"St. Petersburg has a deficit in reality," writes John Nicolson in his first book, The Other St. Petersburg, which went on sale last week. "St. Petersburg ought not to exist."


Nicolson, 28, an Oxford graduate, has lived in Russia's second city for three years, enchanted by the peculiar mentality of St. Petersburg's dwellers. Many foreigners who have spent time in the city have hoped to capture this quality in print, but Nicolson succeeds in avoiding the dilettantism of most -- he truly gets under the skin of the city.


Nicolson's heroes are modern versions of the inhabitants of Dostoevsky's fiction, people who lack common sense, but who are intelligent and sensitive. People, he says, who cannot be found anywhere else in the world.


"Petersburgers have better things to do with their lives (than work)," he writes. "Like talking. Like drinking. Like bumping into friends and acquaintances; or being bumped into; or dropping to see these same acquaintances and friends in their flats and dachas, also more or less unexpectedly; or being dropped in on. These occupations may not pay as well as a job, but they are more productive. They produce: empty bottles, hangovers, anecdotes, friendship, movements, interesting confusions and problems, even the occasional piece of literature."


Nicolson's book is ripe with quotes from Daniil Kharms, Venedict Yerofeyev and Sergei Dovlatov -- an inclusion that forges a clever link between characters from the past and the author's late 20th-century friends.





"The Other St. Petersburg," is available in that city's art book shops on Nevsky Prospekt and in Intourist hotels for around $6.