Letter from St Petersburg, by the Magdalen Boy, Tom Clark

St. Petersburg is, in a fashion, somewhat like Cambridge. Peter the Great visited Europe, was impressed by a rational Enlightenment model for civilisation and borrowed the best bits in order to found his own distilled version of Europe, like a God, forging his own envisaged order out of the shapeless marsh and leading Russia out of its supposedly dark and backward state. And this is more or less the manner in which Cambridge was founded, taking a borrowed paradigm of scholarship to a black-magic-riddled marsh, even if that paradigm was borrowed from a little closer to home and no war had to be fought, at least not with mankind, to possess the austere scrap of fenland on which Cambridge now stands.

When the last Tsar Nicholas II visited St. Petersburg State University, he commented, “There are too many windows facing west”. In one sense a great window to the west is what the city is, with its port to Europe and the ordered, ‘rational’ proportions of its classical architecture; in another it is an unsettling example of the Russian tradition of organizing everything for its people from the very top and without consulting them. There are unpopular plans (recently stalled by the financial crisis) to proceed in a similar fashion with the construction of a huge and gross tower in the middle of town, dedicated to Gazprom’s wealth and might.

Then again who cares? It’s a triviality, there are more important things to worry about in life. How could I possibly apply the brakes to such a huge vessel, better just go where it goes and be free within it? The parameters of life are spiritual, not political. Thus perhaps thinks the fatalistic breed of Russian person.

Yet St. Petersburg is unnerving in another way - it is genuinely a place where one could go mad, cackling at life like poor Evgenii of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman who dares to shake his fist at the statue of a powerful man. Somehow one is not sure of one’s standing between form and formlessness. There is something about the changeability of the weather - the mist that floats in from the Gulf of Finland without a raven’s squawk of a warning - about the architectural perfection of the centre permeated, as it is, by chaos and disregard, about the bare suburbs’ forests of tower-blocks, about the port with its peering cranes, the blinkered industry stumbling lazily but unstoppably forward, that is making my head spin.

The best evening of my visit to date was a dinner when my family, who had invaded St. Petersburg, had a chance to meet some of my Russian friends. I think in England people often anticipate the end of the speech at its very beginning, and silently urge the speaker to keep his word and keep it short. Here, not so. Glasses clinked with regularity to herald one after another unexpected orator, who also spoke, for some reason, in unexpected languages, in English and Russian, German and Finnish. So my head is spinning, but, amidst the great hospitality and kindness of the people I have met here, so far, in the right direction.

I you fly within a two-hour window, leaving London at 3 a.m. on an unseasonable date, and having been dispossessed of all facial creams, you can get to St Petersburg for under £200, where you may see Tom Clark and his family.

Tom Clark and Sam Silkstone, the Armchair Critic, are lifelong friends. Sam’s article on Oxford children’s writing can be seen at iONline, next to Pullman’s Oxford.

- Tom Clark