Petersburg, Fin de Siècle by Mark G. Steinberg (review)

This book analyzes the portrayal of St. Petersburg in the writings of journalists, novelists, poets, and playwrights from 1905 to 1914. Focusing on the thriving popular press and drawing from theoreticians of modernity, Steinberg has written a richly nuanced analysis of the “melancholy” of a literary class struggling to understand troubled times. These people were deeply pessimistic, Steinberg argues, because of ongoing crises in their country and because they believed that their city was beset by the negative consequences, economic and spiritual, of modern urban life.

There were ample reasons for Russian writers to feel despondent. The revolution of 1905 ended in a restoration of government power that crushed the hopes of leftists and liberals. Centrists and monarchists, for their part, were shaken by the intensity and scale of the uprising against the status quo. During the years that followed, people from all points along the political spectrum discussed Russia’s social ills, chief among them poverty, epidemic diseases, alcoholism, and crime. Many commentators bemoaned these problems as products of Russia’s economic and political backwardness. Steinberg argues, and here is his major theme and major contribution, that the commentators also saw the hardship and degradation as products of a more universal ailment—the modern city. The helter-skelter growth of such places generated anomie, corruptions large and small, rootlessness and loss. This critique was not original with the Russians. What distinguishes them, and, perhaps, more particularly distinguishes the writers of St. Petersburg, was the intensity of their despair.

Steinberg begins his analysis with a discussion of the portrayal of the city, a swampy place at the edge of Russia known for its gloomy weather, rococo palaces, enormous steel mills, and squalid slums. He then moves to more particular themes in the writers’ catalogue of Petersburg’s evils: the streets, frequented by the aimless and the predatory; masks, literal and figurative, worn in public to hide people’s intentions; death, which too often came early and violently; and decadence, as practiced by rich and poor. Those journalists enjoining people to transcend all this by embracing fortitude and optimism were a small minority. Steinberg concludes with a chapter entitled “melancholy,” which sums up his argument that the mood of St. Petersburg’s writers arose from the malaise of the European fin de siècle as well as from the particular disappointments of Russia in the inter-revolutionary period.

He might have pushed the analysis a bit further. What did the writers (and perhaps their audience?) imagine as alternatives to the alienating city? Did the conservatives among them have pastoral dreams of a Russia uncorrupted by modernization? Steinberg refers occasionally to the revolutionaries’ goal of redeeming cities by constructing socialism; he could have examined this more systematically. In passing, he points out that censorship prevented writers from addressing the political situation in their country; he might have examined whether any of the themes they did develop (such as their references to the “times”) were coded attacks on the government.

In support of his contention that the Russians were more despondent than their contemporaries, Steinberg could have provided a fuller characterization of Russia after 1905, including a discussion of the political and economic crises ongoing in St. Petersburg. The writers may have reached for universalist explanations of their feelings; people in crises often do. But the depths of their despond were unquestionably a reaction to Russia’s perilous situation after 1905. Steinberg acknowledges this more often in the later chapters than in the earlier ones. He needs to talk about it more fully earlier. Greater discussion of the mood between 1900 and 1905, a time of rising rebelliousness and hope, would also be welcome.

The suggestions notwithstanding, this fine study puts Russia into the scholarship on the gathering gloom of Europe’s fin de siècle.