St Petersburg

(Above middle) A few months before his influential book on Dostoyevsky appeared in 1929, Mikhail Bakhtin was arrested by secret police, and, in the course of an operation to liquidate Leningrad’s underground philosophical and religious circles, he was sent into internal exile.

(Above right) A leading Leningrad dadaist, Daniil Kharms was arrested in 1941, declared mentally ill, and placed in a prison hospital, where he soon died.

(Right top) Threatening the city with obliteration, the 900-day siege of Leningrad by the Germans in World War II claimed innumerable lives and cemented the new image of the city as martyr. Poster by Nikolai Tyrsa, 1941.

(Right bottom) After the war, a new generation of Leningrad artists challenged the official dogma: a drawing by Richard Vasmi mockingly depicts one of the city’s many monuments to Lenin.

(Top left) As did Stravinsky’s reappearance after decades of exile, Balanchine’s triumphant visit to Leningrad in 1962 reconnected émigré and native halves of the modern Petersburg culture. The reconnection took hold slowly; Nabokov’s works were accepted in Russia only in the late 1980s. Photo of Balanchine by Marianna Volkov.

(Top right) The poetry of Joseph Brodsky, exiled to the West in 1972 and awarded the Nobel Prize in 1987, opened a new chapter in the life of Petersburg’s cultural tradition. He, too, is now published widely in Russia. Photo by Marianna Volkov.

(Above) For the younger generations, Akhmatova’s late work fused past and present threads in the city’s self-image. Solomon Volkov (at left) is seen with his group after playing Shostakovich’s Ninth String Quartet for Akhmatova at her summer dacha. Photo courtesy ofSlava Osipov, 1965.

(Top left) The prose of Andrei Bitov presented an unmistakably Petersburg type—restrained, observant, hiding a profound ambivalence behind a mask of irony. Photo by Marianna Volkov.

(Top right) Conductor Valery Gergiev revitalized the Maryinsky Theater, making it once again a premier Russian opera house. Photo by Marianna Volkov.

(Above left) In his rebellious songs rock star Boris Grebenshikov expressed the yearnings of multitudes of the city’s alienated youth. Photo by Marianna Volkov.

(Above right) Alexander Kushner, describing the city’s twilight beauty in his poems, makes a ritual journey “from Leningrad to Petersburg.” Photo by Marianna Volkov.

This monument to Peter the Great by Mihail Chemiakin was unveiled in 1991, just before the city won the right to return to its historical name, St. Petersburg. Photo courtesy of Mihail Chemiakin.