St. Petersburg

Finished W. Bruce Lincoln's Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia over the weekend. Excellent book. Lincoln's writing is great – clear and accessible without being journalistic or glossing over the nuances. His coverage is very comprehensive. It is clear that of the many topics a book like this must address if it is to succeed, the cultural and artistic life of the city, and the individuals embodying that culture and that art, are closest to his heart. This, however, does not cause him to short-change the architectural, political, economic and military aspects of St. Petersburg's role in Russian history.

Of the many reasons for my enjoyment of the book, I will single out two. One is his vivid and enthusiastic descriptions of intellectual life of the Silver Age – the early avant-garde of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Russia, the days of the Stray Dog cafe, the epoch that gave rise to writers and poets like Blok, Akhmatova, Belyi, Maiakovsky, and many others. For the first time in my life, I understood the romance of the Russian avant-garde and the mystical appeal it holds for many Western artists and scholars.

The other is the fact that Lincoln spares no criticism of the Communist regime's brutal and unyielding suppression of all that was creative, individual and distinctive in Russian intellectual life. It dates back to the earliest days of the Bolshevik revolution, and continued, in full force, right up until 1991, and while acknowledging that some periods (the “Zhdanovschina” of the waning days of Satlin's reign) were far worse than others (Khruschev's “thaw” of 1956-1961), Lincoln does not doubt for a second that in the final analysis it was never benign and never excusable.

My complaints about the book are few. The narrative speeds up significantly towards the end, and Lincoln covers all of the post-Communist 1990s in roughly the same number of pages he dedicates to a single building by Quarenghi in the chapter on the reign of Catherine the Great. This is unfortunate – to me, the entire post-1991 history of St. Petersburg is encapsulated in a single televised image of a city bus with smashed windows and peeling paint. It would have been nice to have the details filled in. To be fair, Sunlight was Lincoln's last book, he died before it was published; in fact, the entire last chapter has the feel of having been put together by someone else, probably his wife.

If there are any other deficiencies, they are trifling. Lincoln, a fluent speaker of Russian from what I understand, in translating certain words almost always choses the closest English cognate even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to an average reader. So he renders коммиссионный магазин literally as “commission shop” instead of the far more natural “consignment shop;” rock climbers become alpinists, and – my pet peeve – retirees are pensioners. Once, on p. 313, no doubt through an oversight, he even commits the despicable Soviet practice of treating Jew as an ethnicity. All of these, however, are minor quibbles in an otherwise engrossing and exceptionally informative book. Highly recommended.

A connection-to-history note: While discussing the brief flowering of Russian jazz in the late 1950s, Lincoln mentioned the orchestra of Oleg Lundstrem which my father heard live as a teenager in Kazan, and which was directly responsible for his becoming a life-long jazz fan and a convincing amateur on four instruments.