The City's Memory: Texts of Preservation and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg Julie Buckler, Harvard University Petersburg's Im
The City’s Memory: Texts of Preservation and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg Julie Buckler, Harvard University Petersburg's imperial-era chroniclers have displayed a persistent, paradoxical obsession with this very young city's history and memory. Count Francesco Algarotti was among the first to exhibit this curious conflation of old and new, although he seems to have been influenced by sentiments generally in the air during the early eighteenth century. Algarotti attributed the dilapidated state of the grand palaces along the banks of the Neva to the haste with which these residences had been constructed by members of the court whom Peter the Great had obliged to move from Moscow to the new capital: [I]t is easy to see that [the palaces] were built out of obedience rather than choice. Their walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall. It has been wittily enough said, that ruins make themselves in other places, but that they were built at Petersburg. Accordingly, it is necessary every moment, in this new capital, to repair the foundations of the buildings, and its inhabitants built incessantly; as well for this reason, as on account of the instability of the ground and of the bad quality of the materials.1 In a similar vein, William Kinglake, who visited Petersburg in the mid-1840s, scornfully advised travelers to admire the city by moonlight, so as to avoid seeing, “with too critical an eye, plaster scaling from the white-washed walls, and frost-cracks rending the painted 1Francesco Algarotti, “Letters from Count Algarotti to Lord Hervey and the Marquis Scipio Maffei,” Letter IV, June 30, 1739.
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