Mapping Out a Future, Part Two

From Palace Square, I proceeded to the main entrance of the Hermitage (not on Palace Square but very close to it). The Hermitage is actually situated in two main buildings that have been connected, the Old Hermitage and the Winter Palace, the latter having served as the official residence of the tsars before the October Revolution. The building is a giant confectionary work, a masterpiece of baroque architecture. Currently it is painted sage green, but when it was first built, it was a kind of turquoise blue. During the nineteenth century, apparently, it was painted Venetian red (I am rather astonished the Bolsheviks did not retain this color after the Revolution).

When I reached the entrance, a line was already stretching, in anticipation of the museum's opening at half past ten. Though not at long as my guidebook indicated it would be on a warmer day (at the height of the tourist season in August, the line can stretch as far as the arch of the General Staff Building), it was still fairly long, and I resigned myself to a long wait. A stroke of luck, however, made the wait unnecessary. No sooner had I entered into the line than a guide approached me and offered to let me join her group for a two-hour tour of the Hermitage State rooms. She said that if I did, I could skip the line and would not have to buy a ticket, as she already had several tickets purchased for this group. I felt the price was reasonable and followed her to her group.

At precisely half past ten, the museum opened, and we all went inside. The first marvel to be seen in the Hermitage is called the Jordan Staircase. Above the staircase is an opulent baroque painting that, I was amazed to find out, was not a fresco but rather a work on canvas held into the plaster. The climate of St. Petersburg being extremely moist, fresco was not really a practical form of art. So where palaces in other cities would have frescos, the Winter Palace stretched canvases and suspended them in plaster.


It was not the only trick of the eye I was to see in the Hermitage. Virtually all of the "marble" in the building, it turned out, was not really marble but rather plasted coated to look like marble. This is due not to the cheapness of the tsars but rather, once again, to the St. Petersburg climate. Though elegant, marble apparently prevents blocks heat from entering a building. In an age before modern climate control systems, building in marble would have made for an intensely cold palace.


It would take several blog posts to describe all of the wonders I saw on my tour through the Hermitage State Rooms, so I will be brief and relate only a couple that made a real impression on me. One long room, painted a deep red, contains portraits of all of the generals and commanders of the War of 1812 (known in Russia as the Patriotic War, and, I suspect, as the Great Patriotic War before World War II took that title). My guide indicated that, at the time, there were only a quarter as many generals in the Russian army as there are today.

The room is narrow but very long; the effect is that it seems to stretch on interminably. I doubt there could be a better way of making a visitor aware of the importance of this war in Russian history. But in an altogether different part of the museum, I found something rather incongruous with this gallery: large portraits of Napoleon and Josephine.

All in all, I can say the Hermitage completely overwhelms in its opulence. If I ever needed a primer on why there was a revolution in Russia, the Hermitage provided it. What was most amazing, from what the guide told me, was how often rooms were redone in the Hermitage. It seemed that every czarina from Catherine the Great on felt a need to have completely new drawng room done up. By this, I mean not that the czarinas redecorated the old drawing rooms, but that they had completely new ones made within the Winter Palace.

The day following my jaunt to the Hermitage, I made my way to another of St. Petersburg's great palaces, Peterhof. Situated a bit out of the city center, Peterhof was the summer residence of the czars for many centuries and is most famous for its Grand Cascade, a series of water fountains and gilt statues one sees upon reaching the palace by boat (as I did, enjoying a short trip over the Gulf of Finland in a hydrofoil). The cascades themselves are breathtakingly beautiful, and I look forward to adding my photos of them to the blog whenever I find the cord to my digital camera, or figure out some other way of transferring them. While I did not go in the palace itself, I spent a splendid, albeit cold, afternoon exploring the Peterhof grounds.

My last day in St. Petersburg was, unfortunately, a bit of a disappointment. My leg began to hurt tremendously--I half-suspected I had twisted my ankle at Peterhof--but I forced myself to go to the Russian Museum, for a glimpse of the famous icons there. The Hermitage contains few works by Russian artists, these being instead held in the Russian Museum. I was hoping for a glance at the treasures of Russia's medieval past.

When I got to the museum, however, I found that the medieval section of the museum was closed for renovations. I did, howver, get a good look at various works from the 18th and 19th centuries in Russia, including Repin's famous painting of the barge haulers on the Volga that seems to be in every European History textbook's section on 19th-century Russia. Largely unknown outside of Russia, Repin enjoys great popularity in his native country. I feel I lack a sufficient knowledge of art to say one way or the other whether he is a great artist, but the paintings I saw of his I enjoyed quite a bit.

Overall, as I have said, my time in St. Petersburg has given me a bit of the travel bug. All kinds of destinations in Europe are floating through my head: Kiev, Vilnius, even London (a British teacher at my school has told me cheap flights to England can be had out of Riga, the capital of Estonia). The big question for me becomes whether I will stay in Russia long enough to let this bug run its course. I imagine it would take a couple of years here to earn enough money and have enough free time to see everything I want to see on the Continent.

The map is spread out before me. Which way I will go, I know not yet.