The pale northern night! And is this really night? Is it not pale and sickly day? I’ve never liked the Petersburg nights… So this is St Petersburg! Yes, there can be no doubt about it. These empty, wide, grey streets; these grey-whiteish, yellow-grey, grey-pink plastered and peeling houses with their sunken windows, bright signs, metal canopies over their porches, and wooden stalls selling vegetables […] this smell of dust, cabbage, hessian, and stables; these stony yard-keepers standing in their overcoats at the gates, these hansom-cab-drivers twisted by deathly sleep on their battered drozhki – yes, this is it, our Northern Palmyra. Everything is visible round about; everything is clear, horribly precise and clear, and everything is gloomily asleep, hulking strangely and inscribing itself on the dim and transparent air. The blush of the evening sunset –the blush of the consumption sufferer – has not yet faded, and will not fade until the morning, from the white, starless sky; it settles in strips on the silky smoothness of the Neva, which gurgles slightly and slightly trembles as is pushes forwards its cold blue waters…
Ivan Turgenev, Spectres, 1863