St Petersburg and the British: The City Through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents
by Anthony Cross
To early English visitors St Petersburg seemed an ‘abstract’, artificial city with no roots in the past. It was the creation of one man, Peter the Great, determined to replace Moscow as the capital of his empire by a new city on the banks of the Neva ‘where there was nothing to be seen but marsh and water’. By 1774, for Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, the first tourist to publish an account of St Petersburg, a settlement of mean wooden houses in 1703 had been transformed into ‘one of the most magnificent cities on earth’.
Anthony Cross, formerly Professor of Slavic studies at Cambridge, gives us a learned history of St Petersburg as seen through British eyes. His witnesses range from English governesses to Nancy Astor, from Oxford dons and divines to diplomats’ wives, from Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole to Colin Wilson and Alan Sillitoe.
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