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Innovative perspectives on how St. Petersburg's rich cultural heritage is preserved and remembered


For more than three centuries, St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great as Russia's westward-oriented capital and as a visually stunning showcase of Russia's imperial ambitions, has been the country's most mythologized city. Like a museum piece, it has functioned as a site for preservation, a literal and imaginative place where Russians can commune with idealized pasts. Preserving Petersburg represents a significant departure from traditional representations. By moving beyond the "Petersburg text" created by canonized writers and artists, the contributors to this engrossing volume trace the ways in which St. Petersburg has become a "museum piece," embodying history, nostalgia, and recourse to memories of the past. The essays in this attractively illustrated volume trace a process of preservation that stretches back nearly three centuries, as manifest in the works of noted historians, poets, novelists, artists, architects, filmmakers, and dramatists.


Contents
Introduction: Preserving Petersburg / Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris

1. St. Petersburg and the Art of Survival / William Craft Brumfield
2. The City's Memory: Texts of Preservation and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg / Julie Buckler
3. Unsaintly St. Petersburg? Visions and Visuals / Helena Goscilo
4. A Tale of Two Cities: Ancient Rome and St. Petersburg in Mandelstam's Poetry / Zara Torlone
5. Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration / Vladimir Khazan
6. Multiethnic St. Petersburg: The Late Imperial Period / Steven Duke
7. Leningrad Culture under Siege (1941–1944) / Cynthia Simmons
8. Cultural Capital and Cultural Heritage: St. Petersburg and the Arts of Imperial Russia / Richard Stites
9. Strolls Through Postmodern Petersburg: Celebrating the City in 2003 / Stephen M. Norris

List of Contributors
Index

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Date de parution

13 juin 2008

Nombre de lectures

0

EAN13

9780253027894

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

3 Mo

Preserving Petersburg
Preserving Petersburg
__________________________________
History, Memory, Nostalgia
Edited by Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris
Indiana University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders   800-842-6796 Fax orders   812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail   iuporder@indiana.edu
© 2008 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Preserving Petersburg : history, memory, nostalgia / edited by Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35142-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-21980-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History. 2. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—In literature. 3. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Civilization. I. Goscilo, Helena, date II. Norris, Stephen M. DK552.P73    2008      2007045267 947′.21—dc22
1   2   3   4   5   13   12   11   10   09   08
Contents
__________________________________
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris
One
St. Petersburg and the Art of Survival
William Craft Brumfield
Two
The City’s Memory: Texts of Preservation and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg
Julie Buckler
Three
Unsaintly St. Petersburg? Visions and Visuals
Helena Goscilo
Four
A Tale of Two Cities: Ancient Rome and St. Petersburg in Mandelstam’s Poetry
Zara Torlone
Five
Petersburg in the Poetry of the Russian Emigration
Vladimir Khazan
Six
Multiethnic St. Petersburg: The Late Imperial Period
Steven Duke
Seven
Leningrad Culture under Siege (1941–1944)
Cynthia Simmons
Eight
Cultural Capital and Cultural Heritage: St. Petersburg and the Arts of Imperial Russia
Richard Stites
Nine
Strolls Through Postmodern Petersburg: Celebrating the City in 2003
Stephen M. Norris
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
__________________________________
The editors gratefully acknowledge the following people for their help with this volume’s publication: Karen Dawisha, Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University; Anne Clemmer, June Silay, and Daniel Pyle at Indiana University Press; Candace McNulty, our outstanding copyeditor; and Melissa Cox Norris, who designed the original version of the beautiful cover. Helena thanks Steve for the pleasure of working with him, a feeling Steve reciprocates.
Introduction
__________________________________
Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris
Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
EDWARD GIBBON, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The ravishing night
exudes joy and sensuality!
Heaven’s northern daughter,
the night is mute
And light blue!
PETR VIAZEMSK II, “PETERSBURG NIGHT” 1
The identity and status of cities inevitably changes with the years, though perhaps not in the perception of its residents, admirers, and detractors. Internationally, Rome continues to enjoy its long-standing (and tautological) reputation as the Eternal City, Paris remains the Center of Chic and Amour, and London, its current prices of apartments and houses notwithstanding, still impresses many as eminently Livable. By contrast, historical events as well as economic hardships have diminished the earlier significance of cities such as Berlin, Lisbon, and Warsaw. Perhaps no other European city, however, has experienced such a dramatic change in image as St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 as the country’s Westward-oriented capital and as a visually stunning showcase of Russia’s imperial ambitions.
In 2002, Petersburgers had the opportunity to publicly voice their views of what traditionally has been touted as Russia’s Northern Palmyra when, as a prelude to St. Petersburg’s 300th birthday the following year, the Russian edition of Elle magazine announced a contest for the best essay on “My Petersburg.” The committee judging the entries included the well-known author Tatyana Tolstaya, and submissions came from a number of famous and not so famous Russians alike. Ultimately, Arkadii Ippolitov, a curator at the Hermitage, won. His essay, “The City in a Porcelain Snuffbox,” argues that St. Petersburg no longer exists as a city, for it has become a museum piece, much like an eighteenth-century snuffbox. According to Ippolitov, St. Petersburg is an entity in storage, similar to materials and corpses in libraries and cemeteries—spaces where objects are arranged in a seeming order, yet places that seek to “act on the nerves, but produce a feeling of involuntary respect.” As he argues, “In cemeteries, just as in museums, you understand acutely that there is no death. There is also no life.” Ippolitov concludes that cemeteries, museums, and other depositories of culture store recollections as imprints of memory that “add to a repository of illusions and metaphors,” which in turn create a sense of reality. In his view, “St. Petersburg” was “converted into a recollection and washed away by twilights, white nights, fogs, and hoarfrosts,” thereby ceasing “to exist in reality; only the brittle porcelain of an ancient snuff-box preserved Petersburg.” Ippolitiov’s views correspond to a growing perception in Russia that St. Petersburg has become “museu-mified.” 2 For those subscribing to this view, Petersburg is preserved in a way similar to other exotic phenomena that no longer have contemporary meaning, but function as objects of curiosity.
Ippolitov’s essay explodes traditional views of St. Petersburg. For years scholars and writers have examined the city primarily through four lenses associated with canonized writers, according to which “Petersburg” is a place of great beauty, a supernatural space, an apocalyptic site, or a locus of spiritual endurance—specifically, the images created by Pushkin, Dos-toevsky, Bely, and Akhmatova. 3 Vladimir Toporov argues that a study of the Petersburg Text, as this corpus is commonly called, reveals “the astonishing closeness the various descriptions of Petersburg bear to one another, both in the works of a single author and in those of diverse authors.” 4 Thus the city might seem, in Julie Buckler’s apt description, a place “composed exclusively of palaces and slums, populated entirely by pampered aristocrats, the desperate poor, and writers of genius who immortalized both in artistic masterworks.” 5 Ippolitov explicitly rejects this “storied” view of the city in favor of other approaches. For him, Petersburg is best understood as a preservation piece, one inseparable from history, nostalgia, and constant recourse to memories of the past. Sentiment and desire have turned Petersburg into an immobile site of memory, much like an “old cemetery, a neglected library, and museum depositories.” What links these locales is that “in them time is similar to a pond or a lake with standing water,” where someone can step in more than once and experience the same sensations. 6 For a city intended as the stronghold of future-oriented ideas and projects, the image of stasis and regression represents a startling reversal.
That image of Petersburg intersects with the perspectives of scholars represented in this volume, who likewise maintain that the northern capital and its history have been shaped by ceaseless attempts at preservation and nostalgic yearning for a mythical Petersburg constructed over time. As William Brumfield’s introductory chapter makes clear, Petersburg’s story is above all one about survival. Brumfield focuses on the Winter Palace and the Admiralty, the two most important architectural symbols of Petersburg, and the concerted efforts to maintain the significance of these structures. At the same time, the buildings of St. Petersburg have prompted visitors and residents alike to focus on the unanticipated ramifications of the city’s individual “identity.” From the Marquis de Custine to Fyodor Dos-toevsky, many observers maintained that the survival of the city’s buildings created a sense of overwhelming artifice and power. Yet, as Custine noted, Petersburg’s buildings were sites of memory invested with meanings that inspired successive generations to preserve them and the memories they contained. One might claim, then, that almost from the outset Petersburg was trapped between the progr

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