St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg was built by decree, on a marsh, in a hurry, to be a window — Peter the Great's, on Europe — and three centuries later the window still works both ways: a delta of granite embankments, a hundred islands, three hundred bridges that lift at night to let the ships through, a fortress with a golden needle where the tsars are buried, a green-and-white palace with three million works of art inside, a cathedral dome you can see from the sea, and an avenue, the Nevsky, that Gogol said lied at every hour of the day. In June the sun barely sets and the city walks all night; in January the Neva is a road.

This postal, too, is written with honesty and love: the present has narrowed the sky's doors — flights are few and roundabout, many chancelleries counsel against the journey, and the Guide does not argue with chancelleries. We counsel patience instead: read Gogol's Nevsky and Dostoevsky's Haymarket, see the Mariinsky when it tours, listen to Shostakovich's Seventh, which this city premiered under siege, and let Petersburg remain, for now, a city of the imagination — where, from Pushkin onward, she has always done her best work.

The Guide's honesty, which here is also a vow: this page waits with its lamps lit. When the bridges between the world and the delta are rebuilt, the doors below will open onto the Hermitage's four days, the Peterhof fountains, the White Nights on the embankment and the winter that makes the palaces make sense. Until then the postal stands — the chart of a harbour the Guide intends, one day, to enter by water, the way Peter meant it.