St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Chapter 5

There are black days in people’s lives. They are like eclipses of the sun.”^{476} This is how Galina Serebryakova, the writer and one-time lover of Dmitri Shostakovich, looked back in the 1960s at January 21, 1924, the day the glorified leader of Soviet and world Communists died, the ruler of Russia for over six fateful years, a clever polemicist, brilliant tactician, and ruthless politician, a man who spoke with a thick burr and had a skull shaped like that of Socrates or Verlaine—Vladimir Lenin.

The coffin with Lenin’s body was laid out in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions in Moscow. The poet Vera Inber described the endless line of people come to say their farewells to the legendary Bolshevik. “A cloud composed of the breath of hundreds of thousands blanketed those waiting in line. The frigid air was motionless. In the sky, a triple halo that occurs only in extreme frosts veiled the moon.”^{477} Inside the Hall of Columns “the light of the chandeliers, wrapped in crepe, as if through a dark haze of fog, illuminated the coffin, banked with blood-red tulips.”^{478}

It is difficult now to establish the actual emotions of the crowd that passed before Lenin’s bier. One thing is clear: everyone, even the enemies of Lenin and communism, recognized the significance of the moment. The history of an enormous country, which had always depended on the personal characteristics of its ruler, was once again at a crossroads. It was time to exclaim as Pushkin had in The Bronze Horseman, “Where are you galloping, proud steed,/ And where will you plant your hoofs?” It is only by appreciating the apocalyptic mood of the Russian people in the first days after Lenin’s death that we can understand how Mikhail Bulgakov, who had fought in the recent civil war against the Communists and who had no sympathy for the Bolsheviks, could have written in January 1924, “This coffin will be visited for four days through the cold of Moscow and then throughout the centuries across the faraway caravan routes of the yellow deserts of the globe, there where once, at the birth of humanity, an eternal star rose above its cradle.”^{479}

Next to Bulgakov’s passage, the reaction of seventeen-year-old Dmitri (“Mitya”) Shostakovich, a student at the Petrograd Conservatory and a beginning composer (expressed in a letter to Tatyana Glivenko, with whom he was in love), seems almost like an understatement: “I’m sad, Tanechka, very sad. I’m sad that VI. Lenin has died and that I will not be able to say farewell to him because he is being buried in Moscow. The Petrograd Soviet applied to have his body moved to Petrograd, but this application must have been refused.”

On January 26, the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets was convened, and at its first session, dedicated to Lenin, the general secretary of the ruling party spoke. Joseph Stalin was a Georgian of medium height with a neatly trimmed mustache and a pockmarked face. (Today the two most famous Georgians in the West are Stalin and George Balanchine.) In his low, resonant voice heavy with a Georgian accent, Stalin declared “As he left us, Comrade Lenin willed us to preserve and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. We vow to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will not spare any effort to obey honorably this commandment of yours as well!” To immortalize the memory of their leader, the congress decided to establish a special day of mourning, to build a mausoleum for Lenin on Red Square in Moscow, and to publish his complete collected works.

The Congress, “fulfilling the unanimous request of the workers of Petrograd,” also renamed the city Leningrad, explaining in a special resolution, “In Petrograd the great proletarian revolution had its first, decisive victory…. Like an unscalable cliff, Red Petrograd stood high all these years, and remains today the first citadel of Soviet power…. The first workers’ and peasants’ government in the world was created in this city…. Let this major center of the proletarian revolution from this day forward be connected with the name of the greatest leader of the proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin.”^{480}

The city’s renaming, the second in fewer than ten years, was, like the first, hasty, momentous, and ill-fated. When St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in August 1914 by Nicholas II, it was intended to “Slavicize” the capital of the empire at war with Germany. At the time many considered the tsar’s action not so much in bad taste as filled with evil portents. Alexander Benois, who had always maintained that of all the mistakes made by the tsarist regime the most unforgivable was this “betrayal of Petersburg,” insisted, “I am even disposed to believe that all our misfortunes were a punishment for that betrayal, for the fact that puny ancestors dared to denigrate Peter’s ‘testament,’ and that with no comprehension they decided that there was something humiliating and unworthy for the Russian capital in the name that Peter had given it.”^{481}

Benois, the leader of a movement for the restoration of old Petersburg’s glory and grandeur, pointed to several reasons why the city’s renaming seemed a tragic mistake. In naming the city Sankt-Peterburg, Peter the Great placed it “under the special protection of the saint who had already once blessed the idea of spiritual dominion of the world.”^{482} By making St. Peter the patron of the city, the tsar was announcing his own cosmopolitan ambitions. “Slavicism” was alien to the first Russian emperor. Changing the capital’s name to a more Slavic-sounding version, his descendants conspicuously rejected universal, cosmopolitan aspirations. This renaming inadvertently narrowed the city’s spiritual sphere of influence.

In addition, Nicholas II had made yet another mistake. He thought that by publicly venting his hostility to Petersburg, he was expressing the feelings of “simple” Russian people. Benois felt that this was a fatal error. In violating the will of Peter the Great, the last Russian emperor undermined the idea of sovereignty so important to the first. Nor did he garner the people’s support. Though Nicholas was the first, he was hot the only ruler to tinker with the Petrograd mystique. The Bolsheviks followed him, at least in this, but in a much more decisive if even less rational manner.

The initiative to rename Petrograd Leningrad formally belonged to the Petrograd Soviet of Worker, Peasant, and Red Army Deputies. Actually it was the idea of the Soviet’s chairman, the ambitious Grigory Zinoviev, who as one of the rulers of the Communist Party had obvious reasons for this. When Lenin moved the capital to Moscow in 1918, it radically diminished the importance of Petrograd. In the new situation, when Lenin was rapidly being transformed into a Communist saint, endowing the city with his name would give Zinoviev, the city boss, a political advantage. In 1919, Zinoviev was also the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (Communist International), which made Petrograd the natural center of the world Communist movement. With all its “regalia,” especially the name Leningrad, the city could aspire to become the official “Party” capital of the country and of the entire “proletarian” world. The Communists hoped to perform a radical re-creation of the city’s mythos in the service of Communist ideology. Petersburg, the lighthouse of Russian artistry, would become Leningrad, the torch of the Communist movement.

Zinoviev had grounds for imagining himself leader of the Party. He had always been one of Lenin’s closest friends. The reputation of another major Party leader, Leon Trotsky, was waning. Stalin was still considered little more than an effective but unimaginative Party bureaucrat. In the coming intraparty power struggle, Zinoviev’s move to rename the city was clever.

This move was also, paradoxically, an application for reviving the city’s international status, but with a Communist aura. After all, Lenin and his comrades had always assumed that after the revolution in Russia, the Communists would seize power throughout Europe. Thus, Leningrad would be the natural capital of the future commonwealth of European Communist states. In his imagination Zinoviev could already see himself mounted on a bronze horse (or at least in a bronze car).

Zinoviev’s dreams did not come to pass. But in 1924, the rest of the party leaders supported Zinoviev, each for his own reasons. Renaming cities after revolutionary leaders had become a kind of reward. A Petrograd suburb had been renamed Trotsk even earlier, and also in 1924 the cities of Elizavetgrad and Yuzovka were renamed Zinovievsk and Stalino, respectively.

Decisions made by the Party elite were not subject to wide discussion, debate, or appeal. It was only abroad, in Russian émigré circles, that the renaming of the former imperial capital was met with a squall of protests and mockery. In particular, it was pointed out correctly that Lenin had spent relatively little time in Petrograd during his life, apparently had not liked the city, and moved the Soviet government to Moscow at the first opportunity. For the Russian émigrés and for many others as well, it was clear that the process of “plebeianization” of the city, which began with renaming Petersburg Petrograd, had taken another giant step. A popular joke circulated in the city that if the Bolsheviks had the nerve to give Lenin’s name to the creation of Peter the Great, then the famous “proletarian poet” Demyan Bedny could just as easily demand that “the works of Pushkin” be changed to “the works of Bedny.”

Young Shostakovich was one of the people who was not afraid to express outrage over the renaming of the city. Ignoring the danger of possible inspection, he wrote to Tatyana Glivenko, “Lenin was always against ceremony…. If I become as great a man as Lenin, when I die will the city be renamed Shostakovichgrad?” And later Shostakovich liked to joke about the cult of Lenin that reigned in the Soviet Union. “I love the music of Ilyich,” he would proclaim. Using only the patronymic was the affected way in Russia to refer to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who, as we know, did not compose music. After savoring the confusion of his interlocutor, Shostakovich would explain gravely, “Naturally, I mean the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.”

From the ideological point of view, such jokes were not harmless. The Lenin mystique was being broadly inculcated; even superficial deviations from the official cult were perceived as heresy. So it was only among close, trusted friends that Shostakovich would sometimes sing, after having a few drinks, the song of the Baltic sailors: “Burn bright, candle in Ilyich’s ruddy backside.”

The terrible flooding of Leningrad in September 1924 was seen by many as a punishment for the name change. Olga Freidenberg, the poet Boris Pasternak’s cousin, recalled, “The city was turning into a vessel. The water rose from the bottom up to the sky. We stood by the window and watched floors of buildings disappear. Even though our apartment was on the fourth floor, the terror we felt is impossible to describe.”^{483} Veniamin Kaverin described the foreboding of Leningraders when suddenly “the water imposed chaos and a silence unknown in the city from the days of its founding. When the lights went out in all the houses. And the signal cannon boomed every three minutes. When the schismatics, trapped at the common graves on the Field of Mars prayed loudly, rejoicing that at last the time had come for the destruction of the city, built by the Antichrist on the swamps.”^{484}

Shostakovich hastily informed his Moscow friend, the pianist and composer Lev Oborin, that “the city, especially the Petrograd Side and Vasilyevsky Island, are badly damaged. Huge boats lie on their sides on the embankments. It’ll take colossal amounts of money to clean it all up. Lots of valuable sets and scenery were soaked and washed away from the Maryinsky Theater. Lots of animals perished in the zoo and the botanical gardens are totally destroyed. It’s a disaster.”^{485}

Pasternak immediately pointed out the historical and poetic parallels: “A strange coincidence. It’s exactly the hundredth anniversary of the flood that was the basis of The Bronze Horseman.”^{486} The famous flood of November 7, 1824, had given rise to numerous symbolic and mystical interpretations. The fact that Alexander I died almost exactly a year after it was a favorite point. In 1924 rumors connected the flood with Lenin’s death and the subsequent renaming of the city. Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman was more popular than ever.

Just a half century before that, the attitude toward The Bronze Horseman was much more ambivalent. Pushkin’s status as the national poet was in doubt, under direct attack from the nihilists. They criticized The Bronze Horseman, which according to the radical guru Chernyshevsky, had “no characters, only pictures.”

That makes it all the more noteworthy that in 1863 the nineteen-year-old coast guardsman Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov used The Bronze Horseman as an example in the arts in a letter to his mother, sent to Petersburg from aboard the clipper Almaz while cruising the Baltic Sea. He had started his first symphony and commented,

As for whether the public will like my symphony, I can tell you that it will not. It’s tricky for a decent work to please the audience. There are exceptions, but they are due to effective orchestration and a more or less dance rhythm, like, for instance, Glinka’s Jota aragonesa. It combines both prerequisites, but I doubt that the audience appreciates its true beauty. That is also the situation with my symphony.^{487}

These lines show many characteristics of the young Rimsky-Korsakov, scion of a noble family, whose father was a highly placed official under Nicholas I and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were admirals in the Russian Navy. They evince his confidence in his talent, his direct nature, common sense, rational approach to art, tendency toward a technical analysis of music, and even his love of Glinka. Most interesting, two of the most popular works by Rimsky-Korsakov in the West, the symphonic show pieces Capriccio espagnol (1887) and Scheherazade ( 1888 ), are in fact orchestrated most effectively and propelled by a strong rhythm, particularly Capriccio. The orchestral innovations of these works were used by the French: Debussy, Ravel, and Paul Dukas.

In Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov is particularly revered for his fifteen operas (as many as Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky wrote together); the most popular are the touching fairy tale The Snow Maiden (1880-1881); the vivid and melodic Sadko (1894-1896), based on an old Russian epic; and the entertaining and dramatic Tsar’s Bride (1898). His lofty The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1903-1904) is considered a masterpiece of Russian spiritual music; its mystical revelations are all the more astonishing because the composer was an agnostic. Now, as before the revolution, Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic overture Svetly prazdnik (Easter Overture) is played during the Easter holidays, a musical interpretation, the author explained, of the transition “from the dark and mysterious night of Holy Saturday to the unfettered pagan-religious merriment of the morning of Easter Sunday.”^{488}

One of Rimsky-Korsakov’s main achievements was the creation of a highly influential school of composition, of which three of the most popular composers of the twentieth century are members: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. The music of each composer is so individual, their aesthetic and political views developed in such different directions, that one easily forgets all three have common roots.

Stravinsky and Prokofiev were the master’s students, and his favorite student and son-in-law, Maximilian Steinberg, taught composition to Shostakovich. Thus, Stravinsky and Prokofiev can be considered Rimsky-Korsakov’s composing children and Shostakovich his grandson. However, this common lineage is mentioned at best only in individual biographies of the respective composer; they are never examined as the products of one system of teaching, with a shared background of beginning rules.

The very concept of a Petersburg school of composition, unlike that of the Second Viennese School, did not become part of the aesthetic lexicon of the twentieth century, even though the music of the former is performed much more frequently than that of the latter (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern). And it is unlikely that this trend in popularity is going to flag in the near future.

The Petersburg school of composition has been neglected for both aesthetic and political reasons that, as so often happens, are tightly intertwined. The aesthetics and music of the Second (or New) Viennese School (named after the “First” Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) filled the European cultural vacuum after World War II. Hitler had persecuted modernism, and therefore its triumph in the fifties was perceived not only as an aesthetic victory but as a matter of political justice. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern not only personified the break with Nazi ideology with their highly individualistic, innovative works, but at the same time they reestablished the authority and leadership of German-Austrian music. Those composers were deservedly promoted in postwar Germany and Austria, then practically elevated to the canon. In Europe and America this canonization was accepted with sympathy and understanding and by some with hearty approval. Innumerable books, studies, theoretical conferences, and seminars were the process by which members of the Second Viennese School were fixed in positions of influence among music professionals.

In contrast, no one was interested in glorifying the achievements of the Petersburg school. The very word “Petersburg” has been missing from the map for over three quarters of the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union, one preferred not to recall the former glory of the city. In addition, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich at various times were considered ideological enemies by the Soviet government, with many of their works banned from performance. The first Soviet biography of Stravinsky appeared only in 1964; as recently as 1960 he was still called “a political and ideological renegade” who had lost “all ties with the spiritual culture of his people.” Clearly, in such conditions, there could be no talk of propagandizing the Petersburg school of composition, even though it included the leading names of Russian music.

At the source of this school was Mikhail Glinka. By the middle of the nineteenth century Glinka had moved Russian national music forward with a mighty shove, as Pushkin had done several decades earlier with literature. The good fortune of the new Russian culture was that its founders turned out to be such harmonious and protean creators. Both managed in their works to be simultaneously profound and light, complex and simple, tragic and playful, refined and folklike. Never again in Russian culture would an artist achieve a comparable balance.

Both Glinka and Pushkin were, like Janus, simultaneously Westernizers and nationalists. That is why their work could be claimed as models by representatives of opposite camps. People in Russia inevitably returned to Glinka and Pushkin again and again. No matter how strong the clashes, the basic tradition that the two titans represented remained a common inheritance. Thus, Glinka remained a model both for Tchaikovsky and for the Mighty Five, even though aesthetically they held hostile positions. Tchaikovsky was impressed by the Western tendencies in Glinka’s music. The members of the Mighty Five, Mussorgsky in particular, elevated Glinka’s nationalism.

The question was which interpretation of Glinka’s heritage would become the more influential, and consequently, which path would the Petersburg school follow. It would seem that Tchaikovsky, the star of the first graduating class of the Petersburg Conservatory and an audience favorite, held all the cards. The talent and aggressiveness of the Mighty Five were no substitute for a systematic professional education so necessary for the building of any musical academy—besides which, Tchaikovsky had the sympathy of the court and of the Russian musical bureaucracy.

But in fact Tchaikovsky was edged out of Petersburg, where the musical tradition began forming to a significant degree outside his influence. This took place largely because of the efforts of Rimsky-Korsakov, who possessed all the qualities needed for the methodical construction of the edifice for the Petersburg musical academy, which eventually became the “school of Rimsky-Korsakov.”

Rimsky-Korsakov spent thirty-seven of his sixty-four years as professor of the Petersburg Conservatory, bringing up several generations of composers. A list here will give some idea of his “off-spring”: Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Liadov, Anton Arensky, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Alexander Grechaninov, Mikhail Gnessin, Nikolai Tcherepnin, and Nikolai Myaskovsky, as well as musicians who became leaders of their national cultures: the Latvians Jāzeps Vītols, Emīls Dārzinš and Emilis Melngailis; the Estonians Artur Kapp and Mart Saar; the Ukrainian Nikolai Lysenko; the Armenian Alexander Spendiarov; the Georgian Meliton Balanchivadze.

Two outstanding figures of Petersburg modernism, Kuzmin and Evreinov, also studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. And for five months in 1901 Ottorino Respighi, a musician from Bologna, studied composition with Rimsky-Korsakov. His brilliant orchestrations reveal the influence of the Petersburg master.

In 1921 the Opoyaz group published “Dostoyevsky and Gogol (Toward a Theory of Parody),” a brochure that explains much about artistic inheritance written by one of its members, Yuri Tynyanov, when he was twenty four years old. Tynyanov proposed that tradition in culture is not passed in a straight line, from the elder representatives of a school to the younger ones: “Succession is first of all a struggle, the destruction of the old whole and a new construction from the old elements.”^{489} In the course of this struggle, people do not clash as fiercely with representatives of another school or another tradition, he noted. “You simply go around them, rejecting or revering, you struggle against them by the very fact of your existence.”^{490} In other words, talented students often rise up against their own teachers and older friends, while they simply ignore their enemies.

Tynyanov’s analysis is an excellent illustration of the situation inside the Petersburg musical academy. One of the students described it more colorfully:

Rimsky-Korsakov’s severe rectitude as a teacher and his extraordinarily warm concern at the same time for the achievements or failures of his students, their loyalty toward their teacher and also their struggle against him, leaving him and returning with repentance—these complex relations filled with ideals and emotions between the great teacher and his students, sometimes very talented ones, were somewhat reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci and his school.^{491}

The tall, gray-bearded Rimsky-Korsakov, with his thin, wrinkled face, round glasses, and deep voice, seemed unfriendly and aloof to many people. But Igor Stravinsky, like his other close students, saw a surrogate father figure in the master. Stravinsky first showed his compositions to Rimsky-Korsakov in the summer of 1902, when the younger man was twenty years old. By the time he began regular studies with Rimsky-Korsakov in early 1903, the young composer had recently lost his father and became extremely close to his teacher.

Stravinsky was accepted in the Rimsky-Korsakov home and was good friends with his son, Andrei. The master apparently realized that his student had an unusual gift; that is probably why he did not recommend that Stravinsky enter the Petersburg Conservatory but nevertheless taught him the fundamental technical knowledge in composition. Stravinsky’s technique is undoubtedly rooted in his private studies with Rimsky-Korsakov.

At first, the master tried to turn Stravinsky into a true professional in the Petersburg sense of the word. That meant in particular a rational approach to the process of composition, rigorous self-discipline, accuracy, and neatness, elevated to aesthetic principle. Rimsky-Korsakov urged Stravinsky to compose his first symphony, believing his student would develop these qualities more quickly working in a large form. Stravinsky dedicated that symphony, opus 1, to his teacher.

Rimsky-Korsakov left a brief formulation for a course of composition for gifted musicians like Stravinsky:

In fact, a talented student needs so little; it is so simple to show him everything needed in harmony and counterpoint to set him on his feet in that work, it is so simple to direct him in understanding the forms of composition, if one goes about it the right way. Just one or two years of systematic study in the development of technique, a few exercises in free composition and orchestration, assuming a good knowledge of the piano—and the studies are over.^{492}

At the conservatory there were many students in the famous professor’s class, and this irritated the fifteen-year-old Sergei Prokofiev, who wanted Rimsky-Korsakov’s undivided attention. The maestro sat at the piano and looked through all the exercises in counterpoint his students brought him. He played endless fugues, preludes, canons, and arrangements, but refused to look through a student’s work if written in pencil, declaring, “I do not wish to go blind because of you.” (Later Shostakovich would also insist that his composition students write their scores in ink.)

Rimsky-Korsakov would begin his first class at the conservatory this way, according to one of his students, Nikolai Malko: “‘I will speak, and you will listen. Then I will speak less, and you will start to work. And finally I will not speak at all, and you will work.’ And that’s the way it was,” Malko concluded. “Rimsky-Korsakov explained everything so clearly and simply that all we had to do was to do our work well.”^{493}

Prokofiev had trouble breaking through the crowd that surrounded the maestro.

The ones who knew how much they could learn from Rimsky-Korsakov got the benefit despite the crowding. I approached the lessons half-heartedly, and the Schubert marches for four hands that Rimsky-Korsakov made us orchestrate I found clumsy and uninteresting. My instrumentation did not satisfy Rimsky-Korsakov. “Instead of thinking, you simply choose on your fingers whether it should be oboe or clarinet,” he used to say. Shutting his eyes, he would twirl his index fingers and then try unsuccessfully to make them meet. I would look triumphantly at my comrades, to gloat at the old man being angry, but their faces would be serious.^{494}

Despite the fact that Prokofiev was offended by the maestro’s attitude toward him, the ambitious teenager was thrilled by Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, which premiered in February 1907. Prokofiev was captivated by the grand mystical fresco that told in epic tones of the miraculous salvation of the ancient Russian city from the Tatar invasion.

The legend of Kitezh became popular in the elite circles of Petersburg. Kitezh, which was inundated by God’s will and made invisible, was discussed in the fashionable religio-philosophical societies of those years as a symbol of the desired purity that was unattainable in modern times. Zinaida Hippius even juxtaposed the legendary Kitezh and the real Petersburg, mired in sin.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera was almost immediately compared to Wagner’s Parsifal. Interestingly, Akhmatova thought more highly of Kitezh than of Parsifal; for all the similarity in approach of the two composers to a mystical theme, Akhmatova sensed a false piety in Parsifal and an intuitive, pure religious feeling, typical of the Russian people, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s work.^{495}

Akhmatova also noted the exceptional literary quality of the libretto of Kitezh, written by Vladimir Belsky. The libretto’s influence is apparent in Akhmatova’s lengthy mystical poem of 1940, The Way of All Earth, in which she considers herself a denizen of the vanished Kitezh. At that moment, she associated the legendary Kitezh with the beloved city on the Neva that had lived through such horrible trials. By 1940, Petersburg’s image was transformed from the antithesis of Kitezh to its twin.

Prokofiev was awed by the fantastical orchestration in Kitezh, its rhythmic diversity, the psychological complexity of the characters, especially the “Dostoyevskian” part of the traitor Grishka Kuterma, performed by Ivan Ershov, Petersburg’s best Wagnerian tenor, “with extraordinary brilliance and drama,” as Prokofiev recalled. “But most of all I liked The Battle of Kerzhenets, which at the time I thought was the best thing Rimsky-Korsakov had written.”^{496}

The astounding symphonic picture depicting the decisive battle of the Russian troops against the fierce Tatar horde was the high point of Kitezh. The fact that the confrontation was depicted by the orchestra and not on stage merely emphasized the opera’s epic character. If one can call Mussorgsky’s vocal ballad “Forgotten” a brilliant battle engraving, then The Battle of Kerzhenets was the greatest Russian musical fresco about war until Shostakovich. This work seemed to foretell the further metamorphosis of the Petersburg mythos by not praising the victors but the vanquished—their valor in the face of inexorable evil power. As Prokofiev wrote, “It was all new and astonished the imagination.”^{497}

When Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908, even Prokofiev, a man not given to sentimentality, admitted that he was “profoundly saddened: something hurt my heart. I loved Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, especially Kitezh, Sadko, The Snow Maiden, the piano concerto, Capriccio espagnol, Scheherazade, Fairy Tale.” And the vain but honest Prokofiev added, “I never had the opportunity to become close to him personally: there were many students in his class and he did not distinguish me from the rest.”^{498}

If Rimsky-Korsakov had managed to live another four years to hear the premiere of Prokofiev’s daring First Piano Concerto, it is unlikely he would have clasped the twenty-one-year-old composer to his breast. Even though his last operas, especially the fairy tale-based Kashchei the Immortal and The Golden Cockerel, toyed with modernism, introducing unusual harmonies and “prickly” melodies, Rimsky-Korsakov was increasingly intolerant of the musical avant-garde of his day; for example, he was very critical of Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss.

After hearing Strauss’s Salome for the first time in Paris, Rimsky-Korsakov’s wife wrote in horror to her son in Petersburg, “It is so disgusting, there is nothing worse in the world. Even Papa hissed for the first time in his life.”^{499} Strauss repaid the debt by describing a concert (under the aegis of Diaghilev) of Glinka, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov thus: “Even though it was all very nice, we, unfortunately, are no longer children.”^{500}

Rimsky-Korsakov undoubtedly would have also rejected Stravinsky’s Petrouchka if he had lived to hear it. The maestro of the Petersburg school’s “ideal” student was Alexander Glazunov, his junior by twenty-one years. The teacher adored Glazunov, never ceasing to be impressed by his protégé’s talent, taste, sense of measure, and mastery of counterpoint and orchestration. The premiere of sixteen-year-old Glazunov’s First Symphony in 1882 at the Assembly of the Nobility was a sensation, according to Rimsky-Korsakov: “It was a truly great day for all of us, the Petersburg representatives of the young Russian school. Young in inspiration, but already mature in technique and form, the symphony was a great success. Stasov bubbled and hummed at full blast. The audience was stunned to see that the composer who came out for bows was still in the uniform of a gymnasium student.”^{501}

Among the admirers surrounding the young man at the premiere, besides the colorful figure of the boisterous Stasov, was a handsome man of middle age with an expressive face framed by a mane of hair. Mitrofan Belyaev, the Petersburg timber millionaire, saw in Glazunov a new genius and a “pillar of Russian music,” who had to be supported in every way possible.

An amateur musician, Belyaev’s taste was formed under the influence of another outstanding student of Rimsky-Korsakov, the composer, conductor, and teacher Anatoly Liadov, ten years older than Glazunov. Famous as the “sixth,” junior member of the Mighty Five, Liadov was a master of refined piano and orchestral miniatures, of which the most famous were written in the last decade of his life (1905-1914): “Baba Yaga,” “Kikimora,” and “The Magic Lake.” But Liadov composed his little masterpieces (whose orchestral innovations most probably influenced Stravinsky) extremely slowly, “a teaspoon per hour,” as the Russian expression puts it.

When Diaghilev needed a Russian fairy tale ballet for his Paris company, he first approached Liadov with the idea for The Firebird. Only when he saw that Liadov would never write the ballet did he approach Stravinsky. It was also assumed that the first Russian ballet on the Scythian theme would be written by Liadov; but as we know, Prokofiev realized that idea. There is something symbolic in this: “the fathers” were incapable of keeping up with the times and, kicking all the way, gave up the limelight to their rambunctious “children.”

Liadov’s phlegmatic nature was legendary. Yet many considered him an inspiring teacher. Malko, who studied harmony with him at the conservatory, maintained, “Liadov’s critical comments were always precise, clear, understandable, constructive, and brief…. And it was done indolently, without haste, sometimes seemingly disdainfully. He could suddenly stop in midword, take out a small scissors from his pocket and start doing something with his fingernail, while we all waited.”^{502}

Liadov was the first to point out Glazunov’s gifts to Belyaev. Pleased first with Glazunov’s work, the millionaire then decided to take an entire group of national composers under his patronage. He created a large, noncommercial music publishing house unprecedented in Russia and in the world and an organization he called Russian Symphonic Concerts, all to promote the new works of those Russian musicians dear to his heart. Both the publishing house and the concerts were set up on a large scale; Belyaev spent tens of thousands of rubles on them annually.

He also held “Fridays” for musicians in his spacious Petersburg apartment. They performed quartets (Belyaev played the viola) and then repaired to a luxurious dinner with copious amounts of alcohol. These Fridays eventually grew, as a continuation of the Petersburg musical tradition, into the Belyaev Circle.

The Belyaev Circle succeeded the Mighty Five as the dominant musical force in Petersburg. Rimsky-Korsakov became head of the Belyaev Circle, and he defined their difference from the Mighty Five as follows:

The Balakirev circle corresponded to the period of Sturm und Drang in the development of Russian music, the Belyaev circle to the period of calm forward movement; the Balakirev was revolutionary, the Belyaev progressive. The Balakirev circle was exclusive and intolerant, the Belyaev was more indulgent and eclectic.^{503}

But in fact it requires a stretch of the imagination to call the Belyaev Circle “progressive”; it was more accurate to call it “moderately academic.” Several significant musicians (Liadov and Glazunov, for instance) belonged to it, but the majority were merely erudite composers whose works were derivative. They turned technical accomplishment into an end in itself. The desire for technical perfection had always characterized the Petersburg academy, and the productions of the Belyaev Circle composers demonstrated the dead end to which this road could lead. The Belyaev group regarded with suspicion everything that violated the canons it established.

“Rimsky-Korsakov followed his age, and each new work was yet another concession of genius to his times and to modernity,”^{504} Asafyev wrote in his Book About Stravinsky. It could be said that Rimsky-Korsakov was urged forward by his great talent. One of his favorite expressions was, “Well, if we’re going, we’re going, said the parrot when the cat pulled it out of the cage.” After Rimsky-Korsakov’s death the movement of the Belyaev Circle came to a halt. Petersburg academism triumphed and there could be no talk now of tolerance for the ever-more impatient Russian musical avant-garde.

Prokofiev, who had shown Liadov his school works, recalled that even the most innocent innovations drove the latter crazy. “Shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking in his soft woolen shoes without heels, he would say, ‘I don’t understand why you are studying with me. Go to Richard Strauss, go to Debussy.’ This was said in a tone that meant ‘Go to the devil!’”^{505} Yet Liadov told his acquaintances about Prokofiev. “I am obliged to teach him. He must form his technique, his style—first in piano music.”^{506}

In 1916 Glazunov left the concert hall during the premiere of Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite and, as the newspapers reported with relish, “did not spare words” in evaluating the new work. Ten years later, Glazunov wrote to a pianist friend, “I never considered Stravinsky a good musician. I have proof that his ear was never developed, as his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov had told me.”^{507} Glazunov was so hostile toward Stravinsky that he did not even return his greeting when he bumped into him in Paris in 1935, the year before Glazunov’s death. At the time, both composers were émigrés and their political positions (which was very important in those days) basically coincided. But the aesthetic gap turned out to be too great for Glazunov to bridge. Stravinsky repaid Glazunov by belittling his music at every opportunity, turning him into the personification of the Petersburg academism he so hated.

In 1905 Glazunov, with Rimsky-Korsakov’s active support, was appointed director of the Petersburg Conservatory. He remained at that post for over twenty years, becoming a legend. Heavyset, lost in thought, Glazunov moved quietly along the conservatory halls, cigar in hand, leaving a scent in the air. Students would sniff and say, “The director was just here.”

As a composer, Glazunov was highly respected in that era. Even the irreverent Prokofiev was impressed for a while by his eight symphonies and at first enjoyed playing them in a four-handed version with his conservatory friend Myaskovsky. Pianists eagerly performed Glazunov’s two piano concertos, and his melodic Violin Concerto (1904), which enjoyed great popularity among violinists. And everyone hailed Glazunov’s romantic ballet, Raymonda, which was choreographed by Petipa in 1898, performed with unfailing success at the Maryinsky Theater, and became a repertory staple throughout the world. From time to time Glazunov conducted this brilliantly orchestrated ballet himself, because he was drawn to conducting like a child to a favorite toy, even though he had no talent for it. Nevertheless, he liked to joke, “You can criticize my compositions, but you can’t deny that I am a good conductor and a remarkable conservatory director.”

Everyone knew that Glazunov gave his all to the conservatory. As Prokofiev recalled, “he would either be off to see Procurator Korsak to intercede on behalf of a student who was going to be exiled for revolutionary activity, or appealing for a residence permit for a talented Jew or giving away his director’s salary for scholarships for the students.”^{508} And Glazunov remained just as dogged a defender of the conservatory after the Bolsheviks came to power. Undoubtedly, the main reason why he did not emigrate immediately after the revolution was the desire to defend his beloved conservatory from the destruction that threatened it. Together with his students, Glazunov went through difficult times; he lost weight and grew haggard, his worn suit hanging from his once corpulent body as if from a hanger. But the director continued the ritual inspections of the institution entrusted to him, albeit without the cigar, a commodity impossible to obtain in those years.

The Bolsheviks were impressed by the composer’s European fame, and Glazunov managed even in the hardest of times to obtain special food parcels for particularly gifted students. Viktor Shklovsky wrote down the following story, which was recounted to him by Maxim Gorky, whom the conservatory director visited in the hungry year of 1921.

“Yes,” Glazunov says, “I need a food parcel, even though our candidate is very young—he was born in 1906.”

“A violinist? They start young. Or a pianist?”

“A composer.”

“How old is he?”

“He’ll be fifteen. The son of a music teacher. He brought me his work.”

“You like it?”

“Its awful! It’s the first music I can’t hear just by reading the score.”

“Then why have you come?”

“I don’t like it, but that’s not the point. The future belongs to this boy, not to me. Well, I don’t like it. Too bad. This will be our music, and we have to get an academy food parcel for him.”

“I’m putting him on the list. Name?”

“Shostakovich.”^{509}

Unlike Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Shostakovich did not study with Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1919, when the thirteen-year-old Mitya Shostakovich entered the Petrograd Conservatory, Rimsky-Korsakov had been dead for eleven years. In that period the Petersburg school of composition was often called the “school of Rimsky-Korsakov-Glazunov.” As the caretaker of Rimsky-Korsakov’s legacy, Glazunov’s influence on Petrograd’s musical life was all-encompassing.

It was Glazunov who appreciated Prokofiev’s childhood works and insisted that he enter the Petersburg Conservatory; it was then that he gave the remarkable thirteen-year-old a copy of Glinka’s score for his Valse-Fantaisie, inscribed “To dear co-brother Seryozha Prokofiev from Glazunov.” But the “dear co-brother” turned out to be too insubordinate for Glazunov’s taste. In conversations with me in the 1970s Shostakovich often emphasized that he, not Prokofiev, had been a very “obedient” student.

Glazunov was moved by Shostakovich’s talent and gave the young musician the highest grades on composition examinations (a five in the Russian five-point system), with remarks such as: “Exceptionally vivid and early-maturing gift. Worthy of awe and delight. Marvelous technical ability, interesting, original content (5+),” or “Vivid outstanding creative gift. In music much imagination and inventiveness. In a period of finding himself (5+).”^{510}

Yet in purely creative terms the young Stravinsky and Prokofiev could be placed in Rimsky-Korsakov’s orbit much more than Shostakovich. Stravinsky’s early symphony, when first publicly performed in Petersburg in 1908, was perceived as a composition, according to Asafyev, “displaying the complete mastery of the methods of his favorite teachers, including Glazunov.”^{511} Rimsky-Korsakov even felt that in this symphony Stravinsky was “imitating too much” both Glazunov and himself. It is not difficult to determine that Stravinsky’s first ballet, The Firebird (1910), was written by a student of Rimsky-Korsakov. The exotic harmonies of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas Kashchei the Immortal and The Golden Cockerel surely are reflected in Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale, first produced by Diaghilev in 1914. The early Stravinsky’s orchestral palette was also heavily indebted to the Petersburg maestro.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s influence on Prokofiev is probably even more profound. Prokofiev’s symphonies are built more as paintings in the style of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poems than as developing psychological dramas in the manner of Rimsky-Korsakov’s rival, Tchaikovsky. It was Shostakovich who picked up Tchaikovsky’s symphonic technique.

But Shostakovich also adopted Rimsky-Korsakov’s attitude toward orchestration as a quality of musical thought and not something external that is added to the composition like a dress on a hanger. Rimsky-Korsakov said this about his Capriccio Espagnol: “The opinion of the critics and audience that the Capriccio is a brilliantly orchestrated piece is incorrect. The Capriccio is a brilliant composition for the orchestra.”^{512} In other words, the orchestration is born with the music being composed; it is a characteristic of it, not a later “addition.”

For Shostakovich this idea became a leading artistic principle, and it explains why he was dubious about Prokofiev’s later practice of allowing other musicians to orchestrate his works. Shostakovich was not satisfied by the explanation that Prokofiev made rather detailed preliminary sketches for them. Shostakovich usually imagined a new composition in the form of a full score that he had to write down himself, even though in his last years, when he had difficulties in using his right hand, doing so was quite a problem for him.

As he did with Prokofiev, Glazunov persuaded Shostakovich’s parents to let the youth study composition at the conservatory. Glazunov was the guest of honor at Shostakovich’s fifteenth birthday party in 1921, when the young composer’s father, a noted chemist at the Main Chamber of Weights and Measures, was still alive. Mitya was made uncomfortable by the close relations between the conservatory director and his parents. He told me the reasons much later.

Glazunov was subject to bouts of heavy drinking. Early in their regime, the Bolsheviks had banned the official sale of wine and vodka. Yet Shostakovich’s father had access to strictly rationed spirit alcohol through his work. Learning this, Glazunov sometimes asked him to get him some of the precious liquid. These requests were transmitted through Mitya, who was bothered by this for two reasons. First, he feared Glazunov’s requests were endangering his father. The times were hard and it was impossible to guess whom the Bolsheviks would suddenly decide to shoot as a lesson to others. The recent execution of Gumilyov was on everybody’s mind. Second, Mitya did not want his success at the conservatory to be attributed to bribery.

Maximilian Steinberg, Shostakovich’s teacher, was head of the composition department of the conservatory then. He adored his student, according to Bogdanov-Berezovsky.^{513} Steinberg was a typical representative of the Belyaev Circle, but his conservative orientation did not keep him from considering Shostakovich the most talented young composer in Leningrad and the hope of Russian music.

Then and later, Shostakovich could be rather skeptical about Steinberg, but it was nothing compared with the violent emotions Stravinsky seemed to have about the teacher. Stravinsky told the conductor Malko in 1934 (and only partly tongue in cheek, it seems), “So many people died in the revolution, why did Steinberg survive? I’m not bloodthirsty but … they shot engineers, why did these people keep on living? I left because I couldn’t bear the life that those obscurantists created for me. And now Steinberg’s at the conservatory.” A bit taken aback, Malko reminded Stravinsky that he must have liked Steinberg at one time; he had dedicated the orchestral fantasy Fireworks to Steinberg on the occasion of the latter’s wedding to Rimsky-Korsakov’s daughter. Stravinsky replied with a sigh, “Yes, and so now I’m tied to Steinberg for the rest of my life. But now I don’t want to know him. He’s a mediocrity.”^{514}

In the same conversation with the conductor, Stravinsky noted that he heard Malko conducting Shostakovich on the radio: “I liked him—you can see tradition in him. I like being able to see where a person has come from.”^{515} He was undoubtedly speaking of Shostakovich’s First Symphony, which was first played under Malko’s baton on May 12,1926, in Leningrad. Shostakovich began composing the symphony in 1923, when he was sixteen. Malko, who was then the chief conductor of the orchestra of the Leningrad Philharmonic, decided to perform it even though some conservative musicians felt Shostakovich could wait another year.

Before the concert Shostakovich was consumed with anxiety, nervously enumerating the possible complications in a letter to a friend in Moscow:

What if it doesn’t sound right? That would be a humiliating scandal. I mean, if they boo the symphony, that would hurt. So, there are lots of worries, I can’t list them all. Besides worries like this, there are even more unpleasant ones. What if they cancel the concert? What if Malko gets sick or misses the train and doesn’t get back in time? It’s all very unpleasant. And very tiring and enervating.^{516}

The premiere in the acoustically marvelous hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic (the former Assembly of the Nobility) was a triumph. The nineteen-year-old composer, thin, wearing glasses, still a boy, with a forelock that would become famous, awkwardly took his bows. The audience kept looking over at Glazunov, who sat in his usual sixth-row-aisle seat. He had no intention of quitting the hall (as he had with Prokofiev); on the contrary, he smiled and applauded, even though the young composer had not followed his persistent recommendation to change a bad-sounding (to the maestro) part in the introduction.

This was a significant moment in the history of the Petersburg school of composition. Forty-four years earlier in the same hall, Glazunov’s First Symphony had been performed, and ever since he had been the leading composer of his generation, the “Russian Brahms.” Shostakovich’s symphony had an even more brilliant future; just a year later it was conducted in Berlin by Bruno Walter, and soon after it was included in the repertory of Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini. Shostakovich had no intention of remaining a model student of the Petersburg school. But at that moment very few people guessed that.

In Shostakovich’s symphony, the first audiences heard the influence of the later Rimsky-Korsakov and his students, Stravinsky and Prokofiev. The more attentive could have pointed out traces of Scriabin, Richard Strauss, and some Mahler. The accent in the symphony was on continuing tradition rather than breaking with it. In that city musicians did not merely value tradition—they worshipped it. It seemed particularly important to preserve it in an era of unprecedented social upheaval. The fact that talented young people respected tradition was a comfort.

As it was, the Petersburg school of composition had just entered a period of convulsions. Its time as a school exclusively of the Rimsky-Korsakov-Glazunov line had ended. Once Rimsky-Korsakov had managed to supersede Tchaikovsky in Petersburg. Now Tchaikovsky’s music was coming back with a vengeance.

Beginning composers were also becoming more and more influenced by the musical world of Mussorgsky. In his day Rimsky-Korsakov had done more than anyone to preserve the heritage of his late comrade from the Mighty Five. He completed and orchestrated his opera Khovanshchina, and edited and reorchestrated Boris Godunov. With the help of Rimsky-Korsakov, these works won world fame.

Rimsky-Korsakov had not foreseen that Mussorgsky’s acclaim and influence would exceed his own. Nor would he have imagined that Mussorgsky, whom he considered a technically helpless dilettante who tossed snatches of confused ideas onto paper, would become a model for several generations of Russian composers. For Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, the works of Tchaikovsky and especially Mussorgsky occupied an incomparably higher place in the pantheon of Russian music than Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov. Shostakovich even repeated Rimsky-Korsakov’s enormous labor and redid the orchestration of Boris Godunov in 1940 and of Khovanshchina in 1959. (In 1913 Stravinsky worked with Ravel at Diaghilev’s request to reorchestrate the original numbers from Khovanshchina omitted by Rimsky-Korsakov.)

Shostakovich’s editions did not win out over the Rimsky-Korsakov versions. In the twentieth century, the idea took hold that Mussorgsky should be performed whenever possible in the composer’s own versions. What Rimsky-Korsakov saw as “carelessness,” “clumsiness,” and “composer’s deafness” was now perceived as visionary breakthroughs. The movement for Mussorgsky’s rehabilitation began in Petersburg in the 1910s and received its strongest impulse in Leningrad in 1928, when Boris Godunov had its first performance in the author’s version. And so Mussorgsky gradually became a part of the Petersburg canon.

This helped guarantee the viability of the Petersburg musical tradition. The Petersburg school of composition retained its characteristic striving for form, brilliant orchestration, and exotic harmony but also acquired a taste for the emotional, “wavelike” development of musical material àla Tchaikovsky and the dramatic “Dostoyevskian” contrasts àla Mussorgsky.

Placed by history among particularly harsh conditions, sometimes struggling for its very existence, the Petersburg school of composition nevertheless continued to develop. It absorbed the creative heritage of its famous pupils, in particular the structural and rhythmic innovations of Stravinsky and Prokofiev’s methods of melodic development. Later, the school came to be associated with the tradition of the so-called philosophical symphonies in the style of Shostakovich, the composer of fifteen symphonies, a man recognized by many as one of the world’s giants in this genre in the twentieth century.

Shostakovich, pleased by the success of his First Symphony on the night of its premiere, probably did not think about Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the fate of the Petersburg school just then. After the concert Steinberg, Malko, and Mitya’s young friends went to the Shostakovich home to celebrate.^{517} Steinberg gave Shostakovich a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Malko, more agitated than usual, returned late at night and could not sleep. He wrote a letter to a friend that night: “I have the feeling that I have turned a new page in the history of symphonic music and discovered a major new composer.”

Shostakovich had the gift of charm and easily won over new acquaintances. He was particularly comfortable and animated with adults, despite his apparent awkwardness and a certain shyness. He was even perceived by some of his older friends as being “electrically charged.”^{518}

When Shostakovich was only seventeen, the Petersburg journal Teatr called him a genius. Early fame naturally attracted attention. But the young Shostakovich also projected the impression of an intense inner life. The first famous portrait of Mitya, done in charcoal and bloodred in September 1919 by the Petrograd artist Boris Kustodiev, depicts him deep in thought.

Kustodiev, who was forty-one, inscribed the portrait, “To my little friend Mitya Shostakovich from the artist.” Shostakovich had been introduced to the artist by a classmate, Kustodiev’s daughter, but it was the father who became his friend. For Kustodiev Shostakovich played Grieg, Chopin, Schumann, and his own first compositions. Kustodiev called him Florestan, after one of the characters in Schumann’s Carnival, impetuous and poetic: apparently Mitya was not too embarrassed to reveal himself to the artist, with the piano an intermediary in their communication.

For Shostakovich, Kustodiev personified a link with the Russian past. He was a member of Mir iskusstva, in which he had played an important role. Benois, the leader of Mir iskusstva, and the majority of his comrades were committed Westernizers. What interested them the most in Russian history was the classicist eighteenth century, where they found ties and parallels with western Europe. Kustodiev, who was enormously popular, felt out of place among the refined members of Mir iskusstva. The themes of his paintings were mostly folk Russian: fairs, holidays, dressed-up crowds, merchants, clerks, peasants, white churches with golden domes, troikas—all painted colorfully, with overflowing feeling, not at all in the style of Mir iskusstva. As Petrov-Vodkin recalled, the leaders of Mir iskusstva were silent before Kustodiev’s paintings. Some critics considered his works a revival of the traditions of the Wanderers, the final fireworks of that movement.

The women painted by the Mir iskusstva group were usually refined Petersburg ladies, whereas the women Kustodiev painted were of the merchant class—big-boned, calm, epitomizing spiritual and physical health. Russians use the expression “Kustodiev woman” the way “Rubenesque” is used in the West. But only at first glance do Kustodiev’s works appear to be the apotheosis of triumphant flesh. As a Russian critic noted, “In the voluptuousness of the full-bodied beauties you sense the artist’s irony, anxiety, and longing—the spirit of the Russian intellectual on the cusp of two centuries.”^{519}

Kustodiev’s ambivalence toward his constant merchant wife heroine was forcefully expressed in his illustrations for Nikolai Leskov’s short story “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” done in 1922-1923, when Shostakovich was a frequent guest at the artist’s home. The tale of the provincial merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, who became a murderer out of passionate love, was interpreted by Kustodiev in Dostoyevskian, sometimes grotesque manner. (It is not surprising that Dostoyevsky was the first to publish Leskov’s story in 1865 in his journal Epokha.) Kustodiev’s drawings first appeared in a book in 1930; and it was that edition that started the renewed popularity of Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” which had been almost forgotten by then. Shostakovich read the book and, inspired by Leskov’s tale and Kustodiev’s work, decided to write an opera based on Leskov; it was to become one of the most famous operas of the twentieth century.

Kustodiev did not live to see either the notable edition or Shostakovich’s opera. He died in 1927 at the age of forty-nine, spending the last ten years of his life in a wheelchair as the result of a sarcoma of the spine. The artist, whose canvases were filled with healthy, strong people, could barely move and sometimes suffered intolerable pain. Surgery did not help. Doctors suggested that he seek better treatment in the West. He sought permission for a long time but got his passport too late.

The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose play The Flea (also based on Leskov) was produced with sets by Kustodiev that thrilled Leningraders, compared the artist to the Old Russian saints, “with the only difference that his exploit was not in the name of saving his soul but in the name of art.”^{520} Usually skeptical and rational, Zamyatin was amazed and touched: “What creative willpower must one have to sit like that in a wheelchair, jaws clenched with pain, and paint all those pictures.”^{521} And Kustodiev, when appearing before his guests, including Shostakovich, was almost always animated, amiable, and elegantly dressed, wearing a tie and white collar. His blond hair was neatly brushed, his mustache and small beard carefully trimmed. He shaved off the beard when it began to show gray, explaining to his wife, “A lot of young people visit us; sometimes there are pretty girls, and the beard ages me.”

Kustodiev complained only rarely. “Legs—well, they’re a luxury! But when my arm starts to ache, that’s a shame.”^{522} And it was this invalid who painted a six-foot canvas of Fyodor Chaliapin, which was not only the best depiction of the bass but a symbol of the Russian artist. In it, Chaliapin in beaver hat and “boyar” fur coat stands on a hill with a Russian landscape receding into the distance. Kustodiev enlivened the landscape with a country fair. Chaliapin was perhaps the most national of Russian performing musicians: a giant of a man who could be equally supercharged on stage as tsar or peasant. He was a man of the people and understood them. And he was also their mouthpiece, the expression of their emotions, the embodiment of their potential. Kustodiev captured this relationship of the Russian musician with his country, explaining the Chaliapin mystique in these words: “Here you have the immeasurable power of a natural gift and a peasant’s clever mind, and a refined mastered culture. A totally unique phenomenon!”^{523}

Kustodiev’s portrait vibrates and breathes. That symphony of colors made a lasting impression on Shostakovich, not least because he had watched the artist create it. A block and tackle attached to the ceiling of Kustodiev’s studio allowed the artist to move the canvas away and toward his wheelchair without assistance. So he worked as if he were painting a church ceiling while in constant pain. For Shostakovich, it was a lesson in professional courage that he recalled some forty years later, when he began losing strength in his right hand and began training the left so he could continue composing. Kustodiev’s portrait of Shostakovich hung in the composer’s apartment in a place of honor. Bogdanov-Berezovsky liked to say that whenever he thought of that picture, he recalled the lines a young poet, a mutual friend, dedicated to the composer:

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Petersburg Conservatory was recognized as one of the world’s leading musical academies, preparing first-class performers. It was fitting that its founder was Anton Rubinstein, one of the two greatest pianists of the nineteenth century (the other was Franz Liszt). Rubinstein had brought such European luminaries as the pianist Theodor Leschetitzky and the violinist Henryk Wieniawsky to teach at the conservatory. They both left their mark on Petersburg, spending many years there.

Leschetitzky’s influence was particularly strong. One of his most talented students, Annette Esipova, became his second wife. Esipova toured the world many times; New York critics were thrilled by her, and even the sardonic George Bernard Shaw was impressed by her flawless technique. In the late nineteenth century Esipova settled in Petersburg, where she became a professor at the conservatory, making her appearances like a queen surrounded by a retinue of assistants and students. Being accepted in her class was considered a great achievement. One such fortunate student was Prokofiev.

At first he, like everyone else, was in awe of his professor’s fame, and considered himself as part of the “conservatory guards.” But soon the composer grew disillusioned with Esipova. His rebellious, impatient nature was exasperated by the severe discipline of Esipova’s teaching system. In addition, she demanded a clear, “pearl-like” technique, her trademark, from her students, while Prokofiev had trouble dropping his habit of playing rather carelessly.

Nevertheless, he performed powerfully on his final exam in the spring of 1914 and won the Rubinstein Prize, a grand piano given to the best graduating pianist. (There were 108 graduates that year and over twenty-five hundred students at the Petersburg Conservatory in 1914.) Later Prokofiev became a renowned interpreter of his own works, and gave concerts in Europe and the United States.

One of the main musical attractions of Petersburg in the early twentieth century was the much discussed piano trio of Esipova, the violinist Leopold Auer, and the cellist Alexander Verzhbilovich. Auer had appeared in Petersburg in 1868, and after Wieniawsky left he became the leading violin teacher at the conservatory. The list of Auer’s students reads like a who’s who of twentieth-century violin playing: Yascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Nathan Milstein. No other pedagogue of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries could boast of such a roster. Auer’s class was legendary, and students from all over the world flocked to him.

In his last years Auer did not accept “rough draft” work: he demanded that the student come to class with the music already learned; only then would Auer concentrate on the artistic problems. Milstein recalled Auer’s advice: “Practice with your head, not your fingers.”^{525} That meant the priority of analysis and imagination over mechanical practice. According to Milstein, the impatient professor would not only yell at slow students, he would throw their music at them; even the incomparable Heifetz was not safe from Auer’s flashes of anger.

Yet Auer took an individual approach to each of his phenomenal students. He would help a violinist of lyric bent to discover highly dramatic colors, expanding his artistic palette that way. He would lead a student with a fiery temperament toward a more controlled interpretation. All pupils were expected to play with a beautiful, noble sound and in a lofty style.

Auer was a marvelous performer (Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto for him). The composer Yuri Shaporin recalled the following incident. Shaporin was studying at the Petersburg Conservatory when the word of Professor Auer’s extraordinary new student, Yascha Heifetz, circulated through the school. Only Auer’s students were permitted to attend his classes. In order to hear the prodigy play, Shaporin sneaked into the small space between the two doors leading to the classroom and scraped away some of the paint covering the glass of the inner door. With his eye glued to the “peephole,” Shaporin saw a curly-haired youth in a sailor suit, admirably playing the Glazunov concerto, which Auer himself had premiered in 1905.

When he had finished, Heifetz turned to the professor and asked, “Like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how?”

Then Auer, who was in his late sixties, got out of his deep armchair, took the boy’s little violin, and played the Glazunov concerto from beginning to end with such brilliance and inspiration that Shaporin stood entranced behind the door.

When he had finished, Auer said to Yascha, “Like that!”^{526}

Undoubtedly, the aesthetics of both Auer and Esipova developed to a great degree in parallel to the artistic strivings of the Belyaev Circle. No wonder Glazunov dedicated his Violin Concerto to Auer. The similarities in their musical principles are noteworthy: a striving for grandeur and dignity. Both the composer and the teacher valued clarity of thought, neatness of detail, and technical perfection. With the years both Auer and Esipova demanded from their students an ever more serious, restrained, and “objective” approach to their playing.^{527}

This Petersburg style of playing might be called academic were it not for the overpowering temperament and acuity manifested in the playing of its most talented representatives. It was rather too full of color and life to be academic. Rather, the style—like the best works of some members of the Belyaev Circle—retained traits of Petersburg pseudoclassicism, which at that very period had become the leading architectural style in the capital of the Russian Empire.

A great distance separates pseudoclassicism from neoclassicism. The former is incomparably more conservative. This is particularly visible in composition; it is enough to compare Liadov’s pseudoclassical “Musical Snuff Box” with any piece in Stravinsky’s neoclassical Pulcinella. But in musical performance the situation is not as clear-cut. Here the transition can be much smoother, since performance is a reproductive art. Consequently, a violinist’s or pianist’s aesthetic evolution can be so much less painful than that of a composer. Still, the leap from pseudoclassicism to neoclassicism that was made by some of Auer’s students is astounding. Particularly Heifetz and Milstein are the exemplars of neoclassicism in the art of violin playing.

Both violinists came to Petersburg as outsiders. For Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, one of the few ways to a great career, fame, and wealth was mastery of the piano or, especially, the violin. Entering the Petersburg Conservatory made it possible. Glazunov gave his patronage in every possible way to talented Jews. A Russian, he was even called “King of the Jews.” Shostakovich told me about Glazunov’s famous response to the inquiry from the Russian prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, about the number of Jewish students at the Petersburg Conservatory: “We don’t keep count.”

But Glazunov inspired the respect of young musicians not only because he was a caring director. For Heifetz and Milstein he was the “Russian Brahms,” a renowned composer and for many years the symbol of musical Petersburg. In falling in love with Glazunov, Heifetz and Milstein, like hundreds of other young musicians from the provinces, fell in love with Petersburg. Milstein recalled the time spent in the Russian capital as the happiest period of his life.^{528} Petersburg was the inspiration for the majestic, restrained playing of the young violinists, a style that corresponded well to the city’s architectural style. The role of the Petersburg school of composition in this development is clear.

Their move to the West rapidly accelerated the changes in their playing. As the neoclassical tendencies of Heifetz and Milstein matured, their playing became even more refined, but also more expressive and modern. They can be considered a rightful part of the Russian neoclassical group in the West. The aesthetic closeness of Heifetz and Milstein to Stravinsky and Balanchine is obvious. In the United States, Milstein became one of Balanchine’s closest friends. With a nudge from Milstein, Balanchine created some of his best neoclassical ballets, for instance, Concerto Baroque, to the music of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D minor.^{529}

If Heifetz, Elman, and Milstein had not emigrated to the West but remained in the USSR, the development of the Soviet school of violin playing probably would have proceeded in a very different direction. But the cosmopolitan nature of their talent “pushed” them beyond the borders of Russia, as it had Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Once they moved to the United States, these violinists, together with Arturo Toscanini and Sergei Rachmaninoff, exerted an enormous influence on the American style of music making. Through recordings this style spread to the rest of the world, becoming in the end one of the most distinctive performing styles in the twentieth century. Professor Auer and the Petersburg Conservatory had every reason to be proud of their graduates.

In 1927 the magazine Muzyka i revoliutsiia (Music and Revolution) published a review of a concert by piano students of Leonid Nikolayev, a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory. The review stated, in part,

Almost all the performers control the instrument like first-class masters, they all have a large, multifaceted, amazingly free and light technique; they all have an unforced, very beautiful and gentle tone; an enormous sound range; exceptionally delicate pedaling; a high musical culture and a truly artistic approach. In terms of their devices, they are extremely restrained and economical, but their movements are absolutely relaxed and free; they have a subtle feeling for the keyboard.^{530}

Among the performers in that concert was twenty-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, who was singled out by the reviewer. Shostakovich was one of Nikolayev’s favorite students; the professor had taken on Esipova’s mantle as the most outstanding teacher of piano in the city on the Neva. Nikolayev, a well-known homosexual in Leningrad, was of medium height, taciturn but charming, with a neat part in his hair and clear gray eyes. He was a respected composer of the academic style (Horowitz and Milstein performed his Violin Sonata with great success),^{531} but he was sympathetic to the avant-garde. In particular, Prokofiev worked out his graduation program with Nikolayev, because Esipova was gravely ill by then. Nikolayev voted, against Glazunov’s objections, for awarding the prize to the young rebel. And Nikolayev was one of the first to proclaim far and wide that Shostakovich was a genius.

Shostakovich made great strides in Nikolayev’s class. My piano teacher in Leningrad, Iosif Shvarts, who had been Nikolayev’s student and lover of many years, told me how Shostakovich, then fifteen, played Beethoven’s demanding Hammerklavier Sonata: with profound thought, steely rhythm, restraint but true lyricism, and polished to the smallest detail. (Nikolayev could not stand sloppy but confident playing, calling it, as Shvarts recalled, “negligé with valor.”^{532})

Shostakovich had two strong rivals in Nikolayev’s class: Maria Yudina and Vladimir Sofronitsky. He spoke of them even a half-century later with agitation and some obvious jealousy. Sometimes Shostakovich’s enormous ambitions as a pianist are forgotten. Yet he was selected by Nikolayev to represent his class at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1927, the first international competition for pianists in interwar Europe. Shostakovich prepared for the event with great intensity, locking himself in his room and even taking a break from composing. That made it all the more painful when he received only honorable mention in Warsaw. According to many observers, the jury’s decision was unfair, but the support of the audience and the press was of little consolation to Shostakovich.^{533} After his defeat at the competition he gave up the idea of a concert career and concentrated on performing his own works.

Yudina and Sofronitsky had a different life. Known in the West only to connoisseurs, they were enormously popular in Russia, becoming cult figures. Their significance went far beyond that of musical performance. In a closed, hierarchical society, in which every member had to know his or her place as determined by the authorities and perform all duties in accordance with prescriptions handed down from above, Sofronitsky and Yudina became—in different ways—symbols of inner freedom and cultural protest.

Tall, thin, pale, and mysterious, Sofronitsky was considered one of the most handsome men in Leningrad. Women were said to have left their families and attempted suicide over this romantic musician. Sofronitsky was compared to Byron, and it was often said that he was “the ideal Hamlet.”^{534} He played Chopin and Scriabin incomparably and was married to the latter’s daughter for a while. The general opinion was that after Scriabin’s death, Sofronitsky was the best interpreter of his works. Before the revolution Scriabin’s oeuvre was considered in Russia as the highest expression of creative genius; under the Bolsheviks, his music fell into disgrace. First he was called a mystic, then a decadent, and finally a formalist. Sofronitsky stubbornly continued to play Scriabin, even giving concerts consisting only of his works, which instantly made him more than just a pianist, even a great one.

In 1942 Sofronitsky was brought out of Leningrad, which at the time was besieged by the Germans, and taken to Moscow. In 1943 he received the Stalin Prize, and in 1945 Stalin took Sofronitsky with him to the Potsdam Conference to show him off to President Truman, an amateur pianist. (Besides a trip in 1928-1929 to Warsaw and Paris, this was Sofronitsky’s second and last appearance in the West.) Despite this official attention, the pianist’s alienation from the Soviet cultural apparatus continued to grow. Sofronitsky’s son recalled how in 1948, when Shostakovich and other composers were being denounced by the authorities, Sofronitsky was playing at home and suddenly slammed down the lid of his piano, exclaiming, “I can’t play! I keep thinking that a policeman will come and say, ‘You’re not playing the right way!’”^{535}

Trying to defend his inner freedom, Sofronitsky became an alcoholic and dope addict. His audiences knew it. People held their breath when Sofronitsky brought his famous white handkerchief to his nose, right on stage. This meant that the pianist felt the need for an additional snort of cocaine.^{536} This behavior was a challenge to the strict norms of Soviet life. For the pianist and his admirers, it was a desperate declaration of the right to spontaneity and rebellion.

The next step was Sofronitsky’s refusal to tour Russia and then to give practically any public performances at all. He could be heard only at the small auditorium of the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, playing before specially invited guests. He was also reluctant to make recordings, reiterating, “Recordings are my corpses.” Nevertheless, his fame continued to grow. Legends spread about his rare semiprivate performances, each of which was turned into a mystical rite. Amateur tapes made without the pianist’s permission were passed around, precursors of the Soviet magnitizdat (to parallel samizdat, banned literature that was typed and passed clandestinely to readers), illegal tapes of nonconformist content.

Sofronitsky’s favorite authors were Dostoyevsky and Blok. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who had known the pianist well, once told me that Sofronitsky was a character out of Dostoyevsky who resembled Blok. Sofronitsky liked to say, “Think how many people went mad or committed suicide over Blok’s poems. What power they have!” He was perfectly aware of the magic impact of his playing, too.

When Sofronitsky died at the age of sixty in 1961, his health ruined by alcohol and drugs, Russian intellectuals perceived him as the lonely, persecuted Hamlet described by Pasternak in the poetry of his novel, Dr. Zhivago, a martyr musician who had disdained the cultural dogmas forced on him by the authorities and who had burned his candle at both ends but who had not given in to ideological dictate.

Maria Yudina graduated from the conservatory in Nikolayev’s class the same year as Sofronitsky. They performed together at the graduation concert, which Shostakovich considered one of the strongest musical impressions of his youth. Yudina looked just as striking as Sofronitsky: with large gray eyes on a maidenly face, she was sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa.^{537} She always wore a black pyramid-shaped dress with long, flowing sleeves and a large pectoral cross on a chain. Yudina, who was Jewish by birth, converted and became a fanatical Orthodox Christian, devoting considerable effort to church affairs. Her behavior naturally put her on a collision course with the atheistic Soviet state. Yudina was expelled from Leningrad Conservatory, where she was a teacher, and unlike Sofronitsky she never received any awards and was never allowed to perform outside the Soviet Union.

On and off the stage, Yudina was a proselytizer. Her interpretations, which drew overflow crowds, were always passionate sermons, delivered with imperiousness and conviction. Yudina destroyed forever the stereotype of “female” piano playing as something gentle and tender. Her performances were majestic, with sharp contrasts. Her programs were full of contrasts, too. She would play Bach and Beethoven and then, skipping Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff—that is, the most popular part of the repertoire—turn to contemporary works.

Before the war Yudina promoted the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, and then of Bartok and Webern, and in the final years of her life, she was taken with the works of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono. She was a powerhouse of ideas and information about the avant-garde. Her influence was revolutionary and liberating in that area, but it was not confined to just that. With equal passion, Yudina studied the lives of the saints, church architecture, and the poetry of Leningrad dadaists, many of whom had been friends of her youth. An admirer and connoisseur of Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov, she was capable of suddenly interrupting her concert to start reciting the poetry of the futurist Khlebnikov or the banned Pasternak. Every such performance was regarded by the regime as a political act, of course. Although Yudina was often banned from performing, she was never arrested.

A possible explanation for the authorities’ toleration is a story I first heard from Shostakovich that was later corroborated by others. Stalin, allegedly hearing Yudina playing a Mozart piano concerto on the radio, demanded a recording of the performance. No one dared tell him that it had been a live broadcast. Yudina was hastily called to the studio to produce a special record overnight—one copy for Stalin.

When Stalin received the record, he sent Yudina a large sum of money. She thanked him in a letter, explaining that she was donating the funds to her local church and would pray for God to forgive Stalin his grievous sins before the people. This seemed like a suicidal act, but contrary to expectations, nothing happened to her. It is rumored that Yudina’s Mozart recording was on the record player near Stalin’s bed when he was found dead.

Like Sofronitsky, Yudina was a passionate partisan of Petersburg. In her old age, she was flattered by comparisons to Peter the Great. In fact, her aquiline profile, especially when she was playing, did resemble that of the emperor. On stage, she sometimes placed a picture of the Bronze Horseman on the piano. After a concert in which her playing had been particularly compelling, she explained, “I was in the thrall of the Bronze Horseman today, and I wanted to convey the hoof beats, the chase, the fear.”

Yudina could be called the emissary of the American branch of Petersburg modernism in the Soviet Union. When the New York City Ballet brought Balanchine’s works there for the first time, she compared them with the Pergamon Altar, Bach’s Passions, and Wagner’s Parsifal.^{538} Yudina adored Stravinsky and played almost all his piano works. When Stravinsky came to Russia in 1962, the elderly composer was very embarrassed that Yudina, at age sixty-three, tried to kneel and kiss his hand at every meeting.

Yudina was a personality given to exaltations. Many people, including Shostakovich, who had the greatest respect for her musical talents, found her behavior affected and pretentious. But I always believed Yudina’s extravagant gestures manifested the same fierce temperament that surged in her performances. She violated one convention after another. She never married, wore sneakers even in winter, and could spend weeks sleeping in the bathtub. When we met, she tried to convert me to Russian Orthodoxy with her first words, refusing to discuss musical topics. But since our conversation lasted over five hours, I managed to turn it to questions of culture. The result was the only published conversation with Yudina that I know of, covering aesthetic themes and her musical credo. Alas, it first appeared in Leningrad only in 1972, almost a year and a half after her death at age seventy-one.

Yudina could have used Akhmatova’s poem of 1961 to speak for herself:

Heifetz and Milstein, who belonged to the same school as Yudina but left for the West for “the protection of alien wings,” conquered the world with their art and significantly expanded the cultural horizons of multitudes of music lovers. They began interpreting music in a new way, creating a revolution of sorts in their sphere. Remaining in Russia, Yudina and Sofronitsky also achieved unique musical heights. In fact, their musical evolution paralleled in many ways the development of Heifetz and Milstein in the direction of severe neoclassicism. In addition, Yudina and Sofronitsky also became models of behavior and examples of inner independence for artists in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet state. Their ethical role was enormous, even though it has been little described until now. Thus, the influence of Yudina and Sofronitsky was both narrowed (since they could be heard only in the USSR) and expanded (moving beyond the purely musical into the ethical and political spheres).

An analogous situation developed with the great alumni of the Petersburg school of composition. Stravinsky chose life “beneath foreign skies” and became arguably the leading composer of the twentieth century. Modern music is impossible to imagine without his achievements. Shostakovich remained “with his people,” and his music, which has sometimes been accused of aesthetic provincialism, became a diary of the Soviet era. Prokofiev emigrated but then returned to the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the fate of his music reflects his ambivalence: it did not acquire universal traits, as did Stravinsky’s work, but it is not tied so closely to recent Russian history as is Shostakovich’s music. Diaghilev realized this, saying in 1929 about Prokofiev, “He needs to strengthen the ethical base of his creativity. That is why I insisted on his doing The Prodigal Son.”^{539}

The question does not arise here of which path was preferable and more in keeping with the spirit of Petersburg. Even far from his home town, Stravinsky, like Balanchine and Nabokov, remained true to it. On the other hand, some of the compromises Shostakovich was forced to make caused him to be criticized for violating Petersburg’s stringent ethical norms. It is important to emphasize that having gone through the Petersburg school, a talent could develop and realize itself both in Russia and beyond its borders. Besides the sense of belonging to a glorious tradition, this school imparted a solid grounding of craftsmanship, professional curiosity, restrained irony, and nostalgia without sentimentality.

The city in which Shostakovich grew up was wide open to the temptations of modern culture. In art, literature, and theater, avant-garde influences from the West cross-pollinated with bold native attempts. In 1923 the first research center in the world for the avant-garde was founded in Petrograd, the State Institute of Arts Culture (GINKHUK). Its director was Casimir Malevich, who had moved to Petrograd from Moscow and continued to develop his visionary suprematist ideas; the institute’s departments were headed by Matyushin, Punin, and Malevich’s eternal rival, Vladimir Tatlin.

In 1923 at GINKHUK Tatlin produced a play based on Zangezi, a “zaumny” (“non-sensical”) dramatic poem by the futurist poet Khlebnikov. In Petrograd, Tatlin also created the much discussed Monument to the Third International: he planned for a gigantic metal spiral (he intended it to be four hundred meters tall) to straddle the Neva River in the middle of the city, like the mast of a huge sailing ship or Utopian spaceship. This bold symbol for the new Petrograd was supposed to have replaced the Bronze Horseman, but it was never built and remained but a model that teased the imagination, delighting Punin and his friends. They already viewed Petrograd as the capital of the international avant-garde movement.

In the twenties Petrograd-Leningrad was visited by many leading modern composers of the West. The most important was Alban Berg, who came to see his opera Wozzeck in 1927. Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Alfredo Casella, and the émigré Prokofiev came to perform. Igor Stravinsky did not show up then, but his works were regularly performed in Leningrad at that time. We know that Shostakovich heard many of Stravinsky’s works, including Renard, Song of the Nightingale, Histoire du soldat, and the opera Mavra, and that he had taken part in the Leningrad premiere of Les Noces in 1926, as the second piano player (Yudina played first piano). Shostakovich also played Stravinsky’s Serenade in A and his piano concerto, which, he said, he sometimes imagined that he himself had composed.

One of Shostakovich’s most influential advisers after he graduated from the conservatory was the inveterate modernist music critic, Boris Asafyev. Asafyev spoke in a soft, hypnotic voice, but his erudite articles, published under the pen name Igor Glebov, silenced his opponents. He was a dedicated proselytizer of avant-garde music in Leningrad. Glazunov considered Asafyev not without justification as the main reason that modernist works were constantly being performed at the city’s two opera houses and the philharmonic. A musician from the hostile camp fumed,

Just look at Asafyev’s subtle tactics: first as the critic Igor Glebov he publishes a detailed article in the newspaper praising and advertising a new decadent work, unknown to anyone; then as artistic consultant to both theaters and to the philharmonic, Asafyev makes sure it is performed. And finally, once again as critic Igor Glebov, he hails that performance in print, handing out medals and honors to absolutely everyone involved. Now, how could the conductors resist?

Asafyev headed the music department at the Institute of the History of the Arts, a research institute founded before the revolution by Count Valentin Zubov, called “the red count” because he cooperated with the Bolsheviks and voluntarily gave them his luxurious town house on St. Isaac’s Square. The institute attracted some of the most brilliant minds of the Opoyaz association for its literature department: Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, and Tomashevsky. Work was in full swing in the Zubov House; people from all over the city came to hear the eloquent lecturers who proposed new ideas on the cutting edge of modern cultural theory. The theater department, where the idol was Meyerhold, created radical new conceptions of the interaction between actors and audience. Under the institute’s aegis, there were concerts and exhibitions, evenings devoted to playing and discussing the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and Satie. Sofronitsky played Scriabin; Yudina and Steinberg gave a recital in memory of Dante. Shostakovich attended these concerts regularly.

In that heady atmosphere of modernism, Shostakovich took a decisive step in the direction of the avant-garde. He burned a pile of his early, traditional works, including an opera based on Pushkin’s Gypsies. The musical language of Shostakovich’s new compositions grew more radical, using constructivist principles in developing the melody and harmony, dissonances, sound clusters, and even a factory whistle as an orchestral instrument. These works also bore revolutionary titles and texts: a piano sonata (1926) was called “The October,” in honor of the Bolshevik revolution, and in the Second Symphony, “Dedication to October” (1927), the chorus sang in the finale:

Shostakovich’s Third Symphony (1929) was called “First of May,” after the day of international solidarity of the proletariat, an official holiday in the Soviet Union. It too had a choral finale, with a text that included these words:

Any translation would only improve the quality of this “poem,” which in Russian sounds like poorly rhymed slogans. Shostakovich understood that, of course, and he wrote to a friend as he began to compose the “Dedication to October” symphony, “I received Bezymensky’s poetry, which upset me very much. Very bad poetry.”

Why then did Shostakovich feel the need to use this “very bad poetry” in his avant-garde symphony? The answer is simple: the symphony was written on commission from the Propaganda Department of the music sector of the State Publishing House (that is, the Soviet government) especially for the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. The commission was an honor and a well-paying one, and Shostakovich, who needed the money, tried to complete it on time and without friction with his employer. There could be no question of rejecting the text for the finale, which had been proposed from above. The “Dedication to October” was immediately performed in Leningrad and Moscow.

Reading the art articles and creative manifestos of the twenties, one is struck by the constant reappearance of just a few cultural terms. The most common are “proletarian culture,” “fellow travelers of the revolution,” and “social commission.” At different times, different people endowed these terms with different meanings. At first the creation of proletarian culture was the official goal of the Communist Party, which proclaimed that in the new state of workers and peasants, the corrupt bourgeois civilization would wither away, making way for proletarian art for the proletariat.

Many theoreticians of socialism sincerely believed that the creative powers of “liberated” people would instantly produce thousands of proletarian Shakespeares and Beethovens and that very little would be left of the old culture. Entry into the Communist paradise was closed to Tchaikovsky’s Petersburg works, for example. “Tchaikovsky’s music is melancholy, imbued with a specifically intellectual psychology, and expresses the yearnings of a frustrated life; we do not need it.”^{540}

However, it soon became obvious that a mass manifestation of proletarian geniuses was not to be expected in the near future. In practice, the term “proletarian culture” came to mean merely politically correct—from the point of view of the authorities—works done by people who managed to prove their proletarian origins. Naturally, it was but a small part of the general flow of contemporary Russian culture. But it was these works, though mostly of very poor quality, that were used as a model by the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian writers (RAPP) and its sister organization in the music field, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), founded in the 1920s. All other culture in Soviet Russia loyal to the new regime was created by “fellow travelers of the revolution,” in the Bolshevik definition. When the term was introduced by Leon Trotsky, one of the new leaders, it had positive overtones. But the never-ending attacks by “proletarian” cultural figures on the “fellow travelers” made their status unstable and ambiguous.

The cultural administration in Soviet Russia manipulated the term “fellow traveler” quite arbitrarily. In fact, most of the intelligentsia that remained in the country were “fellow travelers” to some degree. The only ones who protested loudly against the Bolsheviks were Russian émigrés in the West, who did not risk their lives by doing so. Inside Russia, the opportunity for open political protest was rapidly being reduced to nought. But the range of ideological and cultural cooperation with the state was still broad: from utter servility to a false service that barely disguised the author’s subversive intentions.

For the authorities, the main criterion separating good cultural fellow travelers from bad ones was the acceptance or rejection of the social commission, that is, the readiness to fulfill “in high-quality artistic form” the current needs of the ideological apparatus. Silence or work “for the desk drawer,” in the Russian expression, were regarded in these circumstances as hostile acts—and were punished accordingly. For many talented and honest intellectuals, the question was, how does one reconcile the conditions of the state’s “social commission” with the demands of creative conscience?

Making his way in the artistic ferment of Leningrad in the twenties, the sensitive and impressionable Shostakovich could observe the innumerable variations of that deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the authorities. His genius was threatened from two sides: it could be stifled while still in its infancy by the state, but it could also be corroded and gradually dissipate as the result of a multitude of small compromises, or one big one, with the authorities. There were more than enough models for both kinds of behavior. Shostakovich chose the course of survival, but not at any cost.

He was in luck: RAPM greeted “Dedication to October” with enthusiasm and embraced the composer. (The modernists were also delighted by Shostakovich’s Second Symphony.) Asafyev tried to persuade Shostakovich to write an opera, because Berg’s Wozzeck, which had come to Leningrad thanks to Asafyev’s efforts, had made an indelible impression on the young composer. After an intensive search for a subject, Shostakovich settled on Gogol’s The Nose, from his cycle of Petersburg tales.

Written in two and a half months, The Nose became the early Shostakovich’s most “Petersburg” composition. Created at a critical moment in the development of the Petersburg mythos, The Nose seemed to sum up the contemporary efforts to destroy that mythos and simultaneously feel around for a path to its continued development. When The Nose was performed in Leningrad in 1930, one critic called it “an anarchist’s hand grenade.” The opera did go off at the height of official efforts to obliterate the mythos. An army of cultural workers was needed for that campaign, but the anarchist Shostakovich slipped from their ranks.

In 1921 the Petrograd journal Dom Iskusstv (House of the Arts) printed an article by Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled “I am Afraid,” which caused a great stir. He openly declared that the Soviet regime was stifling Russian literature, encouraging accommodating hacks and forcing honest writers to be silent. “Real literature can exist only where it is done not by obedient and dependable clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”

Zamyatin’s passionate protest made an even greater impact because it came from an author loyal to the revolution (he had at one time been a member of the Bolshevik Party) and who was respected for his independence. His incorruptibility was well known in Petrograd. “Fastidious and restrained, he never made a single gesture that resembled kowtowing…. So many writers could, by comparing their behavior with that of Zamyatin, determine unerringly the degree of their deviation from the true and straight path.”^{541}

It was said that Zamyatin carved his works as if out of ivory, weighing and polishing every word, neatly creating a composition that in its mosaic and geometric shape resembled, as D. S. Mirsky pointed out, a cubist canvas. That is the way Zamyatin wrote the symbolic story “The Cave,” in which reviewers saw a requiem for the intellectual dwellers of old Petersburg, doomed to destruction in the grim conditions of the early postrevolutionary years.

The general background of the story is the dying, frozen Petrograd, returned to the Ice Age (by whom? by what?—let the reader decide), and against it, the barely moving shadows of half-dead cultural figures…. The impression is chilling and oppressive. Yes. This is how the intellectual, chilled to the bone by the severe weather of the times, died out in the struggle with the elements.^{542}

Zamyatin’s most famous work is his novel We, completed in 1921 in Petrograd, an ambitious anti-utopia and precursor of Huxley’s Brave New World, as well as an influence on Orwell’s 1984. It was published in New York City in English in 1924 but was immediately banned by the censors in Zamyatin’s homeland and not published there until the late 1980s. Nevertheless, We, which was almost unknown to Soviet readers, was subjected to a constant barrage of hostile criticism in the press, as were most other works by Zamyatin. He complained about this in a letter to the Soviet authorities in 1929: “Since 1921 I have been the main target of Soviet criticism. Since that year, the reviews of my work have been nothing but a dictionary of foul language, beginning with ‘class enemy,’ ‘kulak,’ ‘bourgeois,’ ‘double-dyed reactionary,’ and ‘bison’ all the way to ‘spy.’”

In 1922 the authorities arrested Zamyatin and put him in solitary confinement. An ironic twist of fate had him in the same prison (even the same cell block) as the one in which he had spent time before the revolution for being a Bolshevik. After his release, they first planned to expel him to the West but then changed their minds. Zamyatin went abroad only in 1931, after appealing to Stalin with a desperate letter stating that he preferred exile to “literary death.” Zamyatin died in Paris in 1937. In his own country he was recalled only a half-century later, even though some of the most noted Soviet writers were his pupils.

Called the “grand master of literature” in Petrograd, Zamyatin believed that the craft of writing could be learned. He was an outstanding mentor for Petrograd prose, as Gumilyov had been for Petrograd poetry. In the former palace of the merchants Eliseyev (renamed the House of the Arts), Zamyatin founded a literary studio. In a small room that smelled like a tobacco shop, and furnished with a metal bed and a rickety chair, Zamyatin, dressed elegantly in the British manner, offered students a course of lectures on the mastery of fiction, with titles like “Plot and Story,” “Rhythm in Prose,” “Style,” “Spacing Words,” and “The Psychology of Creativity.” This was like a monastery for budding authors, with a strict, demanding, but just abbot.

The most talented of Zamyatin’s students organized a literary group in 1921 called the Serapion Brothers, after the novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann. (“They were going to call themselves Nevsky Prospect originally,” recalled Viktor Shklovsky.^{543}) They were young men but rich in life experience; according to one of the Serapion Brothers,

Eight people embodied among themselves an orderly, a typesetter, an officer, a cobbler, a physician, a fakir, a clerk, a soldier, an actor, a teacher, a cavalryman, and a singer; they had to hold down dozens of the most menial jobs, they had fought in a world war, participated in a civil war, and could not be impressed by hunger, or disease, for they had looked death in the face too long and too often.^{544}

The Serapions insisted on their apolitical stance. When asked whether they were for or against the Communists, they would reply, “We are with the hermit Serapion.” This sounded quite daring under a Communist dictatorship. Lev Lunts, the group’s theoretician, insisted: “We do not want utilitarianism. We do not write for propaganda.”

Besides Zamyatin, another strong influence on the Serapion Brothers came from Shklovsky, who was so attached to his disciples that he considered himself part of their group. Encouraged by Zamyatin and Shklovsky, the Serapion Brothers blissfully experimented, especially in the area of plot, which they tried to make entertaining and fast-paced in the Western manner. In general, the Serapion Brothers’ Western orientation made them a typical Petersburg group. Gorky wrote of the Serapions, “They understand that Russia can live normally only in constant communication with the spirit and genius of the West.” Zamyatin even compared these young writers with the acmeists. Both groups shared a desire to avoid abstract symbolism, a heightened awareness of the objects of everyday life, a striving to make each word meaningful, and a love for vivid psychological detail, often with an exotic flavor.

But of course next to the Serapion Brothers, the acmeists seemed like relics from another era. After all, they did not write about the dens of thieves as did Veniamin Kaverin, or partisans who kill an infant, like Vsevolod Ivanov, or about soldiers who, crazed by blood, performed a lynching, like Mikhail Slonimsky. Those were shocking subjects. But the most daring and also the most famous of the Serapion Brothers was the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko. He rejected many traditions of Russian classical literature. Though all around, demands were aired for a “red Leo Tolstoy” to hail the revolution in epic novels, Zoshchenko started writing short humorous stories from the life of urban dwellers instead, explaining, “Until now we still have the tradition of the former intelligentsia’s literature, in which the main object of art is the psychological life of the intellectual. We must break down this tradition, because we can’t go on writing as if nothing had happened in the country.” And what had happened was that after the dislocations of war and revolution, many peasants poured into the cities, creating a huge new stratum. These new urban dwellers were now often setting the tone in social and public life. Traditionally oriented Soviet literature continued cautiously to avoid this type; but Zoshchenko changed that almost single-handedly.

Not only did he make this triumphant “new man,” uneducated and unsightly, the sole hero of his works, but he began writing in the persona of that obnoxious Philistine. He created the literary mask of a dull, angry, greedy, and aggressive human amoeba, insisting that this amoeba was the true author of his works. Not only the dialogue but the entire fabric of Zoshchenko’s early prose consists of the phantasmagoric Soviet “newspeak”: the grotesque, ridiculous attempts of his narrator hero to express himself with authority by means of wild neologisms and meaningless but pompous-sounding word combinations (which make Zoshchenko’s best works practically untranslatable). This real revolution in Russian literature was all the more effective because Zoshchenko’s stories were stylized with virtuoso panache and polished with lapidary precision.

Zoshchenko’s attitude toward his hero was complex: he hated him, feared him, and pitied him. The average reader, fooled by the superficial comedy and simplicity, did not sense this ambivalence in Zoshchenko’s stories. Zoshchenko said sarcastically, “I write very compactly. My sentences are short. Accessible to the poor. Perhaps that is why I have so many readers.” Hundreds of thousands of these new “poor”—financially, morally, emotionally—readers made Zoshchenko one of the richest writers in the Soviet Union. His books came out in dozens of editions, in huge printings, and sold out immediately. He received thousands of letters. He had only to step into the street to be surrounded by a crowd, like Chaliapin. Yet unlike Chaliapin, Zoshchenko was not an impressive sight. Shklovsky described him as “a man of medium height. He has a yellowish face. Ukrainian eyes. And a careful tread. He has a very soft voice. The manner of a man who wants to end a big scandal very politely.”^{545}

This desire of Zoshchenko’s “not to stick out” was noted by Chukovsky, too. “Zoshchenko is very careful—I would say, fearful.”^{546} Yet Zoshchenko had been a courageous officer in World War I and was decorated many times. The “table of contents” of his life, which Zoshchenko compiled in 1922, is telling:

Zoshchenko had lofty and even slightly old-fashioned ideas of honor and dignity, but he wanted to be published and censorship was pervasive. All the Serapion Brothers had problems with the censors. Chukovsky recorded a conversation in 1928 with Mikhail Slonimsky, who complained, “I’m writing one thing now that certainly will not pass censorship—it’s for myself, and it will spend all its time in my desk drawer; and I’m writing another one for publication, a terrible one.” Chukovsky agreed with him: “We are in the clutches of a censorship worse than any that had ever been in Russia, that is true. Every publishing house, every journal has its own censor, and their ideal is propagandistic cliche elevated to ritual.”^{547}

In that situation, one had to make accommodations—both psychologically and as a purely practical matter. Daily life was difficult and often disgusting. But blaming the government for that became riskier every day. In that sense Chukovsky’s notation made in 1927 after a walk with Zoshchenko is characteristic. “He cursed contemporary times, but then we both came to the conclusion that nothing can be done with the Russians, and that we can’t come up with anything better, and that the fault is not that of communists but of those little Russian people whom they are trying to remake.”^{548}

Comparisons were made early on between Zoshchenko and Gogol. Zoshchenko had studied not only the works but also the biography of Gogol, in which he found much in common with his own life as a writer: the same lack of understanding from critics and readers who wanted only “a good laugh” ; the same difficulties with the censors; the same desire to “improve the morals” of society through satire. Both writers ended their lives in madness. But there was little in common between them in their daily lives, because conditions had changed so much. Zoshchenko could not, like Gogol, escape to Italy from the Russia which had become unbearable to him. Left face to face with his hero, the modern “little man,” who unexpectedly for the intellectuals had taken charge, Zoshchenko regarded him all the more closely, and that gradually led to a tragic closing of the gap between the writer and his prose characters. As Kaverin stated about Zoshchenko, “He was particularly interested in insignificant, unnoticeable people, with a broken spirit…. And in life he tended to socialize with people who were mediocre, dullish, and ordinary.”^{549}

It is interesting to follow this process in Zoshchenko’s letters, which with time came to resemble fragments from his stylized works. And the same thing happened to him in his contact with others: Zoshchenko began speaking in the abbreviated, clumsy language of his protagonists. The author himself confirmed that he had consciously stylized not only his literary manner but his behavior as well. “I was born into a family of the intelligentsia. I was not essentially a new man or a new writer. And my innovation in literature was totally my invention…. the language that I took and that, at first, seemed funny and intentionally distorted to the critics was, in fact, extremely simple and natural.”

This acceptance of the moronic language of the masses as “simple and natural” was an important step for Zoshchenko, and not only for him. Many Petersburg intellectuals, young Shostakovich among them, began to stylize their everyday speech to match that misapplied bureaucratese that came to be known as “Zoshchenkoese.” Psychologically it eased the burdens of daily life in an often hostile environment that was, unfortunately, dominant. At the same time pretending to buy into the new ideology sent an almost subversive message in a superficially acceptable political packaging.

This duality becomes particularly clear in the attitude of Zoshchenko and his followers to the Petersburg mythos. On the one hand, their work and behavior could be regarded as a last ditch attack on that mythos, as it had developed in the prerevolutionary era, that should have satisfied the new regime. On the other hand, the attack was launched in such an open and absurd manner that it cast doubt on the sincerity of the “new nihilists” and discredited the revolutionary idea behind them. In fact, the mythos mocked in such an eccentric way became only stronger.

The literary and life mask created by Zoshchenko was the result of virtuoso craftsmanship and careful stylistic polish. Shostakovich appreciated that. Throughout his life he considered Zoshchenko a great writer, could recite pages of his work by heart, and sought opportunities to work with him. After Zoshchenko’s death, he made a pilgrimage to his grave near Leningrad. Zoshchenko used to say that Shostakovich’s understanding of his writing was “very correct, even faultlessly so. His opinion was always dearer to me than the opinion of a professional critic.”

Zoshchenko’s characterization of Shostakovich is very perceptive. “Hard, caustic, extremely smart, probably strong, despotic, and not quite kind…. He is made up of enormous contradictions. One cancels out the other in him. This is conflict in the highest degree. It is almost a catastrophe.”^{550}

In adopting Zoshchenko’s style as a tool for everyday communication, Shostakovich (and some of his friends) were making a gesture of accommodation but not capitulation to the regime. Zoshchenko could announce, “I am temporarily representing the proletarian writer.” But the very awkwardness and naïveté of that statement was, of course, parodic. There was a game on, in which the border between political engagement and mocking that engagement became blurred. Life under the Communists was accompanied by constant, ironic self-commentary. This simultaneously made life easier and also made it unbearable. Very few people could take that tension, and Zoshchenko broke completely toward the end. Shostakovich had greater endurance.

Yuri Tynyanov gave a sympathetic review to the anthology of the Serapion Brothers, published in 1922, noting “the decline of the poetic wave.” “Prose must soon take the place that just recently had belonged exclusively to poetry.” In fact, a boom in prose came quickly, and it resulted in a phenomenon I call the “new Petersburg prose,” a term I am introducing to distinguish the “new” from the “old,” which was created in the nineteenth century.

At the turn of the century poetry was decisively ahead of prose, and the leading literary figures were all poets. Prose came into its own in the first half of the 1920s, pulling both poets and theoreticians of literature into its orbit. I call it “Petersburg” not only out of geographic considerations but also because one of its main themes was the city of Petersburg-Leningrad, old and new. It measured itself against the old Petersburg masters, their motifs and symbols, and distorted and parodied them.

It was a powerful movement that yielded more than one masterpiece. Yet it was never gathered under a single literary umbrella. But almost all the creators of the new Petersburg prose knew one another and read and learned from one another. Many even shared the same roof, since they lived at or regularly visited the House of the Arts, founded by Maxim Gorky to bolster the Petrograd intelligentsia, who were dying out from hunger and cold. Before the revolution the enormous dark red building at the intersection of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika River had housed a major bank, the luxurious quarters of the Petersburg millionaire Eliseyev, and also the English Shop, visits to which are described in Speak, Memory by Nabokov, who is tied by many threads to the new Petersburg prose.

It was at the House of the Arts that the Serapion Brothers group was born. There lived the poets Khodasevich and Mandelstam, the ballet critic Volynsky, the literary theoretician Shklovsky, and the writer Olga Forsh, who described the house as a “crazy ship.” This was the title of her experimental roman à clef (even the modern Shklovsky found it “unbalanced”), which compared life in the city to a stormy sea, where the Petrograd Noah’s Ark was buffeted by the powerful waves: “It seemed that the house was not a house at all, but a ship that appeared out of nowhere and was speeding somewhere.” Forsh’s vigorously written book was not made up of traditional chapters but instead was divided into “The First Wave,” “The Second Wave,” and so on up to the ninth, which “washed away” the last refuge of the writers and poets, banned by Petrograd boss Zinoviev.

The ship metaphor, which for a time seemed to have replaced the bronze horseman, was popular in the new Petersburg prose. One of its founders and masters, Zamyatin, began his short story “Mamai,” which was published in 1921 in the House of the Arts magazine, as follows:

In the evenings and at night, there were no more buildings in Petersburg: there were six-story stone ships. A ship speeds along the stone waves, a solitary six-story world, amid other solitary six-story ships; the ship sparkles with the lights of its innumerable cabins onto the stormy stone ocean of streets. And in the cabins there are no residents, there are only passengers.

The whole city seemed to be a huge ship that had broken away from its anchor and with its desperate passengers was being pulled by an overpowering current to its doom. Mandelstam wrote these apocalyptic lines in that period:

This poem, like many others in those years comparing the former capital to a ship, is undoubtedly tied to the ancient image of the “ship of the dead,” which is how its inhabitants perceived their city. That ship wandered between sunrise and sunset, birth and death. Another traditional image was combined with it—the flood. An ark floating between life and death gave hope for a future rebirth—an important theme of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose about Petersburg.

Mandelstam was one of the strangest and most colorful passengers of the Crazy Ship; according to Shklovsky, “he grazed like a lamb around the building, seeking shelter in the rooms like Homer.” Because he was short and his literary style so imposing, the residents of the House of the Arts called Mandelstam “the marble fly.” In turn, he called Shklovsky the “merry cobbler” because he liked to sing while he worked (and more stingingly, “the professor from the high road,” apparently because of Shklovsky’s strident polemics). Mandelstam saw Zoshchenko almost daily in that period because the latter almost never left the House of the Arts, the cradle of the new Petersburg prose. The atmosphere on the Crazy Ship was aptly described by Annenkov:

Lectures, conferences, debates, readings, laughter, curses, more laughter, arguments, sometimes wild arguments—about Cervantes, chicken pox, Dostoyevsky, cholera, roast chicken … oh, yes: about roast chicken. I remember that Zoshchenko once said that roast chickens must have learned to fly very well, since you can’t seem to catch any at all nowadays.^{551}

As Shklovsky recalled, “We sailed, talking, we were still young.” Being on the Crazy Ship, it was impossible to avoid mutual influence: everyone lived openly in close quarters, the “passengers” reading their latest works to one another; everyone knew who was working on what and how everyone was evolving. It was a marathon literary workshop of numerous talented individuals in close professional interaction. Typically, Mandelstam knew many of Zoshchenko’s short stories by heart, as if they were poems.

This attitude toward Zoshchenko’s prose as if it were “high Biblical lyricism” (Chukovsky’s expression) seems paradoxical in view of Zoshchenko’s style and protagonists. But the Petersburg connoisseurs had an acute awareness of Zoshchenko’s ties to the works of Gogol and the early Dostoyevsky. In Zoshchenko’s novella The Nanny Goat, the petty clerk Zabezhkin goes out onto Nevsky Prospect “out of curiosity: after all, there was a variety of people, and the stores had god only knows what, and it was funny to read what people were eating in which restaurant.” In his imagination, Zabezhkin, in an allusion to Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, saves a lady in a black dress and veil from some hooligans; she turns out to be the daughter of

some trust’s director. Or even simpler: A little old intellectual is walking along. And suddenly falls. As from dizziness. Zabezhkin says to him … “Oh, oh, where do you live?” … “A coach!” … “Hold him up!” … And the little old man, may a mosquito fly up his nose, is an American citizen…. “Here,” he’ll say, “here’s a trillion rubles for you, Zabezhkin.”

This evokes the classic passage from Gogol: “But even stranger are the things that happen on Nevsky Prospect. O, don’t trust that Nevsky Prospect! I always wrap my cape more tightly around me when I walk on it and I try not to look at all at the objects I come across. It’s all deceit, all dreams, it’s all not what it seems!”

Zoshchenko’s affection for the Nevsky Prospect sung by Gogol is broken by the prism of parody. This is the alienation described by Shklovsky. The alienation effect is achieved by an intentionally infantile tone of the narrative. And Mandelstam, who according to Akhmatova regarded Zoshchenko very highly, used the same method in his prose work about Petersburg in the 1920s, called The Noise of Time. Mandelstam described “the grandeur of a military capital as seen through the glowing eyes of a five-year-old” (as Akhmatova put it).

With the years Zoshchenko’s prose became more and more “transparent,” moving in that sense from Gogol to Pushkin. The basic elements of Pushkin’s prose Zoshchenko once defined as “entertainment, brevity and clarity of narration, extreme grace of form, and irony.” Undoubtedly, this is also Zoshchenko’s secret self-description, as well as that of the new Petersburg prose as a whole.

A writer who surpassed Zoshchenko in a desire for simplicity and laconic writing was Leonid Dobychin, a remote and lonely man who managed to produce three small books before vanishing in 1936 after a vicious critical campaign against him for his “formalism” (he is believed to have committed suicide). Dobychin’s works, which were greatly esteemed among Leningrad writers, were met with hostility by the critics as collections of “man-in-the-street gossip, foul anecdotes, and operetta episodes.” A critic reviewing Dobychin’s book fumed, “The streets of Leningrad are filled with various people, most of whom are healthy, life-loving and energetic builders of socialism, but the author writes: ‘Gnats bustled.’”^{552}

Dobychin’s stories were formed of short, “naked” sentences: “They were breaking into stores. It reeked of oil. Rooks with twigs in their beaks flew up.” The narrative constantly breaks off; the halting rhythm emphasizes the horror and dislocation in which Dobychin’s characters find themselves—petty clerks terrified by the Soviet regime and desperately trying to adjust to it. Memories of the old life flash through their distorted imaginations like ugly visions:

“In Petersburg I saw someone once,” said the round-cheeked Suslova, dreamily staring at the cups (one had the Winter Palace, the other the Admiralty Spire). “I don’t know, maybe it was the empress herself: I was walking past the palace and suddenly a carriage pulls up, a lady leaps out and flutters into the entry way.”

“Maybe it was the housekeeper with the shopping,” replied Kozlova.

Dobychin’s work was an extreme expression of the attempts by some masters of the new Petersburg prose to achieve simplicity and a laconic tone. At the opposite pole was the loquacious surrealist story, “The Ratcatcher,” by Alexander Grin, perhaps the best “mythologized” depiction of Petrograd’s dangerous life in the early 1920s.

Grin, described by his neighbor Shklovsky as being “gloomy and quiet, like a convict in the middle of his term,” also lived in the House of the Arts. Grin rarely left his small, cold room and the denizens of the house quipped that he must have been training his cockroaches. Grin worked furiously on his manuscripts at a kitchen table, jumping up occasionally to pace in order to warm up. Back in February 1914 he had published a visionary story about the destruction of Petersburg by earthquake. There was still half a year before World War I, but Grin’s vivid prose was already painting prophetic pictures of chaos and destruction. Their prophecy was recalled in the horrible days of the German blockade of the city in 1941-1944:

Frozen in place, I saw an abyss opening into the bowels of the earth; people, crumbling walls of buildings, corpses and horses, fell and vanished in the gaping emptiness with the speed of a waterfall. The sundered earth shook…. Blasts like cannon fire roared from every direction; it was the sound of houses falling, flattened to the ground. Following that overwhelming roar came another, growing like an avalanche—the screams of dying Petersburg.

Grin had close ties to the Serapion Brothers in his passion for entertaining and avant-garde fantastic subjects, which he made seem quite plausible through the use of numerous convincing details, both descriptive and psychological. For his “Ratcatcher,” which ostensibly described an incredible event that took place in Petrograd in the spring of 1920, Grin used a real but eerie-looking scene he had observed in the building where he lived. As Mandelstam recalled, “The rooms were underheated, but the building had virgin reserves of fuel: an abandoned bank, around forty empty rooms knee-deep in thick bank cardboard boxes. Anyone could go pick them up, but we didn’t dare, however Shklovsky would sometimes go into those woods and return with his quarry. The fireplace would crackle with mounds of office papers.” Grin regularly accompanied Shklovsky on these expeditions for lifesaving paper for the fire, and he placed the hero of “The Ratcatcher” in the endless corridors and passages filled with paper snowdrifts and made him meet the evil and powerful rats, who could take on human form at will, and who were planning to conquer Petrograd. It was a powerful allegory for the struggle for survival in that quickly emptying and dying city.

The House of the Arts was also the theme of Khodasevich’s memoir, published in the late 1930s in Paris. In describing the Petrograd of the early 1920s he expressed an idea that was very important for understanding the genesis of the new Petersburg prose: “There are people who grow better-looking in the coffin; I think that was the case with Pushkin. Undoubtedly, that was the case with Petersburg. That beauty is temporary, ephemeral. It is followed by the terrible ugliness of decomposition. But in contemplating it there is an inexpressible, thrilling pleasure.” Khodasevich also compared the House of the Arts with “a ship, sailing through darkness, blizzard, and rain.”

Writers had an acute sense of the moment’s historical significance and tried to capture Petersburg’s image in unprecedented transition before it was too late. No other comparably brief period of time—just a few years—in the city’s history had elicited such an upsurge of memoir and quasi memoir that was stylistically and ideologically intertwined.

Shklovsky reminisced about life on the Crazy Ship in his best book of memoirs, Sentimental Journey:

Imagine a strange city.

They don’t distribute firewood. That is, they do somewhere, but a line a thousand people long is waiting and can’t wait long enough. They create red tape to make a person give up and go away. There’s not enough anyway.

And all they give is one bundle.

Tables, chairs, cornices, and butterfly boxes have all been burned.

A friend burned his library. But that is terribly hard. You have to tear the books up and burn the pages in wads.

Shklovsky’s evocative, crisp style is typical of the new Petersburg prose. Borrowing his title from his favorite writer, Lawrence Sterne, Shklovsky uses a quotidian voice to speak of the most terrible things. Khodasevich noted that in the face of impending separation with the past, you develop a desire to preserve memories of it as thoroughly as possible. That emotion urged Shklovsky to write stylized, ironic memoirs. Shklovsky’s colleague in Opoyaz, Tynyanov, also a leading theoretician of the formalist school, expressed that feeling of farewell to an era in intense fiction disguised as history, even though it was in fact filled with contemporary allusions.

People of the twenties had a hard death, because the age died before them.

In the thirties they had a certain sense of when a person was to die. Like dogs, they chose a comfortable corner for dying. And they no longer expected either love or friendship before death.

What was friendship? What was love?

They had lost friendship back in the previous decade, and all that was left was the habit of writing letters and appeals for guilty friends—at that time there were many guilty ones.

This excerpt from Tynyanov’s historical novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, written in 1927, ostensibly describes the harsh ending of an era after the Decembrist rebellion was crushed in 1825. In fact, of course, he is also talking about the tragic situation one hundred years later, when Tynyanov and his comrades were feeling the iron pressure of Soviet ideology, which constantly sought more “guilty ones” with the inexorability of the Inquisition.

The era of the Crazy Ship was receding into the past. The ship had already sunk by then, and its passengers had scattered—some slipped away to the West, some vanished, destroyed by the Soviet regime, some were in hiding, and some went on working, trying to make sense of the dizzying changes and to preserve their ties with the past. The real fate of the city no longer depended on them, at least that is how the situation must have seemed to them in those trying years, but they were still able to mold its image.

The new Petersburg prose took an active part in the transformation of the Petersburg mythos. The contributions of Mandelstam, Shklovsky, and Tynyanov were the most significant. Mandelstam, according to Akhmatova, “saw Petersburg as semi-Venice, semitheater.” Akhmatova explained that Mandelstam “managed to be the last writer about Petersburg’s mores—precise, vivid, dispassionate, and unique. In his writings the half-forgotten and many times vilified streets reappear in all their freshness.” Undoubtedly, Mandelstam’s Noise of Time influenced the later prose memoirs of Akhmatova and also Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. The Russian émigré press printed many reactions to Mandelstam’s work when it appeared, and O. S. Mirsky noted in 1927 in The London Mercury that Mandelstam’s Petersburg “is crystallized into images of gem-like colour and hardness. It is a book apart, and one of our generation’s greatest contributions to the nation’s literature.”^{553}

In the same article Mirsky called Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey the most representative book of the new Russian literature, drawing readers’ attention to the unbearable but inspired life of intellectuals in dying Petrograd. Shklovsky’s book, first published in Berlin in 1923, also elicited enormous interest among Russian émigrés and became one of the most influential works in the creation of Petersburg’s new image as victim city. And even though Sentimental Journey was later banned in the Soviet Union and not reprinted for over sixty years, the sections on Petrograd were frequently retold and repeated by Shklovsky in his other books, thereby constantly setting the conceptual tone for descriptions of the city in the revolutionary era.

Tynyanov’s role may have been even more substantial. After the revolution, the tsars and tsarinas were sharply criticized, and almost all their actions were pronounced useless or harmful. Petersburg as the creation of the tsars was also undone. One of the innumerable examples of that occurred in the speech of a well-known theoretician of proletarian literature, Vladimir Yermilov: “You know that there was a lot of construction done under the empress Catherine II. But, comrades: compare the scope of construction of Catherine and Peter with the unprecedented scope of the resolution of the Central Committee and the government on socialist Leningrad—and the work of the nobility will seem pathetic, impoverished, and skimpy to us.”^{554}

The reigning formula then was “history is politics turned on the past,” and consequently the sole task of historical prose was to be the direct proof of the legitimacy of the Bolshevik revolution. Before it conditions in the country were so bad that the only way out was the overthrow of the ancien régime, with the consequent destruction of all its roots. Dozens of Soviet historical works can be reduced to this simpleminded thesis.

Tynyanov ostensibly accepted this paradigm but used it in his work in an unexpected way. He was one of the first Soviet writers to use historical prose effectively to create anti-Bolshevik allusions. His story “Lieutenant Kije,” based on a true incident from the days of Emperor Paul I about a nonexistent officer created by a clerical error who successfully rose up the army ladder while a live man accidently listed as dead lost the right to exist, turns this anecdote into an allegory of life in Stalinist Russia, where the bureaucratic document became more important than the individual. In The Waxen Effigy, published by Tynyanov in 1932, the parallel was clear between his description of the wax figure of Peter the Great being installed in the Petersburg Kunstkamera in 1732 and the placing of Lenin’s mummified body in a special mausoleum by the Bolsheviks. In Tynyanov’s novella, Peter’s comrades betray his ideas immediately after the emperor’s death, the harsh lifestyle dehumanizes the people, and denunciations and torture reign across the land. For the careful reader, these hints were very clear.

A Leningrader wrote, “Tynyanov’s books, which appeared every few years, were read by the intelligentsia eagerly and anxiously.”^{555} Nikolai Chukovsky, the son of Kornei Chukovsky, felt as did many others that Tynyanov’s main theme was the clash of Russian statehood with the individual trying to protect his dignity and rights, that is, the theme of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. He recalled that Tynyanov’s “stories about the past agitated contemporaries more than stories by others about the present, because the Bronze Horseman was still galloping after the fleeing Yevgeny and with every year the ringing hoofbeats sounded louder along the stunned cobblestones.”^{556}

Tynyanov’s heroes were not one-dimensional political caricatures. Tynyanov, who died in 1943 at the age of 49 after a twelve-year struggle with what must have been Alzheimer’s disease, was a writer with a virtuoso literary technique who drew on his knowledge of historical material. As demanding a critic as Dobychin considered Tynyanov a great master.

In Leningrad’s cultural circles the cult of mastery and craftsmanship still reigned. That cult was characteristic of the new Petersburg prose as well. Surprisingly, the regime accepted this for a time. The censors passed Tynyanov’s barely veiled historical allegories. Proletarian writers pretended that Zoshchenko’s stories (which Russian émigrés reprinted with delight as satirical depictions of the collapse of morality under the Bolsheviks) were close in spirit to proletarian literature. This created a special cultural climate in Leningrad that allowed some exotic plants to flourish. Among them was Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which began with this rather unusual dialogue for the opera stage but natural enough within the corpus of Gogol’s work:

“Ivan Yakovlevich, your hands always stink.”

“Why would they stink?”

“I don’t know, brother, but they do.”

Many people at the Leningrad premiere of The Nose in 1930 were stunned. Gogol’s absurdist story from his cycle of Petersburg tales, published by Pushkin in his Sovremennik magazine in 1836, had not lost its ability to shock; even in 1930 one critic called it “a clumsy, delirious joke.” It was even more shocking as an opera. Shostakovich, who did not follow the current fashion of totally rewriting the classics, re-created Gogol’s plot rather faithfully: Petersburg Major Kovalyov suddenly loses his nose, which then brazenly walks around town in a uniform trimmed in gold and in a plumed hat. Kovalyov confronts his nose at the Kazan Cathedral, where the nose is praying “with an expression of great piety,” but he is unable to persuade his nose to return to him. Kovalyov is in despair, but the city police capture the nose, which was “already getting into a carriage and planning to go to Riga.” Once his nose returns, Kovalyov cannot figure out how to stick it back on his face. But then the nose miraculously rejoins the face of the boundlessly happy Kovalyov. In conclusion, Gogol mockingly noted that such stories as his bring “no benefit whatever to the homeland.” With a total lack of humor, the Soviet critics almost a century later posed a question after the premiere of Shostakovich’s opera: Could this work “attract the attention of the progressive laborer?” They answered with a resounding, “Of course not.”

And this was despite the fact that Shostakovich, like Tynyanov, whose fiction and theoretical works the composer read avidly, used the ruse of calling his opera “a satire on the era of Nicholas I.” The critics sensed something was wrong. Of course, they were irritated by the frankly avant-garde character of Shostakovich’s opera. (Analogous criticisms were often aimed at Tynyanov.) And in fact, along with Mussorgsky’s Marriage, also based on Gogol, The Nose is probably the most experimental work in Russian operatic literature, with uncompromising vocal demands, a complex polyphonic orchestration in which the percussion instruments play a great part (one of the entr’actes is written only for percussion), and a breathless tempo, with one surrealistic episode quickly following another.

The production added to the impression of the work’s boldness. The movie director Kozintsev recalled, “To dashing gallops and lively polkas Vladimir Dmitriev’s settings whirled and spun: Gogol’s phantasmagoria became sound and color. The youthful Russian art, boldly experimental and tied to urban folklore—hanging signs of shops and taverns, tacky art, cheap dance bands—has burst into the kingdom of Aida and Trovatore. Gogol’s grotesque imagery throbbed: what was farce here, what was prophecy?”^{557} Dmitriev, who had just recently been the guiding spirit of Balanchine’s avant-garde group Young Ballet, had become the leading designer for Leningrad’s musical productions and Shostakovich’s favorite theater artist. He would soon design the premiere for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

But critics were made wary not only by the opera’s stunning avant-garde aesthetics. The satire of Shostakovich’s Nose, like Tynyanov’s satire, was uncomfortably directed not so much against the era of Nicholas I as against contemporary life, in which the police, secret and otherwise, were taking bribes and enjoying unlimited power to decide whether someone was a clerk “in a state position and a rather significant one” or was simply a runaway “nose,” a phantom subject to removal from the system. Shostakovich also depicted the terrible force of mass psychosis, the mechanism of rumors and fears that arise in the atmosphere of the near total censorship.

The Leningrad critics must have also been challenged by Shostakovich’s announcement that one of the coauthors of The Nose’s libretto was Zamyatin. He had just been derided in the Soviet press as “an open enemy of the working class” for the publication abroad of his novel We, which was officially characterized as a “lampoon of communism and slander of the Soviet system.” Though Zamyatin’s actual participation in the writing of the libretto was rather insignificant, including him in the list of coauthors was a gesture that cost Shostakovich dearly. After sixteen performances, The Nose was removed from the repertoire, not to reappear on the Soviet stage for more than forty years.

Soon after the premiere of The Nose, Shostakovich, discouraged by the hostile reviews, wrote to the director of the production: “The articles will do their work and no one who’s read them will go to see The Nose. I’ll get over that in about a week, another two months for the gloating of ‘friends and acquaintances’ that The Nose was a failure, and then I’ll calm down and start working again, but I don’t know on what. I’d really like to do The Carp.”^{558}

The libretto for the projected opera was to be written by a leading Leningrad dadaist, the poet Nikolai Oleinikov, a handsome man with rosy cheeks and blond curly hair, who possessed, according to some, a demonic charm.^{559} Oleinikov, like Leningrad’s other avant-gardists of the time, approved of Shostakovich’s music, while Shostakovich was smitten by Oleinikov’s absurdist poem “The Carp,” which, although unpublished, was nevertheless popular in Leningrad’s elitist circles.^{560} It was a parody of a passionate Gypsy love song that recounted the tragic story of the unrequited love of a carp for the “marvelous madame,” a smelt. The rejected carp throws himself into a net and ends up in a frying pan. The poem concludes with a requiem for the passionate lover:

The plots of “The Carp” and The Nose, for all their superficial dissimilarity, are united by the way a tragic theme is rendered as a parody. In Oleinikov’s poems, Shostakovich saw parallels with Zoshchenko’s prose.^{561} Both authors wrote in brief, intentionally primitive phrases, using and mocking the clumsy language of urban masses. Both hid behind the mask of a frightened and almost retarded observer.

Lydia Ginzburg, who knew Oleinikov well, wrote that he

was formed in the twenties, when there existed (along with others) the type of the shy man, who feared lofty phraseology, both official and vestigial-intelligentsia versions. Oleinikov was the expression of that consciousness. These people felt the inadequacy of ‘high’ values and ‘big’ words. They used jokes and irony as a defensive cover for their thoughts and feelings.^{562}

Oleinikov, Zoshchenko, and Shostakovich appropriated this specifically Petersburgian mask of the “shy man,” who was simultaneously infantile and ironic. For Zoshchenko and Shostakovich it became a second face. Oleinikov used it in a more theatrical manner. He was helped by the tragically carnivalesque atmosphere of Leningrad in the mid-twenties, when the acute and tragic awareness of the disappearance of the old city and its values was transformed into a marked theatricality in the intellectual elite’s daily life.

And at this dramatic moment in the life of Petersburg-Leningrad came the Oberiu group, to which Oleinikov belonged. The acronym Oberiu referred to the Association for Real Art. The name reflected in part the unwillingness of the group’s members to associate themselves openly with “avant-garde” or “left” art and their desire to avoid labels of any “-ism,” like acmeism or futurism. In their manifesto, published in 1928, they insisted, “We are the creators not only of a new poetic language, but creators of a new sensation of life and its objects. Our will to create is universal: it overflows all forms of art and tears into life.”

The central figure of Oberiu was twenty-two-year-old Daniil Yuvachev, who took the pseudonym Kharms (according to one version, forming it from the English words “charm” and “harm”). A poet, prose writer, and playwright, Kharms stylized himself as the classic Petersburg eccentric. Tall and long-haired, looking, as one of his friends said, like both “a puppy of good pedigree and the young Turgenev,” Kharms strolled around Leningrad in an unusual getup for a Soviet city: a British-style gray jacket, vest, and plus fours tucked into checked socks. The image of “mysterious foreigner” was completed by a starched collar, narrow black velvet ribbon on his forehead, thick walking stick, pocket watch the size of a saucer on a chain, and crooked pipe.

Kharms insisted that he was a wizard and frightened friends with stories of his strange magic powers.^{563} His apartment was filled with books on black magic, satanism, chiromancy, and phrenology, as well as a book for interpreting dreams, for Kharms was very superstitious. He would return home if he met a hunchback on the street, and drank milk only if all the windows and doors were shut tight and the smallest cracks were stuffed with cotton. In Kharms’s bedroom, which was full of wires and springs stretching in all directions, on which bounced occult symbols and all sorts of demons and imps made of paper, stood an ancient harmonium on which the wizard host liked to play works by his beloved composers Bach and Mozart. (Kharms used to show off an old medallion depicting a severe-looking man in a powdered wig, telling people that this was a unique portrait of “Ivan Sevastyanovich himself,” that is, Johann Sebastian Bach.)

Kharms’s domestic imps were undoubtedly descended from the private furnishings, known all over town, of another legendary Petersburg eccentric, the writer Alexei Remizov, who by 1921 had already emigrated to the West. A subtle stylist who tried to purify and vivify the Russian language the way it had been “before Peter the Great,” Remizov was an important influence on Zamyatin and on the Serapion Brothers, including Zoshchenko. He also gave the young people of Petrograd a lesson that they remembered for many years, living as if in a subtle literary game. One of the Serapions, Konstantin Fedin, called Remizov one of the most terrible and most miserable harlequins of Russian literature, “who were hindered from tasting earthly delights by the mask they wore. O, of course, it was all stylization! Their whole life was stylization, and their writing, too—almost a joke, a trifle, but what a fatal trifle and what a heart-breaking joke!”^{564}

Remizov invented a literary order called The Simian Great and Free Chamber, whose members, with appropriate titles—bishops, princes, cavaliers—were his writer friends: Blok, Zamyatin, and the Serapion Brothers. Shklovsky’s rank was “short-tailed monkey.” Remizov had a marvelous calligraphic hand. Stoop-shouldered, hook-nosed, and half-blind, he would sit in his tiny Petrograd cell, inscribing filigreed “simian certificates” and turning scraps of paper and wool into little imps that he hung up with string all around his room. So Kharms’s love for hand-illustrating his own texts, inventing cryptograms and hieroglyphs, and organizing various societies, into which he included (and excluded) his friends, echoed Remizov’s eccentricities.

At the literary evenings of the “oberiuts,” as the members of Oberiu were called, the heavily powdered Kharms would be wheeled out on the stage on top of a huge black lacquered wardrobe, from which he would begin reciting in a singsong his intentionally infantile verses:

Other members of the group declaimed their works while bicycling around the stage. The culmination of the oberiuts’ theatrical ambitions was their 1928 production of Kharms’s absurdist play, Elizaveta Bam. The composer of the music for this performance was Pavel Vulfius, later my mentor at the Leningrad Conservatory. Smiling somewhat mysteriously, he would tell me about what he called a dadaist opera: “Elizaveta Bam was layered with music and the actors often switched from rhythmic declamation to song, and the beginning of the play was a half-parody, half-homage to Glinka’s Life for the Tsar.” (Glinka was one of Kharms’s favorite composers; he loved to sing his song, “Calm down, emotions of passion,” sometimes in a duet with another Oberiu member, the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky.)

The day after the play the Leningrad Krasnaya gazeta (Red Gazette) printed a review that described Elizaveta Bam as “cynically frank muddle, in which virtually no one could tell what the hell was going on.” This was a blatant overstatement because the cream of Leningrad’s avant-garde was at the performance, and they certainly would have understood the connection between Kharms’s play and Blok’s Fair Show Booth, as well as the futurist masterpieces, the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the opera Victory Over the Sun. Kharms sent out invitations to the performance to the creators of Victory Over the Sun, Matyushin and Malevich, to members of FEKS, and to other leading cultural experimenters in Leningrad. The oberiuts consciously strove to unite various directions in Leningrad modernism—artists, musicians, theater people, poets, and writers—in what came to be called “happenings” in the 1960s. The traditional collectivist spirit of Petersburg innovators was strong in them.

When the oberiuts turned to Malevich for support, he replied, “I’m an old hooligan, you’re young ones—let’s see what happens.” In those years there was already a feeling in the air that the “left front” in the arts was in its final battle with the winning Philistines. The oberiuts demonstrated this sense of being part of a common cause, lofty but doomed, by appearing, as one later recalled, “in full complement” at the premiere of Shostakovich’s Nose. “It seemed that everyone in the audience knew one another (and in fact that was very much the case!) and, as if they had planned it, they had all come to enjoy a last triumph.”^{565}

The performance of Elizaveta Bam by Kharms was another such demonstration of solidarity. It took place in the Leningrad House of the Press, which was located in the former aristocratic town house on the Fontanka River embankment not far from Nevsky Prospect. The director of the House of the Press, who sympathized with left art, invited Filonov and his students to paint on the walls of the lobby and the theater. The audience for the oberiuts play saw an unforgettable sight:

Filonov, who with Zheverzheyev was one of the founders in Petersburg of the art association Union of Youth in 1910, was one of the masters beloved of the futurists and oberiuts. Khlebnikov described his “cherry eyes and pale cheekbones.” The Russian avant-gardists were fanatical figures, but even among them Filonov was distinguished by his unprecedented single-mindedness, the stubbornness with which he set his goals, and his frenzied proselytizing. Leningrad had a surfeit of art schools—those of Malevich, Matyushin, Petrov-Vodkin. Filonov’s school had the most students, up to seventy followers, the most faithful of whom formed a collective in the late twenties that they called Masters of Analytical Art.

Filonov had started with expressionistic canvases and then came to the “principle of doneness,” which became the guiding light of his method. He taught, “Draw every atom stubbornly and accurately.” He painted large works with small brushes, often starting in a corner and gradually spreading across the canvas, because he was convinced that the painting “must grow and develop just as organically, atom by atom, as growth occurs in nature.” The result of such work was that even his small canvases and watercolors were so thickly “inhabited” by intertwining forms, figures, and faces that in reproduction they seem to be monumental frescoes. Filonov’s works are at once abstract and figurative, because the artist synthesized the myriad component details into complex symbolic images, which he often called “formulas,” for instance, Formula of Spring, Formula of Revolution, and Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat.

Filonov’s art is nationalist and original because its roots go back to primitive Russian folk art and Orthodox icons. A student of Filonov’s recalled that he “rejected the existence of the soul and the spirit and, of course, of God.” But Filonov’s works are spiritual in the highest degree, as happened with certain other Russian artists whose private lives were not marked by devoutness, for instance Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. That is why even though Filonov’s themes are often tragic, his paintings do not have a depressing effect. The current in Filonov’s art is sympathy for the underdog. Many of his paintings are populated by workers and other humble citizens. Filonov poeticized their life, and the working-class neighborhoods of Petrograd were transformed in his works into a carnival of multicolored forms, figures, and faces.

Filonov worked like a man possessed, without commissions, often half-starving. He wrote in his diary, “sometimes I stretch a pound of bread for two days.” On August 30,1935, he wrote, “I made the last pancake with my last pinch of flour this morning, preparing to follow the example of many, many times—to live, not knowing for how long, without eating.”^{567} And he refused to sell his paintings, because he wanted to hang all of them in his imagined grand museum of analytical art. But the Soviet state was getting more hostile toward Filonov and other modernists.

In 1932 Filonov wrote about a conversation with Malevich. “He started complaining about his lot and told me that he spent three months in prison and was interrogated. The investigator asked him, ‘What’s the Cezannism you’re talking about? What’s this cubism you are propounding?’”^{568} The secret police were questioning Filonov’s students about the artistic and political views of their teacher. Then his two stepsons were arrested. Filonov was effectively excluded from the artistic and social life of Leningrad. In 1941, in the first winter of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, he died of starvation, forgotten by all but his most faithful pupils.

After the war Filonov’s name was no longer mentioned, as if he had never existed. His works, over three hundred of them, were preserved by his sister, the singer Yevdokia Glebova. With an introduction, one could come to her apartment to view the paintings. In the early sixties I was among the lucky few. I went there with two friends. In a heavily curtained room in a Leningrad communal flat a gravely imperious woman first read us excerpts from Filonov’s theoretical works and then showed us several dozen paintings. The effect was as if a new world had opened before us, because Filonov had created his own universe, in which animals, people, buildings, and plants existed as a sparkling colorful mass, simultaneously solid and weightless, soaring upward. We lived under a profound impression of those amazing works for a long time. Unfortunately Filonov’s paintings were not available to large audiences until 1988, when an exhibition of his works was organized in Leningrad and the Soviet press happily announced “the discovery of yet another artist almost unknown until now.”

Despite his tragic end, one could say Filonov had been lucky in Stalinist Russia. He himself had not been arrested, had not been beaten during interrogations by the GPU or the NKVD (acronyms for the secret police), had not rotted away in a Siberian prison camp. The fate of many other Leningrad avant-gardists was much worse than the poor artist’s.

“Stunned by a blow from the back, I fell, started to rise, but there was another blow—in the face. I lost consciousness. I awoke, sputtering in the water someone was pouring over me. I was lifted up and I thought they were tearing off my clothes. I passed out again. No sooner had I come to than some strangers dragged me down the stone corridors of the prison, beating me and mocking my defenselessness.”^{569} This was a description of one of his interrogations by the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, an Oberiu member arrested in 1938.

The Leningrad dadaists were persecuted with particular cruelty. Oleinikov died in prison. A friend recalled that Oleinikov had come to visit a few days before his arrest and said nothing, even though the friend could see he wanted to talk. “What about? That he was certain of his doom and, like everyone else, could not move, was just waiting? What to do? His family? How to conduct himself—there? We’ll never know.”^{570} The same fate befell the poet and member of Oberiu Alexander Vvedensky, who disappeared without a trace. Kharms was arrested in August 1941, soon after Germany attacked the USSR. He was declared mentally ill and sent to a prison psychiatric hospital, where he died two months later—it is not known whether of hunger or forced “treatment.”

Zabolotsky survived prison and the camps, his health ruined by heavy forced labor. Then he lived in exile in Kazakhstan and was released in 1946 through the efforts of friends, but he was not rehabilitated until five years after his death, in 1963.

Zabolotsky went through his incredible trials attempting to maintain a sense of his own dignity and the restraint that had been typical of him since youth. Those who knew him commented that there was very little of the poetic about him: a smooth pink face and, behind round bookkeeper glasses, almost expressionless eyes with short lashes. But he soon became the most famous poet of Oberiu, with a special interest in contemporary Petrograd.

A born Petersburger, Kharms was worried by the disappearance of his city. Peter the Great and Nicholas II appear in his Comedy of the City of Petersburg. Nicholas poses the rhetorical question: “O Peter, where is your Russia? Where is your city, where is pale Petersburg?” The echoes in Kharms’s work of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman are not even the typical dada parody but more of an homage. These parallels with the classics were important for Kharms, which is why he made a point of bowing to every ancient lamppost when he strolled through the city: for him those lampposts were animate creatures that had seen, perhaps, Pushkin himself.

Zabolotsky, who viewed the transformation of the Petersburg mythos as a personal trauma, also loved The Bronze Horseman and considered Kharms’s Comedy to be the author’s best work. But Zabolotsky saw the city with the eyes of a provincial visitor, bowled over by the ugly contrasts of life in the metropolis, with the “drunken paradise” of its noisy bars, the hypocrisy of Nevsky Prospect “in glitter and dreariness” (almost a Gogolian image), and simple-minded but crowd-pleasing entertainments at the People’s House (where a few years earlier Balanchine and a friend had presented the “Polovtsian masses” in Prince Igor for the unsophisticated audience). Zabolotsky describes the city circus, which “shines like a shield” ;wandering musicians, singing in narrow Petersburg courtyards, “amid tall dug-out pits” and a wedding where “the pound-heavy wine glasses roared.”

Zabolotsky created one of the most poignant images to convey the mystical effect of the white nights, using the new surrealistic imagery:

But he brings along the fantastic picture of a flea market on the Obvodny Canal, with its brazen speculators, crippled beggars, and the coach drivers who resembled sultans. This is the world of Zoshchenko, whose heroes Zabolotsky regarded with markedly naïve astonishment. It is not surprising that it was Zoshchenko who noted in an early review of Zabolotsky’s poetry, “But this is seeming childishness. Beyond the naive verbal picture there is almost always visible a bold and clear stroke. And that naïveté works as a justifiable device.”

This defense of Zabolotsky by Zoshchenko is characteristic of the cultural state of affairs in Leningrad during the late twenties and early thirties, when experimental authors demonstrated solidarity in the face of the ever-growing hostility from the authorities. They all knew one another, meeting constantly at literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious salons and circles, entering loose creative associations that formed, then fell apart. Zabolotsky admired Shostakovich, and Filonov was one of his favorite artists. In turn, Filonov and his students were brought into the production of Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General by the poet and director Igor Terentyev, one of the brightest figures in avant-garde Leningrad.

This play was shown at the same House of the Press, in which Filonov’s Masters of Analytical Art had done paintings on the walls of the theater and lobby. Now Filonov’s “analytical” method triumphed on the stage: the costume of the postmaster was made up of envelopes sealed with red wax and huge postal cancellations; the policeman’s uniform featured leg irons, chains, locks, and keys; the tavern waiter had a wine bottle and hams on his head and a large sausage dangling from a strategic place. They were called “speaking costumes” and elicited a stormy reaction. The sophisticated audience was as delighted as the critics were outraged by Terentyev’s handling of the text of Gogol’s comedy, which was known to everyone in the country. The characters suddenly switched to French, Polish, or German or burst into Gypsy song and even arias from Rimsky-Korsakov operas in the middle of their monologues.

The play based on The Inspector General was filled with music and staged for the most part as parody; for instance, the hero proceeded solemnly to the toilet to the sounds of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. In general, the toilet played an important part in Terentyev’s production: the actors were constantly heading off for it and interpolating grunts and moans into Gogol’s original text. This was highly unusual for Soviet audiences, as was the blatantly erotic interpretation, which embarrassed even the avant-garde critics.

The premiere of the Gogol-Terentyev Inspector General, which received a hostile reception from the Leningrad establishment, took place in the spring of 1927 and had an undoubted influence on Shostakovich’s Nose, which he began soon afterward. Another striking theatrical phenomenon in Leningrad that entranced Shostakovich was the Theater of Worker Youth (TRAM), which arose in 1922 as an amateur studio at the House of Communist Upbringing. Shostakovich lived nearby and saw many performances by that ensemble, which was headed by one of the most popular theater figures of the city, Mikhail Sokolovsky, the idol of “proletarian” youth. TRAM quickly won a wide audience and realized the secret dreams of the most radical “left” theoreticians of the theater. Sokolovsky, whose energy and enthusiasm could overwhelm any doubters, rejected the most important elements of the old theater. Instead of presenting plays traditionally, the basis of their performance became the “dramatization,” which Adrian Piotrovsky, a TRAM theoretician, later described thus: “The dramatization of a remembered event or asserted slogan was the linchpin onto which were threaded actions, movements, dialogues, and songs.”^{571} According to Piotrovsky, for the avant-garde an important distinction between a “dramatization” and the old psychological drama was the fact that this new theater form “strove not ‘to show,’ but ‘to prove,’ ‘to persuade,’ to change lives.”

In that sense TRAM was the embodiment of all the utopian manifestos of Russian theater symbolism and the later futurism. What had seemed an unrealizable ideal before the revolution suddenly became possible in Communist Petrograd. In the early years after the revolution the authorities allowed and encouraged all sorts of dramatic performances in which thousands of people took part. The avant-gardists were granted an artistic license that had not existed before; they could use “word, song, athletic march, military parade, smoke screen, cannon fire from a fortress, fireworks, projectors from battleships.”^{572} For Soviet avant-gardists these were exercises in preparation for the total theater of the future, which according to their plans would have to blend into life and which they visualized as a never-ending carnival.

But gradually those mass theatrical productions dwindled to nothing. The “obsolete” traditional theater withstood the attacks of the innovators and clearly had no intention of vanishing. Now all the hopes of the left theater people were tied to TRAM, where the indefatigable Sokolovsky banished professional actors as well as the traditional play and replaced them with young laborers. This allowed TRAM to claim to be the bastion of “proletarian” art. More or less protected by his orthodox label, Sokolovsky could undertake any experiment he wished.

Sokolovsky was primarily interested in theater’s unmediated effect on audiences. His actors lived and worked like a creative commune, which Sokolovsky dubbed the Monastery.^{573} TRAM’s performances, which usually consisted of a chain of brief episodes with a generous use of lights, music, and songs, were dedicated to such themes as alcoholism, anti-Semitism, juvenile delinquency, and the questions of free love versus traditional marriage.

Sokolovsky encouraged direct interaction with the audience, and the actors had the right to change the text while onstage, depending on audience reaction. Often as they started a performance, the actors did not know how they would end it—for instance, whether the heroine would die or whether they would decide to let her live. (This was called “total freemenry” in TRAM jargon.)^{574} As a result, each TRAM performance was a passionate improvised dispute that included the audience and often dragged on until dawn.

Shostakovich was attracted by the theatrical form of Sokolovsky’s productions and the bubbling atmosphere around them. For three years he was the musical director of the Leningrad TRAM and wrote the incidental music for several of its productions. For Shostakovich, brought up in the severe “intelligentsia” tradition, the intoxicating carnival life of TRAM was liberating, a source of important new creative impulses. Participating in Sokolovsky’s effervescent productions gave the composer the illusion of continuing his voyage on the Crazy Ship.

The word “carnival,” according to some lexicographers, is tied etymologically to the image of a ship on wheels, the ancient ritual chariot (carrus-navalis in Latin). In the mid-twenties in Leningrad a philosophical-religious circle met at the home of the pianist Maria Yudina and at a few other apartments. Its leader was Mikhail Bakhtin, an original and influential humanist thinker. As Yudina told me, even then one of Bakhtin’s favorite themes was the influence of the carnival on world culture. Bakhtin later developed this idea in his classic work on Rabelais. But the concept of the liberating function of the carnival was polished in the private discussions in a city for which one of the basic metaphors in those days was a flying ship. “The carnival is a spectacle without footlights and without separating into performers and viewers. In a carnival everyone is an active participant,” Bakhtin later wrote. In those words we can hear the echo of theatrical performances in Petrograd in the early postrevolutionary years. Sokolovsky, the creator of the carnival-like TRAM, would have signed that statement.

Bakhtin noted once that the carnival life “is life taken out of its usual ruts.” It would be difficult to imagine a city more torn out of its usual trajectory than Petersburg after the Russian Revolution. In that sense it was the quintessential carnival city. All the hierarchical barriers that had formed over centuries were broken down there, traditional values were tossed out the window, religion was subjected to “carnival” profanation, and numerous eccentrics of various types floated to the surface. These were all important signs of a carnival culture, according to Bakhtin. They were reflected in Shostakovich’s music, Zoshchenko’s prose, Zabolotsky’s poetry, and Kharms’s eccentricity. Filonov’s paintings are also filled with the carnival spirit. This is urban art, just as Bakhtin’s philosophy was urban.

Bakhtin’s discussion group was a phenomenon of underground culture, typical of Leningrad in those years. A network existed in the city of unofficial literary, philosophical, and religious societies, often consisting of just a few people each.^{575} Feeling a threat to their ideological monopoly, the authorities ruthlessly persecuted these underground groups, even though they were not anti-Soviet organizations by any stretch of the imagination. Bakhtin’s circle discussed Kant, Henri Bergson, Freud, Christian theology, and Eastern philosophy.^{576} Although disabled by osteomyelitis, Bakhtin was a charismatic figure. A major thinker whose ideas influenced literary and social history, linguistics, the philosophy of culture and language, psychology and anthropology, Bakhtin was also an inspiring lecturer. Few people knew about Bakhtin outside his narrow circle of friends, but among them were the leading lights of Leningrad’s intellectual elite.

In 1929 the Leningrad publishing house Priboi released Bakhtin’s book Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Creative Works, with Nathan Altman’s engraving of Dostoyevsky on the cover. In this groundbreaking monograph Bakhtin offered a new interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s novels. In Bakhtin’s opinion, Dostoyevsky had created a type of novel that Bakhtin called “polyphonic.” In a polyphonic novel the author does not predominate; the narrative develops as a result of the constant dialogue of many voices that exist independently of the author.

The concept of dialogue is central to Bakhtin’s cultural philosophy. His ideas on dialogue are exemplified by a megalopolis where people talk to each other without listening and pass each other without seeing. Thus Bakhtin describes the existence of the hero of Crime and Punishment as follows:

Everything that he sees and observes—the Petersburg slums and the monumental Petersburg, all his random encounters and petty incidents—all this is brought into dialogue, responds to his questions, poses new ones before him, provokes him, argues with him or confirms his thoughts.

For Bakhtin Dostoyevsky is not only a great novelist but also the creator of a new type of artistic expression and, more broadly, of a new artistic model of the world. Using Dostoyevsky’s works as an example, Bakhtin tries to solve the general problems of human intercourse: “Only with an inner receptivity to dialogue does my word find itself in the closest connection with another’s word, but at the same time it does not blend into it, does not engulf it, and does not dissolve its significance, that is, it preserves fully its independence as a word.”

Bakhtin’s call for dialogue, understanding, and attention to “another’s word” could be construed as a political statement, but it appeared at a time when any meaningful discourse was becoming more and more problematic. Bakhtin’s book on Dostoyevsky was published in May 1929, a few months after the author had been arrested during a secret police dragnet to liquidate underground philosophical and religious circles in Leningrad. The fact that the book came out anyway speaks of the comparative lack of teeth in Soviet cultural policy in that period. Lunacharsky, living out his final days at his post as the cultural czar, even published a lengthy and on the whole positive review of Bakhtin’s work. A surviving copy of the book, which had belonged to Lunacharsky, has a marginal note that reads, “But the problems are posed in an interesting way, and work on them could lead far.”

It is quite probable that Lunacharsky’s intercession saved Bakhtin from death in a labor camp; he was “merely” exiled to Kazakhstan—his work did “lead far,” but not in the sense Lunacharsky meant—where seventy-five years earlier, during the reign of Nicholas I, the subject of Bakhtin’s research, Dostoyevsky, had spent his exile. Unlike Dostoyevsky, however, Bakhtin never returned to the city on the Neva. The last few years of his life (he died in 1975) were spent in Moscow in an apartment obtained for him by the members of the “new” Bakhtin circle. He had lived long enough to see the beginnings of his international fame and recognition.

Bakhtin’s best work stylistically, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Creative Works, can be read as a graceful literary work in its own right, which then leads to parallels with another great Russian thinker; the first book of the religious philosopher Vassily Rozanov (1856-1919) was also a work on Dostoyevsky that brought its author fame, at least in Russia. Published in 1894, this book was the first to assert Dostoyevsky’s religio-philosophical significance. Rozanov wrote that Dostoyevsky was a “flexible, dialectical genius whose almost every thesis is transformed into an anti-thesis.”

Rozanov’s writing style is quite similar to Bakhtin’s manner of expression. In both cases, the reader seems to hear the author’s voice intoning his text with extreme conviction, sometimes sharpening his thought to the point of paradox for better effect. But for Bakhtin refinement and paradox were not an end in themselves. With Rozanov, this did happen. However Rozanov, an unattractive individual who lisped, drooled, twitched his knees and shook his red beard in conversation, went decidedly beyond any other Russian philosopher in the attempt to capture on paper barely perceptible emotional states and feelings, the “cobwebs of life,” as he put it.

Rozanov developed (not without Nietzche’s influence) an aphoristic style that had an enormous impact on the new Petersburg prose. In his later books he created, in fact, a new literary genre. According to Shklovsky, who studied Rozanov closely, it was a sort of novel of the parodic type: “‘Yes’ and ‘no’ exist simultaneously on one page—a biographical fact elevated to the rank of stylistic fact.”

The Petersburg modernists esteemed Rozanov highly, despite his political cynicism and anti-Semitism. Mandelstam wrote almost lovingly of him,

An anarchic attitude toward everything, total confusion, nothing counts, there’s only one thing I can’t do without—that’s living without words, I cannot survive separation from the word! That is an approximation of Rozanov’s spiritual organization. That anarchic and nihilistic spirit recognized but one authority—the magic of language, the power of the word.

Right after the revolution Rozanov began to speak of an iron curtain:

With creaks, screeches, and clanks an iron curtain descends over Russian History.

“The show is over.”

The audience rises.

“Time to put on your fur coats and go back home.”

They look around.

But their fur coats and homes are gone.

Rozanov’s innovative prose is “polyphonic,” to use Bakhtin’s term. Its pages are filled with arguing voices that are seemingly independent of the author. This disturbing prose, which lures readers into its magic circle to make them take part in a philosophical dispute, seems to have been created for Bakhtin’s analysis.

As befits the author of the carnival theory, Bakhtin liked to surround himself with carnival personalities—exceptionally gifted eccentrics. The radical break in traditional culture gave rise to highly unusual situations and eccentric personalities. One observer noted, “In eccentricities, strangeness, and incongruities the intelligentsia expressed its need to deal with its past…. Just the way, after an explosion, the dust remains for a long time, settling slowly, and individual dust specks, totally unconnected and unattached, perform the most inventive pirouettes.”^{577}

In Bakhtin’s Leningrad circle one of the most remarkable figures of the carnival type was the young poet and prose writer Konstantin Vaginov. The son of a fabulously wealthy colonel in the tsarist gendarmes, who was taught western European languages by his private tutors, Vaginov was a cocaine addict and bibliophile. He likened the victory of the Russian Revolution, which ruined his family, to the triumph of the barbaric tribes over the Roman Empire. For Vaginov, Petersburg had been a magical stage for that cultural tragedy, and he sang the praises of the spectral city in dadaist poems (which also showed the influence of Mandelstam), in which “pale blue sails of dead ships” appeared tellingly. Mandelstam, in turn, rated Vaginov highly, including him as a poet “not for today but forever” in a list with Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilyov, and Khodasevich.

Vaginov was part of the left wing of Oberiu. Like the group’s leader, Kharms, he also wrote experimental prose, which he read aloud to his friends. They were particularly interested in Vaginov’s novel The Goat Song. According to one witness, the listeners followed the thin, stoop-shouldered author from apartment to apartment to hear excerpts from the novel again and again in his masterly reading. This avid curiosity existed primarily because The Goat Song was a roman à clef: its characters were easily recognizable as some of the Bakhtin group members and other notable figures of literary Leningrad.

With the frightening speed of change in historical eras, people and events were instantly “bronzed,” becoming natural fodder for fiction that grew directly out of memoirs or for fictionalized memoirs, like Georgy Ivanov’s entertaining Petersburg Winters, published in Paris in 1928, which could also be considered new Petersburg prose.

Ivanov’s memoirs and Vaginov’s novel were written at approximately the same time, and it is not difficult to find much in common between them, especially the acute sense of and mourning for the end of the Petersburg era, the destruction of the Venice of the North. Both Ivanov and Vaginov agreed that the rose of Petersburg culture was about to fade anyway and that the unexpected revolutionary frost had merely hastened its demise. But in his memoirs, Ivanov, a subtle poet of the acmeist circle, an aesthete and snob, provides a nostalgic description of the decadent charms of prerevolutionary Petersburg. The book’s origins in newspaper columns is evident in the amusing albeit not always reliable anecdotes and vivid, prejudiced sketches of Blok, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and the carnival world of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower and The Stray Dog cabaret.

Vaginov’s novel, on the other hand, while written in equally translucent prose and imbued with a melodic quality characteristic of a “poet’s prose,” is a philosophical work, filled with learned allusions to obscure ancient and medieval authors. Even the title The Goat Song is a literal translation of the Greek word “tragedy.” For Vaginov, Petersburg was “Athens on the Neva,” the center of a refined Hellenism. The protagonists of The Goat Song carry on profound eschatological discussions à la Rozanov or Bakhtin, vainly trying to escape from the ugliness of Soviet reality in a “tall tower of humanism.” Vaginov describes these people with love, irony, and pity. He understands their utter doom but hopes for a renaissance of the old values in a new quality. When this will happen Vaginov does not know. He states sadly, in a sarcastic refutation of the clichéd official designation of Leningrad as the “Cradle of the Revolution,” “Now there is no Petersburg. There is Leningrad; but Leningrad has nothing to do with us. The author is a coffin maker by profession, not a master of cradle works.”

Vaginov, who died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of thirty-five, depicted himself in The Goat Song, with ironic allusions to Blok and Akhmatova, as the last inhabitant of Hellenic Petersburg:

On a snowy hill, on Nevsky, now hidden by the blizzard, now reappearing, stands an unknown poet: beyond him there is emptiness. Everyone had left long ago. But he does not have the right, he cannot leave the city. Let everyone flee, let death come, but he will remain here and protect Apollo’s high temple.

Kharms did not share the messianic cultural illusions of his friend Vaginov. The hero of his absurdist prose exists not in the mythical Hellenic Petersburg but in the real nauseating Leningrad.

The house on the corner of Nevsky is being painted a revolting yellow. Have to turn off onto the street. I am pushed by people coming toward me. They all recently moved here from villages and haven’t learned to walk on the streets yet. Their clothes and faces are filthy. They come trampling from all sides, growling and shoving.

Most of the characters in Kharms and Zoshchenko are related, they “growl and shove” in the same world: one that is dark, cruel, and threatening, a world that has nothing to do with the “temple of Apollo” that came to Vaginov in a dream. Khodasevich had taken ninety-nine short stories by Zoshchenko and found at least ninety-nine characters who break the law in some way: they kill, cheat, counterfeit, and brawl—drunk and sober. They do it for absurd reasons, suffering neither doubts nor pangs of conscience “à la Dostoyevsky,” vaguely feeling that they are both “masters” of the new life, as they are told by the posters all around them, but also its victims.

In Kharms’s prose, the darkness gets ever thicker. One of his characters replies this way to a charge that includes rape: “First of all, she wasn’t a virgin anymore, and secondly, I was dealing with a corpse, and she’s not going to complain now. What of the fact that she was supposed to give birth any minute? I pulled out the baby, didn’t I?” But in Kharms’s cruel and surrealistic short parables, which he called “incidents” and which have parallels with Kafka and Céline, there appear also alienated intellectuals, closer to the frightened and despairing heroes of Vaginov.

“A man with a thin neck climbed into a trunk, shut the lid, and started to suffocate.” Thus begins one such metaphorical narrative by Kharms, in which the typical representative of the Leningrad intelligentsia of those years sets up a humiliating experiment on himself to test the ability to survive in a hostile environment. In another “incident” called “The Dream,” a certain Kalugin was reduced to such nervous exhaustion by a recurring nightmare involving a dreaded policeman that when a medical-sanitation inspection team going through the apartments “found him antisanitary and useless,” it had him tossed into the garbage: “Kalugin was folded in half and thrown out like trash.” Akhmatova, commenting on similar surrealistic moments in Kharms’s prose, said, “He managed to do what almost no one else could, write the so-called prose of the twentieth century. When they describe, for instance, how the hero went out into the street and suddenly flew up into the air, no one else can do that convincingly, only Kharms.”

In the epilogue to his Goat Song, Vaginov described the forced dissolution of Bakhtin’s circle and, echoing Rozanov’s lamentations, concluded sadly, “But it is time to lower the curtain. The performance is over. It is confusing and quiet on the stage. Where is the promised love, the promised heroism? Where is the promised art?” Vaginov, like many others, thought that everything was over. But this perception was not universal among the Leningrad elite; even among Vaginov’s loyal followers there were a few extraordinary personalities, who—at least at first—managed to find an application for their outstanding gifts within the limits of officially recognized culture, without making total compromises. The example of the musicologist and critic Ivan Sollertinsky is edifying in that sense, although not typical.

The son of a high-ranking tsarist bureaucrat, Sollertinsky quickly became a local landmark, the “city genius.” He walked around Leningrad in a shabby coat and when asked why he, such a famous lecturer, could appear in trousers worn to a sheen, replied, “It is the sparkle of Soviet musicology!” His genius pose was also a mask for dealing with life, but of a different sort than Zoshchenko’s. Sollertinsky enjoyed playing the absentminded professor, even though he never missed an opportunity to jab an opponent with a sarcastic remark. In a public discussion of a derivative symphony by a Leningrad composer, he said, “It’s the water in which Rachmaninoff’s chamber pot was rinsed!”^{578}

The eccentric genius mask helped Sollertinsky survive. Celebrities arriving from the West always asked for a meeting with that “phenomenal scholar who knows fifty languages.”^{579} Sollertinsky in fact was fluent in at least two dozen languages (thirty-two, counting dialects), from Latin to Sanskrit; in the latter he usually made his most private diary notations. His vast and extremely varied knowledge coupled with the temperament of an activist quickly made Sollertinsky one of the leading proselytizers of the new art in Leningrad. He was an intimate of Bakhtin’s but also met frequently with Kharms and the other oberiuts and was highly esteemed by the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov. Balanchine spoke respectfully of Sollertinsky to the end of his days.^{580} Sollertinsky had a photographic memory: after a quick glance at the most complex text, he could repeat it by heart. Shostakovich liked to remind us that Sollertinsky had memorized “all of Shakespeare, Pushkin, Gogol, Aristotle, and Plato.” When they met in 1927 Sollertinsky pronounced Shostakovich a genius, and the composer immediately fell under the spell of the scholar who was four years his senior and became his best friend.

Sollertinsky defended Shostakovich’s Nose from hostile critics, stating that “The Nose is not a product for instant use and disposal. It is a laboratory factory, where new music and theater language are being created.” Sollertinsky compared Shostakovich’s opera to the works of Swift and Voltaire. “The Nose has no positive characters: only masks.” Bakhtin would have called this work one of “carnival” but not of “dialogue.” Shostakovich made the leap from Gogol’s carnival world to Dostoyevsky’s dialogue world in the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, based on the story of Nikolai Leskov, a Petersburg writer of the late nineteenth century whose careful treatment of every word and mastery of the phrase earned the respect of Zamyatin and the Serapion Brothers, who considered Leskov among their teachers.

A literary maverick, Leskov liked fanciful plots to which baffled critics did not know how to react. His “sketch” about the merchant wife Katerina Izmailova, whose fatal love leads her to commit multiple murders, had remained in obscurity for over a half century; Shostakovich’s opera brought it world fame. The paradox lies in the fact that Shostakovich had radically rewritten Leskov’s story; as Sollertinsky put it, “The evaluation of the roles has been changed: the victims become executioners, the killer—the victim.” In Shostakovich’s version, Katerina kills in self-defense and the composer vindicates her. Leskov’s misogynist work is transformed into a feminist apotheosis.

Sollertinsky believed that “in the history of Russian musical theater nothing of the scope and depth of The Queen of Spades appeared until Lady Macbeth.” In his operas Tchaikovsky sympathetically treated his women characters. Shostakovich continued that tradition. His Katerina is a “polyphonic” heroine, strong passions and deep emotions battle within her; she can be tender, passionate, caring, and cruel. Sollertinsky was among the first to note that killer Katerina’s part “is completely lyrical, with deeply felt melodies,” and that the opera as a whole has “a tragic—Shakespearean rather than Leskovian—sweep.”

Lady Macbeth has sharply contrasting parts: expressionist depictions of the brutish merchant life, satirical carnival vignettes of the police apparatus, and dramatic scenes from the life of hard labor, à la Dostoyevsky. Another striking similarity between Shostakovich’s opera and Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novels is the criminal plot, which keeps the audience in constant suspense and develops in a sweeping way that leads to important social and philosophical conclusions.

Bakhtin discussed with his circle the idea of a special “polyphonic creative thought” that went beyond the limits of the novel. In his second opera Shostakovich showed himself to be the master of that type of thought. He does not judge Katerina Izmailova but gives her the opportunity to express herself through contradictory actions and emotions. This work was influenced by the Bakhtin circle’s aesthetics. A prominent participant in the circle, Sollertinsky was Shostakovich’s closest adviser in the years he was writing the opera. He was present at all the rehearsals, commenting freely, encouraging, inciting, and provoking the conductor, the soloists, and the composer.

The 1934 premiere in Leningrad was a great success; in its first five months the opera was performed thirty-six times to sold-out houses. The happy Shostakovich could allow himself to write to a friend, “The audience listens very attentively and makes a run for their galoshes only after the curtain falls.”^{581} Lady Macbeth was staged triumphantly in Moscow, too, but with catastrophic consequences. In January 1936 Stalin attended a performance. The opera infuriated him and he left before the end.

The best barometer of Stalin’s reaction was the editorial that appeared in the Party newspaper, Pravda, two days later, called “Muddle Instead of Music,” almost certainly dictated by Stalin:

The listener is stunned almost from the first minute by the opera’s intentionally dissonant and muddled avalanche of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and vanish once more in clangs, creaks, and squeals. Following this “music” is difficult, remembering it is impossible…. The music quacks, grunts, pants, and gasps, the more naturally to depict the love scenes…. The predatory merchant woman, who seized wealth and power by murder, is presented as some kind of “victim” of bourgeois society…. This glorification of merchant lust has been called satire by some critics. But there isn’t even a breath of satire here. By all available means of musical and dramatic expression the author is trying to elicit the audience’s sympathy for the crude and vulgar desires and actions of the unscrupulous Katerina Izmailova.

It is not hard to believe that Stalin was personally offended by the music’s expressionistic excesses, its unprecedentedly frank, erotic character, and the opera’s strongly feminist statement. But Stalin had more in mind than public expression of personal dissatisfaction. That became clear when Pravda’s editorials followed, fiercely attacking all kinds of “formalists” and “pseudo innovators” in Soviet art. The headlines—crude, peremptory, sounding like harsh sentences—are characteristic: “Balletic Falsity,” “Cacophony in Architecture,” “About Dauber Artists,” “External Shine and False Content.”

The campaign that followed these publications was unparalleled in its ferocity and scope. Articles from Pravda were reprinted by every newspaper in the country. “Discussions” of the articles were mandatory, and terrified writers, composers, and artists accused one another of formalism, alienation from the people, and other mortal sins, and exercised knee-jerk self-criticism. Virtually no major figure in Soviet art was spared public humiliation in some degree. Accounts of hundreds of such meetings were also obligatorily printed in national and regional newspapers and broadcast on the radio.

The Pravda editorial that started the avalanche clearly presented the official harsh formula not only for the arts but for cultural expression in the broadest sense: “Leftist freakishness in opera grows from the same source as leftist freakishness in painting, poetry, pedagogy, and science. Petit bourgeois ‘innovation’ leads to a break with real art, science, and real literature.” One phrase in particular sounded a very Stalin-like threat: “This is playing with nonsensical things, which could end very badly.”

The articles in Pravda were correctly perceived as direct instructions. Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was immediately taken out of the repertory in both Leningrad and Moscow. Criticized books were removed from libraries and destroyed, plays were banned, art exhibits shut down. One cultural bureaucrat later recalled being sent “to set things straight” at the Leningrad Russian Museum, which had a valuable collection of Russian avant-garde art. At the museum, he found piles of garbage in the halls, works by Malevich and Filonov sticking out. His orders were to destroy the paintings. Risking his neck, he hid them in deep vaults, saving them for future generations.^{582}

The cultural convulsions of 1936 were the culmination of a lengthy process in the course of which Stalin, the supreme manipulator of public opinion, shaped Soviet art and literature according to his far-reaching propaganda goals. By 1932 he had dissolved all literary and artistic associations, including the omnipotent Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which had been a pillar of support for him until then. The terms “proletarian culture” and “fellow travelers of the revolution,” which RAPP juggled so deftly, were replaced by new ones—“Soviet culture” and “Soviet writers.” The sole organization allowed was the new Union of Soviet Writers, created as a model for the bureaucratic coordination of all “creative” professions, including composers, artists, and architects.

At the same time it was officially announced that the road to the development of Soviet culture was to be realism, and not ordinary but “socialist” realism. The intention was for Soviet cultural forces to glorify socialism in traditionally realistic forms. An atmosphere was created in which, with growing rigor, any attempt at experimentation in art was declared “formalism,” and “formalist” became the worst label one could hang on a writer, artist, or composer.

The frightened, broken leaders of the Soviet avant-garde capitulated one after the other; in the thirties this was called “perestroika” or “restructuring.” For example, Malevich tried to restructure himself. He stopped working in his suprematist manner and began painting realistic portraits. They are interesting and significant works, but in his heart Malevich must have continued to consider himself primarily the creator of nonfigurative suprematism. When he died in 1935, Lydia Ginzburg described the funeral: Malevich was “buried with music and in a Suprematist coffin. People lined Nevsky, and people said: Must be a foreigner! … The Suprematist coffin was made from a design by the deceased. For the cover he had planned a square, a circle, and a cross, but the cross was rejected, even though it was called an intersection of two planes.”^{583}

The observation that the mass audience perceived the avantgardists as foreigners was a shrewd one. In Russia, experimental art had never taken root. At all times civic-oriented culture was highly valued, and the demand for “realism,” understood primarily as a naturalistic similarity to life and first presented by populists in the 1860s, acquired legitimacy in intellectual circles. As Akhmatova commented bitterly in the 1960s, “The good things that the narodniki (populists) called for, no one accepted. But their ‘realism’ was accepted right away. And for a long time.”^{584}

In the early years of the twentieth century the symbolists and especially the members of Mir iskusstva succeeded in reeducating a significant number of the Russian intellectual elite, particularly in Petersburg, New perceptions about the possibilities and goals of culture started to take root; this Silver Age prepared the soil for the wild flowering of the Russian avant-garde. But the broad circles of intelligentsia, not to mention the general public, remained outside of this process. When the avant-garde captured a few commanding positions for a brief period after the revolution and tried to expand their influence, the cultural counterrevolution was not long in coming.

Petersburg, as the most Western-oriented Russian cultural center, accepted the ideas of the modern sooner than other locales and remained a platform for avant-garde experimentation longer than any other city. In the postrevolutionary years, the cultural “left front” in Petrograd-Leningrad produced dazzling things: the canvases of Malevich and Filonov, the constructions of Tatlin, the theatrical productions of Sokolovsky and Terentyev, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, the choreography of Lopukhov and Balanchine, the new Petersburg prose, Oberiu, and the symphonies and operas of Shostakovich. But this highly original work, the impulse for which came from the innovations of the Silver Age and which the poet Lev Loseff suggested calling the Bronze Age, took place in an unconducive atmosphere, under constant and increasing pressure both from above and below.

The pressure from above came from the bureaucratic state apparatus that grew stronger with every passing month. From below, the peasant masses that poured into the city brought pressure. An aggressively conservative Philistine taste in culture was common at the top and the bottom. In those circumstances, the Bronze Age was doomed in Leningrad and in the rest of the country.

Inside the country the “left front” did not fulfill even a small part of its goals. But it did become immensely popular in intellectual circles of the West. In that sense a comparison with Mir iskusstva is revealing, whose leaders except for Diaghilev did not become cultural icons in the West; the same could be said about the Russian symbolists. Yet inside Russia the cultural goals of Mir iskusstva and the symbolists were realized in large part. Of course, the “socialist realists” managed to crowd out many recognized figures from Mir iskusstva. But this happened later, in the forties and early fifties, and affected Leningrad least of all, where Mir iskusstva’s authority remained unshakable, even in the most difficult years of Stalin’s cultural clamp-down and in defiance of the prevailing attitude.

The left front in culture was for Stalin not only an aesthetic but a political threat. He considered it part of the left opposition to his political line. Very adept at using art for political gain, Stalin always regarded it in a broader social context. Even though his moves in the political and cultural spheres were not necessarily always simultaneous, the general direction of his strategy in both almost always coincided. And often clamping down in cultural life was a harbinger of pressure in the political sphere. Thus, the bureaucratic centralization of cultural activity and the imposition of socialist realism preceded one of the turning points in prewar Soviet history: the assassination on December 1, 1934, in Leningrad of the Communist Party leader Sergei Kirov, which some historians dubbed “the murder of the century.”

This killing, which stunned the Soviet Union, had tragic consequences for Leningrad. A high Party official and friend of Stalin, Kirov had been his satrap in Leningrad since 1926, replacing Zinoviev, Lenin’s comrade-in-arms, who did not suit Stalin and was a leader of the internal Communist Party “opposition.” The subsequent development of events turned Kirov into a national hero, while Zinoviev was presented for years afterward only in a negative light. In this respect the case of Kirov resembles the situation with Lenin: reminiscences by people who knew him blend contemporary feelings with an overlay of emotions added later.

Energetic, attractive, and a good orator, Kirov was a comparatively well-read man who followed contemporary literature and devoted a lot of attention to Leningrad culture.^{585} He was a patron of Lopukhov, encouraging the choreographer’s experiments in using modern plots in ballet.^{586} Kirov also frequently attended the opera. He did not care for The Nose, but that did not lead to the immediate removal of the production from the repertory.^{587} Kirov no doubt tried to cultivate the image of a “democratic” leader, as opposed to Stalin. That made him popular but also probably annoyed Stalin, who had eliminated Zinoviev and with him the threat of a powerful center of opposition in Leningrad. Then less than a decade later, Stalin perceived that Leningrad was trying to slip from his control again.

That Kirov might have been killed on Stalin’s orders was discussed openly in the Soviet Union after the mid-fifties. But the rumor spread in Leningrad almost immediately. Kirov was shot in a corridor of the former Smolny Institute, which became the Communist Party’s headquarters in Soviet times. A popular jingle of the period went:

The official reaction to Kirov’s death was naturally quite different. It was immediately announced that the enemies of the Soviet state were behind the murder. Many people were truly shocked and frightened. Zabolotsky dedicated a poem to Kirov that appeared in the newspaper Izvestiya three days after his murder. It began

Kirov’s bier lay in state in the Tauride Palace, with Stalin, who had arrived by special train from Moscow, as one of the honor guards. “Huge crowds of Leningraders moved along Shpalernaya Street to bid him farewell. I also walked in that sorrowing and anxious crowd, also felt in that event something of a watershed, a transition to a new era that promised we knew not what,” recalled Nikolai Chukovsky.

The most terrible foreboding of the city’s inhabitants came to pass. Mass arrests and executions began instantly. “The words ‘execution’ and ‘shoot’ became so ordinary in our daily lives that they lost meaning. Only the shell remained, an empty combination of sounds. The real meaning of the word did not reach our brains. It was worn off, like a counterfeit coin,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina, the author of one of the rare surviving honest diaries of the period.^{588}

The “investigation” of the circumstances of Kirov’s death—actually nothing less than the organization of mass terror in Leningrad—was entrusted by Stalin to the infamous Yakov Agranov, who in 1921 had fabricated the “case” against Gumilyov on Zinoviev’s orders. But now Agranov was obeying Stalin, and one of his first victims was Zinoviev. Stalin accused Zinoviev of being the mastermind behind Kirov’s murder. This gave him the opportunity to put an end for good to opposition within the Party. But the consequences of the Kirov case reached much farther. It was Stalin’s pretext for unleashing the Great Terror of 1936-1938, in which millions of people perished.

That terror was like the black plague attacking the Soviet Union, infecting more and more strata of society, who came to be branded “enemies of the people.” The country was caught up in a madness of denunciations, mutual accusations, and self-incriminations extracted under torture. Leningrad was singled out for specially ruthless treatment: Stalin hoped to destroy the city’s oppositional spirit once and for all.

The Great Terror in Leningrad was described by an impassioned witness, Yevgeny Shvarts:

A storm broke, swirling everything around it, and it was impossible to guess who would be killed by the next bolt of lightning. And no one ran and no one hid. A man who knows he is guilty knows how to behave: a criminal gets a false passport and flees to another city. But the future enemies of the people stood without moving, awaiting the blow of the terrible Antichrist brand. They sensed blood, like bulls in a slaughterhouse, they sensed it, but the ‘enemy of the people’ brand kills without selection, anyone at all—and they all stood there, obediently, like bulls waiting for the blow. How can you run if you know you’re not guilty? How do you behave during interrogations? And people died, in a nightmare, confessing to unheard of crimes: espionage, terror, sabotage. And they vanished without a trace, and after them were sent their wives and children, entire families.^{589}

It was hard to find a family in Leningrad that was not affected in some way by the terror. Its horrible shadow reached Akhmatova: in 1935, at the height of the repressions following the Kirov case, they arrested her son by Gumilyov, Lev, and her husband at the time, Nikolai Punin. Both had been arrested before and were already “marked”: Gumilyov, as the son of an “enemy of the people” executed in 1921, and Punin as an influential theoretician of the avant-garde in art and one of the leading figures in Leningrad’s cultural life. On the advice of friends, Akhmatova wrote a short letter to Stalin himself, pleading for the release of her son and husband. It ended with the entreaty, “Help, Iosif Vissarionovich!” A few days later Lev and Punin were home.

In 1938 Lev Gumilyov was arrested again. Among the other absurd charges was the following. Akhmatova was allegedly inciting her son to avenge his father’s death by killing Andrei Zhdanov, the new Party boss of Leningrad installed by Stalin to replace Kirov. New interrogations and beatings followed, but Lev did not sign any of the confessions they tried to force out of him, even though many people who could not withstand the torture “assembly line,” as it was called, incriminated not only themselves but their friends and relatives.

Zabolotsky, arrested also in 1938, later described the behavior of his cellmates in a Leningrad prison: “Here you could observe all forms of despair, all manifestations of cold hopelessness, convulsive hysterical merriment, and cynical disregard of everything in the world, including one’s own fate.” The atmosphere changed dramatically at night, when the multistoried prison was illuminated by lights and the army of investigators set about its ruthless “work” in its innumerable offices: “The enormous stone courtyard of the building, onto which opened the windows of the offices, would gradually be filled with the groans and heart-rending screams of people being beaten. The whole cell shuddered, as if an electric current had run through it, and mute horror appeared once again in the eyes of the prisoners.”

Lev Gumilyov was condemned to be shot. It is not known whether a new appeal, sent by Akhmatova to Stalin, had any effect or whether other circumstances were involved, but his sentence was commuted to exile in Siberia, where he was fated to spend fourteen years in prison and labor camps.

During the more than seventeen months that Gumilyov was imprisoned in Leningrad, Akhmatova spent hundreds of hours in prison lines. The women of Leningrad, who formed most of the long queues by the prison wall, were trying to learn at least something about the fate of their arrested relatives and to deliver food parcels to them. The exhausted Akhmatova, almost fifty years old then, her face ashen, was noticed by many people in the lines, even though in her worn old coat and crumpled hat she must have been hard to recognize.

One of the tensest moments when Akhmatova was turning over a parcel for her son was later described by her neighbor in that horrible line: “It was her turn, she came up to the crevice of a window—inside were insignia and an unapproachable dummy; softly, almost without opening her mouth, she said the required: ‘Akhmatova for Gumilyov.’”^{590} Akhmatova recalled that a woman who stood behind her burst into tears at hearing her name.

They were tears of shock. For many Leningraders Akhmatova must have seemed like a ghost from the past. In 1925, when an unofficial Party directive was issued about her (“Do not arrest, but do not publish”), her new poems ceased to appear. Akhmatova could have been considered deceased long ago, and in fact many thought she was. A favorite theme of the official critics, when her work was submitted for publication, was its blatant incompatibility with the new progressive “socialist way of life.” In her late years, Akhmatova often ironically quoted one such article. “The new people remain, and will remain, cold and unmoved by the whining of a woman who either was born too late or did not die in time.”

Hardest of all for Akhmatova was that this official hostility coincided with a certain cooling toward her poetry among the Leningrad poetry connoisseurs, who preferred to listen to Oberiu avant-garde poets like Zabolotsky or Vaginov. Akhmatova was losing contact with her audience and that may have been one of the reasons for the decline in her productivity. There were years when she wrote only one or two poems or none at all. For a lyric poet such muteness is worse than death, and Akhmatova suffered greatly.

The Great Terror brought to Akhmatova, as it did to millions of her fellow citizens, fear, sorrow, and inexpressible suffering, but it also gave her a new poetic voice and a renewed sense of sharing the nation’s fate. Between 1935 and 1940 Akhmatova wrote the main body of the verse cycle Requiem, which is arguably the greatest contemporary artistic testimony to the Stalin terror. Requiem also played an important role in the later evolution of the Petersburg mythos.

The tsars had created Petersburg as an artificial capital, summoned to exert control over the Russian Empire, and many Russian creative geniuses keenly felt that the city’s influence was that of the devil. Yet over two centuries, Petersburg grew deep roots in the native soil. And now the Communists’ abrupt return of the capital to Moscow was regarded by the locals as violence against history and tradition. Stalin’s vendetta against “oppositionist” Leningrad merely strengthened that impression.

The Petersburg elite of the nineteenth century, in opposition to the regime, felt alienated from their own capital. At the turn of the century, only isolated individuals began to feel a certain sympathy for Petersburg. But by the time Petrograd had lost its political significance under the Soviet regime, wide circles of the intelligentsia had come to love and revere their city.

The city’s imperial traditions made it the ideal focus for remembrance; this was understood well by its enemies, too. When in the early 1920s Nikolai Antsiferov’s book, The Soul of Petersburg, appeared—the first attempt to provide a comprehensive outline of the Petersburg mythos in its literary and architectural manifestations—the proletarian writer Alexander Serafimovich wrote an irritated partisan review:

The book draws the city’s “face,” the face and soul of Petersburg. But it draws it exclusively from the point of view of the representative of the former ruling class. It presents (rather vividly) the image of the central part of the city—its palaces, gardens, churches, and monuments—but does not present at all, does not even mention, the large area where there were factories, poverty, and slavery, as if there existed only the center, full of interest, life, movement, and uniqueness, while the rest was just deserted, dead, mute, and unneeded. This creates an incorrect, anti-proletarian perspective.^{591}

The Great Terror in Leningrad destroyed the juxtaposition of the “imperial” and “proletarian” parts of the city. Right after Kirov’s murder in 1934, Lyubov Shaporina, describing the start of the deportation of the Leningrad elite, wrote in her diary, “Who is being exiled? For what reasons? What do all those people have in common? They are the intelligentsia. And the majority are native Petersburgers.” The subsequent terror of the late 1930s spread a much wider net. It was not that just a part of Leningrad was destroyed; the whole city was a victim now. These tragic events paved the way for a decisive change in the Petersburg mythos, while the city became a martyr city. The work that cemented that radical change of the city’s image was Akhmatova’s Requiem.

Stalin had declared a genocidal war against his own people, and Leningrad was one of his most visible victims. And yet the terror wanted to remain anonymous, unnamed. “Enemies of the people” were harangued daily on the radio, in newspapers, at countless meetings, but it was forbidden to speak of where they were being sent as they disappeared. The words “terror,” “prison,” “camp,” and “arrest” were not spoken aloud and seemed not to exist in the everyday vocabulary. The infamous black vans that carried off the arrested had fake signs of their sides: “Meat” or “Milk.”^{592} People called them Black Ravens or Black Marias. Lydia Chukovskaya (daughter of Kornei Chukovsky) recalled that in the “prison lines women stood in silence or, whispering, used very impersonal forms of speech: ‘they came,’ ‘he was taken.’” The official slogan for the country, by which everyone allegedly lived at that time, was Stalin’s constantly quoted “Life has become better, life has become merrier.” In that atmosphere it took enormous inner strength for Akhmatova to violate that taboo and write about her officially “merry” times:

A mythos without names is impossible; every mythos demands that people, things, and events be named. Naming is an ineluctable part of mythos creation. The ritual importance of naming is confirmed by the principle Nomina sunt odiosa (“names are odious,” that is, they may not be spoken), prevalent in many ancient cultures. In Requiem, Akhmatova fearlessly named things:

The fifteen verse fragments of Requiem form a terrible mosaic of daily life in terror-stricken Leningrad: arrest, desperate pleas for mercy, endless lines by the prison wall, sentencing. The emotional culmination of Requiem are two stanzas called “Crucifixion,” in which Akhmatova compares the fate of her arrested son to the trials of the crucified Christ and she accents the suffering of Mary. Those two fragments are Akhmatova’s tour de force and the key to Requiem, which would be better called Stabat mater dolorosa.

Akhmatova had an old Russian musical model, the kondak, a liturgical song of Byzantine origin that relates in dramatic form episodes from the life of Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary. The epigraph to “Crucifixion” is taken from a kondak and indicates this connection. In her work Akhmatova even loosely followed the kondak structure: introduction—relating the drama—and a final edifying conclusion. Like the kondak, Akhmatova’s Requiem is a kind of mystery play, retelling the Passion of Christ for a modern audience.

Akhmatova’s use of traditional religious imagery echoed a similar experience of Stravinsky’s, who in 1930 composed his Symphony of Psalms, one of Akhmatova’s favorite musical works. But she was facing a task of extraordinary difficulty: she was the first to find the words and the art form to respond to a genocide unmatched in world history. Later attempts to describe and interpret the Holocaust showed how difficult it is to treat such a horrible theme artistically. Words, pictures, and music seem inadequate to depict simple, horrible facts. In addition, Akhmatova was working in total isolation against Stalin’s enormous propaganda machine, selecting grain by grain the needed words of grief, despair, and protest.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, meeting Akhmatova in the early 1960s when he was collecting material for his monumental work on the Stalinist labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago, said of Requiem, “It’s too bad that in your poetry you are talking about only one person.” Solzhenitsyn thought that the accent on the suffering of mother and son narrowed the scale of the national catastrophe. As if in response to him, Joseph Brodsky noted, “In fact Akhmatova was not trying to create a national tragedy. Requiem is still the poet’s autobiography, because everything it describes happened to the poet.”^{593}

Requiem’s power lies in the way its mirroring of the fate of its author and her son reflects the tragedy of a city and a nation. Akhmatova’s talking about her personal experiences personalizes a tragedy that in its bare facts is beyond human comprehension. That is the key to the poem. Akhmatova says in Requiem that she is writing it

As to the mechanism of Requiem’s creation and its emotional effect, Brodsky commented,

But really, such situations—arrest, death (in Requiem it always smells of death, people are always on the edge of death)—well, such extreme situations rule out the possibility of an adequate reaction. When a person weeps, it is the weeper’s private concern. When a writer weeps, when he suffers, he actually benefits somehow from suffering. A writer can really suffer, really grieve. But describing that grief, those are not real tears, not real gray hair. It is merely an approximation of a real reaction. And the realization of that alienation creates a truly mad situation. Requiem is a work that is constantly balancing on the edge of madness which is the result not of the catastrophe itself, not the loss of a son, but of that moral schizophrenia, that schism, not of reason but of conscience. The schism between sufferer and writer. That is what makes this work so great.^{594}

During World War I, Akhmatova announced in her frightening poem “The Prayer” her readiness to sacrifice on the altar of Russia her child, her friend, and her mysterious gift of song. Twenty years later her offer was accepted, but only in part, and with truly Faustian conditions: both her friend and her child were taken away (which did not lessen Russia’s suffering, however, as she had requested in “The Prayer”); but it was these tragic events in her own life, so terrible for Akhmatova the woman, that gave a powerful impetus to the inspiration of Akhmatova the poet. Her son sensed this acutely. After returning to Leningrad from his many years in exile after Stalin’s death, he once reproached his mother in the heat of an argument, “It would have been even better for you [as a poet] if I had died in the camps.”^{595}

The Communists’ execution in 1921 of Akhmatova’s first husband Gumilyov and the death of Alexander Blok left the poet with the halo of “poetic widow.” She was on her way to becoming a national symbol, but further developments left her in relative isolation. The tragic turns in her son’s life and then in the life of her third husband somehow returned the moral authority of the seer Cassandra to Akhmatova, making her the priestess of the national destiny. It was then that she fully felt herself the guardian defender and even—to some extent—the creator of the nation’s historical memory.

Politically, artistically, and emotionally Leningrad no longer juxtaposed itself to Russia as a whole. Languishing under the weight of the Great Terror, the city suffered like the rest of the country—only more so. In that sense it continued to be the symbol of all Russia, but a hidden, esoteric symbol: officially there was no terror.

The new mythos of the martyr city was being created, as befits a mythos, in deep secrecy, underground. At first only her closest friends knew about the existence of Akhmatova’s Requiem. For many years she did not commit it to paper but secreted it in the memories of several trusted friends. They were to be the bearers of that still hidden mythos until such time as the secret could be revealed. Lydia Chukovskaya, one of those living depositories, recalled meeting with Akhmatova in her bugged apartment:

Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, she would stop, and looking up at the ceiling and walls, she would pick up paper and pen; later she would say something quite social very loudly, “Would you like some tea?” or “You’ve gotten quite a tan,” and write on the scrap of paper in a quick hand and give it to me. I would read the verse, memorize it, and silently return it to her. “We’re having such an early fall this year,” Akhmatova would say loudly, strike a match, and burn the paper over the ashtray. It was a ritual: hands, match, ashtray—a beautiful and bitter ritual.”^{596}

In every mythos, there are esoteric and exoteric elements. For many years, Requiem, known only to initiates, formed the esoteric part of the new Petersburg mythos. In 1941 a work appeared that announced to the whole world the exoteric message of that mythos: Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, which came to be called “Leningrad.” It appeared in circumstances that were no less dramatic than those of Requiem, and it followed another important symphonic work by Shostakovich, also directly tied to the Great Terror and its horrible psychological trauma.

The Great Terror bypassed Shostakovich personally; however, because his compositions were subject to official attacks for their “formalism,” he had to expect the worst and confided to his closest friends more than once, “Who knows what will happen to me, they’ll probably shoot me.” Like millions of his fellow citizens, he did not sleep well at night, awaiting the arrival of the secret police to arrest him. (As Yevgeny Shvarts recalled, “For some reason it seemed particularly shameful to stand in your underwear before the messengers of fate and pull on your trousers before their eyes.”^{597}) But arrests did take people close to the composer—his older sister’s husband, his wife’s family. Under these circumstances, he was compelled to recall his Mahlerian Fourth Symphony, but despite that the creative impulse flourished, as it did with Akhmatova. Shostakovich vowed to a friend, “If they chop off both my hands, I’ll still write music with a pen between my teeth.”^{598} Prokofiev reacted in a similar way to the enormous pressure of the Great Terror, confiding to Ilya Ehrenburg, “Now I must work. Only work! That is salvation.”

Shostakovich wrote his Fifth Symphony very quickly, between April 18 and July 20, 1937; the central part of the symphony, the long Largo, was composed in just three days. Le tout Leningrad came to the symphony’s premiere on November 21, 1937, conducted by the rising star, thirty-four-year-old Yevgeny Mravinsky. This was a brilliant crowd, dancing on the volcano, the intellectual elite of the city, leading a precarious existence in those terrible days. Theirs was a surrealistic world, the nights spent listening for the Black Maria, guessing on which floor the elevator bearing unwelcome callers would stop, the days pretending that everything was fine. Shvarts, a member of the elite feasting during the plague, described its emotions: “We lived outwardly as we had before. There were evenings at the House of the Writer. We ate and drank. And laughed. In our servile condition we laughed at the general misfortune—but what else could we do?^{599}

The first audience of the Fifth Symphony entered the hall dressed to the nines, exchanging pleasantries, flirting, gossiping, and wondering what the “disgraced” Shostakovich would offer up for their judgment. But from the very first sounds, reflexive, jagged, filled with nervous tension, the music captured them and did not release them until it ended. The Fifth Symphony developed like a grand monologue without words, in which the protagonist led the audience through the thicket of his doubts and worries, through his private hell, which was painfully familiar to every Leningrader. Shostakovich’s music expressed the feelings of the intellectual who tried in vain to hide from the menacing outside world, which nevertheless found him everywhere—in the great outdoors, on the street, at home—ruthlessly pushing its hapless victim against the wall.

The Fifth Symphony moved the audience; when the music ended, many were weeping.^{600} The audience rose as one for a thirtyminute ovation. Mravinsky waved the score over his head. The orchestra had long left the stage, but the public would not leave the hall. They understood that this music was about them, about their lives, their hopes and fears. The Fifth Symphony from the very beginning was interpreted by Leningraders as a work about the Great Terror. Of course, it was impossible to say that. As Isaac Babel commented with bitter irony, “Now a man talks frankly only with his wife, at night, with the blanket over his head.”

Therefore the premiere of the symphony was wrapped by the author and his friends in “protective” words to blunt its impact. Shostakovich gave an interview in which he tried to avoid arousing the ire of the authorities against his work. “At the center of the concept of my work I placed man with all his feelings,” he explained vaguely. The reporter published this interview under a headline typical of the times, “My Creative Reply” (Shostakovich’s reply, that is, to the allegedly “just” rebukes for formalism and other mortal sins of the period).

For Shostakovich, as for other Soviet artists, this was a routine feint, a half-hearted attempt to cover his tracks. Shklovsky compared such behavior with the weary circling of a cat with a can tied to its tail. “The cat races around, and the tin can rattles across its tracks.” But Western critics, not understanding or not willing to understand the reality in which Shostakovich lived, accepted the legend that his Fifth Symphony was conceived and written as “an artist’s creative reply to justified criticism.” As a result, this tragic and highly personal symphony, which has won popularity worldwide as perhaps the most frequently performed of Shostakovich’s works, for many years was interpreted in the West as an act of creative capitulation before the Stalinist regime.

Nevertheless, the first Soviet reviewers described the Fifth Symphony rather accurately, discovering “traits of physiological horror” and the “coloring of mortality and despair.” “The thrust of suffering in a number of places is taken to a naturalistic scream and howl. In some episodes the music is capable of eliciting an almost physical sense of pain,” stated a critic. Another critic maintained that in Shostakovich’s symphony “the emotion of dazed mourning is elevated to the heights of tragedy.”

The paradox is that these critics were not trying to help Shostakovich. At the height of the Great Terror their perceptive judgments were in fact intended as political denunciations of the composer who dared to create a tragic work in the paranoic atmosphere of enforced optimism. Shostakovich’s symphony truthfully reflected the emotions of the populace, exhausted by mass arrests and executions, yet the press rebuked the work for its “concentratedly gloomy musical colors” and its “horror of numbness.” But precisely because the Fifth Symphony continued to be performed and to be discussed in the press, it became the subject of public debates, unlike Akhmatova’s Requiem. And so Shostakovich’s work played a certain role in the crystallization of the mythos of Leningrad as a martyr city.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony could be called the Bronze Horseman Symphony because, like Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, it deals with the eternal question for Russia about the conflict between the individual and the state. Like Yuri Tynyanov in his prose, Shostakovich reinterpreted the problem under Soviet conditions. In his symphony the basic conflict occurs in the finale, which caused the greatest arguments. The critics, especially those in the West, saw an unconditional apotheosis in the finale, an anthem to the status quo. Yet the first Soviet listeners perceived the music quite differently. One of them noted that the start of the last movement is “the iron tread of a monstrous power trampling man.” Upon first hearing the symphony, Alexander Fadeyev wrote in his diary, “The end does not sound like an outcome (and ever less like a triumph or victory), but like a punishment or revenge of someone.”

The finale of the Fifth Symphony is tied in its imagery with Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, in which poor Yevgeny entered in vain battle with the awesome statue of Peter the Great, the embodiment of the idea of the Russian state. Yevgeny lost his mind and died, and the state triumphed. But Pushkin, as we recall, refused to make a final judgment, as if “suspending” the conclusion of his poem. This allowed various and often contradictory interpretations of his work, depending on the critic’s ideological persuasion. Symphonic music tends to ambiguity more than literature does, allowing even more room for various interpretations. This gave Shostakovich the chance to “speak out” in an atmosphere that otherwise made open public discussion impossible for Soviet intellectuals.

The ambiguity of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony helped it to surface, while Akhmatova’s Requiem continued to exist in the underground. All critical attacks on the music’s “horror,” its “mortality and despair” were of a general character. Its detractors were not able to provoke a political scandal, and the discussion of the Fifth Symphony was largely confined to an aesthetic realm. The name of Leningrad, for understandable reasons, was not mentioned in connection with the symphony. The new Petersburg mythos of the city as martyr remained hidden. The decisive push toward its public acceptance—both in the USSR and in the West—came from the war with Nazi Germany.

On June 22, 1941, Shostakovich was chairman of the final examinations for pianists at Leningrad Conservatory, where he had been a professor since 1937. The exam was interrupted by terrible words resounding in the hall: “War with Germany!”

Many Soviet people had feared that Hitler would one day invade their country. A Leningrader recalled the mood of those years, “Somewhere in Europe the war is on, for several years now—so what? Our country is outside the war; we were told that it was good that the capitalists were fighting among themselves, we could only profit from that.” This same person continued, “It was not considered appropriate to worry about international events, to exhibit, as they used to call it, ‘unhealthy moods.’ We were lulled by a popular song that went: “Our favorite city can sleep peacefully, and dream, and grow green in spring.’”^{601}

The shock was great. The Germans had striking success in the early days of the war, causing unprecedented damage to the Soviet Army and occupying huge chunks of Soviet territory. By July 14 German troops were at the gates of Leningrad. On September 8 they completed their encirclement of the city. On September 22, 1941, German Naval headquarters issued a secret directive called “On the Future of the City of Petersburg,” which stated,

The Führer has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg from the face of the earth.… After the defeat of Soviet Russia there is no interest in the further existence of this large inhabited area.… We propose blockading the city tightly and to level it through artillery shelling of all calibers and constant bombing from the air.^{602}

Secret Nazi Party instructions, detailing the need for great caution in conversations with Russians, pointed out that most dangerous were discussions with residents of the former Petersburg: “The latter are good dialecticians by nature and have the ability to persuade one of the most incredible things.”^{603} The Nazi leadership considered Moscow a semiAsiatic village whose residents could be worked over and possibly still forced to serve the interests of the German Reich. But the Nazis were of a different mind when it came to residents of the former capital. The logical conclusion was that Leningrad, the heir of Petersburg, had to be destroyed by German military might.

Stalin’s own prewar policies were clearly aimed at bleeding Leningrad dry. But the German invasion instantly changed the situation. Now Leningrad became a prominent part of Stalin’s defense against Germany.

On August 21, 1941, Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad’s party leader, appealed to the people of the city with a declaration:

The enemy is trying to break into Leningrad. He wants to destroy our homes, capture the factories and plants, steal the people’s wealth, flood the streets and squares with the blood of innocent victims, rape the peaceful populace, and enslave the free sons of our Homeland.^{604}

Zhdanov’s appeal was posted on the walls of many Leningrad buildings. And on September 14, Leningraders heard the writer Vsevolod Vishnevsky on the radio: “The Fascists want to turn our people into numbered cattle, deprive them of honor, rights, and dignity. ‘Hey, you, from Leningrad, Sankt-Peterburg! This is the city that first made revolution. So go to the wall, or go to hard labor.’”

Among the evils listed by Zhdanov and Vishnevsky were none that had not already been perpetrated in Leningrad by Stalin and his henchmen. But Stalin’s rape of Leningrad took place in secret. After the German invasion, Leningrad’s salvation suddenly became a legitimate theme. It became possible to speak and write openly about the city’s struggle for survival.

In these dramatically changed circumstances Shostakovich started writing down his new work dedicated to the fate of Leningrad, a work that became famous as the Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony. I emphasize the term write down, not compose: Shostakovich typically worked fast, because in many cases he was writing down a work that had been completed in his mind, with just a few preliminary sketches. Therefore Shostakovich wrote the orchestration of his symphonies in ink. “But, even in light of Shostakovich’s typically accurate preliminary conception of sound, this was a special case, a notation of unusual clarity, fullness, and speed,” his Soviet biographer averred.^{605}

Shostakovich could not stand talking about his “creative plans,” preferring to announce his completed works. Nevertheless, his Seventh Symphony was included in the program for the Leningrad Philharmonic’s 1941-1942 season, that is, before the German invasion. That could have been done only with the composer’s consent and indicates that Shostakovich had a clear idea of his Seventh Symphony and was sure he would complete it by the fall season.

Undoubtedly, the shock of the war created a new psychological background for the composer’s work and influenced the final result. We know that at that time Shostakovich was seriously considering using words from the Psalms of David, for a soloist to sing. Sollertinsky, who was knowledgeable about the Bible, helped him select the texts. Excerpts from the Ninth Psalm were chosen:

When He maketh inquisition for blood, He remembereth them: He forgetteth not the cry of the humble.

Have mercy upon them O Lord; consider my trouble which I suffer on account of them that hate me; thou hast lifted me up from the gate of death.

For Shostakovich the words about “inquisition for blood” were of particular importance, corresponding with the composer’s outrage over Stalin’s oppression. Though before war broke out he could not even think about a public performance of a work to that text, after the invasion, the opportunity arose, at least in theory. The reference to “blood” could now be applied to Hitler. Moreover, Stalin, stunned by the country’s setbacks, was trying to appeal to the patriotic and religious feelings of the Russian people. Orthodox themes and images were no longer suppressed by the authorities. Ehrenburg recalled the cultural situation in that period: “Usually war brings with it the censor’s scissors; but in Russia during the first eighteen months of the war writers felt much freer than before.”^{606}

Shostakovich had another, professional reason for turning to the Psalms. Igor Stravinsky had used them in his 1930 Symphony of Psalms. Shostakovich did not hide the fact that Stravinsky was always at the center of his attention. “Stravinsky’s work had a big influence on me. Every work made a strong impression and elicited enormous interest,” Shostakovich confessed.

As soon as the score of the Symphony of Psalms (which Stravinsky began writing to a Russian text and only later switched to Latin) reached Leningrad, Shostakovich transcribed it for piano for four hands and often performed the work with students in his composition class at Leningrad Conservatory. When he began composing the Seventh Symphony, he clearly intended to compete with his idol.

Eventually, Shostakovich gave up the idea and the Seventh Symphony turned out to be a work “without words” and with a vaguely programmatic theme. But the spirit of the Psalms of David hovered over it, especially in the first movement, with its elevated intonations and in the grand orchestral chorale of the third movement. Thus, the theme of “inquisition for blood” remained in the symphony. But echoes of the German siege of Leningrad burst into the symphony, as well.

Leningrad authorities declared a state of siege. The Germans bombed the city ruthlessly from the air and bombarded it with heavy artillery from the surrounding territory. To save the Bronze Horseman from destruction, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great was placed in a special “sarcophagus” of sand and wooden boards but remained standing in the middle of the city. Inhabitants recalled the legend that the city would be impregnable as long as the Bronze Horseman retained his original spot. Along with other Leningraders, the teachers and students of the conservatory, including Shostakovich, dug antitank trenches around the city. Then Shostakovich, along with the pianist Sofronitsky, was drafted into the fire brigade that kept watch from the conservatory roof. He also wrote songs and musical arrangements to entertain soldiers at the front.

But of course, his primary occupation was the feverish work on the symphony, with the first three movements—an hour or so of music—ready by late September. In early October Shostakovich, along with other cultural figures considered to be of importance by the regime, including Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, was taken out of blockaded Leningrad by special plane on government orders. Among the few things Shostakovich took with him were his transcription of the Symphony of Psalms and the manuscript of his Seventh Symphony.

Before being evacuated Shostakovich had time to show what he had written to a few friends. As Bogdanov-Berezovsky recalled, the guests at Shostakovich’s apartment were stunned by what they heard.

Everyone unanimously asked him to play it again. But sirens rang out, another air raid alert. Shostakovich suggested that we not end the musicale but take a short break. He had to bring his wife and the children, Galina and Maxim, to the shelter. Left to ourselves, we sat in silence. Any words we could use seemed inappropriate after what we had heard.

A section of the first movement, later called by critics the “invasion episode,” made a particularly strong impression on its first listeners: an evil “marionette” march theme is played in eleven variations by different instruments, rising in volume like Ravel’s Bolero and reaching a powerful, screaming climax with a level of sound that is unbearable physically and mentally. It has become commonplace to explain this episode in a naturalistic way: Shostakovich wanted to depict the march of the Germans across the burning Soviet land.

However, many of the symphony’s first listeners, especially those who were part of the composer’s circle, spoke much more ambiguously about this music, preferring to discuss the images of universal evil and violence that it embodied. For instance, the conductor Mravinsky, who usually chose his words with extreme care when describing Shostakovich’s music, insisted that when he first heard the Seventh Symphony on the radio in March 1942, he had thought that the “invasion episode” was the composer’s depiction of unrestrained, shameless stupidity and crudeness.

The composer in the last years of his life often said in private conversations that his Seventh Symphony contained a protest against two tyrants—Hitler and Stalin. But how did Shostakovich explain this clearly programmatic music right after it was written, during the war years? The answer became known only a half-century later, when the Russian press began publishing the testimony of witnesses who had been forced to keep silent before the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. The music critic Lev Lebedinsky, who had been Shostakovich’s friend for many years, confirmed that the Seventh Symphony had been conceived by the author before the war and explained,

The famous theme in the first movement Shostakovich had first as the Stalin theme (which close friends of the composer knew). Right after the war started, the composer called it the anti-Hitler theme. Later Shostakovich referred to that “German” theme as the “theme of evil,” which was absolutely true, since the theme was just as much anti-Hitler as it was anti-Stalin, even though the world music community fixed on only the first of the two definitions.^{607}

Another important testimony comes from the daughter-in-law of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister before the war who was then dismissed by Stalin. She recounted attending Shostakovich’s piano performance of the Seventh Symphony in a private house during the war years. Later the guests discussed the music:

And then Shostakovich said meditatively: of course, it’s about fascism, but music, real music is never literally tied to a theme. Fascism is not simply National Socialism, and this is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit. Later, when Shostakovich got used to me and came to trust me, he said openly that the Seventh (and the Fifth as well) was not only about fascism but about our country and generally about all tyranny and totalitarianism.^{608}

Shostakovich could speak this freely, of course, only in a very narrow circle of friends. But even in his statements for the Soviet press, he attempted to hint as much as possible about the hidden agenda of his Seventh Symphony, insisting, for instance, that the “central place” in the first movement was not the “invasion episode,” which was the first thing journalists asked about, but the tragic music that followed the episode, which the composer described, characteristically, as “a funeral march or, rather, a requiem.” And Shostakovich continued his commentary, trying to imbue every carefully chosen word with hidden meaning for future listeners. “After the requiem comes an even more tragic episode. I do not know how to characterize that music. Perhaps it is a mother’s tears or even the feeling that the sorrow is so great that there are no more tears left.”^{609}

Shostakovich’s words echo in a remarkable way not only the general mood of Akhmatova’s Requiem but especially one of her “memorial” poems that belong to the same period—a poem written in 1938 in response to news of the demise of a close friend, Boris Pilnyak, in the cruel machine of the Stalinist terror:

Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and Akhmatova’s Requiem are brought together not only by the same horrible initiating impulse (the Stalinist terror in Leningrad), not only by a common artistic model (Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms) and the requiem character dominant in both works, but also by the similarity of creative method, which permitted Shostakovich and Akhmatova to tackle such a daunting theme. The effect of the Requiem was achieved in large part by the almost schizophrenic splitting of the central figure of the narrator into the images of mother and poet. Shostakovich also brings in the composer as a protagonist of his symphony.

In Shostakovich’s later works the autobiographical element is announced unambiguously by including the composer’s musical signature, the motif DSCH (D, E-flat, C, B). In the Seventh Symphony Shostakovich signals his presence more subtly. For instance, in the second movement he introduces a wild theme that could be called the “theme of the condemned.” The programmatic meaning of this musical theme can be deciphered without doubt because of the way Shostakovich used it subsequently in two later instances—in “Six Songs” to the words of English poets (1942) and in the Thirteenth Symphony (“Babi Yar,” 1962). Both times Shostakovich uses that particular theme to illustrate the same image—a defiant dance of the condemned man before execution:

Undoubtedly, in choosing this poem by Robert Burns, “MacPherson’s Farewell,” for his vocal cycle, Shostakovich was identifying himself with its hero, who exclaimed,

Another side of the author’s personality in the Seventh Symphony appears in the third movement, where the hero seeks shelter from mortal concerns in high art. Shostakovich characterized this movement as an “adagio with pathos, the work’s dramatic center.” The composer tied the genesis of this music to his strolls through the city during the white nights, when the majestic architecture of old Petersburg was particularly impressive against the pale background of the shimmering gray Neva and the pearly skies.

Shostakovich could have added that in a musical sense this movement is the most indebted to Stravinsky, this time for his Musagète ballet of the late 1920s, Apollon Musagète, with its imperious themes carried by the strings. For Shostakovich the connection of Stravinsky’s ballet with Petersburg’s architecture was indisputable. In the Seventh Symphony he pays homage to both with the help of musical borrowings from Apollon Musagète, adding in the process his own lonely figure to the idealized Petersburg landscape. In that sense the third movement can be interpreted as the composer’s attempt to flee the harsh real world, the realm of unbridled terror, into an imaginary ideal world of art, ruled by Apollo and his muses.

This attempt to escape was doomed to failure, both in art and in life. Even though the Seventh Symphony was conceived as an esoteric work, a radically different fate awaited it.

As early as September 17, 1941, just two months after Shostakovich started writing down the symphony, he was summoned to Leningrad radio to tell the whole country about his new work. As one of the producers of the broadcast later recalled, a special car was sent for Shostakovich and as they drove to the Leningrad Radio Committee, the composer was given the editorial “The Enemy Is at the Gate,” in the latest issue of Leningradskaya pravda: “Leningrad has become a front. The enemy is counting on the workers of Leningrad to lose heart and become confused, not to think clearly and thereby disorganize the defense of our great city. The enemy has miscalculated!”^{610}

It was explained in no uncertain terms to Shostakovich that his radio talk had to be a variation on this theme. And he read a prepared text that announced he was writing his Seventh Symphony “so that the Leningraders who are listening to me now will know that life in our city is going on normally.”

The life of Leningrad, like that of any besieged city, had very little normalcy about it, but for the major propaganda machine that was gearing up, this fact was insignificant. After the radio announcement, Shostakovich’s new patriotic work made the newspapers—first the local ones, then Moscow’s Pravda, which set the tone for subsequent coverage in newspapers throughout the USSR. The fact that Shostakovich was composing a symphony in besieged Leningrad was turned into a national symbol of the determination of the city and the country to resist the Nazis to the very end. The talented writer Alexei Tolstoy, a leading propagandist of the Stalin era, captured that well in his lengthy article in Pravda, “At a Rehearsal of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony,” written in the dramatic style of the day.

The Seventh Symphony is the creation of the conscience of the Russian people, who have undertaken mortal combat with black forces without hesitation.… Hitler didn’t scare Shostakovich. Shostakovich is a Russian man, and that means an angry man, and if you get him good and angry, he’s capable of fantastic exploits.

The performance of the symphony was organized with great urgency, considering the war. Shostakovich completed the orchestration on December 29, 1941, in Kuibyshev (Samara), where leading ministries and theaters had been evacuated from Moscow, including the Bolshoi. And on March 5,1942, the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, one of the best in the Soviet Union, performed it under the confident baton of Samuil Samosud, who had earlier performed the premieres of Shostakovich’s operas The Nose and Lady Macbeth. The concert was broadcast all over the country, and it was announced that the performance was in Moscow, not Kuiybyshev, where it was really taking place; this was part of the propaganda plan.

On the title page, Shostakovich had inscribed “Dedicated to the city of Leningrad.” In that way, the “secret” dedication, as the composer had planned it before the war, became an open one. But he continued to worry, often repeating before the premiere, according to his friends, “They won’t like the symphony, they won’t like it,” in his nervous manner. He was afraid that the audience would not get its hidden message.

Shostakovich’s anxieties were unfounded: the premiere and subsequent performances drew tears from listeners. But even this fact was used by the Soviet propaganda machine. The Seventh Symphony was a real find for them: it was a work of world-class stature, expressing tragedy and pathos. It truly moved audiences but, like any symphony, it was subject to the most general interpretations. A spate of ecstatic reviews followed the premiere, and on April 11, Pravda published the decree bestowing the country’s highest cultural award, the Stalin Prize first class, on Shostakovich.

Stalin put great store by propaganda aimed at Britain and America, his allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. The Seventh Symphony fit his plans beautifully. Shostakovich’s name had been known in the West before the war, but news of the Seventh, which spread quickly in the British and American press, made him particularly popular. Curious details surrounded the work, written up by Western correspondents languishing in Kuibyshev, who were permitted neither in Moscow nor at the front lines.

For instance, a photo taken earlier in besieged Leningrad appeared in publications around the world, depicting Shostakovich, in full fire-fighting uniform and helmet, “putting out a fire” on the Conservatory roof. Later a Shostakovich friend admitted,

Of course, it was a stage show of sorts. The brass fireman’s helmet was becoming to Shostakovich’s antique features. And he looked amazingly effective in the photograph in his uniform and holding a nozzle. Later we ran into each other, and I reminded Shostakovich of that photo. He merely lowered his eyes in response.^{611}

But in Britain and America, where people were eager to learn more about their unexpected mysterious Soviet allies, the clever propaganda photo was met with delight. The image of Shostakovich in the golden fire helmet against a background of burning buildings appeared on the cover of Time magazine, captioned “Fireman Shostakovich” and subtitled “Amid bombs bursting in Leningrad he heard the chords of victory.” The magazine wrote about the coming U.S. premiere of the Seventh Symphony: “Not since the first Manhattan performances of Parsifal (in 1903) had there been such a buzz of American anticipation over a piece of music.”^{612}

In addition to the dramatic story of the symphony’s creation, Time rehashed the excitement of getting the microfilmed score to the United States—by plane from Kuibyshev to Teheran, by car from Teheran to Cairo, by plane from Cairo to New York—and the sensational battle of the most famous conductors for the right to premiere the symphony for American audiences. Millions of Americans heard the broadcast from New York’s Radio City played by the NBC Orchestra, under Arturo Toscanini. After that the concert premiere of the work was done by Serge Koussevitzky, the director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who announced,

It is my deepest feeling that there never has been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses. No one since Beethoven has had the esthetic sense, the approach to musical material that Shostakovich has. He is the greatest master of musical wealth; he is the master of what he desires to do; he has melody without end; his language is as rich as the world; his emotion is absolutely universal.^{613}

During the 1942-1943 season the symphony was played more than sixty times in the United States—unprecedented success for a modern work of classical music lasting over an hour. Often those performances were turned into demonstrations of support for the Soviet war effort and of sympathy for besieged Leningrad. Shostakovich’s contemporaries in the music world were nonplussed. Virgil Thomson, expressing the opinion of many American musicians, wrote condescendingly that if Shostakovich were to continue composing in the same manner, it “may eventually disqualify him for consideration as a serious composer.”

The usually restrained Bela Bartok, who was living in New York City at that time, was so incensed that he vented his anger by including a parody of the “invasion” theme from the Seventh Symphony in his Concerto for Orchestra. Bartok bitterly told a friend about his disappointment in the huge success of a work that he felt did not deserve it in the least.^{614} Stravinsky privately expressed similar feelings while enthusiastically supporting the Russian War Relief and hailing any news of the successes of the Red Army that he had earlier hated.^{615}

The political situation, however, made a dispassionate aesthetic discussion of the symphony’s merits unfeasible, which had a negative effect on its postwar reputation. For many years it disappeared from the repertory of Western orchestras, a victim of both artistic ostracism and cold war mentality. But the symphony’s startling and, for many, unjustified move beyond the notice of connoisseurs to the large Western audience during the Allied coalition became an important support for the international fame of Leningrad as a martyred city. The Seventh Symphony became an acceptable universal symbol of Leningrad’s suffering. Its success in America and Britain boomeranged back to the Soviet Union and forced Pravda, which had attacked Shostakovich’s music in 1936, to write this about him: “His unique talent developed in a great city, beloved by all Soviet people, dear to all progressive humanity.”

This “love for Leningrad,” decreed from on high, was the result of the city’s special status as a strategic besieged fortress, symbolizing the heroic efforts of the Soviet people to repulse the German invaders. The German blockade lasted from September 1941 until January of 1944. Those twenty-nine months were the most tragic in the city’s existence and entered history as the 900 Days, during which between one and two million of the almost three million inhabitants of the city were lost to bombings, shellings, disease, and, most of all, to starvation. The exact figure for the victims of the blockade will probably never be determined, like that for the victims of the city’s original construction. Soviet statistics are notoriously unreliable and, in the case of the siege of Leningrad, the authorities tried to hide and distort the actual situation for political reasons, so that the hopelessly muddled existing data will always be open to different interpretations. In those months the 240-year-old curse of Eudoxia seemed about to come true: “Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!”

Historians continue to debate whether the defense of the city was needed or justified from a military point of view. Should Stalin have ceded the city and thereby spared the civilian population its suffering? It is almost certain that Leningrad’s capitulation would not have saved it. Hitler thirsted for its destruction more than Stalin had before the war. The two evil spirits hovered over the city, nearly annihilating it by their joint efforts. Many other cities might have succumbed under such pressure. But Leningrad’s stubborn, proud spirit prevailed.

The worst scourge was hunger. Workers were given 200 grams of bread per day and members of their families, 175 grams (two thin slices). White-collar workers received the same rations. Shostakovich, who had been evacuated to Kuibyshev, wrote to a friend in 1942, “I get occasional letters from Leningrad that are incredibly painful to read. For instance, my dog has been eaten, several cats have been eaten.” An eyewitness recalled the conversation of some students in a bread line: “They found that cat meat was quite good—like rabbit. The unpleasant part was killing the cat. It defends itself desperately. If you go about it wrong, you can get seriously scratched.”^{616}

In the first months of the blockade, pet birds were eaten, canaries and parrots; then came the turn of street birds, pigeons and crows. Then the hungry turned to the mice and rats. With amazing inventiveness, people tried to extract the edible components of everything around them: they scraped flour paste from wallpaper and book bindings, boiled leather belts, used up all kinds of medicines and drugs, petroleum jelly, and glycerine. They ate dirt—the peat around Leningrad was considered nutritious and one could trade a piece of bread for two mugs of peat.

There were periods when up to thirty thousand people a day died of hunger. Yevgeny Shvarts recalled, “The first to die of hunger in our building was a young actor named Kramskoy, who was rumored to be the artist’s grandson. He died instantly—fell down in the hallway.”^{617} Olga Freidenberg wrote of the same thing:

People walked and fell, stood and toppled. The streets were littered with corpses. In pharmacies, doorways, entries, landings, and thresholds there were bodies. They lay there because people threw them there, like foundlings. The janitors swept them out in the morning like rubbish. Funerals, graves, and coffins had been forgotten long ago. It was a flood of death that no one could handle. The hospitals were crammed with mountains of thousands of corpses, blue, emaciated, horrible. People pulled bodies silently down the street on sleds. They sewed them up in rags or simply covered them, and they were all long, dried out somehow like skeletons.… Whole families vanished, whole apartments with several families. Houses, streets, and blocks vanished.^{618}

The heartbreaking diary of twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva, who died of malnutrition in 1944, survives; in a childlike hand, she recorded the terrible fate of her family on seven sheets of paper:

Zhenya died Dec. 28 at 12:30 A.M. 1941. Grandmother died Jan. 25 at 3 P.M. 1942. Lyoka died March 17 at 5 A.M. 1942. Uncle Vasya died Apr. 13 at 2 A.M. 1942. Uncle Lyosha May 10 at 4 P.M. 1942. Mama May 13 at 7:30 A.M. 1942. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya remains.

The real Petersburgers—noble, restrained, scrupulous—died first as a rule: it was harder for them to adjust to the inhuman conditions of existence, to the struggle for survival. The artist Pavel Filonov died in his studio on December 3,1941—he had been on hunger rations even before the blockade; his exhausted body did not last long.

Children suffered in particular from hunger, turning into wizened little beings very quickly. Like the adults, they thought and talked about food constantly. One Leningrad woman recalled her son, fiveyear-old Tolya:

He was so skinny that he rarely got out of bed, and he kept saying, “Mama! I could eat a whole bucket of porridge and a whole sack of potatoes.” I tried to distract him. I tried telling him stories, but he kept interrupting, “You know, Mama, I’d eat a loaf of bread this big”—and pointed at the washtub. I said, “No, you wouldn’t. It wouldn’t fit in your tummy.” And he argued, “I would, Mama, I would. I’d stay up and eat and eat and eat.” He looked like a baby bird, just a mouth and big brown eyes, such sad eyes.^{619}

Little Tolya suggested to his mother several times that he be killed, maybe by gas. “At first it would make my head ache, but then I would fall asleep.” Many children spoke in those terms during the blockade. One girl consoled her mother, “If I start dying, I’ll do it very quietly, so as not to frighten you.”^{620}

Rumors of cannibalism circulated in Leningrad, which were never reflected in Soviet publications. But some survivors of the siege did touch on this taboo topic with me. One woman told me, “I once traded a chunk of bread for a piece of jellied meat. I brought it home, we started to eat, when my father spat it out. ‘It’s made of human flesh.’ And who was to know whether it was human flesh or not. But we didn’t eat it, we couldn’t. How could we have looked each other in the eye afterward?”

The dying experienced a strange sense of liberation. The academician Dmitri Likhachev, who survived the blockade, wrote, “Only someone dying of hunger leads a real life, can perform the vilest deed or the greatest sacrifice, without fear of death.” Similar emotions were expressed by Olga Berggolts, the bard of the blockade, whose line “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten” is carved on the stela of the monument commemorating the victims of the siege. Her poem reads,

More than one survivor of the blockade described this sense of inner liberation, an emotional flight, to me. It involves the physiology of hunger, when the body seems weightless and visionary impulses are sharpened, heightening the potential for sacrifice and mysticism. And many Leningraders justifiably felt superpatriotic once again: the city’s inhabitants often recalled that never had an enemy set foot on Petersburg soil, and it was not to be this time, either.

These intense and noble emotions and the heroic behavior of Leningrad under siege were skillfully exploited by Stalin’s propaganda machine, which cleverly mixed truth with lies. On the one hand, articles, poems, and songs appeared about the exploits of the Leningraders; on the other hand, the terrible facts of the siege were classified. Olga Freidenberg, who spent the entire blockade in Leningrad, recalled,

The hunger and the killing of people in Leningrad were a deep secret for Moscow and the provinces. The censors had a legal (military) right to check all our letters. You could not tell, nor complain, nor appeal. The newspapers and radio screamed about the courage and valor of the besieged; the deaths were vaguely termed “sacrifices on the altar of the Fatherland.” There was something bizarre about having these besieged people, these starving ghosts, left without water and fuel, be proclaimed officially as the luckiest people in the country.… Our hardships were not only hidden from the world, but the official version spread the rumor that things were better in Leningrad than in the rest of the country, including Moscow. But the people stubbornly insisted that “Stalin does not like our city, if Lenin were alive, things wouldn’t be like this.”^{621}

As far as Freidenberg was concerned, the siege of Leningrad was a “double act of barbarity, Hitler’s and Stalin’s.” Typically, Hitler’s propaganda acted in unison with Stalin’s when it came to the city on the Neva. The Germans had a good picture of the horrible conditions inside the city but preferred not to publicize it. When they needed to make a propaganda point about hunger on Soviet territory, German newspapers published photographs of emaciated children in the city of Kuibyshev. There wasn’t a word about Leningrad. The German tactic was explained this way: “The population of Leningrad not only had to be wiped from the face of the earth, it had to be forgotten.”^{622}

Soviet photographers in besieged Leningrad did their best to falsify the tragic situation. In the seventies, the Soviet writer Daniil Granin went to the official archives in search of photographs of the blockade years. He was particularly interested in pictures taken at Leningrad plants and factories. Granin recalled “factories destroyed by bombs, exhausted people who tied themselves to the lathes and machines to keep from falling.” He found nothing like it in the archives. “We went through thousands of photographs taken by reporters in those years. We saw people at work, laborers—men, women, stern or smiling, but invariably hearty. And very few signs of hunger or suffering.”^{623}

One of the main acts of Stalin’s propaganda was the performance on August 9,1942, of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the besieged city. This performance had been prepared and carried out like a military operation. It was run by Alexei Kuznetsov, Zhdanov’s righthand man. Additional musicians were deployed from the front to the Leningrad Philharmonic over the objections of the generals, who asked, “Make music, not war?”^{624} But the Party bosses explained to the generals the political significance of performing the symphony. Its score was delivered by special military plane from Kuybyshev to Leningrad.

Because important Party and military leaders of the city were expected at the concert, Soviet forces had to protect the Leningrad Philharmonic from German fire. This was the task of Lt. Gen. Leonid Govorov (later marshal of the Soviet Union), commander of the Leningrad front. A few weeks before the performance, military intelligence actively searched out German artillery batteries and observation posts. Three thousand large-caliber weapons were provided for the operation—code name Squall. As a result, the Soviet artillery was able to open heavy fire on the enemy on the day of the concert. The stunned German artillery was put out of commission during the time of the performance.

The Leningrad premiere was broadcast on the radio. Before it started, the announcer stated solemnly,

Dmitri Shostakovich has written a symphony that calls for struggle and affirms faith in victory. The very performance of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad is evidence of the inextinguishable patriotic spirit of the Leningraders, their stalwartness, faith in victory, readiness to fight to the last drop of blood, and to win victory over the enemy. Listen, comrades.

As Bogdanov-Berezovsky later recalled, Philharmonic Hall (formerly the Assembly of the Nobility) was overflowing, and he had the impression that the whole city had turned out for the concert. In the boxes sat Kuznetsov, Govorov, and other party and military leaders. The weary and hungry Bogdanov-Berezovsky thought that

the brightly illuminated Great Hall of the Philharmonic, with its beautiful combination of blinding white, gilt, and gentle raspberry velvet tones, and its flawless architectural proportions, looked even more festive than it had during the most solemn prewar concerts. Compared to the facades of the buildings on the streets, full of wounds, it seemed like an apparition from a wonderful fairy-tale world.

The program said that the Seventh Symphony was dedicated to Leningrad. It is hard to imagine a more grateful audience. Everyone realized that this was a historic occasion. “No one will ever forget this concert on August 9. The motley orchestra, dressed in sweaters and vests, jackets and collarless shirts, played with inspiration and agitation.… When they played the finale, everyone in the audience stood up. It was impossible to listen to it sitting down. Impossible.”^{625}

Many in the audience wept, as had happened during the premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. In both cases such a reaction was the result of shock created by the unexpected emotional attack, when the music spoke of common tragedy. To the sounds of the Seventh, Leningraders wept for their fate and that of their city, slowly dying in the grip of the most ruthless blockade of the twentieth century.

Shostakovich’s music accompanied the crystallization of the new legend of Leningrad the victim city, martyr city, city of suffering. A hundred years earlier, Gogol and then Dostoyevsky had created the image of Petersburg as the cold, inhuman colossus, the center for oppression and humiliation of simple folk. Years passed; bearing blow after blow, the city lost the prerogatives of power and grandeur: first it ceased to be the capital, then it was devastated by the Great Terror. The German siege was supposed to destroy Leningrad completely. But a miracle happened: even though it was physically broken, the city’s spirit soared, buoyed by the sea of compassion from the nation and world.

Once upon a time the anti-Petersburg legend grew in the national consciousness, deep underground, and only later burst to the surface in the prose and poetry of leading Russian writers. In the twentieth century the mythos of the martyr city was also born in the underground, this time not in folk legends but in such brilliant and sophisticated works as Vaginov’s novels and Akhmatova’s Requiem. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was conceived in the same vein, a hidden message about Leningrad’s tragic fate. A dramatic zigzag in history turned that symphony from an esoteric into an exoteric work. Talk of Leningrad’s horrible fate grew louder. The joint efforts of Hitler’s and Stalin’s censors failed; rumors of the starvation and destruction of Leningrad spread widely and it was impossible to suppress them. The underground legend surfaced and, breaking through official barriers, became a national one.

Akhmatova was one of the first to sense it. It was much too soon to think about publishing the anti-Stalinist Requiem, but she did manage to publish a cycle of poetry dedicated to the Leningrad of the war years, when there was a brief window of opportunity, in which she discreetly incorporated some of the main themes from Requiem. For the rapidly changing Petersburg mythos, this was a historic moment: the whole country heard Akhmatova’s great tragic poem, perceived by all as a requiem for the victims of the Great Terror and the martyrs of the 900 Days.