A city of five million, St. Petersburg (formerly, Leningrad) is often referred to as the cultural capital of Russia. It is one of the world's strangest and most fascinating cities. Founded by Peter the Great, in 1703, on a barren, marshy Baltic shore (a singularly unlikely, inauspicious locale!), St. Petersburg has been from the start, from its very blood-soaked beginnings, a dolorous place of unarticulated mystery, inexpressible existential angst and evanescent nocturnal light (the fabled "white nights," in June-July); a decidedly surreal stage, upon which the iron-clad European architectural classicism and bureaucratic pragmatism continually clashed with the sheer unruliness of a famed (if forever ill-defined) Russian spirit. Like its silvery reflection in the free-flowing Neva, St. Petersburg effortlessly defies one's mind's eye's repeated post-factum attempts to reduce its forever-changing, amalgamated image to a picture-postcard frozenness; at any given point in time, it is many different cities in one: it is a city of starchy imperial granite facades and mega-majestic Italianate palazzos, peeling lemon-yellow facades, decrepit litter-strewn stray cat-owned inner courtyards (whose entirety forms a veritable city within a city), desolate echoing silences, long vertical shadows at midnight, empty water-bound perspectives, low Arctic sky, blinding glare of the unseen afternoon sun, ostentatious (banana republic-style) opulence and equally fantastic poverty; it is a city that never sleeps during the fleeting summer months... It is a city of inordinate, staggering beauty borne out of profound sadness. An unforgettable city.

LITERATURE AND ST. PETERSBURG

This remarkable city (artifice incarnate, both in concept and its realization) is as much a literary paradigm as it is, for instance, the home of the Hermitage or a year-round seaport--in other words, there is nothing esoteric, or even remotely far-fetched, about the fact of its having been shaped (and repeatedly reshaped, made over), to a large extent, by the power of fevered literary imaginings. Often unbeknownst to its inhabitants, it lives and breathes literature. It is a product of its own mythology, the ultimate chameleon of urbanity (or if you will, a mood ring: the color of its disposition is strictly in the beholder's eye); for there are as many different St. Petersburg's as there were bona fide literary geniuses who, over the past almost three centuries, have felt compelled to write about it: think Pushkin (Eugene Onegin,The Bronze Horseman), think Gogol (Nevsky Prospekt, The Nose, The Overcoat), think Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment,The Idiot, The Poor People, White Nights). Think Andrei Bely (Petersburg). Think Alexandre Blok (The Twelve). Think Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel. Think Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko. Think the great exiles Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Think... but the list is too endless. Think: vita brevis, ars longa. Or vice versa.