Gogol was the first of the great writers after Pushkin to accord Petersburg a central place in his work, in terms that owe much to his predecessors and profoundly influenced his successors. His earliest recorded impressions of the city date from a letter he wrote his mother in April 1829, in which he describes a cheerless, eerily silent metropolis, where "everything is crushed, everything is mired in idle, trivial pursuits." This is the city which, with further indebtedness to Pushkin, later figures in his short stories. Appearances to the contrary, the eighteenth-century conventions are present, only with a peculiarly Gogolian twist. A colorful, bustling city of the kind beloved by Trediakovskii turns up in "Nevskii Prospect" (1835), but it is the product of a mind unhinged by lust, "all [Piskarev's] feelings were ablaze and everything before him was veiled in a kind of mist. The sidewalk swept off beneath his feet, carriages and their trotting horses seemed to stand still, the bridge stretched and broke in mid-arch, a house stood roof downward, a sentry box hurtled toward him, and the sentry's halberd seemed to flash upon his very eyelash, along with the gilt letters of a signboard and the scissors painted on it." This prepares us for the theme of the unreal city that is introduced at the very end, in one of the most fertile passages in Russian literature: "It tells lies at any hour, this Nevskii Prospect does, but most of all when night falls in a dense mass upon it. . . and when the devil himself lights the street lamps for the sole purpose of showing everything as it really is not." Here "light" serves to parody the eighteenth-century idea of Petersburg as an emblem of the Enlightenment.
"The Overcoat" (1842) is Gogol's most famous work, and its treatment
of St. Petersburg has shaped much of Russian urban literature. The main character, Akakii Akakevich, is a "little man" in the mold of Pushkin's Evgenii, but undergoes considerable development. As a copy-clerk, he at first simply accepts what he has been handed, and performs his mindless routines contentedly. Once he leaves his office, however, he is at the mercy of the city, which is bleak and hostile. Still, there are hints that he is capable of a kind of creativity that makes the city unchallenging, even congenial. "But if Akakii Akakevich did look at anything [outside his office], on it he saw his neat, evenly copied lines." The comment has greater point when we remember that much of Petersburg is laid out rectilinearly, and that across the river, on Vasilevskii Island, the streets are called "lines." Akakii's gift, if not necessarily a parody of the "great thoughts" that enabled Peter to make of the real world anything he wanted, establishes him as a character who presumes that he can deal with his surroundings, even change them for the better. But this apparently harmless fantasy proves to be the kernel of larger ambitions, which end by destroying him. Their instrument is the new overcoat, which comes to represent for Akakii something more than a protection against the icy winter wind: full acceptance by his fellow-clerks, perhaps an opportunity for sexual fulfilment, in short, qualities that most human beings take as their due. In Gogol's world, however, aspirations to social and psychological mobility always involve enormous risks; hubris, or overstepping, is as unwise there as in ancient Greece. Punishment soon follows. The coat is stolen off Akakii's back as he walks through late-night streets and enters "an endless square, its houses barely visible on the far side, looking like a fearful desert." In spiritual literature, the desert is often a place of illumination and self-discovery. In Gogol's story, Akakii discovers a self that is stripped of illusion; but the sudden illumination (ironically, nocturnal, as in "Nevskii Prospect") of his true state is too overwhelming for him to survive. Just as Petersburg itself (following Pushkin) no longer functions as an enclosure against hostile nature, so the overcoat can no longer conceal Akakii's ordained position in life, which, Gogol seems to say, is that of mere copy-clerk.5
Gogol's Petersburg is phenomenologically unreal. Perhaps that is why there are so few topographical markers in his urban landscapes, and few references to such traditional motifs as enclosure. Ultimately, he regards this city as deeply un-Russian, even as non-place. We might expect him to hew to convention and advance Moscow as a vital native alternative. He does so only once, in an article of 1837, where, in a detailed comparison of the two cities, Moscow comes off as unmistakably Russian in its open-hearted, slovenly, "feminine" ways. But even here, Gogol has reservations. Perhaps borrowing from Evgenii Onegin, he philistinizes "femininity" to
mean a profusion of marriageable girls and a craze for fashions. And even while deeming Moscow's intellectual life more vigorous than Petersburg's, he reminds us that it too is largely imported from abroad.6 For truly Russian settings, Gogol turns to small provincial towns, but he finds them even less vital. When he did eventually focus, in Dead Souls, on the question of the national identity, his reference point was not Petersburg or Moscow, but all of Russia - and a phantasmal Russia of the future at that.
By this time, it was clear that many different kinds of verbal discourse -histories, guidebooks, newspapers, even popular anecdotes - had begun to contribute to the developing myth of St. Petersburg. But belles-lettres were by far the most important, not only because they now occupied a central position in the national culture, but because they tended, especially in the form of the novel, to exploit and absorb other genres. The work of Fedor Dostoevskii is crucial in these respects. He was born in Moscow, but received his higher education in St. Petersburg, spent most of his life there, and made it the setting of many of his works. Moscow does not really figure in his fiction; other cities and towns are either provincial or foreign; his urban geography therefore resembles Gogol's. Several Petersburgs are evident in his early writings: fantastic and menacing, as in The Double (1846); enchanting and magical, as in "White Nights" (1848); sordid and harsh, as in The Insulted and Injured (1861). In Notes from Underground (1864), the narrator aphorizes a conventional theme when he calls Petersburg "the most abstract and premeditated city on the surface of the earth. (There are premeditated and unpremeditated cities.)"7 He finds evidence at hand in the form of trendy contemporary issues like socialism, science, and utilitarianism. Against them he deploys caprice, anger, and even compassion, which are Dostoevskii's versions of the "irrational" sides of the city that Pushkin had found in vengeful nature, and Gogol in drives for power, sex, and self-aggrandizement.
Of Dostoevskii's four great novels, it is Crime and Punishment (1866) that most creatively draws on tradition to create a haunting picture of nineteenth-century Petersburg. Among the major ingredients are Western influences, the impoverished orders of society, and enclosure. But in every case, Dostoevskii takes these elements to an extreme, and gives them a new slant. For example, Raskolnikov is chock-full of the social, political and anthropological ideas of the day, despises them as the products of "other people's intelligence" - thereby raising the borrowing motif long associated with Petersburg - yet uses them to justify his murder of the old pawnbroker, only to discover that his motives for the crime involve far more than ideas, whatever their source. Urban poverty had been registered by Pushkin and Gogol, but in Dostoevskii's novel, it establishes an overwhelming presence,