ABSTRACT
Since the time of St. Petersburg’s founding in 1703, the Russian imperial capital has been much reviled. Nineteenth-century writers such as Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Dostoevsky characterized Petersburg as a citadel of hollow rhetoric—utopian in conception, yet inhumanly indifferent to its humbler citizens. The humanist literary tradition that regards Petersburg as a phantasm has, moreover, a counterpart in strictly aesthetic judgments of the city as counterfeit. This aesthetic critique of Petersburg addresses the presumptuous Russian project of creating a Western-style capital in an alien cultural and topographical setting, since Peter the Great’s showpiece city seemed at odds with its surroundings, the famously chilly and damp expanses of the low-lying Neva delta. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors marveled at the resources expended to produce Petersburg’s effects, they often dismissed the result as a shoddy imitation of other capital cities, and thus an inauthentic copy of foreign cultural achievements.
