St. Petersburg : A Cultural History - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Solomon Volkov (ч. notes)

Footnotes

1

A typical ukase intended to protect the wooden streets of Petersburg and signed by Peter read, “from this time on all clamps and nails used on men’s and women’s shoes may no longer be sold and no one may have any; just as no one, no matter his rank, may wear shoes or boots shod this way; and if someone does have shoes or boots shod this way, he will be fined harshly, and the merchants who keep such clamps and nails will be sent to hard labor and their property confiscated.”

2

As Russia’s most popular poet after Pushkin, Alexander Blok wrote in 1910, underlining the nervous instability that transfixes the reader, “The Bronze Horseman—we all exist in the vibrations of its bronze.”

3

At this time the population of St. Petersburg was rapidly approaching a half-million.

4

Dostoyevsky also selected the victim’s profession with great care, paying attention to the circumstances of contemporary Petersburg. Usury became a widespread phenomenon in the capital during the 1860s.

5

Stalin once expressed his concern in a heart-to-heart with a favorite actor: “Peter didn’t kill enough of them.”

6

Almost eighty years later, Shostakovich would pick up this tradition with his anti-Stalinist Rayok, which documented the suppressed anger of the Soviet intellectual frightened by the “anti-formalist” campaign of 1948.