Once upon a time a now-forgotten Italian art critic called this city "Russia's window to Europe," a platitude not meant wholly as a compliment. Through the turmoil of the last couple of centuries and Moscow's usurping of its place as the governmental capital, the term "window to Europe" has appended itself to St. Petersburg's many titles. These inevitably include "the northern capital," "Leningrad," its name for sixty-seven inglorious years, "Russia's capital of culture," and "The Venice of the North" (a name also bestowed upon both this German city and this Scandinavian capital), among a few more local variants. Whatever the name chosen, the point remains: Petersburg is an imitation. Yet if you have ever been to Petersburg, one of the most magnificent metropolises on this planet, you may well disagree. There are elements that can be hastily categorized as Italian-influenced – after all, Italians did design the city in the form it assumed three hundred and twelve years ago – but these have been transformed by time and empire to reflect a very different understanding of human nature. Some more cynical minds may sneer at the sleaze and corruption that have always composed the foreigner's guidebook to Soviet and post-Soviet territory; others may claim that Russia's enduring struggle to gain religious autonomy makes their pseudo-Roman architecture a particularly lurid form of blasphemy. But we will leave behind these negative hordes to their misbegotten agendas and proceed to a tale of mild salacity and great nostalgia.
And when night finally fell, and the house was asleep, Katya and I would look at the dark house from the park where we kept huddled on a hard, cold, invisible bench until our bones ached, and it all seemed to us like something that had already once happened long ago: the outline of the house against the pale-green sky, the sleepy movements of the foliage, our prolonged, blind kisses.
In your elegant description, with profuse dots, of that summer, you naturally do not forget for a minute – as we used to forget – that since February of that year the nation was "under the rule of the Provisional government," and you oblige Katya and me to follow revolutionary events with keen concern, that is, to conduct (for dozens of pages) political and mystical conversations that – I assure you – we never had. In the first place, I would have been embarrassed to speak, with the righteous pathos you lend me, of Russia's destiny, and in the second place, Katya and I were too absorbed in each other to pay attention to the Revolution.
Thereupon follows a Petersburg anecdote about a cat, a "truck packed with jolly rioters" (a dead giveaway in any tale by Nabokov), a fateful swerve, and then the repetition of the same sequence in Spain, which deprives the event of any "deep occult meaning." It also hints at another type of story, the very core of which the narrator ingresses as his memories float further and further away from unfriendly and rather parochial shores.
Should night bring us our notions of mortality and dread, endless day might inspire us to overcome our fears and hope for a fairer destiny. Nabokov's political leanings were always quite evident in his works, with his bitterness towards two loud and brutal regimes peaking for a solid decade between 1937 and 1947 (thankfully, one at least was extinguished). Not that one needs the political background to enjoy what is said; only the most unimaginative reader requires history and dogma to frame his fiction. But those of us who have the opportunity now can look back and smile at the prescience of his insight, given that he never supposed he would see his hometown again, and if he did, only ravaged and naked in nightmares without sense or end. Windows, we recall, often let us look in as well as out.