St. Petersburg, City of Literature

Moscow Times ^ | 06/30/2013 | John Freedman

[TexGrill]

St. Petersburg is the city of literature. Most of its streets are as straight as an arrow, laid out on a fanned grid like books neatly placed on a shelf. But there are anomalies, too. Its curved, tapered streets lined by beautiful old buildings that hug narrow, wending waterways can actually look like an open book if you look hard enough. At least they always have to me.

St. Petersburg is a city you share with the writers you love. You sense clearly that they — even if they wrote in the 18th or 19th century — sat in the same parks and walked the same sidewalks as you. When you look up at a second or third-floor corner window in a fascinating but slightly forbidding old building, you know the walls and environs still look more or less as they did when Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived there.

You can walk into Alexander Pushkin's house and stand over the sofa he died on. You can actually see the fading blood stain on the deteriorating fabric. That's Pushkin's blood, for God's sake. It drained the life out of him right there on the Moika Canal after he was shot in a duel by a Frenchman who may or may not have been having an affair with his wife.

That's pretty heavy stuff. The literature of life and death.

I was a student in Leningrad way back when. Dinosaurs were no longer roaming the bogs on which Peter the Great raised his great and mysterious city, but ghosts were. I saw one as plain as day and I had a witness.

[TexGrill]

St. Petersburg tip

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Makes one want to visit St. Pertersburg, Russia. I would love to ghost hunt in those old buildings.