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. “ Petersburg”/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. 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. 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. “Redefines not only the phenomenal presence of Saint Petersburg as city but also the modern city’s impact on the creation of new kinds of narrative.” Slavic Studies / History / Literature & Criticism UW Press - Petersburg/Petersburg Novel and City, 1900-1921 - Edited by Olga Matich
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