Three hundred years after Peter the Great founded it, St. Petersburg is the new European phenomenon, a city of revived fervor and "eight thousand objects" being readied for display. G. Y. Dryansky strides the boulevards, seeking the secret of its energy

St. Petersburg has likely not been this happy a place in three hundred years—not since blood and sweat raised the city from swampland as an awesomely aesthetic triumph of the will. Now, I find it the most fascinating city I've ever visited. It stays in your mind long after you've left: streets where vast palaces cohabit with vintage factories, mirrored in rivers and canals; the skyline of spires and smokestacks, all burnished by a marine light so lovely that it seems an objective extension of benevolence. Anyone looking for an intimate getaway will find the sheer theatricality of St. Petersburg, under midnight sun or midwinter snow, a catalyst for romance. Beyond the surface reality of its exalted beauty, though, this is a city where history has made everything seem a metaphor. Moreover, it has now become Europe's hot city for art-loving travelers. But, on another level, St. Petersburg and its inhabitants—the living and the wraiths—convey that rare density of significance which is proper to art. Aleksandr Pushkin, who died there in an absurd duel, called this wind-scrubbed confection facing the Baltic "Russia's window on the West," and that's been a label ever since. But the story is more complex and revelatory than that.

When I was there last, a few months ago, countless workmen were hurrying to be ready for this month's Tricentennial, repairing and scrubbing what Nikita Yavelin, head of the restoration, described to me as "eight thousand objects." "Objects," on St. Petersburg's grand and sumptuous scale, include pastel palaces, gilded bridges, and bronze monuments—the stuff that draws an ever-increasing flow of visitors. As for the people, they definitely looked a lot happier than on my previous visit, in 1999, when clean-cut citizens who had been caught in the economic crash the year before came up to you in the street with upturned palms. The people seemed still happier, of course, than when I'd first come to this city, in Brezhnev's days. The portraits of that burly vodka bibber all along Nevsky Prospekt have long since been replaced with a riot of ads for things to buy.

The glances toward strangers in the street seemed more self-assured, without the old traces of furtive envy. In the moonlight, as I walked along the gleaming Fontanka River, I could still smell the lignite from furnaces, the night odor that Western European cities had half a century ago, but by day, thick traffic gave off a more updated pollution. Among the cars moving with reckless exhilaration on the wide boulevards were not only the grimy Ladas and the sleek, black-windowed Mercedeses of the New Russian wheelers and dealers but also the black-windowed cars of more modest categories, evidence that wealth and its local totems were trickling down toward a middle class that had never before counted for much in Russia.

Indoors, everywhere except in the luxury hotels and restaurants, I could still catch a trace of that curious Russian smell, a mysterious scent recalling sour milk and rotting apples, reminding me that I was someplace other.