"Unemployment is half what it was five years ago," Vladimir Ugryumov, chairman of the city's Union of Journalists, assured me when we met in his office in one of Nevsky Prospekt's many palaces. "The Chechen war has helped the military industry. Shipping is up and the breweries are thriving. The average salary has grown to two hundred dollars a month. For Russia, that's good money."

In his workshop at the edge of town, in a cement tenement overlooking the Bay of Finland, Eduard Kochergin, head set designer for the Bolshoi Drama Theater, waxed enthusiastic over the choreography of the Tricentennial ceremonies, which he'd been charged with creating.

During the last week in May, torches will be blazing along elegant embankments and banners flying among sponsors" billboards. Sails will billow on antique ships. An ermine cape will be draped upon the beauty queen crowned as Nymph of the Neva, surrounded by her retinue of nymphs from some of the other sixty-eight waterways on which the city has been suspended for three centuries like a cold Venice. Vladimir Putin will of course be there. George W. Bush was invited for a summit meeting, along with forty or more presidents, who will get the Tricentennial extravaganza as a bonus.

Kochergin was excited to tell me that on the Wnal day of the celebration he intended to have a hundred monks march behind the Orthodox archbishop, more correctly known as the metropolitan, while he carried to Peter and Paul Cathedral the Alexander Nevsky icon that had saved Peter the Great from a Swedish bullet. Peter, the city's founder—that "great butcher and genius," in the words of the historian Alexander Herzen—lies at rest in the cathedral. On the mighty and terrible czar's tomb, oYcials are to lay a new gold medal inscribed "To Peter the Great from a grateful Russia." Imperial nostalgia, blatant commercialism, promotional kitsch, and religious fervor—the program of events Kochergin detailed was a poignantly topical and paradoxical mix when you consider that St. Petersburg's prevailing mood is an emulsion of hope, pride, and denial.

Of course, a visitor can be fascinated by St. Petersburg without all these emanations and still love it. You can spend more than a week visiting and revisiting the Hermitage, the world's second-largest museum (after the Louvre) and second to none in the quality of its encyclopedic collection of paintings. "We show about five percent of what we have," Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, told me. "We'd like to be able to show twenty percent." To that end, a big wing of the General Staff Building, opposite the museum, is being redone to house the Hermitage collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, based on what Lenin expropriated from two great Russian collectors. Piotrovsky, who has been expanding the Hermitage's presence all over the world, also plans to allow visitors into the museum's six-floor storehouse, where there is some astounding furniture, among other things.