The Writer and the City in Late Imperial Russia

The Writer and the City in Late Imperial RussiaAuthor(s): Joseph BradleySource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Jul., 1986), pp. 321-338Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209309 .

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REVIEW

Volume 64, Number 3-July I986

The Writer and the City

in Late Imperial Russia*

JOSEPH BRADLEY

THE relationship between the writer and the city in late imperial Russia provides an insight into the changing urban environment, the influence on the population of contact with urban life, and contemporary perceptions of the city. St Petersburg, of course, was the most vivid embodiment of the city, in particular of the contrast between poverty and opportunity and between the man-made and rapidly changing urban environment and the unkempt, timeless Russian countryside. For this reason the greatest writers - Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Bely - have left us the most striking images of the city. Scholars, too, have been attracted to the relationship between the writer and St Petersburg and between urban reality and human imagination. 1 Lesser

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Russian Literature Seminar at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, June, 1984. The author wishes to thank Michael Branch, Richard Freeborn, David Budgen, and Julian Graffy for making the seminar presentation possible. The research on which this paper was based was supported by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board and the University of Tulsa.

Joseph Bradley is Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Tulsa.

1 See, for example, Donald Fanger, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, Cambridge, Mass., I 965; and M. Holquist, 'From Utopian City to Gnostic Universe' (Virginia Quarterly Review, 48, no. 4, 1972, pp. 537-57). The best studies of the writer and society are William Mills Todd, Literature and Society in Imperial Russia, I800-I914, Stanford, I 978 and Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Culture, Princeton, I985. Others are Orysia Karapinka, 'The Image of the City in Russian Letters from Pushkin to Tolstoi' (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, I 972); Robert Whittaker, 'My Literary and Moral Wanderings: Apollon Grigor'yev and the Changing Cultural Topography of Moscow' (SlavicReview, 42, no. 3, I983, pp. 390-407); and I. K. Lilly, 'Moscow as City and Symbol in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago' (Slavic Review, 40, no. 2, 1981, pp. 241-50).



322 JOSEPH BRADLEY

cities, lesser writers, the mundane relationships in the city, and the lives of the lower classes, however, are less familiar to us. The purpose of the present article is to explore the image of the city in the mind of seven writers who wrote about Russia's second city, Moscow. The seven writers I have chosen are Aleksandr Petrovich Golitsynsky, Ivan Gavrilovich Pryzhov (I827-85), Aleksandr Ivanovich Levitov (I835-77), Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (I828-19IO), Sergey Terent'yevich Semyonov (i868-i 922), Semyon Pavlovich Pod"yachev (i866-i 934), and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gilyarovsky (i 853-I 935) .2 Though contact with urban life determined the purpose, subject matter and choice of form for these seven writers, the literary influence of the city went much further. Moscow was more than a background and setting: the city itself embodied social relations and values that were transforming a rural nation.

To contemporaries Russia's second city was rapidly changing at the end of the nineteenth century. The erstwhile 'big village' was giving way to a cosmopolitan metropolis. In the fifty years preceding the First World War Moscow's population increased fourfold. In the period 1900-14 it grew at an average annual rate of four per cent, and among the world's largest cities only New York was growing as fast. Moscow reached the million mark on the eve of the I 897 census and almost two million at the time of the Revolution. Torrents of immigrants sought a livelihood in Moscow: during the period I882 to 1902, between ioo,ooo and I50,000 immigrants entered the city every year.3 With a rate of illegitimacy ten times that of the rest of the province, with a very slowly declining death rate, with only one-quarter of its adult males living with members of their own family, Moscow, no less than St Petersburg, was experiencing strains of urbanization too severe for governmnent officials, public health doctors, the police, and writers to ignore.4

Though only Ivan Pryzhov was native born, all seven writers spent at least part of their lives in Moscow. Three lives, in particular, provide examples of the great geographical and occupational wandering during the second half of the nineteenth century. Born in Tambov, Aleksandr Levitov in I 855 walked to Moscow to enrol in the university; however,

2 Biographical information has been taken from various references, the most important of which are S. A. Vengerov, Kritiko-biograficheskiy slovar' russkikh pisateley i uchonykh, St Petersburg, 1886-1904; K. D. Muratov, ed., Istoriya russkoy literatury: Bibliografcheskiy ukazatel', 2 vols, Moscow-Leningrad, I962-63; and Russkiy biograficheskiy slovar', 25 vols, St Petersburg, I896-I gI8.

3 Moskovskaya gorodskaya uprava, Perepis' Moskvy 1882g., 3 vols, Moscow, I 885, II: Pt. 2, pp. 31-34; Moskovskaya gorodskaya uprava, Perepis' Moskvy I902g., Moscow, I904, I, 2, i, pp. 8-i i. The proportion of immigrants remained remarkably steady at 70-75 per cent from I882 to I9I2.

4 For an analysis of the strains of urbanization, see my Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia, Berkeley, I985.



THE WRITER AND THE CITY 323

having failed the entrance examinations and having no money, he then walked to St Petersburg and enrolled in the Academy of Surgeons. Upon graduation he became afel'dsher in several small towns, returned to his native village, and again walked to Moscow in I86o, where he lived a pauper's life until he got a job at Russkiy vestnik. However, he drank,too much, lost the job and went back to Petersburg where he got a certificate as a village school teacher. After a short visit to Tambov, he returned to Moscow. Unable to hold on to jobs because of his worsening alcoholism, Levitov lived off the meagre earnings from writing. His bohemian life alternated between Moscow and Petersburg and in I877 he died of consumption in a hospital, in the nineteenth- century city the ultimate sign of poverty.5

A generation later, both Semyon Pod"yachev and Vladimir Gil- yarovsky also led Gorkyesque lives of wandering, working at odd jobs, and heavy drinking. Born the son of a minor government official in the province of Vologda, Gilyarovsky, for example, left home to be a Volga boatman, joined the army, fought in the Turkish War and then became involved in provincial theatre. He spent the rest of his career as an actor and journalist.6

One writer, at least, settled down after youthful wanderings. Sergey Semyonov, born in the proverbial glukhaya derevnya, like all young boys of his village, left home at an early age to look for work. His first job was at a Moscow rubber factory at the age of eleven; a year later he went to Petersburg where he learned drafting; he then went to Poltava and back to Moscow. He found the city unbearable and, encouraged by Tolstoy, he returned home, took up farming and raised a family. Although he travelled twice abroad, including a trip to England after which he became a proponent of individual farming, he spent the rest of his life in

5 Levitov's first story, Grachovka, named after a tenement district in Moscow, was published in Zritel' in I 862. This was Levitov's most prolific period and sketches followed in rapid succession in Biblioteka dlya chtentya, Moskovskiye gubernskiye vedomosti, Russkiye vedomosti, Vestnik Evropy and Delo. A series of sketches of Moscow life under the title Moskovskiye komnaty s mebelyu appeared in I863 in Biblioteka dlya chteniya and was later republished several times under the titles Moskovskiye nory i trushchoby, St Petersburg, i866 and Zhizn' moskovskikh zakoulkov, Moscow, 1875. (In the former Levitov collaborated with Mikhail A. Voronov.) The most complete edition of his works is the Sobraniye sochineniy published by K. T. Soldatenkov in I884 with a ioo-page bio-bibliographical introduction and criticism by F. Nefedov. The most complete reviews are the obituary by F. Nefedov ( Vestnik Evropy, no. 3, 1877, pp. 452-64); A. Skabichevsky, 'A. I. Levitov' (Otechestvennyye zapiski, ccxxxii, pt. 2, I877, pp. 137-73); and A. Pypin, 'Belletrist-narodnik shestidesyatykh godov' (Vestnik Evropy, no. 8, I884, pp. 648-84).

6 Gilyarovsky's most important works are Trushchobnyye lyudi, Moscow, i887; reprint, Moscow, 1957; Moskovskiye nishchiye, Moscow, I896; and Moskva i moskvichi, Moscow, I926, and various later editions. Soviet editions of his works include groups of sketches titled 'Moskva gazetnaya', 'Moi skitaniya', 'Druz'ya i vstrechi', and 'Lyudi teatra'. See Izbrannoye, 3 vols, Moscow, I961, and Izbrannoye, 2 vols, Kuybyshev, i965.



324 JOSEPH BRADLEY

the country.7 Semyonov was fortunate that his home was less isolated than the average village: one-quarter of its population were Old Believers who were energetic flax farmers and more than one-half of the population were literate, approximately twice the national average.8 We may assume that Semyonov was satisfied with his work and his life and, in a letter to Rubakin, he gave a rare admission for an educated Russian: 'I consider myself happy, thank God'.9

Several of these writers had brushes with the authorities at some point in their careers. Levitov was expelled from the Tambov seminary for writing humorous verses, reading foreign authors, and reading aloud Dead Souls. Pryzhov was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment and exile for involvement in the Nechayev affair. Gilyarovsky's first book, Slum Folk, was confiscated at the printers and, like many of its characters, never saw the light of day. Tolstoy was constantly a thorn in the side of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and his reflections on charity in Moscow were not published in complete form until I 906. Rejecting what would have been volume I2 of Tolstoy's complete works, including these reflections, Pobedonostsev personally told Sofiya Tolstoy in I886: 'Whatever passes the censors is considered approved and these pages can in no way be approved ... Notwith- standing the author's good intentions, this is a book that will be a bad influence on young minds'.10

Each writer had a specific purpose in writing about the city which, coupled with the writer's own experience of city life, determined subject matter, themes, and choice of form and language. Moreover, these writers responded to specific aspects of urbanization and, alongside government officials, the police, and reformers, confronted the strains of Moscow's rapid growth and the dislocations in the lives of the common people. A few examples should illustrate this interaction between writer and city.

At the beginning of Ulichnyye tipy Golitsynsky tells us his purpose and choice of genre: 'to acquaint the reader, in a few entertaining (lyogkie) sketches, with the rich and plentiful characters of Moscow's street

7 Posrednik, the publishing house which specialized in cheap popular editions of the lives of saints, 'useful books', and Tolstoy's stories, published most of Semyonov's stories, both as single editions and as collections. See, for example, Vgorod, Moscow, I888; Krestyanskiye rasskazy, Moscow, 1894; Upropasti i drugiye rasskazy, 2nd edn, Moscow, I904; DevichIya pogibel' i drugiye rasskazy i ocherki, 2nd edn, Moscow, I894; and Krest5anskiye pyesy, Moscow, 1912. The most complete Soviet edition is V rodnoy derevne, Moscow, I 962.

8 Many interesting observations on changes in Russian agriculture and on urban-rural relations are contained in Semyonov's memoir, Dvadtsat' pyat' let v derevne, Petrograd, 19 I 5.

9 N. A. Rubakin, Etyudy o russkoy chitayushchey publike, St Petersburg, I895, p. 170. Additional biographical material may be found in L. M. Kleinbort, Ocherki narodnoy literatury, 88o-i923, Leningrad, I924. 10 L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, go vols, Moscow-Leningrad, I928-58, 25,

pp. 757-.8. The publishing history of Tolstoy's reflections on poverty, entitled Tak chto zhe nam delat ?, is summarized in note I 9 below.




life'.1' Golitsynsky sets out to observe how the common people work, eat, drink, spend their leisure, chat and quarrel. A secondary purpose is 'to expose those unwashed and shady characters' - the allegedly fraudulent beggars, holy fools, and cripples.12 The sketches take the form of a stroll through the city. As we encounter different people along the way, we might imagine our guide saying to us, 'Ah! Look over there! There is a beggar'. Or 'My, my, what kind of rustic do we have here?'. Golitsynsky has his tongue in his cheek and we can be amused (though the dour reviewer, Pisarev, was not) by characters who look different and who made mistakes in Russian, such as saying 'telegrap' for telegraph, 'chikhvir' for tsifr, and 'tal'yanskiy' for Italian. His sketches were richly illustrated with drawings by G. Shmel'kov, which in their vivid portrayal of facial expressions and physical types remind one of drawings in Mayhew's Life and Labour of the People of London.13

Golitsynsky wrote at a time of exploding interest in popular culture and ethnographic studies, to which Pryzhov's studies of pilgrims, holy men, drunkards, and wandering mendicants form a major contribu- tion.14 Pryzhov's purpose, as well as that of contemporaries such as Bezsonov and Maksimov, was to present the richness of popular culture and the alleged quintessential examples of the Russian nation, so many of whom were 'conveniently' located in the city of Moscow

11 A. Golitsynsky, Ulichnyye tipy, Moscow, i 86o, p. 4. He also wrote Smekh i slyozy: Rasskazy doktora, Moscow, I 859, and Ocherki izfabrichnoy zhizni, Moscow, i 86 i. Unfortunately, there is little biographical information about Golitsynsky. Various references reveal only that he was a writer of humorous sketches, some of which appeared in Razvlecheniye, in the i 8sos and i 86os. The preface to one of these sketches leads us to believe that he was a physician in a county seat in central Russia, and he almost certainly lived in, or was a frequent visitor to, Moscow. Other than a critical review by Pisarev in Russkoye slovo, Golitsynsky's works seem to have received little contemporary attention; and the one post-revolutionary history of literature that did mention him dropped him altogether in a subsequent edition. See D. Pisarev, 'Nesorazmernyye pretenzii' (Russkoye slovo, no. 2, pt. 2, i86i, pp. 58-70); and I. N Kubikov [I. N. Dement yev], Rabochiy klass v russkoy literature, 3rd edn, Ivanovo- Voznesensk, 1926, pp. 36-37.

12 Ulichnyye tipy, p. 4. 13 Henry Mayhew, Life and Labour of the People of London, London, I85I and various later

editions. 14 Pryzhov's major works are Zhitiye Ivana Yakovlevicha, izvestnogo proroka v Moskve, St

Petersburg, I 86o; Nishchiye na svyatoy Rusi: Materialy dlya istorii obshchestvennogo i narodnogo byta v Rossii, Moscow, I 862; Dvadtsat' shest' prorokov, yurodivykh, dur i durakov, Moscow, I865; 'Russkiye klikushi' ( Vestnik Evropy, no. io, I868, pp. 64I-72); and Istoriya kabakov v Rossii, St Petersburg, i868; reprint, Kazan', I914. All but the latter were reprinted in I. G. Pryzhov: Ocherki, stat'i, pis'ma, Moscow, 1934. Two other authors of ethnographic sketches were Petr Alekseyevich Bezsonov ( I828-99) and Sergey Vasilyevich Maksimov (I 83 1-19O g). See, for example, Bezsonov's Kaleki perekhozhiye: Sbornik stikhov i issledovaniy, 2 vols, Moscow, i 86I- 64; Maksimov's Brodyachaya Rus' Khrista-radi, St Petersburg, 1877; and the review 'Noveyshiy etnograficheskiy stil' (Vestnik Evropy, no. 8, I877, pp. 822-31). Two important focal points for the burgeoning interest in ethnographic studies were the Russian Literary Society at Moscow University, where Bezsonov was an active member, and the Russian Ethnography Exhibition, held in Moscow in I867. See Vserossiyskayaetnograficheskaya vystavkai slavyanskiy s'yezd I867g., Moscow, I867, and Obshchestvo lyubiteley rossiyskoy slovesnosti, Slovar' chlenov, Moscow, I9I6. Tolstoy, Semyonov, and Gilyarovsky were also members of the society.



326 JOSEPH BRADLEY

itself. Both Golitsynsky and Pryzhov recount short tales to put their characters in the proper setting but develop no story and, as their titles suggest, their characters are no more than social types. There is no apparent concern for any mass phenomenon of rustics in the city or of indigence. Indeed, at the beginning of the era of the Great Reforms, Moscow, with a very slowly growing population of only a little more than 300,000, did not appear inundated by great numbers of these characters, who could remain colourful curiosities.

Levitov tells his readers of a less detached purpose. 'In these sketches I intend to portray the myriads of people, whose lives have been shattered by unending sorrow. Before you stands a whole line of mute people who can't even tell you about their suffering or ask for help. I am convinced that readers know nothing about Moscow's mores . . .'.15

Although biographers and critics all state that he lived the kind of life he wrote about, in fact a major source for his subject matter was the reports of murders, fires, missing persons, and accidents published daily in the 'Dnevnik proisshestviy' section of Politseyskiye vedomosti. Nevertheless, Levitov was one of the first writers to have immediate experience with the lower classes - struggling artisans, domestics, lower officials, and poor students -an experience that was largely in an urban setting. These subjects blend almost imperceptibly with other 'heroes' - thieves, prostitutes, mendicants, proprietors of seedy shelters, and parents who market their daughters. These 'myriads of people' were an undifferentiated mass, little distinguished from each other by residence or by occupation. However, they were no longer colourful curiosities. Indeed, as early as i 863 the police expressed concern that a maze of tenements, taverns, and lodging houses, the setting of Levitov's stories, concealed vagrants and criminals and infected, morally and physically, the honest labourer.16 Though he was labelled by contemporary and Soviet critics alike as a narodnik writer, Levitov does not idealize his subjects, whose moral failings often inspire disgust rather than sorrow.

Elsewhere Levitov called himself a risovshchik of Moscow's mores and a writer of mores (nravopisatel'). Like Golitsynsky and Pryzhov, Levitov presents archetypal characters. One method is the subtitle added to many of his sketches; thus 'Pleasant Memories' is subtitled 'A Sketch of Moscow Mores'; 'They Neither Sow nor Reap' is subtitled 'Life of the Moscow Proletariat'; and 'A Young Girl's Sin' is also the 'Life of

15 'Figury i tropy o moskovskoy zhizni', Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, p. 349. 16 Moskovskaya gorodskaya duma, Komissiya po delam o pol'zakh i nuzhdakh obshchest-

vennykh, 'Doklad ob ustroystve i soderzhanii kvartir dlya nochlezhnikov' (Doklady Moskovskoygorodskoy upravy,June 20, i 866, p. i). In proposing low-cost public housing for the poor, the police actually were ahead of the City Council, which only reluctantly became involved in such social services.




Moscow's Seamstresses'. Levitov's stories are more developed than those of Golitsynsky, but the characters are one-dimensional and the story frequently proceeds as a conversation between strangers who meet and swap their gloomy life histories. Nevertheless, this fragmen- tation and lack of 'fictional refinement', as Pypin called it in his review of Levitov's collected works, serve the author's purpose of presenting truncated lives, losers, and drifters. Moreover, unlike greater writers surrounded by the same kinds of people, Levitov is not a visionary moralist.

This, of course, cannot be said of Tolstoy, whose tract on poverty in the city was written in the context of the author's spiritual crisis beginning in the late I870S. Charity and poor relief had recently become public issues as the police, City Council, and reformers sought ways to cope with the problems of immigration, family dislocation, and housing shortages. In the I88os traditional forms of charity such as almsgiving came under increasing criticism.17 Tolstoy was one of the earliest critics, believing that charitable balls, bazaars and perform- ances, big contributions by the wealthy, and institutional confinement separated the giver from the receiver of aid and relegated good deeds and individual self-sacrifice to a secondary position. Tolstoy devised a charity plan based on the principles of broad public support, friendly visiting, registration and investigation of the poor, and individual determination and dispensation of aid, principles stated widely in Europe at this time. Hoping to implement his plan, he moved to Moscow and, as an enumerator for the i 882 city census, Tolstoy visited the homes of the poor.

The census not only enabled the writer to discover poverty in its urban context but would enable, or so Tolstoy thought, those really interested in charity to enter into relations with the needy:

Then let the final act of our enumerators and supervisors be to distribute IOO twenty-kopek pieces to those who have no food; and this will be not a little, not so much because the hungry will have food, but because the supervisors and enumerators will conduct themselves in a humane manner towards one hundred poor people.18

17 I discuss the provision of poor relief in the city in Muzhik and Muscovite, Chapters 7 and 8. 18 Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 25: pp. 179-80. Tolstoy himself slept through the first morning

of the census and then had to have coffee and a cigarette for his digestion before he could be bothered to join the group of student census-takers. He found those he surveyed to be friendly and helpful but did relate a rather disarming incident that should make any quantitative historian shudder: 'Our questions merely were an opportunity for their enjoyment and jokes about whom to count, whom to count twice and which two people could be counted as one' (ibid., p. 2I2). See also Richard Wortman, 'Tolstoj and the Perception of Poverty: Tolstoj's What Then Must We Do?' (Rossiya: Studia e ricerche a cura di Vittorio Strada, no. 4, 1980, pp. I I 9-3 I).



328 JOSEPH BRADLEY

Though couched in appealing rhetoric, this was almsgiving pure and simple; indeed, Tolstoy discovered that his attempts to distribute money in the tenements started a riot, the money ended up in the tavern anyway, and everyone was degraded. Disillusioned, he abandoned his charity scheme and began expressing the thoughts on the evils of money, modern political economy, and the city and on the need for change to come from within oneself that in raw form would make up What Then Is To Be Done?.19 Though Tolstoy rejected governmental action, parts of his scheme become a reality in I894 in the District Guardianships of the Poor, modelled after a similar plan in the German town of Elberfeld.20

Personal experience of Russia's 'lower depths' provided the subject matter for the stories of Gilyarovsky and Pod"yachev. Gilyarovsky's sketches of the urban down-and-out, more numerous than those of his more illustrious contemporary, Gorky, were dominated by Moscow's most notorious skid row, Khitrov market, a concentration of lodging houses and taverns in what was called Moscow's Whitechapel. It was the location of the city's largest labour market and attracted gangs of unskilled labourers, mainly men, looking for casual employment. The city's major eyesore, it became the subject of numerous investigations in the I 8gos and early I 900s by the municipality, the District Guardianships of the Poor and the Imperial Society of Russian Engineers.21

While many of Gilyarovsky's characters sink to the Khitrov slum, those of Pod"yachev are driven from their homes and families, wander

19 Tolstoy's tract was written over a period of four years and had a tortuous publishing history. He started writing in I 882 and meant to have it appear in theJanuary, I 885, issue of Russkaya mysl', though the censors earlier prevented publication of Ispoved' and V chom moya vera in the same journal. After a long delay it was rejected, and Tolstoy decided to try to publish parts of it in Russkoye bogatstvo; meanwhile he became absorbed in Henry George's Progress and Poverty. Finally, parts appeared in Russkoye bogatstvo during I885 as 'Life in the City', 'Recollections on the Census' and 'The Country and the City'; the central censors had actually put back in much of what the local censor (that is, at Russkoye bogatstvo) had cut out. Then Tolstoy decided to try to get all of What then is to be done? along with My Religion and My Confession published as volume I2 of his complete works; meanwhile he continued to make changes until the end of i886 and decided to have parts published abroad. When no word came on volume 12, he dispatched his wife to Moscow and Petersburg to pursue the manuscript. Many cuts later, in I887 Tak chto zhe nam delat'? appeared in volume I2 of Tolstoy's collected works under the title Thoughts Prompted by the Census. It was not published in complete form until a Posrednik edition in I906. (See Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 25: pp. 757-58). 20 See 'El'berfeld'skaya sistema prizreniya bednykh' (Izvestiya Moskovskoy gorodskoy dumy,

19, no. i, January I895, pp. I7-36); and V. I. Ger'ye, 'Russkaya blagotvoritel'nost' na Vsemirnoy vystavke' ( Vestnik Evropy, 35, no. 8, I 900, pp. 48 I-505). A recent survey is Adele Lindenmeyr, 'A Russian Experiment in Voluntarism: The Municipal Guardianships of the Poor, I894-I9 4' (Jahrbucherfur Geschichte Osteuropas, 30, no. 3, 1982, pp. 429-551). 21 See my "'Once You've Eaten Khitrov Soup You'll Never Leave!": Slum Renovation in

Late Imperial Russia' (Russian History, i i, no. i, Spring, I 984, pp. I-28).




all over the country looking for work, lead brutal, tragic lives, and, like the author, sink to the Moscow Workhouse. Based on his own stay in I900, Mytarstva rather predictably describes the hopelessness pervad- ing the institution, the rude treatment, the lack of amenities, and the lack of work, especially for the unskilled labourers. Apparently, though, this description was not predictable to the city officials, who looked with pride upon the 'reformed' Workhouse of the I 890S. As part of a package of devolution of social services of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the late I88os, the municipality had gained control of the century-old institution - this alone was considered an important accomplishment by proponents of city-government. In I895 the city incorporated the Vocational Centre into the Workhouse and expanded facilities for job training and job placement; this became an integral part of what might be called Workhouse public relations. Finally, various ed-ucational and cultural amenities - Sunday lectures, concerts, plays and a library - were introduced to improve moral training.22

Pod"yachev's story gave ammunition to liberals and conservatives alike and, according to Korolenko, Pod"yachev's mentor at Russkoye bogatstvo, was a major event in Moscow. To begin with, when officials of the Workhouse admitted the accuracy of the writer's account, the liberal press criticized the city for backsliding in its efforts at reform and for letting the punitive functions of the 'pre-reformed' workhouse overshadow the reformist functions. On the other hand, Moskovskiye vedomosti claimed that the Vocational Centre and Workhouse should be separate institutions and that the Workhouse should offer religion, not plays. 'Theatre, theatre, everywhere the theatre, even in the Work- house a theatre!' The institution was described as the 'favourite child' of the 'City Council windbags'.23

Moscow's most prominent institution of relief was the Imperial Foundling Home, and it is not surprising that the home and its foster- children should have figured in stories of the period, including those of Pod"yachev. In the I88os and I89os it came under increasing attack from critics who accused the lax admissions procedures for encourag- ing immorality and fraud among the lower classes. An astonishing number of infants died in the Foundling Home itself and the foster care system of sending the infants out to be raised in the countryside easily

22 A useful survey of workhouses in Russia may be found in G. G. Shvittau, Trudovaya pomoshch' v Rossii, 2 vols, Petrograd, 19 I 5. See also my 'The Moscow Workhouse and Urban Welfare Reform in Russia' (Russian Review, 41, no. 4, October 1982, pp. 427-44). 23 [Omega], 'Lyubimoye detishche upravy' (Moskovskiye vedomosti, no. 264, September 25, I902, p. 2).



330 JOSEPH BRADLEY

lent itself to abuse. In I 890 alone, for example, there were six leading articles on the institution in Russkiye vedomosti.24

In Pod"yachev's Shpitaty, village slang for the children of the Foundling Home, a traveller on his way home from Moscow stops at a peasant cottage to spend the night. His hosts, he learns, consist of a drunkard and his wife and their two children who, with no livestock, live on the monthly four roubles paid to raise two foster-children: 'Shpitatami vot pitaemsya, imi zhivem'. The foster-mother admits to the traveller that at first she did not understand the system and was worried about the children; but then she saw how everybody did it and got used to it: clearly, this is not an isolated phenomenon. Apparently these are not their first foster-children, whom they get by paying a woman who has just had a child, and therefore has milk, to go to the Foundling Home and bring back an infant. The drunkard repeats that they do not get foster-children for pleasure and this is obvious from the abusive treatment they get. The foster-mother, with no milk of her own, gives them a pacifier made of bread soaked in hot water or tea. They claim that the sooner the children die the better, because then they can get new ones; and infants bring in more money than children. In the end the husband and wife get into a fight and one of the foster-children is accidentally killed. 'Mothers of these children, where are you?' asks the traveller as he rushes out of the cottage in disgust.25

Depiction of the brutality and hopelessness of lives at the lower depths gives purpose and subject matter for Gilyarovsky and Pod"yachev. Semyonov exemplifies a rather different purpose. In his study of the Russian reading public, Nikolay Rubakin cites Semyonov as an example of an intelligent iz naroda, a self-educated man who uses books to bring learning and culture to the village.26 Semyonov was influenced by Tolstoy who became his mentor at Posrednik publishers after reading the young author's first story, Two Brothers.27 As befitting a protege of Tolstoy, Semyonov believed that learning and culture would come through individual self-improvement and strength of character. Alone among these seven authors, Semyonov wrote for a readership of

24 The foundling homes and the fosterage system are discussed in A. I-ov, 'Vospitatel'nyye doma v Rossii' (Vestnik Evropy, 25, no. 6, I890, pp. 490-98); N. N. Ginzburg, 'Prizreniye podkidyshey v Rossii' (Trudovaya pomoshch', 7, no. 4, I904, pp. 500-13); David Ransel 'Abandonment and Fosterage of Unwanted Children: The Women of the Foundling System' in Ransel, ed., The Family in Imperial Russia, Urbana, I978; and my Muzhik and Muscovite, Chapters 7 and 8.

25 S. Pod"yachev, Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, i i vols, Moscow-Leningrad, I92 7-30, 5, p. 85. Several of Semyonov's stories deal with child abandonment and fosterage. See in particular 'U propasti' and 'Chuzhoye dityo'. Abandoned children figured prominently in European literature, too. One of Eugene Sue's best known novels was Martin the Foundling (London, I847). 26 Rubakin, Etyudy, pp. I 69-70. 27 Kleinbort, Ocherki, pp. 2I-22; Rubakin, Etyudy, pp. i69-70.



THE WRITER AND THE CITY 33I

fellow peasants.28 His labourers do ordinaryjobs and are not curiosities or romantic types. Although occasionally the fate of the down-and-out life will be hinted at as an example to the weak-willed, Semyonov avoids this setting. His choice of form is the short story - action- oriented, with a minimum of description, reflection, and comment. We learn about the characters chiefly by what they do and about good and evil by the juxtaposition of virtuous and weak-willed lives. Unlike the characters of Golitsynsky and Levitov who make mistakes in Russian, Semyonov's peasants speak in literate, if not standard literary, Russian.

Moscow's inhabitants and the city itself had a physiology that captured the imagination and was recorded by several of these writers, especially those of the i86os. In the I840s and I850S there was a fascination in Europe for crime and the alleged criminal type - no longer the highwayman of earlier periods but the urban lumpen- proletariat, the 'criminal classes', the 'dangerous classes', the 'savage' inhabitants of an urban 'wilderness' or underworld.29 The best example of this fascination was Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris, .written in I843, and well known to the Russian reading public at the time. The criminal type was assumed to have not only identifiable moral or social features, but also physical features. Consequently, like naturalists, explorers and physicians, writers described in great detail physical features, clothes, mannerisms, and habitats, in the process of gathering, classifying, and cataloguing facts.

Though Pisarev sneered at the physician Golitsynsky for classifying Russians according to how they eat and what kind of fish they smell like, the physician-writer of humorous sketches was, like the great classifier Mayhew, a master of this study of urban physiology, as a few examples should show. Thus a new arrival in the city is classified:

28 Evidence of readership of the authors I have been discussing is scant. One may surmise that publication in thick journals and in magazines such as Zritel' would have prevented writers such as Levitov and even Pod"yachev from having wide readership. The standard studies of readership at the end of the nineteenth century rarely mention even Semyonov. However, we do have one account of the reaction in a Kiev Sunday school to Bezpriyutnyy, one of Levitov's sketches, and published in a Public Library edition in I 883 for five kopeks. In this story, a homeless old man, a drunkard but nevertheless a very engaging and kind fellow, tries to stop a fight and is killed in the process. Peasants who were read this story sympathized with the old man. 'The poor man, suffers for others but can't do anything for himself ... A good man but he drinks too much ... Vodka did him in. . .' City girls, however, were much more censorious and could not forgive the old man for his drinking. The account is given in Kh.D. and E. A. Al'chevskaya, Chto chitat' narodu? Kriticheskiy ukazatel' knig dlya narodnogo i detskogo chteniya, 2 vols, St Petersburg, i888-89, i, pp. I62-63. See also M. M. Lederle, Mneniye russkikh Iyudey o luchshikh knigakh dlya chteniya, St Petersburg, I895; N. A. Rubakin, Sredi knig, St Petersburg, I906; V. L'vov-Rogachevsky, Noveyshaya russkaya literatura, I88I-IgIg, Leningrad, I924, pp. 48-49. 29 See Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Halfofthe

Nineteenth Century, trans. FrankJellinek, New York, 1973.



332 JOSEPH BRADLEY

For examples, the dear little rustic (muzhichok), havingjust come to Moscow for the first time and especially from some far-off steppe province, strikes one by his frightened, jittery appearance and especially by his extraordin- ary naivete. Here you have a little wild animal who has stumbled onto a place inhabited by human beings. If you like, he still has his wits about him, but he is so preoccupied with everything going on around him - the noise, the crowds, the traffic and the new impressions - that at first he simply cannot figure out what to do.30

The next character we meet on the streets is the cape woman, whose head is covered by an old cloth cape or shawl (salop), hence her name, salopnitsa:

She always has tears in her eyes and has the gentle peaceful resigned expression of constant sorrow. The cape woman is invariably the wife of one of those civil servants who worked for forty years for five roubles per month and who died of poverty, alcoholism and haemorrhoids . .. She has a remarkably supple character. The cape woman was created precisely for the proletariat: she is a matchmaker, gossip and maker of cosmetics, pious, a mourner, a fortune-teller and a clever woman all wrapped in one.31

One of the street characters an educated Russian like Golitsynsky confronted frequently was the porter:

The porter is such a striking type that, even if he is without his broom, you will instantly recognize him by his apron, his greasy cap, his peasant shoes, leaning against the gatepost of his master's home . . . The expression on his face is frequently dull and angry and his entire bearing exudes laziness and apathy, no doubt a consequence of a disagreeable job which forces him constantly to root around in the rubbish and manure or to spend the whole night opening the gate. No doubt for these reasons he has a sullen and unfriendly nature.32

Not only were its inhabitants certain physical types, with gestures and mannerisms, such as scratching the backs of their necks, that classify them, the city itself was personified even more vividly by Russian than by European writers. Writers of the I 840s, I 85os and i 86os continually referred to the city, and of course especially St Petersburg, as hideous, superfluous, parasitical, unnatural, bewildering, impersonal, random, alienating, and dedicated to form rather than to content.33 Moscow, too, inspired such images, and indeed the images of Levitov are among the most demonic of the genre. Big cities have

long clutching tentacles! Relentlessly, they tarnish our isolated steppe villages and pitilessly seize and drag in for the fleeting enjoyment of their

30 Ulichnyye tipy, p. 23. 31 Ibid., pp. 8-j. 32 Ibid., PP. 36-37. 33 Karapinka, 'The Images of the City', pp. i162, i84, 265. See also Fanger, Dostoevsky.




stuffed residents everything that we hold dear, everything that decorates our wretched lives.34

Naturally, the city turns fresh, sweet, angelic village girls into prostitutes, but in a general sense 'the city is a monster, ready to swallow up anyone who goes there'.35 Even when one goes home for some peace and quiet, the city is sure to follow one with its 'careless yelling'. 36 In a common accusation, the city uproots, dislocates and destroys the rural way of life: 'In the space of a few years the peasant family substitutes its strong rural morals for the effeminate morals of the city-dweller and, along with this change, the village economy that has been built up for decades, imperceptibly languishes'.37 Such is the power of the city that it not only can destroy the local economy and morals, but in Levitov's vivid metaphor and personification,

if somewhere in the provincial firmament a real star lights up and illuminates the impenetrable darkness of the land, then invariably with a whole train of demonic temptations the metropolis entices the star from the heavens where it was shining and puts it on its avenues.38

In case the reader does not get the message, other devices enhance the sinister and demonic qualities of the city. Many of Levitov's stories are set in the gloomiest days of late autumn. In A Sure Way to Avoid Ruin,

It all ended one pitch-black autumn night. If anything, this night was one hundred times more inclement, dreary and rainy than that morning when it all began . .. It was pouring buckets of rain and you could hear the words of the wind howling. . . The lanterns were blinking rather plaintively and mournfully.39

The time is usually night; and as if to beckon people into the fleeting, random and impersonal relationships of the big city and into its sinister underworld, a street light invariably flickers in the wind.40 In contrast, when we come to Semyonov, we do not have elaborate descriptions of the weather or time of day; frequently one word, such as the name of a holiday, tells us the season.

34 'Dvoryanka' (I863) in Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, p. 2I8. 35 'Figury i tropy o moskovskoy zhizni' (I865) in Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, p. 353. 36 'Skazka i pravda' (I872) in Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, p. 440. 37 'Sel'skoye uchen'ye' (I872) in Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, p. 457. 38 'Govoryashchaya obez'yana' (I 870), Sobraniye sochineniy, I, p. 377. 39 'Vernoye sredstvo ot razzoren'ya' in Sobraniye sochineniy, I, p. 346. Krym, a story set in a

Moscow tavern by that name, begins on a 'sullen autumn evening', and A Maiden's Sin begins on a 'rainy October night' (Sobraniye sochineniy, 2, pp. 73, 505). 40 By comparison, the opening lines of Mysteries of Paris show the universality of these

devices of weather and time: 'One cold rainy evening towards the end of October, 1838 ... On this night, the wind fiercely swept through the City's cheerless gullies. The wan and flickering light of the street lamps, swinging from lines, danced by reflection in the black water of the gutter midway in the muddy road'. (Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of Paris, London, i878, p. I).



334 JOSEPH BRADLEY

The sketches of Moscow in the I86os, like the flood of stories and feuilletons of the period, were devoted to recording the facts of urban poverty, disease and misery. The poor were not found just anywhere, though ihey did appear ubiquitous to contemporaries, but were concentrated in certain districts and haunts. Though space does not permit a walking tour to reconstruct these haunts, a few examples will show the changing topography of poverty. As the title of his book suggests, Golitsynsky finds the life of the lower classes out on the streets (and, considering the previous discussion, in broad daylight). The common people converge at centrally located outdoor flea-markets:

Every day from morning till night a most colourful and dirty crowd pushes and shoves ... The very essence of the flea-market [literally 'shoving market', tolkuchzy rynok] lies in this dirty, unshaven, tattered, hideous crowd moving back and forth. Any poor man who can't spend more than a rouble for ajacket or half a rouble for pair of trousers, or who needs an old cap for a few kopeks, can go to the flea-market and immediately find everything. Because of this, rubbish worn only by lower orders of Muscovites, and rags and garbage that make you sick to look at, are bought and sold here.41

Pryzhov goes to the unlit outskirts to find his beggars and holy fools. For example, Fedosy, a peasant from Dmitrov, discovered that being a holy fool was more profitable than factory labour and started to practice the trade in Moscow's Khamovniki district which 'has recently become a haven for all sorts of charlatans'.42 Yevdokiya, from Tambov,

could always be found in Rogozh', at Taganka Square, at the Pokrov Gates, in those dumps where all kinds of holy fools and charlatans can be found. She'll stop a passer-by and ask him, "Dear friend, give a kopek for a blessing". And if they give her the desired coin, she'll start to bless the kind friend, but if not, she'll send them to hell, and you know they're afraid of these things in Zamoskvorech'ye.43

Levitov, as titles such as Moscow 's Furnished Rooms and Moscow 's Plank Beds and Slums suggest, shifts the location of poverty to congested tenement districts, to the cul-de-sacs of the city basements, garrets, courtyards, sleazy taverns, and lodging houses. These dens and rookeries are scattered randomly throughout the city: some are on the outskirts, on the city's 'devstvennyye ulitsy', to use one of the author's

41 Ulichnyye tipy, p. 43. Many foreigners made similar observations. SeeJohn Bell Bouton, Roundabout to Moscow, New York, I 887, p. 303. 42 Dvadtsat' shest' moskovskikh prorokov,yurodivykh, dur i durakov ( I 865) in I. G. Pryzhov: Ocherki,

P. 55. 43 Ibid., p. 54. Zamoskvorech'ye, literally 'across the Moscow River', was an old merchant

neighbourhood. The word was virtually synonymous with traditionalism, superstition, and Old Belief.




favourite metaphors; others like Grachovka and the nearby red light district at Trubnaya Square were in the centre of Moscow. This randomness of location is enhanced by the restlessness and fleetingness of the howling wind, rattling glass, and ubiquitous flickering street lamp. However inclement the weather, it is inside the tenements and taverns that the saddest stories of family dissolution and moral disintegration take place. Like his more celebrated contemporary, Baudelaire,44 Levitov describes obscure lives and the claustrophobic sense of entrapment and victimization in a labyrinth of forces that operate within urban society. In the cul-de-sacs of the city reside those, like Levitov himself, with cul-de-sac lives; and the wills of the weak and unfortunate sink along with the foundations of the tenements and lodging-houses in which they live.

To these writers the city was something more than itself, more than a mere backdrop to events: it represented the central experience of modern life. But this central experience was constantly changing and, accordingly, the images of the city changed over time; the Moscow of the early twentieth century was no longer the Moscow of the i 86os. In conclusion, several distinct visions of the city may illustrate this change.

The most negative image of the city, especially the city of the I 86os, is simply that of death. Levitov's demonic metaphors depict this most vividly, but it is clearly there in Tolstoy's description of the lodging- houses, in Gilyarovsky's Slum Folk, and in the many references to the archetypes of urban decay: skid-rows, family dislocation, poverty, and crime. Levitov's collaborator at one point, Mikhail Voronov, presents the vision of death succinctly in his description of the rookery known as Grachovka:

This is the eternal sink of the poor of all ages; it is a gigantic grave filled to the rim with living corpses, consumed by poverty, debauchery and other curses of hapless humanity. Here one can find the Russian les miserables because nowhere else is there such a striking aggregation of foul conditions . ..45

Equally negative, though less stark, is the vision of the city as seducer, a frequent theme in Semyonov's stories. In Going to the City, twenty-year-old Aleksey is sent by his parents to earn money in the city. When he returns home for the summer, he shows his estrangement from the village (read family, the community): he finds the work hard

44 See, for example, the stories Le Vin des chiffoniers (I 857), Les Sept Vieillards (i 859), and Les Petites Vieilles ( I 859), part of the series 'Tableaux parisienis' that appeared in the i 86 i edition of Les Fleurs du mal. 45 'Skvoz' ogon', vody i mednyye truby' in Boloto: kartiny peterburgskoy, moskovskoy i

provintsial'noy zhizni, St Petersburg, 1870, pp. 273-74.



336 JOSEPH BRADLEY

and during the mowing season takes un-peasantlike cigarette breaks.46 He complains that the cabbage soup is watery (and one could write much about the visions of the city starting with the short Russian word zhir). As one might expect, the city brings on the village lad's downfall. On his second trip, Aleksey loses his job, frequents the taverns more and more, and winds up an alcoholic and beggar. However, this is the city as seducer, not the city as death, and in the end Aleksey is picked up by the police and sent back to the village, where he is rescued by his father.

In Semyonov's play, The Groom from Moscow, a peasant couple is impressed by their future son-in-law, a stylish and worldly lad who has an easy and well-paid job in a Moscow store. 'Did you see how he rode home in a coach? Who travels like that here? Only the landlords and officials'.47 When the prospective groom and his parents arrive, the stage directions suggest that the lad has brought back goodies from the city: the groom is described as dressed in very colourful city clothes; lhis father is described incongruously as 'an awkward man, wearing a Russian shirt with a narrow jacket (vizitka) clearly his son's size, stretched across his shoulders'.48 The city lad knows light racy songs and fashionable dances that the country boys do not; when he becomes bored with the village plyaski, he shows off a tantsiya, defined as plyaska po-nemetski. The groom's songs, dances, and tales of acquaintances, excitement, and pleasures in the city do not impress the wholesoine bride-to-be. Before the wedding he makes a pass at another village lass and suggests that she come to live with him in Moscow. At this point papa appears on the stage and catches his future son-in-law. He calls off the wedding and refuses to let his daughter go.

Though the theme of seduction is clearly there, and in a way more vividly than in the previous story, the play, written more than twenty years later, is more ambiguous in its ending and moral. The positive attributes of the city are more plausible; after all, the bride's parents are quite convinced at the beginning that the Moscow lad will be a perfect husband. The seduction of the city is presented less directly than in Going to the City because we do not see the depths to which Aleksey sank. It is only by chance that papa catches his future son-in-law making a pass at another girl, and it is easy to wonder what might have happened had he not. In the earlier story the city alone is the seducer; in the later play, with the 'groom from Moscow' attempting the seduction, the city is distanced somewhat from blame for the action. Increasingly discouraged by his fiancee's simplicity, the prospective groom does not appear terribly distraught at the end. The ambiguity in the treatment 46 Vgorod, p. 19. 47 Zhenikh-moskvich, p. 6, in Krestyanskiye pyesy. 48 Ibid., P. 9.




of the theme of seduction suggests a similar image, latent in the earlier period but becoming increasingly open - the increasing influence of the city on the countryside.

In the i86os and I870s, when one left the city and crossed its boundaries, by and large, Levitov's demonic metaphors notwith- standing, one left the city behind. Though Moscow was a rather distant magnet for immigrants, its influence did not appear immediate. By the I89os, economic growth, the greater production and marketing of consumer goods, railways, and the rapid spread of literacy enabled the city to reach far-off villages. Much of this influence, of course, was in material goods and in fashion, and here the image of the city is another aspect of the city as seducer, with the important difference that the means by which the city seduced peasant immigrants are now brought to the village. But the influence of the city penetrates much deeper than fashionable dances and clothes. The city has increasing power to shape occupational patterns and thereby change the entire character of a village. In Semyonov's A Horrible Matter, the residents of Baranovo had been better off than those of neighbouring villages under serfdom because they had been reasonably good farmers. However, gradually they saw that inhabitants of other villages, who worked part of the year in Moscow, brought home money and city purchases such as samovars and fancy dresses. The Baranovtsy became jealous - and it would be hard not to if one were told by a neighbouring villager: 'If we want to earn a little money we go to the city, find a job and live there, and we have warmth, food and money. That's why we're richer and sharper than you folks'.49 Naturally, it was not long before the Baranovtsy started doing the same thing, with, in this case, rather disastrous consequences for one of their lads.

This influence suggests a final image - the city as a land of opportunity. Even the gloomy scenes of Levitov show the opportunity that the city offers. In The Mores of Moscow's Virgin Streets Levitov sees in the constant movement of poor to the capital a sign that poverty will be alleviated. In Moscow's Furnished Rooms the landlady Tat'yana can enjoy herself in a way she never could in the village (among other things she can have sugar); having started her working life as a cook, her own career is a testament to upward mobility.50 Though Tolstoy would be the last to see the city as a land of opportunity, he describes another landlady who is living in luxury compared to what she had in the village: she has a feather bed, a quilt, a samovar, a warm coat, a cupboard with crockery; her friend has a watch. Even one of her lodgers

and this in a tenement that shocked Tolstoy by the destitution of its

49 'Strashnoye delo' in Krest(yanskiye rasskazy, p. I I8. 50 'Moskovskiye komnaty s mebel yu' (I863) in Sobraniyesochineniy, 2, pp. I4-I6.



338 JOSEPH BRADLEY

residents - has a small trunk with possessions, a teapot, two cups, boxes of sweets, tea and sugar.51 Indeed, by the beginning of the twentieth century the city's occupational structure was changing rapidly, as an unprecedented number of skilled and white-collar jobs were being created. Although a sense of homelessness and wandering pervades Levitov's sketches and, later, those of Pod"yachev and Gilyarovsky, Semyonov's characters have more purposeful, if not longer, sojourns in Moscow. No longer does the city take on monstrous proportions.

Inevitably, the land of opportunity changed consciousness. In Going to the City Aleksey explains to his mother that 'Before I thought everyone lived like us. But then I looked around and saw that it wasn't like that at all'.52 Such revelations can have a very selfish resolution: Aleksey saw that some people worked like horses and ate like dogs while others worked little, but ate well, and had more money and fun. (Of course, we saw what happened to Aleksey.) In The Groom from Moscow, written twenty years later, the groom describes the books and illustrated magazines with racy pictures he has seen in the city's taverns. Presumably, these magazines offered not only racy pictures but opened a new world to the village lads, a world of adventure, risk, geographical and cultural mobility, choice and change.

The Moscow writers, in varying degrees, were shocked by the monstrousness, hopelessness, immorality, and artificiality of the metropolis. To use Raymond Williams's words,53 'the miscellaneitly, crowded variety, contradictions, and unexpectedness' of the metropolis demonstrated that old values and ways could no longer guide or explain action. At the same time, the city more and more provided unprecedented choice and opportunity. Whether viewed negatively or positively, the city was more than just a backdrop to events: the city itself shaped trends and attitudes.54 At the end of the nineteenth century, the city was a microcosm of the patterns of rapid change occurring in Russian society and, for more and more Russians, the central experience of life.

51 Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy, 25, p. 2 I 7. 52 Vgorod, p. 22.

53 The Country and the City, London, 1975, p. 190. 54 Theodore Hershberg, 'The New Urban History: Toward an Interdisciplinary History of

the City' (Journal of Urban History, 5, no. i, November 1978, pp. 3-40). Hershberg argues (pp. 4-9) for approaching urban as process rather than the city simply as site.



Documents

The Writer and the City in Late Imperial Russia