The Spectacle of the Besieged City: Repurposing Cultural Memory in Leningrad, 1941–1944

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 69, Heft 2, S. 327-355

Abstract

Focusing on less studied areas of the twentieth-century war experience, this article investigates the notions of "urban beauty" and "urban spec-Slavic Review69, no. 2 (Summer 2010) tacle" as experienced by the residents of besieged Leningrad. Polina Barskova suggests that, via an estrangement effect, the siege gaze replaces the unrepresentable traumatic experience of presentnesswith an aestheticized cultural past containing such useable notions of cultural memory asruin, stage set, monument,andframe.This replacement can be described as a siege urbanscape sublime, a sublime lying not in the distinction between the horrific and the beautiful but rather in the observer's tendency to substitute the horrific with the beautiful. This particular species of sublime aims at psychological anesthesia and is thoroughly oxymoronic: the intense clashing of opposites—to the point that oxymoronic sensibility leads to rhetorical confluence—alerts us to the connection between the aesthetic discourse of besieged Leningrad and the perennial Petersburg text, thus opening new opportunities for the study of the functioning of cultural memory in Soviet society.