Petersburg: The Physiology of a City

by Nikolay A. Nekrasov (Editor), Thomas Gaiton Marullo (Translator)

This landmark collection of short works forms a vivid documentary of life in midnineteenth-century St. Petersburg. Editor Nikolai Nekrasov was the most influential literary entrepreneur of the day, and he assembled works ranging from ethnography to fiction to literary criticism, all written by leading authors and thinkers of the time. The book he edited represents many important strands in Russian culture and history, including the development of Russian prose and the rise of the intelligentsia. A vital political document as well, Petersburg is a record of—and served as a spur to—the changes in Russian society that culminated in the 1917 revolution. This first-ever English edition brings its storied and studied illumination to a new audience, providing a key to understanding the place that St. Petersburg holds in Russia’s identity.

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Nikolay Alexeyevich Nekrasov (Николай Алексеевич Некрасов) was a Russian poet, writer, critic and publisher, whose deeply compassionate poems about peasant Russia won him Dostoevsky's admiration and made him the hero of liberal and radical circles of Russian intelligentsia, as represented by Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. He is credited with introducing into Russian poetry ternary meters and the technique of dramatic monologue (V doroge, 1845).As the editor of several literary journals, including Sovremennik, Nekrasov was also singularly successful.

Reviews

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until I picked up this book and read the introduction, I was totally unaware of the nineteenth century genre of "physiology" books, which were microscopic encyclopedic literary examinations of a particular place or topic. The genre was apparently particularly popular in France, and this book was one of several attempts to translate it to Russia. Reading this book did not make me want to run out and further explore the genre, but it was generally enjoyable and well worth the effort to read, particularly for the contributions of the great nineteenth century Russian critic, Vissarion Belinsky. When I was in college studying Russian literature in the 1970's, Belinsky was out of favor and much maligned, but I have subsequently come to think that many of the criticisms of Belinsky were unjust. He was a dazzling writer, and although he was often wrong in his analysis, he had a discerning eye for quality. His essays in this book are particularly enjoyable and insightful -- one comparing Petersburg and Moscow, a second on the state of the Russian theater and a third on the literature of Petersburg. The Belinsky essays which take a high level analytical approach to the "physiology" are interspersed with other essays, each of which examines minutely some small sliver of Petersburg life and society, mostly focusing on the low and middle strata, and generally with a sympathetic point of view. These essays throw light on aspects of the life and society of Petersburg that are not viewed with quite the same sort of lens in other literary and historical works on the city and its society that I have read and were therefore original in their perspective and entertaining to read. I don't think that this book would be the best first introduction to Petersburg for an English reader, but for someone who has read Gogol's Petersburg stories, or Crime and Punishment or Bely's Petersburg, this book is a good way to dive further into the life and culture of this fascinating city.

[john callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a translation of a book published in Russia in the 1840s. I've never seen a copy in Russian. It's very interesting if you are strongly interested in Russian culture.