Solomon Volkov's name sets off alarm bells with anyone who's followed the controversy over his book Testimony. I'm nowhere near qualified to judge its accuracy myself, but Richard Taruskin and Elizabeth Wilson, among others, have cast doubt on Volkov's claim that the book is a more or less verbatim record of the opinions and ideas of its subject, Dimitri Shostakovich. So I'm not surprised to learn his St. Petersburg book is gossipy, but how reliable is it?

Yes, I'm well aware of the controversy over Testimony, which is probably unresolvable and which by now I find fairly tedious. I see no reason to think that it has any bearing on the tremendous amount of (duly footnoted) literary and cultural history presented by a lifelong Petersburger who clearly loves his city and its past and who personally knew people like Akhmatova and Brodsky and all sorts of other cultural figures. Sure, he mentions things that come from his memory; he starts off by recollecting an occasion when he and three other musicians played Shostakovich's then-new Ninth Quartet for an audience of one: Anna Akhmatova. I guess if you're predisposed to disbelieve everything he says that isn't backed up by unimpeachable sources, you can ignore those bits; that leaves a tremendous amount of material quoted from memoirs, letters, histories, and the like. Unless you read Russian and are willing to duplicate his research, there's no way you're going to learn all that stuff otherwise.

I was tremendously unimpressed by Taruskin's book on Musorgsky. He took a debunking approach and clearly disapproved of Musorgsky's life and personality. He came up with some interesting things, but there wasn't much appreciation of Musorgsky there. (I've been told that "appreciation" is a curse word in the academic critical community, which explains but does not excuse Taruskin).

Pochemu tak nazvany? has an ugly internet version. The site itself (БУХАРСКИЙ КВАРТАЛ ПЕТЕРБУРГА) is what I would call a curiosity.

Hey, thanks very much, hilding! The internet comes through again.

I'd also recommend the chapter on St. Petersburg in Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. It draws especially on literary figurings of SPb from Dostoyevsky to Mandelshtam--one of the few accounts that's really sensitive to the culture and history of the city.

Thanks for the recommendation—that's one of those books I've always meant to read, and you've just moved it a lot closer to the top of the list.

Thank you for providing an opportunity to be helpful.