ABSTRACT

This chapter suggests new perspectives for the study of toponymic change as a symbolic boundary-making practice, whereby the shifting of time borders between past, present, or even future served the political strategy of re-assessing a city's cultural and political identity. Toponymists and cartographers made inventories of place names to study their etymological origins or standardize topographic appellations. Cultural studies and research on the toponymic silencing of indigenous cultures in colonial contexts later popularized textual approaches of place name changes. In Russia's second capital, toponymic changes in the 1990s restaged St. Petersburg as the European capital of a new Russia eager to catch up with the historical time from which it was disconnected in 1917. St. Petersburg was particularly affected by the name-giving mania of Russian leaders. Built from scratch on an untamed landscape, as goes the legend, in 1703 the city was like a white page, void of socially embedded place names.