Petersburg museology: Visions of modern collectors in 20th century Russian culture

Originating from the acknowledgement of the widely-accepted connection between St. Petersburg and museum, this dissertation explores the museum principles that manifest themselves throughout Petersburg culture and contribute to the major historical and cultural transformations of the city from its foundation, development, and marginalization to its remapping/reformation. In the context of Petersburg Museology, the term museum is used not only to describe tangible architecture, but also to provide a conceptual framework for a more general range of museum-like collections and structures, including innovative forms of literary and cinematic narrative. Hence, the term museum is associated with a wide variety of cognitive activities including the logic of collecting, the process of compiling, the principles of organizing, and the intention and psychology behind all of these endeavors.;The dissertation contains four chapters. The two sections of the first chapter cover the different modes of collecting imposed on Petersburg in different periods. The first section, "Implantation: Museums as the Space for the Future," investigates how museum principles and diverse collections imported from Europe and implanted in Russia contributed to organizing Petersburg as the first modern Russian city. The second section in chapter one, "Archivization: the City as the Archive of the Past," interrogates the dramatic transformation of Petersburg from the space for the future to the archive of the past. Each of the last three chapters (Ch. 2, 3, and 4) focuses on a single important text about St. Petersburg in distinctive historical timeframes in the twentieth century. In these chapters, I endeavor to find visions of modern collectors in the twentieth-century Russian culture through the seminal Petersburg texts of Vaginov's satirical novel Satyr Song (1928), Bitov's novel-museum Pushkin House (1978), and Sokurov's film-elegy Russian Ark (2002).