This book is a guide to St. Petersburg as it was in the last years of the empire: the city of the highest receptions, May parades on the Field of Mars, Fokine’s ballets in the scenery of Bakst, gatherings of poets in “Stray Dog”. The author proposes to take two walks through the aristocratic part of St. Petersburg-Petrograd and try to understand the essence of the city's dying blossom and its imminent collapse.