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Item Condition: Collectible; Like New
THE CITY OF ST. PETERSBURG
has encompassed all that Russians are and all
that they hope to become. Home to Peter and
Catherine the Great, it provided ereative suste-
nance to Dostoevskii, Rimskii-Korsakoy, Pavlova
and Nizhinski, Fabergé, Gogol, and even Joseph
Brodsky. Although St Petersburg has played a
role in many histories of Russia, until now there
has been no definitive history of the city and all
its elements. In this stunning and lavish biogra-
phy of St. Petersburg, W. Bruce Lincoln captures
all of the city's opulence and artistic brilliance,
blended with images of power, suffering and
monumental heroism.
Climate and comfort were not what Peter the
Great had in mind when he decided to build a
new capital in the muddy marshes of the Neva
River delta in the spring of 1703. Barely 500 miles
below the Arctic Circle and easily submerged by
the tides that flowed upriver from the Gulf of
Finland, the region saw snow as carly as
September and as late as May. lts foul weather
bad water, and low-lying sodden soil made it so
unattractive that only ahandfull of Finnish fish-
orman had ever bothered to settle there. Yet to
the Tsar, the place he named Sankt Pieter Burkh
had the rpakings of paradise" And like Russia
itself, Pters ngw espital became a place of star-
ting contrasts. Bathed in sunlight at midnigtht in
the summer, it brooded in darkoess at neon in the
winter and its canals froze solid at leaSt ffve
months of every year. St.: Petersburg was closer
to London, Paris, and Vienna than to Russia's far-
off eastern lands, but it quickly became the polit
eal, cultural, and economie center of …