Includes bibliographical references and index.

Moscow Station and Palace Bridge -- Making a home on the Neva -- "The Hermitage and my own front door" : city spaces -- Initiation into the working class -- Eliseev and Aprashka -- Theatre street -- From Nord to Saigon -- The twenty-seventh kilometre -- The last journey -- Afterword.-

In this beautifully illustrated and highly original book, Catriona Kelly shows how a creative engagement with the past has always been fundamental to St Petersburg's residents. Weaving together oral history, personal observation, literary and artistic texts, journalism and archival materials, she traces the at-times paradoxical feelings of anxiety and pride that living in the city has inspired, both when it was socialist Leningrad, and now. ...