This beautifully produced volume brings together in a single edited collection many of the most important articles written over the last fifty years by the eminent scholar of St. Petersburg Al΄bin Konechnyi. It will obviously interest those who work on the history and literary text or myth of St. Petersburg, but it also has a great deal to offer a broader scholarly audience, including specialists in Russian history, performance studies, and nineteenth-century literature.
The first and longest section of the volume contains lightly re-edited versions of Konechnyi's superb essays on life and leisure activities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Petersburg. His articles on the popular fairs and entertainments (narodnye gulian΄ia) held during maslenitsa and Easter week; his work on portable panorama boxes (raiki), military reenactments, and “living pictures” (zhivye kartiny) as forms of popular theater; and his publications about Petersburg's public parks, restaurants, and dacha districts are all included. This section of the volume also features articles on the river Neva and the white nights in city culture and myth, a chapter on literary strolls and the culture of walking on Nevskii prospect, and a piece on merchant life. Konechnyi's articles on Petersburg enrich our understanding of the city in key periods and provide important context for interpreting the work of authors such as Nikolai Gogol΄, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Aleksandr Blok. In his articles, Konechnyi relies on a rich base of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs and historical correspondence, periodicals, guidebooks, archival documents, and publications by both Russian and western scholars. His work with newspapers as sources is particularly impressive. Konechnyi's studies are filled with citations from reviews, feuilletons, sketches, and chronicles of city life. He not only manages to reconstruct largely forgotten aspects of old Petersburg, he also shows us how the phenomena he studies were understood and evaluated at the time.
The second section of this volume focuses on Konechnyi's publications on the discipline of Petersburg studies (Peterburgovedenie) and its most significant practitioners and institutions. Konechnyi's seminal articles on the kraeved and excursionist Nikolai Antsiferov (written along with Kseniia Kumpan), the Petrograd Excursion Institute, and the Society of Old Petersburg-New Leningrad are all included as is his essay on Faddei Bulgarin as chronicler of urban life and a sketch-writer. Konechnyi reminds us that Bulgarin, although an odious man and a secret police informant, was innovative as a journalist and, in the context of Russian literature, a pioneer in his use of new genres (the historical novel, the feuilleton, the sketch) even as he sometimes slavishly imitated foreign models (396). Citations to Bulgarin's sketches and feuilletons run throughout Konechnyi's work on old Petersburg because Bulgarin, in his work as a journalist, was such a meticulous observer of urban life.
The ground-breaking 1976 article “Nabliudenie nad topografiei ‘Prestuplenie i nakazanie,’” which Konechnyi authored with K. A. Kumpan at the very start of his scholarly career, appears as part of this section along with a note describing the genesis of the article and the role of Lidiia Ginzburg in mentoring the younger scholars. This note, which is titled “On the History of the Appearance of the article ‘Observations Concerning the Topography of Crime and Punishment,’” also includes a selection of correspondence with other scholars (Iurii Lotman, Dmitrii Likhachev, Richard Pope) about the article, thereby offering an illuminating glimpse of key scholarly networks in the late 1970s.
Only two of the articles by Konechnyi that appear in this volume are new: the note on the composition of Konechnyi and Kumpan's famous Dostoevskii article that I reference above and a piece on the soundscape of pre-Revolutionary Petersburg titled “Petersburg's Melody” (Melodiia Peterburga). This latter article considers the rhymes shouted by street hawkers marketing various wares (as catalogued by Prince Vladimir Obolenskii), the noise of ice being scraped from sidewalks by Petersburg's yardmen (as remembered by Mstislav Dobuzhinskii), the everyday sounds that echoed through Petersburg courtyards (as recalled by Anna Akhmatova), and the tunes played by organ-grinders (as referenced by émigré journalist Sergei Gornyi) (374, 377, 379, respectively). Konechnyi notes that in the northern capital only the Peter and Paul Fortress offered a space of relative silence; everywhere else the city's melody dominated (383).
In addition to Konechnyi's articles, this volume contains some associated reference materials. Konechnyi's study “‘Eating establishments’ as a Fact of Everyday and Literary Life in Old Petersburg” is followed by an extensively annotated list of Petersburg's many restaurants, coffee shops and saloons that notes when they opened, who ran them, the kind of food they served, and who frequented them. Konechnyi's article on the Humanities Section of the Petrograd Excursion Institute is followed by an appendix that lists the papers delivered at the section's meetings between 1921 and 1924. Each republished article in this volume is accompanied by a note that indicates where it initially appeared.
This volume is well-edited and a joy both to read and to hold. I struggle to find anything to criticize beyond the choice to include both footnotes and endnotes, which seemed unnecessarily complicated at times. Reading through this fine volume of Al΄bin Konechnyi's scholarly work makes his impact as a researcher even clearer. As Irina Paperno notes in her introduction to this collection, Konechnyi is “entirely original” as a scholar: his work cannot easily “be assigned to any existing school of urban studies” (9). This fine edition does a marvelous job of bringing together many of his best publications.
