Bilenky, Serhiy Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800–1905 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 783 be literally rendered as ‘peril’ of the castle of Sziget rather than the history of its siege, but the contents of the poem justify its translation as ‘siege’. This is indeed the title of the epic’s first English translation by László Kőrössy published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2011. As for the sources of this impressive epic poem, we learn from Zrínyi-album that although in his own foreword the author speaks of his adherence to Homer and Virgil, his principal modelwasOvid‘whosenamedoesnotevengetmentioned’(p.217). Zrínyimust have also found Marino closer to his taste than Tasso, though this ‘marinism’ informs more the Hungarian poet’s lyrical poems, quoted and rather clumsily translated by the translator of the rest of the album (pp. 233–39). Finally, the chapter on ‘Fame and Memory’ (pp. 282–379) could have been shorter. While some parts of it are helpful in the interpretation of Miklós Zrínyi’s survival in national and international memory, the last twenty pages could have been cut — for example, what the Habsburg Archduke Joseph thought about Zrínyi is not of especial importance to the present-day reader. Apart from that, the numerous illustrations and reproductions of images and the majority of the well-prepared essays make this book an important contribution to the growing literature on Hungary’s great seventeenth-century poet and military commander, Count Miklós Serini/Zrínyi. UCL SSEES George Gömöri Bilenky, Serhiy. Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800–1905. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, ON, Buffalo, NY and London, 2018. xxii + 490 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figure. Tables. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $95.00: £64.99. Serhiy Bilenky traces the nineteenth-century transformation of Kyiv from a frontier town perched on the Dnipro into the polyglot powerhouse of the Russian Empire’s southwestern borderlands. Ending his analysis before 1905, Bilenky argues that post-1917 shifts in urban life overshadow the comparably dramatic changes that Kyiv and its inhabitants experienced in the nineteenth century. Alongside anthropogenic change, natural disasters drastically altered Kyiv, sometimes levelling it and making the city a laboratory for urban organization. Bilenky’s overarching chronology follows three successive ‘urban regimes’,eachofwhichencompassedchanging waysofproducing,representing, administering and experiencing space in Kyiv. The book itself is structured into four thematic sections that follow the three regimes from different angles. Bilenky’s expansive study of the city’s evolving ‘sociospatial form’ contributes to scholarship on nineteenth-century Kyiv and Eastern European urbanism, enriched most recently by Michael F. Hamm and Faith Hillis. SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 784 The first urban regime covers the opening third of the nineteenth century, when Magdeburg rights guarded the municipal autonomy of a loosely integrated Kyiv. After 1835, the mid-century second regime abolished self-rule, bringing intense restructuring and centralization under Nicholas I and his governors. Finally, new structures of self-rule and an ascendant financial elite arose under the post-Reform third regime lasting from 1871 to 1905. By the outset of the third regime, Kyiv would have been unrecognizable to a native son returning after thirty years abroad. Now dominated by military fortifications, boulevards, monuments and a city centre, Kyiv had grown from a sleepy provincial settlement into a city moulded by visionaries of ‘imperial urbanism’ who sought to discipline a topographically messy and demographically mixed environment into an ideal Russian city. Across the three regimes, municipal leaders, imperial administrators, economic elites, urban planners and residents jostled for the means of producing and defining social spaces, revealing a tripartite tension between local initiatives, central imperatives and the rising forces of urban capitalism. Bilenky’s reconstruction of Kyiv’s transformation is informed by his theoretical understanding of space. For Bilenky, space is not a neutral background onto which social interactions are superimposed. Rather, it is a fabric that is constituted by and inseparable from social relations rooted in historically specific modes of symbolic and material production. Different social communities have different ties to these modes of production, and so they produce different kinds of social spaces whose structure and meaning they strive to shape. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre, Bilenky crafts an interdisciplinary account of...