In St Petersburg: Shadows of the past, Catriona Kelly tells the story of the city’s least glamorous but also least traumatic period. Tracing the life of Soviet Leningrad from the 1950s to the 1980s and the post-Soviet transformation of St Petersburg after 1990, Kelly explores the city dwellers’ persistent inclination 
to view their present through the lens of the past. The main problem, as Kelly shows, is that this past is not entirely user-friendly. “Extreme beauty is unsettling and difficult to 
live with”, she writes in her preface, setting the tone for the volume. Her book is a remarkable attempt to show how this difficulty has been managed, avoided, or repressed.