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Introduction Stories That Come True T HIS I S ABO 0 K about stories that come true. Stories can "come true" in a variety of ways, and these selfsubstantiating (or self-instantiating) stories belong to a variety of genres: there are popular myths that prove more enduring than scientific efforts to debunk them, clever lies that effectively alter the fabric of reality to accommodate a wished-for circumstance, or-as in many a narrated life-metaphorical confessions and creative testimonies that mask or even obliterate the memory of "what really happened." There are also official versions, stories told by the powers that be with the explicit intention of remaking "reality" in a form deemed more suitable for public consumption. Russian literature is especially rich in stories that come true, being a place in which the boundaries between the printed page and everyday life, between textual and physical worlds, have proved particularly porous: one might think, in this context, of the way walking tours of "Dostoevsky's Petersburg" take in both the dwelling places of the writer himself and sites frequented by the characters of Grime and Punishment; or the way Pushkin's narrator in Eugene Onegin appears to share certain autobiographical experiences with the poem's hero and others with its author, allowing him to act as a kind of "bridge" between the virtual world of the novel and the real world in which it was written. These last are not idle examples; they are selected not only for their prominence in relation to the Russian literary canon but for the clues they yield about the kind of literary terrain in which this "crossing over" between fictional and real worlds can take place. The first of these is a terrain in the literal sense: the geographical place which, accumulating over time a set of mythical, historical, and literary signifiers unique to it, becomes a kind ofpalimpsest whose narrative can be reshaped and elaborated but never erased.! Not all such places are cities-haunted forests and sacred mountaintops also, surely, figure in the mythical landscapes which writers, in their literary mapping, both record and create-but the city, itself a "poem" in the etymolOgical meaning of"thing created," is the literary place par excellence, 3 Introduction and the one that seems most thoroughly to inscribe itself on literary works (which in tum reinscribe themselves on it). The city with the most fully elaborated text in Russian literature is, of course, St. Petersburg, designated by Dostoevsky's narrator in Notes from Underground as "the most abstract and intentional city on earth" and by Yuri Lotman as a city "devoid ofhistory,"2 an ideally empty signifier destined to be filled up by successive generations ofwriters. As Julie Buckler puts it: St. Petersburg has been comprehensively mapped in terms of the literary mythology created by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Bely, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, and by scholars who tease out allusions and influences within this select group of authors and texts.... This second Iiterarycanonical Petersburg insistently inscribes itself upon human subjects and transforms them into textlike bearers ofcultural legacy.3 The implication-Buckler is summing up here a set of arguments advanced by numerous writers and critics over more than a century-is that to live and breathe in St. Petersburg is to be enmeshed in a canon of Petersburg narratives from which one cannot escape, and that to tell stories in Petersburg is an endeavor fraught with the weight ofstories already told. The territory of St. Petersburg belongs to Hermann, Raskolnikov, Akaky Akakievich, and countless other fictional personae who, so to speak, "outrank" the mere flesh-and-blood occupants of their storied stamping grounds: in Petersburg, the real feels virtual, and the virtual real. Any literary work produced-or set-in the spaces haunted by such ghosts is immediately absorbed into the cumulative "Petersburg text," and proceeds to inscribe itself in tum on the denizens of this "most abstract and intentional" city. Isaac Babel, in his 1916 essay "Odessa," suggests that St. Petersburg exerts a sinister literary force which inexorably overwhelms any author hapless enough to enter its sphere of influence: Do you remember the life-giving, bright sun in Gogol, a man who came from Ukraine? Though such deSCriptions are there, they are an episode.. .. Petersburg vanquished Poltava. Akaky Akakievich shyly but with horrifying authority rubbed out Gritsko, and Father Matvey finished the business that Taras started.4 Babel proposes to offer resistance to the "mysterious, heavy fog of Petersburg ," counteracting it with...

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