Description
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
About the Author
Julie Buckler is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of "The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia".
Reviews
Winner of the 2005-06 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures "[Mapping St. Petersburg] challenges the enduring myth of the city's uniqueness by exploring its ordinariness, as depicted in "middlebrow" fiction and non-fictional sources, uncovering a rich body of material that in itself should prove invaluable to researchers in a number of disciplines."--Lindsey Hughes, Times Literary Supplement "[Buckler] conveys very effectively what many writers have felt about the city--its elusively cerebral characters, its insubstantiality verging on evanescence."--Catriona Kelly, Russian Review "[Buckler] offers a useful, thematically organized synthesis of interesting writing on St. Petersburg, many of them otherwise inaccessible to anglophone readers."--Stephen Lovell, American Historical Review "[A] brilliant and intriguing exercise in urban textology... [Buckler] conveys the sense of complexity and mystery that defines, and always has defined, Saint Petersburg."--Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Bookforum
Awards
Winner of MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures 2006.
Book Information
ISBN 9780691130323
Author Julie A. Buckler
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 567g