Online Lecture: A Textual Terrain: Imperial St. Petersburg as a Landscape of Literature and Culture

An online lecture by Dr. Julie Buckler

St. Petersburg, the capital of imperial Russia, was a unique geographical and historical entity, but also a dynamic cultural formation exerting a shaping influence on the Russian literary imagination. In turn, Petersburg was shaped by its textual representations. Writers, artists, and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries collectively transformed the city into a richly layered cultural text, in which the imperial project and urban modernity converged. Theoretical frameworks that illuminate St. Petersburg’s special textual quality include Vladimir Toporov’s concept of the “Petersburg Text of Russian Literature” and Yuri Lotman’s model of the city as a “semiotic mechanism”—a structured but volatile and contested space. St. Petersburg is a palimpsest, where past, present, fiction, and history overlap. 

Lovers of Russian literature are often unaware that the “Petersburg Text” extends well beyond justly famous works by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Andrei Bely. Textual mapping is similarly performed by literary sketches, guidebooks, urban legends, perspectives from peripheral neighborhoods, and textual repositories of the city’s memory. Exploring noncanonical texts, marginal genres, everyday experiences, and under-described urban spaces helps us construct a richer, more heterogeneous literary map of St. Petersburg.