The Song of the Slums: Music in Vsevolod Krestovskii’s Peterburgskie trushchoby

• In Event: Music and Liberation I: Music and Narratives

Abstract

From prisoners’ songs to musical accompaniments at flophouses (nochlezhki), brothels, and taverns, diegetic music is at the heart of Vsevolod Krestovskii’s Peterburgskie trushchoby (1864–66). However, like the rest of this largely-forgotten novel, musical performances captured within it have escaped the attention of literary and cultural historians. Treating Krestovskii’s text as a fictional urban ethnography, this paper lends an ear to its sonic materiality to probe its function as a tool for defining the sites of Petersburg’s alternative culture. Comparing the milieus that inspire and host musical performances, I examine music’s narrative function of foreshadowing and decelerating the plot, as well as reveal the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the audiences within (and beyond) the text. Provoking a wide range of reactions—from pleasure, to sympathy, to disgust—music, I argue, provides invaluable social commentary that illuminates the formation of a collective underground identity, as well as the alienation of its involuntary witnesses. "

Author

• Ani Abrahamyan, Hamilton College