THE OTHER
St Petersburg
"Quite possibly, the worst guide I've ever read"
"Doesn't even mention the Hermitage!"
A guide for the independent traveller, the restless walker,
the wanderer through walls and history ...
"For practical purposes,
completely useless!!!
"
Why this site is so disorienting
(read this first)
Starting points:
(points from which to begin exploring St Petersburg)
The shape of the city
Beautiful St Petersburg? (Architecture and light)
Other hotels (atmospheric places to stay)
Scoundrel!!! (Incidents from the life of St Petersburg)
The other St Petersburg: a book
Other weather
Staircases, courtyards, other spaces
Melancholy of the white nights
Sounds of St Petersburg
Anatomy of a house
Full list of entries
Indelible impression
Anya Florenskaya: Scoundrel!
Why there are so many columns on the streets
of St Petersburg
Alternative accommodation
(atmospheric guesthouses in St Petersburg)
How Malevich painted his Black Square
Mandelshtam's first poems
Brodsky's balcony
St Isaac's: the colour of power and money
St Isaac's in winter, 1862 (early photograph)
No more dangerous than hunting lions
(Nikolay Gumilev returns to Russia)
It was a terrible night, a November night...
One day Petrovich
In early spring
Mandelshtam in love
Nikolay Gumilev: The stray tram (translation)
How Gumilev wrote 'The stray tram'
(walking over Palace Bridge after a long night out)
Beautiful St Petersburg?
April
Feeding the 5000
Osip Mandelshtam: Leningrad (1930)
Haymarket Square, August 17th, 1998
House of Vavelberg
Daniil Kharms: Tumbling old ladies
Disappearing city
The pale northern light
Houses of Rozenshteyn
Nevsky prospekt, 1830-1835
Mstislav Dobuzhinsky: "The city died a death
of extraordinary beauty"
"Will kill your old woman"(graffiti from the staircase
of Dostoevsky's old woman pawnbroker)
House of Burda
(ghosts on the streets of St Petersburg)
"I have never managed to love St Petersburg"
Aleksandr Benois on the white nights
Dom Mertensa on Nevsky prospekt
"This way for the old woman"
Exploring St Petersburg
(feels like an exercise in archaeology)
Aleksandr Blok, The Twelve, and death
Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin
The mist of St Petersburg (Georgy Ivanov)
At this point Akaky Akakievich's spirits sank
Boris Kustodiev: Akaky Akakievich at the ministry
Boris Kustodiev: Akaky Akakievich at Petrovich's
Boris Kustodiev: Akaky Akakievich on Nevsky
Boris Kustodiev: Akaky Akakievich
returns from his evening out
Academy Garden: location
Balcony rooms
Silver room
Lotus room
Rooms with Dutch stove
Kulibin's extraordinary bridge
Daniil Kharms:
"I have fallen so low
that now I can never get up again"
Who was Daniil Kharms?
Kulibina Square: the shape of St Petersburg
Spassky Lane, 1865: "recourse was had to a heavy iron"
Povarskoy, 1915: criminal history of St Petersburg
40,000 cesspits
Smells, scents, and stinks of St Petersburg
Fontanka 185 and the fate of foreign architects
in St Petersburg
The real centre of St Petersburg
The Academy Garden
It was the beginning of August, a warm bright night
(arrest of Nikolay Gumilyev, 1921)
Yuletide, 1920
Experiment (Trouble telling the Petersburger
from the Muscovite? Try this simple experiment)
Beyond Kalinkin Bridge
"Quite possibly, the worst guide I've ever read""Quite possibly, the worst guide I've ever read"