, monumental, and grotesque. As such, it is a typ- ical modern city like Paris, both monumental and monstrous (or grotesque) at the same time, and in the same place of the marsh. Th e monumental is erected on the grotesque lower earthly stratum of the marsh. Th e marsh makes both the monumental and monstrous possible. Without the marsh, there would be no monumental and monstrous city. Th e same modus oper- andi applies to Paris too as we have seen. Th e Bronze Horseman No greater or more fi tting monument to the founding of the monumental city of St. Petersburg can be found than Falconet’s statue unveiled in 1782 of Tsar Peter riding a horse (Volkov, 1995: xii and xxv). It only became known as “the bronze horseman” aft er the publication of Pushkin’s poem of this title in 1837, half a century aft er the unveiling. Pushkin’s poem for Berman (1988: 182) is “a kind of Petersburg Book of Genesis, beginning in the mind of the city’s creator- God.” Berman is alluding to the Judeo- Christian god of Yahweh who created land and water and divided them as Peter did, but his allusion also applies equally to the Grecian god of Zeus giving birth to his “brain- child” out of his brain box as Peter gave birth to St.