Urban writers in prerevolutionary Russia, even those writing in mass-circulation newspapers, sounded a persistent alarm about the moral and spiritual condition of the self in the «conditions of modernity». They described the present as an age of sickness and decline. This decadent history was embodied in quite concrete forms (such as worries about modern sexual life or the «epidemic» of suicides) and in quite abstract feelings and thoughts. In particular, at the heart of talk about the fate of the person in the modern life of the city, notably in St. Petersburg, was a pessimistic view of time itself: an anxiety that the modern myth of time as «progress», the promise of continual change for the better, was falling into ruin. At issue was not simply Russian «backwardness» but also the intensifying experience of urban modernity. Given the harshness of the Russian experience, Russian urban observers were especially aware of the dark and destructive sides of modernity.