"Petersburg Is the Most Intentional Town in the World" in the Context of Contemporary Petersburg Mythology

Abstract

Petersburg mythology reflects the perception of the city by its residents and their experience of it. This article considers Petersburg mythology as a replica of the “Petersburg text of Russian literature”. The author examines the phenomena characteristic of contemporary Petersburg mythology of the postmodern period: indeterminacy, free quotation, fragmentation, hybridization, “little history”, etc. Further, the paper analyses the meanings that Petersburg dwellers attach to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous expression “Petersburg is the most intentional town in the world”. One of the main features of postmodern thinking is manifested in the ideas about St. Petersburg, when various sources – first of all, literary, but also historical and architectural – make up contemporary Petersburg mythology. For this reason, the author chose the structural-typological method: comparing new mythological motifs with archaic and literary ones. Petersburg dwellers assign both positive (something thought out beforehand, an idea, a plan) and negative (something impetuous, a mistake, a crime) to the phrase “intentional Petersburg”. The author analyses the relationship between the concept of intentional town and the main myths of St. Petersburg: the creation myth and the eschatological myth, which are inseparable. Ideas about the intentionality of St. Petersburg are also associated with utopian ideas: creation at the will of an autocrat of an ideal city out of chaos, on swamp, but according to the rules of regular European urban planning. The author concludes that studying the concept of “intentional Petersburg” is relevant at present due to the following: the city’s creation and subsequent existence serve as a potential for an “intentional” impulse for the development of not only St. Petersburg, but of Russia as a whole.