Cover13; -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction / Olga Matich -- I. 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 -- II. Petersburg, the City -- 4. "The Streetcar Prattle of Life": 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: Fl226;neurs of the Karpovka River / Polina Barskova -- 12. The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok / Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock -- Concluding Remarks / Olga Matich -- Postscript. St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology / Gregory Kaganov -- Contributors -- Index
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 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
