Though St. Petersburg is extravagantly picturesque, offering the pedestrian winding canals, candy-colored buildings, and fancy-capped churches each way she turns, I’ll remember the city for the decoration of its interiors, particularly the stonework in its churches.

Inside Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral on the island fortress, there are monolithic tombs for Alexander II and Empress Maria carved from deep green jasper and mottled pink rhodonite whose otherworldly hues and markings befit a tsar and his wife. The chunks of stone are very literally magnetic, drawing one forward. The inside of the Cathedral of Our Lady of St. Kazan is crowded with religious paintings, gilded trim, brass chandeliers, wreaths of lit candles, bearded priests, and praying babushkas. And the walls and floors are lined with stones the likes of which I have never seen before. The floor is a mosaic of different dark, tumultuously-patterned varieties, the tiles of each worn to different depth because of its unique hardnesses. There are pilasters flanking the altar carved from lapis lazuli and malachite, their blue and green the strongest, purist colors I’ve ever seen. It’s suddenly obvious why the stones are precious, and why they’re employed here in the service of the divine. There’s something in the way strongly colored and patterned stones are used so liberally in (many are mined in the Urals) that’s particularly revealing. The stone isn’t subservient to the architecture or ornament; it remains a substance with marvelous properties.

July 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

One thing I did not see nearly enough of in Russia was Bad Communist Architecture. You know, the sort of overbearing, rationalist, concrete megaliths we associate with the cold war. There were, in the parts of St. Petersburg I visited, precious few communist-era buildings to be seen, and those were sedately neoclassical. The entire city seems to have been restored to its picturesque eighteenth-century origins. It wasn’t until we arrived at St. Petersburg’s Moscow Station (Moskovsky Vokzal) that I found what I’d been searching for.

While the main station is from the nineteenth century, the small hall from which we departed is from 1912. It’s a simple concrete shell with bare walls, clerestory windows, and a triangulated concrete ceiling, anchored by a giant bust of Peter the Great raised on a pillar right in the middle. (The bust was added in 1993.) Light from the clerestories threw delicate shadows across the concrete, giving the entire space a special softness. The design isn’t terribly complicated (just compare this ceiling to the triangulated concrete ceilings of Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery), but it’s simple, handsome and well-proportioned. Peter the Great’s presence is a bit bombastic but adds warmth, focus, and a sense of history. Maybe without it the hall would have felt exactly like one of the sturdy, unglamorous communist buildings I was romanticizing.

July 19, 2012 by Nalina Moses

If you love a man or woman in a uniform, then you will love the crowds of them milling about Plaza Square in St. Petersburg, near the naval training academy (Admiralty). Both the men and women wear dark olive jackets embellished with red trim. The men top off the look with big, round concave hats that rise dramatically in front and frame their faces like halos. (Their shape reminds me of the asymmetrical bowls that trendy pan-Asian restaurants serve noodles in.) The men in the city’s police force wear similar hats, in black. The women soldiers and officers, rather sadly, wear peaked flight-attendant-style caps that don’t do justice to their powerful roles.

After arriving in Russia I was starved to see those things that were authentically Russian, and these hats struck me so. They’re modern, exotic, and old-school communist. Each time I saw a man wearing one I had to stop and stare and say a silent prayer in appreciation. It’s easy to sport a hat that’s practical (like a knit skullcap) or fashionable (like a baseball hat). But the men wearing these sloping-bowl-hats are going out on a limb, wearing an accessory, like a bustle or heels, that isn’t absolutely necessary and that requires considerable poise. In St. Petersbirg the men in uniform are participating hard in fashion.

July 18, 2012 by Nalina Moses

After seeing the rooms of the Winter Palace, two Leonardo da Vinci canvases, and twenty-six Rembrandt canvases, museum fatigue set in and I was ready to leave the Hermitage. Just then our guide dropped us off on the third floor, where the modern paintings are, and my energy level exploded. The thirty-seven small galleries here are crammed with pieces from Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne and other masters. They rival the selection of modern paintings on display at MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the heart of the collection are a number of groundbreaking works by Henri Matisse, including Dance and Red Room. Seeing Dance for the first time, after knowing it from reproductions, was convulsive. It’s huge, like a mural, and rendered in sour, unpretty reddish hues. Seen at this scale, practically life-size, the flatness of the rendering is incredibly brazen. It’s not pictorial really and not graphic really and yet it depicts a world that is, dramatically and spatially, complete. The canvas was coursing with energy, as if it would burst from the wall. (It would certainly benefit from being moved to a larger gallery.) My favorite Matisse was Game of Bowls, a smaller canvas that shows three boys playing on the lawn. The composition is simple, strange and calm. There is something primal about the means – smears of color – with which the boys are rendered, and with which their joy is captured. Standing in front, I felt the jolt that turn-of-the-century Parisians must have felt when encountering modern painting for the first time.

July 17, 2012 by Nalina Moses