The meadows, marshes, and birch forests were spread with a low-hanging mist and dusted with Queen Anne’s lace. In the little clusters of farmsteads, only the corrugated roofing and the occasional single thread of electric wire indicated modern times. The houses were built of logs with gables, eaves, and small, deep- set windows decorated with hand carvings. There is an open-air museum, the Skansen, in Stockholm, where dwellings like these have been preserved. The home that I saw in the Skansen that most resembled the homes I was looking at now dated from the sixteenth century. In Russia, people are still living in them. Potato plants grew up to the front doors. Open wells and outhouses stood in the yards. I counted one truck and a motorcycle. This is the part of Russia that’s closest to Western Europe. This is the route between the nation’s two historic capitals. And for one complete hour, looking out that train window, I did not see a paved road. In the morning in St. Petersburg, I went to the Winter Palace. From across the Russian-size expanse of Palace Square, it was an impressive building, becoming less so as I walked toward it, following the path that charging Bolsheviks didn’t actually take when they didn’t really storm the Winter Palace, which wasn’t in fact defended by the czar and his minions but by members of a moderate provisional government. But it made a great visual in the Sergei Eisenstein film October, and that is more than the Winter Palace does in person. It is painted call-the-lawn-service green picked out in lardy white and cheap gilding. Ugly statues and clumsy urns line the cornice tops. Whole families of servants used to live up there, performing such tasks as keeping the royal plumbing from freezing by dropping hot cannonballs into the cisterns. They built huts between the chimneys and fed goats on the grass that grew on the roof. The building was designed in 1754 by Bartolomeo Rastrelli. He spent most of his life in Russia, and it shows. The look is Go for Baroque. In unimaginative decoration, coarseness of detail, and infelicity of proportion, the Winter Palace has everything Stalin would want 200 years later. The Hermitage museum, housed inside, is not much better. There is spectacular art—El Greco’s The Apostles Peter and Paul, Filippo Lippi’s Adoration of the Infant Christ, Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna, Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross. But there is so much art that, just as a statistical matter, some of it would have to be spectacular. And most of it’s junk. There are Titian rent-payers, Peter Paul Rubens factory seconds, Watteaus painted by the yard, rooms full of Dutch genre paintings that explain the phrase
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online