Northwestern Russia Culture & Language

The region holds two very different high cultures — imperial European and medieval Russian — plus a folk tradition in wood.

The imperial city

Saint Petersburg is a planned baroque and neoclassical capital executed by Rastrelli, Quarenghi, Rossi and others, with sightlines, a height limit below the Winter Palace, and granite embankments along the canals. The Hermitage holds around three million objects in the former imperial residence, and the Russian Museum holds the national collection of Russian art.

Medieval Russia

Novgorod and Pskov developed their own architecture — squat, whitewashed, single-domed churches with asymmetric roofs — and their own schools of icon painting, more linear and vivid than Moscow’s. Theophanes the Greek painted here before he worked in Moscow.

Wooden architecture

The northern carpentry tradition built churches, chapels, houses and windmills entirely in interlocking logs without nails. Kizhi’s Church of the Transfiguration, raised in 1714 with twenty-two aspen-shingled domes, is the outstanding survival.

Folk and epic

The Karelian and Russian north preserved a sung epic tradition longer than anywhere in Europe. Elias Lonnrot collected the runes that became the Finnish Kalevala largely from singers in Karelian villages, and Russian byliny — heroic narrative songs about Kievan princes — were still being sung from memory by fishermen on Lake Onega and the White Sea coast into the twentieth century.

Performance and letters

The Mariinsky commissioned and premiered much of the classical ballet repertoire, including Tchaikovsky’s three ballets under Petipa, and remains one of the major opera and ballet houses in the world. The city is equally a literary one: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Akhmatova and Brodsky all wrote here, several of their apartments are museums, and the streets of Dostoevsky’s novels can still be walked.

Russian is the language, and outside the tourist core of Saint Petersburg you should not expect English.

Learning Cyrillic is worth an evening: many words are borrowings and become readable immediately, which transforms navigation, menus and metro signs.

Karelian, Veps and Sami are Finno-Ugric languages spoken by small populations in Karelia and the north, with some revival effort.

Finnish is understood near the border, and Saint Petersburg has a long-standing connection with it.

Useful Russian: zdravstvuyte for hello, spasibo for thank you, pozhaluysta for please, skolko stoit for how much, and ya ne ponimayu for I do not understand.

A translation app with offline Russian is genuinely useful here.