PUBLIC LECTURE: St. Petersburg, Fin de Si�cle

Notice of Repeat Lecture

Due to overwhelming demand, we have scheduled a repeat of Mark Edele’s lecture to be held on 10 August. The repeat lecture will take place

Wednesday, 14 September at 6.30pm

Social Sciences Lecture Theatre, UWA

No registration is required. All welcome.

St. Petersburg at around 1900 was a city in upheaval. Gogol's rather sleepy city of civil servants had become a bustling industrial metropolis. Former peasants and new proletarians crowded the working-class districts at the city's outskirts and the slums around ‘Haymarket’ in the very centre, just off Nevskii prospect. Like the emerging middle class and the increasing number of professionals, their experience no longer conformed to the old ways of describing social identity and social experience in Tsarist Russia. As old identities became fluid and new identities were not yet fixed, the search for meaning and self-definition became paramount.

Both old and new inhabitants of ‘Piter’ (as the inhabitants of the city tenderly called it) had to find their place in an urban world which was as confusing and threatening as it was exciting and inspiring. This search for belonging fuelled the production of great literature and art, the expansion of popular entertainment and mass culture, the emergence of urban styles among the working classes, the growth of voluntary and professional organisations, and the emergence of the revolutionary movement.

Dr Mark Edele teaches in UWA’s History Department, with a specialist interest in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian history. He completed a Master of Arts at The University of Chicago and a Magister Artium at Universität Tübingen, Germany, before completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago.