Saint Petersburg and the circulation of Humanistic ideas: building an ideal city through the book and the language

As any idea is built upon the knowledge of reality, an ideal city is an idealisation of the reality that an intellectual finds inadequate. In other words, the ideal city requires the real city, as the world of thought requires the world of facts, while at the same time substantially differing from them. In this paper, we argue that Saint Petersburg was created as a realisation of an idea of a capital, drawing on a local reinterpretation of the Humanist ideal city models. In the endless literature on ideal cities, Saint Petersburg has never received particular attention (for a history of ideal cities, see Sciolla 1975 and Rosenau 1983)1. Only recent studies have partially addressed this issue, which support the hypothesis of a city based on common features between « Petersburg"s urban development and traditional European city as well as an “ideal city” » (Lavrov and Perov 2016 : 31). However, today as in the past, the major studies focus on the first thirty years of the 19th century, during the reign of Alexander I, when the city found its final geometry (Hassell 1974 : 248). Instead, our research2 addresses the rise of the cultural and architectural identity of Saint Petersburg, based on the archival documents and unedited manuscripts from the period of the city"s creation, i. e. the first quarter of the 18th century. Our perspective is that Peter"s idea for an « ideal capital » grew in parallel with the tsar"s knowledge of Western culture, leading him to formulate a plan for an ideal city not only in its urban geometry but also in the cultural structure of the new capital, its institutions, and its inhabitants : an invisible state machine, according to the Platonic model. Simultaneously, we argue that the city of St. Petersburg was not merely the product of the transfer of knowledge and a passive reception of Western architectural models, but a synthesis of many models, a programmatic project of hybridisation between European architectural knowledge and the local Russian expertise. The agents of transfer and hybridisation were European architects working in St. Petersburg, as well as the Russian architectural students sent to Europe to study. The research is based on the archival search in St. Petersburg in 2020- 2021 and analysis of architectural treatises. It also provides a new analysis of the data dispersed across various sources on the history of St. Petersburg and its architecture.