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  The table of contents is worn to holes. Through them one sometimes chances to catch a glimpse of the sun in the white nights. For me, this is probably the third June with snow on the trees. If we could sell this light, we would live like the Kuwaitis—until the ruin of Hollywood. In July the heat of blasting music fades, candle-lights get dim, exotic trophies get covered with a patina of chance, and the mirage of yet another golden season rises up behind your back.

  But the gold doesn’t stick. Someone is holding a glass or a phone receiver, someone else has the perfect knowledge of geographical maps or at least playing cards; many circumstances turn out to be much more complicated than they appeared in spring or simply last year. Only mathematics seems transparent; everything else seeks superiority or to be exiled in history.


The swallows are back under the roofs, and the sparrow orgies at five in the morning have stopped.

  The advantage of postcards or reports, it seems, is that they first give us only one snapshot, then another one, and later a few more. In this context, “the journalist” is like a character from a folktale where he tries to put together a name from the fragments of frozen water, and the last letter always slips away like a melting crystal.

  But no matter how many postcards attempt to reconstruct the city from various redeemable angles, the right map appears on the table, inexplicably connecting the sites of an unfinished motorway, Taurida—long without water, the sleepless gulf, pedestrians caught in a certain aperture of the slanting muslin of movement, dew on ghostly tram tracks, myopic opera house boxes . . . An endless debate—is this the city?

  What we have listed here is enough for the Great Wall of China. The dissensions are also included in the sum of property and distance, along with world festivals, fountains, phantasms, or discussions on how to turn the city into another cosmopolitan Havana—although its Harbor has been and will be there till the end of time.


One can distinguish various contours in the optics of Petersburg. To some, they appear as harmonious colonnades of reason and splendor amidst curtains of nostalgia. To others—as intricate configurations of power and its attributes. And yet to thirds, these outlines form the impenetrable concerns of everyday life, where fragile things, half-abraded by repetition, surface in unexpected arrangements, revealing remarkable uniqueness, like, for example, a newspaper photograph behind the wallpaper, a brass thimble lost somewhere on the floor, Arsenyev’s third volume by GosLit, laughter behind the wall, and if jasmine blooms are in season, nobody will notice the burning garbage cans around the corner.

 I don’t remember exactly, but it seems in the 60s a man was filmed in New York, sleeping (for 12 hours?). The man slept, the camera kept filming. The entire reel was a sleeping man—they didn’t capture his dreams, it was left unmontaged. Sokurov filmed the Hermitage much later. Could one assume that the man dreamed he was sleeping and that the camera was relentlessly documenting, in phases, his trembling half-existence and the running shadows of the receding day or approaching sunrise?

Can we presume that Petersburg dreams, too, how it emerges out of the endlessly self-erasing descriptions of one and the same old self?

  But splitting is always a parting from the whole. And sooner or later something other than a harrowing disappointment or disconnection is formed from this irreducible parting. At the same time, the bifurcation, the parting results not from the intention of merely looking at yourself, but looking at you gazing “at yourself” with enchantment. In some sense Petersburg literature owes a great deal to such an enterprise and its best descriptions can never be brought to a full circle.


At times, one may come across spaces of extreme visual minimalism past those descriptions, such as the unsophisticated five-story Khruschevka buildings, junked cars by the pavements, and lovely wastelands drowning in amethyst sally-blooms, broken bricks, and outbreaks of coltsfoot bushes.

  Here, the same postcards reveal something completely different. Imagine the number of montages they’ll have to undergo. Sometimes the black peats burn beyond the horizon of Porokhovye. The air thickens. Time becomes tangibly reified, and fact, message, event enter the field of dangerous proximity.

  And yet, the thickness of the air—like silence or a ringing in the ear—can hardly ever be listed as an event.


A “snapshot” of a city as such probably doesn’t exist at all. The association with another city, country, language, memories of books read or lost in Cairo, Paris, Stockholm stretch the transparent layers of the fabric that we’d like to (erroneously) consider as “the only” impression and final conclusion.

  I’m not fully convinced that I’ve listed everything in the correct order. Things may appear differently. Likewise, a certain event can be made into fact. There is, doubtlessly, a message in between. Does it change anything? It’s hard to tell. First of all, it probably changes the person who creates it. Then the message transforms to something else, another element is added. Sometimes it may turn into dreams, sometimes into a self-sufficient fact.

  After a while, you frantically dial a number and tell the person on the other end that the panorama isn’t composed of a mosaic of snapshots arranged along the axes of values and valuables, and that it’s not a matter of taking a few steps back so as to see everything as a whole, but that actually there are no such spaces as “the back,” just as there are no final facts full of promises to experience an event.


I don’t like snapshots, they kill imagination, driving boredom to a sappy hedonism, and consequently, to irony. It would be quite right to say that Petersburg became a collection of postcards a long time ago: voluptuous harpists lasciviously leaning onto Titian’s bed-foot in the light of the flaming Rostral Columns, or the lamps of a night club where the front entrance is crowded with yet another folio of more than familiar faces, a couple of which haven’t been devoid of appearing on gaudy book covers, and others, whom one can grant a thoughtless nod, of appearing in newspaper headlines.

  A familiar signboard might flash somewhere—fassbinder, beer, chekhov, a message to man . . . Signboards can also be a Primer, a quite bizarre one: it can help one unlearn how to read by reducing consciousness to a world of arrows and symbols.

  It’s odd that no one publishes photo albums (with morocco bindings) of train station kiosks and carefree people on lawns, images of Grazhdanka, Porokhovye, Vesely Poselok, and other bleak suburbs . . . Could it be that these spaces are substantially less valuable than the Hermitage and its surroundings?

  Frankly speaking, I like spaces that happen to be on the “brinks.” I come from there, having received from life more than anyone could possibly imagine. But the desired snapshot shouldn’t consist of competing postcards juxtaposed to one another. Nor should it consist of cross-stitches between obligation and inevitability.

  Rather, it should consist of facts rooted in experience based on events inspired by dreams (it’s simply impossible that someone’s camera hasn’t captured them); and after that we should have, again, a description, a retelling, a rumor, and yet another encounter with some event.

  In its hasty speeches—this is where Petersburg’s notorious mythology seems to originate. Its love of shells, the precipitance of the barreled river and the carefully concealed passion for duality and mirrors. But you notice a shadow on the asphalt, the rustling of a sick poplar, a dirty fourth-floor window—love probably never passed through here—and high up, the swift swallows, sowing canvasses of continuity. In response, you gesture something filled with uncertainty.


Was it really there or here that memories, stubbornly evading public attention, were written and sent off into the future—memories amazing in their beauty and restraint? Was it there or here that quiet ideas were proclaimed, construing unnoticeably revolutionary manifestos that were supposed to change the world?

  But those ideas couldn’t change the geography or methods to adapt it. The weather hasn’t been the same for years.

  Permanence is one of the facets of metamorphoses. I agree, to a certain degree, we indeed consist of the fabric of the same “memories” that ceaselessly transform us into something else. Sometimes, with a bit of a stretch, we can liken “memories” to roads. Some are broken, others consume dreams, bicycle wheels, time, money, and speculated bends.


Petersburg, they say, is somewhat different from other cities. Indeed, many cities were “created” by means of seed and residue and then slowly bloomed with noble nodules, falling into an endless lethargy of efficiency. Let’s imagine how hundreds and thousands of histories unfold. And we, looking out as though from the back window of a car, see things, objects that appear as if from nowhere, inscribing themselves in the field of vision of our present time.

  Then everything—the landscape consists of—“ages,” as it were, shrinks, and disappears beyond the horizon. And everything becomes, on the one hand, memory, and on the other hand—past (it’s unclear what comes first and what second)—a residue of vision that we know exists. Let’s use a familiar metaphor: time passes, its residue remains.

  Sometimes cities symbolize that residue. Petersburg, however, is not the residue of history. It’s a place created by a momentary force, a momentous and destructive lightning that reversed vision. This is where the difference lies, and hence creates a different perspective—even if the perspective comes from a juxtaposition of postcards, from where this city will only begin, with certain anticipation, for the outsider. And it will never be defined or trespassed because it’s within its own limits.

  This may be why it becomes for many the labor of idleness and exclusion, including the margins of understanding that Petersburg appears first and foremost as a pure form of desire.