Readers of Anna Karenina will know Krasnoye Selo, even if they have never been within a thousand kilometres of it. It was here, at the summer camp of the imperial guards, that Tolstoy set the officers' steeplechase in which Vronsky rides his mare Frou-Frou to disaster in front of the court. For more than a century, from the early nineteenth century until the revolution, the guards regiments of the Russian army gathered each summer in this area south-west of Saint Petersburg for manoeuvres, parades and horse races, and the tsar and the court came to watch. It is listed as one of the monuments associated with the historic centre of Saint Petersburg.
Today Krasnoye Selo is a district of the city, with apartment blocks, old churches and parks, and the traces of the imperial camp are scattered and subtle. The town lies at the foot of the Duderhof heights, a ridge of hills that is the highest ground in the surroundings of Saint Petersburg, with views on clear days across the flat land toward the Gulf of Finland and the city. During the Second World War the front line of the siege of Leningrad ran through this area, and the heights saw heavy fighting.
The riding around Krasnoye Selo is mostly flat, with long straight roads, some busy traffic close to the city and quieter lanes as you head out toward Ropsha, Gatchina and the villages of the Leningrad region. Road surfaces vary, with potholes and patched sections not unusual, and the weather is changeable, with short, bright summers and long, dark, cold winters. Summer nights around the solstice barely get dark at all.
As a sizeable suburban district, Krasnoye Selo has petrol stations, supermarkets and cafés in easy reach. Within reach are the imperial palaces of Peterhof, with its fountains, and Gatchina, as well as the palace and park at Ropsha. Saint Petersburg itself, with its canals, museums and bridges, is less than an hour away.
The countryside here has a melancholy beauty: birch woods, wet meadows, small lakes and the wide sky of the north. Come in early summer, when the white nights are at their brightest and the air smells of lilac and cut grass, and remember that a whole imperial court once came here to watch officers race their horses.