Alexey Bogolepov

Parnas
Saint Petersburg is growing northward. One can practically see new residential districts and
infrastructure spring up in a matter of months around and beyond the KAD a busy
circumferential highway, defining the citys boundary. Where recently there were only
swampy grasslands, dotted with lonely wooden houses and unsightly garage cooperatives,
there is now, and will be in the foreseeable future a never-ending construction site. For an
observer this is a chance to catch a territory in transition, in a delicate and almost poetic
state of being not quite urban and not quite rural. Parnas is one of these places.
In the XVIIIth century the land here belonged to Count Shuvalov, one of the closest
associates of Elizabeth I. Upon the Empresss order a 200 feet high artificial mound, named
Mt. Parnas, was built in the middle of Shuvalov estate. The nobles from the city frequently
came up to observe the sunset from its top.
The Soviet times saw the territory used for peat mining, and a small set of Stalin-era workers
barracks can still be found nearby. Finally, in the late 1970s and 80s an effort was made to
develop a vast industrial park in the eastern part of Parnas. A grid of streets was laid out and
several production facilities built, but beyond that the Soviet cultural layer is notably absent
from the environment here.
This is an important absence, as Soviet architecture is notorious for giving a certain gloomy
vibe, an uncomfortable and restraining sensation to its inhabitants and spectators. A visitor
in Saint Petersburg can make this observation whenever leaving the ornate pre-revolutionary
downtown and entering a part of the city developed after the 1950s. In Russian cities to
cross the line between eras and moods one often only needs to walk from one side of the
street to another a reflection, perhaps, of the sharp turns the countrys history took.
In the freshly built residential part of Parnas, marketed as the Northern Valley, the feeling
that this is no typical eastern-bloc style sleeping district is especially prominent. Its
strongly felt by anyone whos ever lived it the kommunalka apartments of the historic
Saint Petersburg, or in its expansive and unfriendly modernist housing projects. The
psychological environment of this high-rise complex can be described as simultaneously bare
and liberating.
These photographs attempt to capture the subtle peculiarities of a rather modest and
undistinguished place, the likes of which are probably many. And just like in other Russian
urban peripheries, here you occasionally wander across imposing brutalist factories,
utilitarian structures of unknown purpose, or vast no-mans land areas, which could well be
used as sets for Tarkovskys Stalker.

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