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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
It has long been common to interpret the mythology of St. Petersburg through the prism of eschatological prophecy. But what happens to the cultural tradition when the prophecy of doom comes to be experienced as reality, and predictions give way to reaction? How did the discourse of the end of Petersburg change when the legendary curse of Peter's estranged wife—“This city will be empty”—turned into the devastation of postrevolutionary Petrograd: violent, starved, frozen, and diseased? In this article Polina Barskova explores various cultural expressions of the urban crisis in the years just after 1917. These artistic reactions come from Viktor Shklovskii, Pavel Shillingovskii, Semen Pavlov, and Grigorii Kozintsev, among others. Here, the focus is on the tension between two impulses: to distance and aestheticize the ruins or to bring them closer to author and recipient, rendering these signs of urban disaster maximally incoherent and ugly. The article argues that the Petersburg authors use both strategies, as well as their hybrids.
I would like to thank Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Andreas Schönle, Luba Golburt, Maria Joaquina Villasenor, and the anonymous readers for their astute comments, patience, and generosity.
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Accepting Toporov's idea that Petersburg's texts function as a complex unity, I suggest treating the texts of the city created between 1917 and 1935 as a separate system that, in spite of its obvious kinship to the system Toporov described, operates according to laws of its own. The main distinction between these two sets of texts is their relationship to the “end” of Petersburg: while the former treats this event as a cerebral notion, the latter is compelled by its reality. Thus, projections give way to reactions.
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