The Presidential Library illustrates Summer Garden

June 14-16, 2019 St. Petersburg will host a big festival dedicated to the 315th anniversary - the Summer Garden, the city’s oldest park. In connection with this significant date, the Presidential Library provides the electronic collection posted on the institution's portal. It consists of the extensive material - postcards, paintings, sets of photographs and descriptive texts, covering the history of the Summer Garden.

“Today’s Summer Garden is a small remnant of what it used to be”, - writes Sergey Knyazkov, a researcher of the northern capital. “The Summer Garden of Peter the Great occupied all the space between the Moika and the Fontanka from the Neva to Nevsky Prospect”. The place for the summer house and the garden, from the point of view of Peter, is ideal. On three sides it is surrounded by water - the Neva, the Moika and the Fontanka. In addition, the territory fit the Dutch style, there is a house with outbuildings and a small garden.

By order of Peter Alekseevich, the work was given a grand scale. At the beginning of June 1704, carts with flowers and seedlings for the royal garden were delivered from Europe to St. Petersburg. The Summer Palace for Peter is being built, the first fountains are arranged, a “water wheel” is installed on the river. Thanks to Russian and foreign masters, such as, Johann Yaftman (Ivan Yakovlev a la russe), and also due to the inexhaustible energy of Peter I, by 1715 the garden was well landscaped, decorated with sculptures and fountains and became a favorite meeting place and the feasts that Tsar Peter liked to arrange, “when things didn’t get in the way of fun”.

“In society, Tsar Peter was usually cheerful, courteous, talkative and loved clever conversations”, - we read in the above-mentioned book “Paintings on Russian History”. “He very much disapproved of the quarrels and arrogance among his guests and those guilty of violating the friendly conversation, the one who “lied too much and bullied others ”!”.

In the Summer Garden, the Tsar's birthday was celebrated solemnly and the day preceded by it was the “Glorious Victoria” - the naval victory over the Swedes. The holiday began at about five o'clock in the evening; By this time, on the vast lawn of the garden, the Tsaritsyn Meadow, the Transfiguration and Semenov regiments were lined up. The tsar treated the soldiers, personally presenting them in wooden cups wine and beer.

Knyazkov writes: “On the north side, near the water, there are three long open galleries, of which the longest average, where always for big celebrations, have not yet started dancing, is presented a table with sweets. In the middle gallery there is a marble statue of Venus, with which the tsar values ​​so much that he orders to place a guard for it. Against this gallery, the alley is the widest in the whole garden; it has beautiful fountains that are quite high. The water in them is conducted to the pools from the canal with the help of a large wheeled vehicle".

“The festivities in the Summer Garden and other festivals took place with strict observance of the rules issued in 1718 on how to organize an assembly, - the author of the above-mentioned book stresses. – These rules said that “the assembly is a French word, which cannot be expressed in one word in Russian; to say in detail that what is free in which the house is a meeting or congress is done not only for fun, but also for business, because here you can see each other and talk about every need, and also hear what is being done. And how to send these assemblies is determined by the point below, for the time being, it does not become a custom.

The author of the book “Paintings on Russian History” makes a conclusion from this pleasant walk through the Summer Garden that is completely idle: “Assemblies, public meetings, masquerades, gala dinners in honor of the glorious events of the reign, instituted by Peter the Great, had a great educational value for that time, created social life, taught people to have fun together. So imperceptibly, a great thing flowed out of the fun of Tsar Peter, created "humanity and polite" in the closed and disconnected Russian society, as it used to be during Moscow times".