White nights, phantasmagoria, and sieges
Aleksandr Pushkin, Evgeny Onegin (1823-1830)—The city of St. Petersburg looms large in this “novel in verse” as well as in his poem “The Bronze Horseman” (1833) and his short story “The Queen of Spades” (1834).
Fyodr Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)—Dostoevsky made Petersburg integral to this book, as well as to Notes fromUnderground (1864) and his short stories “White Nights” (1848) and “A Raw Youth” (1875).
Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem” in Poems of Akhmatova (Little, Brown and Company, 1973)—Petersburg is the setting for her acrid love poems and for this, her famous, long-suppressed poem about Statin’s purges.
Nikolai Gogol, “The Portrait,” “Nevsky Avenue,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” and “Diary of a Madman” (1834-1842)— A malevolent, phan- tasmagoric St. Petersburg dominates Gogol’s cycle of short stories.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1863-1869) and Anna Karenina (1873- 1876)—St. Petersburg figures prominendy in these novels as the epitome of all that is false and unnatural.
Andrei Bely, Petersburg (Indiana University Press, 1978)—This bril- liant experimental novel, first published in 1913-1914 and superbly translated into English for the first time by Robert A. Maguire ’5l and John E. Malmstad, proved seminal to twentieth-century literature about the city. This novel profoundly affected Russian prose of the twenties and, subsequently, American prose through the work of Bely’s great admirer, Vladimir Nabokov, whose short stories and novels are often set in St. Petersburg.
Robert Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (Knopf, 1981)—A beautifully written book, the best of the many biographies of Peter the Great.
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian Historyand Thought (Oxford University Press, 1985)—A study of the profound impact Peter’s actions and ideas had on Russian society.
James H. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change (McGill- Queens University Press, 1976)—This book shows how the city’s resources were overwhelmed after 1861 by a surge of population growth, caused first by the emancipation of the serfs and then by industrialization.
Blair Ruble, Leningrad: Shaping a Soviet City (University of California Press, 1990)—Ruble discusses the ways in which Soviet political and municipal considerations have guided the evolution of the city.
Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days (Harper and Row, 1969)—Of the many books written about the siege of Leningrad, none can compare to this.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The City on the Neva” in Stories and Prose Poems (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1970)—A remarkable meditation on the city and its meaning.
Joseph Brodsky, “A Guide to a Renamed City” in Less Than One (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1986)— An extraordinary essay on St. Petersburg by one of Russia’s finest poets. Both Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, Nobel Laureates, have received honorary degrees from Dartmouth in recent years.
Richard Sheldon
