Peter the Great's U topia: S t. P etersburg as an A sian City

Abstract

Peter the Great's Utopia: St. Petersburg as an Asian City Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich Town so gorgeous, town of beggars, Air of slavery, splendid face, Pale green archway of your heaven, Boredom, cold, and granite grace. (A. Pushkin) What will be presented here is a hypothesis, which emerged in the process of writing an article about Thomas More's most famous book, Utopia. Utopian thought and architectural planning have a fundamental connection: both strive to form social space according to certain ideal. In More's Utopia, this ideal has a direct model: Plato's Republic. Multiple parallels between More's Utopia and Plato's Republic have been well documented and are easily verifiable. This essay will argue that the conception of the city of St. Petersburg might be to a certain extent related to both of the above‐mentioned utopian texts. To the best of my knowledge, St. Petersburg's connection to the European utopian tradition has not yet been the subject of academic research. This is not to say that the city's utopian nature has not been commented upon before. On the contrary, observations concerning the city's unnatural, deceitful, and faux air have long become commonplace in Russian literature and especially in the early 20th century poetry. The Russian researchers N. Bystrov and I. Polyakova recently wrote an article with the explicit title “St. Petersburg as Utopia,” wherein they stress the strange бeзвpeмeньe (extemporal aspect) of the city, its lack of connection to both time and space, which are due to the city's utopian origin. This origin itself, however, has remained unclear. It is evident that from the beginning, Peter strove to re‐create his capital after a certain model in which Lindsey Hughes, albeit dimly, perceives, for example, the idea of a “pleasant place” (locus amoenus) associated with Ovid's metamorphoses. However, considering Peter's education, on which more will be said further on, the tsar's familiarity with Ovid seems rather unlikely. Also, Peter's emphasis on the military, administrative, and bureaucratic aspects of St. Petersburg project does not fit the Ovidian pattern. St. Petersburg does not correspond to the native Russian utopian model either. For, according to the legend, the utopian city of Kitezh was situated on the lake in the splendid wooden area in central Russia, and disappeared in the depths of the lake upon contact with the hordes of Asian invaders. Neither St. Petersburg's political purpose nor its geography of a swampy wasteland matches this description. In this essay, my aim is to make a case of the city's connection to Plato's utopian construct. I believe that, although indirect and hidden, this connection concerns the major component of Plato's Republic: the idea of utopia as a state machine. This element of Plato's work has been initially explored in Louis Mumford's brilliant 1966 article “Utopia, the City and the Machine.” Mumford convincingly argues that Plato's social model is oriented not toward the future but toward the past and is inspired not by the Greek but by the ancient Asian, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian societal organization. According to Mumford, Plato's choice of inspiration was conditioned by his bitterness over Athens’ military defeats in the Peloponnesian War, which was due, in large part, to the internal instability of Greek cities: “[…] the constitution and daily discipline of Plato's ideal commonwealth converge to a single end: fitness for making war.” It is with Plato that the classic elements of the ancient Asian despotic city‐state enter into the conception of urban utopia: it is isolated, rigidly stratified, planned according to cosmic patterns, closely controlled, highly regulated, and driven by the absolute power of the king. By means of putting together Mumford's arguments and examining, one by one, the similarities between Plato's Republic and the archaic Asian city, the parallel with St. Petersburg will appear not so far‐fetched. The ancient Asian city is, first of all, “the creation of a king acting in the name of a god, a sacred place.” Second, the king's first act, at the foundation of the city, is the erection of a temple within a heavily walled...