Petersburg cont.

[Bekah]

I really ought to proof read what I write prior to sending.   gads.

Bekah
who will get back to Bandwraith when I get home from work


On Sep 17, 2008, at 6:49 AM, Bekah wrote:

> 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. [...]"
>>
>>
>>
>
>