Volume 50, Number 9 · May 29, 2003
Window on Russia
By Christian Caryl
Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881
by Joseph Frank
Princeton University Press, 784 pp., $35.00
Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia
by W. Bruce Lincoln
Basic Books, 432 pp., $18.50 (paper)
Russia in the Age of Peter the Great
by Lindsey Hughes
Yale University Press, 602 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Peter the Great
by Lindsey Hughes
Yale University Press, 285 pp., $29.95
St. Petersburg: A Cultural History
by Solomon Volkov,translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis
Simon and Schuster, 598 pp., $26.50 (paper)
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
by Orlando Figes
Metropolitan Books, 729 pp., $35.00
Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
St. Martin's, 672 pp., $45.00
In 1873, Fyodor Dostoevsky sat down at his desk to write a few impressions of everyday life in his home town of St. Petersburg. Read today, these sketches come as something of a shock. Few of the great figures of Russian literature are so closely identified with Petersburg as Dostoevsky, and yet, as his observations demonstrate, he was far from being a booster for the city. In his youth, as his biographer Joseph Frank points out in Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881, Dostoevsky had regarded Petersburg's mélange of architectural styles as inspiring proof that the Russian capital had succeeded in absorbing the best of European culture. But now, as his mental eye roams over the cityscape, all he can see is the 'lack of character of the idea and all the negativity of the essence of the Petersburg period from its very beginning to its end.' The architectural aspirations of generations of aristocrats and emperors, tirelessly striving to imitate the best European models, Frank writes, have resulted in nothing but
Review, 4154 words
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