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EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Peter the Great and Vladimir Nabokov

PETER I OF RUSSIA or Peter the Great (1672-1725) was the youngest child of Tsar Alexis by his second wife. Alexis was succeeded by Feodor III, a son by his first wife. Feodor’s death ignited a bloody power struggle between the families of the two wives. Peter, aged 10, was made joint tsar with Ivan IV, Feodor’s feebleminded brother, under the regency of Feodor’s sister, Sophia Alekseyevna. In 1689 she attempted a coup against Peter. It failed. For some years, the second wife’s family ruled. Peter, who had by then developed an obsessive interest in shipbuilding, armies and war in general, took power.

For 18 months, beginning in 1697, he toured Enlightenment Europe and unsuccessfully attempted to form an alliance against Turkey. However he did lay the basis of a Baltic coalition against Sweden. The tour opened his eyes to industrialisation and he began a radical transformation of his backward country, bypassed by both the Renaissance and the Reformation. Crushing Sophia’s plots, he despatched her to a convent. His rampaging reforms began with his symbolic cutting off of the long beards and sleeves of his nobles. He ordered them to adopt Western dress. Conscription was introduced to sustain his various wars, particularly the ongoing disputes with Sweden under Charles XII. Peter established a navy. The sons of nobles were forced to attend military schools. The serfs fed the ranks, while also becoming even more tied to their masters and to the land. State mines and factories were dedicated to the war effort. Peter’s manic energy kept his ill heath at bay, although he died young at 52, having tortured his son Alexis to death, hauled Russia towards modernity and possibly, most telling of all, created a new capital on swamp land won from Sweden in 1721. St Petersburg replaced Moscow and Peter’s luminous city inspired artists and writers including Pushkin, who immortalised Peter in The Bronze Horseman (1833).

St Petersburg has always spawned genius. Among its famous sons was the dauntingly intellectual Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Born into minor nobility, he fled the 1917 revolution, first arriving in Berlin, before moving on to Cambridge. He later returned to Berlin, becoming part of the émigré set. He spent three years in France, then conquered literary America where he radicalised 20th century fiction writing in English – his third language – while pursuing a distinguished academic career. Nabokov was also a lepidopterist. A chance discovery of various books by the German natural scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) in his family’s attic attracted him to butterflies.

Shortly before her death in Amsterdam, Peter the Great came to see Merian’s work. Several of her botanical and scientific paintings are housed in St Petersburg collections.

Lolita, an ambiguous, multi-layered meditation on the loss of innocence as filtered through Humbert Humbert’s crazed, somewhat unsavoury obsession with a non-committal, emotionally dead 12-year-old nymphet, remains Nabokov’s most famous novel. Published 57 years ago today, this stylish celebration of art and cold wisdom is comic, sad and defiant; dominated by death and beautifully repulsive.