St Petersburg and the British
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St Petersburg and the British
The City through the Eyes of British Visitors and Residents
Written by Anthony Cross
The British links with St. Petersburg date back to the very year of its foundation and have continued almost unbroken to the present day. Towards the end of Peter the Great’s reign St. Petersburg became home to merchants of the Russia Company, who formed the core of a steadily growing British community or colony that enjoyed its halcyon days in the reigns of Catherine the Great and Alexander I but remained numerically significant, if less conspicuously influential, until the October Revolution. The number of visitors from Britain increased from the middle of the eighteenth century. These were firstly Grand Tourists adding an exotic variant to their customary southern-European routes. A century later, they were followed by more conventional tourists in the Thomas Cook mould. For many visitors St. Petersburg was Russia and, despite all its Western pretensions and surface, a strange and bewildering place that attracted and repulsed in equal measure.
Anthony Cross narrates the story of this vibrant and tragic city through the first-hand accounts of its British residents and visitors. A unique anthology of St. Petersburg's culture, politics, architecture, commerce, recreation and everyday life, this book includes extracts by, for instance, Daniel Defoe, Lewis Carroll, W. Somerset Maughan, H.G.Wells, Isaiah Berlin, J.B.Priestley, Alan Sillitoe and Colin Thubron.
Professor Anthony Cross is Emeritus Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. Internationally known for his work on eighteenth-century Russia and Anglo- Russian cultural relations, he has written and edited over twenty books. In 1998 he was awarded the Antisferov Price for his book 'By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia'.
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