I would like to thank Andreas Schönle, Diane Koenker, Mark Steinberg, John Randolph, Tamara Matheson, Christine Varga-Harris, Matti Bunzl, Jonathan Bolton, and Peter Fritzsche, as well numerous other members of the University of Illinois kruzhok and my anonymous reviewers for their generous and helpful comments on this and previous versions of this article. My research was supported in part by grants from the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an American Councils Research Scholar Fellowship from die United States Department of State.

1. Benjamin, Walter, “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (New York, 1978), 26.Google Scholar

2. Recent discussions of urban daily life, and of urban spectacle in particular, have emphasized the essential novelty of such experience, “the relentless iteration of the new,” as Peter Fritzsche puts it. See Fritzsche, Peter, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 8.Google Scholar See also Schwartz, Vanessa R., Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), esp. 3-18.Google Scholar

3. Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” 28.

4. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 38.Google Scholar

5. Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” 28. A similar motif appears in N. P. Antsiferov, Byl’ i mif Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1924).

6. Gilloch, Graeme, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 49.Google Scholar Gilloch offers an overview of beggars in Benjamin's writing. The connection between beggars and ghosts is my own.

7. Walter Benjamin, “Moscow,” Reflections, 107. For Benjamin, the rearrangement of furniture marks the passage of modern time. The mention here is an oblique reference to Marcel Proust's description of waking up in a dark room and reconciling current with remembered surroundings. See Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), [k8a, 2], 403.Google Scholar

8. A thorough discussion of such accounts can be found in my dissertation, see Gregory N. Stroud, “Retrospective Revolution: A History of Time and Memory in Urban Russia” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2006).

9. Among these enthusiasts, starina, roughly translated here as “antiquity,” is very close to what Benjamin meant by modern ruins. For these enthusiasts starina usually referred to the resonant remnants of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the boulevard press, it was also used to describe the remnants of the wartime Christmas holiday.

10. Starye gody had a circulation of 1,000 in 1907, its first year of publication. The circulation increased fairly steadily until just before the war: 1,200 in 1908, 1,500 in 1909, 2,000 in 1910, 3,200 in 1911, 5,000 in 1912, 4,500 in 1913, 5,000 in 1914, 4,000 in 1915. (Compiled by F. M. Lu're from Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), f. 788.) Katerina Clark calls the journal “the most popular magazine of the time“; see Clark, Katerina, Petersburg: Crucible of the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 54–73.Google Scholar Kornei Chukovskii agrees; see Chukovskii, Kornei, Sobranie sochinenii v shesti tomakh (Leningrad, 1969), 6:375-87.Google Scholar

11. For Makovskii's discussion of Retrospective dreamers, see Makovskii, Sergei, Stranitsy khudozhestvennoi kritik—Kniga vtoraia: Sovremennye russkie khudozhniki (St. Petersburg, 1909), 115-17.Google Scholar For detailed discussions of these and other figures of intellectual Retrospectivism, see Bowlt, John E., The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the “World of Art” Group (Newtonville, Mass., 1982)Google Scholar; Kennedy, Janet, The “Mir Iskusstva” Group and Russian Art, 1898-1912 (New York, 1977)Google Scholar; Clark, Petersburg; and Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York, 1995). Considering Dobuzhinskii's popularity in early twentieth-century Soviet and imperial Russia, he remains surprisingly little discussed. For a recent treatment of his Urban Dreams, see Moeller Sally, Betsy F., “No Exit: Piranesi, Doré, and the Transformation of the Petersburg Myth in Mstislav Dobuzhinskii's Urban Dreams ,” Russian Review 57, no. 4 (October 1998): 539-67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Kovarsky, Vera, “M. V. Dobujinsky—Pictorial Poet of St. Petersburg,” Russian Review 19, no. 1 (January 1960): 24–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. For an invaluable survey of the early twentieth-century mass-circulation press, see McReynolds, Louise, The News under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of the Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, 1991).Google Scholar Trudovaia kopeika consistently focused on low-level office workers in its fiction and human interest stories. It was moderately socially conservative for a penny paper. Moskovskii listok was one of the better selling newspapers in early twentieth-century Russia with a circulation of 45,000 in 1910. It was noticeably more formal and better written than the average boulevard paper, with a “bourgeois” sort of interest in society, restaurants, and gatherings. McReynolds has described its political slant as “conservative,” though growing more liberal with a change in publishers in 1911. By and large, it sided with the establishment and the Octobrists, and in 1905 was a strong advocate of social order. Ibid., 249. Malen'kaia gazeta fashioned itself as a populist paper for the “little guy.” Columnists encouraged reader input, offered advice, and regularly recommended the power of the press to help “right the wrongs” of urban daily life. The tone was friendly, colloquial, and somewhat paternalistic. In 1916 it had a circulation of 60,000. Ibid., appendix A, table 6. Petrogradskaia gazeta had a daily circulation of 50,000 in 1914 and enjoyed a significant jump in annual stieet sales during the early part of the war, rising from 7.9 million to 11.8 million copies sold. McReynolds groups it with the “liberal” newspapers, calling it the most “cordial daily” with “more attention to personalities than political issues.” She emphasizes the apolitical nature of its political coverage: for example, its coverage of the Stolypin family's summer vacation. Ibid., 245-47.

13. See, for example, Clowes, Edith W., Kassow, Samuel D., and West, James L., eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991)Google Scholar, and McReynolds, Louise, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the TsaristEra (Ithaca, 2003).Google Scholar

14. See Brower, Daniel, The Russian City behoeen Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 1990), 120 Google Scholar; Bater, James H., “Transience, Residential Persistence, and Mobility in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900-1914,” Slavic Review 39, no. 2 (June 1980): 253 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bradley, Joseph, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985), 347-53.Google Scholar See also Engel, Barbara Alpern, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861-1914 (Cambridge, Eng., 1994)Google Scholar; Geldern, James von, “Life In-Between: Migration and Popular Culture in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 55, no. 3 (July 1996): 365-83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Daniel Orlovsky has argued for the existence of an essential “lower middle strata” akin to (though more limited than) my use of obyvatel'. Laura Engelstein and Louise McReynolds, among others, have also recognized and previously discussed the importance of such commonalities. For an overview of this work, see McReynolds, Nexus under Russia's Old Regime, 251, and Daniel Orlovsky, “The Lower Middle Strata in Revolutionary Russia,” in Clowes, Kassow, and West, eds., Between Tsar and People. Hubertusjahn has suggested an analogous cultural phenomenon, a “dilution of categories” toward the end of the nineteenth century and a “convergence” of mass and elite cultures “particularly evident during World War I.” See Jahn, Hubertus F., “For Tsar and Fatherland? Russian Popular Culture and the First World War,” in Frank, Stephen P. and Steinberg, Mark D., eds., Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1994).Google Scholar Jahn suggests that this convergence disappeared along with the patriotic fervor evident during the early wartime consensus. My own research suggests that little such diminution is apparent just eight weeks before the February revolution during the 1916 Christmas holiday.

16. For a more thorough discussion of Christmas consumerism and a common sense of urban residency, see Stroud, “Retrospective Revolution,” 93-103.

17. Chukovskii, Sobranie, sochinenii v shesti tomakh, 6:375-87. See also Korolenko, Vladimir, Otoshedshie: Ob Uspenskom, o Chernyshevskom, o Chekhove (St. Petersburg, 1908).Google Scholar

18. Azizian, I. A., Dialogiskusstv serebrianogo veka (Moscow, 2001), 321.Google Scholar Azizian does not mention modern ruins but offers a typology of monument, pamiatnik, memorial (321-32).

19. A. Rostislavov, “Iskusstvo i voina,” Apollon 6-7 (1916): 83.

20. Ivanova, V., Myl'nikova, V., et al., eds., Velikii kinemo: Katalog sokhranivshikhsia igrovykh fil'mov rossii, 1908-1919 (Moscow, 2002), 400–403.Google Scholar See also the film review in Kino-Gazeta 11 (1917).

21. Ves' Peterburg (1914) and (1917).

22. Iurii Beliaev, “Dusha veshchei,” Stolitsa i usad'ba, 15 November 1914, 7-8.

23. Ivan Lazarevskii, Sredi kollektsionerov (1914; reprint, Moscow, 1999), 50 and 115.

24. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), particularly 267-88Google Scholar; Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 8; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7-24. See also Halbwachs, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans, and ed. Coser, Lewis A. (Chicago, 1992)Google Scholar; Weber, Eugen, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, 1976).Google Scholar

25. To be fair, Halbwachs anticipated exactly this criticism and indeed qualified the application of his work on collective memory: “Clearly, I do not in anyway dispute that our impressions perdure for some time, in some cases for a long time, after they have been produced. But this ‘resonance’ of impressions is not to be confused at all with the preservation of memories. This resonance varies from individual to individual, just as it undoubtedly does from type to type, completely aside from social influence. It relates to psycho-physiology, which has its domain, just as social psychology has its own.” Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 40w3.

26. Beliaev, “Dusha veshchei.“

27. G. T. Polilov-Sivertsev, “Starinnyi khram vesel'ia (Kamennoostrovskii teatr),” Stolitsa i usad'ba, 15 February 1915, 17.

28. Boris Pil'niak, Krasnoe derevo i drugie (Chicago, 1968), 6, 8, 66.

29. Nik. Ser. Eremeev, “Schast'e stoliara Parfenycha,” Malen'kaia gazeta, 25 December 1914.

30. Petr Stolipianskii, “Suveniry (iz proshlago),” Stolitsa i usad'ba, 15 October 1915, 9-10. Prior to the revolution, Stolipanskii had been a member of the Museum of Old Petersburg and a contributor to Starye gody. After the revolution in the late fall of 1921, Stolipianskii served as a founding and leading member of the Society for the Study, Popularization, and Artistic Protection of Old Petersburg and Its Surroundings, an important organization in the post-October estate movement and sponsor of popular excursions to the estates.

31. Makovskii, Stranitsy khudozhestvennoi kritiki, 115-17. The play, L'Oiseau bleu, first performed the previous year at the Moscow Art Theater in a production directed by Konstantin Stanislavskii, was exceptionally popular with Moscow audiences and ran for almost a year. Its animate sugar heads and loaves of bread, its Christmastime beggarly ghosts and its haunted memories closely resembled and anticipated much of the Retrospective language during the first decades of the twentieth century.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid. In 1906 Benua himself wrote of his own such feeling and that of his fellow Retrospectivists: “The past, all of the dead, forever interred, without hope, have risen up as if alive before us.” Benua, Aleksandr, Istoriia russkoi zhivopisi v XIX veke (St. Petersburg, 1906), 272.Google Scholar See also Zhuravleva, E. V., Konstantin Andreevich Somov (Moscow, 1980), 80–82 Google Scholar, for a brief discussion of Somov and Retrospectivism.

34. Makovskii, Stranitsy khudozhestvennoi kritiki, 137.

35. Ibid. Years later, A. S. Shenderov would say much the same. He recounted meeting Dobuzhinskii sometime in the early 1920s: It was in St. Petersburg and Dobuzhinskii had nearly finished a sketch of a house. And what seemed at first a perfect rendering of the house opposite, was actually entirely wrong in the details. Dobuzhinskii captured less the outlines than the seeming interior and essence of the structure. See Chugunov, G. I., Vospominaniia o obuzhinskom (St. Petersburg, 1997), 79–81.Google Scholar

36. N. N. Vrangel', “Pomeshchich'ia Rossiia,” Starye gody, July-September 1910, 6.

37. Pil'niak, Krasnoe derevo i drugie, 7.

38. G. K. Lukomskii, Mebel’ (Berlin, 1923), 99-100,101,109, 110.

39. D. D. Ivanov, Iskusstvo mebeli (Moscow, 1924), 29.

40. Clark, Petersburg, 16-23.

41. Wortman, Richard S., Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, 2000), 481.Google Scholar

42. A. Rostislavov, “Oktiabr'skiia sobytiia,” Apollon 6-7 (1917): 81, 82. Apparently Rostislavov had nearly finished his essay as die October revolution erupted, and he appended these comments.

43. Lukomskii, G. K., Sovremennyi Peterburg (Petrograd, 1917), 20.Google Scholar

44. Lukomskii, G. K., Staryi Peterburg (Petrograd, 1917), 29.Google Scholar

45. Lukomskii, Sovremennyi Peterburg, 12.

46. Ibid., 39-41. Lukomskii's use of pirog, a Russian pastry, suggested the fanciful neo-Russian nostalgia favored at the time in official circles.

47. Vrangel', N. N., Iskusstvo i gosudar’ Nikolai Pavlovich (Petrograd, 1915).Google Scholar Georgii Lukomskii enunciated this critique in the fall of 1914 in Apollon. Compiling a list of the various important artistic and historical monuments city by city in Poland and Lithuania, Lukomskii presented for his readers a virtual guidebook for making sense, not just of the wartime news, but also of a longer-running history of the tsarist artistic-historical devastation of Poland. Slipping between concerns about wartime German and longer-running tsarist ‘Vandalism,” Lukomskii suggested hopefully that the attention generated by the war had changed Russian attitudes “toward the art of Poland and to the substitution of new tasteless quasi-Russian churches for ancient ones.” Lukomskii's wording equated the recent official nostalgia for fanciful medieval style churches with the horrible modernness of German “militarism” and precision shelling. See Lukomskii, G., “Starinnye goroda, zamki i pomest'iia tsarstva Pol'skago,” Apollon 10 (1914): 77.Google Scholar See also Lukomskii, G. K., Galitsiia v eia starine (Petrograd, 1915).Google Scholar

48. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva Sankt-Peterburga (TsGALI SPb), f. 29, op. 1, d. 3 (Otchety o deiatel'nosti Tsarskosel'skoi khudozhestvenno istoricheskoi komissii za vremia Okt. 1917-Okt. 1918). This conversation is spread throughout a large number of documents in f. 29 as well as TsGALI SPb, f. 32 (Obshchestvo zashchity i sokhraneniia v Rossii pamiatnikov iskusstva i stariny).

49. Lukomskii, G. K., Khudozhnik i revoliutsiia, 1917-22 (Berlin, 1923).Google Scholar

50. For discussions of consumer crisis and revolution, see Iurii Kir'ianov, “Massovye vystupleniia na pochve dorogovizny v Rossii (1914-fevral’ 1917g.),” Otchestvennaia istoriia 3 (1993): 3-18; Lih, Lars T., Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar; McAuley, Mary, Bread and Justice: State and Society in Petrograd, 1917-1922 (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koenker, Diane and Rosenberg, William, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton, 1989).Google Scholar

51. Engel, Barbara Alpern, “Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 696–721.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. It would be impossible to provide even a brief overview of this body of work, but for classic treatments, see Bonnell, Victoria, Roots of Rebellion: Workers'Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1983)Google Scholar; Neuberger, Joan, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Powerin St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1993)Google Scholar; Koenker, Diane, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; Smith, S. A., Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-18 (New York, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. In theory at least, consensus was the ideal outcome of the public sphere. See Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).Google Scholar

54. Years before the war, the holidays were already becoming places infused with intellectual Retrospective meaning. Dobuzhinskii and I. V. Evdokimov avidly collected Russian toys, and Benua and other notable Mir iskusstva participants incorporated them in their illustrations. Nostalgic essays on the declining holidays appeared in Stolitsa i usad'ba and Slarye gody. Georgii Lukomskii's much-read appraisal of Slaryi Peterburg included the suggestion of reviving the holiday fairgrounds of his youth on Mars Field. Fairytales, mummery, and carnival—topics inevitably tied to the celebrations of Christmas and Easter— were notable interests of the proto-Retrospectivist Mir iskusstva. In 1917 Dobuzhinskii illustrated the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale Svinopas (The swineherd) for parents and young children, its pages richly decorated with unmistakable and unobtainable Christmas piggies. Even with the enormous and pressing task of preservationism in 1917, Maksim Gor'kii and Benua took the time to illustrate and edit a collection of Christmas fairytales Elka: Knizhka cilia malerikikh detei—a virtual compendium of modern loss from Baba Iaga to Christmas trees.

55. Daniel Brower has also argued for the importance of the obyvatel’ as an essential shared identity of early twentieth-century Russian urban residents. Brower's use of the term, however, differs from my own by rooting it in the shared experience of material scarcity during the civil war. See Koenker, Diane P., “'The City in Danger': The Civil War and the Russian Urban Population,” in Koenker, Diane P., Rosenberg, William G., and Suny, Ronald Grigor, eds., Party, Stale, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History (Bloomington, 1989).Google Scholar Despite the departure of significant numbers of men to the war, and women's obviously important role in the holidays and shopping, the obyvatel’ was almost invariably a male figure. I have found only two depictions of a female obyvatel’ despite the fact that women were frequendy blamed for the problems caused by their supposedly irrational purchasing habits. In holiday fiction concerned with many of these same themes, women were a noticeable (even dominant) presence. A thorough discussion of the relationship between gender and the obyvatel’ remains to be written.

56. A discussion of these vignettes can be found in my dissertation work. See Stroud, “Retrospective Revolution,” 100-103.

57. Engel, “Not by Bread Alone,” 717-18.

58. “Trezvyi Petrograd,” Malen'kaia gazeta, 17 December 1914.

59. Ser Pich-Brendi, “Bol'shaia entsiklopediia,” Petrogradskaia gazeta, 11 December 1916.

60. “U antikvara,” Bich, December 1916.

61. Compare Skorpion, “Boi s bel'em,” Trudovaia kopeika, 3 December 1914, and Vrangel', “Pomeshchich'ia Rossiia.“

62. “Nemtsy fal'sifikatory,” Petrogradskaia gazeta, 10 December 1914.

63. F., “Rozhdestvenskiia elki,” Moskovskii listok, 24 December 1916.

64. Er, “Otgoloski dnia,” Moskovskii listok, 24 December 1914.

65. Kornei Chukovskii, “Deti i voina,” Niva, nos. 51-52 (December 1915).

66. Ibid. In his account of the Moscow toy stores, Vasilii Ledin, an observer for Moskovskii listok, described much the same five days before the 1915 holidays. Ledin pointedly described a whole “squadron of hussars fashioned from common pinecones” competing alongside the usual marbles, wagons, and Christmas dolls in the toy store windows. The Christmas crackers were filled with tiny toy soldiers from the allied nations, the tree ornaments were recast as hot-air balloons and light airplanes, children's games such as Lotto and Travel around the Globe were refashioned into more “modern” guises. And such new-fangled toys and ornaments appeared again and again in newspaper stories and illustrations during the war. A 29 December 1916 illustration in Trudovaia kopeika showed the Kaiser and his allies dangling by their necks like so many ornaments from a Christmas tree bough. See Vs. Ledin, “Elochniia ukrasheniia i igrushki,” Moskovskii listok, 20 December 1915.

67. R. Mech, “Rozhdestvenskaia noch',” Moskovskii listok, 25 December 1916.

68. P. Gnedich, “V novyi god!” Petrogradskaia gazeta, 1 January 1917. This quotation was pointed out in V. P. Lapshin, Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Moskvy i Petrograda v 1917 godu (Moscow, 1983).

69. P. Gnedich, “Sviatochnoe,” Petrogradskaia gazeta, 27 December 1916.

70. “Vmesto sakhara morfii,” Matenkaia gazeta, 1 January 1917.

71. Chukovskii, Kornei, Dnevnik, 1901-1929 (Moscow, 1991), 135.Google Scholar

72. M., “Na letu,” Moskovskii listok, 30 December 1915.

73. A. Savvich, “Gusi,” Malen'kaia gazeta, 27 December 1914.

74. “Auktsion na Moskovskiia gazety,” Malen'kaia gazeta, 5 March 1917.