Insider Secrets: A writer’s guide to understanding St Petersburg

My best travels have always come from writing projects. A sense of space is essential for my writing. Photographs, films, maps, and descriptions I find in books are a good beginning, but it is only when I return from my “writing trips” that I can truly see and feel the places I write about.

When I began working on The Winter Palace – a historical novel based on the early life of Catherine the Great – I knew I had to go to St Petersburg and look for the surviving traces of the 18th century city where Catherine the Great spent most of her life. I had to orient myself in her space, see how the sun lights up the city at different times of the day, watch the flow of the Neva river, observe the layout of the streets, and note my impressions of distances between the palace and other landmarks. I also had to experience the white nights, the time in June around the summer solstice, when St. Petersburg’s sun sets for just a few moments of twilight before it raises again.

All writers have their own ways of making the most of their travels. Here are mine.

Before my writing trip I read as much as I could about the 18th century St Petersburg. I read the story of how the city was built on the marshes, a dream of Peter the Great who wished Russia to have a northern port and secure the newly captured territories. I read the accounts of St Petersburg’s first years, the descriptions of constant pounding as wooden poles were hammered into the bogs to provide the foundations for the city’s palaces and municipal buildings. I read of the shortage of stones which made Peter the Great order all travellers to St Petersburg to bring a quota of stones before they would be allowed to pass the city gates.

I also made a list of places, which changed little from the time when Catherine arrived in St Petersburg as a 14-year-old German princess, a prospective bride of the Russia’s Crown Prince: the Kunstkamera, the Menshikov’s palace, Monplaisir Pavilion in Peterhof.