“Do you like street singing?” Raskolnikov suddenly addressed an elderly passer-by, looking like a flaneur, who was standing beside him at the barrel organ. Astonished, the man threw a bewildered glance at him. “I do,” Raskolnikov went on as though he was speaking of something else. “I like to hear them sing to the music of the barrel organ on a cold, dark and damp autumn evening, when all passers-by look sick and pale-green. Or better yet, when there is no wind, and wet snow falls straight, you know, with gas lamps shining through it…““I don’t know… Excuse me..,” muttered the man, frightened both by the question and Raskolnikov’s odd appearance, and passed to the other side of the street.”This excerpt from Dostoyevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” tells, certainly, not about love for street singing, but about love for Saint-Petersburg. A person who cannot love dank weather, deserted wells of courtyards, desolation, eternal restoration, greenish patches on bronze railings and the marks of dampness that turn walls into abstract poems; such a person cannot love this city – one which is much more beautiful in its untidy grandeur than in the plastered and varnished form the authorities constantly try to impart to it. In expectation of its 300th jubilee, the city has been doomed to Euro-repairs.  Count Stroganov’s palace has already jumped out of its scaffolding, frisky and pink as a newly-born piglet at a model pig-farm, squealing to the whole Nevsky Prospect, “I am new, new, recently repaired, look at me; I am painted, painted according to Rastrelli’s project...” But there is a ring of falsehood in this squeal, and we hardly believe that it was done according to Rastrelli’s project (if it was, woe to Rastrelli!). Saint-Petersburg must be dark and majestic. It shouldn’t have the excessively joyful squeal of fresh make-up, the marble prettiness of Malaya Sadovaya and Malaya Konyushennaya, for the city has gotten accustomed to resisting new building, so alien to it, with its frowned gloom.  Everyone who saw the city during or immediately after the war asserts that abandoned and devastated, Saint-Petersburg was the most beautiful and majestic, as beautiful as it will ever be. The fate of the city is in fact quite sad – to look beautiful in its final hour, when its residents are doomed. This is the beauty of arrogance and selfishness, since a city must be intended for life, not for death.  But Saint-Petersburg is a special city with special inhabitants that have never abandoned it: angels, gods, heroes – so proudly and unprotectedly naked, freezing in the rains, winds and snowstorms, though firmly opposing all woes accompanying their difficult existence. Their eyes are vacant, their bodies are perfect, and their unruffled calmness is a model of true Saint-Petersburg behavior. Natural emptiness is as typical of Saint-Petersburg as rush is typical of Moscow, and the largest crowd among Petersburg’s colonnades and arches seems to be a mere link of lonely dots. Saint-Petersburg is a city that nurses its solitude. For a year Saint-Petersburg has been standing still, facing what many people call its revival. Out of the scaffolding and polythene bags must jump a fresh, neat city resembling scenery for a cheap, but fitting film version of the life of “the forerunners”. Sparkling cars will travel all over the city in a strict order, then stop by the entrances of banks, boutiques and restaurants finished with marble. Worthy gentlemen in suits, and ladies, also in suits, holding mobile phones of the latest model, will leave these cars and be met at the entrance by bronze statues of policeman, Ostap Bender, Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova – also all dressed in suits, deprived of that insolent vagrant nakedness typical of the autochthonic population of the city.An absolute paradise will come. Everyone will see how wonderful this world is, created by the jubilee repairs. Not one lover of street singing will be found in the whole city, so there will be no one to kill the old lady. Criminality will decrease, historical monuments will enrapture with their newness – everything will be as clean as under the emperors.But for the present, on the threshold of this promised paradise, the city has frozen in the greatness of a strange anonymity with buildings clad in scaffolding, like masquerade dominoes; scary, phantasmal, like a ball of ghosts in an abandoned palace. Wrapped not by an earthly artist, but by a heavenly demiurge, Saint-Petersburg has become unexpectedly and extravagantly beautiful, without losing its sublimity.  Monotonous heaviness has proven to be emphasized by the peculiar overalls, showing the imperial grandeur of Saint-Petersburg architecture. The city has turned into an enormous cocoon that conceals either a butterfly or a monstrous tarantula. The city became a monument to itself, a museum-necropolis in the open air only recently, in the last century, approximately at the same time that it changed its name for the first time. Actually, Saint-Petersburg, when it appeared on this earth, was the most modern city in Europe, being for Russia scaringly avant-garde. It was the idea of Peter the Great. Rus’ had neither seen anything of the kind before nor expected to see it. Therefore she treated the neonate with fear, as if it were a freak. She conceived hatred for it, then cursed the child feeling that it would bring misery upon her head. Thus, it was doomed to carry this curse through its whole history. Saint-Petersburg brought misfortune upon Russia just as tsarina Avdotya and all of rural, close-grained Muscovite Russia predicted it would. But it was punished, renamed in honor of an impostor who usurped power given by God, and was known under the pseudonym “Lenin”, which in no way could be called a surname. The impostor himself punished the city (that later obediently accepted his alias) having made Moscow the capital again, depriving Leningrad of all privileges a capital would possess.  Since then the city has had to drag out an existence of a museum in the open air, having turned into Pompeii, an assemblage of ruins valuable only from historical point of view.The very attire the city put on during the repairs revealed its radical structure in an unexpected way, hiding all details of the external décor that diverted attention from architectural might. Saint-Petersburg turned into phantasm, a city where no time, neither modern nor ancient, old nor new, has power. And such is Saint-Petersburg, a city, where only the residents it was intended for can live – its sculptures. Angels and snakes, martyrs and warriors, heathens and apostles proved to be endowed with a supernatural expression, the scaffolding emphasizing their special position in the city, not realized before.The purpose of the project that is the basis of this photography album is to imprint a unique moment in the history of city architecture, so unexpectedly transformed by the revelry of the construction carnival.  No one knows what the result will be – whether the city will turn into a varnished model of a new Russian Petersburg or obtain a new life and a new grandeur. Yet it will undoubtedly never look so strikingly and scaringly extravagant.



A. Ippolitov,  2003