12. Experiencing Information: An Early Nineteenth-Century Stroll Along Nevskii Prospekt

Bowers shifts the perspective from producers onto viewers, and discusses, on the basis of a close reading of visual and verbal responses to a particularly prominent public space (Nevskii Prospekt in St Petersburg in the 1830s and 1840s), aspects of the reception and perception of the urban display of information. Nevskii Prospekt is widely considered Russia’s most well-known boulevard. Bowers utilises eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists’ renderings and writers’ sketches which generate ‘snapshots’—in a sense—of the street’s life, giving insight into its appearance before the development of photography. In particular, she uses Sadovnikov’s Panorama as a case study to enable close observation of the minutiae of shop signs, their placement, arrangement, contents, and aesthetic, harking back to Franklin’s investigation into the Russian graphosphere in chapter 11.