ILLUSTRATIONS ix ACKNOWGEDMENTS xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: Petersburg Eclecticism, Part I: City as Text 27 CHAPTER TWO: Petersburg Eclecticism, Part II: Literary Form and Cityshape 61 CHAPTER THREE: Armchair Traveling: Russian Literary Guides to St. Petersburg 89 CHAPTER FOUR: Stories in Common: Urban Legends in St. Petersburg 116 CHAPTER FIVE: Literary Centers and Margins: Palaces, Dachas, Slums, and Industrial Outskirts 158 CHAPTER SIX: Meeting in the Middle: Provincial Visitors to St. Petersburg 195 CHAPTER SEVEN: The City's Memory: Public Graveyards and Textual Repositories 218 CHAPTER EIGHT: Timely Remembering and the Tricentennial Celebration 247 NOTES 253 BIBLPGRAPHY 321 INDEX 355
In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler rewrites the exclusionary ideology of classicism that has dominated pictorial and verbal discourses on Petersburg from Pushkin's 'Bronze Horseman' to the Petersburg Tricentenary of 2003. Meticulously researched and illustrated, deftly theorized, and vividly written, the book presents an exhilaratingly concrete study of Petersburg urban design and architectural history, focusing on the many 'eclectic' rental buildings, markets, cemeteries, and places of amusement that constitute a physical testimony to the aesthetic tastes and mixed social experience inscribed in them. Buckler explores the rich array of lowbrow and middlebrow writing on Petersburg that furnishes the forgotten matrix of urban folklore on which the Russian realist novel drew. Her intellectual mission: to restore to visibility the elided 'middle' of Russian society and taste that has been so carefully expunged from the cultural record and has only recently become a focus of interest for Russian imperial historians and students of cityscape as embodied myth. -- Monika Greenleaf, Stanford University This is a fascinating book. It is beautifully written and contains countless original details, insights, and observations. The rich array of materials offers a great deal of new information about and analysis of the cultural history of St. Petersburg. Buckler's approach represents a major contribution not only to Russian studies and comparative literature but also to cultural geography, history, and urban anthropology. -- Alexei Yurchak, University of California, Berkeley This strong, timely book celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg in a manner that is genuinely--not just rhetorically--interdisciplinary. In this exotic ex-centric city, with its autoreferential literary legacy and its 'anti-Moscow' mystique, the spatial and verbal arts came together concretely in a monolithic myth of violent beginnings and apocalyptic ends. So monolithic was this myth that it cultivated its own areas of blindness. Buckler brings these blind spots back into the light. -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
Julie Buckler is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of "The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia".
[Mapping St. Petersburg] challenges the enduring myth of the city's uniqueness by exploring its ordinariness, as depicted in "middlebrow" fiction and non-fictional sources, uncovering a rich body of material that in itself should prove invaluable to researchers in a number of disciplines. -- Lindsey Hughes Times Literary Supplement [Buckler] conveys very effectively what many writers have felt about the city--its elusively cerebral characters, its insubstantiality verging on evanescence. -- Catriona Kelly Russian Review [Buckler] offers a useful, thematically organized synthesis of interesting writing on St. Petersburg, many of them otherwise inaccessible to anglophone readers. -- Stephen Lovell American Historical Review [A] brilliant and intriguing exercise in urban textology... [Buckler] conveys the sense of complexity and mystery that defines, and always has defined, Saint Petersburg. -- Cynthia Hyla Whittaker Bookforum
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