St. Petersburg: A Portrait of a Great City by Victor Giroud (review)

Abstract

758 SEER, 84, 4, 2006 authors'recent research. In all cases they point the way to furtherstudy. By the end even beginners should be able to deconstructthe I95I poster on the cover, composed of a map above indicating the expansion of electrification grids across the Azov and Caspian regions, below it the multi-million-strong population of the USSR stretchingto the horizon, foregroundedby representativesof gender and nationality,directingtheir gaze upwardsto a tower-like Stalin. This fruitfulcollection reveals spatialgames that we can all play. School of Slavonic andEastEuropean Studies LINDSEY HUGHES University College London Giroud, Victor. StPetersburg: A Portrait ofa Great Ci. The BeineckeRare Book and ManuscriptLibrary,Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 200 . I44 PP. Illustrations.Selected bibliography.Indexes. f2I.50 (paperback). THIs book is a catalogue published on the occasion of an exhibition with the same title held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, between October 2003 and January 2004. The purpose of the exhibition was to commemorate the tercentenaryof the city of St Petersburg with a display of materials drawn mainly from the library'sand university's collectionswhich illustratethe historyof the city. The book consistsessentially of a wide selection of illustrations,ranging from views of the city, drawings, photographs, postcards, maps, portraits,letters, plans, and theatre programmes to the title pages of books having some connection with St Petersburg. There is also an accompanying explanatorytext. Given the rather random character of the materials which have been acquiredby the libraryover the years,those selectedfor inclusionin thisbook are somewhat disparate. The book is divided into three sections. The first serves to illustrate the city's history during its first century. The second, entitled 'Visitsto St Petersburgduringthe Romantic Period',containsillustrations relating to the city's foreign visitors, beginning with the memoirs of August von Kotzebue who served under Catherine the Great and was sent brieflyto Siberiaat the beginning of the nineteenth century,and ending with letters sent by Giuseppe Verdi during his visit to St Petersburgin I86I-62. The brief third section relates to the city's history during the twentieth century , including materialfrom Belyi's novel Peterburg, from Anna Akhmatova's poem Poemabezgeroia,and, perhaps rather oddly in view of their association with TsarskoeSelo ratherthan the city itself,photographsfrom the Romanov familyalbums.The latterwere originallyin the possessionof Anna Vyrubova, lady-in-waitingand companion to EmpressAlexandra Feodorovna. The text which accompanies the illustrations is generally informative despite the occasional factual error (suchas the statement on page 8 that the city was officially declared capital in I717, incidentally contradicting the statement on page 5 that it was 'decreed' capital ten years after its foundation in 1703). An annoying and confusing problem is the failure to provide proper captions to many of the illustrations, meaning that the exact relationship REVIEWS 759 between text and illustrationis not always clear, or that the necessaryreference to the illustrationis buried in the text. A classicinstance occurs on page 28 which is headed by two titles, the first the title to an illustrationof the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo which is in fact overleaf, and the second the title to the Shubert map of Tsarskoe Selo which appears opposite. Here and elsewherepossible confusion is compounded by the failureto provide an English translation to many of the titles. In fact, to be sure of one's way through this book one needs some command of several European languages, including Russian. It is obviously not a book meant for the masses. That said, the editor and his team should be congratulatedon the superb qualityof many of the printswhich both bring the city to life and successfully convey something of its unique atmosphere.For that reason alone this book is well worth adding to one's personal library. School of Geography, EarthandEnvironmental Sciences DENIS J. B. SHAW University ofBirmingham Bogucka, Maria.Baltic Commerce andUrban Society, I500-I700: Gdansk/Danzig and its Polish Context. Variorum Collected Studies Series: Studies in EastCentral Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington,VT, 2003. x + 3I2 pp. Tables. Notes. Index. C57.50? THE work of Maria Bogucka, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw,has influencedsocial and economic historiansof the Balticsfor many decades, especially before the fall of Communism, when she was...