Description: Can a single city revitalize an empire? Conversely, can it infect and destroy the body of a nation? The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, represented the crowning piece of the tsar’s ambitious plan to radically reorient Russian culture toward Europe. Beginning in the early 19th century, the city emerged as an important locus of debate over the central issues of Russian national identity: does Russia belong to East, West, or neither? Which political and cultural values did Russia appropriate from the West, and could those take root in Russian soil? And how does the image of Petersburg embody these questions in the Russian imagination? This course will examine the contradictory myths and ideals that have surrounded Petersburg from its very inception, drawing on its rich artistic heritage to investigate the duality of the city and the light it sheds back on Russian culture as a whole.

Goals: we will focus on Petersburg's famous literary tradition, but will also have a chance to examine its maps, legends, visual art, music, and film. Through discussion and written engagement with these various texts, students will gain a sense of the city as...

• a mythical space, encompassing the central questions and tensions of Russian national identity: Nature/Culture, East/West, Old/New, Past/Future.

• a textual space, in which various authors and artists call their own city into being across a two-century tradition, from the poetry of Pushkin through the films of Uchitel' (and beyond)!

• a physical space, inhabited by tsars and beggars, artists and artisans, Gogolian civil servants and Dostoevskian dreamers (as well as three centuries of everyday Russians)!