Dostoevsky would have detested the city of Philadelphia. In many ways, the city exemplifies everything that he hated about the West in general; problems which, in his view, were beginning to infiltrate Russia as well. He was appalled by what he saw as the oppressive modern turn toward a Rationalist approach in the world and the deeply destructive legacy of the Enlightenment. This perspective is embodied in Dostoevsky’s feelings about Russian cities, some of which, he felt, had been corrupted by an emphasis on order and rationality above all else. In the case of St. Petersburg, the city in which many of his novels are set, it is not simply that the city has been corrupted, but rather that the existence of the city itself is a perverse attempt to control and bring order to the natural world. St. Petersburg was built in the image of urban spaces across Western Europe, its streets arranged in an orderly grid and its entire urban design the result of mathematical precision. This attempt to subdue the marshes on which St. Petersburg was built was, for some, a triumph of humanity over nature, while, for Dostoevsky, it represented something far more sinister and perverse. According to him, St. Petersburg was both “the most rational and abstract place on earth” and “the most fantastic, insubstantial, alien (un-Russian), and unnatural of Russian cities”; it is a misguided attempt to conquer the natural environment and to impose a profoundly oppressive logic on human nature itself.
It is not hard to accept that Philadelphia, too, could be characterized as a “rational” city. The city streets form a near-perfect grid; the numbered streets run pretty much due north and south, while the named ones go essentially east to west. Four beautiful squares – Logan, Rittenhouse, Franklin, and Washington – form a perfectly symmetrical rectangle with Philadelphia City Hall at the center. Notably, at the time when it was built, City Hall was the tallest habitable building in the world, and the first non-religious building ever to have this honor. The secular, rational spirit of Western European cities, on which St. Petersburg too was modeled, was (and still is) clearly alive in Philadelphia.
And this influence was certainly not merely tangential. The same Enlightenment optimism about humanity’s capacity for freedom through reason was directly present in and shared between those who envisioned the urban landscape of Philadelphia and similar cities in Western Europe. In fact, the iconic Parisian boulevard, the Champs Élysées, was a direct inspiration for the architects of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. While the parkway was built several centuries after the initial plans for Philadelphia’s grid were implemented, it is nonetheless linked to the same legacy of urban design and humanistic radical restructuring of the environment. These beliefs were, at least in part, central to the vision behind the Champs-Élysées, which was used as a model by the two French architects responsible for the parkway’s design. Given the extensive Western European ideological (and technical) influence on Philadelphia’s urban landscape, Dostoevsky may well have felt the same antipathy toward Philadelphia as he did toward much of Western Europe.
However, having grown up visiting my grandparents in Center City, hanging out in the public parks, and enjoying Philadelphia’s easily navigable and coherent streets, I cannot help but disagree with Dostoevsky about the ostensible perversion of the natural embodied in this “rational” city. While the city is certainly orderly and makes sense, it also leaves room for excitement, mystery, and community. As I have gotten to know Philadelphia much better during numerous weekend trips over the past couple of years at Swarthmore, my sense of the city’s whimsical cohesion has only grown stronger.
It is certainly the case that the rational and orderly approach to urban space that Dostoevsky targets can be quite problematic. The ideology of Enlightenment rationality and the liberal tradition linked with it is defined by freedom from previous restrictions on individual human possibility. Yet it also imposes a certain oppression of its own on natural instinct (something that Dostoevsky thought was quite important), as well as the potential for creativity, spontaneity, and even sociality. For Dostoevsky, the city streets of Saint Petersburg felt dismal and oppressively controlling in their attempt to impose a rigid structure on both the landscape and human nature. The limits of such rationalism should certainly not be dismissed. In a way, the uniformity of America’s modern suburban landscape, with its acres of identical houses and never-ending cul-de-sacs, feels unnatural to me, much like Philadelphia might to Dostoevsky. However, standing on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and staring down the boulevard to City Hall, it is impossible (at least for me) to dislike this city and its perfectly geometric and rational urban design. These are not the “dismal” and “dirty” streets that repress human nature, but rather an environment that allows it to flourish. This became clearer to me than ever last month when the Eagles won the Superbowl, and I went into Philly to celebrate. As I joined thousands of other fans crowding onto Broad Street, yelling, cheering, and hanging out on the longest straight street in the United States, I felt the spontaneous joy and communal possibility of the city.
