Petersburg

[Clark argues that] the cultural atmosphere that evolved in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and made the Great Terror of the late 1930s possible was actually created by the idealistic intellectuals and artists themselves In developing this revisionist argument, Ms. Clark forces us to rethink the relationship of a totalitarian government to its subjects. She makes us ask the same question now being raised in Germany in connection with the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II: Who were the real victims and who were the real perpetrators? In the course of her Herculean labors, she has sifted through piles of archival material, consulted all the leading authorities, viewed scores of films, read hundreds of novels and mastered a dazzling array of historical, theatrical, linguistic, and literary theories. What she has produced is a major contribution to the cultural history of this seminal period. -- Harlow Robinson * New York Times Book Review * Petersburg is full of close readings of early Soviet texts, performances and artworks; and Clark is particularly sensitive to the subtle dialectic between utopian aestheticism and cultural Realpolitik shaping Soviet culture over the decade or so following the revolution. -- Scott McLemee * The Nation * This is a rich bookand very well documented. In particular, the author has evidently trawled through the issues of the weekly journal Mir Iskusstva (Life of Art) to very good effect, giving us a kaleidoscopic sense of the multitude of changing issues that constituted the visible surface of Petrograd/Leningrad intellectual life. -- Robin Milner-Gulland * Times Literary Supplement * Turning away from traditional interpretations of early Soviet intellectuals as a uniform corps of resistant, tragic figures, Clark explores lesser known cultural activists of the Soviet new age who were challenged by the socialist order and pressed for their own agendas. Like her previous pathbreaking book on socialist-realist literature, Petersburg pries into the work of the hegemon by finding power, after Foucault, in all the least usual places. Little wonder that this volume, which at times approximates a Russian novel for its own daunting cast of characters and sea of detail, took the 1996 Vucinich Prize for best book in Russian Studies. -- Bruce Grant * Common Knowledge * No one should think that Katerina Clarks brilliant, provocative and extremely ambitious book is merely a history of Petersburg Anyone who reads this book intelligently will have to reread Russian history in its light. -- Sidney Monas * Journal of Modern History * Ever since the traditional friend or fiend scheme, prevalent in Soviet studies so far, started to crumble, Western scholars time and again have asked for a reevaluation of Russian politics and culture of the 1920s. Katerina Clarks new book on Petersburg as crucible of cultural revolution is an amazingly fresh and original answer to this request. It is also a fine example of how intense occupation with the methodological and theoretical approach of one scholar, in this case Bakhtin, can shape and remodel the view of a by now familiar period. Petersburg has long entered collective memory as one of the most mythopoeic places of Russian history. Yet it took a brilliant scholar like Clark to provide us with an all-encompassing, in-depth analysis of the citys role in the formation of Stalinist culture, the role of its intellectuals, its artists, writers, architects, theater directors, composers, musicians, film-makers, linguists, and what have you; their theories, ideas, hopes, and desires for a renewal of society. -- Rosalinde Sartorti * Russian Review * [R]eaders coming to [Clarks] new book have reason to expect a provocative work that combines careful scholarship and intellectual rigor. In Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, they will find all of that. Clark examines the complex cultural life of the years between roughly 1910 and 1930 in an attem

Katerina Clark was B. E. Bensinger Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her books include Eurasia without Borders; Moscow, the Fourth Rome; Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution; and, with Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin.

Preface Introduction: The Ecology of Revolution Revolution as Revelation: The Avant-Garde Imperial Petersburg, 1913 Masquerade Theater and Revolution in the New Republic Petrograd: Ritual Capital of Revolutionary Russia NEP and the "Art of Capitulation" Revolutionary Culture Meets the Jazz Age The Establishment of Soviet Culture Promethean Linguistics Straight Talk and the Campaign against Wagner The Sacralization of Everyday Life The Ultimate Cultural Revolution Epilogue: The Thirties Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index