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The idea of Moscow as a 'Russian' city developed from the notion of St Petersburg as a foreign civilization. The literary conception of St Petersburg as an alien and an artificial place became commonplace after 1812, as the romantic yearning for a more authentically national way of life seized hold of the literary imagination. But the foreign

character of Petersburg had always been a part of its popular mythology. From the moment it was built, traditionalists attacked it for its European ways. Among the Old Believers, the Cossacks and the peasants, rumours spread that Peter was a German, and not the real Tsar, largely on account of the foreigners he had brought to Petersburg and the attendant evils of European dress, tobacco, and the shaving-off of beards. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was a thriving underground mythology of tales and rumours about Petersburg. Stories abounded of the ghost of Peter walking through the streets, of weird mythic beasts hopping over churches, or of all-destroying floods washing up the skeletons of those who had perished in the building of the town.²⁰ This oral genre later nourished in the literary salons of St Petersburg and Moscow, where writers such as Pushkin and Odoev-sky used it as the basis of their own ghost stories from the capital. And so the myth of Petersburg took shape - an unreal city that was alien to Russia, a supernatural realm of fantasies and ghosts, a kingdom of oppression and apocalypse.

Pushkin's Bronze Horseman - subtitled a 'Tale of Petersburg' - was the founding text of this literary myth. The poem was inspired by Falconet's equestrian statue of Peter the Great which stands on Senate Square as the city's genus loci. Like the poem that would make it so famous, the statue symbolized the dangerous underpinning of the capital's imperial grandeur - on the one hand trumpeting Peter's dazzling achievements in surpassing nature and, on the other, leaving it unclear to what extent he actually controlled the horse. Was he about to fall or soar up into space? Was he urging his mount on or trying to restrain it in the face of some catastrophe? The horseman seemed to teeter on the edge of an abyss, held back only by the taut reins of his steed.²¹ The huge granite rock - so wild in its appearance - on which the statue stood, was itself an emblem of the tragic struggle between man and nature. The city hewn in stone is never wholly safe from the incursions of the watery chaos from which it was claimed, and this sense of living on the edge was wonderfully conveyed by Falconet.

In 1909 a technical commission inspected the statue. Engineers bored holes into the bronze. They had to pump out 1,500 litres of water from inside.²² Without protective dikes, flooding was a constant threat to Petersburg. Pushkin set his poem in 1824, the year of one

10. Etienne-Maurice Falconet: The Bronze Horseman. Monument to Peter the Great, 1782

such flood. The Bronze Horseman tells the story of the flood and a sad clerk called Eugene, who finds the house of his beloved, Parasha, washed away. Driven to the verge of madness, Eugene roams the city and, coming across Falconet's horseman, castigates the Tsar for having built a city at the mercy of the flood. The statue stirs in anger and chases the poor clerk, who runs all night in terror of its thundering brass hooves. Eugene's body is finally washed up on the little island where Parasha's house was taken by the flood. The poem can be read in many different ways - as a clash between the state and the individual, progress and tradition, the city and nature, the autocracy and the people - and it was the standard by which all those later writers, from Gogol to Bely, debated the significance of Russia's destiny:

Proud charger, whither art thou ridden? Where leapest thou? and where, on whom Wilt plant thy hoof?²³

For the Slavophiles, Peter's city was a symbol of the catastrophic rupture with Holy Rus'; for the Westerners, a progressive sign of Russia's Europeanization. For some, it was the triumph of a civilization, the conquering of nature by order and reason; for others, it was a monstrous artifice, an empire built on human suffering that was tragically doomed.