St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Preface

On May 16, 1965, a string quartet of young musicians with their instruments in cases and their folding music stands boarded a cold and uninviting commuter train on the outskirts of Leningrad en route to the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland. It was a Sunday, and they were off to visit the poet Anna Akhmatova, who every spring spent her time in the dacha settlement of Komarovo, the former Kellomäki, some forty kilometers from Leningrad.

I was twenty-one and first violinist of the ensemble, made up of students from the Leningrad Conservatory. Since my youth, I had known by heart many of Akhmatova’s poems, for I considered her the greatest Russian poet alive, as did a multitude of other literature lovers, and I had long wanted to express my delight and deepest respect to her. Finally, I learned Akhmatova’s telephone number, called her, introduced myself, and offered to play whatever she liked. After some reflection, she named Shostakovich, a very fortunate choice for us, because just recently we had been the first ensemble in Leningrad to have learned his latest quartet, the Ninth, and performed it at the Shostakovich Festival in Leningrad with the composer present.

And this work, a half-hour piece not yet published, we performed for Akhmatova at her green dacha, which she called “a booth.” It was probably the most unusual concert performance of my life—for an audience of one, a seventy-five-year-old grande dame in a black kimono worn over a festive pink dress, who sat majestically in a deep armchair, her eyes half shut. She seemed to be absorbing the bitterness, alienation, and tragic intensity of Shostakovich’s music, so compatible with her own late poetry. The dramatic fates of Akhmatova and Shostakovich, closely tied to Petersburg, had crossed more than once. They had both been criticized by the Soviet authorities; they had addressed each other in their works, and in the book of poetry she gave the composer, Akhmatova had written: “To Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose era I live on earth.”

While we played, the unpredictable Baltic weather, probably in unison with the music, went crazy; a terrible wind was followed by hail and then snow. But when we finished, the sun was shining. Akhmatova sighed, “I was afraid only that the music would come to an end.” Then Akhmatova and I went out on the porch. And nature—perhaps continuing its competition with the music—tried to prove that it always had the last word if it wanted it: above snow-covered Komarovo a brilliant rainbow filled the sky.

Enjoying the rainbow, Akhmatova noted portentously in her throaty, hypnotic voice, “The weather was like this, I recall, in May 1916” and proceeded to recite her poem “May Snow,” written almost half a century earlier.

Was there a lover of Russian poetry who did not know that languorous, magnificently realized poem, which ended with the lines,

I was struck by Akhmatova’s uncanny ability, which I later learned was very characteristic of her, to combine seemingly incompatible historic periods and events and make complex parallels between them, showing, in Akhmatova’s opinion, a predestination and repetition of the apparently most unexpected and unpredictable turns of fate. For this witness to and participant in the cataclysms of the twentieth century, who had survived immeasurable suffering and trials, the times were out of joint, and setting them right was the most natural undertaking, her daily duty. Akhmatova extended with ease an instantaneous but sturdy thread between the snows of 1916 and 1965, at the same time conscious of the significance of such a union, only superficially random, which inevitably took on a profound cultural and philosophical meaning. For me, this calm imperiousness in dealing with time and space was one of the most significant lessons I took away from my encounters with Akhmatova. That is why I trace to that extraordinary May day in Komarovo, filled with transcendent music and illuminated by the marvelous rainbow, the impulse realized almost thirty years later in this book.

Whenever I visited the Russian Museum in Leningrad—to my mind the best collection of Russian art in the country—I often stopped in the section devoted to early-twentieth-century painting by the enormous decorative panel created in 1908 by Leon Bakst, a leading figure in the artistic association Mir iskusstva (World of Art) and famous in the West as the art director of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Entitled Terror Antiquus (Ancient Terror), that imposing painting depicted the destruction of ancient Atlantis, the mythical civilization that flourished, according to Plato, on an enormous island in the Atlantic Ocean. The island’s inhabitants had achieved incredible cultural and spiritual heights but the gods punished them for their excessive pride. Atlantis was swallowed up forever by the churning ocean.

Bakst’s painting, with its bird’s-eye view of the violent storm, the ancient temples slipping into the ocean, and the theatrical flash of lightning crossing the canvas, made a striking impression on me. I was particularly struck by the statue in the center of the composition, a goddess who accepted with a calm smile the destruction of the civilization that had given birth to her. The goddess was isolated from the chaos around her by a higher wisdom, a higher knowledge that protected her.

I was a teenager then and found out only later that Bakst, a passionate devotee of the ancients, had depicted in Terror Antiquus the goddess Aphrodite, who symbolized for him the victory of love and art over blind destruction. And still later that painting seemed to me the almost perfect visual metaphor for the Atlantis of the twentieth century—the glorious culture of the city in which I lived.

Founded in 1703 as Sankt-Peterburg by Peter the Great on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland, the capital of the Russian Empire, this city, twice willfully and unwisely renamed (it became Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924), was world famous as an architectural gem, with resplendent palaces proudly lining the banks of the spectral Neva.

The beauty of Petersburg’s historic buildings is obvious. Erected with unparalleled sweep, luxury, artistry, and refinement, they exude an almost mystical enchantment, particularly during the white nights of early summer, which plunge the classical architecture into an atmosphere of fantasy.

But I was always more attracted and mystified by the great works of literature and music created in that magical city or inspired by it: the works of Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky—speaking of the nineteenth century alone. In Petersburg, the inanimate excitingly came to life, palaces and monuments moved onto the pages of prose and poetry or were reflected in the spellbinding music, only to freeze once again on the granite banks of the river and along the open squares but now enriched and elevated, like magically enticing symbols.

The classic, and perhaps greatest, example of this symbiosis is the legendary fate of the equestrian statue of Emperor Peter by Etienne Maurice Falconet, unveiled in 1782 in the center of the Russian capital on the orders of Catherine the Great. Onlookers were struck by its power and by the strength with which the sculptor had realized his idea—the emperor, dressed in a Roman toga and crowned with a laurel wreath, imperiously extending his hand while proudly looking down from his rearing steed on the city that he created and that personifies Russia. But this bronze monument did not acquire its true symbolic significance for Petersburg’s fate and its status as the capital’s most famous silhouette until the publication in 1837 of The Bronze Horseman, the narrative poem written four years earlier by Alexander Pushkin.

The poet Prince Peter Vyazemsky maintained that he was the first to point out to Pushkin the visual ambiguity of the statue. “Peter seems to have made Russia rear back rather than urge it forward.”^{2} Pushkin placed Falconet’s sculpture at the center of his poem and “revived” it, creating a masterpiece in which that ambiguity was transformed into a philosophical puzzle about the country’s destiny and the fate of its capital—both of which were irrevocably tied in Pushkin’s mind. And for over a century and a half Russia’s best minds have been trying to solve that puzzle, offering ever more convoluted solutions, examining from different angles the poem and the statue, which would be known forever after as the Bronze Horseman.

Poets, writers, philosophers, and historians were constantly interpreting the general idea, the imagery, and even the details of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman and Falconet’s statue. Here are two samples. For our contemporary Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), the steed beneath the imperious rider is “Poetry itself, rushing in a frenzy toward the heavens, and frozen in a storm of water, fire, and metal.” And in the early twentieth century the sharp eye of the subtle and gloomy Innokentii Annensky, Akhmatova’s poetry teacher, fastened on the symbolic serpent, which is hard to notice in the general composition—the impatient horseman tramples it and leaves it behind:

With his poetic genius, Pushkin transformed a “merely” brilliant monument to the awesome emperor into the emblem of Petersburg, a sign of its majesty and endurance, and also into the symbol of the awful fate and terrible suffering that was to befall the city. However, the significance of his Bronze Horseman is even greater: in essence, it is the start of the Petersburg mythos.

Earlier one could speak of the existence of the Petersburg legend, which arose and was cultivated almost from the moment of the capital’s establishment. That is astonishing enough, for legends usually form much after the event that gives rise to them. But the miracle of the almost instantaneous appearance of the capital of a huge empire on inhospitable northern soil was so striking, and the cost of that miracle in human lives was so high, and the personality of its creator so extraordinary that Petersburg quickly inspired both praise and condemnation of a mystical character.

Fully formed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Petersburg mythos included the official legends of the miraculous appearance of the lovely city in a marsh and the folklore predictions of its imminent demise. It also had absorbed the so-called Petersburg text, which consisted of the literary works, paintings and drawings, music, and theatrical productions devoted to it, the marvelous buildings but also the complex of philosophical and moral ideas connected with Petersburg’s special place on Russian soil and in Russian history. Another component of the mythos was its creators themselves, both authors of works inspired and dedicated to Petersburg and historical and political figures.

The Petersburg mythos would not have existed without Peter the Great and Pushkin. The emperor forced Petersburg into the vast body of the Russian state, and the granite city acted as an irritant—the grain of sand in the mollusk’s shell that became the nucleus of a pearl. Thanks to Peter, the mysterious manifestation of the new capital incorporated the cosmogonic element into the mythos, and Peter himself appears as the traditional mythological cultural hero. Subsequently, he is joined by the figure of the man-myth Pushkin in the same capacity.

But the legendary image of Petersburg’s founder was always doubled, reminding us of the fairy-tale twins endowed by opposite traits, one who does good and the other evil. This fundamental duality of the Petersburg mythos was first inculcated into the Russian cultural consciousness by Pushkin. After Pushkin, it became ever clearer that, as Vladimir Toporov put it,

The inner meaning of Petersburg is in that antithesis and antimony that cannot be reduced to unity, which death itself makes the basis of new life, and understood as the answer to death and as its expiation, as the achievement of a higher level of spirituality. The inhumanity of Petersburg is organically tied to that type of humanity, esteemed highly in Russia and almost religious, which is the only one that can comprehend inhumanity, always remember it, and with that knowledge and memory build a new spiritual ideal.^{3}

Pushkin gave the subtitle “A Petersburg Tale” to his Bronze Horseman. As we know, one of the meanings of the ancient Greek word mythos is “narrative.” The Petersburg texts picked up the duality of the city and of its founder and began to depict the capital not as the paradise Peter had envisioned but as a hell.

That fateful transformation was inspired by Nikolai Gogol, who saw Petersburg as a virtual kingdom of the dead, “where everything is wet, smooth, even, pale, gray, and foggy.” For Gogol, Petersburg was a bacchanalia of demonic forces hostile to humans, where the soil was always shifting, threatening to suck up the majestic edifices, the soulless government offices, and the multitudes of petty clerks within them.

Soon the theme of the city’s destruction blocks out all others in the Petersburg mythos. Foreboding and prophecies of doom took on unprecedented power in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Pushkin had interpreted the threatening Baltic waters as a terrible force or a cleansing substance akin to the mythological World Ocean. Dostoyevsky doomed Petersburg, “that rotten, slimy city,” to vanishing along with the fog, like smoke.

The Petersburg mythos, according to a modern scholar, “reflects the quintessence of life on the edge, over the abyss, on the brink of death.”^{4} A watershed in its existence arose in late-nineteenth-century music, when Peter Tchaikovsky in his ballets and particularly in his “Petersburg” opera, The Queen of Spades (based on Pushkin), combined that sense of life over the abyss with a premonition of his own tragic end and injected a searing nostalgia into the Petersburg mythos.

Never before had music played such a decisive role in the drastic transformation of a great city’s image. Under the influence of Tchaikovsky’s music, Mir iskusstva, led by Alexander Benois and Sergei Diaghilev, began resurrecting the idea of Petersburg as a providential and vitally necessary cultural and spiritual leader of Russia. They shared Tchaikovsky’s foreboding of cataclysms threatening the city. This was the genesis of Bakst’s Terror Antiquus.

The premonitions of sensitive creative artists proved to be prophetic. From the moment of its establishment, Petersburg was subjected to destructive floods. And in the twentieth century its culture and the city itself were in fact in danger of disappearing. It was ravaged by terror and hunger, underwent three revolutions, and suffered a siege unparalleled in modern history. It ceased to be the capital of the country and lost its best people, its self-respect, its money and power, and, finally, its glory.

By the middle of the twentieth century the Petersburg mythos was submerged. One could only surmise its existence, as if the city had become another Atlantis.

Of course, even in Stalinist Russia the works of Pushkin and Gogol were studied, but Dostoyevsky was under deep suspicion. Tchaikovsky’s role in the renaissance of the Petersburg mythos was not mentioned, and Boris Asafyev’s early pioneering works on the subject were banned. There was no possibility of openly discussing the Petersburg texts of the twentieth century—they had vanished into a historical black hole.

Russian modernist movements were branded “decadent” in the Soviet Union. The Silver Age—the brilliant flowering of Russian culture after 1910, or as Akhmatova put it, “The time of Stravinsky and Blok, Anna Pavlova and Scriabin, Rostovtsev and Chaliapin, Meyerhold and Diaghilev,” was officially termed “the most shameful and most mediocre” period in the history of the Russian intelligentsia. The Party verdict on Akhmatova declared, “Akhmatova’s work belongs to the distant past; it is alien to contemporary Soviet reality and cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines.”^{5} This was the attitude toward almost all Petersburg culture of the early twentieth century, with the exception of two or three figures retouched beyond recognition.

It was not simply a question of aesthetics but of politics as well. Both Lenin, who moved the capital back to Moscow from Petrograd in 1918, and Stalin, who subjected Leningrad to terrible suffering, felt nothing but suspicion and hostility for the city, fearing the development there of a hotbed of political and cultural opposition. This unwillingness to tolerate the city in his empire was shared by another notorious dictator of the century, Adolf Hitler.

The assassination in 1934 of Party boss Sergei Kirov in Leningrad, sometimes called in Russia “the murder of the century,” gave Stalin (now believed to be its real perpetrator) the excuse to unleash a squall of terror on the city. After the war Stalin fabricated the “Leningrad Affair,” which put the city back on the political blacklist. As a result, according to the writer Daniil Granin, “the name ‘Leningrader’ was used more and more infrequently. After the Leningrad Affair it sounded suspicious.”^{6}

During my youth, it was impossible to talk about any of this in public. Even the complete truth about the city’s incredible suffering during the 900-day German siege was suppressed by the Soviet authorities. We all lived with the impression that the city had a gigantic gag down its throat. Its past was being destroyed, its present humiliated, and its hopes for the future torn out by the roots.

The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot had this to say about the move of the Russian capital from Moscow to Petersburg: “It is extremely unwise to place the heart on the fingertip.” In the Soviet era, authorities kept cutting off the oxygen to Russia’s former “heart”; it shriveled and almost stopped beating, for it was dying, but no one was allowed to sound the alarm. When I started writing in Russia about art, and particularly when I was preparing my book Young Composers of Leningrad (1971) for publication, I had to deal with this over and over. The very concept of Petersburg or Leningrad culture was being quashed. “What’s so special about this culture? We have only one culture—the Soviet one!”

The Petersburg Atlantis sank to the bottom of the Soviet political ocean. But it stubbornly continued its submerged existence there—in the form of bizarre but beautiful ruins, under terrible atmospheric pressure, in darkness and muteness. To behold these marvelous ruins, one had to dive deep and stay underwater for a long time. Nevertheless, many people in Leningrad did just that, despite the danger. A new Petersburg mythos was ripening in the underground.

Its central figure, and to a great degree its creator, was Anna Akhmatova, the courageous voice of the city on the Neva. In her youth, Akhmatova had a reputation as a Cassandra, prophesying and mourning the destruction of Troy. As early as 1915 she saw Petrograd as a “granite city of glory and misfortune.” Later she wrote,

In the popular imagination Akhmatova turned into a symbolic “poetic widow,” the keeper of the sacred flame, the mourner for the victims of the revolution, for Petersburg’s lost grandeur. She molded the new Petersburg mythos from one poem to another, and her stiff mixture was bound by blood—living, steaming moisture, without which no sacrifice or prophesy can endure.

Petersburg as a city rose on the bones of its nameless builders. Those victims were part of the legend of the monster capital that stifled the little man. The blood of the new innocent victims, poured out under Stalin’s ruthless terror, gave birth to a new mythos that it also confirmed and strengthened, the Petersburg as martyr, the symbol of Russia’s tragic fate and of its hopes for a phoenixlike rebirth. This metamorphosis had never occurred in history—a radical change in the mythos of a city.

Every mythos has “exoteric” elements, which are comprehensible to many, and “esoteric” elements, which are known only to the initiated. In the Stalin years, Akhmatova created the esoteric mythos of Petersburg the martyr in her works, particularly in Requiem, the poetic distillation of the horrible pictures of mass repressions by their witness. Her Requiem, which was too subversive to commit to writing, was known at first only to a few of Akhmatova’s closest friends, who memorized it, thus turning themselves into living depositories of banned truth.

In contrast, Shostakovich’s Fifth and Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphonies, even though they revealed essentially the same banned theme, were allowed to resound openly, and they quickly became widely known not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the world. That was one of the paradoxes of the situation: modern symphonic music, in its language seemingly more elitist than descriptive poetry, turned out to be the bearer of the public message of Leningrad’s tragic fate.

Beleaguered but unbroken, Shostakovich continued this Petersburg line in his picturesque Eleventh Symphony, and also in his late quartets, while Akhmatova moved from prophesying a terrible future to the re-creation of the legendary past (“Just as the future ripens in the past,/So the past smolders in the future”) and crowned her construction of the new Petersburg mythos with the monumental Poem Without a Hero, whose true hero was, of course, her beloved Northern Palmyra.

Akhmatova did not live to see either Requiem or Poem Without a Hero published in full in the Soviet Union. They were clandestinely copied by hand or typed and received with growing enthusiasm, even as the Soviet cultural apparatus not only ignored but tried to stamp out and destroy the unofficial Petersburg mythos that stubbornly grew stronger. One of the most notorious post-Stalinist acts of government repression was the show trial in 1964 of the young Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky, a protégé of Akhmatova’s, charged with “parasitism.”

Exiled to the north and later expelled to the West in 1972, Brodsky settled in the United States, where with his talent and powerful intellect he became an heir to the “American branch” of Petersburg modernism. I use this term to unite a group of creative giants who had never declared their membership in any artistic school. Nevertheless, there was much to link Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Balanchine. All three came from Petersburg, and after years in Europe they settled in the United States, where they had an enormous influence on American culture and created their “nostalgic” version of the Petersburg mythos, which attracted the attention of the Western intellectual elite when that mythos was being persecuted ruthlessly in the Soviet Union.

Brodsky picked up that tradition, thereby creating a link between the two great strata of Petersburg culture, sundered by the inexorable historical forces of the turbulent twentieth century.

I first met Brodsky in Leningrad in the early 1970s, but paradoxically I became truly acquainted with him only in New York, where I moved in 1976, having emigrated from the Soviet Union. In 1979 I published Testimony, the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, written in collaboration with the composer while we were both in the USSR. Several other collaborative projects followed: Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky (with George Balanchine, 1985), From Russia to the West (with violinist Nathan Milstein, 1990), Joseph Brodsky in New York (conversations with the poet, 1990), and also with him a book of dialogues about Akhmatova, published in 1992 in Moscow. But for all those years I was working on a book devoted to Petersburg culture and the Petersburg mythos—an idea that had flashed through my mind on the unforgettable day in May 1965 with its snow and its rainbow, when my friends and I played the Shostakovich Ninth Quartet for Akhmatova in her dacha near Leningrad.

The need for such a book seemed even greater since neither in the Soviet Union nor anywhere else was there a comprehensive cultural history of the city that included literature, music, theater, ballet, and the arts. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and New York were firmly established in the world’s consciousness as important cultural centers, where revolutionary aesthetic concepts were born and the clash of brilliant personalities created the greatness of modern art. People were fascinated by the “nervous splendor,” energy, and vitality of those grand cities.

But Petersburg did not join this distinguished group, which seemed grossly unfair to me. This was the city where Diaghilev’s artistic ideas were formed, where Meyerhold realized many of his most daring theatrical experiments, where the young Stravinsky composed his amazing music, where Matiushin and Malevich held the premiere of their epochal futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun; this was the city where one could find the roots of the literature and the theater of the absurd, of the New Criticism and of contemporary structuralism, of plotless ballet and the modern symphony. But through a fateful combination of cultural and political reasons, all these splendid accomplishments and famous names floated in some kind of space and time vacuum and remained strangely unconnected.

I began collecting the material for documenting this era in the early 1960s, meeting in Leningrad (and later in Moscow) with remarkable people, survivors of the Silver Age, the creators, participants, and observers of the flowering of Petersburg culture in the early twentieth century. Some of them held prominent social positions; others, often beset by terrible hardships and chastened by bitter experience, tried to live out quiet lives.

But they all wanted to recall those glorious years that were buried under a historical avalanche and about which they felt the new, indoctrinated generation knew nothing nor cared to know. That is why these people responded gratefully to any well-meaning interest in their past.

Another unique cross section of Petersburg culture and an invaluable source of information about the era was revealed to me when I moved to the West. Here I had the good fortune to meet with some quintessential Petersburgers, who managed to preserve despite the tribulations of exile and their advanced years a clear memory of the events of their youth. These gentle souls met me sympathetically, in large part because they were pleased by my enthusiasm for the city that they themselves continued to consider the greatest and most beautiful in the world. A part was also played by the fact that they at last had an opportunity to discuss and savor with a new arrival from Russia the details of their precious impressions of the distant past—in their native tongue! I was very touched by one interlocutor who had described in all particulars a performance he had seen in prerevolutionary Petersburg and suddenly admitted that he had not discussed that topic for about sixty years.

Then, in the late 1970s, the old émigrés and I, a new one, knew that the barbarous, artificial division of Russian culture into “Soviet” or “metropolitan,” on the one hand, and “abroad” or “émigré,” on the other, which began with the Communist regime in Russia and was propagated with great ferocity, would continue if not forever then for an unbearably long time. We feared we would not live to witness the reunification of Petersburg culture or the recognition in Russia of the greatness of the Petersburg mythos.

In predicting the fate of the Soviet empire, we were not the only ones to be mistaken: almost the entire world was wrong. Few had expected the suddenness and speed with which the empire collapsed and the startling changes that would occur in Russia in the late 1980s. Unprecedented political, economic, social, and cultural shifts shook the country and turned it upside down. For the city on the Neva they meant, among other things, an almost inconceivable salvaging of the Petersburg mythos from beneath the sea, as if the legendary Atlantis had reemerged before the very eyes of its descendants. The names of vilified individuals and artistic phenomena returned from oblivion; authors whose works it had been a punishable offense to distribute just a few years earlier were declared overnight to be classics and were printed in great numbers; and the canvases long hidden in dusty warehouses were once again glowing with their vivid colors at festive exhibitions.

The culmination of this dizzying process was the return on September 6, 1991, of the city’s historic name—St. Petersburg. Petersburg culture celebrated its unexpected and thus all the more satisfying triumph.

I thought about this gift from fate as I strolled along the streets of Petersburg in the fall of 1993: how fleeting it had been, like a mirage, and how important it was to preserve it in my heart—for myself and in memory of those old Petersburgers, native and émigré, who had not lived to see the changes for which they had desperately hoped.

Joseph Brodsky liked to say, “You cannot enter the same river twice, even if it is the Neva River.” In vain I whispered to myself a line from Mandelstam’s poem, “I have returned to my city, familiar to the point of tears.” I did not recognize the city; rather, I recognized it with difficulty, gradually—like a slowly developing photograph. Many years ago I had left Leningrad, where I had studied, fallen in love, played the violin, and started writing; now I had returned—albeit very briefly—to Saint Petersburg.

Yes, the changes were striking. There wasn’t a single state-owned store or café on the legendary Nevsky Prospect, and its glorious panorama brought the poems of Nikolai Zabolotsky to mind: “There the Nevsky is in glitter and dreariness, changing its skin in the night.” The street names familiar from my youth were gone—their original names had been reinstated. Now, ironically, the constructions, monuments, and heroes of the Soviet era were swiftly receding into history.

The city clearly wanted to part as quickly as possible from its recent humiliating existence, and a writer, yesterday a Leningrad and today a Petersburg writer, observed, “In moments of acute historical changes we fall under the influence of ideas, brilliant in their simplicity and obviousness—ideas of a symbolic revenge on the past. They brought Lenin into the Mausoleum—we will take him out; they blew up the church—we will build it again; they called the city their way and we will return its former name.”^{7}

Sometimes it seemed to me that the only constant of the city was its visual symbol, the Bronze Horseman, that only at its pedestal could I understand the multitude of doubts, questions, regrets, and recollections that assailed me. The physical and spiritual dynamism that animates this sculpture could lift the spirits of the most hidebound pessimist. The Bronze Horseman is in an eternal leap, connecting Petersburg soil with the Baltic sky above it.

For me the Bronze Horseman personified the vitality of the Petersburg mythos, its eternal ambivalence, its ascent to the heights of the human spirit, but also the constant threat—from without and within—to the equilibrium, to the very existence of that mythos. Before the Bronze Horseman you unwittingly forget about the zigzags of current politics, about economic problems, and are left alone with time, with the mythos that will live and thrive for a long time to come, I hope.

Here, at the foot of the statue, I recalled with gratitude all those—there were several hundred of them—whose testimony, stories, advice, materials, documents, and photographs helped me prepare this book. Particularly inspiring was my personal contact with the book’s four protagonists—Anna Akhmatova, George Balanchine, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Joseph Brodsky—who in the contemporary world stand as paragons of artistic, intellectual, and ethical standards. Meeting those artists shaped my life and was one of its greatest blessings. For each of those four giants, Petersburg always remained the leading creative symbol and impulse, and each has inimitably played a pivotal role in the creation of the new Petersburg mythos.

I want also to name here some of my interlocutors and correspondents over the last three decades, both in Russia and in the West, many of whom are major figures in Petersburg and Russian culture. They are Iogann Admoni, Nikolai Akimov, Grigory Alexandrov, Nathan Altman, Boris Arapov, Leo Arnshtam, Gennady Banshchikov, Alexander Beniaminov, Olga Berggolts, Andrei Bitov, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Isaiah Braudo, Lili Brik, Nina Bruni-Balmont, Semyon Bychkov, Mihail Chemiakin, Alexandra Danilova, Anatoly Dmitriev, Leonid Dolgopolov, Sergei Dovlatov, Sofia Dubnova, Mikhail Dudin, Orest Evlakhov, Kurt Fridrikhson, Valery Gavrilin, Valery Gergiev, Tamara Geva, Evdokia Glebova, Gleb Gorbovsky, Lazar Gozman, Irina Graham, Daniil Granin, Boris Grebenshikov, Yuri Grigorovich, Lev Gumilyov, Pavel Gusev, Vladimir Horowitz, Anatoly Kaplan, Vasily Katanyan, Aram Khachaturyan, Nikolai Khardzhiev, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Alexander Knaifel, Georgy Kocheyitsky, Yuri Kochnev, Leonid Kogan, Kirill Kondrashin, Maria Konisskaya, Zinovy Korogodsky, Gidon Kremer, Alexander Kushner, Konstantin Kuzminsky, Viktor Liberman, Fyodor Lopukhov, Lev Loseff, Berthe Malko, Mikhail Matveyev, Yakov Milkis, Nathan Milstein, Alexander Mintz, Yevgeny Mravinsky, Anatoly Nayman, Ernst Neizvestny, Yevgeny Nesterenko, Rudolf Nureyev, David Oistrakh, Alexandra Orlova, Boris Paramonov, Nadezhda Pavlovich, Maya Plisetskaya, Boris Pokrovsky, David Pritsker, Lina Prokofiev, Lev Raaben, Rita Rait, Yevgeny Rein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Vadim Salmanov, Dmitri Shagin, Marietta Shaginyan, Veniamin Sher, Vladimir Shinkarev, Viktor Shklovsky, Maxim Shostakovich, Iosif Shvarts, Sergei Sigitov, Yuri Simonov, Sergei Slonimsky, Gennady Smakov, Arnold Sokhor, Vladimir Solovyev, Viktor Sosnora, Vladimir Spivakov, Vera Stravinsky, Georgy Sviridov, Alexander Tcherepnine, Yuri Temirkanov, Boris Tishchenko, Alexander Tyshler, Yulian Vainkop, Mikhail Verbov, Pavel Vulfius, Leonid Yakobson, Roman Yakobson, Mariss Yansons, Maria Yudina, Sergei Yursky, Sergei Yutkevich, Vyacheslav Zavalishin, Kurt Zanderling, Irina Zegzhda, Lydia Zhukova, and Yevgeny Zubkov. I am forever grateful to them for their attention, forbearance, responsiveness, and patience.

Some aspects of my work I also discussed with Peter Vail, Alexander Genis, Roman Timenchik, Lazar Fleishman, and Mikhail Yampolsky. These consultations were of great help.

I thank Adam Bellow and Loretta Denner for their wholehearted support of this project, and my wife, Marianna, for her enormous help as a researcher and photographer.

In 1922 a book was published in Petrograd, The Soul of Petersburg, by Nikolai Antsiferov, a pioneering student of local lore. The author, unlike traditional travel guide writers, did not dwell on dates and details but concentrated instead on the genius loci of Petersburg, a city of “tragic imperialism,” as he put it. Antsiferov’s vivid Soul of Petersburg was the work not of an academic observer with pretensions to covering everything and being “objective,” but a passionate testimony of a participant in Petersburg’s tragedy. Antsiferov’s own fate was unhappy (he was arrested and exiled several times), as was that of his book, which was suppressed soon after publication and reprinted only seventy years later. A precious first edition is one of the items dearest to my heart in my private library.

Another important creative stimulus and model for me was the work of several art and music critics, who worked in Petersburg-Petrograd in the first decades of the twentieth century. Alexander Benois, Nikolai Punin, and Igor Glebov (the pseudonym of Boris Asafyev) were very popular in their time; they were published in high-brow journals and mass circulation newspapers, playing a dual and equally outstanding role—as creators of revolutionary concepts of modern culture and as its influential interpreters for the Russian educated classes. Their contribution to the comprehension of the city’s grandeur and mystical significance is invaluable. For many decades their most perceptive works were deemed too controversial for Soviet readers and were not reprinted. Only now are they coming out of the shadows. Their passionate desire to enlighten their audience, to make available the highest achievements of the human spirit, in conjunction with their erudition and cosmopolitanism, makes these authors timely and necessary today in Petersburg.

My book is to a great degree a tribute to these writers. In addition, for the more than seven years needed to complete my work, a constant source of intellectual sustenance was James H. Billington’s interpretative study of the development of Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe. Reading it strengthened me in my resolve to write this book, not as an encyclopedia of Petersburg culture but as an elaborated conceptual history of the development, over several centuries, of the Petersburg legend and the Petersburg mythos.