![]() ![]() Petersburg for almost one hundred fifty years was passed from the hands of the writers to musicians and then artists, and in which the reader learns how a Queen of Spades, if felicitously played, could influence the charms of an imperial capital.ĬHAPTER 3 in which we learn how merry it was living in Petersburg in 1908, how that merriment was soon interrupted, and how the city first lost its name and then its status as capital of Russia and, almost dead of hunger and cold, tried to remain faithful to itself. Petersburg was built, how the mythos of this wonder was created, and how classical Russian literature from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky boldly and brilliantly interpreted the image of the city and, in the end, profoundly changed it.ĬHAPTER 2 which describes how the mirror that reflected St. Title.įor eighteen years my publisher, mentor, friendĬHAPTER 1 describing how the great city of St. Petersburg: a cultural history/Solomon Volkov Antonina W. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manufactured in the United States of America Remembering Anna Akhmatova: Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (Moscow, 1992)Īll rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.įREE PRESS PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc. Joseph Brodsky in New York (New York, 1990) Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York, 1979)īalanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet and Music (New York, 1985)įrom Russia to the West: The Music Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein (New York, 1990) Young Composers of Leningrad (Leningrad and Moscow, 1971) But this well-researched and deeply personal book gives a complex, subtle view of the city's haughty and tortured history Also Volkov, a musicologist by training and a devotee of literature by inclination (his previous books include Joseph Brodsky in New York and the controversial Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich) is sketchier in his treatment of the visual arts. ![]() This is a complicated strategy involving a tacking back and forth to pick up numerous themes and biographies and there are, perhaps inevitably, redundancies. From Peter the Great's imperial mandate impelling the city from the marshy Baltic coast in 1703, Volkov moves on to Gogol's and Dostoyevski's cynical anti-Petersburg writings the passionate, European/Russian hybrid of Tchaikovsky and the Mighty Five (Musorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Balakirev, Cui) the waxing sense of doom and the concomitant nostalgia of Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok the emigre Petersburg created abroad by Balanchine, Stravinksy and Nabokov Shostakovitch's city, depleted by the Great Terror and pounded during the Siege of Leningrad and finally, to the beleaguered postwar city of Joseph Brodsky. In each of six impressive chapters, Volkov focuses on an era and on a typically Petersburgian art form of the time. For the city Dostoyevski called "the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world," artists were crucial to creating an identity and a mythos.
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