A Poem and a Palace - Predestined Destruction?

I am going to cover a couple of different topics in this blog.  Before that, I confess that All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is not quite what I imagined it to be, but I am trudging through just the same to try to connect with the ideas Marshall Berman is offering.  This probably is the case also with more than a couple student-chosen books. Hopefully some value can still gained and conveyed in these short reflections.

This statue emerges through the violent floodwaters
as a symbol of Peter the Great's vision for his city.

So one interesting strategy of Berman's is to trace aspects of modernity and its development through the literary texts of the time.  As the text is fairly Eurocentric, the great cities of the continent and their artists are featured in parallel.  Such is the case for St. Petersburg, Russia and Alexamder Pushkin.  Specifically, Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman" which is subtitled, "A Petersburg Tale." Berman cites this poem as the quintessential story of the inception of modernity in the form of the city: "Petersburg itself is the product of thought - it is, as Dostoevsky's Underground Man will remark, 'the most abstract and premeditated city in the world'" (183).  There is great beauty and possibility in the city as it rises from the landscape:

Where once a humble Finnish lad – / Poor foster-child in Nature’s keeping – / Alone upon the low banks had / Oft cast his time-worn nets when reaping / The waters’ hidden harvest, – now / Great towers and palaces endow / The bustling banks with grace and splendour;

The hero is a commoner named Yevgeny, who stands in wonder of the city yet seems to be a product of it.  He is in love with a woman Parasha and would like to marry her. Nice enough, until THE FLOOD! Yevgeny surveys the damage:

Here a house was gone: / Uprooted; here debris lay scattered / About; here still stood, mauled and battered, / Some crippled houses. All around, / As if upon a battleground, / Lay corpses. 

So, all that was solid (again) melts into air - the city of dreams and certainty (and I am giving a VERY brief account here) seems doomed from the outset.  The flood of 1824 portrayed in the poem was one of THREE in St. Petersburg's history (1725 and 1924 as well).  So, is the quest for modernity destined to end up in destruction?  Is the destruction part of the process for even more advanced development?

One additional piece from Berman.  Apparently Russians who were trumpeting the advancements of their cities like St. Petersburg had some real modernist envy when it came to London's Crystal Palace. Once again it is Dostoevsky who is in wonder: "Must not one accept this as the ultimate truth, and become silent forever? This is all so triumphant, majestic and proud it takes your breath away . . . you feel that something final has taken place here, taken place and ended" (236). That "something final" is where Dostoevsky was wrong. As destruction is a theme of modernism, so was the Crystal Palace destroyed in fire.

I can't help but make some connections to the comics world.  In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan creates an enormous timepiece / airship / palace that seems perfect is every possible way.  That is until his former companion Laurie throws a perfume bottle at it.  Was it built to last? Is it a symbol that all that is built eventually comes to ruin?  It is no coincidence that the poem "Ozymandias" is also evoked in Watchmen, as "Nothing beside remains" from his once "mighty works."

This:

Then this: