Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

7. Panoramas from Above and Street from Below: The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin

194 7 Panoramas from Above and Street from Below The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin   The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of profound social change for Petersburg. The site of Russian imperial power was being transformed into a modern metropolis. The destruction of old social structures, accelerating industrialization , the development of a modern consumer culture, and the growth of new residential areas built according to the latest architectural fashions all shaped its urban space. The practices through which people experienced the city changed too. In classical studies of the city and of modernity, such as the works of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, vision holds a central place, both as a mode of perception (to see) and as part of the process of creating the self in relation to others (to be seen).3 Walking is a practice related to both. The idle vagabond, or flâneur, has been the symbol of the modern city, but other ways of walking and seeing existed alongside him, ranging from Sunday strolls in parks with family members to cruising in the sites of the nascent homosexual subculture. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, who considers urban space and its everyday practices as a system similar to language, describes the relationship of city inhabitants to this language as tactical: they are confined to the rules of its system but can apply them in a creative manner to serve their own specific needs. One of the everyday practices that de Certeau presents as functioning in this way is walking. Just like speech or writing, walking, too, has its style and rhetoric—the turns and detours one makes affirm, suspect, test, transgress, or respect the rules. This makes us not simply consumers of readymade spaces but their producers, too, and allows the city-dweller to make the urban space his or her own. Walking, then, is a spatial acting-out of place; the walker transforms the spatial signifiers into something else, actualizing in them the potential for constructing identity.4 De Certeau juxtaposes everyday practices like walking to the panoramic view, which “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.” According to him, this panorama-city is a theoretical simulacrum, belonging to “the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions.”5 In Bely’s Petersburg such vision belongs to Apollon Apollonovich, who prefers to see Petersburg as squares, parallelepipeds, and cubes and wants to control the crowd of shadows from the islands threatening it. However, as I will show in this essay, panoramic vision can also be affective, and reading the panorama-city can mobilize different stylistic and rhetoric choices that in turn contribute to the creation of the self. In this essay I focus on two Russian modernist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin, and consider how each appropriated the urban space of Petersburg through his daily practices and individual vision of the city. Drawing on their diaries, I explore their typical modes of perception and urban movement and map their personal “topographies,” or descriptions of place— which takes us to the neighborhood of the Tauride Gardens, in whose vicinity both Ivanov and Kuzmin lived from 1905. Despite their spiritual affinity, the ways the two writers experienced the city differed in accordance with their respective worldviews, including their aesthetic ideas. Two distinct visions of the city emerge from the private writings of Ivanov and Kuzmin: panoramas and close-ups, reflecting their differing social Panoramas from Above and Street from Below 195 orientations. The famous apartment of Ivanov, the Tower, functions for him as a base, from which he orients himself toward unity and the sublime. Kuzmin, on the other hand, does not have a home of his own; he lives and spends time as a visitor in the homes of relatives and friends, and much of his movement in the city is motivated by his homosexual orientation. He has an eye for the details of city life, which he records in his diary, including the city’s profane elements. Petersburg has certainly produced a rich tradition of writers who selfidentify with the city space and associate their creative lives with the city.6 What I will focus on here are the daily practices of living in this city and the ways in which Ivanov and Kuzmin framed themselves by...