The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Mapping St Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape by Julie A.
Buckler; My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern
Russian Letters by Anna Lise Crone and Jennifer Jean Day
Review by: Catriona Kelly
Source: The Russian Review, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 317-320
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review
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 Book Reviews 317

appropriation of these sources, along with the parodying of canonic Socialist

both the historical and postmodernist discourse on Soviet photography tak
familiar authorities who contributed to this book-among them, K. Akinsha
Dyogot, A. Efimova, and B. Groys.
In discussing the production of photography from the 1960s to the 19
revisit the nineteenth-century debate as to whether photography is really
that, at least from the Western perspective, had been resolved long ago.
attitude toward photography's status as a tool of propaganda rather than a fo
artistic expression is what allows the contentious issue to surface as a d
phenomenon which no forms of Western argument can untangle. The book's r
of contemporary photography through Soviet "optics" has resulted in analys
aesthetics alone. For instance, ideas about "narrativity" and "visuality" ar
Soviet body-image (both physical and ideological) relayed by the concep
(corporeality); other subtle formalist issues, such as the predilection for stage
suggest categories that would have no relevance to Western photography. Th
scale in Soviet photographs, for example, serves not only as a metaphor for th
of dictatorial rule, but also points to the medieval conventions of Byzanti
Slavic culture.

Because this publication draws on a rich cache of first-rate photographs produced at the
height of totalitarianism, it serves as a productive platform from which to define the parameters
that would indeed establish a new theoretical paradigm for its analysis and study. Articulating
the stakes of the argument should have been the task of the editor, who, alas, missed the
opportunity to pull the excellent scholarly contributions into a coherent thesis. Although her
introductory essay of personal reflections seems out of place by comparison with the otherwise
profoundly objective treatment of the subject, the overall value of the book as a foundation that
should lead to a comprehensive study of photography since Khrushchev has not been diminished
in the least.

Myroslava M. Mudrak, Ohio State University

Buckler, Julie A. Mapping St Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005. xiv + 364 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-691-11349-1.

Crone, Anna Lise and Jennifer Jean Day. My Petersburg/Myself Mental Architecture and
Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004.
x + 385 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 0-89357-313-2.

For every resident of, or visitor to, St. Petersburg, there are times when the city seems to be
impudently plagiarizing its own literature. As the waters rose during the unseasonably warm
January of 2005, one could congratulate the Neva on at last living up to Mednyi vsadnik. Even
when parallels are not so obvious, the sheer artificiality of the place often amazes: a grinning
man walking a bear-cub through the rush-hour traffic on Palace Square, say, or a film-crew
grimly sticking nylon plush icicles to Lomonosov Bridge because the weather had not provided
the right backdrop for a winter scene. Often, it seems, the inhabitants would rather live with the
imaginary-as in the case of the heroine's brother in Oleg Potemkin's recent film, Gorod bez
solntsa (2005), whose windows are closed up by black-and-white views of the city in the
dandified Silver Age to which he aspires. Both the books reviewed here belong to an analytical
tradition which attempts to systematize and explain this heritage of Petersburg textuality and

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318 The Russian Review

metatextuality, as most influentially expounded in the late V. N. Toporov's es

'Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury,"' now set material on the Russian Feder
"Kul'tura v Rossii."
Julie A. Buckler's Mapping St Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape is the more heavily
indebted to Toporov, but also the more original of the two studies. Buckler's book is not so
much an argument, but rather a chronological survey (though its focus is the first half of the
nineteenth century), or an integrated analysis as a tour round various figures held in common by
the built environment of St. Petersburg and the literary representations of the city. In the first
two chapters, the notion of "eclecticism" (which, as Buckler points out, was originally
complimentary rather than derogatory in meaning) holds together a discussion of the city's not-
quite-classical or more-than-classical buildings, irritant to architectural purism, and the literary
magpie tactics and fusions of incompatible discourses that Buckler identifies in say Mednyi
vsadnik and in Gogol's Nevskiiprospekt. Later chapters deal in turn with "armchair traveling,"
or the evolving role of guidebooks; "stories in common," or the symbiosis of urban folklore and
literary yams; and "literary centers and margins" (this juxtaposes the genteel outskirts of Tsarskoe
Selo and Pavlovsk with the celebrated slums of Vyazemsky Yard and other favorite haunts of
nineteenth-century investigative writers. "Meeting in the Middle" handles the vital part played
in engineering the St. Petersburg myth by provincial outsiders, whose stereotypical emotion on
arriving tended to be disappointment. "The City's Memory" describes cemeteries real and
fictional, and other forms of commemoration, as well as the threat to memory inherent in disasters
such as floods and fires.
The writers included on Buckler's "map" are for the most part as well-known as the Kazan'
Cathedral or the Alexander Column. They include Pushkin, Gogol', and Dostoevsky (though
not Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina, Smert' Ivana Il'icha, and Otets Sergii are surely the most
brilliant portrayals ever sketched by a Petersburg outsider-observer-perhaps these did not
qualify because Tolstoy's focus, unlike Buckler's, is on the capital's interior world). Certainly,
there are excursions on say Nikolai Leikin and Anatoly Bakhtiarov, and indeed such relatively
obscure figures as Aleksandr Bashchutskii, but the middling writers that formed the backbone
of literary journals are mostly absent (including such interesting female cases as Mariya Zhukova
and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya). Nevertheless, if the choice of material is conventional, the
way in which it is represented is often not. Buckler writes thought-provokingly about many
things, sometimes with an entertainingly tart note-as when she writes, "most Russians proudly
declare Pavlovsk their favorite among the palace parks, thus providing evidence of their
discriminating taste by agreeing with the majority" (p. 166). Provocative questions are asked:
is St. Petersburg a school for bad writing? (p. 23). While Bucker makes no attempt to capture
what the essence of the St. Petersburg myth is (perhaps, indeed, there is no such thing, only
constantly changing sets of tropes), she conveys very effectively what many writers have felt
about the city-its elusively cerebral character, its insubstantiality verging on evanescence.
Anna Lise Crone and Jennifer Jean Day's My Petersburg/Myself is, in chronological terms,
complementary to Buckler's book, since the main concern here is modernist writers such as
Blok, Belyi, Khodasevich, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, with an emphasis on poetry rather
than prose (but, one might add, still on men as opposed to women-so, the extremely original
Leningrad/St Petersburg work of Elena Shvarts, for instance, somehow escapes the generous
purview). The approach taken by Crone and Day is also very different to Buckler's.
Methodologically, the book is quite difficult to pin down: Crone and Day apply huge concepts
such as "time" and "space" to their material, and often seem more concerned with the
metaphysical than with an utterance's relation to the tangible world of the city: "When 'one'
speaks in the third person, impersonally, as in the expression, 'one would hope....,' it is never

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 Book Reviews 319

the whole of oneself who is the subject; rather, it is the part that would stand
a diluted, generalized self. Subjectively, one senses the incompleteness of
incompleteness that for Brodsky paradoxically becomes away of asserting hi
(p. 221). The problem with this kind of formulation is that it tends to entangl
self-questioning asides: is the "one" who senses the incompleteness of that "o
altogether different, individual, and if similar, is it not a problem to have an auth
at all if "one" is so incomplete (or is that where the paradox lies)? A certain
Petersburg fog seems to have got into the discussion at times here, as in the c
"reverse kenosis," according to which "the city pours out its own classic versio
onto its spaces and inhabitants, often appropriating and negating any positive
(p. 8). Exactly where wherein refers to remains something of a mystery; and whet
would see the concept of "reverse kenosis" as meaningful anyway is an open
The lack of precision also applies to selection of material: here, it would
less anyone who ever had to do with St. Petersburg becomes absorbed int
architecture." Thus, Fedor Tiutchev, whose tributes to St. Petersburg form rat
part of his work, somehow floats up with the autobiographical poem "Itak, opi
vami," evoking the Russian countryside, because this is in the same vein as P
ia posetil," which in turn is a forerunner to Innokentii Annenskii's Tsarskoe Sel
on (pp. 146-48). Once such free association has started, there is really no reason
including the poems of John Donne, should not be deemed an honorary St. Pete
perhaps the most unwarranted display of imprecision is in the interlinear Eng
accompanying the extensive citations of Russian verse. To take just a few e
most definitely not a bulldog (pp. 24-25), and the phrase Vnebe zhirafii risunok
rzhavye chuby grammatically cannot mean "the giraffe's drawing is ready t
motley with rusty clumps of hair" (ibid.); zaputalsia is "to get entangled" and
up in" (p. 18); Peterburgu byt'pustu cannot properly be rendered "May Petersb
out" (p. 100). Even where closer to accuracy, the translations are stylisticall
extent where, to a reader without Russian, they are likely to make little sense:
decided to be born / And, measuring thetime without error, / So as not to miss an
/ Spectacles, we bade farewell to non-being" (p. 133). These lapses are the m
given that Crone and Day have managed to assemble an absolutely magnifice
poetry, and snippets of prose too, so that their study could have functioned, had
worked better, simultaneously as an anthology with commentaries.
In sum, the effect of these two books is to leave the reader wondering whether
text" actually exists. This is attributable, I think, to more than a certain la
argumentation (which has more intellectually and aesthetically stimulating res
text, one should say, than in the Crone and Day discussion). There is a sense in w
has been "mapped" not so much by creative writers as by critics and memoir
authors of textbooks, children's books, and popular essays. London has its litera
as well (Dickens, and more recently Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair), but th
nearly so dominant as is the vision of Dostoevsky or Gogol', particularly, relative t
There is simply far less "para-literary" material about other major European cap
the degradation of Petersburg to a provincial town in the twentieth-century is o
the obsessive celebration of the place-nostalgia-soaked 6migr6s such as Nabo
resident culturologists such as Antsiferov were alike commemorating and mou
no longer existed, except in the words poured out about it. But one might also s
St. Petersburg myth" comes out of a search for identity in a city that, rivers an
largely strikingly unpicturesque, in a picture-postcard sense, and loo

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320 The Russian Review

indistinguishable, give or take flaking paint and plaster, from stretches of

Budapest or even (whisper it not) Moscow. One might, whichever way, hope now
the myth from rather a different perspective: not what it, in various culturologic
be held to "mean," but the mechanics of how it was created; of how the po
Petersburg came to think that what was written about the city was important, an
visions of the place had been anticipated in advance.

Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxfor

HISTORY

Szvik, Gyula. Novye napravleniia i rezul'taty v rusistike: New Directions

Russistics. Ruszisztikai K6nyvek 16. Budapest: Magyar Ruszisztikai
201 pp. ISBN 963-7730-37-0.

The contributions to this anthology originated primarily at the 2004 fourt

conference on Russian history organized by the Center for Russian Studies of
University in Budapest; Szvdik also edited the preceding volumes. There are twenty
sixteen in Russian, seven in English, by scholars from six countries: Hunga
seven, United States three, United Kingdom two, and Italy and Canada one e
Librarians beware: the outside cover omits the words "mezhdunarodnykh i
po" and "international" from the title as printed on the inside cover and title p
Despite a few editorial lapses, this volume maintains the high quality of its
but differs in greater chronological scope. The categories of the anthology's ti
if sometimes arbitrarily identify its two types of articles, historiographic and
Among historiographic articles, Gyula Szvaik describes the growth of Hung
historical studies since 1991. E. G. Anisimov analyses new research on Rus
noting the need for new integrative paradigms. S indor Szili depicts chang
Soviet conceptions of Russia's acquisition of Siberia, from "conquest" to "
"unification." I. O. Tiumentsev summarizes new research on the "Time of Troubles" which has
moved away from the "peasant war" thesis. Sergei Filippov succinctly probes the categorization
of the Old Believers as "Old Ritualists" in light of recent anthropology, sociology, and theology.
Saindor Gebei surveys post-1991 Ukrainian evaluations of Khmel'nits'kyi, rightly using Frank
Sysyn's publications as his standard. Beata Varga discusses eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Ukrainian judgments of the 1667 Andrusovo truce. A. B. Kamenskii identifies promising areas
of research on eighteenth-century Russia, including daily life. S. A. Kozlov addresses recent
Anglo-American scholarship on eighteenth century Russian travel accounts, urging more
international collaboration. A. P. Korelin deals with familiar issues of late Imperial Russian
social and economic history, insisting that the high cost of reform derived in part from the long
delay in undertaking it. Paul Dukes discusses English-language works on the 1917 Russian
Revolution since 1991, urging more attention to its international context and significance. Tamais
Krausz presents a disturbing picture of the politicization of the Holocaust and the term
"holocaust" in East European historical scholarship, including Hungarian, and objects to
equations of Hitler and Stalin as anti-Semites. Philip Longworth offers a selective interpretation
of the effect of the fall of the Soviet Union on Russian historical scholarship.
Among substantive articles, Istvin Vaisairy surveys Muscovite diplomatic books and stolbtsy
(columns), not, despite his title, diplomacy, with "oriental" states as Muscovy evolved from a
local East European into a major Eurasian power. Ann Kleimola presents a technically dazzling
survey of the "rediscovery and restoration of Muscovite iconographic needlework," unfortunately

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