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Reviewed by:
  • Petersburg Fin de Siècle
  • Daniel Beer
Petersburg Fin de Siècle. By Mark D. Steinberg (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011) 399 pp. $45.00

The inhabitants of St. Petersburg in the decade before World War I were an anxious and pessimistic bunch. Confronting an array of social malaises—from suicide to violent crime and from child prostitution to imposture—the denizens of the imperial capital created in their copious writings “a picture of modern disarray: moral transgression and disorder, illusoriness and deception, sickness and death, excess and extravagance, and moods of disorientation, uncertainty and incomprehension, if not outright disgust and fear” (8–9). Arranging his chapters to cover such broad themes as “city,” “streets,” “death,” and “decadence,” Steinberg’s Petersburg Fin de Siècle presents a wealth of material drawn from the popular press—from boulevard dailies to the more high-brow “thick journals”—as well as popular literature to explore the pervasive sense of dislocation, disillusionment, and morbid fascination with the darker sides of life in the city. Steinberg’s declared goal is to “read what could also be read by a contemporary consumer of the Petersburg press” (6), and he [End Page 490] undoubtedly succeeds in weaving his numerous examples into a set of coherent thematic explorations. The range and density of the evidence is compelling. Steinberg presents an object lesson in how the “social life of emotions” can be studied in order to unlock discursive components of social consciousness.

Yet much of the territory over which Steinberg moves has been extensively covered by other scholars, such as Engelstein, Neuberger, Morrissey, and Matich.1 Steinberg acknowledges these studies, but it remains unclear what exactly he is adding to them and in what ways he seeks distance from them. Some, though by no means all, of these scholars concentrated on more scholarly or high-brow treatments of suicide, sexuality, decadence, degeneration, etc. Although Steinberg succeeds in showing the diffusion of such cultural anxieties down to the level of the popular press, the preoccupations remain eminently recognizable, much of it already familiar to historians of the period.

Another problem with the book is periodization (or rather the lack of it). By concentrating on the decade after 1905, Steinberg neglects much of what happened earlier, thus skewing his own interpretation. He argues that Russia experienced a particularly acute cultural crisis in that decade. But a view of the city as a site of moral perdition, sexual corruption, and subterfuge permeates the Russian imagination throughout the nineteenth century in works by Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Vsevolod Garshin, and a host of less-celebrated writers. Although there is no denying the potency of the discourse of collapse and decay in the last decade of Imperial Russia, its appearance during the preceding half century or more is surely significant, raising important questions about what precisely (beyond a rapidly expanding popular press) was particular to the period from 1905 to 1914.

The social and political history of the period remains much in the shadows of Steinberg’s study. If, as Engelstein declared in her own study of fin-de-siècle sexuality, “sex was a political subject,” in Steinberg’s study, the politics are sidelined. The ferocious levels of political violence that rocked the capital in 1905, forming part of a continuum of assassinations, violent demonstrations, and state repression that shaped the culture of the Russian capital at the beginning of the twentieth century, and their undoubted impact on the popular imagination are barely mentioned. Steinberg’s observation that “faced with the great difficulties of the post-1905 years in Russia, political radicals would insist on wilful heroism” raises fascinating questions about the relationship between cultural pessimism and political militancy that he does not explore (210).

Given this lack of context, comparative pessimism would appear to [End Page 491] be an inconclusive affair. Were the Russians really more gripped by finde-siècle anomie and anxiety than their counterparts in Paris, Vienna, Budapest, or Milan? Steinberg maintains that “Russia’s fin-de-siècle was more pessimistic than in the west” (1), but the work of such scholars as Nye, Pick, and others has shown that writers in these...

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