Petersburg cont.

[Bekah]

I was also thinking that dropping the Saint from Petersburg was a  
slight bow to Dostoevsky and his way of thinking about Peter, his  
Westernization  and  reforms of the Orthodox Church.  Without the  
"Saint"  Petersburg becomes a secular capital.  Saint Petersburg was  
named for the apostle, not the Tsar (although the Tsar named it after  
his patron saint).  Basically  Peter's later reforms  made the state  
more powerful than the Church.

   Dostevsky was more of a mystic with an Eastern flavor to his  
spirituality and he thought the church had lost its spiritual  
authority with the Peterine changes.  He was searching for a  
community of believers reflecting the Russian people, soul.     
Dostoevsky was apparently sympathetic to the Slavophiles, although he  
denied "membership," and called his own brand the  Pochvennichestvo  
movement (Return to the Soil - Soil Rootedness) with its anti- 
Westernization, anti-socialist, anti-nihilist and somewhat anti- 
Semitic ideas.

a bit more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavophile
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pochvennichestvo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_reform_of_Peter_I

Dostoevsky discusses this on this briefly in The Brothers Karamazov  
where Ivan, the secularist,  explains his paper on Church reforms to  
Zosima, the spiritualist  and Dostoevsky's works have many internal  
voices,  many  his own,  and all sympathetic to some degree.

Bekah


On Sep 17, 2008, at 1:22 AM, Richard Ryan wrote:

> Note that in the novel TMoP the city is almost always referred to  
> as Petersburg. Dropping the "Saint" from the proper name gives the  
> place's title a secular familiarity, a colloquial quality, that's  
> appropriate to TMoP's themes of doubt, psychological intimacy and  
> confrontation.
>
> To my amusement, I found the main Wikipedia article on "Saint  
> Petersburg" is a re-direct from "Leningrad":
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad
>
> "Saint Petersburg (Russian: Санкт-Петербу́рг?·i,  
> tr.: Sankt-Peterburg, Russian pronunciation: [saŋkt pʲɪtʲɪr 
> ˈburk]) is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the  
> Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea.  
> The city's other names were Petrograd (Петрогра́д, 1914– 
> 1924) and Leningrad (Ленингра́д, 1924–1991). It is often  
> called just Peterburg (Петербу́рг) and is informally known  
> as Piter (Пи́тер).
>
> "Founded by Tsar Peter I of Russia on May 27, 1703, it was the  
> capital of the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years  
> (1713–1728, 1732–1918). Saint Petersburg ceased being the  
> capital in 1918 after the Russian Revolution of 1917.[1] It is  
> Russia's second largest and Europe's fourth largest city (by city  
> limit) after Moscow, London and Paris.[citation needed] The city  
> has 4.6 million inhabitants, and over 6 million people live in its  
> vicinity. Saint Petersburg is a major European cultural center, and  
> an important Russian port on the Baltic Sea.
>
> "Saint Petersburg is often described as the most Western European  
> styled city of Russia.[2] Among cities of the world with over one  
> million people, Saint Petersburg is the northernmost. The Historic  
> Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments  
> constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Russia's political and  
> cultural center for 200 years, the city is sometimes referred to in  
> Russia as the northern capital. A large number of foreign  
> consulates, international corporations, banks and other businesses  
> are located in Saint Petersburg. [...]"
>
>
>