Everyday St. Petersburg

I’m scheduled to go to return to return to St. Petersburg in about a month.  If all goes accordingly to plan, my two-week administrative Fulbright will take me to Kaliningrad, Archangelsk, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.  As some of my readers may know, I am not conversant in Russian and have only been to Russia once in my life.  On my single visit to Russia I stayed in St. Petersburg, which quickly became my favorite place in the world.  To a large extent, my love of the city is predicated on my fascination with what Solomon Volkov called “the myth of St. Petersburg,” which focuses on a long series of interconnecting legends of monarchical power, aesthetic and political inventiveness, and resistance to Nazi (and even Stalinist) totalitarianism.  The power of the St. Petersburg myth rests on the firm foundations of dozens of brilliant historical and quintessentially modern actors, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, George Balanchine, Igor Stravinsky, and Anna Ahkmatova, as well as on Leningrad’s 900 day siege.  As I walked up and down the Nevsky Prospect, or took a boat tour of the city’s famed canals, I hardly needed to interact with the “real” St. Petersburg at all.   At first, I thought that the St. Petersburg I visited two years ago was oddly historical.  Only interacting with people when I needed to order a sandwich or ask for the way to a hidden museum entrance, I was the archetypal tourist, staring at the city’s bridges, cathedrals, and palaces—many of which were utterly impervious to time.  But perhaps my second visit to St. Petersburg will allow me, or force me, to catch at least a glimpse of life beyond the myth.    This is of course easier said than done.  I have encountered St. Petersburg many times, but always through the lens of literature.  These encounters, and even those which are mediated by the work of literary theorists, are in a sense of a form of concentrated mythology.  The house museums in St. Petersburg are a case in point.  My first visit to St. Petersburg put me in one writer’s flat after another.  Genius (the genius of Blok, Ahkmatova, Pushkin, Nabokov, and Dostoyevsky—I never could locate Leskov’s pad) permeated the city. 

If there’s any academic anecdote to the myth of St. Petersburg, it is certainly Catriona Kelly’s recent book, St. Petersburg:  Shadows of the Past.  In this book, Kelly does her best to circumvent the city’s legacy of aesthetic and political brilliance.  Instead, she takes an almost anthropological tour of the city, explaining how ordinary Russian and Soviet citizens lived everyday life.  Kelly’s tour de horizon of Leningrad/St. Petersburg takes us into the most quotidian aspects of the city’s existence.  Relying on insights from scholars in the field of cultural studies and related fields, Kelly breaks city life down into its simplest parts.  Where did people live?  How did they make use of their shared and private space?  What did they eat?  How did they get to work or move around the city?  What entertainment did they seek out?  The value of Kelly’s work is immense, especially in light of the fact that the city has been subjected to so many one-sided treatments in the past.  St. Petersburg’s denizens did not (and do not) spend their lives at the ballet; nor do they always fret about politics.  More often than not, men and women are navigating complex rituals related to their kitchens, television sets, and recreational activities.  Kelly’s treatment of everyday life in St. Petersburg is encyclopedic, although it deliberately deemphasizes those aspects of city life that have already been documented, including work as well as politics and art.  While Kelly, a scholar of language, is intimately familiar with St. Petersburg’s poetry scene, she only quotes specific poems to illustrate some detail of the people’s most banal experiences.  One downside of Kelly’s approach to her subject matter, is that St. Petersburg often seems to be the mirror image of every major, modern city.  Although Kelly explores many of the city’s peculiarities, one is left with the overall impression of urban sameness.  If you take away the political and artistic myths, and spend no time admiring the city’s famed Bronzed Horseman, you might be anywhere.  Her argument might be summed up this way:  if you live in Chicago, how much time do you really spend dwelling on the significance of the lion sculptures that adorn the Art Institute?  As somebody who recently left the city to take up residence in a distant suburb, located in what one scholar labeled “the geography of nowhere,” I can’t fully embrace her line of thinking.  Cities are more than the sum of their parts.  While it’s interesting to note that the citizens of St. Petersburg rarely actually use its famed canals in the service of business interests, the canals have been, and remain, vitally if ineffably linked to what it means to inhabit (as well as visit) this special place. 

St. Petersburg Seminar

From time to time I've touched upon the idea of teaching a course about the Russian Revolution and its legacy. I've been unsure about whether this course would delve deeply into the revolutionary tradition in nineteenth century Russia, or spend much time tracing the revolutionary aftershocks that continue to this day in Russia and its "near abroad." Probably, the Revolution proper deserves its own course.

Reading Volkov makes me dream of a topics course or upper division seminar on St. Petersburg. Following Volkov's text, and perhaps Bruce Lincoln's treatise on the same subject, I'd like to explore the history of Russian modernity as that history has been revealed in St. Petersburg. I taught a course called the British Novel at Arizona State (West) that explored modernity (British modernity anyhow) through an exploration of British literature. We read Defoe, Shelley, Dickens, Woolf, Burgess, and various post-colonial authors such as Jamaica Kincaid. We ended spectacularly with Bridgette Jones' Diary and an episode of Absolutely Fabulous.

This class was one of the favorite ones I've ever taught. Aside from appreciating the high percentage of literature majors in the class, I liked looking at history through the lens of history, free of the heavy emphasis on dates and indeed the general question of causation. This class didn't focus on when things happened, or who made them happen. It didn't even stress why they happened. Instead, it looked at what happened, which is a difficult enough question to answer without any other complicating factor. And by using great literature, we looked at each age's most articulate, intelligent, and subtle spokespeople. What a relief to be free of safe, monotonous, and committee-written textbooks!

It would nice to look at Russian history by relying on the writers and artists rather than the historians. Following Volkov, I'd use Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Blok, Bely, Bunin, Mayakovsky, Trotsky, Akhmatova, Lunchacharsky, and of course Stalin--the sinister aesthete, not the sinister politician.

The point about St. Petersburg is that its intelligentia and artistic community experienced and articulated the severe dichotomy of modernity more accutely than any other European city--the glittering hopes as well as the awful suffering. Once the capital of one of the most powerful autocracies in Europe, and the scene of the country's most advanced forms of industrialization, St. Petersburg enjoyed many of the rewards of imperial patronage, including a sophisticated culture of prose, poetry, art, music, and theatre. But in a very short timeframe by European standards, St. Petersburg's privileged position as vanguard of Russian history was overthrown.

Lenin and Stalin de-graded the capital, fearful of its relationship to the West. The Nazi dictatorship starved the re-named city for 900 days. Following that, Stalin attacked the city again, as he had done before the wary in response to the Kirov murder he apparently authored, sending many of its leading writers to death or exile.

Modern Capital

This blog has already summarized Solomon’s Volkov’s majestic survey of Russian high culture in the twentieth century, The Majestic Chorus. That work was a supremely sophisticated and beautiful explanation of Russia’s cultural achievements prior to the First World War as well as the aesthetic continuity that somehow survived a frontal attack from the forces of Soviet totalitarianism. Volkov’s earlier book, St. Petersburg: A Cultural history, despite its longer chronology and geographical constraints, is a very similar book.


St. Petersburg is urbane, humane, well-written, and well-informed; and Volkov, expatriate musician and historian, is equally at home discussing St. Petersburg’s centrality to European art, music, dance, theater, poetry, architecture, literature, and politics. Even as an exile, Volkov somehow remained the ultimate Russian insider. And now he may be the doyen of the expatriate Russian intellectual community.

In addition to his career as a musician, Volkov has produced a series of books that are predicated on oral interviews with some of St. Petersburg most famous sons, including Shostakovich (See Nick’s previous post on Testimony), Brodsky, Balanchine, and Akhmatova.

Volkov’s purpose in this book is twofold: to assert St. Petersburg’s importance to the history of European and global modernity, even apart from the Revolution; and to explain how the St. Petersburg “mythos” operated in Russian cultural history.

Volkov necessarily begins with the city’s highly unusual founding by the highly unusual emperor, Peter the Great (for whom the city was not actually named). The city was nothing if not experimental: at great human cost, Peter built a new “window to the West” which bore little resemblance to Moscow or the rest of Russia. Its architecture was well-organized, spacious, and elegant, if also cold and sterile. The city immediately found both aesthetic champions and detractors.



Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, celebrating the imposing statue of the same name, launched the powerful but ambivalent poetic response to the physical city. Dostoyevsky and Gogol built on what Pushkin had written, although each had severely critical reactions to the city, for despite its grandeur St. Petersburg had its drawbacks. Built at the cost of tens of thousands of serf laborers, St. Petersburg was cold, landlocked during the long Russian winter months, subject to floods, strangely inorganic, and home to brilliant but often superficial court life.

Ultimately, it’s hard to dismiss Volkov’s claims about St. Petersburg. Smaller and newer than cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, St. Petersburg’s cultural elites eventually became the most articulate artistic exponents of what it meant to live in the modern world. ). Marshall Berman has written very succinctly on the subject, exploring Dostoyevsky’s feverish explanation of modernity: on the one hand, you get freedom born of the anonymity of city life; on the other hand, you get uprooted from the traditional moral and social networks.

Eventually, St. Petersburg’s claim to historical importance would be solidified for all time by the October Revolution, though ironically Lenin hated the city and hasted to move the Russian capital to Moscow (though not entirely for the reasons Volkov suggests). It’s true that many of Russia’s aesthetic innovations predate the Revolution. However, although this may be impossible to prove, it seems likely that revolutionary aesthetics led to revolutionary politics, and of course the reverse is certainly true: once the political revolution occurred, the new political elite alienated traditional artistic elites and therefore coincidentally opened doors for radical artists and poets such as Blok and Mayakovsky.



St. Petersburg suffered tremendously for its radical pretensions. In some ways, its gloomy artists had expected as much: poets such as Blok has foretold the city’s collapse before it became inevitable. The Revolution, Civil War, Stalinism, and World War II, led to the murder, suicide, death by starvation, exile, flight, or imprisonment of countless artists, writers, and poets. Somehow, the city survived.

The survival was embodied by the great poet, Akhmatova, who refused to leave Russia, although Stalin executed a former husband and imprisoned another husband as well as her son. Volkov’s St. Petersburg is a wonderful reminder that even had the city of St. Petersburg perished, its “mythos” would live on. For better or worse, the city helped to define what it means to be a modern person. The legacy is complex and ambivalent, so perhaps Volkov’s hagiographic tone isn’t quite right. What is certain is that we need to think seriously about St. Petersburg’s legacy to the modern world if we want to understand our place in that world. It was the home of the Bronze Horseman, Mir iskusskva (World of Art), Suprematism, Acmeism, Russian Futurism, Constructivism, the Decembrist Revolt, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Krondstadt Revolt, the Marysky Theater, the Stray Dog, etc. This city meant something important (if not always positive) to people such as Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belinsky, Herzen, Pasternak, Punin, Mirsky, Tchaikovsky, Balanchine, Lenin, Benois, Chukovsky, Ginzburg, Gumilyov, Mussorgsky, Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Shostokovich, etc. And if meant much to them, it should to us as well.