Passage to Europe: Dostoevskij in the St. Petersburg Arcades
Katia
Dianina
In the little that has been written about Dostoevskij's short work
The Crocodile (1865), critics have conventionally
emphasized its intertextuality, reading the story as a playful
imitation of Gogol&soft;, a satire on the journalistic squabbles of
the time, or an allegorical
attack on the contemporary
writer &Chachek;erny&shachek;evskij. Indeed, Dostoevskij presents us
with a caustic parody of petty styles and grandiloquent debates that
occupied the periodical press of the time. It is hardly surprising
that the first installment of The Crocodile received
little appreciation from those same journalists whom Dostoevskij
ridiculed. The incomplete text has remained on the margins of
Dostoevskij's oeuvre ever since.
What has been largely ignored in the sparse commentary on
The Crocodile is the particular context in which the
story takes place: the St. Petersburg Passage
proper. This is surprising, considering the prominent role that this
cultural site played in the Russian capital in the mid-nineteenth
century. Modeled after a Parisian prototype, the
Passage was the first shopping arcade in Russia
to encompass under one roof both commerce and popular
entertainment. Following the arcade's sensational opening in 1848,
crowds were drawn to its live music, gas lighting, elegant dining, and
curious exhibitions. Whereas the commercial part of the enterprise
fully developed somewhat later, show business flourished in the
Passage in the 1850s and early 1860s. Here one
could encounter an Egyptian mummy, a German giant, and an exotic
crocodile. One such crocodile appears in Dostoevskij's story: as a
spectacle and as a vessel for spectacular
ideas.
In a peculiar Russian variation on the international theme of the
arcades, the Literary Fund was incorporated into the structure of the
spectacular Passage as well. There, the Literary
Fund organized public readings by esteemed writers and critics; it was
within its walls that amateur theatrical productions took
place—in which Dostoevskij, among other celebrities, took
part.
As has often been the case in Russia, generous borrowings from the
West (especially those of a spectacular nature) generated both
admiration and discontent, public opinion oscillating between
assimilation of, and resistance to, Western culture. Embracing both
high
Russian literature and popular Western
entertainment in a single space under its glass roof, the
St. Petersburg Passage reflected a disharmonious
conjunction of local and foreign, as well as material and literary,
elements in the Russian culture of the 1860s. In positioning
Dostoevskij's piece within and against the
culture of spectacle, I analyze The Crocodile as the
writer's reflection on Russia's equivocal relation to the West in the
nineteenth century.