A Textual Terrain: Imperial St. Petersburg as a Landscape of Literature and Culture
An online lecture by Dr. Julie Buckler
St. Petersburg, the capital of imperial Russia, was a unique geographical and historical entity, but also a dynamic cultural formation exerting a shaping influence on the Russian literary imagination. In turn, Petersburg was shaped by its textual representations. Writers, artists, and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries collectively transformed the city into a richly layered cultural text, in which the imperial project and urban modernity converged. Theoretical frameworks that illuminate St. Petersburg’s special textual quality include Vladimir Toporov’s concept of the “Petersburg Text of Russian Literature” and Yuri Lotman’s model of the city as a “semiotic mechanism”—a structured but volatile and contested space. St. Petersburg is a palimpsest, where past, present, fiction, and history overlap.
Lovers of Russian literature are often unaware that the “Petersburg Text” extends well beyond justly famous works by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Andrei Bely. Textual mapping is similarly performed by literary sketches, guidebooks, urban legends, perspectives from peripheral neighborhoods, and textual repositories of the city’s memory. Exploring noncanonical texts, marginal genres, everyday experiences, and under-described urban spaces helps us construct a richer, more heterogeneous literary map of St. Petersburg.
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Want to prepare for the talk? Read the beautiful essay A Guide to a Renamed City (1979) about Petersburg, by the renowned Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky.
About the Speaker
Dr. Julie Buckler is the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She works on the literature, performing arts, and urban environments of imperial Russia. Buckler received her B.A. from Yale University in Russian and East European Studies, and her doctorate in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard. She has spent her academic career at Harvard, appointed as a junior professor in 1996 and awarded tenure by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2003. Buckler was named a Harvard College Professor for 2010-2015 in recognition of her excellence in teaching and was awarded the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award by the Harvard Graduate Student Council in 2004.
Buckler is the author of two award-winning books: The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2000) and Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityscape (Princeton, 2005). Buckler has also co-edited three volumes: Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe (Northwestern, 2013), Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action (Wisconsin, 2018), and the first-ever Oxford Handbook of the Russian Novel (forthcoming 2025). Her current book project is titled Why Don’t We Read Them? The Forgotten Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Russian Realist Novels. Buckler is also writing a reader’s guide to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Connecting with Zoom
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This program will be recorded and posted to the museum’s YouTube channel.