“My Literary and Moral Wanderings”: Apollon Grigor'ev and the Changing Cultural Topography of Moscow

Slavic Review ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 390-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Local Populations ◽  
Literary Images ◽  
Cultural Topography ◽  
The City ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Modern Russian

Modern Russian literature created its image of Moscow by depicting a number of typical inhabitants of the city and by identifying specific locales in which they lived. These settings — buildings, streets, squares, small neighborhoods, and larger regions — lent the authenticity of recognizable landmarks to generalizations about personality and life style. Similarly, descriptions of “typical” if fictitious Muscovites provided actual Moscow locations with specific, characteristic qualities. As these literary images of Moscow evolved, so too did their settings: first one area and then another became the “typical” Moscow. Thus the city's cultural topography changed with the values symbolized by Moscow's landmarks and local populations.In nineteenth-century Russian memoir literature no work succeeds better than “My Literary and Moral Wanderings” at vividly evoking the historical circumstances of a specific time and place. In this, his best known work, the critic and poet Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev (1822–1864) depicted the Moscow of his childhood in the late 1820s and early 1830s. However, writing in 1862 and 1864, Grigor'ev described a Moscow that had changed radically in the intervening thirty years. The city's image had been preeminently aristocratic for several decades following 1812, but by mid-century a new image of merchant Moscow began to appear. The “Wanderings” confirm this change with rich descriptive material illustrating the concomitant shift in the city's cultural topography.

The Gogol-St. Petersburg Nexus

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-298
Author(s):  
Janet Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Solid Surface ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Nikolai Gogol ◽  
Inspector General ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
The City

From Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky in the nineteenth century to Andrei Bitov in the twentieth, St. Petersburg functions as a critical element in Russian literature and social thought. The great nineteenth-century prose writer and playwright Nikolai Gogol strikingly embodies motifs and themes associated with Russia’s great yet dysfunctional and, ultimately, erstwhile capital city. Gogol is especially celebrated for his fragmented and surreal images, his sense of a terrifying void lurking beneath an apparently solid surface reality and his dehumanized characters, all of which are linked with the city of St. Petersburg. The reader encounters these elements from Gogol’s first tales, embedded in his native Ukraine. They will figure significantly in such St. Petersburg stories as “The Nose” and “The Overcoat.” Most importantly, even those later works not set in St. Petersburg – his play The Inspector General and his unfinished novel Dead Souls – incorporate features peculiar to Gogol’s reading of a terrifying and, in the end, alien urban environment. For Gogol, St. Petersburg betokens the void, a deceptive superficial reality, and a blurring of the boundaries between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. Carried further, Gogol uses his reading of St. Petersburg symbolism to blur the line between the living and the dead, with damnation lying just beneath an illusory surface reality of an evil Westernized city founded by the tsar who led Russia away from traditional values. His characters embody this Westernized capital city and carry it around with themselves even in provincial settings far away from its dangerous glitter.

“NO M’ESTIMIS MASSA; ESTIMA’M SÀVIAMENT”: LA CONSTRUCCIÓ LITERÀRIA DE LA IDENTITAT MONSTRUOSA DE BARCELONA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
MARGARIDA CASACUBERTA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Control ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literary Images ◽  
The City

This article aims to analyze the process of literary construction of the “monstrous” identity of Barcelona. Specifically, it examines and contextualizes the literary images of the city-as-woman from the mid-nineteenth century until Francoism. The metaphor of Barcelona as a woman is articulated around two axes: the idealization of the city as a compliant and submissive woman, and its monsterification as a rebel woman. Both processes are inextricable and serve to justify (symbolically and literally) the political control of the city.

scholarly journals Image of a Russian Professor in Stanislav Rakъs’s The Eccentric University

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-232
Author(s):  
Oksana Blashkiv ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Academic Novel ◽  
Literary Images ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

This article focuses on the image of the Russian professors in The Eccentric University (2008), a novel by Stanislav Rakús. Based on previous research, the author presents a short survey of Russian images in Slovak Literature in the late nineteenth — early twentieth-first centuries, whose peculiarities are rooted in the history of interaction between the two Slavic nations. Thus, the early twentieth century idealistic image of the Russian was built on the basis of Russian literature. The first images of Russians based on personal experience were created by Czechoslovak legionnaires as a result of interaction with Russians between 1917 and 1920, while after World War II, they were presented through a dichotomy “brother — suppressor”, to be changed into more dynamic ones by the early twenty-first century. The Eccentric University, which the author approaches from the perspective of the academic novel and part of Rakъs’s academic trilogy, enlarges the list of literary images of the Russians in Slovak literature. The author analyses images of Maria Petrovna Golovčikova, a female professor of Russian nineteenth-century literature, and Alexandr Kirillovič Ћuprej, a professor of Russian literature, both immigrant scholars at a Slovak university in the 1950s. The author maintains that through these images, Rakъs addresses not only Slovak Russophilic stereotypes historically embedded in nineteenth-century literary images of Russians, but also gender and immigrant stereotypes that circulate in contemporary Slovak culture. The author concludes that an ironic portrayal of Russian professors is directed at the cultural memory activation, which together with other features typical for both campus and academic novel adds to the new (Rakús’s) invariant of the “university novel”.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Emotional Cities

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
Urban History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Global Capital ◽  
Dynamic Transformation ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

International Opera in Nineteenth-century New York

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-269
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Considerable Extent ◽  
World War ◽  
Metropolitan Opera ◽  
The City

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”

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