Peter the Great’s St Petersburg in the Works of Pavel Svin’in (1787–1839)

Abstract

This passage about an eccentric Englishman comes from The Sights ofV St Petersburg and its Environs (Dostopamiatnosti Sanktpeterburga i ego okrestnostei), a pioneering guide that appeared in a dual Russian–French text in five volumes between 1816 and 1828. Each volume contains several chapters on individual monuments or architectural ensembles, each section illustrated with an engraving based on sketches by the guide’s author, Pavel Petrovich Svin’in (1787–1839). The subject of this essay is St Petersburg as presented in the pages of Svin’in’s guide and other works by him and his contemporaries, which allow us a glimpse of the city viewed through the prism of early nineteenthcentury, post-Napoleonic, pre-Pushkin and (mostly) pre-Decembrist sensibility and national self-awareness.

Rumours of the extraordinary beauty of the iron railings of the Summer Palace persuaded a certain Englishman, a great connoisseur of the arts, to travel to St Petersburg in order to verify this claim with his own eyes. Having inspected the railings and confirmed that he had not been deceived about their fine qualities, he immediately returned to his homeland.¹