On 13 September 2018 I spoke at the symposium ‘Narva, an Industrial Border City: Literary Reflections’, held in Narva, Estonia. Unlike most of the speakers I did not speak about Narva, North East Estonia, or even Europe. Here is the abstract for my talk, Mobilizing a Riverine Border City: Plans and Memoirs of St Louis, 1910-60. I introduced the city beside the Mississippi which has a long-standing narrative of itself as the ‘Gateway to the West’. Individuals’ narratives of the city are exemplified by memoirs and autobiographies written by those who spent portions of childhood and youth there, including the poet T.S. Eliot and the boxer Henry Armstrong. Both wrote forms of Protestant spiritual autobiography concerned with this city which has a strong Roman Catholic tradition. Eliot and Armstrong’s views of the city contrast with those taken by city planners, notably Harland Bartholomew, who radically reshaped the city between the 1910s and 1950s as it entered an era of dramatic decline.
I was delighted to partici
pate in such a dynamic event at this border city where several cultures meet. Apart from the formal discussions in the seminar room, a highlight was a guided tour of the now disused Kreenholm works (pictures from inside), a vast cotton mill with many ancillary buildings, on the western side of the Narva river separating the EU and Estonia from Russia to the east. Thanks go to the other organizers of the event, from the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University. The event took place at the splendid new building of the University of Tartu’s Narva College, next to the seventeenth-century old city hall of Narva which survived the Second World War, unlike few other buildings in the town.
