Review by New York Times Review
to walk the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, on a clear evening during the white nights of June is one of the world's more sublime urban experiences. The sun will not set in this former imperial capital until 10:25, and before it drops you can wander a city suffused with radiant light and take in a density of landmarks whose beauty and historical significance rival those of Paris: The czars' Winter Palace, now part of the vast Hermitage Museum. The Summer Garden on the Neva River, where, in 1811, America's first ambassador to Russia, John Quincy Adams, strolled with Czar Alexander I. And across the Neva, the imposing walls and 400-foot, golden cathedral spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the first major structure planned by Peter the Great when he established the city in 1703. A city of this stature deserves a book to match, and so the Paris-based cultural historian Jonathan Miles has set out to write a sweeping account of a metropolis whose tumultuous, bloody past and dazzling cultural heritage mirror that of Russia as a whole. Miles, whose previous books include "The Nine Lives of Otto Katz" and "The Wreck of the Medusa," has conducted extensive research and has gotten some things right, most notably the rich architectural and artistic legacy of a city that was home to such luminaries as Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Shostakovich and Nureyev. Miles dishes up the A-to-Z of St. Petersburg's history: The brutal, westward-looking Peter the Great commanding his subjects to drain and fill the swamp to give Russia a great city on the Baltic. ("Sooner or later," a 19th-century French visitor wrote, "the water here will get the better of human pride.") The succession of rulers - including the empire-building Catherine the Great and the ineffectual last czar, Nicholas II - whose stable of European architects created St. Petersburg's handsome neo-Classical facade. The sorrows of a city that spawned the Russian Revolution and endured the 900-day German siege during World War II. And the trials of Soviet-era Leningrad, which gave us its native son, Vladimir Putin, now dragging St. Petersburg and Russia halfway back to their authoritarian past. The problem with Miles's book is that it so often skims along the surface of St. Petersburg's - and Russia's - history, looking from the outside at a culture and a people the author doesn't seem to genuinely understand. The book lacks the depth, narrative drama and feel for the past that are hallmarks of Robert K. Massie's first-rate imperial biographies, including, to name just two, "Nicholas and Alexandra" and "Catherine the Great"; Harrison Salisbury's magnificent account of the siege, "The 900 Days"; and, more recently, Douglas Smith's "Rasputin." One reason Miles's book falls short is his near-total reliance on English-language sources. His bibliography, which runs to almost 20 pages, doesn't contain a single Russian-language book, and his eyewitness historical accounts tend to rely on the impressions of foreign visitors to the city, not Russians. He makes rudimentary linguistic mistakes, like misspelling the Russian word for Saturday and repeatedly referring to Prince Grigory Potemkin - and the famed battleship named after him - as Potempkin. Imagine a Russian setting out to write a history of New York City using only Russian-language material, and you have the inherent conceit that undermines this ambitious project. ? FEN Montaigne is a former Moscow correspondentfor The Philadelphia Inquirer and the author of "Reeling in Russia."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 20, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
City of Bones. Paris of the North. Window on the West. Seedbed of Revolution. St. Petersburg has borne each of these epithets in its 300 years, all simultaneously valid. Miles' (The Dangerous Otto Katz, 2010) spellbinding account of this magnificent yet tragic city reflects the passions, triumphs, and colossal failures of Russia itself. Miles unsparingly describes the three constants in St. Petersburg history: brutality, art, and flooding. A city created by a drunken man trying to walk a straight line, it was dredged from uncooperative marshlands by the monomaniacal Peter the Great and constructed over the unmarked graves of 30,000 slave laborers, a harbinger of miseries to come. Peter and his descendants cruelly indulged outsize appetites, yet they paved the way for the glories of the Hermitage, the storied Russian ballets of Nijinsky and Diaghilev, and the passionate intellectualism of Dostoevsky and Kandinsky. Czars gave way to commissars, yet St. Petersburg remained the center of Westernization, a place where high winds carried the groans of dying Russian laborers and the lilt of European minuets. Thoroughly documented and illustrated, though it could use more maps and a time line, this is an eloquently written tribute to a legendary city.--Williams, Lesley Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Biographer and historian Miles (Nine Lives of Otto Katz) spans three centuries in this profile of St. Petersburg-a "dysfunctional" European city and "improbable" former capital. It's a cluttered and skewed history; Miles delivers architectural details along with lurid tales of orgies on ice and other debaucheries of court life, while futilely attempting to tally the denizens who succumbed to disease, cold, and political terror. Miles juggles three themes: the "murderous desire" of St. Petersburg's elite; a ruthless succession of secret police organizations; and the city's compromised cadre of musicians, dancers, artists, and writers. Some of the latter, including Andrei Bely, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Nikolay Nekrasov, exposed the deprivation beneath the city's gilded cupolas. But Miles's lens is primarily that of an outsider and his analysis is simplified and colloquial. He describes in depth the opinions of foreign ambassadors, businesspeople, and tourists, yet the native Russians tend to blend into an undifferentiated mass. Miles visited the city in the 1990s and again two decades later, and goes so far as to suggest that the modern city is "in danger of sinking into the mire." Unfortunately this work comes across as more empty hype than history. Illus. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Miles (The Nine Lives of Otto Katz) writes a fascinating and rich history of the founding of St. Petersburg/Leningrad, beginning with 26-year-old Tsar Peter (Peter the Great) visiting the great cities of Europe, disguised as a workman, ready to learn shipbuilding and navigation from the "ground up." What Peter sees and learns in London, Amsterdam, and other places, he brings back to a Russia tied to tradition. It is the boundless drive and energy that Miles describes so well, that allowed Peter to see his vision come to life in St. Petersburg. Along with this vision came much death and destruction in the building of the city. Throughout the book, Miles undertakes to explore the Western art and architecture that influenced future leaders, especially the Romanovs. Some Russians in the mid-19th century were seeking democratic change; not seeing it in their own country. Miles effectively describes the beginnings of revolutionary transformation in St. Petersburg and the county as a whole with the coming of the 1917 Revolution. VERDICT The importance and the epic scale of St. Petersburg comes across vividly in this work. For all readers who enjoy Russian history combined with a rich overview of the arts.- Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Peter's dream capital was majestic but crumbling, even as it was built": an expansive portrait of the calamity-laden urban center of European Russia.St. Petersburgthe city that would be known as Leningrad throughout most of the 20th century and then revert to its old nameis a city built on swampy ground. As Dostoevsky noted, it is "damp, foggy, rainy, snowy, fraught with agues, catarrhs, colds, quinsies [and] fevers of every possible species and variety." It has been the site of devastation and suffering and has spawned monstrous ideas and monstrous people, but it has endured, if improbably, and has even attained a certain majesty. Paris-based biographer Miles (The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy, 2010, etc.) likens the city to New York in being a gathering place of strangers, foreigners, and people who wouldn't easily fit anywhere else. The author also uncovers a few ironies, such as the fact that some of the city's most impressive monuments were built by a French veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who "submitted twenty-four different proposals in every known style, so it is hardly surprising that he won the commission." Chronicling shifting cultural styles, including Czar Alexander III's interest in making a more Russian city of his Russian capital, closing the popular Italian opera in the bargain, Miles turns in some familiar tales as well, populated by stock characters like Rasputin and Lenin. But perhaps not so familiar after all, since, as the author writes, the modern St. Petersburg is the city of the young, people for whom "the gulag is a distant epoch" and who are at home in the globalized era even if the Putin regime keeps them from realizing their potential. The author's account is vigorous and readable but a touch long; one wonders at what the economical Jan Morris might have done had she logged a few seasons in Russia.Readers with an interest in Russian cultural history and urban history will find much of value in these pages. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
