Petersburg / Petersburg

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 Russiars"s northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Belyrs"s novelPetersburg(1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the "Petersburg myth" in Russian culture, takes issue with the cityrs"s premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century. "Petersburg"/Petersburgstudies 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 novelrs"s phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburgrs"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.

Olga Matich is professor of Russian literature and culture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de SiFcle, which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award and an honorable mention for the 2007 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the Modern Language Association.