By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg—with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives—to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning.
We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices—all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.
By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg—with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives—to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning.
We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices—all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.
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Overview
By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg—with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives—to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning.
We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices—all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691130323 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2007 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Mapping St. Petersburg
Imperial Text and CityshapeBy Julie A. Buckler
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2005 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
Introduction
Petersburg not only seems to appear to us, but actually manifests itself-on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from this very mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular. -ANDREI bELY, Petersburg
AS THE CAPITAL of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg was the seat of pomp and policy, but "Piter," as insiders have always liked to call it, was also the literary capital of tsarist Russia, not to mention its own favorite literary subject. Self-regarding St. Petersburg virtually wrote itself into existence, so vast and varied is the Russian literature that charts this city in all its aspects. The textual "map" of St. Petersburg-that is, the sum total of genres, topoi, and tours that cover the city in writing-constitutes a detailed literary analogue for urban topography.
St. Petersburg has been comprehensively mapped in terms of the literary mythology created by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Bely, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, and by scholars who tease out allusions and influences within this select group of authors and texts. Cultural historians treat the literary tradition togetherwith the visual and performing arts in a chronology of overdetermined cultural high points such as "The Bronze Horseman," the Winter Palace, and "Swan Lake."
Imperial St. Petersburg, thus conceived, might seem a city composed almost exclusively of palaces and slums, populated entirely by pampered aristocrats, the desperate poor, and writers of genius who immortalized both in artistic masterworks. The textual mapping of imperial St. Petersburg was, however, a project that ranged over the entire city and across a broad spectrum of literary forms and tonalities. Much of this literary production, which insistently and prolifically maps the city in all its aspects, has been relegated to the margins of cultural history.
When the eighteenth-century classicist ideal of unified continuous facades proved logistically impossible for Petersburg, the Masonry Construction Commission devoted its energies to placing freestanding monumental buildings at key locations. These grand-scale edifices visually unified the space of the city along the perspectives of avenues and embankments, and lessened the impact of the intermediate "gray areas" in between. Literary and cultural histories from the imperial period and most of the twentieth century have replicated this building strategy, orienting themselves either toward the monumental, or toward unsightly areas that radically undercut the illusion of unbroken panorama. The palaces and slums of St. Petersburg may seem like familiar literary territory, but other aspects of the city's history, its "gray areas," are decidedly underdocumented, if not invisible. The myth of imperial St. Petersburg thus excludes aspects of the city's cultural life characterized by mixed aesthetic tastes and social experiences. As I hope to show, the familiar mythology of St. Petersburg leaves out much of the middle-the ground-level urban experience that is more representative and thus less visible than the extremes of rich and poor. This study aims to revise the traditional literary "monumentalization" of Petersburg, and to offer a more decentralized view of a broader urban topography that includes noncanonical works and underdescribed spaces.
Myriad literary works that failed to achieve the status of Pushkin's "Bronze Horseman" or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment nevertheless played an active part in shaping the discourse of the very cultural mythology that later excluded them. I seek a corrective to High Romantic images-those two poles of the Petersburg binary purveyed, ironically, by middle-class writers during the heyday of literary realism-that elide the cultural middle of the imperial period. The Petersburg corpus is indeed a dense network of intertextual references, shot through with common themes and formal properties, but it is also the case that this body of texts appears unified because its boundaries have been established and maintained by a tradition. The poet Joseph Brodsky asserted that St. Petersburg would always be the capital of Russia, regardless of official designation. Its primacy is based upon "the second Petersburg, the one made of verses and of Russian prose," whose excerpts Soviet schoolchildren learned by heart: "And it's this memorization which secures the city's status and place in the future-as long as this language exists-and transforms the Soviet schoolchildren into the Russian people." This second literary-canonical Petersburg insistently inscribes itself upon human subjects and transforms them into textlike bearers of cultural legacy.
A fuller accounting of writing about Petersburg is essential, precisely because the Russian imperial capital has been characterized so persistently in textual terms. Petersburg, it is said, is a city whose identity has depended on literature in compensation for its unusually short history. Vladimir Toporov's essay "Petersburg and the Petersburg Text of Russian Literature" thus synthesizes the mythology of the city into a single text. Yuri Lotman suggests that Petersburg mythology is subject to a double reading, one utopian and the other apocalyptic, whereby a motif such as the Falconet monument snake can be read plausibly and simultaneously in contrasting ways. Lotman thereby proposes Petersburg as the ultimate hermeneutic object, comprehensible only through multiple, seemingly incompatible readings. Petersburg has not yet been treated, however, as I propose to do, in terms of a cultural network that cannot be reduced to a single textual structure, as a body of texts that collectively provides a structural analogue for the material city, and not merely an artistic refraction of it. The geographical, material entity that is Petersburg corresponds to an equally complex structure comprised of diverse literary forms, interrelated in spatial terms, and modeling specific sites of urban life. Throughout, this study poses two central questions: What kinds of writing correspond to specific places in Petersburg or to particular aspects of imperial-era Petersburg life? How does writing constitute imperial Petersburg, both before and after the imperial period?
Searching for Middle Ground
The sociocultural middle in St. Petersburg served a vital function over the course of the nineteenth century in effecting the transition to the pre-capitalist phase of pre-revolutionary Russian history. Yet the middle has long been the least studied aspect of Russian urban culture, dismissed with reference to Russia's lack of an established bourgeoisie like that in England and France. In Russian cultural criticism, the literary middle has been an object of abuse, reviled as the refuge of vulgar epigones, where "pure" aristocratic and folk cultures are contaminated by market influences, and authentic genres are diluted. Yet, as I hope to show, a great deal of urban cultural negotiation takes place on this same middle ground of literature.
The underdocumented middle ground of St. Petersburg also reflects a larger problem in Russian imperial historiography. The "middle" represents a kind of conceptual outpost, so vexed is this notion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature, social life, and urban geography. It has often been asserted that the West's burgeoning middle estate-in the parlance of Marxist theory, the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie-had no real equivalent in Russia, but it may be more accurate to say that Russia's "missing bourgeoisie" was rather "an indeterminate, ambiguously delineated one." In the imperial capital, new property owners were concentrated among the merchants, a group whose cultural influence in Petersburg did not correspond to its amassed capital, as was to a greater extent the case in Moscow. Instead of a property-owning class whose influence came to rival that of the declining aristocracy, it is said, Russia had its intelligentsia-a tiny minority rich only in moral and cultural values-to mediate between privileged elite and illiterate peasantry. Imperial Russia's middle ground in social, cultural, and political terms has, however, come under historiographical reassessment in recent years.
The middle estate as formulated by Catherine the Great's instructions-a category of urban residents known as meshchane-designated those who were not nobles, high clergy, merchants, or peasants. This definition encompassed nontaxed members of the urban community, such as low-ranking or unranked administrative personnel, artisans, and petty tradespersons. During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the middle space of society and culture was more often associated with the raznochintsy, those intermediate "people of various ranks," who did not belong to the juridical-social categories of estate (soslovie). This notoriously vague term has been evoked in terms of "shifting and indeterminate boundaries, spontaneous development, and multiple structures," which seems the only way to characterize the "range of interstitial groups" between the primary established social categories. By the 1880s, the term raznochintsy had become closely linked to the radical intelligentsia and had lost its usefulness as a categorization of Russia's indeterminate cultural middle. Moreover, the second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the accelerating growth of new interstitial groups. Late imperial urbanization led to increasing numbers of professionals in fields such as law, medicine, engineering, and education, as well as artists, entrepreneurs, and industrialists who did not fit the traditional categories of estate. These new groups were distinct from the traditional intelligentsia, who typically considered social service far more important than private life and individual expression. Like the intelligentsia, professional groups did, however, recognize the need for a legal framework to protect individual freedoms as well as impose public obligations.
The term "middle class" with reference to imperial Russia has come to connote "the transcendence of traditional estate loyalties in favor of wider class identities" in connection with social structures that establish "intermediate identities" between the family and the state. This definition emphasizes the importance of civic and social practices in the formation of a middle class, instead of taking the more traditional Marxist approach of treating class in connection with the base-superstructure model and with political life. In Russia, although the bourgeoisie did not come to power, the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century can thus be seen as an ever-expanding, increasingly messy middle ground.
As an overarching concept for this study, the "middle" unites the various approaches to the city explored in the following seven chapters. My perspective on the middle itself is similarly multi-angled. In the geographic sense, the middle does not specify the physically central part of Petersburg, but rather those spaces that might occupy the "middle distance" in a visual representation, although they never serve as the focal point. Because the middle is considered ordinary it may not seem worthy of notice, but the middle is everywhere. Seen in socioeconomic perspective, the middle includes that amorphous portion of the urban population to which nonaristocratic nineteenth-century writers generally belonged (or, that portion in which aspiring writers became enmired), and which so often afforded them subjects for literature, Petersburg legend notwithstanding. Considered in evaluative terms, the middle refers to writers of no more than average talent, and to writing that is largely undistinguished, even derivative. From a generic standpoint, however, the intermediate levels of the neoclassical hierarchy generated vital emergent forms neither noble nor humble, including lyric poetry, prose fiction, and history. Nikolai Karamzin's late eighteenth-century ideal of "pleasant" language emerged from that same part of literature and became the basis for nineteenth-century Russian literary fiction. These middle categories then dominated literary production, and from these, "Petersburg" literature, including those best-known works describing aristocratic and indigent urban subcultures, took shape. The entire Petersburg literary corpus-canonical and noncanonical exemplars-participates in the collective project of constituting the cultural middle, with writing as the ultimate medium.
In grammatical terms, a middle verb form or voice allows the subject to perform while also being affected by the specific action, in other words, to be both subject and object. In logical terms, the middle term in a syllogism is presented in both premises, but does not appear in the conclusion. Middling writers documented the milieu they knew best-their own-and this reflexive state of affairs became the hidden pretext for the Petersburg corpus, which then covered its tracks. In functional terms, the cultural middle may mediate; it is the medium or midwife that acts as conveyance, assists in bringing something forth, or marks an intersection. The cultural middle may surround, as mediums are wont to do, or be surrounded-that is, be besieged amidst an encompassing environment. Where does the middle begin and end, however, if it is to be conceived as more than a baggy catchall for those diverse parts of urban text and topography that fall between identifiable extremes? I seek the middle primarily in its functions within the urban context, as directly related to the preceding definitions, if not limited to them.
The cultural middle has a relational existence, as I conceive it, produced through the dialogic relation, in the Bakhtinian sense, of different populations and interests in the city. This cultural middle seems closely related to space itself, which has been similarly proposed by social theorists as constituted by the nature of links between separate entities. Of course, the same claim could be made for the spaces of "high" and "low" culture; all levels of culture are interconnected, and the middle cannot be articulated in isolation from the rest. My project aims at an archeological reconstruction of a complex discursive formation-the full textual articulation of imperial St. Petersburg as a cultural object.
Mapping Textual and Cultural Space
The notion of time has underwritten influential Western cultural paradigms such as Darwin's theory of natural selection and Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. In contrast, the Newtonian view of space as fixed and abstract has persisted throughout modern history, in spite of the many developments in theories of space that have suggested its integral connection with human social and cognitive patterns. The nineteenth century saw a paradigm shift linked to changing practices in the natural and social sciences, as well as in artistic form, all of which began to treat space as multiple and heterogeneous, produced by subjective points of view and derived from the particular features of human physiology. Traditional Marxism, however, did not occupy itself explicitly with questions of space, considered to be a reflection of social structure and class conflict, and not an autonomous determinant of social relations.
In the terms of the twentieth-century social materialist Henri Lefebvre, space represents "social morphology," the form of lived experience, and "a materialization of 'social being'"; space is constituted by particular social relations that give it meaning. Michel de Certeau has argued that everyday activities are the means of producing space or "practiced place." An act of reading is thus "the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs." In the paradoxical case of narrative fiction, an essentially temporal medium creates the illusion of events unfolding in physical space, while "a succession of spatial scenes" provides the sense of time passing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mapping St. Petersburg by Julie A. Buckler Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Petersburg Eclecticism, Part I: City as Text 27
Petersburg Eclecticism, Part II: Literary Form and Cityshape 61
Armchair Traveling: Russian Literary Guides to St. Petersburg 89
Stories in Common: Urban Legends in St. Petersburg 116
Literary Centers and Margins: Palaces, Dachas, Slums, and Industrial Outskirts 158
Meeting in the Middle: Provincial Visitors to St. Petersburg 195
The City's Memory: Public Graveyards and Textual Repositories 218
Conclusion: Timely Remembering and the Tricentennial Celebration 247
Notes 253
Bibliography 321
Index 355
What People are Saying About This
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
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
"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
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