Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921

ISBN-13: 9780299236045 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 320 str.

Olga Matich

Opis

Since its founding three hundred years ago, the city of Saint Petersburg has captured the imaginations of the most celebrated Russian writers, whose characters map the city by navigating its streets from the aristocratic center to the gritty outskirts. While Tsar Peter the Great planned the streetscapes of Russia's northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg (1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the "Petersburg myth" in Russian culture, takes issue with the city's premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century.
"Petersburg"/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. It begins with new readings of the novel-as a detective story inspired by bomb-throwing terrorists, as a representation of the aversive emotion of disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text-stressing the novel's phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburg's narrator, the rest of this volume (and the companion Web site, stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/) explores the city from vantage points that have not been considered before-from its streetcars and iconic art-nouveau office buildings to the slaughterhouse on the city fringes. From poetry and terrorist memoirs, photographs and artwork, maps and guidebooks of that period, the city emerges as a living organism, a dreamworld in flux, and a junction of modernity and modernism.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations           Preface           Introduction  Olga Matich   Part One: Petersburg, the Novel   1. Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance  Olga Matich   2. Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg  Olga Matich   3. Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics  Olga Matich   Part Two: Petersburg, the City   4. \u0022The Streetcar Prattle of Life\u0022: Reading and Riding St. Petersburg's Trams  Alyson Tapp   5. How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov's Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse  Alexis Peri and Christine Evans   6. The Enchanted Masquerade: Alexander Blok's The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets  Cameron Wiggins   7. Panoramas from Above and Street from Below: The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin  Ulla Hakanen   8. The Button and the Barricade: Bridges in Paris and Petersburg  Lucas Stratton   9. 28 Nevsky Prospect: The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative Olga Matich   10. Meat in Russia's Modernist Imagination              Mieka Erley   11. The Fluid Margins: Fl\u00e2neurs of the Karpovka River              Polina Barskova   12. The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok              Victoria Smolkin   Concluding Remarks              Olga Matich   Postscript. St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology              Gregory Kaganov   Index