Western media coverage of Russia usually takes the form of political reportage, understandably, perhaps, in the light of the Sochi Winter Olympics, the Edward Snowden NSA scandal and the crisis in Syria. In this interview with Yale University Press, Catriona Kelly, the author of St Petersburg: Shadows of the Past , focuses instead on one particular Russian city, discussing the intricacies of St Petersburg, from its fascinating cultural history to its unique position within Russia.
Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism, and archival materials, she traces the at times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that were inspired by living in the city, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. There are some things about St Petersburg that are typical of Russian settlements. These are traditionally sited on the banks of a river, and the expanse of water shapes the landscaping, as the Neva does Petersburg. The extreme flatness of the Neva delta is also characteristic of the spatial relations over much of the country.
And, as the historian Adrian Selin has pointed out, the way the city was built was typically Russian also: first the Peter and Paul fortress, which is a sort of eighteenth-century version of a kremlin with church, dungeons, accommodation for soldiers, and official residences all together , then a sloboda, or settlement for workers and other plebeians.
Petersburg looks both modern and Western β rather like a mixture of Paris, Vienna, and Stockholm. Then there is the carefully articulated frontage of the Neva, particularly from the Winter Palace to Trinity Bridge, and the great squares, such as Palace Square and the Field of Mars. In traditional Russian cities, the riverbanks tended to be a working space. Of course, it also was in St Petersburg also, but from the early nineteenth century, the shipping more or less disappeared from the centre.
In the nineteenth century, nationalists such as Dostoevsky one of those incomers himself regarded the local churches as hideous and not like churches at all the British writer H.
