Literature - St Petersburg - page 453

praise industrialisation and demonise social misfits. While Stalin's propaganda ma-
chine was churning out novels with titles such as How the Steel Was Tempered and
Cement, St Petersburg's literary community was secretly writing about life under
tyranny. The tradition of underground writing, which had been long established under
the Romanovs, once again flourished.
Crime and Punishment may be on everyone's reading list before they
head to the northern capital, but another (far shorter) St Petersburg work
from Dostoevsky is 'White Nights', a wonderful short story that has been
adapted for cinema by no less than nine different directors!
LITERATURE OF DISSENT & EMIGRATION
Throughout the 20th century, many talented writers were faced with silence, exile or
death, as a result of the imposing standards of the Soviet system. Many accounts of
Soviet life were samizdat (literally 'self-publishing') publications, secretly circulated
among the literary community. The Soviet Union's most celebrated writers - the likes
of Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Bitov -
were silenced in their own country, while their works received international acclaim.
Others left Russia in the turmoil of the revolution and its bloody aftermath, including
perhaps St Petersburg's greatest 20th-century writer, Vladimir Nabokov.
Born to a supremely wealthy and well-connected St Petersburg family in 1899, the
18-year-old Nabokov was forced to leave St Petersburg in 1917 due to his father's
previous role in the Provisional Government. Leaving Russia altogether in 1919,
Nabokov was never to return to his homeland and died in Switzerland in 1977. His
fascinating autobiography, Speak, Memory, is a wonderful recollection of his idyllic
Russian childhood amid the gathering clouds of revolution, and the house he grew up
in now houses the small, but very worthwhile, Nabokov Museum ( CLICK HERE ).
No literary figure is as inextricably linked to the fate of St Petersburg-Petrograd-
Leningrad as Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), the long-suffering poet whose work
contains bittersweet depictions of the city she loved. Akhmatova's family was im-
prisoned and killed, her friends were exiled, tortured and arrested, and her colleagues
were constantly hounded - but she refused to leave her beloved city and died there in
1966. Her former residence in the Fountain House now contains the Anna Akhmatova
Museum ( CLICK HERE ), a fascinating and humbling place.