The Mariinsky ballet troupe is now as good as it was when it was called the Kirov, thanks largely to its renowned art director, Valerii Gergiev. Theater lovers who don't follow the Russian of the now world-class productions at the Bolshoi Drama Theater can spend hours among the Bakst costumes, Constructivist set designs, and memorabilia of the State Museum of Theater and Music. In an office where Nijinsky used to come for his paycheck, Natalya Melitsa, the affable vice director, does her best to make two percent of the 480,000 objects visible.

You'll find, along with much else musical, the baritone that Haydn composed on and Tchaikovsky's piano at the Sheremetev Palace. Lovers of literature can follow in the footsteps of Raskolnikov from his rooms at 19 Grazhdanskaya Ulitsa to the Xat of the old woman he murdered, at 104 Griboedov Canal. You can also visit Dostoyevsky's modest apartment and see the desk where he burst an artery writing through the night. From there, it's not far to the elegant town house that Pushkin left at dawn to catch a bullet in the snow, or to the apartment of Aleksandr Blok, Russia's great poet of the early twentieth century. There's even a rumor around town that the public is in for surprising treats from the successors of the KGB, who are said to intend to make public a vast store of manuscripts and notebooks conWscated as "evidence" from writers like Blok, whose only crime at the time of the revolution, apparently, was to have been suspiciously bourgeois.

When your eyes and mind are sated with the city's bounty of civilization, you can go home to a luxurious hotel and on to a delightful dinner at, say, the Nobles" Nest in the palace of Prince Yusupov (who killed Rasputin)—as suave a restaurant as any on the Continent.

Your appreciation of more than a golden ghetto or a Potemkin Village of culture begins when you put on sturdy shoes and start on a serious St. Petersburg walk. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel poet, once wrote that in St. Petersburg "there is something in the granular texture of the granite pavement next to the constantly Xowing, departing water that instills into one's soles an almost sensual desire for walking." Your feet, in any case, as much as your eyes, will give you tangible access to the meanings here. You set out for your first destination—say forty numbers up or down a street—and you keep walking as the numbers change with a slofiness that makes you feel as if you've been smoking opium. Your feet get tired and you're still not there; they have to adjust to the superhuman scale of this city, where palaces of vast width go on one after another and where even plain apartment buildings are outsized. Peter the Great, the first czar to travel outside Russia, is credited with founding a Western city that placed his empire in the world of the Enlightenment. But his material interpretation of a Western utopia was fated to be superficial. He wanted his grandiose plan to persuade Westerners of Russia's right to be seen as an equal—a claim still crucial to its self-esteem. On that score St. Petersburg is a monumental failure, and its uncozy and ultimately inhuman grandeur was stained from the start, as it has been over the centuries, by calamity. Tens of thousands of slaves died of hardship and disease initiating the czar's capital. In contrast, the great cities of the West, lodestones of humanist culture, were not built to a despot's orders. They evolved from the activity of a middle class dedicated to making more and more of the material world in a pragmatic way. These were people for whom success in life depended on down-to-earth astuteness, moderation, measured judgment, and open-mindedness. The plight of Russia and St. Petersburg, long after this czar who killed his own son was gone, was that there would be too few people around of that kind to influence the course of events.