{"id":692,"date":"2020-02-17T05:01:27","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T05:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/?p=692"},"modified":"2020-02-17T05:15:42","modified_gmt":"2020-02-17T05:15:42","slug":"reading-a-guide-to-a-renamed-city-with-susan-sontags-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/nkhumalo\/reading-a-guide-to-a-renamed-city-with-susan-sontags-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading A Guide to a Renamed City With Susan Sontag&#8217;s Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">At first, Joseph Brodsky\u2019s choice to begin <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Guide to a Renamed City<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> with an excerpt by Susan Sontag confused me. What could a quote about photography have anything to do with St. Petersburg? As I continued to read, I began to realize that the line actually illustrates the relationship between \u2018Peter\u2019(St. Petersburg) and his people, specifically their excessive pride in themselves and their city and St. Petersburg\u2019s ability to give Russians a space to subjectively analyze their country. In his description of the Neva River, Brodsky writes, \u201cThe \u2026 Neva\u2026 provides this city with such a quantity of mirrors that narcissism becomes inevitable\u201d. (77) Though \u2018quantity of mirrors\u2019 does not directly reference a camera, I interpreted \u2018mirror\u2019 to be synonymous to lens in this instance. This line shows that if St. Petersburg\u2019s inhabitants are constantly viewing snapshots of themselves, they are \u201c<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">re-experience[ing] the unreality and remoteness of the real\u201d <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">as Susan Sontag writes. Sontag&#8217;s line demonstrates that St. Petersburg&#8217;s citizens view themselves only in a flash of time instead of as an integral part of Russia\u2019s vast history and as separate from the \u2018real\u2019, or Moscow\/the rest of Russia. Even though Brodsky effectively conveys this quality in his reading, the Susan Sontag line offers a new and exciting way to read his piece. He continues the photography motif when describing St. Petersburg after the capital moved to Moscow: \u201cPetersburg, having nowhere to withdraw to, came to a standstill-as though photographed in its nine teenth-century posture.\u201d (88) The line \u2018came to a standstill\u2019 shows that once Moscow became the capital, St. Petersburg, a reformative city, did not revert with the rest of the country into Russia\u2019s old conservative ways. St. Petersburg instead stood in contrast to Russia and became a place for Russians to experience a reality that did not exist in the rest of the country, therefore, accentuating the \u2018remoteness of the real\u2019, or offering an opportunity to properly assess the rest of the country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At first, Joseph Brodsky\u2019s choice to begin A Guide to a Renamed City with an excerpt by Susan Sontag confused me. What could a quote about photography have anything to do with St. Petersburg? As I continued to read, I began to realize that the line actually illustrates the relationship between \u2018Peter\u2019(St. Petersburg) and his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1023,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-5-the-founding-of-st-petersburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1023"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2240-spring-2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}