Elaine Blair's writing journey is taking her west - to L.A.

Boxes take up plenty of floor space in Elaine Blair's brownstone apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, a neighborhood where every third person seems to be reading a respectable book.

It's half a week from Moving Day, when Blair and husband Aaron Matz, who begins an assistant professorship of English this fall at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., head to a new life in Los Angeles. She's just made it through her last day (with goodbye champagne party) at the New York Review of Books, where she's worked for four years as an assistant to editor Robert Silvers. Soon scores of her books in Russian literature and history will fill some of those boxes.

Horace Greeley, in this case, might want to give more nuanced instructions. Because while heading west to California and a life of fulltime writing "feels exciting" to Blair, her just-published first book, Literary St. Petersburg (The Little Bookroom, $16.95), indicates where a large part of her literary heart lies - to the East, in the Russian city where she was born in 1975.

And then, of course, there's the place where she grew up.

"When I was about 4 1/2, we came to Philadelphia," says Blair, now 32. The year was 1980 and "we" meant little Yelena Verokhovskaya, her 34-year-old mother, and her 64-year-old grandmother. Blair's father had died when she was 2.

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society settled the family first in an apartment on Penrose Avenue in Elkins Park, then in another apartment off Bustleton Avenue in the Northeast. After her mother remarried, Blair, with new surname, moved to Hatboro and then Huntingdon Valley. Blair attended Lower Moreland Middle School before continuing to the George School in Bucks County and Brown University, from which she graduated in 1997 with a degree in semiotics.

For the ambitious Russian emigre, desire for a literary life seemed inseparable from another goal: "I always wanted to live in New York." That was partly because, Blair explains, her suburban upbringing left her with no immediate role models for the future she sought.

"Almost everyone in my family is either a computer programmer or an electrical engineer or some other kind of engineer," she says amiably.

"I always had the sense that I wanted to do writerly things," Blair continues, "but it was pretty abstract. . . . I knew that there were writers, I knew that there were journalists. I didn't know for a long time that there were editors. I didn't really have any sense of how books were published. . . . I certainly wanted to get out of the suburbs and live in a city."

In her early teens, she contemplated living in Philadelphia again, in part because she had "friends who still lived in the Northeast." Over time, however, she felt provincial, especially after she "met people who had grown up in New York," with parents who worked in publishing. Literary life, she says, was "real to them in a way that it was not for me." If her aspiration was to become real, too, Blair concluded, she needed to move to New York.

"I think it would have been very hard for me personally at that time," she recalls, "to go to Philadelphia and pitch pieces to people in New York or send ideas. I just had to see this world for myself."

After Brown, she made her long contemplated move, got an internship at the Village Voice, an editorial assistant job at prestigious book publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and then started editing and writing at the respected Internet magazine Feed until it folded. A period of freelancing followed until 2003 when she took the position at the New York Review of Books, a "total literary experience" that offered her a "breadth of duties" and a chance to witness "purity" in a high-quality editing process. Over the decade after college, her engagement with Russia and her home city's literature also grew steadily as she began to write criticism for places like Slate, the Village Voice, and the New York Review of Books itself.

"In the beginning," Blair admits, thinking back to her childhood, "I didn't even want to be Russian. . . . I found it embarrassing that my mother spoke with an accent, or that she might speak to me in Russian."

Literary St. Petersburg, by contrast, marks a culmination of adult years in which Blair has felt "a sense of responsibility to know these writers and also to know Russian history." In 2005, she sold the idea to Little Bookroom, received a three-month leave of absence, and spent the summer in her aunt and uncle's St. Petersburg apartment, researching the book.

The result, a guide to famous St. Petersburg writers from Alexander Pushkin to Josef Brodsky with the expected information about museums and statues, also displays Blair's refined critical temperament: It's full of nuanced literary insights into the writers that one would never find in a Fodor's or Frommer's.

Blair agrees that Philadelphia and St. Petersburg resemble each other in key ways: Both are former capital cities eclipsed by the current major city of each country, yet cities crucial to their nations' essences, "with a similar sense of pride - defensive pride, perhaps." Blair, noting the frequent attacks on St. Petersburg by Russian intellectuals as too European and un-Russian, feels Philadelphia has "a more gentle reputation."

In fact, after a decade of Manhattan literary life that has made Blair view it as no longer essential to her own, the Philadelphia area, where her mother and stepfather still live in Warrington, has regained its allure. "While it never would have occurred to me as a place to make a literary life when I was graduating from college," Blair says, she and her husband talked about moving here before his California job came through.

"Now that I've seen publishing and the literary world up close and know it very intimately," Blair reflects, "it seems possible, even preferable, to live in a different city away from the hothouse atmosphere."

For the moment, though, she's enthusiastically scrutinizing Los Angeles in the broad context of her whole life, "sort of the next leg of the westward journey."