Literary Petersburg from Pushkin to Brodsky The Russia Semester MSSU,11 November 04 Michael Makin, Dept of Slavic Literatures and Languages, University of Michigan

Sport Express, 11 July 2003

Petersburg: Чел выходит с трубкой из парадной и едет за булкой и курой на машине, припарковав ее на поребрике; Moscow: Человек выходит с мобильником из подъезда и едет за белым хлебом и курицей на машине, загнав ее на бордюр. US: A guy walks out of his apartment building with his cell phone, and drives to the store to get bread and a chicken, parking at the curb UK: A bloke walks out of his block of flats with his mobile, and drives to the shop to get bread and a chicken, parking at the kerb

Count Lev Tolstoi ( ). Tolstois War and Peace ( ) was intended, at least in part, to illustrate the positive role played by the Russian aristocracy and gentry in the establishment of moral and social values, as well, of course, as in the defence of the country in the Napoleonic wars. The opposition of Moscow/Petersburg is fundamental to the novel.

Joseph Brodsky ( ) Я родился и вырос в балтийских болотах, подле серых цинковых волн, всегда набегавших по две, и отсюда -- все рифмы, отсюда тот блеклый голос, вьющийся между ними, как мокрый волос, если вьется вообще. Облокотясь на локоть, раковина ушная в них различит не рокот, но хлопки полотна, ставень, ладоней, чайник, кипящий на керосинке, максимум -- крики чаек. В этих плоских краях то и хранит от фальши сердце, что скрыться негде и видно дальше. Это только для звука пространство всегда помеха: глаз не посетует на недостаток эха 1975 I was born and grew up in the Baltic marshland by zinc-gray breakers that always marched on in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence that wan flat voice that ripples between them like hair still moist, if it ripples at all. Propped on a pallid elbow, the helix picks out of them no sea rumble but a clap of canvas, of shutters, of hands, a kettle on the burner, boiling - lastly, the seagull's metal cry. What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. Only sounds needs echo and dreads its lack. A glance is accustomed to no glance back

Vsevolod Nekrasov (born 1934) Translations by Gerry Janecek Что-то я так хочу В Ленинград Так хочу в Ленинград Только я так хочу В Ленинград И обратно Somehow I really want to go to Leningrad I really want to go to Leningrad Only I really want to go To Leningrad And back Какой я Пушкин я кто Некрасов не тот Некрасов и еще раз не тот не хвастаюсь я я хочу сказать с вас и такого хватит What kind of Pushkin am I Im who Nekrasov not that Nekrasov and also not that one Im not bragging but I only want to say from you even that is enough

Emperors and Empresses made St Petersburg; architects built it; but authors defined its character PushkinGogol DostoevskyBlok

Well into the twentieth century Brodsky Belyi Kharms Akhmatova Mandelstam

Some of the classic literary statements of the city: Pushkin, The Queen of Spades, The Bronze Horseman Dostoevsky, Poor Folk, The Double, White Nights, The Landlady The Injured and the Insulted, Notes from the Underground Crime and Punishment, The Idiot Gogol, The Nose, Nevsky Prospect, The Overcoat, The Diary of a Madman Bely, Petersburg Blok, The Twelve Kharms, Incidents Brodsky, I was born…

The Petersburg of literature and art combines the magnificence of the Imperial project with quite other elements: the city as place where the logic of design meets the fantastic, even the demonic; where imperial will fights with the nature that it aspired to conquer; the city as place of extreme alienation, where the small man is crushed; the city as place of madness; the city of outsiders and newcomers; the the city as place of violence and crime; the city as trading place for people….

The Nineteenth-century City

Moscow, the new Petersburg? Viktor Pelevin Venedikt Erofeev

They were shooting from the bridge, the way they do these things in Moscow. The old T-8os only fired at long intervals, as though the sponsors, short of money for shells, were afraid it would all be over too quickly and so they wouldn't make the international news. There was apparently some unwritten minimal requirement for reports from Russia: there had to be at least three or maybe four tanks, a hundred dead and something else as well - Tatarsky couldn't remember what exactly. This time an exception must have been made because of the picturesque visual quality of the events: although there were only two tanks, the quayside was packed with television crews with their optical bazookas blasting out megatons of somnolent human attention along the river Moscow at the tanks, the bronze Peter the Great and the window behind which Tatarsky was concealed. The cannon of one of the tanks standing on the bridge roared and the same instant Tatarsky was struck by an interesting idea: he could offer the people in the Bridge image-service the silhouette of a tank as a promising logo to replace that incomprehensible eagle of theirs. In a split second -less time than it took for the shell to reach its target - Tatarsky's conscious mind had weighed up the possibilities ('the image of the tank symbolises the aggressive power of the group and at the same time introduces a traditional Russian note into the context of cosmopolitical finance') andimmediately the idea was rejected. "They'd piss themselves,' Tatarsky decided. 'Pity, though.' A shell caught Peter the Great in the head, but it didn't explode, passing straight on through and continuing its flight roughly in the direction of Gorky Park. A tall plume of steam shot up into the air.Tatarsky remembered that the head of the monument contained a small restaurant complete with full services and facilities, and he decided the blank must have severed a pipe in the heating system. He heard the TV crews yelling in delight. The swirling plume made Peter look like some monster knight out of Steven King. Remembering how the rotting brains of the monster in The Talisman had dribbled down over its shoulders, Tatarsky thought the resemblance would be complete if the next shell severed a sewage pipe. Peter's head was defended by the Defence of Sebastopol committee. They said in the news that didn't mean the city, but the hotel, which was being fought over by two mafia groups, the Chechens and the Solntsevo mob. They also said the Solntsevo mob had hired stuntmen from Mosfilm and set up this strange shoot-out in order to attract TV coverage and generally inflame anti-Caucasian feeling (if the abundance of pyrotechnics and special effects was anything to go by, it had to be true). The simple-minded Chechens, who weren't too well versed in the protocol of PR campaigns, hadn't figured out what was going on, and they'd hired the two tanks somewhere outside Moscow.

If you would like to look at this presentation again – go to (without the sound files): Or contact