‘Sadder and wiser’: St Petersburg 1872 and Budapest 1876

Abstract

R and Hungary, the hosts of the last two editions of the international statistical congress, worked hard to prepare and execute the task entrusted to them. The St Petersburg congress was probably the most stylish of all the congresses, and that had everything to do with the city itself. In the course of the nineteenth century St Petersburg acquired the qualities of a European capital. Between 1800 and 1850 the population grew from 220,000 to 487,000. By 1869 the city had 550,000 inhabitants and by 1890 over one million. Infrastructural improvements were made as the city industrialised. Railway connections established with Warsaw and Tallinn in 1862 intensified St Petersburg’s economic and cultural contacts with north-western Europe. The cityscape assumed an international elegance. Théophile Gautier noted in his account of his travels in Russia that Nevski Prospekt was teeming with carriages, and the scene even surpassed the bustle of Paris at times.1 The ‘Passage’, a magnificent two-storey arcade housing a theatre, shops and cafés, and featuring a glass roof, opened on Nevski Prospekt at the end of the 1840s. The enormous St Isaac’s cathedral was completed in 1856. At the time, its dome was the third largest in the world. The nobility and the nouveau riche had mansions built in eclectic styles in a departure from the harmony of the eighteenth century. Tranquillity gave way to excitement. Musicians, painters and dancers sought and found access to the ultimate in European modernity. Max Nordau, a correspondent from the Pester Lloyd who visited the city to cover the creation of the Three Emperors’ League in 1873, was overwhelmed by the contrasts between Budapest, his city of birth, and the Russian capital. In his eyes, St Petersburg in the 1870s was comparable to Vienna before the revolution of 1848 and Paris in the heyday of the Second Empire: the city ‘revels in enjoyments with an intensity of which even the hedonistic Romans were incapable’.2 The participants of the St Petersburg congress stayed in the best hotels in the