The most grandiose simulacrum that expressed the simulative nature of Russian civilization was, of course, Petersburg itself, erected on a "Finnish swamp." "Petersburg is the most intentional (or imaginary--umyshlennyi ) and abstract city on earth," wrote Dostoevsky in "The Notes from the Underground": the reality of the city was composed entirely of fabrications, designs, ravings, and visions lifted up like a shadow above a rotten soil unfit for construction.

     A shakiness was laid into the very foundation of the imperial capital, which subsequently became the cradle of three revolutions. The realization of its intentionality and "ideality," simply not having found firm soil beneath itself, gave rise to one of the first, and most ingenious, literary simulacra--in Dostoevsky: "A hundred times, amidst this fog, I've been struck with a strange but importunate reverie: 'And what, if this fog were to scatter and leave for above, wouldn't this entire rotten, slimy city take off with it, wouldn't it rise up with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the prior Finnish swamp would remain, and, in the middle of it, for beauty, I think, the bronze horseman on his hotly breathing, exhausted horse?'"

(M. Epstein, A Draft Essay on Russian and Western Postmodernism)