St. Petersburg: Madness, Murder, and Art on the Banks of the Neva

Biographer and historian Miles (Nine Lives of Otto Katz) spans three centuries in this profile of St. Petersburg—a “dysfunctional” European city and “improbable” former capital. It’s a cluttered and skewed history; Miles delivers architectural details along with lurid tales of orgies on ice and other debaucheries of court life, while futilely attempting to tally the denizens who succumbed to disease, cold, and political terror. Miles juggles three themes: the “murderous desire” of St. Petersburg’s elite; a ruthless succession of secret police organizations; and the city’s compromised cadre of musicians, dancers, artists, and writers. Some of the latter, including Andrei Bely, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Nikolay Nekrasov, exposed the deprivation beneath the city’s gilded cupolas. But Miles’s lens is primarily that of an outsider and his analysis is simplified and colloquial. He describes in depth the opinions of foreign ambassadors, businesspeople, and tourists, yet the native Russians tend to blend into an undifferentiated mass. Miles visited the city in the 1990s and again two decades later, and goes so far as to suggest that the modern city is “in danger of sinking into the mire.” Unfortunately this work comes across as more empty hype than history. Illus. (Mar.)