This last June marked ten years of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, which brings primarily American and Canadian writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry together for something of a creative workshop wonderland in a time and place where, for weeks, the sun does not set (literally).
Participants and teachers speak about how the seminars during the White Nights are "destabilizing" for both their writing and their bodies, creating an unusually intense experience.
I'm struck by what one person mentioned, about how the city of St. Petersburg is something of a fiction in itself--a city that probably shouldn't exist if it weren't for the vision of a powerful madman who was the czar of Russia just over 300 years ago
When I was in college, the University of Michigan had a St. Petersburg theme semester, I believe to celebrate the tricentennial of the city. This meant that classes from a wide variety of departments put a St. Petersburg emphasis, or angle, into their syllabi.
This happened to be the semester where I took a class on Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels in the Russian department. So, we read books and stories of his that are set in the city of White Nights; a city built on unstable land; a city arranged according to a plan, so that ordered streets put a sheen of reasonability over a place where a natural madness lurked in its shifting ground and in the moonless June skies.
The reading list was strikingly good: The Idiot (my second favorite novel by my favorite writer), The Injured and the Insulted, Poor Folk, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Brothers Karamazov (my first favorite, forever). With that, and a fantastic teacher, the class was bound to be a great one. But the St. Petersburg semester emphasis--which I'd been rather shoulder-shrugging about in the beginning--brought a whole new cohesion to our conversation, introduced me to a city I knew nothing about, and revealed the powerful way that a very strange city has played into these novels--a peculiar physical/spiritual dynamic implicit in its landscape, shaping the way people (or characters) live and die. I've never been to the city--nowhere even close--but I feel passionately about books that are placed there, and I was fortunate to have a passionate guide through them.
"The city itself is a fiction."
The Underground Man in Dostoevsky's short novel features an emotionally wrecked man who rarely steps outdoors and is prone to ranting. It begins:
I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased.
A pleasant enough of a welcome, wouldn't you say? The Underground Man goes on to issue a full-blown polemic against rationalism, while attempting to interact with the world, with hilarious and tragic consequences.
It's not by chance that this guy lives in St. Petersburg. The city is steeped in the fantastic, though it is seemingly the most logical of cities, and is thus the perfect metaphor for the plight of our liver-diseased, rationalism-loathing Underground Man.
It was unusual for St. Petersburg to be a planned urban center. Peter the Great founded it in the early 18th century with measured and straight streets. Traditional European sights of add-ons to buildings crammed in alleys have no place here. St. Petersburg borders the Baltic Sea, making the navy an important part of the city, and the very foundation of the place was a swamp. Petersburg buildings were built with stern and simple design; that is, they were far more Western in appearance than Russian. And the city is Russia's capital, meaning that it is home to the most powerful government leaders and the (much more lowly) military and civil service members; there was a huge gap between the wealthiest and the poorest. The city's population, in Dostoevsky's time, was comprised of many more males than females, and the population was full of foreigners, visitors, and travelers. Finally, the weather in Petersburg has been a constant preoccupation in literature and, apparently, in neighborly conversation. It's typically unhappy weather, marked by the strange White Nights once a year.
Dostoevsky manipulates these characteristics of St. Petersburg in his tale of the Underground Man to emphasize the dissonance in what he calls "the most abstract and premeditated city on the face of the earth." It is the failure of man's premeditation, the book indicates, that results in the unnatural, or "abstracted," character of the city.
The careful plotting of Russia's capital can be readily compared to the Crystal Palace that the Underground Man rails against. The Palace is a glass and steel marvel, recently built when the novel was published, that represented the latest of humankind's achievements--just as Petersburg did upon its world debut. Both the Palace and the city are Western in architectural style and were intended for admiration, particularly from the visitors that frequent them (via the city's transient population and the tourists who went to see the Palace in London).
But the Underground Man despises the Palace, because it is merely a mechanical perfection that satisfies humankind's physical needs--not spiritual needs. This condemnation can be applied to his view of the city, which stands so singularly with its rationally planned neighborhoods and imposing Western buildings.
The text goes further to show how this intentional environment fails to meet humankind's true needs. The snow in the city is "dingy, yellow, wet." When Liza and the narrator first talk, they discuss the wet graves--the city's foundation is so marshy that coffins may be buried in a foot of water. The unhappy characteristics of nature in the"premeditated city" demonstrate the conflict between human will and design against natural resistance. And, says the Underground Man, who is in bad health because of Petersburg's climate, just as the natural state of the environment resists humankind's rational concrete and steel, so does humankind's natural state demand more.
The planned city never fulfills the people, creating a sense of abstraction. It exemplifies the Underground Man's beliefs--that human beings, in reality, are irrational, capricious, naturally refuse to be categorized.The 2 x 2=4 philosophy that Petersburg was built on stands for a cold rationalism that leads to a reduction of humankind's natural will and spiritual growth, which in turn condemns people to such a state of stagnation as to equate to death. Petersburg is abstract because, despite its premeditation, it doesn't actually make sense in terms of what a person really needs to live on.
So it goes in Dostoevsky's book, at least. I, for one, am fascinated by it. Maybe one day I'll get a chance to see it for myself. Summer Literary Seminars, anyone? It looks like the next session of the program is in 2010, while next year the seminars head to Lithuania, Kenya and Italy. I suppose that leaves time for poor shmoes like me to save some dollars.
It looks more than worthwhile. Rumor has it that past teachers include Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill, Jim Shepard, Denis Johnson, and George Saunders. With guides like that through the literary city and the wildness of writing, a person couldn't rationally hope for more.
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