“...But St. Petersburg - the magic wand of Russia - has long since begun to fade in souls. If the Moscow heart was still beating, the genius of St. Petersburg grew dim. Just remember that after Pushkin and Gogol we had almost not a single singer from St. Petersburg, and after Tolstoy our literature began to slide, as it were, from the Russian Peter’s peaks into the lowlands of some kind of tribal, ethnic-Great Russian, “folklore” literature with endless men and endless villages. They stopped seeing, loving and understanding St. Petersburg a long time ago...”