Passages

Passazh Interior, Petersburg 1902

The “Passazh” – an example of French nomenclature applied to modern urban spaces – contained not only the Café de Paris, but also the Crédit Lyonnais bank office and, after 1912, the cinema Soleil (Солейл).

The arcade represents, as Walter Bejamin would have it, an ambiguous space as well as a modern space par excellence. It fuses the outer and the inner, taming a city-street under glowing glass planks.

Paris knew the passage as early as the late eighteenth century, whereas Petersburg would belatedly build its first in 1841 (Shchukin Dvor). The Passage on Ital’ianskaia ulitsa, Petersburg’s second, was completed in 1848 and opened on May 9th of that year.

Passage des Panoramas, Paris 1910

The Passage, as its name purports, represents a transitional space. Its history, too, bespeaks a cross-cultural fate: originating as a feature of oriental bazaars, the Passage was co-opted by Western Europe. Paris instituted the sunlit gallery as a chic commercial space, capitalizing, no doubt, on its exotic eastern provenance. Placed in the context of Petersburg – Russia’s own passage, as it were, to the West – this emblem of bourgeois modernity serves also as a cypher of the Russian imperial capital’s aspirations to a European identity. What European fashion has subsumed – by way of the Orient – Petersburg integrates as a testimony to its own participation in the establishment of urban modernity and as a gage of its own legitimate participation therein.

Yet, Petersburg inhabits a liminal space. In an attempt to overwrite Russia’s own partially oriental identity, the Russian capital inserts the Parisian Passage by via the West as a trope of the modern European urban experience.

Passage Choiseul, Paris 1829