I Witnessed My City Dying &ellipsis;: Post-Revolutionary St. Petersburg in Autobiographic and Collective Memory
Among many traumatic experiences of the Revolution of 1917, the
realization of the death of St. Petersburg held a special place in the
minds of Russian intellectuals. When the appearance of St. Petersburg
and its topography (even Nevskij Prospect was renamed) were destroyed,
the consciousness of its inhabitants transformed the city into a
pre-Revolutionary Petersburg to whose chronotope they returned
inevitably in their memories. Hence, the nostalgia and a peculiar
development of a retrospective culture, with a marked orientation back
from this modern Age of Mud to the Gold and Silver Ages. The death
itself, perceived by the contemporaries as both scary and beautiful
(smert&soft; neoby&chachek;ajnoj krasoty,
accroding to
Mstislav Dobu&zhachek;inskij), was realized as an expiatory
sacrifice. Many Russian intellectuals canonized St. Petersburg in its
posthumous existence. For them, the city remained as a Museum of
cultural treasures, a Library of humanistic thought, and a Sanctuary
of national spirit. The problem of the city as collective memory is
based on the theory of collective memory elaborated by the French
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the Russian psychologist Lev
Vygotskij. They asserted that all memories were formed and organized
within a collective context and that art and literature were among the
mechanisms that helped to keep collective memories alive. This study
analyzes the belles-lettres, diaries, and memoirs of Anna Axmatova,
Jurij Annenkov, Nina Berberova, Aleksandr Blok, Ol&soft;ga For&shachek;,
Zinaida Gippius, Sergej Gornyj, Georgij Ivanov, Vladislav
Xodasevi&chachek;, Osip Mandel&soft;&shachek;tam, Vladimir
Mila&shachek;evskij, Irina Odoevceva, Vsevolod Ro&zhachek;destvenskij,
and Konstantin Vaginov as fractions of a shared set of beliefs and
experiences. In accordance with the latest research of the American
scholar James W. Pennebaker, who has found that individuals and
societies look back and reconstruct their past every 20–30
years, the corpus of texts is divided into three chronological
sections. Works created as a response to the political turmoil from
1917 till the mid-1920s form the first section. The texts written in
the late 1930s–1940 belong to the second group. Finally, the
memoirs published in the 1960s and 1970s set the third group. The
study focuses on the processes of reconstructing, distorting, and
forgetting the past and the patterns of their historic
development.