Well, it's another damp day in St Petersburg. Rather like yesterday, in fact - frustrating when you're only in a place for three days!
I will post pictures soon, but right now all we have here is the pastel confections of St Petersburg under threateningly dark skies, while we scurry from one tourist must-do to another! I was in St Petersburg about... ten years ago, and my abiding memory of that time was the difficulty of finding anything which resembled a modern, western shop. Looking back, we must have wandered up and down Nevskt Prospekt, St p's main commercial sreet, without even realizing it was anything more than a residential backstreet! No fear of that today - it's Oxford Street ransplanted, heaving with people and neon and global brands. But over it all still broods the original baroque buildings, and even the glamour of modern marketing can't quite shake the impression that modern St Petersburg is shoehorned in, that it is trying to find the cracks in Peter the Great's diktat. Perhaps as a result, the place has the feeling of make-do and mend. Here and there are signs of it - the Russian Mint being run out of the incongruously candy-coloured confections of the Peter and Paul Fortress... a decidedly aged antenna strung up over a baroque spire on Nevsky Prospekt... the glitter of the west, thrown over a dustsheet of poverty, covering the original, brutishly-powerful nouveau-riche power-architecture of Imperial Russia...
Okay, enough nonsense. There's a girl in a hotel room waiting for me to get back so we can go eat!
7 comments:
:( Has it been totally homogenized, or are there lots of new "local" shops *with* some others?
Can't wait for the pictures, but your description is marvellous. I have never been to Russia so it is all new to me and your observations are fascinating. (Wish there was a girl waiting in a hotel room for me right now!)
To be fair, they're mostly local with one or two recognizable names (Zara has a huge store right at the top of Nevsky Prospekt, for example). But the overall feel of many of the stores, even if they have unpronouncable names, is of that glitzy, shrink-wrap smoothness that you get on every High Street.
See these 100 year old pictures of Russia in color, until Matt posts his.
But she deserves it for being in Dr Zhivago.
These are cool. Some of them make me wish that I could have seen them in both their original black and white versions prior to colorization, and also as stereoscopic 3-D colorized images. Historic photos, particularly protrait photos, are always interesting for what they say, and also what they don't say. Some of those royal robes and native costumes look a little uncomfortable on their wearers, don't they? I suspect that these photos were taken with the harbingers of new (and perhaps presciently troublesome) eras clearly within view.
Photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time. (From the note above the first pic).
Post a Comment