In this very strange year for weather unseasonable floods have been reported in some parts of the world. I was reminded of this recently when giving my talk ‘The Bronze Horseman, A tale of Peterburg’ to a group of hospitable WI Members in Long Melford.
The talk focusses on Peter the Great and the founding of St Petersburg, and in it I look at Peter’s legacy through the prism of two works of art: Falconet’s great equestrian statue of Peter that stands in Senate Square, and Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman. In both the Great Flood that occurred in 1824 and the statue of the horseman take pride of place.
The historian, James Cracraft, wrote in his book on Petrine Architecture about the founding of the city that
‘a less auspicious setting in which to found a city is difficult to imagine.’ The site of St. Petersburg violates virtually every principle of good town planning. Its climate is damp, it is frozen up for roughly 150 days a year, its soil is poor, it is miles from trade routes, being the most northerly in the world, roughly on a level with Hudson Bay. Most important for our purposes is the city’s propensity to flood. In 1986 the city had already flooded 269 times since its foundation. The floods were generally storm surges, where an unfortunate combination of wind and tide led to the inundation.’
I have always been fascinated by the picture by Fyodor Alexeyev (1754-1824) of the Great flood of 1824, shown above. This was the artist’s last picture and he is depicting a very recent event. The scene is Theatre Square. The flood itself is of course dramatic, but perhaps even more interesting are the scenes of Petersburg life that can be seen struggling through, and sometimes under, the water. A grandee is making his way home in his carriage, a droshky is almost submerged under the waves. To the right of the picture an officer of the horse-guards tries to rescue a capsized boat.
Another contemporary, the playwright Alexander Griboyedov, wrote in his memoirs:
’The embankments of the various canals had disappeared and all the canals had united into one. Hundred-year-old trees in the Summer Garden were ripped from the ground and lying in rows, roots upward.’
When the waters finally receded 569 people were dead, and thousands more had been injured. More than 300 buildings had been washed away. Today of course the city is protected by flood defences completed in 2011, which successfully averted what would have been the 309th flood!