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Welcome to St Petersburg

Dear Friends,

I am glad to welcome you to St Petersburg during our winter season which we call White Days.

St Petersburg is beautiful at all times of the year. Our unique architectural ensembles, numberless bridges and canals, the old parks – they all capture the hearts of people during our enchanting white nights in summer and the snowy days of winter.

Winter was the fashionable season in Imperial St Petersburg. Splendid salons, balls and concerts are depicted in the many classics of Russian literature. Lev Tolstoy described exactly the constant daily round of balls and receptions where Russian high society danced and romanced, and carriages and troikas rushed about the city, crushing the snow and ice beneath wheels and runners.

Our White Days season is reviving these traditions, and we can see how our full programme of entertainments is attracting tourists to our city in winter time. During these days the best theatres, concert halls and the old imperial palaces will receive many lovers of Russian art and culture.

I wish success to the organisers of the season, and to you, our visitors, I warmly wish you many unforgettable impressions from your days spent in the Northern capital.

Valentina Matvyenko, Governor of St Petersburg St Petersburg past

Since its foundation in 1703 by Peter the Great, St Petersburg has been a city of fable and legend. It has been an Imperial city, the city of revolution, the cultural capital. In St Petersburg you feel history at every step. From here the autocratic Romanov tsars ruled Russia for three centuries with an iron authority and unwillingness to reform that led to their downfall at the hands of workers and soldiers in March 1917.

Successive Tsars and Tsarinas all contributed to the architecture and culture of the capital. If we do not remember them for their politics, or how successfully or otherwise they ruled such an enormous empire, we can still see today all over St Petersburg the legacy of each and every one of them; Empress Anne set up the first School of Dancing, which became the foundation of the Imperial Russian Ballet, which in turn became the Kirov Ballet; Empress Elizabeth ordered into being the Academy of Fine Arts, the , and the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo; the unfortunate Paul I, son of Catherine the Great, built the Mikhailovsky Castle, surrounded it with water to protect himself from his many enemies, and was murdered in his bedroom.

St Petersburg has been defined by its writers: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Akhmatova, Brodsky. Dostoevsky set Crime and Punishment here. He knew the underside of life in the city at first hand – he once spent a couple of days in a debtors' prison across the square from the Sennaya Ploshchad metro station; he had been put there by his publisher, for missing a deadline. Just west of the square is the flat where he wrote the novel which for many visitors is St Petersburg; Raskolnikov's route to the murder passed right under the author's window; the old woman lived on Griboyedov Canal 104; you can visit the stairway outside the apartment (the residents will know what you are doing!).

Russian music had its flowering in St Petersburg, and every evening somewhere in the city one can hear the melodies of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev…

St Petersburg past is a mosaic of three-hundred years of politics, empire, culture; so many layers of different lives waiting to be discovered. St Petersburg present

St Petersburg has been variously called the city of palaces, the city of 300 bridges and the Venice of the North, but when you visit us during White Days we want it to be your city. Perhaps you have come with your guide book in hand, and you know what it is that you want to see; then the concierge at your hotel will be more than happy to tell you how best to get to the places on your list of ‘must-see’ things.

But when the pale winter sun is shining on the glittering snow, and you decide that it’s not a museum day, why not put your guide book away and let the mood take you where you will. The centre of the city is a very walkable area, and if you want to you can always hop on a tramcar; looking out the window perhaps you will be reminded of that heartbreaking moment in the film Doctor Zhivago when Omar Sharif catches a last sight of Julie Christie...

No doubt you will start your walk on Nevsky Prospect, which for generations of Petersburgers has been the place for a promenade. Perhaps you will be resolute and walk the whole way (although we have to tell you that it’s four kilometres!), but there are so many side streets to explore, and so many interesting and individual shops and cafes.

Perhaps you will see an antique shop, and go in to browse; inside you can often find objet’s d’art by Faberge,’ and delicate Lomonosov porcelain. Perhaps on a canalside you will come upon a secondhand bookshop with coffee table albums of your favourite artists. And when it’s time for a stop perhaps you will discover the smart Apricot cafe on Nevsky, with its hand-painted Chinese interiors from 1905, or one of the many homely cafes selling traditional Russian borsch soup, and blinis – with black and red caviar, or with sweet fruits and sour cream.

One can say that there are many St Petersburgs, but no matter which one you have come to visit during the season of White Days – imperial St Petersburg, literary St Petersburg, ballet St Petersburg, art St Petersburg – we feel certain that you will find in our city everything that you have always wanted to see, and so much more.

The State

The Hermitage is a museum known throughout the world, both for its buildings and its art collection.

The Hermitage consists of five linked buildings along the ; from west to east they are the Winter Palace, the Little Hermitage, the Old and New Hermitages (sometimes grouped together and called the Large Hermitage) and the (the private theatre of Catherine the Great). The art collection is on all three floors of the Winter Palace and the main two floors of the Little and Large Hermitages. The art collection is also housed in other branches: Menshikov Palace, the General Staff building and the Repository in ‘Staraya Derevnya.’

The Winter Palace is the building that everybody knows the world over, and deservedly so, for it is a masterpiece of Baroque architecture. Simple statistics can give an indication of its size – 1 057 rooms, 117 staircases, 1 945 windows – but only an actual visit can show you how majestic and beautiful it is.

The Winter Palace and its adjacent buildings have witnessed some of the most personal and also the most momentous events in Russian and world history: here Catherine the Great hurried from her State Apartments to meet with Prince Potemkin, her secret husband, in the privacy of the bathhouse; here Nicholas II and Alexandra stood on the balcony facing Palace Square in 1914, acknowledging the crowd cheering at the proclamation of war, the same crowd that would return only a few years later to storm the Winter Palace, and so end three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty. Here Sergei Eisenstein filmed that same event, but filmed it not where it had actually taken place (on a back staircase) but on the far more imposing and dramatic ; he filled the scene with an army of extras, far more than there had been during the ‘real’ revolution, and was told by a caretaker that there had been much less damage when “your people came the first time.”

The history of the Hermitage as a museum collection is traditionally held to have begun in 1764 when Catherine the Great bought a large number of Western European paintings; Catherine described herself not as a lover of art but a “glutton.” It was a compulsive buying habit that was shared by all of her successors, with the result that today the collection occupies over 200 rooms; there are 16 000 paintings, 600 000 drawings and prints, 12 000 sculptures.

There is so much to see, and we are sure that you will try to see as much as you can, but during White Days there is something else; late afternoon, if you turn away for a moment perhaps from looking at the luminous pink in Boticcelli’s St Jerome, and look out the window at the frozen Neva River, there is an equal beauty in the sight of the sun setting over the golden spire of The St Peter and Paul Cathedral.

This is St Petersburg, a city where art and nature are always exhibited in brilliant display.

The Mariinsky Theatre

Since its opening in 1860 the Mariinsky Theatre has been at the centre of St Petersburg cultural and social life. Today the Mariinsky is the home of the Kirov Ballet, the Kirov Opera, and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre.

During the winter season being seen at the Mariinsky was de riguer for St Petersburg’s aristocracy; in Eugene Onegin (1831) Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet, describes the atmosphere in the parterre:

Onegin hastens to the theatre, Where everyone, breathing freedom’s air, Prepares to clap an entrechat, To hiss a Phaedrus, boo a Queen, To shout for Moina, (only for one thing, To make his own voice heard in the din). The Imperial Family sat in a box close to the stage, and there was a passageway connecting with the backstage, through which many Grand Dukes made their way to a liaison with a pretty ballerina; the most famous of these relationships was that between the young Mathilde Kschessinskaya, later a prima ballerina, and the Tsarevitch Nicholas, later Nicholas II.

In the 19th century the fashionable audience at the Mariinsky saw the premieres of works by Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. It was an exacting audience; they didn’t like very much Tchaikovsky, they thought that he was too ‘Russian,’ not cultured enough. Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades received its premiere here, also Iolanta, Swan Lake, Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. Tchaikovsky himself conducted the theatre orchestra, premiering his Fifth Symphony, as well as the fantasy overture Hamlet; he was a very nervous conductor and the premieres were not a great success.

A theatre of course is nothing without scandal and uproar, and the Mariinsky has had plenty of both: in 1910 Vaslav Nijinsky wore a very tight revealing costume for a performance of Giselle, and was fired because of it. In the 1960s Rudolf Nureyev outraged the purists with the shortness of his jackets, and in the 1970s the multiple show-stopping pirouettes of Mikhail Baryshnikov similarly upset the balletomanes (but delighted the audience).

Since 1988 Maestro Valery Gergiev has been Artistic Director of the Mariinsky, and he has been responsible for reclaiming and reviving the heritage of the Russian masterworks that have been performed here – Prokofiev’s War and Peace, Semyon Kotko, and The Fiery Angel, Shostakovich’s The Nose, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of Kitezh, and many others. He has also premiered here in recent years many operatic masterpieces of the western repertory including Wagner's Parsifal, and Ring cycle, and Verdi's Petersburg version of La Forza del Destino.

When you come to St Petersburg during White Days, and take your seat at the Mariinsky, we like to think that it will be a memorable personal experience; perhaps, also, it will be one of those very special historic performances, one that will have you say to your family and friends, “I was in the audience.” The St Petersburg Philharmonia

The D.D. Shostakovich St Petersburg Academic Philharmonia is Russia's most celebrated musical institution. It is the oldest Philharmonia in Russia; its history dates back to 1802, when the St Petersburg Musical Society organised concerts in a rented townhouse on Nevsky Prospect; the venue is now the Small Hall of the Philharmonia. One of the most important events in the history of the hall was the premiere of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis on March 26, 1824.

In 1839 work was completed on the construction of a Noblemen’s Assembly, now known as he Great Hall of the Philharmonia. Because of its excellent acoustics the hall soon became the centre of musical life in St Petersburg. Franz Lizst, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss all appeared on its stage. Additionally, the premieres of works by Russia’s own best composers were given here: Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov and Sergei Rachmaninov.

Nine days before his death, in 1893 Tchaikovsky himself conducted the first performance of his Sixth (Pathetique) Symphony. Among the members of the audience was the eleven-year old Igor Stravinsky.

In the 20th century both Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev collaborated with the Philharmonic Orchestra, and premieres of many of their works were heard here. On August 9, 1942 during the 900 days Siege of Leningrad, the Seventh Symphony of Shostakovich was performed by the orchestra of Leningrad’s radio.

During the Soviet period one could have regularly listened to David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter, many of them performing under the baton of the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky who held the post of Principal Conductor for over fifty years. He was succeeded by Yuri Temirkanov in 1988.

Yuri Temirkanov is one of the world’s most original and distinguished conductors today. He has appeared with leading European orchestras, including the Berlin, London, Vienna Philharmonics, the Dresden Staatskapella, the French National Orchestra, the Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Every evening in the Large and Small Halls the Philharmonia presents concerts for the lovers of all genres of classical music.

One of the highlights of the recent history of the Philharmonia has been the inaugural concert in January 2005 for the newly repaired organ, when President Vladimir Putin and President Horst Koehler of Germany were in the audience.

The State Russian Museum

There is all of Russian culture and its history contained in the pictures and sculptures that comprise the collection of the State Russian Museum. Perhaps one might say that they also offer a clue as to what is meant by that elusive thing called the Russian soul. There are more than 400 000 works dating from the 11th century to the present, and the mystery of Russia begins to unfold with some of the few icons known to have been painted by the great Andrei Rubliev; in his icons there is meditation and spirituality, qualities which we associate with the Russian character. But as one walks through the elegant halls, one also notices that there is laughter here, and sadness, and anger.

Housed in the former Mikhailovsky Palace, built for Mikhail in the early 19th century, brother of Emperor Nicholas II, the State Russian Museum was opened to the public in 1898.

If you want to have an idea as to what the rulers of Russia looked like, and to know something about their characters, then the many portraits of tsars and tsarinas can say more about them than many books; Peter the Great Interrogating Tsarevich Alexei at Peterhof, or Peter II and Princess Elizabeth Riding to Hounds, and Catherine the Great on a Walk.

Similarly, the portraits of generations of St Petersburg courtiers are a means to understanding where that very Russian love of display comes from; look for example at the Portrait of The Sisters Shishmariov by Karl Briullov (1839) and the Portrait of Zinaida Yusupova by Valentin Serov (1902).

There is much that is idealised about ordinary Russian life, particularly so in the work of Alexei Venetsianov, one of the founders of genre painting in Russia; he paints a smooth image of how the other half lived, witness his Peasant Children in a Field. The Russian peasantry is a constant theme in Russian art, both before and after the 1917 revolution; one thinks of Abram Arkhipov’s A Festive Day in Spring (1915) and then Georgy Nissky’s Collective Farm (1960).

At the same time, as you walk around the Museum you notice the movement in Russian painting in the second half of the nineteenth century towards a more democratic, increasingly radical, art.

There is Ilya Repin’s famous image of The Volga Boatmen, one of the key works which ignited the division between the liberals and the reactionaries.

Perhaps one does not expect to find the seeds of revolution in a museum, but they are very much present in the Russian Museum; the canvases today have lost their original shock value, but they are still the fingerprints of the cataclysm that came in 1917.

In recent years the Russian Museum has once again been at the forefront of the Russian arts scene, with its active promotion of contemporary art, both of Russian and foreign artists. The Yusupov Palace

In his memoir of life before the 1917 Revolution, Lost Splendour, Prince Felix Yusupov gives a dramatic account both of his own life and of his family. Prince Felix Yusupov is remembered in history as the man who murdered Rasputin; it is one of those moments in history that is known to everyone. If it were not for that one deed, however, perhaps he would not be remembered, for until that night he was one of the spoiled darlings of pre-revolutionary St Petersburg society, a rich boy who tripped from one party to another.

The Yusupovs were rich almost beyond imagination - one could travel for days across Russia and never leave the Yusupov lands. The Yusupovs built fabulous palaces and amassed an art collection valued in the millions. Yet of all that immense wealth, Felix Yusupov was able to take with him out of Russia only two Rembrandts and some jewellery.

The Yusupovs were proud of their Eastern lineage, which included a nephew of Muhammad and a sixteenth-century Muslim khan named Youssouf. In the seventeenth century the family converted to Russian Orthodoxy, adopted the name Yusupov, and received the title of prince from the czar. Thereafter many Yusupovs played significant public roles, marrying into the Imperial Romanov Family, and becoming ever more wealthy.

There was more than one Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg, but the most splendid was the long yellow building on the Moika river, designed by Vallin de la Mothe in the Early Russian Classical style. Money was no object, and Prince Yusupov purchased an entire Italian palazzo just to use the marble staircase as the main entrance. The palace was famous for its exotic interiors such as the Moorish room, and its exquisite 165 seat private theatre; Franz Lizst and Clara Schumann played here, Fyodor Chaliapin also sang here, and Anna Pavlova danced.

The Yusupov Palace was famous for its balls, whose splendour and magnificence were reported in the capital’s newspapers, and the main topic of society gossip for many days after the last carriage had pulled away.

Today, during the White Days season, the Yusupov Palace once again echoes with the sound of parties and people enjoying themselves. Some of the most popular entertainments are the Masquerades; these are costume balls with a theme always closely connected with the history of the Yusupov family. An evening will include a gala performance in the theatre, dancing in the Banqueting Hall, a candlelit dinner, and a casino.

Entertainment and Festivities The White Days season offers an exciting programme of events encompassing society balls and masquerades, music and theatre festivals, exhibitions and premieres, and all types of sporting and outdoor activities.

The Christmas season is deservedly popular with visitors, both for the beauty of the decorations throughout the city, and for the social flurry that brings together citizens and visitors.

The Philharmonia Winter Arts Festival in Arts Square takes place from December to January. There are performances not only in the Great Hall of the Philharmonia, but also in the Russian Museum located on the other side of the square, and in the legendary Stray Dog cafe (one of the most famous literary cafes in Russia, where in the years before the 1917 Revolution Anna Akhmatova read her poetry to a rowdy band of avant-garde artists, writers, actors, dancers and bohemian intellectuals).

Maestro Temirkanov, Music Director and Principal Conductor of the Philharmonia also hosts a glittering New Year’s Eve Ball at the Yusupov Palace.

Equally glamorous is the New Year’s Eve Gala Performance and Ball given by the Mariinsky Theatre.

Orthodox Russian Christmas on January 7th is celebrated in the many churches around the city, and there are always many parties held afterwards.

In February Maestro Gergiev presents at the Mariinsky Theatre the festival dedicated to a signifi- cant Russian cultural figure; one year this might be Tchaikovsky, the next Gogol.

The ballet festival ‘Mariinsky’ is an annual gathering together of the Kirov Ballet’s famed principal dancers and many invited international stars.

In March, all of St Petersburg celebrates Maslenitsa (Shrove-Tide Week), and the Mariinsky joins in the celebrations with its Maslenitsa Festival.

Throughout the White Days season the Russian Museum mounts a number of exhibitions. One of the highlights of the closing of the season is the ice-sculpture exhibition in the Summer Garden.

Many of the visitors who come for White Days like to combine a cultural programme with more active pursuits. The White Days season offers a comprehensive array of outdoor sports and activities, both in and out of the city; there is ice skating, ice fishing, cross-country skiing, snowboarding, and snow mobiling. Troika rides in the parks outside of St Petersburg are very popular, and there is also the opportunity to try a traditional Russian banya, similar to a sauna, but with an atmosphere and ritual that is unique to Russia. Participating Hotels

Angleterre Hotel

Ul. Bolshaya Morskaya 39 Tel.: +7 812 313 56 66 Fax: +7 812 313 51 25 [email protected] www.angleterrehotel.com

Rocco Forte’s Hotel Astoria

Ul. Bolshaya Morskaya 39 Tel.: +7 812 313 57 57 Fax: +7 812 313 50 59 [email protected] www.roccofortehotels.com

Corinthia Nevskij Palace Hotel

Nevsky Prospect 57 Tel.: +7 812 380 20 01 Fax: +7 812 380 20 64 [email protected] www.corinthia.ru

Grand Hotel Europe

Mikhailovskaya Ul. 1/7 Tel.: +7 812 329 60 00 Fax: +7 812 329 60 01 [email protected] www.grandhoteleurope.com

Hotel Moika 22 Kempinski

Moika River Embankment 22 Tel.: +7 812 335 91 11 Fax.: +7 812 335 91 90 [email protected] www.kempinski.com

Hotel Pulkovskaya

Pobedy Square 1 Tel.: +7 812 140 39 00 Fax: +7 812 140 39 24 www.pulkovskaya.ru [email protected]

Radisson sas royal Hotel

Nevsky Prospect 49/2 Tel.: +7 812 322 50 00 Fax: +7 812 322 50 05 [email protected] www.radissonsas.com

Renaissance St. Petersburg Baltic Hotel

Pochtamtskaya Ul. 4 Tel.: +7 812 380 40 00 Fax: +7 812 346 56 10 [email protected]

www.marriott.com Noble, text , 2005 Jeremy Emil Kan, photos, design, 2005 © ©