St Petersburg
Shadows of the Past
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Fragile, gritty, and vital to an extraordinary degree, St. Petersburg is one of the world’s most alluring cities—a place in which the past is at once ubiquitous and inescapably controversial. Yet outsiders are far more familiar with the city’s pre-1917 and Second World War history than with its recent past. In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St. Petersburg’s residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. Ranging from rubbish dumps to promenades, from the city’s glamorous center to its grimy outskirts, this ambitious book offers a compelling and always unexpected panorama of an extraordinary and elusive place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on official documents, literature, art, memoirs, oral history, and personal observations of city streets and buildings, Kelly, professor of Russian at Oxford, offers a history/sociological study/travelogue of Leningrad-St. Petersburg from the late 1950s to the 2010s. "Piter" denizens have a reputation for being formidably reserved and defined by WWII experiences, though its status as cultural capital was long defined through the glories of the Kirov ballet and classical music. Film, painting, and theater also thrived, as did an alternative art scene in the 1970s; but by 2010 "ordinary Petersburgers were no longer so awestruck by the arts." In the Soviet era, major factories aimed "to cater to every aspect of its workforce's needs," shopping meant long queues, "Western goods, films, and magazines... set the standards of taste," and the kitchen was the home's center. In post-Soviet Petersburg, people feared that food was "less healthy' and tasty' than in the past"; an obsession with cars created wild road conditions; and a "devastating lack of trust in officials" prevailed. Although this well-researched, ambitious book is often engrossing, the sprawling nature of its material overwhelms and its amorphous style of writing is frustrating, making it less appropriate for general readers and more suitable to academics specializing in Russian sociology, history, and civil engineering. Illus.
