The English Embankment

Abstract

For the student of the history of St Petersburg and of Anglo-Russian relations no subject might seem more self-recommending than the English Embankment (Angliiskaia naberezhnaia), eloquently named and strategically placed in the heart of the city and on the left bank of the Neva in full flow for the Gulf of Finland. Let us, like Pushkin and his friend Onegin in the poet’s famous drawing, lean on the granite parapet of the Neva embankment and gaze across the river, but from Vasil’evskii Island, near the Academy of Arts, towards the Admiralty Side and the Bronze Horseman, which stands in what is now Decembrists’ Square ( ploshchad’ Dekabristov), but was first Isaakievskaia, then Petrovskaia, then Senatskaia, and let our eyes move right past the rounded corner of Carlo Rossi’s Senate, which was only built in 1829–32 and which today houses the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA). What we see today is, of course, somewhat different from what Pushkin and his contemporaries saw, but not unrecognizably so. True, the golden dome of St Isaacs gleams for us as it did not for him and the Lt Shmidt Bridge, even in its first incarnations as the Blagoveshchenskii and the Nikolaevskii, did not yet span the river, but the line of buildings on the opposite embankment, despite many late nineteenth-century adjustments and changes, produces a more or less similar impression of flow and harmony.