Why am I passionate about this?
I particularly enjoyed writing this book about a city that I love and have visited many times (starting in the late 1970s, when I was a student), and whose history I know well too. Most books, by foreigners anyway, talk about the city from a distance; I wanted to write something visceral, about sounds and smells as well as sights, and above all, how locals themselves think about their city, the way in which its intense and in some respects oppressive past shapes St Petersburg’s life today – yet all the same, never gets taken too seriously. Readers seem to agree: as well as an appreciative letter from Jan Morris, whose travel writing I’ve always admired, I treasure an email message from someone who followed my advice and tramped far and wide – before ending up in the room for prisoners’ relatives to drop off parcels at Kresty (the main city prison) when he wrongly assumed he was using an entrance to the (in fact non-existent) museum.
Catriona's book list on modern St Petersburg
Why did Catriona love this book?
This is a great anthology in the City Picks series, with lots of different literary and essayistic texts about St Petersburg, including recent and offbeat ones as well as the classics. You can get lost in the place even if, for the moment, you can’t travel there!
1 author picked City-pick St Petersburg as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg ... Here's beauty built on bones, classical facades that cradled revolution, summers that lie in the cup of winter' - Helen Dunmore, The Siege Malcolm Bradbury guides us to the Hermitage Anna Pavlova describes her school days Vladimir Nabokov re-lives a Petersburg winter Helen Dunmore plunges us into the worst of times Serge Dovlatov shows some 'different' Petersburg film-making Dmitry Shostakovich reveals a musical secret Truman Capote takes Porgy and Bess to the Soviets Nikolai Gogol walks us down Nevsky Prospekt J.M.Coetzee reimagines Dostoyevsky ... over sixty writers on one of the world's most fascinating and…