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Piranesi in Petrograd: Sources, Strategies, and Dilemmas in Modernist Depictions of the Ruins (1918-1921)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Polina Barskova
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Abstract

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.

Type
Forum
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 65 , Issue 4 , Winter 2006 , pp. 694 - 711
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2006

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References

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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5. V. N. Toporov, in his field-defining article “The Petersburg Text of Russian Literature,” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg, 2003), 7-66, points out that the prophecy of disaster was a leitmotif unifying the texts about the city into one body. The artistic texts of Petersburg thus react to the eschatological mythology; the anticipation of the end defines these texts thematically and structurally.

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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26. Beginning with the texts chronologically and structurally akin to William Blake's allegory “The French Revolution” (1791, “In the tower named Order, an old man … his den was short and narrow as a grave dug for a child, with spiders’ webs wove, and with slime of ancient horrors covered, for snakes and scorpions are his companions“), the discourses of the revolution and the gothic become intertwined. For analyses of the gothic as a consequence and a symptom of revolution, see Barker, Francis, Bernstein, Jay, and Hulme, Peter, eds., 1789: Reading Writing Revolution (Essex, 1982)Google Scholar; Radisich, Paula Rea, “Hubert Robert and the Revolution,” Hubert Robert: Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), 117-40.Google Scholar The principal inclusion of the Soviet text into gothic paradigms was realized by Naiman, “Behind the Red Door: An Introduction to NEP Gothic,” 148-81.

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52. It should be noted that FEKS was the first to include multiple views of Petersburg in their film; Vsevolod Pudovkin employed this technique a year later in his famous The End of Saint Petersburg (1927).

53. Kozintsev, Grigorii, “Glubokii ekran,” Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Leningrad, 1982), 1:110.Google Scholar He specifically argues with Jay Leyda. See Leyda, , Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton, 1983), 202.Google Scholar

54. Leyda, Kino, 202.

55. Kozintsev, “Glubokii ekran,” 1:111.

56. Ibid., 112.

57. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 104.