Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape.

MAPPING ST. PETERSBURG: IMPERIAL TEXT AND CITYSHAPE

BY JULIE A. BUCKLER

PRINCETON, NJ: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. 432 PAGES. $35.

Saint Petersburg is at once a glorious and a sad city. Despite having existed for a mere three hundred years, the metropolis has experienced--in fact, embodied--a succession of historical epochs that are reflected in the various changes to its very name. Christening Russia's new capital Saint Petersburg, after his patron saint, Peter the Great founded the city in 1703 as a monument to his determination to Europeanize and modernize his quasi-Asiatic realm. Renamed the more Russian-sounding Petrograd in 1914, as the empire marshaled its forces against the German enemy in World War I, the city three years later became the stage for two of the most momentous events of the twentieth century: the revolution that overthrew the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty, and the subsequent October Revolution that gave birth to the first Communist state. With the installment of the new regime, the city's designation changed yet again, this time to Leningrad, in honor of the Bolshevik hero, and because of the German army's horrendous siege of the city for nine hundred days, from 1941 to 1944, it came to be seen as a symbol of the suffering endured by the Soviet people during World War II. The reversion of its name to Saint Petersburg in the early '90s provided the clearest signal that the fateful seventy-four-year Soviet experiment had come to an end.

Now, Mapping St. Petersburg offers a tour of the city's "text," that is, what has been written about it and how the various genres reflect its topography. Challenging the usual vision of Petersburg as a city of either palaces or slums, Julie A. Buckler, a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University, explores the middle regions of "noncanonical works and underdescribed spaces."

Over the course of this textual journey, Buckler restores legitimacy to architectural and literary eclecticism, an aspect of the onetime capital long demeaned as middle- or low-brow, and, in a tour de force, she elevates them as essential to understanding the city's intricate and dynamic culture. Guidebooks and feuilletons, usually ignored, are ennobled here as keys to parsing the diversity of life in the northern Russian metropolis. Petersburg legends, tales of provincials arriving in the big city, cemeteries, place names, and little-explored sites, such as country homes or industrial sections, are all given their due as cultural texts. A final section elaborates on the tricentennial celebrations held in 2003.

Finally, one hundred pages of notes and bibliography, plus twenty-five maps and illustrations, buttress this brilliant and intriguing exercise in urban textology. If Buckler employs the distracting vocabulary of contemporary literary theory, which often obscures her meaning and detracts from the book's overall excellence, she nonetheless conveys the sense of complexity and mystery that defines, and always has defined, Saint Petersburg.