Leningrad Cares For The Past

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30959, 15 January 1966, Page 5

Leningrad Cares For The Past

[By ROGER COVELL in the "Sydney Morning Herald”] JN the Palace of Marriage on the Neva Embankment of Leningrad the loud-speakers are cheerfully pouring out “Wouldn’t it be luverly” from “My Fair Lady” as bride and groom descend the main marble steps on their way out to married life together.

The ground floor bustles with young people making appointments for similar occasions in a month’s time and at the pavement outside a small queue of Volga taxis contains a succession of couples waiting their turn to go through the marriage cere-

mony within the next hour or so. The ceremony will not be elaborate. It consists of a short address from a deputy of the city soviet, an exchange of rings and declarations, a few flashes from the resident photographer. Perhaps there will also be a pre-marriage snack taken from a long table on which the champagne buckets glisten with permanent plastic ice. But if the ceremony is plain (it was not considered at all surprising that no parents attended the marriage we were allowed to observe) the surroundings, provided free, are much more splendid with gilding and candelabra than most brides and grooms elsewhere can expect to enjoy, however briefly. The Palace of Marriage is nothing less than its name implies: it is a genuine palace, one of the many Leningrad palaces that formerly belonged to the Tsar’s immediate family. Six years ago it was converted to its present use as the first Palace of Marriage in the Soviet Union. Before that, couples about to marry had to go to a general registry office where they were likely to find themselves queueing behind people waiting to record divorces or deaths.

Marriage Centre Now the practice of providing a special, handsomely decorated centre for marriages is spreading rapidly to other cities and young couples themselves, after some initial hesitation, are taking advantage of it with galloping enthusiasm. Leningrad already has a second marriage centre and is preparing another palace exclusively for the registration of babies. In an English-speaking postrevolutionary society the word “palace” would probably be shunned for its past associations of aristocracy and privilege. Not so in the Soviet Union, and particularly not in Leningrad, which must have more palaces to the square mile than any other city on earth. One of our Leningrad hosts surmised that there are thousands of them. I suppose he was exaggerating. But if anyone put the total at hundreds I should be inclined to believe him. The summit of the Leningrad palaces is the former Winter Palace, generally known as the Hermitage art collection and museum (from the name once given to the Empress Catherine’s private suite), a green and white structure so astonishingly elaborate and well kept that it makes Versailles seem almost mean and dingy by comparison. But some of its smaller companions are hardly less fine in detail and unquestionably surpass it in unity of decoration.

Useful Role Like the Hermitage itself, the former noble palaces and wealthy merchant houses are now all doing useful Soviet work housing institutes, museums, rest centres, the headquarters of writers and composers’ unions, the Home for Veterans of the Stage, and so on. But that does not mean that the Leningraders are careless of their traditional character.

The centre of the city remains much as it was in Tsarist days, with low, formally cut buildings (Nicholas I decreed that all other secular buildings had to be at least seven feet lower than the Winter Palace) flanking the banks of the Neva or parading down both sides of the Nevsky ProspekL

Someone is sure to have called Leningrad the Venice of the North, but it needs no such catch-penny title. With it 101 islands and 620 bridges, some of them no more than affectionate humps over narrow canals, it is a water-cradled wonder and delight among cities, with a character all its own. We were lucky enough to arrive on one of its rare mornings of November sunlight, when the spires of the Peter and Paul fortress and the old Admiralty and the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral shone bright gold among the coot symmetry of the city’s classically proportioned streets and squares.

900-Day Siege The most baffling first impression of Leningrad is that it should look so serene and untouched, as though the terrible 900-day siege of the Second World War, which killed half the city’s population of the time and shattered many of its finest buildings, had never happened- The museum of the city’s history, masterfully planned and executed, assures us otherwise. Yet the older buildings have been restored so well that the centre of the city is almost completely preserved in its eighteenth and nineteenthcentury form.

“In Leningrad we like to preserve our style” was how one of our hosts put it in a tone of some considerable satisfaction. Indeed, they do. Leningrad remains, as it evidently has always been, a strikingly different city from Moscow.

Moscow’s grand buildings are mostly assertive, rather bombastic parvenus, Its streets, shoes and manners are muddier. It is a vast graceless, awesome power-house of a city.

Vodka For Visitors Leningrad is smaller, with less than half of Moscow’s eight million people, more elegant and cosmopolitan, better dressed, perhaps a little smug. It has only 13 theatres to Moscow’s 30: it sometimes seems a city of museums. But it is impossible not to sense that its citizens feel they live in the finest city of the Soviet Union, difficult not to agree with them; and, in spite of Leningrad’s massive concern for the past—particularly for the careers of Peter the Great and Lenin, its eponym—even loyal Muscovites sometimes admit that ideas are still often brought to birth in Leningrad and then adopted on a bigger scale in Moscow.

Leningrad’s care for the past (a tradition reportedly begun by Peter the Great himself when he encouraged the first Leningraders to visit his natural history museum by offering them free tots of vodka) is not restricted to maintaining or rebuilding the exteriors of its older buildings.

The skill and care devoted to the accurate preservation of the interiors of these buildings could hardly be surpassed. lam not at all surprised to learn that one of Leningrad’s principal art institutes has a department assigned to scientific training in restoring paintings and historical interiors. It has every reason to be proud of its graduates, intricate gilt work and wood carving in styles not attempted for generations seem to come easily to them.

House Of Friendship

One of the most recently completed samples of its works is the House of Friendship, the Leningrad headquarters of our official hosts. With ceilings finely embossed in gilt and sealing wax red, lovingly polished doors and a generous share of the seem-

ingly never-ending supply of dazzling Leningrad chandeliers, it possibly surpasses in appearance even the glories of the days when it belonged to the Shovalov family.

10 Years To Clean But the most ambitious and touching work of restoration of Leningrad’s specialist craftsmen and designers is taking place outside Leningrad at Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo or Tsar’s village) in the shell of Catherine the Great’s Summer Palace. Even before the Second World War this palace had become one of the Soviet’s most popular museums, with up to a million people passing through it each year. Some 20,000 items of its treasures of ornament and furnishing were evacuated to safe storage at the beginning of the war, but German soldiers left the palace building a ruin and destroyed most of its contents. It took until 1957 to clear the rubble. The reconstruction begun then has already cost more than £1,500,000 and will require at least as much again before it is finished. We tied on carpet-soled overshoes to avoid marking the palace’s pew parquet flooring. The guide showed us pictures of the postwar ruins and then the coloured ground plan on which experts have set out the priorities of reconstruction: one colour for rooms that can be brought back to their original state with comparative speed and certainty, another for sections of the palace for which the necessary evidence is relatively scanty or will take longer to assemble, a third—depressingly large in area—for rooms thoroughly destroyed that there is no foreseeable hope of their satis-

Across s—Straight stroke. (4) 7 Might one call it an airship? (5-5) 8— Check for parasite. (4) 10— Unusual dance, wriggling toe? What a story! (8) 11 — Twists about fifty, lying carelessly. (6) 12— Russian was returning the blarney. (6) 14—Lines not for the players, though a team’s involved. (6) 16— Cured fish in cooler outside hotel. (6) 17— Oxford man in the navy? (4, 4) 19—Songs in some plays. (4) 21— Study an account for a change. (10) 22 Sounds a feeble time. (4)

factory restoration. One room contains a sample of the original inlaid flooring from the throne room: the rest was used for firewood by German troops. It will be another five years before the throne room resembles the small, painstakingly detailed models and plans that represent it now.

But there are a few. more cheerful instances of the restorers’ improving on the palace’s recent history. The decorated ceiling of its blue ceremonial room had never been replaced after the huge fire of 1820, because the master plans of Charles Cameron, the Scottish architect who supervised the last main restyling of the building, had been lost. These plans have recently been found by art experts rummaging through the archives of the Hermitage, with the result that the ceiling of the blue room now conforms to Cameron’s designs for the first time in nearly 150 years. Cultural Taxidermy

Admittedly, Leningrad's restoration of its palaces can be viewed as only a kind of cultural taxidermy. But at least it is the noblest kind of taxidermy; the preservation of a sumptuous heritage that is quite evidently seen not to be the property of any one class or period. If it reinforces uneasy thoughts about the backwardlooking nature of much (not all) Soviet visual art, it also rouses speculation on the fruitful effect that the patient and public cultivation of grace and fine detail may have on future generations of Soviet citizens. If it has no longterm effect of this creative kind, the process of taxidermy will still be noble but it might well become ultimately depressing.

Down 1— Scoring attempt photographed. (4) 2 Sailor, having pack, distributed cards. (4-4) 3 Bob, breaking the law, holds creditor —write hurried note. (6) 4 Certain birds catch fish in them. (6) 5 Preliminary sketch not finished—saw the boss. (4) 6 Could pay to reach for old chemist. (10) 9—l am good enough not to be crossed. (10) 13—Hauling machine might leave girl breathless. (8) 15— Listen to mum! (6) 16— Tentative proposal touching organ. (6) 18—Pleasurable thrill a gun can give. (4) 20—May show that time is literally running out! (4) (Solution Page 3>