4

I

n the pit below the gold-embroidered theatre

scrim emblazoned with a double-headed

imperial Russian eagle, the orchestra is

warming up on a chilly autumn evening in

Saint Petersburg. Their brows furrowed, they

test and tune their instruments with the kind

of intense concentration I recall in the characters of

Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, the leading lights

of the famously intense Russian canon that I laboured

through many years ago at university.

In a different way, I’m limbering up, too, since this

is the first night of a highly anticipated journey by ship

into the heart of Russia.I’ve long beencurious about

life in the world’s largest nation, but also humbled by

the scale of this Slavic enigma. I owe my grail to the

18th-century Romantic poet Lord Byron, who wrote:

“Admittedly there are other ways of making the world’s

acquaintance. But the traveller is a slave to his senses;

his grasp of a fact can only be complete when reinforced

by sensory evidence; he can know the world, in fact,

only when he sees, hears, and smells it.”

Despite the dulling scents of damp wool and wet

leather in the overheated air, there’s an aura of collective

wonderment in the audience, comprised mainly of my

fellow passengers aboard theViking Ingvar. “I still can’t

believe I’m actually sitting here, in Russia,” whispers the

woman next to me. “When I was a girl in grade school

in Massachusetts, we had air-raid drills to practise hiding

under our desks if there was a Russian missile attack.

I doubt our desks would have saved us, but it stamped

our young minds with ideas about the Soviet Union.”

She shrugs, “I guess you could call that propaganda.”

We’re in the lavishly gilded private theatre of

Catherine the Great in the Hermitage Museum, which

also houses her 18th-century Winter Palace. Now the

conductor arrives, and bows to the audience. He raises

his arms, holding them aloft just a second or two

longer than anyone expects to insist on silence, and the

performance by the Saint Petersburg State Governor’s

Symphony begins. The exquisitely doleful opening

144 GOURMET TRAVELLER

Ru

ssi

a

Saint

Petersburg

Moscow

Yaroslavl

Uglich

Kizhi

Volga River

Lake Ladoga

Neva River

Estonia

Finland

Baltic Sea