St. Petersburg has long been imagined as more than a capital city: it is a blueprint for how power, morality, and knowledge might be built into stone, streets, and bodies. This text explores two rare Catherine-era books that reveal how medicine, urban planning, and Enlightenment ideology converged in Petersburg, turning both the city and its inhabitants into objects of rational design.
Text by Angie Afifi
In the late eighteenth century, St. Petersburg stood as one of the most ambitious experiments in human reason ever attempted. Conceived by Peter the Great as a “window to Europe,” it became under Catherine II not merely an imperial capital but a laboratory of Enlightenment ideals — a city designed to tame nature, refine manners, and rationalize the human soul. If Paris gave the Enlightenment its language, St. Petersburg gave it architecture: geometry turned into government, symmetry into social order. It was a place where science and morality were no longer private pursuits but instruments of empire, where the city itself was meant to educate its inhabitants.
Two rare books from the late Catherinean period — Dr. Andrei Bakherecht’s ‘On the Immoderation of Lust and the Diseases Arising Therefrom’ (1780) and Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s ‘Description de la ville de St. Pétersbourg’ (1793) illuminate this extraordinary moment when medicine, morality, and urban form converged into a single Enlightenment project. These books trace the intellectual anatomy of Catherine’s St. Petersburg — a city where vice was pathologized, virtue quantified, and architecture embodied the principles of reason.
Notably, by the 1770s, Catherine II’s reforms had turned science into statecraft. Physicians, naturalists, and educators were enlisted to serve the moral improvement of the population. The Russian Enlightenment was pragmatic: it sought enlightened order. The Empress admired Voltaire, corresponded with Diderot, founded the Free Economic Society and the Imperial Academy of Sciences. But unlike her French counterparts, she ruled a society still half-feudal, half-frozen in the past. Rationality here required translation into discipline. Science was moral instruction in disguise. A good example of this is Dr. Andrei Bakherecht’s 1780 treatise, printed at the Free Press of Weitbrecht and Schnor, one of the few private presses licensed under Catherine’s cautiously liberal policies. The book’s title — ‘On the Immoderation of Lust and the Diseases Arising Therefrom’ — sounds almost medieval, yet its argument is strikingly modern. Bakherecht writes not as a confessor but as a physician; his goal is not to condemn sin but to classify it. Excessive sensuality, he insists, is a physiological disorder that weakens the body, corrupts the mind, and destabilizes the household — a threat to both individual health and social order.
In other words, the regulation of the body became a means of regulating society itself. In this sense, Bakherecht’s rhetoric mirrors the broader Enlightenment conviction that moral reform could be achieved through scientific vocabulary. The book blends clinical observation with moral urgency: the body is a civic instrument, and indulgence in pleasure a kind of rebellion against reason. By diagnosing lust, he was diagnosing Russia’s own struggle between impulse and order, between nature and civilization. That is why this volume is remarkable. Very few medical-moral tracts from the Russian Enlightenment have survived outside institutional archives, and even fewer were printed in private presses rather than state-controlled ones. The Free Press of Weitbrecht and Schnor operated on the fine line between censorship and freedom, serving a readership of physicians, civil servants, and enlightened nobles hungry for “useful knowledge.” Bakherecht’s treatise thus represents both an artifact of scientific culture and a gesture of intellectual daring — a physician attempting to domesticate desire through the tools of Enlightenment reason.
In turn, Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s ‘Description de la ville de St. Pétersbourg’ (1793), published in Saint Petersburg by Jean Zacharias Logan, offered European readers a detailed and panoramic vision of a city that embodied the Enlightenment’s ideals in its architecture, canals, and street plan.
Georgi, a German naturalist and geographer who had accompanied academic expeditions across Russia, approached St. Petersburg as a taxonomist of civilization. His descriptions are precise, almost architectural in their syntax: the alignment of streets, the measurement of façades, the classification of institutions. For Georgi, St. Petersburg was not merely a city but a living diagram of rational order. Its canals imitated Amsterdam, its avenues Paris, but its spirit was uniquely imperial, attempting to bring order, rationality, and grandeur to social life through urban design. His Description situates the city within the natural sciences as much as urban planning: he writes of climate, soil, and hygiene alongside theaters, academies, and churches, treating them as parts of one ecosystem of civilization. This holistic approach shows that the Enlightenment understood the city as a mechanism for cultivating virtue.
Georgi’s copy, annotated by Alexander Benois (1870-1960), adds yet another layer of significance, connecting the eighteenth-century vision of the city with the perspective of a twentieth-century artist and historian. Benois, one of the founders of the World of Art movement, was obsessed with St. Petersburg as both myth and moral warning. His marginal notes — terse, emotional, sometimes ironic — transform Georgi’s Enlightenment optimism into historical irony. Where Georgi saw a city of reason, Benois saw the shadow of autocracy. His handwriting in the margins turns the eighteenth-century text into a palimpsest of two eras: one constructing order, the other mourning its collapse. The very fact that this Enlightenment description passed through Benois’s hands testifies to its afterlife as a symbol of the Petersburg myth — the dream of a rational utopia forever threatened by its own perfectionism.
Both Bakherecht and Georgi, in different registers, reflect the moral ambition of Catherine’s project, a kind of social architecture. The city, the body, and the soul were to be governed by the same principles: balance, moderation, and symmetry. Doctors were moralists, architects were legislators, and the Empress herself fancied the role of philosopher-queen. In this sense, the two books can be seen as complementary parts of a single intellectual system. Bakherecht seeks to discipline the private passions that threaten public health; Georgi describes the public order designed to contain those passions. The body and the city mirror one another — both striving toward equilibrium.
What makes these books so precious today is not only their rarity but the world they reconstruct. They belong to a brief and fragile moment when Russian modernity still believed in coherence. Within a generation, Napoleon’s wars, censorship, and romantic nationalism would dissolve the rational optimism they represent. Bakherecht’s moral medicine would give way to 19th-century psychology and moralism; Georgi’s geometrical city would turn into Dostoevsky’s fevered labyrinth. Yet in these volumes one still hears the confident voice of Enlightenment: the conviction that knowledge could purify, that design could redeem, that human beings could be perfected through the ordering of space and desire.
There is also a subtler irony. The Enlightenment that sought to discipline pleasure and regulate behavior also created the modern idea of individuality. By classifying human impulses, thinkers like Bakherecht gave them visibility; by mapping cities as systems, observers like Georgi revealed their underlying tensions. Both books, in their scientific clarity, inadvertently preserve the very irrationality they sought to suppress. Reading Bakherecht’s warnings against lust, one senses the fascination beneath the condemnation; reading Georgi’s plans for urban harmony, one glimpses the anxiety of control.
Together, these volumes illuminate the paradox at the heart of Enlightenment modernity — the conviction that reason could redeem chaos. They show how Catherine’s St. Petersburg was less a city than an argument: that civilization could be built from symmetry, that morality could be engineered, that desire itself could be measured and reformed. Yet in their pages, as in the city they describe, order and obsession blur into one another. The doctor who diagnoses lust and the geographer who maps perfection share the same faith — that knowledge can save us from ourselves. The Enlightenment’s desire to measure everything reveals, in retrospect, a deeply human desire to understand, order, and make sense of the world. Catherine’s Petersburg, gleaming on its marshes, endures as their monument: at once sublime and fragile, forever constructing enlightenment.
