This article explores a stylized version of “natural” birdsong as an element of the soundscape of a historical city, late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. From 1880 to 1900, canaries were brought to the city in great numbers from hatcheries located in the Russian countryside. Their song was the ovsîanka, a mix of melodies acquired from wild Russian birds. This song reflects “enhanced nature,” linking human intentionality to the agency of a nonhuman animal, the canary, and both to the city. Breeders, merchants, keepers, and birds formed a super-urban assemblage spanning the city and the countryside. Canaries, like human migrants flooding to the city during this time, retained their strong village roots, and their urban role depended on them. In this super-urban assemblage, the canaries’ urban performance was an expression of their modified and contextual agency, though their agency was assembled and authorized by human-nonhuman networks engendered by the city.

This article explores queer sexual policing in late Imperial St. Petersburg (c.1900-1917). The focus is on the street-level constables who bore the principal responsibility for policing male homosexual offenses in the city's public and semi-public spaces. This emphasis on the street-level policing of homosexuality contrasts with other discussions of gay urban history and the oppression of queer men by the authorities. The article draws on new evidence from precinct-level police archives to complement and challenge previous discussions of queer sexual policing in the Imperial capital. By taking the fate of queer men in an autocratic city, this article refines our understanding of the ways in which homosexual practices and identities emerged in modern times. Specifically, it builds on Michel Foucault's descriptions of constables as "arbiters of illegalities," where the term arbiter suggests rule-based and yet discretionary coercion. Here, the influential model of disciplinary policing of sexuality is complemented by an emphasis on the role of discretionary power in the history of homosexuality.

This chapter looks at a dossier preserved in the personal archives of imperial minister Mikhail Ostrovskii to explore the visibility and composition of late imperial St. Petersburg's queer milieu. By the late nineteenth century, St. Petersburg's queer milieu had developed a clear and recognizable footprint. One of its central locations was Anichkov Bridge, part of the city's largest traffic artery, Nevsky Prospect. The chapter addresses the prism of social class, the dossier's emphasis on decadent and exploitative cross-class encounters, and sets out the preliminary position of the dossier vis-à-vis other key historical sources and, most important, the forensic-medical discussion of “homosexuality.” The chapter summarizes certain themes highlighted in the dossier that are repeated in other documents from around this time: the tension on the part of the city's governing authorities between suppression and toleration; the implications of streetlife for the queer milieu; its use of semipublic spaces; and finally, casual queer socialization.

This chapter begins with a brief description of the Tavricheskii Garden as a physical space and a hub of queer sociability and spatial practices. The rambling paths, glades, and embankments of the garden played an important role as regular meeting places for queer men and for some it served as a relatively safe social setting—an emotional refuge among St. Petersburg's public spaces. The chapter then connects this description to an emotional or allegorical map of cruising that celebrated poet Mikhail Kuzmin and painter Konstantin Somov set out to make. It explores Kuzmin's experience of flirtation, friendship, love, and confrontation as he participated in cruising patterns that often started in the garden. Finally, the chapter looks at the interaction between cruising and friendship, tracing modes of queer socialization that suggest a more diffuse and less instrumental sexuality than that often attributed to queer men in the historical city.

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