Letts

Dinner at Latvian restaurant, Riga Seta.  My first Latvian restaurant; nothing detectably Latvian about the food.

Nabokov

Petersburg is the perfect place to be reading Speak, Memory.  Nabokov describes how, in his family's city house on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, the sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling on a marble table would make his nerves 'twang'.  I'm struggling to remember the sound of a chrysanthemum petal falling in Meols.  We may not have time to visit the Nabokov Museum in the family's city residence on Большая Морская Улица, but it's nice to know it's there.

Kazan Cathedral

St. P's Kazan Cathedral is a mighty affair, complete with colonnades and statues to Kutuzov (responsible for burning Moscow so that Napoleon wouldn't get it - the original 'scorched earth' policy?) and Barclay de Tolly.  Inside, a wedding was going on and the singing (a 5-woman choir) was heavenly.  We stopped briefly at Kutusov's tomb, which has captured Napoleonic standards above it that are very faded indeed.

Colourful Cakes

Benois Wing

After a lunch spent mostly in the queue, we briefly visited the Benois wing for a temporary exhibition called Гимн Трудну - Hymn to Labour.  Dreary factory scenes, miserable miners etc etc.  Oh dear.

Russian Museum

It took us a while to find the Mikhailovsky Palace, but it was worth it!  This museum is one of the greats - not only paintings, but also red and gold tableware, princesses' headresses, lacquer boxes, figurines.  Our favourites among the paintings included the icons of The Archangel with the Golden Hair and Boris and Gleb, Rublev's Peter & Paul, Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii, Vasily Smirnov's Nero's Death, Stepan Bakalovich's Praying of Khans, Nikolai Yarushenko's In Warm Lands, Genrikh Semiradsky's Purina at the Poseidon Celebration in Elusium, Nicholas Ge's The Last Supper, Repin's Barge-Haulers on the Volga, The Zaporozhe Cossacks Writing A Mocking Letter to the Sultan, portrait of Tolstoy with bare feet (which we saw at the From Russia exhibition at the Royal Academy), Sadko and Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council, 7 May 1901, Vasily Surikov's Yermak's Conquest of Siberia and Suvorov Crossing the Alps (the soldiers tobogganing down), Vereshchagin's At the Entrance to the Mosque and In Jerusalem, The Royal Tombs, Arkhip Kuindzhi's landscapes, Filip Malyavin's Two Girls, Vervka and Peasant Women Dancing, Serov's society portraits (esp. of Princess Zinaida Yusupova), Mikhail Nesterov's The Great Taking of the Veil, Leon Bakst's Antique Terrors and Boris Kustodiev's At Shrovetide.  The model for the head of Falconet's Bronze Horseman is also in one of the halls and you can go and look it in the eye.

Vasily Surikov,
Surinov Crossing the Alps

Boris Kustodiev,
At Shrovetide