| The school year usually is over by the end of May, when the White Nights arrive in this city, to stay throughout the whole month of June. A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city, when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that |
 |
|
you can
almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink
tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river
almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the
islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift,
turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to
fall asleep, because it's too light and because any dream will be inferior
to this reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water. |
|
|
Petersburg is the fourth dimension that is not
indicated on maps. . . . It's not customary to mention that our capital
city belongs to the land of spirits when reference books are compiled.
Karl Baedeker keeps mum about it. A man from the provinces who hasn't been
informed of this takes only the visible administrative apparatus into
account; he has no shadow passport. |
|
|
|
|
|
The Nevsky Prospect always lies, but more than ever
when the thick mass of night settles over it and makes the white and
yellow walls of houses stand out, and when the whole town becomes
thunderous and dazzling, and myriad carriages roll down the street, and
postillions shout and mount their horses, and the devil himself lights the
lamps in order to show everything in an unreal light. --Nikolai Gogol (1835) |
 |
|
And do you know what a Petersburg dreamer is, gentlemen? . . . In the streets he walks, with a drooping head, paying little attention to his surroundings . . . but if he does notice something, even the most ordinary trifle, the most insignificant fact assumes a fantastic coloring in his mind. Indeed, his mind seems attuned to perceive the fantastic elements in everything. . . . These gentlemen are no good at all in the civil service, though they sometimes get jobs. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the Petersburg News, 1847 |
|