St. Petersburg : A Cultural History

Chapter 6

On January 26, 1945, on Stalin’s command, the highest award of the land, the Order of Lenin, was bestowed upon Leningrad “for outstanding achievements by the workers of Leningrad for the Motherland, for the courage and heroism, discipline and steadfastness displayed in the fight with the fascist invaders under the difficult conditions of an enemy blockade.” Stalin did not wish the city well, but he had a genius for propaganda, and at that moment the promotion of Leningrad suited his political tactics. His main goal was a complete victory over Hitler, and Leningrad had made a signal contribution to that end. For this, Stalin officially designated Leningrad a “hero city,” an accolade that even Moscow had not yet been awarded.

For a brief time Stalin’s acolytes chorused songs of glory and praise to Leningrad. Typical was Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s radio address to the nation in 1946:

Vishnevsky, a crafty propagandist, offered an artful mix of truth and lies. It was true that Leningrad’s moral status after the war against Hitler was higher than ever. There was briefly no impediment for the nation’s heartfelt respect for Leningrad’s suffering to surface unchecked. This allowed the mythos of Leningrad the martyr city to take root in the national consciousness. Additionally, the mythos took on international resonance—an extremely important circumstance for Russia, which even under Stalin jealously followed its image abroad.

The result was a radical change in the city’s image from that of the previous hundred years or so. A symbol of oppression turned into a symbol of suffering. Morally and culturally, this was an incredible triumph. Now Leningrad wore a double halo: an architectural marvel celebrated in story and song and a city of majestic exploits and unmatched suffering.

But did Leningrad, exhausted by the Great Terror and the siege, have the strength for the “historical drive” so grandiloquently described by Vishnevsky?

The truth was that the stifling of the city, which began after the capital was moved to Moscow from Petrograd in 1918, had continued unabated for many decades. It was a process initiated by Lenin and continued after his death by Stalin. Culture was the great victim because in a centralized state it was supported exclusively by subsidies from above. The artist Milashevsky observed, “The great city dried up like a great river. Water was leaving the soil. There was no cash or it was cut. Moscow was taking all the money and all the people’s energy and initiative.”^{627}

Back in 1919 a clever poet had suggested joining Petrograd and Moscow and calling the new city Petroscow. (This project was resuscitated a half century later; then the megalopolis was to be called Moscowleningrad.) Nothing came of this plan, but it reflected the spirit of the times and the desire of some Leningraders to at least retain a link with capital status.

In practice, the stifling process involved a shift of talent out of Leningrad into Moscow. In the early thirties several leading Leningrad ballet dancers, including Marina Semyonova and Alexei Ermolayev, moved to Moscow. Leningrader Viktor Semyonov became the new artistic director of the Bolshoi Theater’s ballet school. Fyodor Lopukhov even became (albeit briefly) the chief choreographer of the Bolshoi.

The Petersburg poet Mandelstam ended up in Moscow, trying to explain it thus:

It was then too that Mandelstam wrote, “Living in Petersburg is like sleeping in a coffin.” The writer Valentin Kataev called the Leningrad of that era a “strange, half-dead kingdom.”

Stalin’s Great Terror and the almost nine-hundred-day German siege of Leningrad had together ruined the city almost irreversibly. In 1944 there were fewer than six hundred thousand people left. The city’s water, sewage, and central heating systems were destroyed, its trolleys and buses not functioning. When the writer Ilya Ehrenburg came to the city in 1945, he was stunned: every house was scarred. But the passersby on Nevsky Prospect depressed Ehrenburg even more. There were so few native Leningraders! Kataev imagined that the soul of Leningrad had “flown away like a bee swarm that abandoned its lovely hive.”

Anna Akhmatova returned from evacuation in June 1944 and later recalled how she had been struck by the “terrible ghost that pretended to be my city.” Akhmatova told a friend then, “The impression of the city is horrible, monstrous. These houses, these two million shadows that hover above us, the shadows of those who starved to death. It should not have been allowed to happen. It was a monstrous mistake by the authorities.”

But Leningrad, revived, albeit slowly. The moral basis of that rebirth was the growing awareness of the city’s heroic survival. The poet Olga Berggolts put it thus:

Trying to capitalize on the idea that the country owed Leningrad an enormous debt, the city’s Party leaders, especially the young Alexei Kuznetsov, proposed a highly ambitious plan for the city’s restoration and expansion. Leningrad claimed once again the role it had played before the revolution: window into Europe.^{628} The Party leaders even spoke incautiously of the possibility of returning the capital to Leningrad from Moscow.

This idea was picked up by some of the foreign correspondents in the Soviet Union. One was the young American Harrison Salisbury, who later published a best-selling book on the Leningrad blockade, The 900 Days. In 1944, after a visit to Leningrad, he wrote an article for the New York Times that was, in his words, “an open plea that Leningrad again be Russia’s capital.” But the article was not passed by the Soviet censors.^{629}

Such vague dreams were part of a general mood in Soviet society at the end of the war. Though it took tens of millions of lives, World War II had ended victoriously for the Soviet Union. Its authority in the world was at its peak, and the Soviet government seemed to many to be one of “national unity.” Millions of Russian soldiers had marched through Europe, where they had been hailed as liberators from the Nazi yoke; they had seen how much better people lived in the West. Now they wanted more consumer goods and an end to mass repression. The not very bold hopes of the artistic intelligentsia included communication with Western colleagues and correspondents, a greater access to travel abroad, and even—the ultimate dream!—the latest films from America.

“The people have gotten much smarter, that’s for sure,” Marshal Govorov, the commander of the Leningrad front during the war, said to Ehrenburg. The writer later described Govorov as a quintessential Petersburger—educated, a lover of poetry, able to hide deep passion behind a mask of restraint; a man of precise calculation, of clear and sober thought. It had been the troops of Govorov, one of the youngest Soviet marshals, that had repelled the Germans from Leningrad in 1944.

In 1946 Govorov, discussing the future of Leningrad and the country with Ehrenburg, suddenly began declaiming Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, the part where the poet in meditation and anxiety turns to the equestrian statue of Peter the Great that had come to symbolize the Russian state:

Govorov was typical of a large group of new Soviet military leaders, men who had marched victoriously through Europe, who were decisive and full of initiative, reminiscent somehow of the young Russian generals who had routed Napoleon in 1812-1813. Many of those officers had joined the Decembrist uprising in Petersburg in 1825. Knowing Russian history, Stalin must have seen this dangerous parallel. He decided to strike a warning blow. As he had with the Great Terror, he chose Leningrad as his first target.

Akhmatova often said that she considered August her unluckiest month. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, had been shot by the Bolsheviks in August 1921; another husband, Nikolai Punin, had been arrested for the last time in August 1949 (he died in 1953 in a concentration camp in Siberia, presumably also in August). Finally, in August 1946, a quarter century after Gumilyov’s execution, the infamous resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was passed, aimed primarily against Akhmatova, Leningrad’s leading poet, and Zoshchenko, Leningrad’s leading prose writer. To this day the resolution is attributed to Zhdanov, since at that period Andrei Zhdanov, the former Party boss of Leningrad, was the national Party ideologue and “specialist” on arts questions.

In fact, the initiative for this and subsequent cultural threats during the period called Zhdanovshchina came from Stalin himself. He had summoned to the Kremlin a group of party and literary administrators from Leningrad and then had unleashed on them a series of crude, often profane attacks centering on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko. These attacks set the tone for the dramatic events that followed.

On Stalin’s orders, Zhdanov gave two speeches in Leningrad to Party and literary elites, who were forced to attend. He repeated Stalin’s directives but added touches of his own. The result was both insulting and illiterate. About Akhmatova: “The range of her poetry is pathetically limited—the poetry of a crazed lady, chasing back and forth between boudoir and chapel…. Neither nun nor whore, or rather, both whore and nun, whose lust is mixed with prayer.” Zoshchenko was characterized as “an unprincipled and conscienceless literary hooligan” and a “scoundrel of literature,” who “is used to mocking Soviet life, Soviet mores, and Soviet people, covering that mockery with a mask of silly entertainment and inappropriate humor … depicting people and himself as vile, lustful animals.”

A writer present at Zhdanov’s speech recalled, “The audience grew silent, frozen, petrified, until it had turned in the course of three hours into a solid white lump.” One young woman writer grew faint. She tried to leave the hall, but two armed guards blocked her path: it was forbidden to leave before Zhdanov. And he was still shouting: “On what basis do you permit Zoshchenko to stroll around the gardens and parks of Leningrad literature? Why does the Party of Leningrad and its writers’ organization allow these shameful facts?!”

For the Leningrad intelligentsia gathered in the room, this outburst was totally unexpected. After enduring war and blockade, they had hoped for a thaw. They thought that Leningraders’ sufferings gave them the right to expect lenient treatment from Stalin. But they were once again threatened with repression.

It was obvious that Stalin would not rest until he had destroyed the Petersburg remnant within Leningrad. That was the only explanation for Zhdanov’s statement:

Leningrad should not be a haven for all kinds of slimy literary rogues who want to exploit Leningrad for their own goals. Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, and their like do not hold Soviet Leningrad dear. They want to see it as the personification of another sociopolitical order and of another ideology. Old Petersburg, the Bronze Horseman, as an image of that old Petersburg—that is what is before their eyes. But we love Soviet Leningrad, Leningrad as the progressive center of Soviet culture.^{630}

The meeting ended after midnight. Several hundred people left silently. No one even whispered. A huge question mark hung over each of them and over the city.

As it turned out, Stalin put off a new strike against the Party and bureaucratic elite of Leningrad for several years, until Zhdanov left the scene. A loyal satrap, the short and plump Zhdanov, whose puffy face sported a dandified mustache, had headed the Leningrad Party organization for ten years after Kirov’s death in 1934. Transferred in 1944 to Moscow, he continued to supervise Leningrad. For organizing its defense during the war, Zhdanov received high honors from Stalin and the rank of major general, but his national and world fame (including an appearance on the cover of Time) came as “overseer of ideology” (as Stalin mockingly called it), in which capacity came his harsh attacks on Akhmatova, Zoshchenko, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev, among others.

Stalin observed Zhdanov’s growing celebrity with increasing irritation; Zhdanov’s sudden death in August 1948 was thus suspicious. (Stalin later attributed Zhdanov’s death to the “sabotage” of his doctors.) By mid-1948, though, Stalin had already begun preparing to liquidate Zhdanov’s former Leningrad aides and protégés, about two hundred people in all. They were all arrested in 1949, charged with various state crimes, tortured, and executed.

Yet again, Leningrad and its leadership had become national pariahs. Numerous arrests and firings followed, and former Leningraders were hunted down nationwide. In essence, they were accused of creating a criminal “Leningrad sect,” which plotted to restore Leningrad’s cultural and economic preeminence, including returning to the city its status as capital of the nation. This mass action of repression and persecution came to be known as the Leningrad affair.

But while alive, Zhdanov was Stalin’s point man in the campaign to completely subdue Soviet culture. After Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced, a series of aggressive Party resolutions attacked theater critics, filmmakers, and “composers hewing a formalistic, antipeople line,” the last of whom included Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian. Though each resolution seemed to be passed for a specific reason, the press and radio immediately absolutized and generalized them as new Communist commandments.

Millions of people living in the devastated, hungry country repeated and memorized the formulas of these Party resolutions, as if they were magic spells, with frightening numbness at thousands of meetings. A contemporary recalled, “Life went from meeting to meeting, from campaign to campaign, and each was more total, all-encompassing, more ruthless and ridiculous, than the last. The atmosphere of guilt was heightened, a general and individual guilt that could never be expiated.”^{631}

Stalin relied more and more on nationalism and isolationism. In 1947 he invited to the Kremlin the film director Sergei Eisenstein and his favorite actor, Leningrader Nikolai Cherkasov, celebrated for his roles as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible in Eisenstein’s eponymous films. The conversation turned to Russian history, and Stalin expressed the opinion that Peter the Great had opened the gates of Russia too wide and that too many Germans and other foreigners had come in. “The wisdom of Ivan the Terrible consisted in standing on a national point of view and not letting foreigners into his country.” Two and a half months later Stalin repeated these thoughts to a group of writers, saying that Peter began the “obsolete tradition of kowtowing before shitty foreigners.”^{632} Stalin announced that this attitude toward Western culture had infected all of the contemporary Soviet intelligentsia. “They lack a proper sense of Soviet patriotism.”

The obscurantist ideas of the aging, paranoid leader were perceived as directives to immediate and energetic action. In all areas of Soviet life, the struggle against “cosmopolitanism” began. Leningrad was singled out yet again: Stalin considered the city, the direct descendant of Peter the Great’s Petersburg, the source of the contagion. All ties with the West, real or imaginary, were to be axed.

Ridiculous things happened. Edison Street disappeared; the Nord Café was renamed the Sever (North); Camembert became “snack cheese,” and French bread Moscow bread. But much more important were the human aspects of this Stalinist ideological campaign. Thousands of people were fired, and many were arrested. With a creak and a clang, an iron curtain fell between the Soviet Union and the West.

Nikolai Punin, art historian and critic, was arrested and sent to Siberia where he died. The arrest was preceded by a series of attacks in official speeches and newspaper articles that accused Punin of “openly propagandizing decadence, the perverted art of the West and such representatives of it as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and others. These extreme formalists are called geniuses, great artists by the cosmopolitanizing gourmand Punin.” Once the newspapers added Punin to the list of “sworn enemies of Soviet culture,” his fate was sealed. Friends begged him to leave Leningrad quickly. “I’m no rabbit to be running around Russia,” he replied. When Akhmatova learned of Punin’s death in the camps in 1953, she wrote a poem to his memory:

In 1949 Grigory Gukovsky, a forty-nine-year-old specialist in Pushkin and Gogol and a leading Leningrad literary historian, was arrested; he died in prison soon after. Other Leningrad scholars—Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum—were not allowed to teach or publish. At meetings they were denounced for “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West.” After one such meeting Eikhenbaum noted in his diary, “You need incredible health and iron nerves.” Another eyewitness, recently back from the war, confessed to a friend, “I led my squad to attack. It was scary. But this is worse.”^{633}

Eikhenbaum was then one of the most notable intellectual figures of Leningrad. He had great authority even in prerevolutionary Petersburg, and Nikolai Gumilyov had tempted him to head acmeism as theoretician of the movement. Instead Eikhenbaum became a leader with Shklovsky and Tynyanov of the Opoyaz, an innovative group studying literature as the sum of “formal devices.” He also devoted a lot of time to Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy, and in 1923 he wrote the first major study of Akhmatova’s poetry. Ever ready with an ironic comment, the small and elegant Eikhenbaum (whom Shklovsky called the marquis), flawlessly dressed in blinding white collar, was a fixture at the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky told me of a conversation with the sixty-two-year-old Eikhenbaum in 1948, after the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich had been denounced for formalism. Strolling outside of town, Eikhenbaum drew Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s attention to a complicated cobweb. “Here is the symbol of a composer’s work! What fantastic mastery, what subtle calculation! What painstaking, exhausting work! But all it takes is a hostile storm, and there won’t be a trace left. That is the composer’s lot.”

Eikhenbaum’s pessimism was understandable: many of the works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich had been banned, and it seemed that the ban would endure. With far-reaching limitations on many areas of cultural and spiritual life, the atmosphere seemed unbearable, and the old Petersburgers were certain that they would not live to see better days.

When Eikhenbaum was fired from his post as dean at Leningrad University, he wrote in his diary, “I’m through, thank God, with the department. I should finish up with life, too, really. Enough, I’m weary. Only curiosity is left: what else will history come up with and how will it laugh at me?”^{634} Lydia Ginzburg confirmed that the general feeling among the Leningrad elite in that period of total repression (1946-1953) was one of doom: “It came from the repetition (no one expected a repetition), from the horror of recognition of a model that had therefore not changed. As someone put it then, ‘It used to be a lottery, now it’s a queue.’”^{635}

The head of that queue was eventually reached by the pride of Leningrad’s culture, the world-famous Lenfilm studios. In the early 1950s Lenfilm was practically shut down on Stalin’s orders. For the studio’s workers this was doubly shocking and unfair, since it had seemed that if there was anything at all that Stalin did like in Leningrad’s culture, it was Lenfilm.

“Of all the arts the most important for us is film.” This was said by Lenin, but it was Stalin who made Soviet film a powerful and effective political weapon. In the cultural sphere—according to writer Konstantin Simonov, who knew the leader’s tastes well—Stalin “did not program anything as consistently and thoroughly as future films, and this program was tied to contemporary political goals.” Stalin often met with leading Soviet filmmakers, proposing ideas for films (which, naturally, were instantly made), attentively read and edited screenplays, actively participated in the discussion of completed works, and generously rewarded their authors if he felt they deserved it. In this sense Stalin was like a Hollywood mogul, but with the fundamental difference that a mogul could only cut off an actor’s salary, while Stalin could take off his head as well.

The all-powerful Kremlin producer watched the work of Lenfilm with avid interest. Before the revolution 90 percent of the Russian industry had been concentrated in Moscow. Filmmaking in Petrograd was created—almost from scratch—by the efforts of immensely gifted outsiders: the Jews Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Fridrikh Ermler and the Karaite Sergei Yutkevich. Through them, Lenfilm developed a style that was eccentric and daring despite a tendency to stylistic excess; but the studio also had an opportunistic bent and willingly acceded, though admittedly under increasing pressure, to every whim of the Party and of Stalin.

Lenfilm’s first headquarters were in the former Aquarium, a popular café chantant of tsarist Petersburg, and the directors were given office space in the old “private rooms,” where prostitutes accommodated the highest officials of the empire, including the legendary Grigory Rasputin. The young Lenfilm directors noted ironically that, after all, their position in Stalinist Russia often resembled that of highly paid prostitutes.^{636}

For all that, the atmosphere at Lenfilm, especially in the early years, was rather heady. The studio worked as a single group, a “collective of committed individualists,” as it was sometimes called. Their first important models were American serials and German expressionist films. The complex system of training silent-film actors developed at the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), founded by Kozintsev and Trauberg, was put to use by them in the film The Adventures of Oktyabrina, in which a young female revolutionary in military helmet and miniskirt rode a motorcycle among the majestic colonnades of Petersburg, creating a grotesque contrast.

As Trauberg recalled, “We didn’t know how to do anything, we didn’t know anything, but we dealt cruelly and joyfully with the city of Blok.”^{637} The authors insisted that The Adventures of Oktyabrina had all the necessary ingredients for the authorities: satire of the bourgeoisie and the West, antireligious propaganda, and “agitation for a new lifestyle.” But the reviewer for a Soviet newspaper didn’t buy it: “A worker will not understand a thing in this picture, he’ll simply shrug.”^{638}

Kozintsev and Trauberg continued their experiments in the deconstruction of imperial Petersburg in The Overcoat, with a screenplay by Yuri Tynyanov. This was a fantasy based on Gogol’s short story, in which Petersburg—in accordance with contemporary ideological considerations—was depicted as an enormous prison. The beauty of the imperial city was rejected derisively by the young directors. The critics tied their film to the 1918 manifesto “How The Overcoat’ Is Made,” by Eikhenbaum (like Tynyanov, a leading figure in Opoyaz). At first coyly denying the article’s direct influence, Trauberg later did admit, “There were three Leningrad writers and scholars—Eikhenbaum, Tynyanov, and Shklovsky—for whom we always had not only understandable respect but unlimited tenderness.”^{639}

As theoreticians of culture, the members of Opoyaz treated film rather disdainfully at first. “Cinematography is in its very essence outside art,” Shklovsky proclaimed. Eikhenbaum wrote something similar. But Tynyanov saw in cinema’s “poverty,” its flatness and monochrome, the aesthetic base of a new type of art.

In 1927 an anthology called The Poetics of Cinema, edited by Eikhenbaum, was published in Leningrad. Besides his own article, “Problems of Film Stylistics,” there were works by Shklovsky and Tynyanov. This anthology exerted great influence on the European theory of montage in film, but on a practical level personal contacts with the Opoyaz group—lectures, friendly chats, and the participation of Eikhenbaum and especially Tynyanov (who became head of the screenwriting department at Lenfilm in 1926) in the studio’s daily work—had an even greater significance for Leningrad filmmakers.

Movies became an important source of income for Eikhenbaum and Tynyanov. Perhaps that is why they seemed unperturbed by the radical changes made in their screenplays. The Overcoat was filmed and edited in under two months, and, according to Trauberg, the scenario was “cut and sewn anew.” This did not keep Tynyanov from defending the completed film when the Leningrad press called for sweeping the filmmakers from the studio. One Leningrad critic’s reasoning went something like this: Gogol was a national treasure, and the authors of the screen version of The Overcoat distorted and ruined it; therefore, they should be prosecuted.

An even more hostile reception was accorded New Babylon (1929), a film about the Paris Commune by Kozintsev and Trauberg. The Young Communist League (Komsomol) attacked it as an ideologically harmful work. In addition, New Babylon failed at the box office. Even the help of sympathetic theater managers was not enough. One manager proudly announced, according to Trauberg, that after an advertising campaign and special educational lectures, the audience at his theater had doubled for New Babylon: instead of twenty people, he had forty. It was a silent film, and the customers were particularly outraged by the music. The composer was the young Dmitri Shostakovich, who had been hired by Kozintsev and Trauberg when they learned that he had written an avant-garde opera based on Gogol’s story “The Nose,” which was close in spirit to their Overcoat.

Shostakovich arrived at the studio dressed in a soft gray hat and a white silk scarf. Kozintsev was presumably appreciative; he himself typically sported a colorful scarf and a thin cherry walkingstick. He also spoke in falsetto. The short, plump, and slow Trauberg must have seemed like Sancho Panza to Kozintsev’s Don Quixote.

The directors, whose combined age was under fifty, had never worked with someone even younger. They wanted a completely new approach from Shostakovich. As Kozintsev later explained, “in those years film music strengthened the film’s emotional content or, as they used to say, illustrated the shots. We immediately decided with the composer that the music would be tied to the inner meaning and not the external action and that it would develop contrary to the events, in opposition to the scene’s mood.”^{640} For instance, the tragic episode of the attack of the German cavalry on Paris was accompanied by a melody reworked from an Offenbach operetta, effectively caricaturing the scene. The average filmgoer in the late 1920s found Shostakovich’s music, in the words of a contemporary review that presaged Stalin’s later condemnation of the composer, “a muddle that gets in the way of understanding.” The acclaim for this forgotten score only came forty years later, when the restored New Babylon made a triumphant tour of European capitals.

Despite failure with the public, Shostakovich’s talent was appreciated and recognized immediately at the Leningrad film studio. He was hired for all the major productions. One such project, commissioned by the state to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, was Counterplan, which hailed the efforts of a Leningrad plant to build a powerful turbine before the deadline. The production was personally supervised by Kirov, who compared making Counterplan with “crucial economic and political work.”^{641} Stalin himself impatiently awaited completion of the film, which had an enormous budget (including construction of a set to represent a huge turbine-building plant). Counterplan was intended to praise the achievements of the Soviet five-year plans for developing industry. It was also the first Soviet film to depict the saboteur engineer as a fullblown villain; this was the start of a theme soon to dominate Soviet culture—“the hidden enemies.”

Unlike The Overcoat and New Babylon, with their themes of defeat and impotent protest, their ghostly characters, and their over-complicated style and technique, all of which made them unacceptable to the authorities, Counterplan was out-and-out agitprop, albeit masterfully done; it therefore received unqualified approval from the Soviet state. The film was shown everywhere, and the song Shostakovich wrote for it quickly became a hit; it even became fashionable in leftist intellectual circles in the West. After World War II it was designated as the anthem of the United Nations. (Most people were unaware that the author of the lyrics, the Leningrad poet Boris Kornilov, had died in one of Stalin’s purges.)

Counterplan made celebrities of its two young directors, Sergei Yutkevich, a founding member of FEKS, and Fridrikh Ermler, who came to the film studio straight from the Soviet secret police. Yutkevich, an aesthete, and Ermler, an autodidact, were united by opportunism: both were ready to tailor the form and ideology of Counterplan to the Party’s wishes. Once they moved to the front ranks, these directors began to set the tone at Lenfilm, which was beginning to change from a refuge for eccentrics to a state factory of ideologically correct dreams.

The leaders of FEKS, Kozintsev and Trauberg, sensed the changes in the rules of the game. FEKS ceased to exist as a part of the Leningrad film studio after completion of New Babylon in the late twenties. It became clear that its avant-garde aesthetics did not suit the state’s purposes. The directors’ attempts to find a new path led in the midthirties to their film Maxim’s Youth, a fictional story of a simple fellow from a working-class suburb of Petrograd who is transformed into a professional Bolshevik revolutionary.

Kozintsev and Trauberg, having lost their ideological virginity by then, wanted to create a work accessible to a mass audience. Maxim’s Youth, Kozintsev explained, was an attempt at a Soviet biographical novel in film. “The audience had to fall in love with Maxim not for his incredible looks or for his general ‘good qualities,’ but because Maxim had to represent the best qualities of his class. The strength of his class. The humor of his class.”^{642} In other words, the film had to be ideologically instructive as well as entertaining.

Kozintsev and Trauberg made Maxim’s Youth entertaining; it had good actors (but, tellingly, not former FEKS members), and the musical score was again by Shostakovich. Against a backdrop of mediocre Soviet films and an almost total absence of movies from the West, Maxim’s Youth caught on with Russian viewers. But more important for the former FEKS leaders was Stalin’s approval.^{643} The Soviet leader was preparing his major political purges, in which almost all the leading Bolsheviks who had seized power in 1917 with Lenin were to disappear from the stage and people’s memories. Therefore, Stalin hailed the creation of new heroes to replace old ones: the mythical Maxim would supplant the real Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others doomed to destruction and oblivion.

Stalin likewise gave broad support for Chapayev, the 1934 film produced in Leningrad about a minor commander in the Red Army who drowned in action in the civil war. The film’s directors, Georgy and Sergei Vasilyev (not related, even though people referred to them as the Vasilyev brothers) single-handedly made Chapayev a national hero. This suited Stalin, who planned to (and soon did) liquidate the real revolutionary military leaders.

Chapayev was the most popular Soviet film of the prewar period. Legend has it that many teenagers saw Chapayev dozens of times, hoping against hope that this time their beloved hero, played by Boris Babochkin, would be saved. Other Lenfilm productions were extremely popular with audiences, too.

Many in the West were impressed by the Moscow filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, but their works, which lacked traditional plots and likable heroes and which used metaphorical, so-called poetic montage, did not find a mass audience at home. But the well-crafted, accessible productions of Lenfilm touched the Soviet public. Their conscious emphasis on “prosaic” cinema was both acceptable to the authorities and eagerly consumed by the masses. Indeed, the Leningrad films were the only truly popular Soviet art of the period.

Lenfilm and its directors thus became the cultural darlings of the Stalinist era. In 1935 Stalin, using the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinematography as an excuse, awarded the Order of Lenin to Lenfilm, making it the first Soviet “creative collective” to receive the country’s highest honor. The order was also bestowed upon Kozintsev, Trauberg, Ermler, and the Vasilyevs (Eisenstein did not get one). That same year at the International Film Festival in Moscow, the first prize went to Lenfilm for a program that included Chapayev, Maxim’s Youth, and Ermler’s Peasants, a film about class struggle in the countryside. This official recognition as the country’s best film studio was the peak of success for Lenfilm.

That success was achieved at the cost not only of the directors’ youthful avant-garde ambitions but also of even the illusion of independence of the Party line, no matter how much it zigzagged. The directors themselves later admitted the cost. Trauberg bitterly recalled how his old friends rebuked him after Maxim’s Youth, which led to two acclaimed sequels. “Why did you move away from The Overcoat and New Babylon? A violinist should not switch to drums.”^{644}

Ermler underwent an even more radical evolution, going from a film based on “The Cave,” a story by the 1920s Leningrad nonconformist Yevgeny Zamyatin, to The Great Citizen, the most notorious film of the 1930s. The Great Citizen presented, thinly disguised, the story of Kirov’s life and death in an interpretation that came from Stalin: the hero fights opposition leaders, spies, and saboteurs and dies at their hands. Stalin’s written reaction to the screenplay is known to us. “It is composed with indisputable political literacy. Its literary qualities are also indisputable.”^{645} The film’s writers announced breathlessly, “If our work receives critical appreciation from Soviet viewers, if it is of benefit in mobilizing vigilance, in exposing and destroying the enemies of the people, we will be happy knowing that our creative duty has been done.”^{646}

Ermler’s The Great Citizen was both a justification of and an inspired hymn to the Great Terror. According to contemporaries, viewers left the movie theaters prepared to tear apart any opposition villains who tried to move the country from Stalin’s course. Trauberg’s reaction was understated. He called it “a splendid film with highly interesting characters.” Its effect was enhanced by Shostakovich’s music. The Great Citizen received, for its political and popular acceptability, the Stalin Prize first class.

Ermler was proud of The Great Citizen to the end of his days (1967), stubbornly insisting, “I am a soldier of the Party!” Shostakovich avoided talking about his early films in general and The Great Citizen in particular, merely saying that “one had to make a living.” However, it is clear that working on such projects was more than a source of income for him. Participation in film work sanctioned and supported by Stalin was a safe-conduct pass for Shostakovich. The composer did his work well and received an appropriate fee, but the real goal was to survive in a totalitarian state where his music was often branded “anti-people.” Many times he told his students, “Take up film scores only in case of extreme need, extreme need.”

Paradoxically, in his film work Shostakovich took unexpected creative leaps. For films with revolutionary themes, particularly the Maxim trilogy, Shostakovich often used Russian protest melodies from the turn of the century. These quotations made a powerful impression on the audiences, inspiring as they did memories of happier days past.

In the years of Soviet rule, the old revolutionary songs and revolutionary traditions in general underwent significant cultural revision. Stalin shunted them aside in favor of paeans to the exploits of the contemporary Communist Party and its great leader. The new “pseudo-revolutionary” songs were pompous and cold. The old ones—sincere and spontaneous—still had the spirit of protest. Gradually they became part of the new cultural “Aesopian language” characteristic of the Soviet era.

In that coded language, references to the revolutionary past—in a novel, play, or film about the Decembrists or nihilists, for instance—took on a special meaning. Words like “liberty,” “tyrant,” and “prison,” while formally referring to the past, were signals of the present situation as well. This technique became particularly popular after Stalin’s death, in the fifties and sixties. In that period even some of the revolutionary films of the twenties and thirties provoked an emotional impact of another sort. The romantic image of “revolutionary Petersburg” was juxtaposed with the contemporary drab and faceless Leningrad, where the slightest sign of nonconformity was eradicated and punished severely. Struggles against tsarist gendarmes, distribution of underground leaflets, and antigovernment demonstrations were elements of that contrast, formed in part by the film trilogy of Kozintsev and Trauberg about the ever-hopeful “fellow from the suburb,” Maxim.

It is against this cultural background that we must examine the appearance in 1957 of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony, which came to be known as 1905 Symphony. The revolutionary events of Bloody Sunday, January 9, 1905, when tsarist troops shot at a demonstration by unarmed workers, had taken on the status of martyrdom.

Mandelstam had written about Bloody Sunday as a tragedy that

could have unfolded only in Petersburg—its plan, the disposition of its streets, the spirit of its architecture left an ineradicable mark on the nature of the historical event. The ninth of January would not have happened in Moscow. The centrifugal force of that day, the proper movement along radii, from the outside to the center, that is to say, the entire dynamic of January ninth was determined by the architectural and historic meaning of Petersburg.

Even in 1922 when he wrote these words, Mandelstam realized the significance of Bloody Sunday for the creation of a new legend of Petersburg, when “the liberated new soul of Petersburg, like a tender orphaned Psyche, wandered along the snows.” Thirty-five years later the memory of Bloody Sunday fit organically into the underground mythos of Petersburg the martyr city.

Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony was a grand portrait of that city. A master of symphonic development, Shostakovich here, somewhat unexpectedly, extended his hand to the Mighty Five, basing the symphony on revolutionary folk songs. By using these familiar melodies, the words of which were known to most people, Shostakovich introduced the multifaceted imagery of revolutionary romanticism into his symphony. The sound of the songs inevitably elicited freedom-loving associations, or, as Soviet cultural bureaucrats used to put it, “incorrect allusions.”

Hearing the refrain of a well-known Russian prison song in the first movement, the audience could recall its words.

The same effect ensued in the finale with the revolutionary melody “Rage on, Tyrants.”

Intimations of code words like “prison” and “tyrants” created a charged environment for Soviet audiences of those years, attuned as they were to the slightest dissident hint. Even Akhmatova, a strict critic and no idealizer of revolution, was strongly moved by Shostakovich’s use of the revolutionary songs. According to Lydia Chukovskaya, Akhmatova responded with delight to the Eleventh Symphony: “The songs fly across the horrible black sky like angels, like birds, like white clouds!”^{647}

For more aware listeners, the music elicited a contemporary parallel, one intended by the composer: the cruel suppression by Soviet tanks of the 1956 Hungarian anti-Communist uprising. In the second movement Shostakovich ostensibly depicts the shooting on the Petersburg demonstrators on Bloody Sunday. But at the Leningrad premiere of the symphony, one woman was heard to say, “Those aren’t rifle shots, that is the roar of tanks crushing people.”^{648}

This stratum of Leningrad society also took to heart the musical depiction of Petersburg as an oppressed city. The introduction to the first movement evoked the mood of some scenes in The Queen of Spades. The music may in general be characterized as a “symphony of catastrophe.” This depiction of Petersburg as a backdrop for tragedy unites Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Mandelstam, and especially Akhmatova, who maintained that “Leningrad is at bottom extraordinarily well suited for catastrophe…. That cold river with heavy storm clouds always over it, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, frightening moon…. Black water with yellow reflections of light…. It’s all frightening. I cannot imagine how catastrophes and trouble look in Moscow: they don’t have all that there.”^{649}

Alas, by the time the Eleventh Symphony was written, Shostakovich had a good idea of what catastrophe looked like in Moscow. He had moved there permanently in the spring of 1943, a move sanctioned as part of Stalin’s general policy for the cultural deprivation of Leningrad. He was there when the infamous Party resolution of 1948 condemned composers of a “formalist, anti-people tendency,” including Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian. This resolution, issued by Zhdanov on Stalin’s orders, cut Shostakovich out of the mainstream of Soviet music. Even so, Shostakovich was allowed to work in film—also on Stalin’s orders—and his music accompanied many of the hit films of the final years of the Stalin era.

Practically all these films were made in Moscow. The significance of Lenfilm dwindled in those years. The successful duo of Kozintsev and Trauberg had broken up, but Shostakovich continued working with Kozintsev. They were brought together by their Shakespeare project. Back in 1941 Kozintsev staged a production of King Lear with music by Shostakovich. The sets and costumes were designed by Nathan Altman, with whom Kozintsev had studied art.

This prewar King Lear was a Leningrad sensation. Shakespeare had always been one of the most admired writers in the country, both before and since the revolution. Interest in him rose at crisis moments, when productions of his plays became political statements in disguise.^{650} Kozintsev’s production of Lear was a closet commentary on the madness of Stalin’s purges in Leningrad. Altman’s scenery prominently featured scaffolds with dangling nooses, a menacing and easily understood visual hint. The Leningrad critic Naum Berkovsky wrote in Aesopian terms about Kozintsev’s production, talking about a city exhausted by terror. “For Shakespeare there is tragedy in a regime that does not emanate from human personality, which does not seek justification for itself there … society has abandoned public morality, it has turned to random cohabitation, it fosters low, base, crude behavior in people and leaves noble deeds to languish unnoticed or punishes them.”^{651}

In 1954 Kozintsev produced Hamlet at the former Alexandrinsky Theater. Once again Shostakovich and Altman were part of his team. This outstanding production, mounted soon after Stalin’s death, opened a new era in Soviet interpretation of Shakespeare and prepared the way for two films by Kozintsev—Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971)—which were to be his swan song. They rank among the Lenfilm’s greatest achievements.

Yevgeny Shvarts called Kozintsev “a mix of mimosa and nettie,” a description that could apply equally to Shostakovich.^{652} The two men were drawn together by a certain shared emotional restraint that Petersburgers like to think of as characteristic of their upbringing. Shvarts noted that habit as well, saying about Kozintsev, “In his snobbish, aristocratic nature, formed in the twenties, he is ridiculously reticent. Like Shostakovich. Their strict bandbox neatness trains them for tidiness and meticulousness of the spirit.”

Kozintsev, himself a master of Aesopian language, noted approvingly the subtlety of Shostakovich’s music. After hearing the Eleventh Symphony, he wrote in his diary, “The beginning was frightening: ice cold on the square and damned tsarism beating a small drum. And then—cruelty, desperation, an evil force destroying all life, pain, heartrending grief; and the question—what was all this for?”

These musings became the leitmotif of Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films, in which the texts, in unorthodox translations by Boris Pasternak, sounded like commentaries on the news. In Hamlet, done in severe black and white, the visual metaphor of Elsinore as prison permeates the film. The cult of personality of the pathetic usurper is juxtaposed with the proud independence of Hamlet, played nobly and impetuously by the popular Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Shostakovich himself was often compared to the prince, and Hamlet-like traits had been noted in his works since the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich wrote a harsh, elliptical score for Kozintsev’s film, some critics consider it the most successful musical interpretation of Hamlet, and many see it as one of Shostakovich’s best works. Kozintsev, who understood the enormous role played by Shostakovich’s music in shaping the hidden message of his Hamlet, had considered calling the film a “cinema symphony.”

Kozintsev, who died in 1973, summed up his life’s work, as well as that period of Lenfilm history, in King Lear. The film was shot in black and white, like Hamlet, but was even more severe, with several shocking naturalistic scenes. Kozintsev personified the avantgarde roots of Lenfilm, the studio’s youth and early maturity when Stalin was its main patron. Kozintsev—like few other directors—though a favorite of Stalin’s, still appealed to mass audiences and elicited respect from critics both in the Soviet Union and in the West even in the post-Stalinist period. His Hamlet and King Lear are rightfully considered treasures of world film as treatments of Shakespeare. Kozintsev, an ambitious and proud man, knew full well the impact of Shostakovich’s music. “Without it, and without Pasternak’s translations, I could not have made the Shakespeare films.”^{653}

Kozintsev tried to formulate why Shostakovich’s music was so important to him, a Leningrader of the new era.

What seems most important in it? The sense of tragedy? Philosophy, universal thoughts about the world? … But still, another quality is most important. A quality that is hard to write about. Goodness. Kindness. Charity. But a special kind of kindness. We have an excellent word in our language: fierce. There is no goodness in Russian art without a fierce hatred of what destroys man. In Shostakovich’s music I hear fierce hatred of cruelty, the cult of power, the oppression of truth. This is a special kindness: fearless kindness.”^{654}

In the late forties and early fifties Akhmatova and Zoshchenko lived in Leningrad like shadows. They were expelled from the Writers’ Union, they were not published, and they maintained an impoverished existence, shunned as lepers. Former friends crossed the street when they saw them coming. They expected to be arrested at any moment.

One contemporary theory was that Stalin allowed Akhmatova and Zoshchenko to remain free in order to continue the ideological campaign ad infinitum.^{655} The Party resolution of 1946 directed against them was “studied” at innumerable meetings all over the country and then made part of the school curriculum so that class after class of Soviet youngsters learned it by heart. To millions of Soviet people, Zoshchenko was a “literary hooligan” and Akhmatova “either a nun or a whore” whose poetry was corrupt and decadent.

Leningrad in those years lived by inertia. Everything it had been proud of was taken away; many cultural figures were in disfavor, others moved to Moscow. Stalin’s fabricated Leningrad Affair clouded the city. Even the glory of the 900-day siege was now being belittled. The popular Museum of the Defense of Leningrad, founded in 1946, was shut down in 1949, its administration arrested, and many precious exhibits destroyed.

The main sentiment of that difficult time was hopelessness. These were probably the gloomiest years in the history of Leningrad culture. People felt that the stifling monotony, brightened only rarely by an anniversary or some still-tolerated icon of national culture, would reign forever.^{656} The self-awareness and self-esteem of the city on the Neva seemed past all hope of renaissance.

Yet even then there existed (at least in outline) a work that foretold the fate of the Petersburg legend in the second half of the twentieth century. I am referring to Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, begun at the end of 1940 and completed in first draft in 1942. The fate of Poem Without a Hero is unusual: Akhmatova continued working on it for some twenty years, adding lines, prefaces, dedications, and commentaries. As a result, the final version is almost twice as long as the first. And the text has the additions of Prose About the Poem and sketches for a ballet libretto intertwining various themes from Poem Without a Hero.

Akhmatova was aware of the historic and cultural significance of her magnum opus. That is why she gave the first part of the poem, “1913,” the subtitle “A Petersburg Tale,” thereby creating a direct parallel with another famous “Petersburg Tale,” Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. In fact, the role of Akhmatova’s poem in forming the latter-day Petersburg mythos is comparable to the impulse given to the birth of that mythos by Pushkin’s poem. In the opinion of Lev Loseff, Poem Without a Hero is a “‘historiosophical’ poem, not so much about the events of history as the mechanism of history, which Akhmatova sees in the cyclical nature of the ages, in the endless repetition, which is what brings it close to Pushkin’s historical vision.”^{657}

Poem Without a Hero lacks a developed narrative. The embryo of a plot can be reduced to the traditional love triangle, Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, beyond which can be seen the real drama that agitated the artistic circles of the capital in 1913. A young poet and officer, Vsevolod Knyazev, committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. Rumor tied this suicide, typical of Petersburg’s “prewar, lascivious and threatening” atmosphere, in Akhmatova’s words, to Knyazev’s unrequited love for Akhmatova’s friend, the dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. Knyazev’s lucky rival was said to be the poet Alexander Blok. At her son’s funeral, Knyazev’s mother lashed out at Olga. “God will punish those who made him suffer.”

Knyazev, his poetry, and the tragic story of his love were buried by World War I and the revolution; they seemed destined to oblivion. (The death in 1945 of Olga Glebova-Sudeikina from consumption in Paris also went unnoticed.) But Blok remained popular after the revolution, and his untimely death in August 1921 only added to his mystique and made him one of the most revered poets in the history of Russian literature.

Blok played an exceptionally important part in Akhmatova’s life, both as a poet and as a symbol of his era. In the 1910s Akhmatova started a risky literary game with Blok, hinting in her published poems of her love for an unnamed poet with features—like his famous gray eyes—that made him easily recognizable.

The legend that Akhmatova and Blok had had an affair survived the poet’s death and even the publication of his diaries and notebooks. The average reader did not notice what Akhmatova’s eye caught instantly: “As is clear from Blok’s notebooks, I had no place in his life.”

Angry protestations and ironic puzzlement became part and parcel of Akhmatova’s conversations with acquaintances old and new, including me. In 1965 I would not have dared suggest to her that the obvious source for the legend was Akhmatova’s early—and quite popular—love poems. Be that as it may, the Blok elements in Poem Without a Hero form a crucial layer of the work, a knot of themes, images, allusions, and direct citations all leading to Blok.^{658}

Blok appears as an androgynous hero, a demon with a woman’s smile and a dual image. He is not only Harlequin but also Don Juan “with dead heart and dead gaze.” Akhmatova took the epigraph to the first chapter from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni:

As usual for Akhmatova, the reference hides a deeper parallel—with the classic Russian interpretation of the Don Juan legend, Pushkin’s Stone Guest (on which Alexander Dargomyzhsky, the spiritual father of the Mighty Five, based his imaginative opera of the same name).

Shortly after World War II Akhmatova wrote a work on The Stone Guest; she later revised and expanded it several times. In this essay she maintained that Pushkin projected his own emotions onto his Don Juan: fear of happiness and eternal fidelity. For her, Pushkin’s Don Juan “truly was transformed during his assignation with Donna Anna and the whole tragedy lies in the fact that at that instant he loved and was happy, and instead of salvation, from which he was just a step away, there came disaster.”

It has practically become a truism that Akhmatova often hints at a correlation between Pushkin’s life and work and her own. She compares Pushkin’s Don Juan with a Petersburg rake and calls his friends “golden youths.” The well-versed reader of turn-of-the-century Russian poetry (Akhmatova’s intended reader) will readily recall “the Petersburg Don Juan” Alexander Blok and his famous 1912 poem “The Commendatore’s Footsteps,” in which the autobiographical hero, called Don Juan, meets the Commendatore, who has come for him, and exclaims,

These lines are themselves an imitation of the last line of Pushkin’s tragedy (“I perish—it’s over. O Donna Anna!”).

This brings us back to the love triangle, Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin, at the nucleus of Poem Without a Hero. Beyond the triangle are two poets, Knyazev and Blok, and Akhmatova’s friend Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. Akhmatova admitted that she used secret writing (“invisible ink” and “mirror writing”) and that this box, in her own words, had two “false bottoms.” She directly addresses Olga this way: “You are one of my doubles”; she thereby gives enough cause for the reader to substitute Akhmatova for Olga in the poem and to see Blok as Don Juan, who in “The Commendatore’s Footsteps” called his beloved by the name that is also Akhmatova’s:

Knyazev’s place in this new imaginary triangle will be taken by another poet and officer, Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolai Gumilyov. “The Commendatore’s Footsteps” then becomes a secret confession of love for Anna (Akhmatova), and Blok becomes the repentant Don Juan, who—like the hero of Pushkin’s tragedy—finds true love only on the brink of death. (Akhmatova claimed that Blok thought of her in his deathbed delirium.) Thus, Akhmatova, asserting the poet’s right to transform reality, presented in a coded way (but open to the careful reader) a continuation of her imaginary affair with Blok in Poem Without a Hero.

Reorganizing her own biography thus, Akhmatova entered into a complex relation with history. In accordance with Russian tradition and her own philosophical system, the poet was not only the bearer of the nation’s historical memory but the catalyst of important contemporary events. Invisible but sturdy threads stretch from the poet to pivotal personalities and dramas of the twentieth century.

In particular, Akhmatova had an acute sense of a personal tie with Stalin even though she never met him. As he had done with the cinema, Stalin took Russian literature under his personal control. He followed the latest books year after year, he met with writers (sometimes in informal settings) and phoned them. Some of these telephone conversations (with Bulgakov and Pasternak, for instance) were much talked about in literary circles.

Akhmatova first appealed to Stalin in 1935, asking for the release of her current husband, Nikolai Punin, and her son Lev. They were freed almost as soon as her letter was given to Stalin; word of that miracle spread far among the Soviet intelligentsia. When her son was again arrested, though, a second letter did not secure his release. But in 1939 Stalin asked at a meeting with writers how Akhmatova was doing and why her poems were not appearing in print. After that, the leaders of the Writers’ Union showed “heightened attention” to Akhmatova, and soon after, a collection of her poems appeared, the first in many years. From that time on, Akhmatova felt—probably with reason—the leader’s attentive gaze. She reasonably connected Stalin with the unexpected remission of her son’s death sentence to a term in the camps and with her own timely evacuation from besieged Leningrad during the war.

Akhmatova assumed that Stalin had spared her because he had formed an image of her as a secluded, ascetic woman, talented but modest, completely devoted to her literary work. (Pasternak had described Akhmatova that way in his letter to Stalin.) According to Akhmatova, Stalin periodically inquired, “Well, how’s our nun doing?” But a fateful event in 1945 shattered that image forever.

Isaiah Berlin, then a young and intellectually curious staffer of the British Embassy in Moscow, came to Leningrad and, knowing Russian well, decided to visit Akhmatova, whose poetry he had long loved. This was late November 1945. Probably Berlin did not fully realize that Stalin perceived all Western diplomats as real or potential spies and therefore kept them under constant surveillance.

Akhmatova was also being watched, and the meeting between Berlin and Akhmatova was immediately reported to Stalin. She always felt that Stalin’s anger was caused by the fact that the thirty-six-year-old Berlin stayed until morning. As Akhmatova told it, when Stalin learned of the nighttime rendezvous, he cursed and shouted, “So our nun receives foreign spies!” The invisible thread that, Akhmatova believed, connected her to Stalin was broken.

She felt that this chain of events led to the infamous Party decree of 1946, directed against her and Zoshchenko. The decree, in turn, led—in her opinion—closer to the Cold War. She wrote about her meeting with Isaiah Berlin in Poem Without a Hero:

This pronouncement may seem far-fetched, and the significance of her almost random meeting with Berlin blown out of proportion. But that is so only at first glance. Close examination suggests that her interpretation is logical and psychologically sound. Though the Cold War would have begun anyway, the vicious campaign against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko noticeably chilled the postwar euphoria, especially among the leftist Western intelligentsia, and hastened the descent to hostility.

When I arrived in the West in 1976, I saw how painfully fresh the Akhmatova-Zoshchenko affair was in the minds of local Russophiles. As one who had borne the brunt of Stalin’s wrath, Akhmatova rightfully could feel that she had played a central role in world events, especially if we accept the view that some outbursts of the aging Stalin were linked to random or irrational causes.^{659}

In these skeptical times the novels of Alexandre Dumas père are read, if at all, only by children, and we tend to forget the roles that chance and individuals play in history. In Poem Without a Hero, Akhmatova tried to challenge historical determinism; in that sense her work is a polemic with and a parallel to Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. But, just as it is in Pushkin’s poem, fate is stronger than the characters in Poem Without a Hero, including the author. All of them, in Akhmatova’s mythology, are inhabitants of a legendary, doomed Atlantis pulled to the bottom of the sea both by the undertow of world history and by a shared sense of guilt.

The theme of general guilt—and even more important, personal guilt—is central to Poem Without a Hero and traditional in Russian literature. Nor was it original to project such guilt onto Petersburg, the new Rome, generally decadent and richly deserving destruction at the hands of twentieth-century barbarians. But the transformation of the theme of sin and guilt into the theme of expiation through suffering, wherein the city and Akhmatova follow the way of the cross of humiliation, torment, and transfiguration—that is both new and essential.

Akhmatova begins by unfolding a rich tapestry of the carnival life of Petersburg in 1913 (here the influence of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on the central place of carnival in culture is evident). During a New Year’s carnival the author is visited by legendary characters of prerevolutionary Petersburg (recognizable among them are Blok, Mayakovsky, and Mikhail Kuzmin), dressed as Don Juan, Faust, Casanova, “Prince of Darkness.” But the action immediately opens out onto the expanses of Petersburg, and Akhmatova deftly weaves the city’s cultural symbols into the panorama. Thus, in the text of the poem, the “inaccessible swan,” the ballerina Anna Pavlova, appears, as does the voice of the great bass Fyodor Chaliapin, which “fills hearts with trembling.” When Akhmatova writes

she evokes in the reader’s mind scenes from another work that had become a symbol of prerevolutionary Petersburg—the Stravinsky-Fokine-Benois ballet Petrouchka, the first major work built around the theme of nostalgic longing for the capital of the old Russian Empire, a theme developed around the same love triangle that is the basis of Poem Without a Hero (in Stravinsky’s ballet Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin become Petrouchka-Ballerina-Moor).

Yet another character in Akhmatova’s carnival is the leading avant-garde theater director of that era, Vsevolod Meyerhold. In 1906 Meyerhold had staged Blok’s symbolist fantasy The Fair Show Booth, which also embodied the ubiquitous Pierrot-Columbine-Harlequin triangle. That production became a manifesto of Petersburg modernism. A few years later Meyerhold staged Arthur Schnitzler’s pantomime Columbine’s Scarf, where the same characters whirled in carnival ecstasy. Meyerhold created a touching figure, a blackamoor who was remembered by many in the audience, including Akhmatova. She includes “Meyerhold’s blackamoors” in the action of Poem Without a Hero. As usual, this detail has many meanings. It recalls another Meyerhold production with blackamoors—a Don ]uan, based on Molière’s, which Meyerhold directed at the Alexandrinsky Theater in 1910. Akhmatova uses every chance to remind the reader of the core theme of Poem Without a Hero (which is also the leitmotif of the Don Juan legend): sin and its punishment.

Akhmatova herself considered Meyerhold’s work a mainspring for the creation of Poem Without a Hero. She tied its genesis to her impressions of his 1917 production of Lermontov’s drama Masquerade. The play sounded then like a requiem for imperial Petersburg; it was that memorial note that Akhmatova captured in Poem Without a Hero.

Another Meyerhold production that may have played as great a role in the genesis of Poem Without a Hero was his innovative 1935 production in Leningrad of The Queen of Spades. Akhmatova had a complex relationship with this work. She was captivated by Tchaikovsky’s music, and besides, The Queen of Spades was a favorite of Blok and Arthur Lourié, who both considered it central to the Petersburg mythos.^{660}

In a published letter Blok identified Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, Lermontov’s Masquerade, and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades as variations on the same Petersburg theme. For him magical Petersburg was a city of masquerades (carnivals) where “‘Apollonic’ Pushkin fell into the abyss, pushed there by Tchaikovsky—magus and musician.” Akhmatova, who studied Blok’s letters closely, could not have missed this observation. But she was shocked by the liberties taken in Tchaikovsky’s opera, radically transforming its literary source, the Pushkin story.^{661} Part of what made Meyerhold’s production of the opera so memorable was that the director tried to “re-Pushkinize” the plot, even commissioning a completely new libretto that revealed more sharply the linchpin of Tchaikovsky’s music—guilt and its redemption (this theme was clear in Lermontov’s Masquerade as well).

Meyerhold’s production split the intellectual elite of Leningrad into two camps: one fiercely attacked it taking liberties with Tchaikovsky’s opera, the other—including Shostakovich—considered it a work of genius.^{662} Meyerhold himself announced that he wanted to convey the “mood of The Bronze Horseman.” He structured the production around the contrast between the twilit urban landscape and Petersburg’s decadent entertainments. Akhmatova later built this contrast into her Poem Without a Hero, endowing it also with veiled reminiscences of and parallels with The Queen of Spades.

Tchaikovsky sensed the possibility of the death of Petersburg, so dear to his heart, and he was horrified and worried by that possibility. His music—particularly Sleeping Beauty, The Queen of Spades, and the Pathétique Symphony—embodies his requiem for the imperial capital. (In conversation with Akhmatova we discussed using the Pathétique for a ballet of Poem Without a Hero.) For Akhmatova, Tchaikovsky’s music represents a core element in the classic Petersburg mythos. Poem Without a Hero is in effect an encyclopedia of that mythos. Its citations—obvious, hidden, and encoded—from works of Petersburg authors make it the quintessential postmodernist text.

It sometimes seems that the poem, unlike anything else in Russian literature, is, as Mandelstam said of the Inferno, “a real quotation orgy.” Akhmatova admits her habitual use of this technique in the first lines of the verse dedication:

The key term is “another’s word,” arising out of Bakhtin’s literary concept of “reported speech.” Bakhtin was particularly interested in the use of “reported speech”—that is, citation—in medieval literature, where “the borders between another’s and one’s own speech were fragile, ambivalent, and frequently intentionally convoluted and confused.” When Bakhtin spoke of citations that were “clearly and reverently emphasized, half-hidden, hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted, and so on” in medieval literature, he could have been describing Poem Without a Hero.

According to Bakhtin, reported speech inevitably becomes not only a constituent part of the work in which it is included but its theme. Something like this occurs in Poem With out a Hero, where the quotations and images from Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Blok, and Mandelstam turn into mirrors in which Akhmatova regards herself, using the past to tell the future—her own and the city’s.

A contemporary of Akhmatova’s, the Leningrad critic Efim Dobin, compared Poem Without a Hero to Velazquez’s famous painting Las Meniñas, in which the artist depicted himself painting his subjects:

The artist is in two worlds at once. Outside the painting. And inside it, next to his creations. In the world that exists in reality. And in the poetic world he has created. The whole painting is a mirror, everything that is depicted in it. Like Velázquez, Akhmatova wrote herself into an ancient drama. She stood next to the heroes in order to have uninterrupted dialogue with them.^{663}

Akhmatova’s tragic experience is woven into the horrible history of twentieth-century Petersburg, the culmination of which was the 900-day siege. Though she was evacuated, the blockade confirmed her theories about the unity of the poet’s and the city’s destinies:

The suffering of the city is personified in Akhmatova, and the city’s way of the cross includes her torments. When Akhmatova began Poem Without a Hero, she announced, “From 1940, as if from a tower, I look at everything.” It might have seemed to her that the Petersburg of 1913, like Sodom and Gomorrah, deserved to be destroyed. Yet the more scandalously Akhmatova painted prerevolutionary Petersburg, the more terribly stood out the later history of the city:

But the weakened city and the weakened poet continued to live. To this half-dead city Akhmatova brought her Poem Without a Hero, in which all the elements of the new Petersburg mythos were synthesized. She even brought in Shostakovich’s Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphony; a verse about it at one time ended the poem. (In fact, an early subtitle for the poem was “A Tragic Symphony.”)

Poem Without a Hero has in fact two heroes: the author and her city. They maintain a constant dialogue above the heads of listeners and readers. Often Akhmatova intentionally encodes that dialogue, ironically justifying it thus:

I noticed that the more I explain it, the more mysterious and incomprehensible it becomes, that everyone sees that I can not and will not (dare not) explain it completely, and that all my explanations, for all their ornament and inventiveness, merely confuse things—it came from nowhere and went off into nowhere, explaining nothing.^{664}

Akhmatova considered Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman a terrifying, hopeless, gloomy work. Thus, how ambivalent is the epigraph she chose for the final part of Poem Without a Hero, a line from The Bronze Horseman: “I love you, Peter’s creation!” There is no doubt in Akhmatova’s love for Petersburg, but for the reader, Pushkin’s solemn pronouncement is colored by the grim shadow of twentieth-century events described in Akhmatova’s work.

In the Russian cultural sphere The Bronze Horseman and Poem Without a Hero form the two bases of a majestic arch, an imaginary space under which lies the Petersburg mythos. In The Bronze Horseman, the heartbreaking story of Yevgeny and his bride, sacrificed to the fanatical idea of the building tsar, is reminiscent of ancient sacrificial legends: “no significant city can stand if in the erection of its fortifications a live man, or at least, his shadow, is not placed in the wall.”^{665} In Akhmatova’s work, Petersburg, erected on the bones of numberless, nameless workmen, becomes a victim of the mighty forces of history and thereby expiates its guilt. Having walked to Calvary, Petersburg earned the right to resurrection.

This idea is realized in Poem Without a Hero to magical effect. For all its complexity, confusion, and allusiveness, Poem Without a Hero goes down in a single cathartic, almost joyful gulp.

I felt this clearly when I first read Poem Without a Hero in the spring of 1965. Akhmatova inquired if I had come across a typescript copy circulating in Leningrad and Moscow. I replied that I had read only excerpts in poetry almanacs and journals.

“Well, that means you don’t know the poem,” she noted sadly. “I treated it badly, I see that now, not like a caring mother. I shouldn’t have published it in pieces.” Then she read me a section intended for the final part:

Declaimed by Akhmatova in her hierarchical, solemn manner, slowly and carefully, each word stunned me. The publication of such a text in those years was of course unthinkable.

For me the essence of Akhmatova’s philosophy of history and her ideas on the evolution of the Petersburg mythos are most succinctly expressed in the lines, “Just as the future ripens in the past,/So the past smolders in the future.” This formula came to Akhmatova from her own experiences and therefore has a convincing ring. The role of “history’s lightning rod” almost always falls on the poet. Though historical epochs mirror one another, the terrible predictability is visible only to the poet, whose role is to create all-encompassing historical myths.

Poem Without a Hero brought the creation of a new Petersburg mythos to its culmination, one to which all Russian culture of the preceding 250 years had contributed. Akhmatova’s crucial achievement was the melting down of important elements of previous incarnations of that mythos into a new, indivisible whole. She takes her reader through Petersburg’s entire history: from imperial capital to the city where the poet can only

Her model in the complex relations between poet and history was Pushkin. She once said, of his verse novel Eugene Qnegin, that its “aerial enormity, like a cloud, stood over me.” In the middle of the twentieth century, Akhmatova became the ethical compass for a new generation of Leningraders. Poem Without a Hero embodied for them the new Petersburg mythos, that “aerial enormity” in whose shadow a new generation of Leningrad intellectuals grew. They were to be the ones to carry the legend of the city and the poet, Petersburg and Akhmatova, around the world.

On February 18, 1964, in Leningrad, in the Dzerzhinsky district court—a grubby room with a spit-covered floor—there began the hearing of Joseph Brodsky, who was already well-known in the city. The twenty-three-year-old Brodsky was charged with “malicious parasitism”—that is, being out of a job—which was a violation of Soviet law. Tall and thin, with red hair and bright cheeks, Brodsky (with a guard next to him) spoke calmly, trying to explain to an ignorant and hostile judge that his work was writing poetry. She and Brodsky had the following exchange, which was written down clandestinely by the sympathetic journalist Frida Vigdorova.

This was like something out of Kafka or an absurdist play. The judge sent Brodsky under police escort to a psychiatric hospital to determine his sanity. Things were very tough there: he was forcibly given sulfur injections, which caused the slightest movement to be unbearably painful.

A favorite amusement of the male nurses was to wrap Brodsky in a sheet, dip him in an icy bath, and then toss him, still wrapped in the sheet, alongside a radiator. They called this the “cold-damp envelope.” As it dried, the sheet tore off Brodsky’s skin.^{667} His roommate committed suicide by slitting his veins with a razor at night, and Brodsky was afraid that he would never leave the hospital alive. His sufferings during that terrible period are reflected in the long philosophical poem “Gorbunov and Gorchakov.”

Forensic psychiatrists found Brodsky sane, and he went back to court. The same judge who committed him asked him, “What good have you done for your homeland?”

Brodsky replied with quiet persistence, “I wrote poetry. That is my work. I am convinced … I believe that what I write will be of service to people, and not only now but for future generations.”^{668}

All Brodsky’s attempts to explain fell on deaf ears. The predetermined sentence read, in part, “Brodsky systematically does not fulfill the duties of a Soviet man in the production of material goods…. He wrote and recited his decadent poems. From the report of the Commission on Work with Young Writers, it is clear that Brodsky is not a poet…. Brodsky is to be sent to remote areas for a term of five years at forced labor.”^{669}

This cruel sentence of a young man who already had heart trouble infuriated many Leningrad intellectuals. A secret KGB report informed the Party which writers had called Brodsky’s trial illegal, that Kornei Chukovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich were among those who rose to Brodsky’s defense, and that in artistic circles the Brodsky case was considered a “turn back to 1937.”^{670}

The worries of Soviet intellectuals, based on years of bitter experience with the authorities, were not unfounded. After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the new leader of the Communist Party, the sly Nikita Khrushchev, renounced many of the excesses of his ruthless predecessor and at first steered a course toward liberalization of political and cultural life. This policy became known as the Thaw. Mass arrests on the Stalinist scale were ended. Many victims of the Great Terror were rehabilitated; those who had survived were released from the camps. After a long hiatus Russia was beginning, albeit feebly, to reestablish cultural contacts with the West, and a certain—a very limited—deviation was permitted from the total conformity enforced by Stalin.

But the liberal experiments of the down-to-earth Khrushchev were erratic at best and turned out to be short-lived. He soon began to tighten the screws impatiently, wanting the intellectuals to toe the Party line. In late 1963 Khrushchev attacked a group of famous Soviet writers and artists in crude and abusive language. Brodsky’s trial was symptomatic of the tightening. And many feared that it was only a prelude to a harsher repression.

There is evidence that Khrushchev, who had a deep distrust of intellectuals, was planning just that, but in October 1964 he was unexpectedly removed from power by his Party colleagues, who had tired of his endless reshuffling of the political apparat, his unpredictable policy zigzags, and his uncontrollable outbursts. The new Party leader was the imposing Leonid Brezhnev, whose chief goal was to rock the ship of state as little as possible. The “stagnation period” had begun.

Under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, Leningrad became even more a second-rate city. Of course, it remained an important industrial and scientific center with a stress on military production. Its population increased from slightly over a half million people in 1944 to four and a half million in the 1970s. But where culture was concerned, the various Party bosses were interested only in maintaining the status quo. It was no accident that the first major post-Stalinist trial of a writer (Brodsky’s trial) took place in Leningrad. The city had a particularly reactionary local climate, one conducive to conflict between the authorities and the resident intellectual elite.

In Moscow it was easier for poets with liberal leanings to gain official publication or to find a large audience. These young poets thus had something to lose and hence were more easily manipulated by the authorities. So a public game of cat-and-mouse ensued: a writer would release a nonconformist work, then was censured by the government for so doing; in order to smooth relations, he would write several more acceptable works; he could then regain popularity with another liberal work.

The Leningrad authorities were less willing to play this game; local artists thus had fewer temptations than their Moscow contemporaries.^{671} Also, they had the towering moral model of Anna Akhmatova, the only living representative of the Silver Age.

The poet Yevgeny Rein brought his friend Brodsky to visit Akhmatova at her dacha in Komarovo, near Leningrad, in the summer of 1961.^{672} At first Akhmatova did not make any special impression on the cocky Brodsky. “It was only one fine day as I was returning from Akhmatova’s house in a crowded commuter train that I realized—you know, it’s as if the scales fell away—with whom, or actually with what, I was dealing,” Brodsky later confessed. “I recalled something she said or the turn of her head—and suddenly everything fell into place. After that it wasn’t that I became a frequent visitor, but I did see Akhmatova fairly regularly. And I even rented a dacha in Komarovo one winter. Then we saw each other literally every day. It wasn’t a question of literature at all, but a purely personal and—dare I say it?—mutual attraction.”^{673}

By the time he met Akhmatova, Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad in 1940, had led a colorful life, especially for an urban Jewish young man. Like other residents of Leningrad, he and his mother had nearly starved during the blockade (his father, who served in the navy, took part in breaking it). One of Brodsky’s most vivid childhood memories was of his first white bread roll. “I am standing on a chair and eating it, and my adult relatives are watching me.”^{674}

When “the great leader and teacher” Stalin died, the thirteen-year-old Brodsky was already independent enough to refrain from the hysterical mourning that was widespread in those anxious days. “We school children were called into the auditorium and our class mentor (Zhdanov himself had pinned the Order of Lenin on her—we all knew about that and it was a real big deal) came out on stage,” Brodsky recalled. “She began a funeral oration and suddenly cried out in a wild voice: On your knees! On your knees!’ Pandemonium broke out. Everyone was howling and weeping and it was somehow expected of me to cry too, but—to my shame then; now, I think, to my honor—I couldn’t. When I got home, my mother was also crying. I looked at her with some astonishment, until my father suddenly gave me a wink. Then I realized for sure that there was no particular reason for me to get upset over Stalin’s death.”^{675}

At the age of fifteen Brodsky dropped out of school and went to work as a milling machine operator at the Arsenal defense plant in Leningrad. He had at least thirteen jobs between 1956 and 1962 and traveled around Russia with geological groups. One of his more unusual jobs in that period was assistant in the dissecting room of the morgue of a district hospital, where he cut up corpses, sliced off the tops of their skulls, removed their internal organs, and then sewed them back up.

Brodsky left that job after a very unpleasant scene. That summer many small children in the Leningrad region were dying of toxic dyspepsia. Among them were a pair of Gypsy twins. When their father came to the morgue for the bodies and saw that they had been autopsied, he began, knife in hand, chasing Brodsky around the morgue, trying to kill him.

“I ran from him among the tables with sheet-covered corpses,” Brodsky told me. “Now that’s surrealism that makes Jean Cocteau seem like nothing! Finally, he caught me, grabbed me by my shirt, and I knew that something awful was about to happen. I managed to get hold of a surgical hammer that lay nearby and hit him on the hand. His hands unclenched, he stopped, and started to weep. And I felt very eerie.”^{676}

When Brodsky started writing poetry, his early experiences contributed to the appearance of the themes of loneliness and alienation, their primary source being the tragic and romantic character of Brodsky’s gift. But a highly important role, according to Brodsky himself, was played by the fact that his native city was Leningrad, which Brodsky always chose to call “Piter,” in defiance of its official name, like many of his contemporaries.

Brodsky explained that Petersburg was built on the edge of the state, almost outside it, and thus a writer living there willy-nilly becomes an outsider. As a witness to Brodsky’s first poetry readings in Leningrad put it, “Alienation was the only accessible road to freedom for young Brodsky. That is why separation—from life, from a woman, city, or country—is so often rehearsed in his poems.”^{677}

Brodsky as a rule picked the outskirts of “Piter” to describe in his poetry. A poem from 1962, which Brodsky titled “From the Out-skirts to the Center,” describes the “peninsula of plants, a paradise of workshops, and Arcadia of factories.” Brodsky commented, “At that time no one wrote about that part of the city, about that world. But I was always impressed by the industrial landscape. The vision of newly started construction projects, the sense of open space filled with protruding structures, was close to me. It all gave rise to thoughts of loneliness and dislocation.”^{678}

In the same poem, where Brodsky’s emotions include “sadness from a brick chimney and a dog’s bark,” the poet makes a startling prediction, echoing Akhmatova’s “Prayer” in its tragedy. “Thank God that I am left on this earth without a homeland.” As Akhmatova had predicted the horrible sacrifices to come in her life, Brodsky here either guessed his future or determined it.

According to Brodsky, the centrifugal idea of the poem “From the Outskirts to the Center” can be explained this way: “The outskirts represent not only the end of the familiar world, but the start of the unfamiliar world, which is much larger, huger. The idea of the poem is that in moving to the outskirts, you remove yourself from everything in the world and thereby go out into the big world.”^{679}

This new view of Leningrad contrasts with a more traditional approach expressed in “Stanzas to a City,” also written in 1962, in which the poet thus addressed the city:

Even here there is the persistent theme of escape, which conflicts with Akhmatova’s constant insistence on her inseparability from the city’s fate. Akhmatova nevertheless included Brodsky in the circle of young poets that formed around her and that she dubbed the “magic choir.”

That choir included, besides Brodsky and Rein, the poets Anatoly Nayman and Dmitri Bobyshev, who took closer to heart some of the acmeist principles of Akhmatova’s work, such as her demand that the poet be brief. Brodsky constantly violated this principle. Some of his poems stretched to two hundred lines and more; after a while even Akhmatova began to like them. She said of Brodsky’s poetry that she had not read anything like it since Mandelstam, and she used one of Brodsky’s lines as an epigraph to her poem “The Last Rose.”

What Akhmatova liked in Brodsky was his furious poetic temperament. She jokingly called him “a cat and a half”: she had given that nickname to a neighbor’s cat, a huge, noisy, orange beast. When Brodsky was arrested and tried, Akhmatova actively took up his defense and grieved at his punishment. At the same time, she noted acerbically that the authorities who persecuted Brodsky so maliciously were helping him. “What a biography they’re creating for our redhead! You’d think he hired them.”

The repressive Leningrad apparatus was not misguided in selecting Brodsky as the focus for punishment, even though his poems were not overly political. They did give off, as did Brodsky himself, a specific Petersburgian air of liberty and independence that the authorities perceived as threatening. Brodsky wrote about this later, recalling his Leningrad friend, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, “The idea of individualism, a man on his own, all by himself, was our proud property. But the possibility of realizing it was minuscule, if it existed at all.”

Once at a debate, Viktor Shklovsky, a leader of the Petrograd Opoyaz circle of formalists, sarcastically asked his Marxist critics, “You have the army and navy on your side, and we’re just four people—why are you so worried?” In fact, the answer was clear to both Shklovsky and his opponents: with its position consolidated, the Soviet regime wanted absolute obedience, and to get it, the state generously wielded the stick and the carrot. In the 1920s and 1930s, the authorities not only broke up Opoyaz but to varying degrees forced some of its members to compromise. This they did not manage to do with Brodsky.

Of course, the pressure was not as focused in the 1960s as it had been in the Great Terror. But Brodsky’s “existential nonconformism” and his unwillingness to collaborate turned out to be unusually steadfast. In 1964 Brodsky went north to exile unintimidated and unrepentant.

The city that Brodsky left behind lived a contradictory cultural life. Creative processes of considerable vitality survived, but for the most part they were hidden from the national and international communities.

Though local authorities did everything they could to prevent the unpredictable in Leningrad, the performing arts flourished. It was in this area that the characteristics of Petersburg culture could thrive: high professionalism, refinement, and a reliance on long-standing European tradition.

The Leningrad Philharmonic prided itself justly on being the only world-class orchestra in the country. It was headed for a record fifty years, until his death in 1988, by the greatest Russian conductor of the twentieth century, the Petersburger Yevgeny Mravinsky. Scion of an old noble family, the tall, thin, haughty, and taciturn Mravinsky was an imposing figure. The musicians were in awe of their leader, whose endless rehearsals and attention to detail were legendary. Mravinsky’s interpretations were frequently illuminating and structurally revealing.^{680}

Mravinsky’s repertoire was a bit small by Western standards. His favorite composers were Tchaikovsky (whose portrait the conductor carried like a talisman) and Shostakovich; Mravinsky’s performances of their music were incomparable. His recordings of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, particularly the Pathétique, were renowned. George Balanchine recalled his friendship with Mravinsky in Petrograd in the 1920s. In those days Mravinsky made money as an extra at the Maryinsky Theater, and the future choreographer set a poem by the future conductor to music.^{681}

Mravinsky and Shostakovich had a close-knit relationship. In 1937 the composer trusted Mravinsky with the premiere of his Fifth Symphony. It was a triumph. The conductor subsequently premiered another five Shostakovich symphonies, including the monumental Eighth, which was dedicated to him. In Mravinsky’s performances, Shostakovich’s symphonies seemed more like Greek tragedy than modern drama.

The approach had pluses and minuses, creating as it did a certain distance between the horrible events of daily life and their musical reflection in Shostakovich’s music. This Petersburg classicism worked until the late 1950s, when editorial tendencies began to predominate in the composer’s work (he was by then living in Moscow). A mutual dissatisfaction developed between composer and conductor; though suppressed at first, it surfaced after Mravinsky’s refusal to conduct the premiere of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth (“Babi Yar”) Symphony.

Mravinsky was accused of cowardice: the Thirteenth Symphony, which set the topical poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, dealt with politically touchy themes, including anti-Semitism. But the conductor had not been fainthearted in even grimmer times. Mravinsky, a firm anti-Soviet, considered Shostakovich’s music important. “Shostakovich’s greatness is defined for me first of all by the significance of the public and moral idea that runs through his entire work. It is the thought that things should not be bad for people, that they not suffer because of wars and social catastrophes, injustice, and oppression.”

In 1948, when Shostakovich’s music was denounced and banned, Mravinsky put the disgraced composer’s Fifth Symphony on the program of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The performance was a great success; the curtain calls would not stop. In response to the applause, Mravinsky held the score high over his head. The audience stood, realizing that this was a challenge, a desperately brave act. Mravinsky was risking a lot, perhaps even his life. His defiant gesture became part of the history of Petersburg culture.

The differences between Mravinsky and Shostakovich in the mid-1960s were thus less political than aesthetic. When, late in life, Shostakovich composed the introspective and textless Fifteenth Symphony, Mravinsky immediately added it to his repertoire.

Mravinsky was a religious man and did not hide the fact, which in the officially atheist state strongly complicated his relations with the authorities, who were forced to disregard this “eccentric” behavior because of the conductor’s international fame. He took to his heart Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Bruckner’s symphonies, music through which he could express his spiritual ideas. Mravinsky also became a zealous exponent of Stravinsky’s works. He gave the first Soviet performance of Agon, a serial work, and included the neoclassical Apollo and Baiser de la fée in his programs.

Mravinsky stressed the Petersburg roots of these Stravinsky works. Was the conductor thus shielding himself from reality, losing himself in the realm of the Petersburg mythos? His search for the ideal was tortuous. Mravinsky was often mired in despair (a fact few people knew); he would go off to his dacha and drink heavily.

One such time, his wife played a recording of Apollo for him. He listened intently and then exclaimed, “Oh, my God! I am so miserable! They play so well, the form is so perfect. I wouldn’t be able to do that with my musicians!”

“That’s you,” Mravinsky’s wife told him. “That’s your orchestra.”

Mravinsky broke down and sobbed like a baby.

When Mravinsky died, the score of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony lay on his desk. He had first performed it in 1937; fifty years later the conductor was still working on it. This attitude was typical for Mravinsky, who expanded his core repertoire with caution.

He rarely performed works by the Leningrad composers of the generation that followed Shostakovich. Among the few exceptions were the works of Galina Ustvolskaya, Shostakovich’s favorite student at the Leningrad Conservatory. From the very beginning Ustvolskaya stood out for her uncompromising nature and indifference toward success. She worked for years over her compositions, keeping them hidden and destroying many of them. Her music did not imitate Shostakovich’s, but spoke in its own voice: ascetic, unornamented, built on strong contrasts.

Ustvolskaya’s chamber works are as monumental as a symphony, and her symphonies are as translucent as chamber music. Though partial to titles like The True, Eternal Goodness (Second Symphony, 1979) and Jesu Messiah, Save Us! (Third Symphony, 1983), she insisted that her music was “spiritual but not religious.” Her brand of expressionism delighted Shostakovich, who told Ustvolskaya, “You are a phenomenon, while I am just a talent.”

Shostakovich spent a lot of time with Ustvolskaya, who was short and girlish looking. He wrote to her frequently, sometimes twice a day. He confessed to his son, Maxim, that he had never loved anyone as he did her.^{682} When his wife died suddenly in 1954, Shostakovich proposed to Ustvolskaya but was refused outright, which caused him great grief. Traces of his passion may be found in a melody by Ustvolskaya that Shostakovich used in two major works: the Fifth String Quartet (1952) and the Suite to Poems by Michelangelo (1974), one of his last pieces.

Ustvolskaya did little to promote her music, which therefore was known to only a narrow circle in Leningrad, where it developed cult status. When Ustvolskaya began teaching, the defiantly ascetic character of her life and her works created a great impression on her students. One of them was Boris Tishchenko, who subsequently did graduate work with Shostakovich. In the years when modern Western culture was in effect banned, Ustvolskaya introduced her students to the works of Mahler and Stravinsky, to which Shostakovich had introduced her. Thus was preserved in Leningrad music the sense of an uninterrupted cultural tradition.

Ustvolskaya’s creative energy, devoutness, and personal eccentricity reminded people of the pianist Maria Yudina. Like Yudina, Ustvolskaya spent a lot of time with her students in discussion and listening to music; such “Socratic” sessions had gone on in Leningrad since the days of the Bakhtin circle.

This underground method of passing on culture was typical of Leningrad of that era. Thus, a group of young artists gathered around Vladimir Sterligov—a student of Malevich’s who had returned to Leningrad from the camps, where he had been sent during the Stalin terror after Kirov’s murder—and Sterligov’s wife, Tatyana Glebova, a student of Filonov’s. Sterligov and his group discussed Malevich’s suprematist ideas and Filonov’s “principle of doneness” and declaimed the dadaist poems of the Oberiuts. Here, too, special emphasis was placed on the spirituality of art.

The “principle of doneness” of Pavel Filonov, who died of starvation during the Leningrad siege, held that the artist built a painting out of the tiniest strokes, working with a small brush and creating a complex composition that incorporated seemingly incompatible elements. When the Leningrad artist Mihail Chemiakin first saw Filonov’s works in the late 1950s, the technique stunned him. Chemiakin proceeded to form an art association with his nonconformist friends; they called it Sankt-Peterburg.

The total informational vacuum of the Stalin era gradually broke down but it was a slow and arduous process. It was particularly hard for artists, because the work of the Russian avant-garde was hidden deep in the cellars of museums; the little that came from the West—an occasional album—was worth its weight in gold. Chemiakin collected reproductions of modern art however he could.

I once brought him a German recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s music with a portrait of the composer by Oskar Kokoschka on the album cover. Chemiakin’s room held an ancient harmonium, a press for etchings, a horse’s skull, and a Limoges crucifix. He was wearing black leather pants and a vest with buttons depicting the Russian imperial eagles; the other guests were dressed no less eccentrically. Played with the Leningrad white night outside the window and lit candles inside, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht evoked a near trance. Stunned, Chemiakin talked me into leaving the record, priceless in those days, for further study. I never saw it again; the reproduction of Kokoschka’s painting probably became an addition to Chemiakin’s collection.

The cult of old Petersburg reigned in Chemiakin’s circle. When a film version was being made in Leningrad of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in the mid-1960s, the production unit re-created a corner of the city of that era near Haymarket Square. Chemiakin and his friends would go there at night, dressed in period costumes, and wander around the sets until dawn, getting a feel for vanished Petersburg.

This passion for the Petersburg mythos, which was out of official favor in those years, found reflection in Chemiakin’s celebrated exhibit at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1966. (Chemiakin’s reputation among musicians was very high, even though the Artists’ Union rejected him totally; he was even asked to create the masks for an experimental conservatory production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose.) Chemiakin’s stylized Petersburg landscapes revitalized the almost lost tradition of tragic depiction of the city by the artists of Mir iskusstva, Benois and Dobuzhinsky. These calligraphic works are very sophisticated. To many viewers their ironic carnival spirit came as a revelation. His exhibit was a huge success. The authorities quickly sounded the alarm: the conservatory was pressured, and a week after its opening, the exhibit was shut down. Chemiakin was back in total isolation, surrounded by official hostility.

The situation of Leningrad music was significantly more liberal, thanks to the efforts of Andrei Petrov, a stammering but quickwitted composer of popular songs, who became head of the local Composers’ Union in 1964. Petrov tried to create a beneficial atmosphere for moderately modernistic works by Leningrad composers in a period when even the concept of a distinctive Petersburg school of composition was rejected by Moscow. In this Petrov stood out from two other pop-song writers who had earlier headed the city’s composers—Isaak Dunayevsky and Vassily Soloviev-Sedoi. While talented in their genre, they were very conservative.

Petrov aided Boris Tishchenko in particular. Petrov expedited the publication and performance of Tishchenko’s sprawling symphonies in the manner of Shostakovich and arranged lucrative commissions for theater and film scores. The income made Tishchenko’s daily life comfortable—he eventually moved into a well-appointed apartment in a prestigious neighborhood—but left him in an awkward position in 1966 when he completed his Requiem for soprano, tenor, and orchestra, based on Akhmatova’s poem.

Tishchenko wrote the music in secret since Akhmatova’s antiStalinist text, despite the Khrushchev thaw, was still strictly taboo. I first heard Tishchenko’s Requiem at a private performance in a piano reduction played by the composer, and the work made a strong impression on me and all the others present. Though a local performance was out of the question in those years, Tishchenko always refused any proposal to premiere the piece in the West.

The reason was undoubtedly Tishchenko’s fear of open confrontation with the authorities, which would lead to a loss of the privileges he enjoyed, a loss that even Petrov could not prevent. So the first publicly performed musical setting of Akhmatova’s Requiem became that of the British composer John Tavener, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1981. Accenting the religious aura of Akhmatova’s poetry, Tavener’s Requiem drew the attention of musicians in the West to the Petersburg mythos in the dark years of the Brezhnev stagnation.

Moscow looked askance at the Leningrad composers’ attempts at rebelliousness. When a concert of Leningrad music was held in 1965, an official in the Composers’ Union sneered, “Petersburg chopped a window into Europe and now some Leningrad artists have fallen out that window!” This was a reference to the experimental works of Sergei Slonimsky, who called himself a “white crow” for sticking to the traditions of Prokofiev in a city where Shostakovich’s followers were the majority.

In the 1960s Slonimsky toyed with and then abandoned the idea of basing an opera on a short story by Solzhenitsyn; but even his opera on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita was rejected by the authorities. Slonimsky noted bitterly that if Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov had been written in the years of the Soviet regime, it would never have made it into print or onto the stage.

The son of one of the active members of the Serapion brothers, the influential literary association of the 1920s, Slonimsky had an ear for poetry and was one of the first in the post-Stalin era to set the works of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Kharms. In the mid-sixties, around when Tishchenko first set the poems of Brodsky, Slonimsky used the poetry of Brodsky’s friend Rein for a song cycle. When Slonimsky presented this difficult music (in the presence of the agitated poet) at an informal recital at the conservatory where he taught composition, the large classroom was overflowing. Students watched the ruffled composer introduce his new opus, which used devices unknown to most of those present: he strummed, plucked, and banged on the strings of the piano, eliciting unusual and attractive sounds.

Slonimsky could not have hoped for a better audience. Leningrad musical youth of the sixties were hungry for the new and unknown. We filled Maly Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic for the premieres of Shostakovich’s quartets, the intimate works of a wounded soul that was dear to us. But we also wanted to hear other music, outspoken and avant-garde.

The work of the émigré Stravinsky had been banned comparatively recently; he was invariably called a “rootless cosmopolite” or a “political and ideological renegade.” But after 1962. when the eighty-year-old composer visited Moscow and Leningrad after a half century’s absence and was received by Khrushchev himself, the situation changed somewhat for the better. Stravinsky’s later works were still performed rarely and reviewed dismissively, but his “Russian” works—Firebird, Petrouchka, Le Sacre du printemps— gradually entered the repertoire.

This breakthrough coincided with the start of the partial rehabilitation of other Russian émigrés; in particular, some of the Mir iskusstva group. I remember the instant sellout of the first postcard reproductions of watercolors by Alexander Benois. In 1962 the memoirs of choreographer Michel Fokine were published in an edition of thirty thousand copies, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes could be mentioned favorably. Some books illustrated by Dobuzhinsky were reprinted.

They were returning our past to us: cautiously, reluctantly, drop by drop. But we were persistent and resourceful. The poets of the Silver Age could be taken from the libraries only with special permission, so we would show up armed with official-looking letters testifying to our need to familiarize ourselves with the poetry of Kuzmin and Mandelstam for “ideological debates.” A bouquet of flowers for the librarian could open up the way to getting the piano score for the still-banned Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. I remember a friend bringing a roll of film he had taken of a book by Oberiut Zabolotsky published in 1929, and we spent the night in a stuffy darkroom, printing the book, page by page on photo paper; we wanted to share our discovery with other students.

At the former Maryinsky Theater—which, though renamed for the murdered Kirov, retained the luxury of tsarist times—we listened with delight to the operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, under the batons of Sergei Yeltsin and Konstantin Simeonov, as well as the occasional Prokofiev opera, but our hearts longed for the new. Benjamin Britten jolted our imagination, presenting several of his operas in Leningrad in 1964, including The Turn of the Screw, based on the Henry James story, which astonished us with its psychological subtlety. My friends and I, all students at the Leningrad Conservatory, decided to create our own experimental studio for chamber opera, and overcoming a multitude of bureaucratic obstacles, we produced several works.

We were the first to stage Veniamin Fleishman’s opera Rothschild’s Violin, based on the Chekhov story. This young Jewish student of Shostakovich died in 1941 defending Leningrad from the Germans in the ranks of the home guard. With two other composition students, Fleishman fired on enemy tanks from a pillbox that was finally surrounded and blown up. The home guard consisted of hastily selected, ill-trained, and poorly armed workers, students, and intellectuals of Leningrad. Zhdanov used them during the siege as cannon fodder; almost none survived.

Among the dead was the former director of the avant-garde Theater of Worker Youth (TRAM), Shostakovich’s friend Mikhail Sokolovsky. Shostakovich suffered the loss of his friends badly. Torn by guilt, he completed and orchestrated Fleishman’s unfinished opera. The premiere was successful, and Shostakovich was happy that the memory of his talented student was thereby preserved.

The Fleishman-Shostakovich opera was lyrical and tragic. But we wanted to laugh, too, and so I wrote an absurdist libretto, based on the old parody play Lyubov and Silin, for a friend, the composer Gennady Banshchikov. Banshchikov worked on the opera at night, and in order to wake up mornings, he constructed a device that blasted out Stravinsky’s Le Sacre when the alarm went off (he was a skilled mechanic, too); the wild sounds roused his neighbors as well. Banshchikov’s opera was bold and barbed; it attacked cultural censorship, xenophobia, and the illiteracy of the bureaucratic elite.

We asked another young iconoclast, Alexander Knaifel, to set to music Lenin’s letter (of which we were all sick and tired, forced to memorize it at school) in which he called for the start of revolution in Petrograd. The innocent-looking Knaifel brought us a score in which the words, familiar to every Soviet citizen from childhood, were sung menacingly by a unison chorus of basses. The effect was hilarious, absolutely surrealistic. Rumors of Knaifel’s musical satire quickly reached Leningrad Party headquarters, from which came an edict banning its performance. They shut down our enterprise for good, despite the fact that the popular bass Yevgeny Nesterenko, soon to become famous with the premieres of Shostakovich’s late vocal works, was part of our group. This time, the last laugh belonged to the authorities.

One of the first people to whom we showed the just-completed Lyubov and Silin was Nikolai Akimov, director of the Leningrad Comedy Theater. His opinion was important to us, and we all heaved a sigh of relief when he responded positively. Akimov was small and scrawny, but he had a large head, a long nose, and a sharp gaze. Though his enemies mocked his erudition, intellectualism, and seemingly endless capacity for work, he was one of the country’s leading theater directors. Akimov first became famous in 1932 for an irreverent production of Hamlet as a farce.

Young Shostakovich wrote appropriately impertinent music for Akimov’s production. A scandal ensued that almost destroyed the director’s career. However, things were smoothed over, and despite the “formalist” label that followed Akimov throughout his life, his Comedy Theater, situated in the center of Nevsky Prospect, remained one of the city’s most popular theaters. Audiences laughed at his productions of French farces and American comedies, while catching the hints about the absurdity of Soviet reality in his productions of Leningrad playwrights.

Akimov’s brilliance as a theater designer played an enormous part in the success of his productions. Sometimes Akimov the artist outshone Akimov the director, from the first costume sketches to the lobby posters advertising the next premiere. In the 1950s and 1960s Akimov may have been the most famous and beloved artist in the city: his colorful posters, depicting in an intriguing way the essence of the play and the production, stood out in the quotidian atmosphere of those days, eliciting delighted attention from thousands of Leningraders.

Akimov had to wage exhausting battles with the censors over each poster. As he later recalled, “No one banned posters in general, but almost each poster specifically was banned. The excuses were quite subtle: ‘Does not express the play’s idea,’ ‘insufficiently optimistic,’ ‘the text is not visible from a distance,’ ‘the title is too aggressively presented,’ and the favorite, which fit any occasion, ‘isn’t there some formalism here?’ ” For one play Akimov drew Moscow at night; the authorities perceived it as an attempt by a Leningrader to undermine Moscow’s international reputation as a sunny city and consequently termed it a “crude political error.”

As a painter (he adored doing grotesque portraits of his friends and left a huge series depicting Leningrad’s intellectual elite), Akimov was a major representative of the prerevolutionary Petersburg neoclassicism that grew strong under the aegis of the Petersburg Academy of Arts. The academy, founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth, was given the title “imperial” by Catherine the Great a few years later, reflecting the traditional Russian idea that art must serve the monarch and the state.

Even in Petersburg, which readily assimilated all things foreign, the Academy of Arts remained an exotic flower, embodying a taste for the nude in a city where religion, climate, and mores were obstacles to unclothed bodies. Perhaps that is why the academy, having trained several artists like Karl Briullov, capitulated so quickly in the mid-nineteenth century to the attacks of Ivan Kramskoy and his fellow Wanderers. It reestablished its authority only in the early twentieth century, when the pedagogue Dmitri Kardovsky turned it into a bastion of Russian neoclassicism, “setting the eye and the hand,” as the professionals put it, of such outstanding masters as Boris Grigoryev, Alexander Yakovlev, Vassily Shukhaev, and Boris Anisfeld.

The clear-thinking Kardovsky stressed drawing, and his best students bore comparison to the greatest artists of the past. Soon after the revolution Anisfeld emigrated to the United States and Grigoryev, Yakovlev, and Shukhaev went to France. They all were successful in the West, cleverly responding to the demand for the neoclassical with a touch of the exotic just as everyone’s attention was caught by the corresponding works of Igor Stravinsky.

Yakovlev’s and Grigoryev’s Western careers were cut short by untimely death (1938 and 1939, respectively). Shukhaev returned to Leningrad from Paris at the invitation of the authorities to take over the ailing Kardovsky’s class. Shukhaev taught at what was then the Soviet Academy of Arts for two years before he was arrested and sent to Siberia, from which he returned ten years later, morally and physically broken.

Akimov, who had studied with Yakovlev, revered his demonic-looking mentor (he had been wildly popular with women and had had a long, turbulent affair with Anna Pavlova in the West). Akimov’s apartment faced the Neva and was filled with his many portraits of famous men and beautiful women (his friends called it the wizard’s cave); in it the place of honor was given to a drawing by Yakovlev, which had miraculously survived all the trials of Leningrad life, even the siege. It was a museum-quality drawing of large reddish hands and a huge foot.

Every self-respecting director dreams of discovering a great playwright. In the early 1930s Akimov believed he had made his discovery when he met a modest young man, the Leningrad playwright Yevgeny Shvarts. At the time Shvarts was at a crossroad. He was a successful children’s writer, but he had a quarrel with the influential poet and editor Samuil Marshak, whose word in children’s literature, then and later, was law.

Marshak and Kornei Chukovsky could be called the fathers of twentieth-century Russian children’s literature. Chukovsky had begun writing his brightly rhymed poems in 1916, and to this day children all over Russia memorize them. Before the revolution Chukovsky had tried to free children’s literature from treacly verse and goody-goody stories and afterward relentlessly fought the attempts of the Soviet authorities to turn children’s literature into an instrument for ideological brainwashing.

In those days any fairy tales that caused “harmful fantasies” in children were banned by the censors. Even traditional dolls were taken out of circulation for inspiring “hypertrophy of maternal feelings.” Instead girls were given propaganda dummies depicting fat, repulsive priests in order to elicit antireligious emotions. But the little girls, responding to their hypertrophic maternal feelings, stubbornly gave the dolls baths in toy tubs, fed them, and put them to bed.

This obvious failure did not stop the authorities from urging further ridiculous innovations. Chukovsky eventually wearied of his struggle (he bitterly described the “shameful history of my children’s books—they were stifled, persecuted, sedated, and banned by the censors”) and yielded the leadership in children’s literature to Marshak, who had not only an uncommon poetic gift but fantastic organizational skills.

The bespectacled, chain-smoking Marshak reigned on the fifth floor of the House of Books, located in the former headquarters of the Singer Company on Nevsky Prospect, over a team of writers, poets, and artists. Marshak cleared the way for the dadaist Oberiuts—Kharms, Oleinikov, and Vvedensky—into print. They produced several children’s magazines, full of vivid poems, counting games, and stories, on which several generations of young readers were to grow up.

Marshak created a new genre in Russian children’s literature: stories of experienced people—sailors, pilots, divers, geologists, polar explorers. One man he brought in was Boris Zhitkov, a navigator and engineer who had circled the world several times in a sailing ship. Marshak sat up nights with Zhitkov, prodding him to develop a new Leningrad style of prose for children.

The fifth floor of the Singer building was crowded with people bearing manuscripts and drawings and ideas for new books. The floor shook with laughter, and some visitors were so overcome with the general hilarity that they left the building staggering, holding onto walls like drunkards. Shvarts, Oleinikov, and Kharms were particularly good at comic improvisations. An absurd sense of humor was the most esteemed. For instance, Kharms talked of a trained flea that bit its master and then rubbed the bite with its tiny legs. When he was asked his telephone number, Kharms replied, “It’s very easy to remember: thirty-two, fifteen. Thirty-two teeth, fifteen fingers.”

Only one man seemed to remain totally serious and unperturbed: Marshak’s favorite artist, Vladimir Lebedev. He was one of the golden boys of Soviet culture, like Shostakovich or Kozintsev. Lebedev graduated from the Petersburg Academy of Arts and, on the first anniversary of the Bolshevik seizure of power, joined others in a provocative display of semiabstract compositions. As a painter and graphic artist, Lebedev quickly moved from cubism to nonfigurative experiments, creating a series of works by the early 1920s that are still considered among the cream of the Russian avant-garde.

Lebedev’s art was always political, and he is properly considered one of the creators and masters of the Soviet political poster. But by the early 1920s he had also become a social critic, doing several series of satiric sketches of contemporary life, depicting nouveaux riches, their vulgar girlfriends, and colorful urban toughs. Lebedev’s works revealed a different world; it seemed that after the long hegemony of Mir iskusstva, a new leader had appeared in artistic Petrograd. No wonder that Punin, who had supported and propagandized Tatlin in his time, published a monograph on Lebedev in 1928, based on the materials of the artist’s solo show at the Russian Museum. Now Punin made Lebedev the benchmark.

But Lebedev was not cut out for leadership. He called himself a lone wolf, and his favorite poet was Kipling. Shvarts, who knew the artist well, said of Lebedev, “He was impressed not by fame, but power. Like Shklovsky and Mayakovsky, he believed that the times were always right.”^{683} Lebedev did not wish to fight the times. Having already renounced nonfigurativism, he preferred now to abjure social satire. He moved to children’s books, where his collaboration with Marshak caused a sensation.

In the 1920s Marshak and Lebedev produced a series of illustrated children’s books that became classics of the genre. These books had a seemingly utilitarian goal: to introduce the small child into the adult world, to explain how things worked—a repair shop, the plumbing, the circus, a typewriter, or an electric light bulb. But these editions were also works of art in which the combination of Marshak’s polished verse and Lebedev’s vivid drawings created an original whole.

Each subsequent Marshak-Lebedev book was a treat for young and old, reprinted over and over. A “Marshak school” and a “Lebedev school” sprang up in Leningrad: talented writers and artists working in the style of the masters.

Lebedev’s loyal cohorts could be seen daily at the Leningrad printing house Pechatny Dvor, which published the best children’s books. The Lebedevites were there round the clock, creating dummies, selecting fonts, setting type, and running off copies, as well as doing the actual drawing. Some artists, like Yevgeny Charushin or Alexander Samokhvalov, also wrote texts for their illustrations.

Many members of the Lebedev group had no competition in their field: Valentin Kurdov was celebrated for his depictions of horses, and Yuri Vasnetsov for his variations on the imagery from old Russian folk pictures. Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, who produced the book The Post Office with Marshak, became an experimenter in cartoons. He even began a satirical cartoon opera with Shostakovich. This was in 1933, seven years before Walt Disney’s Fantasia. But the authorities did not allow Tsekhanovsky and Shostakovich to complete the work, and only fragments survived.

A bit apart from Lebedev’s young artists were the old Petersburgers Dmitri Mitrokhin and Nikolai Tyrsa, whose illustrations added elegance to Leningrad book production. In sum, Leningrad literature for children was done by highly qualified professionals for whom quality and artistic worth were more important than ideological imperatives.

This led to an immediate attack by the Moscow press on the “harmful literary practice of the Leningrad group,” which allegedly juxtaposed “aristocratic form” and “crude content.” The attack against the “Marshak-Lebedev group” was not limited to words: in 1931 a number of Leningrad writers and artists for children were arrested on false charges of “organizing on the basis of their counterrevolutionary convictions” an underground anti-Soviet cell. Among the arrested was the artist Vera Ermolaeva, one of Malevich’s closest colleagues, who was working with Marshak and the Oberiuts.

Ermolaeva always said, “Leningrad is the last citadel of new art in Russia.” Always on crutches (her legs were paralyzed after a childhood fall from a horse), Ermolaeva was surrounded by loyal students. Her achievements in children’s literature rivaled those of Lebedev.

Released after her first arrest, Ermolaeva was detained once again and sent to a camp in Kazakhstan in 1934, when a new wave of arrests and and sanctions rolled over Leningrad in the wake of the murder of Sergei Kirov. Sterligov, who was taken to the camps in the same group as Ermolaeva, recalled how the convoy soldiers mocked the handicapped artist, ordering her around at the daily roll call: “Stand up!” “Lie down!” “Stand up!”

After several years in the camps, where Ermolaeva’s legs were amputated, she was given an automatic second term. Finally, she and other inmates were loaded onto a barge and sent onto the Aral Sea (Sterligov witnessed the event). All the prisoners were left on a desert island. No one ever heard from Ermolaeva again. All that was left of her in Leningrad were a few works and some photographs and letters.

For Lebedev, Ermolaeva’s fate was a terrible blow and a warning. Events moved quickly: by the end of 1937, the new Leningrad’s children’s literature was destroyed. Arrests of writers and artists continued unabated, but Marshak and Lebedev were not arrested, despite the fact that the press invariably referred to their group as “a counterrevolutionary, sabotaging gang of enemies.”

Lebedev was terrified. He, like Shostakovich, was personally attacked by Pravda; in those days that was a reliable signal of coming extermination. Lebedev’s wife, Irina Kichanova, recalled,

The fear did not leave Lebedev from that moment. And he tried to escape the fear in the city. The walls of the house stifled him, did not save him from fear, while he knew the city like no one else and loved it like no one else. And with the obsessiveness of an explorer he began showing it to me. We went off on long excursions on the Petrograd side, along Vasilyevsky Island, down the canals, to the Summer Gardens, the Neva, the Palace Embankment, I saw the house of the Queen of Spades, the English Embankment…. It was a strange feeling, sometimes very hard. That was not how you love art or architecture. That was how you love someone’s soul, living and elusive.^{684}

Such fear-induced attacks of claustrophobia were typical in those years among the Leningrad elite. The theatrical designer Vladimir Dmitriev (George Balanchine’s best friend in the early 1920s) had his wife taken away in the middle of the night by the secret police; they pulled her from the cradles holding their sleeping seven-month-old twins. Dmitriev told Maria Konisskaya how he “spent the ten best years of his life in constant icy fear. Sometimes he would drop his work, jump on any train and go wherever it went, then change to another one in another direction, looping around, choking on fear.” Commenting on this confession of Dmitriev, who received the Stalin Prize four times for his designs, Konisskaya concluded sadly, “I’m not surprised that he died of a heart attack at forty-seven.”^{685}

It was almost impossible to avoid the omnipresent fear. The bravest people felt it. Someone said to Akhmatova in 1938, “You are fearless. You are afraid of nothing.” She replied, “Not at all! That’s all I do, is feel fear.” Akhmatova always added when she told this story, “Really, how could you not be afraid? They would take you and before killing you force you to betray others.”

Lydia Ginzburg described the surrealistic fear in Leningrad’s cultural circles. “The horrible background never left your mind. The people who went to the ballet and to visit friends, played poker and rested at their dachas were the ones who got news in the morning of the loss of relatives, who themselves froze every time the doorbell rang at night, waiting for their uninvited guests.^{686} Shvarts recalled this, too. “Love was still love, life was life, but every moment was imbued with horror. And the threat of shame.”^{687}

Everyone dealt with this daily, exhausting horror differently. Lebedev never missed a sports event—he went to soccer games and wrestling and boxing matches. Shostakovich went with him everywhere. Lebedev’s wife said they were “united by fear and by love of sports.”^{688} Shostakovich’s devotion to soccer is now often mentioned, usually in terms of a genius’s amusing hobby. But in those difficult times it was one of the few available forms of spontaneous emotional release and, for Leningrad intellectuals like Lebedev and Shostakovich, also perhaps an unconscious attempt at social mimicry.

In those conditions it was natural to bend or break, psychologically and artistically. The greatest test was in creative work. Lebedev, like Dmitriev and Kozintsev, belonged to a generation whose creative potential gave them the ability to work at the highest level of modern culture, while the exigencies of life pushed them toward politically dictated, albeit professional, hackwork. Only a strong character could survive this unequal battle with a ruthless age.

In Shvart’s severe judgment, “Lebedev believed in today, loved what was powerful that day, and scorned weakness and failure as something unacceptable in polite society.”^{689}

Such an attitude was a betrayal of the age-old traditions of Russian culture, which had always risen to the defense of the “insulted and injured.” For that betrayal Lebedev, who continued to illustrate children’s books to the end of his life (he died in Leningrad in 1967, at the age of seventy-six), paid with the emptiness of his late style. It is his early works that are now reprinted.

The children’s texts of Yevgeny Shvarts were also very popular in their day; indeed, they were praised by the notoriously hard-to-please Mandelstam. But Shvarts earned his place in the history of Russian literature with his plays, which were commissioned by Akimov. They include The Naked King, The Shadow, and especially The Dragon.

In form the plays are fairy tales (The Naked King and The Shadow are based on stories of Hans Christian Andersen), but they were intended primarily, though not exclusively, for an adult audience. Shvarts used a broad spectrum of expressive devices, blending fantasy, irony, parody, lyricism, and lampoon. His plays can be read as parables, but they are most effective on stage, amusing and touching.

Like the historical political allegories in Tynyanov’s prose, Shvarts’s plays were filled with political hints and allusions, which Soviet audiences easily understood. Like Tynyanov, Shvarts transcended the political situation of his time, thanks to which his plays remain topical. But unlike Tynyanov, Shvarts had to suffer much at the hands of the Soviet censors. The authorities subjected plays and films to much greater scrutiny than books, and all of Shvart’s best works underwent lengthy periods of being banned.

The censors were right to be upset by the characters Shvarts created: the Cannibal, who worked for the police; the Shadow, who ran affairs of state; the Vampire Bureaucrat. The greatest indignities were visited on The Dragon, written in 1943, one of the best Russian plays of the twentieth century. Shvarts tells of a magical city ruled by a terrible Dragon, which any Soviet citizen would recognize as Stalin. The Dragon frightened and corrupted his subjects. “Armless souls, legless souls, deaf-mute souls,” he says with contempt.

As Kaverin, who read The Dragon in manuscript, recalled, the first readers were stunned by Shvarts’s brutal analysis of Soviet conformity. “The impossibility of struggling against violence, the attempt to justify what is unjustifiable—that is ours, lived through.” A traveling knight kills the Dragon, but true liberty still does not come to the people: power in the city is seized by the monster’s loyal aide, the obnoxious Mayor. The Dragon may be gone, but tyranny “with a human face” continues.

In 1944 Shvarts and Akimov tried to bring The Dragon to the Soviet stage in the guise of an “anti-fascist satire.” But even in the war years, when ideological censorship was comparatively temperate, the play was instantly banned. It was produced in Leningrad only in 1962, four years after the author’s death.

Everyone rushed to see The Dragon at the Comedy Theater (Akimov both directed and designed the sets and costumes). They wanted to see the play before it was closed down. This possibility was real, since people saw in the social-climbing Mayor who replaced the Dragon-Stalin none other than the brutish Khrushchev. Shvarts’s Dragon, like his other plays, had been prophetic.

Along with Shvarts’s Shadow, which had been permitted on stage after a twenty-year hiatus (alas, after the author’s death), The Dragon was Akimov’s signature piece. A similar relationship linked another Leningrad director, Georgy Tovstonogov, to two plays by Alexander Volodin, like Shvarts a Leningrader. Twenty years younger than Shvarts and badly wounded in World War II, Volodin tried to express the feeble hopes of Leningraders in the period of Khrushchev’s brief thaw.

If Shvarts resembled Andersen, then Volodin resembled Chekhov. The heroines of his plays (Volodin almost always had a woman at the center of his works)—saleswomen, telephone operators, secretaries—tried to find meaning and a little happiness in the grim life around them. It never occurred to them to confront the regime, but neither were they Soviet literature’s traditional obedient cogs in the state machine.

Volodin’s characters were not given to lofty declarations; they spoke and behaved like real people. This recycling of Chekhovian technique irritated official critics. As Volodin, painfully shy—not unlike his characters—later recalled, “Even before I completed the play Five Evenings, they came up with the formula that this was malicious barking from around the corner. However, there was no barking at all, no criticism of reality—it is beyond that, either beneath or above it, as you like. Then they changed the formula: These are just little maladjusted people, pessimism, petty themes.’ And they all repeated it every time: whatever I did, it was a petty theme and pessimism.”

Conservative reviewers fought doggedly to get Volodin’s plays off the stage since their very existence undermined socialist realism. Thus, becoming Volodin’s champion—which is what the sober and cautious Tovstonogov did—demanded quite a bit of courage.

At the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater Tovstonogov staged Volodin’s Five Evenings in 1959 and The Older Sister in 1961. Audiences followed the uncomplicated twists of Volodin’s plays, which appeared to be carelessly constructed but actually were crafted with great subtlety. These were plays about themselves, “ordinary Soviet people,” as they were patronizingly described in the media, about their feelings. Volodin’s works, an amalgam of sadness and tenderness, were touchingly played by Tovstonogov’s accomplished actors—Tatyana Doronina, Zinaida Sharko, Efim Kopelyan, Yevgeny Lebedev, and Kirill Lavrov.

Both Akimov and Tovstonogov dominated their theaters, heading them, respectively, for twenty-seven and thirty-three years. (During the campaign for eradicating “formalism and kowtowing before the West” in Leningrad, Akimov was removed from the Comedy Theater; he was given his troupe back only seven years later.) These two directors were intellectually characteristic of Leningrad dramatic art. In Akimov’s theater, the director’s first visual impulse determined the concept and form of the play, and the actors sometimes seemed no more than strikingly dressed chess figures, moving in foreordained patterns. Tovstonogov’s theater was first of all a showcase for his incomparable actors.

Tovstonogov needed first-class performers to embody his creative ideas, and he knew where to find them. He discovered Sergei Yursky, who later delighted audiences with his interpretation of Chatsky (in Alexander Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit) as the prototype of a modern dissident. Tovstonogov likewise launched the career of Innokenty Smoktunovsky (known in the West as the Hamlet in Kozintsev’s film), offering the thirty-two-year-old actor the difficult role of Prince Myshkin in a stage version of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.

That 1957 play took on a legendary aura comparable to that of Meyerhold’s production of Lermontov’s Masquerade in the first half of the century. Meyerhold’s production had reflected the emotions of Russian society on the eve of revolutionary cataclysm. A similar sense, that life could now be arranged in completely different ways, imbued Tovstonogov’s production.

Prince Myshkin appeared meekly on stage, returning from a long absence in Petersburg—just as those victims of the Great Terror who had managed to survive Stalin’s camps were returning to contemporary Leningrad. “His figure is narrow, with elongated arms and legs, not so much a human body as an outline of a body, a poor diagram for life in the flesh,”^{690} wrote Naum Berkovsky, an influential Leningrad critic of those years. Smoktunovsky represented the Russian school of spiritualized acting at its peak.

The production was also a manifestation of the return to Leningrad of the tradition of Dostoyevsky, who had been banned by Soviet ideologists as a “reactionary” and “mystic.” In that period Dostoyevsky’s works began to reappear, and with them surfaced the religious dimension of the Petersburg mythos. In the play The Idiot, Smoktunovsky created on stage every evening a visionary space; the audience saw in him a new Russian saint. This theatrical experience became something to tell one’s children and grandchildren about.

Another temple of high art in the fifties and sixties was the Kirov (formerly the Maryinsky) Theater—home to one of the world’s great classical ballet companies. Existing symbiotically with its famous ballet school, the company cultivated and preserved the technique of classical dance. Surviving the revolutionary hurricanes, the Great Terror, and the war years, these institutions remained true to the principles of Petersburg professionalism.

Here the legendary names of Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky were remembered and revered. Their rise in Petersburg and subsequent fairy-tale careers in the West are well-known parts of ballet history. Pavlova created an audience for ballet in the West, particularly in the United States. Nijinsky, who with Tamara Karsavina became the focus of choreographic innovation in Diaghilev’s company, speeded audience acceptance of classical dance as a central part of twentieth-century culture. The exotic sets and costumes of Benois and Bakst and the gripping music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev furthered a ballet revolution born in Petersburg.

But mid-century Leningraders had only heard of this revolution. Local ballet battles had had more impact. One concerned the patronage of “choreodramas,” the Soviet version of ballets d’action, which gained the dominant aesthetic position over the experiments of Fyodor Lopukhov, Balanchine’s mentor, and Leonid Yakobson.

Since the early 1930s most successful new productions at the Kirov had been choreodramas. Compared with traditional classic dance, of which people had tired, the form seemed to promise interesting things. Flames of Paris (1932; choreographer Vassily Vainonen), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934; Rostislav Zakharov), Laurencia (1939; Vakhtang Chabukiani), and Romeo and Juliet (1940; Mikhail Lavrovsky) all devoted more attention to plot development, psychological motivation, and dramatic expressiveness in corps scenes than to the invention of complicated dance steps. Most of them, including Romeo and Juliet, involved the outstanding theater director Sergei Radlov, a follower of Meyerhold, who was artistic director of the Kirov Theater in the second half of the 1930s.

Ivan Sollertinsky, a defender of the genre and a close friend of Shostakovich, wrote, “Orthodox balletomanes are not delighted by The Fountain of Bakhchisarai: not enough dancing! There are no dizzying variations with thirty-two fouettés, no pearls of the Italian school technique, no lush parade of symmetrically dancing corps-de-ballet masses in white tunics.”^{691} In response to these disgruntled “conservatives,” Sollertinsky claimed that “Bakhchisarai was a happy step forward”; it at least had dramatic action and living characters. He concluded, “No wonder the production was performed by the company with a true creative enthusiasm.”^{692}

The truth was that the Kirov dancers enjoyed performing in the later much-maligned choreodramas because it gave them an opportunity to expand their repertoire and broaden their audience appeal. Marina Semyonova and Galina Ulanova were masters of classic dance, but many think some of their most vivid achievements were in choreodrama. Ulanova’s Juliet became her signature part in Russia and abroad. The two premiere danseurs of the Kirov in that period, Chabukiani and Alexei Ermolayev, made their mark in the new repertoire. Their leaps, poses, and dramatic insight delighted Leningrad audiences and prepared the way for Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Stalin closely watched the triumphs of the Kirov troupe; many of its brightest figures, including leading choreographers, were transferred to the Bolshoi. The vitality of choreodrama evaporated, and the genre took on parodie elements in “boy meets tractor” productions. The last effective choreodrama was The Bronze Horseman, produced by Zakharov in 1949 in Leningrad, with Konstantin Sergeyev and his real-life wife, Natalya Dudinskaya, in the roles of Yevgeny and his beloved Parasha.

Zakharov, following the party line, interpreted the conflict in The Bronze Horseman from the point of view of “historical inevitability.” Yevgeny, who lost his beloved in a terrible Petersburg flood, is wrong to blame Peter the Great, who founded Petersburg in a swampy place; state interests supersede ordinary men’s desires. To express that idea, the composer Reinhold Glière closed the ballet with an “Anthem to the Great City,” which became a kind of unofficial anthem of Leningrad.

But Sergeyev and Dudinskaya turned the choreographers’ ideas upside down, eliciting pity and compassion for their characters. Sergeyev sometimes brought tears to the eyes of the audience. “The downtrodden Yevgeny, transformed by love, seems to rise above all around him. Yevgeny in the world of dreams. And then, a man over-whelmed by disaster…. An enormous all-engulfing grief…. The mad scene is the highest note of human tragedy, the way Sergeyev did it,” recalled a viewer.^{693}

Despite success and official recognition, the genre had implacable foes, among whom was the irascible Agrippina Vaganova, a former soloist at the Maryinsky and then a leading teacher of classical dance, who had trained a generation of principal dancers for the Leningrad ballet, including Marina Semyonova, Galina Ulanova, Natalya Dudinskaya, Alla Shelest, Irina Kolpakova, and Alla Osipenko. Vaganova created her own teaching method in the 1920s, which was published as Fundamentals of the Classic Dance in 1934 and reprinted many times at home and abroad. (She was helped in writing the book by Lyubov Blok, the widow of the great Petersburg poet, who had become a knowledgeable ballet historian.)

In her book Vaganova laid out the distinctive technical goals of the Petersburg ballet: clarity, precision of movement, and a clean line. Vaganova’s pedagogical forte was her ability to assess the artistic potential of her little pupils. As Fyodor Lopukhov recalled, “She took into account the individuality of each girl, the most subtle characteristics, which didn’t strike you right away but which the real pedagogue has the sensitivity to sense.”

Vaganova did not waste words. Other teachers might give general orders: “Jump! Higher! More grace!” Vaganova’s comments were always concrete: “Lift your right side,” “take hold of your right hip and bring it back harder,” and so on. Vaganova selected specific exercises for each student to strengthen the leg muscles, effecting thereby a painless transition to the most difficult dance combinations. But she never let her students forget that every virtuoso step had to make emotional sense.

Vaganova’s counterpart in male dancing was Alexander I. Pushkin, whose method of teaching, like Vaganova’s, developed his pupil’s best qualities through carefully chosen individual exercises. The unruly and temperamental Rudolf Nureyev was on the brink of being expelled when Pushkin took him into his class; in three years (instead of the customary nine) Pushkin shaped the young rebel into a dancer who stunned the graduation concert audience in 1958 with his animal energy and grace.

Nureyev, who much of the time lived at Pushkin’s house, described him as a second father.^{694} Pushkin steadfastly supported Nureyev’s attempts to expand the expressive boundaries of men’s dancing and nursed his young charge after Nureyev tore a ligament in his right leg and feared he would never dance again.

Pushkin defended Nureyev in his conflicts with the ballet authorities. These conflicts grew ever more serious. The Kirov ballet, though detached from the routine of Leningrad life, was still a microcosm of the Soviet state. The spirit of hierarchical obedience was deepened by traditional Russian bureaucratism and Soviet ideology. Indoctrination was pervasive, discipline and conformity were valued above all else, and manifestations of independence were regarded with suspicion.

The explosive Nureyev, who resembled the heroes of his beloved Dostoyevsky (he would later dance the role of Prince Myshkin in the Valery Panov ballet The Idiot), was shrilly lectured on how he, despite his phenomenal success, was “poisoning the atmosphere” and “corrupting the collective.”^{695} Nureyev felt that he could no longer breathe.

The chance to escape the Soviet system came to Nureyev in 1961 in Paris, while the Kirov Ballet was performing there. He made his leap to freedom at Le Bourget Airport, fighting off his two husky “bodyguards.” This was a story in the Cold War period, and repercussions of that event were felt in Leningrad. As the flight of a major artist from the Soviet Union, Nureyev’s departure was discussed endlessly not only in ballet circles but among Leningrad intellectuals, despite the extraordinary measures taken by the authorities to hush up the incident and to force Nureyev’s fans to forget their idol.

Soon a new jolt struck the city’s cultural elite. In the fall of 1962, on the heels of Stravinsky’s triumphant visit to Leningrad, came fifty-eight-year-old George Balanchine with his New York City Ballet. Balanchine, though he had left thirty-eight years earlier, was in no hurry to go back. For him, a staunch anti-Communist, the name Leningrad was deeply offensive. Besides which, he feared being interned by the Soviet authorities.^{696}

Under pressure from the Department of State, Balanchine did go to Russia, where the tour seemed tiring and rather depressing. He thought that he was being followed and that his hotel rooms were bugged; he was annoyed by the meaningless “aesthetic” discussions with officials from the Ministry of Culture; and he was deeply saddened by the fact that the authorities had turned Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism.^{697} (It was restored as a place of worship in 1991.)

But for Leningrad’s artistic youth, the visits of Balanchine and Stravinsky were determining events. One memorable moment was a performance of Balanchine’s ballet to Stravinsky’s Agon at the Kirov Theater. Many older dance lovers mockingly called it “Agony,” complaining that the Americans did not so much dance as “solve algebra equations with their feet.” The dancing and the music seemed abstract and cold; conversations buzzed with the ubiquitous charge of formalism.

But for Leningrad’s young musicians and dancers, Agon was a breath of fresh air. Even the stage looked different, as if a gigantic sponge had washed off the dusty scenery. Agon’s frank physicality (irritating to the old) seemed natural to us, suggesting a society with fewer restrictions than our own. On top of that, we heard jazz rhythms in Agon; this too was sexy, like the jazz broadcasts over Voice of America or the glossy pin-up covers of America, the propaganda magazine of the U.S. government.

Discovering Agon in Leningrad, we appreciated for the first time the unrealized possibilities of the stifled Petersburgian avant-garde. Some said wistfully, “Balanchine brought us the future that was not allowed to flourish in Russia.” Balanchine and Stravinsky personified Petersburg culture at its apex, a cosmopolitan art that had achieved world success and recognition.

It turned out that the Petersburg mythos was being realized in the international arena and was not the property of our domestic underground alone. The figure of Akhmatova was suddenly plugged into a global cultural context for us, and this unexpected shift gave a new vitality to the Petersburg mythos. It was also becoming contemporary for us.

The effect of the personal “materialization” in Russia of the titans of the world avant-garde cannot be overestimated. Tales of what they saw and said became for many years the barometer of local good taste in intellectual circles. Even their eccentricities became the object of intense gossip. Brodsky recalled how he came to Akhmatova’s house and announced that he had just seen Stravinsky on the street. He began to describe him—small, hunched, with a fashionable hat. “And basically, all that’s left of Stravinsky is his nose.” “Yes,” added Akhmatova. “And his genius.”^{698}

For a long time the Western branch of Petersburg modernism could not even be mentioned in Russia, at least not with praise. When its two leading representatives—Stravinsky and Balanchine—were allowed to return in triumph, even if only for a short time, to their hometown, the result was a rush of optimism in Leningrad’s creative circles and an impulse to accelerate their own artistic experiments.

For thirty-five-year-old Yuri Grigorovich, then a staff choreographer with the Kirov company, Balanchine’s work was confirmation of his own conviction that choreodramas were destructive of Russian ballet. In his recent success, Legend of Love, Grigorovich had tried complex ballet forms, bringing onto the Kirov stage dance combinations in the style of Fokine. Grigorovich insisted that Fokine and Lopukhov were masters of dance and that Russian ballet had to learn from them and drop all the nonsense about formalism.^{699}

Another Kirov choreographer who used the American visit to serve his own creative battles was Leonid Yakobson, Balanchine’s contemporary. The resident modernist of the Kirov (he was called the Chagall of ballet, sarcastically by his enemies and delightedly by his fans), Yakobson was having trouble fighting off the attacks of conservative critics of his recent ballet based on Mayakovsky’s futurist comedy Bedbug. In it Yakobson had mixed elements of pantomime, free dance à la Isadora Duncan, Fokine-style impressionism, and near surrealism.

Yakobson was considered the enfant terrible of the Leningrad ballet. His escapades were overlooked, and his “madness” was a given. I witnessed Yakobson calling cultural bureaucrats idiots to their faces. They merely shrugged it off: the “crazy” Yakobson could get away with things that would cost others their heads.

The more adventurous dancers of the Kirov company were crazy about Yakobson; many got the opportunity of their lives through him. For the twenty-one-year-old Natalya Makarova, Yakobson created a lyric role in his satiric Bedbug: Zoya, a frail, naive worker who hangs herself over unrequited love. This was a character taken from life, an unhappy woman similar to characters in the contemporaneous Leningrad plays of Alexander Volodin. This role was a turning point for Makarova, exposing her to modern influences.

Yakobson gave a similar impulse seven years later to the career of the twenty-one-year-old Mikhail Baryshnikov with a cameo ballet, Vestris, for the international ballet competition in Moscow. Portraying Auguste Vestris, the French eighteenth-century dancer, Baryshnikov’s vivid performance of an amalgam of neoclassical steps and pantomime movements astonished the jury, which included Maya Plisetskaya, Ulanova, Grigorovich, and Chabukiani. Plisetskaya, herself a devotee of Yakobson’s talent, proclaimed Vestris the “ballet theater of my dreams” and gave Baryshnikov thirteen out of a possible twelve. He won the gold medal.

Like Nureyev, Baryshnikov had a classical training under Alexander I. Pushkin. Nureyev’s flight left Pushkin with an emotional vacuum, which Baryshnikov, ten years younger than Nureyev, with his curiosity, humor, and charm, managed to fill. Pushkin was the only one to believe that the short-statured Baryshnikov would ever be more than a character dancer.

Pushkin pushed his student to spend long hours over exhausting exercises. At his graduation performance in 1967, Baryshnikov, who had developed balance, musicality, and confidence of execution, proved no less a sensation than Nureyev had been in his day, and he soon took a leading position in the Kirov company.

Baryshnikov had not seen the New York City Ballet perform in 1962, but their second tour in 1972 made him dream of someday working under Balanchine. Curious about the new, Baryshnikov tried to expand his horizons, using new contacts in the Leningrad underground art milieu. Baryshnikov recalled,

You get no information in the Soviet Union. Not even magazines. And so you read every page of Vogue, or other fashion magazines that somebody smuggles in, from beginning to end. You even read who is editor and you remember the names. And there is a black market for art books, just like for underground literature and poetry. Somebody arrives from abroad and the first few nights they don’t sleep, because their friends just move in and read and read the forbidden books.

Baryshnikov’s reputation in Leningrad as a free spirit was so widely known that when Natalya Makarova defected in 1970, some members of the Kirov commented, “Why, we expected Baryshnikov to do it.” Four years later Baryshnikov became the third star of the Kirov Ballet to flee to the West.

These defections cumulatively played an important cultural role. They engendered an extraordinary amount of attention from the Western media and as a result helped to make classic ballet accessible to a wider audience than ever before. They also helped change the attitude of some in the West to Soviet émigrés. Intellectuals here had traditionally been uneasy about them, wary of their “reactionary” attitudes. The appearance in the West of Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov allowed the debate to focus on the question of artistic freedom and get away from politics. The liberal Western cultural elite felt more comfortable on those grounds, and this shift had an immediate effect on the tone and volume of media coverage of the new émigrés.

The Western version of the Petersburg mythos consequently took on added meaning. Like Fabergé eggs, the ballet was a part of the tsarist heritage that elicited universal enthusiasm. In the wordless, mostly plotless, and therefore apolitical sphere, even Balanchine’s “monarchism” seemed somehow acceptable, like a form of artistic nostalgia. The idea of Petersburg as a twentieth-century Atlantis took hold primarily thanks to the efforts of the old Petersburg modernists—Nabokov, Stravinsky, and Balanchine. The new refugees introduced the theme of preservation of classical tradition in contemporary Leningrad into the discourse.

This was quite a shift. All that was needed for the mythos of Leningrad as the cultural heir of imperial Petersburg to take root in the West was a strong intellectual leader. That part was taken by Joseph Brodsky, who had been expelled to the West in 1972.

Brodsky’s arrival in the United States had been preceded by dramatic events. In March 1964 the Soviet authorities had sent him north into internal exile, where Brodsky was supposed to spend five years at manual labor to cleanse himself of “harmful” ideas. But Brodsky’s trial had turned into a cause célèbre in the Soviet Union and in the West. The transcript, made surreptitiously by an enterprising female journalist, was circulated widely in samizdat, the underground method of distributing banned works in the Soviet Union, wherein people “self-published” books by retyping or photographing texts and handing out copies to trusted friends for reading and further copying.

Samizdat handled anything banned by the censors: political tracts, prose, and poetry, including Akhmatova’s Requiem, which achieved great popularity thereby. The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya later described how copies of Requiem grew. “At least a hundred copies came from me alone during the winter and spring of 1963 (even though I didn’t have my own typewriter). I typed at least five versions with four carbons and gave them out on the principle, ‘You return my copy and another one,’ which I sent out further. Many others did the same thing.”

In post-Stalinist Russia, samizdat was a revolutionary phenomenon that underlined the weakening of the authorities’ control over cultural processes. For the first time, a writer had the opportunity to create a reputation outside official channels. This is what happened with many of Brodsky’s poems. Another development was the establishment of regular contacts between Soviet intellectuals and the Western media. Many works from samizdat were clandestinely sent to the West, published there in translation (and sometimes in Russian), then returned to the USSR, but in print form—magazines, anthologies, or books.

Brodsky’s poems began being published in the West in 1964. The transcript of his trial—the first such document to reach the West—was also widely known. This awareness explains the appearance of a document that played, as we can see today, a substantial role in further developments: a private letter from Jean-Paul Sartre, dated August 17, 1965, to Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Anastas Mikoyan.

Dear Mr. President,

I allow myself to appeal to you with this letter only because I am a friend of your great country. I often visit your country, meet many writers, and know that what the Western foes of peaceful co-existence are already calling the Brodsky Affair is nothing more than an inexplicable and regrettable exception. But I would like to inform you that the anti-Soviet press will use it to start a wide campaign and present this exception as a typical example of Soviet justice; it has gone as far as reproaching the authorities for hostility toward the intelligentsia and anti-Semitism. Until the early months of 1965, we proponents of a broad juxtaposition of various cultures had a simple reply to this scurrilous propaganda: our Soviet friends had assured us that the attention of the higher courts is turned to the Brodsky case and the decisions of the court will be reviewed. Unfortunately, time passed, and we learned that nothing had been done. The attacks of the enemies of the USSR, who are also our enemies, are becoming more and more harsh. For instance, I want to note that I have frequently been asked to express my opinion publicly. Until the present time I have been refusing to do so, but remaining silent is becoming as difficult as responding.

I want to let you know, Mr. President, about the anxiety we are undergoing. We are not unaware of how difficult it is within any social system to review decisions that have been made. But knowing your profound humanity and your interest in strengthening cultural ties between East and West within the framework of ideological struggle, I am daring to send you this highly personal letter, to ask you in the name of my sincere friendship for socialist countries, on which we pin all our hopes, to come to the defense of a very young man, who already is or, perhaps, will become a good poet.^{700}

Obviously, Sartre, who in his time had attacked Nabokov for doing nothing—unlike Soviet writers—to build a socialist society, would send such a request (found in the Party archives by the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta in 1993) only as the result of extraordinary social pressure. The Kremlin must have understood this. In November 1965 Brodsky was given early release from his northern exile and returned to Leningrad.

A few months later he (and many others of us) suffered a cruel blow: on March 5, 1966, thirteen years to the day after Stalin’s death, Akhmatova died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-six. She had not lived to see the official publication of Requiem or the full text of her masterpiece, Poem Without a Hero. But she knew that these works would not vanish without trace, since they had been bred into the bone of the Russian intellectual elite by then.

Akhmatova also knew that she was leaving behind a poetic movement she had created; the “magic choir,” as she had dubbed them, consisting of Brodsky, Bobyshev, Nayman, and Rein, were now part of the Petersburg literary mythos. (After Akhmatova’s death, the group got another name coined by Bobyshev—Akhmatova’s orphans.)

Brodsky recalled that when someone began a eulogy at her funeral with the words, “With Akhmatova’s departure has ended …,” everything inside him rejected those words. “Nothing had ended, nothing could or would end as long as we existed. Choir magical or not. Not because we remember her poetry or whether we write or not, but because she had become part of us, part of our souls, if you will.”^{701}

According to Akhmatova’s wishes, the funeral service was at the Nikolsky Cathedral, where a large crowd (perhaps as many as fifteen hundred people) gathered on the cold morning of March 10. They were mostly Leningrad’s young people; an old beggar woman at the church gate said, “They keep coming, more and more, and they’re all her students!” A memorial tribute was held for her at the Writers’ Union. Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov, a former inmate of the Stalin camps and at this time a famous historian, asked me to play something at the ceremony, adding hastily, “But I’d like it to be a Russian Orthodox composer.” We agreed on Prokofiev. But that evening, at a private wake where Gumilyov was not present, we played Bach, whose works Akhmatova loved.

Music played an important part in Akhmatova’s life. With me she talked about, among others, Schumann, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky, especially his Pathetique Symphony. Akhmatova also talked about Shostakovich and Stravinsky, whose books of conversations with Robert Craft she had read attentively, paying particular attention to the inaccuracies in the description of their mutual friends in old Petersburg.

Conversations with Akhmatova tended to take place on two planes, the everyday and the transcendent. Brodsky formulated it accurately: “Of course we talked about literature, of course we gossiped, drank vodka, listened to Mozart, and laughed at the government.”^{702} And yet because of the power of Akhmatova’s mind and her special place as witness to history and preserver of the Petersburg mythos, according to Brodsky, “there was always a field around her that permitted no access to scoundrels. And belonging to that field, to that circle, determined the character, behavior, and attitude toward life for many—almost all—of its inhabitants.”^{703}

After Akhmatova’s death the moral atmosphere of Leningrad changed substantially: the figure that had connected eras was gone, the person against whom people checked their behavior and whose judgments they awaited and feared. This depressed the already grim city even further. The Leningrad Party hacks of the period were more reactionary and vengeful than their Moscow counterparts. This condition manifested constantly, in important decisions and in trifles.

When the local authorities banned a Western film that was allowed in Moscow and someone spoke up about it, he might get the smug response, “Leningrad, comrades, does not need to repeat Moscow’s mistakes!” The director of the Leningrad Philharmonic was fired because the performance by a Western ensemble of one of Bach’s church cantatas accidentally fell on Russian Orthodox Easter, a holiday that the Party was trying to eradicate from the popular consciousness.

The Leningrad artist Gavriil Glikman recalled that once, during the regime of Vassily Tolstikov, one of the most unpredictable and stupid Leningrad bosses, Shostakovich said to him sadly, “I think that you should hide your works carefully. Dig a hole, line it with concrete, and put your canvases in there. Who knows, today Tolstikov is in a good mood, but tomorrow they might all be destroyed.” (It is said that when Tolstikov received a delegation of American congressmen and one asked about the city’s mortality figures, Tolstikov replied confidently, “There is no mortality in Leningrad.”)

Upon Brodsky’s return from exile, Party officials tried to influence him with the usual carrot and stick. They gave him the opportunity to publish a few poems. At the same time that people were being arrested for keeping typewritten copies of the trial transcript, they offered to publish a collection of his works. However, the authorities made it a condition for publication that Brodsky agree to collaborate with the secret police as an informer. In a confrontational meeting with the KGB officials, Brodsky said, echoing an old remark of Shklovsky’s, “This conversation is absurd, because we’re not talking as equals. Behind you is an enormous system, and behind me is half a room, my typewriter, and nothing else.”^{704} The planned collection of Brodsky’s poems was canceled.

This game continued until May 1972, when Brodsky was called in to the visa department of the local police and told to leave for the West immediately. When Brodsky asked, “And if I refuse?” the police colonel replied with an unambiguous threat, “Then, Brodsky, in the very near future you will have a very hot time.”^{705}

Trying to forestall the inevitable, Brodsky appealed directly to Leonid Brezhnev in a letter asking for repeal of his deportation. “It is bitter for me to leave Russia. I was born, grew up, and lived here, and I owe everything I am to it. Everything bad that was my lot is more than compensated by the good, and I never felt injured by the Homeland. I do not feel that way now. For though I cease being a citizen of the USSR, I do not cease being a Russian poet. I know that I will return; poets always return: in the flesh or on paper. I want to believe that it will be both.”^{706}

Brodsky did not receive a response. If Brezhnev read the poet’s letter, its tone must have seemed strange and unusual. “We are all condemned to the same thing: death. I, who am writing these lines, will die, and you, who are reading them, will die, too. Our work will be left, but even that will not last forever. That is why no one should interfere with another in doing his work.”^{707} Free of philosophical ruminations, Sartre’s letter in defense of Brodsky demonstrates a greater understanding of how a Soviet apparatchik’s brain functions. Brodsky was in Austria by June; he later came to the United States and eventually settled in New York City.

His elderly parents were left behind in Leningrad, and Brodsky never saw them again. The Soviet authorities would not allow them to visit their son in America. When they died, the authorities vengefully kept Brodsky from attending their funeral in Leningrad. He also left behind his four-year-old son, Andrei, whose mother was the artist Marianna Basmanova, to whom Brodsky had dedicated his 1983 collection New Stanzas to Augusta—eighty love poems written over the course of twenty years.

Brodsky’s expulsion deprived him of communication with his devoted readers in Leningrad, whose attention, understanding, and support had made his readings so memorable. He would gradually raise his guttural voice to something like singing and, shamanlike, bring his audience under his spell.

Soviet authorities counted on such separations to have a traumatic effect. Exile had ended the creative life of more than one Russian writer. For Brodsky the event was an unhealing wound. But his tormentors had underestimated his strength of character and cosmopolitan turn of mind. The acmeist ideology, “longing for world culture,” which Brodsky had learned through Akhmatova, also eased his transplantation. In addition, Brodsky was not long without Russian companionship in the West.

As the result of the Soviet policy to push potential troublemakers out of the country, a significant number of new émigrés from Leningrad had gathered in America (primarily in New York); many had been acquaintances or friends of Brodsky’s from his youth. Among them were the poets Lev Loseff, Dmitri Bobyshev, and Konstantin Kuzminsky, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, the cultural critics Boris Paramonov and Gennady Smakov, and the artists Mihail Chemiakin and Igor Tulipanov.

The Party’s ideological strategists were sure that all these creative personalities would—after some initial interest in them—soon sink to the bottom, never to return. They based this strategy on the fact that the old Russian émigrés had never managed to develop a successful political dialogue and even less so a union with liberal Western intellectuals. To make sure that it would not happen this time either, Soviet propagandists denounced the new émigrés, many of whom were Jewish, for fascistic leanings.

To the horde of unfinished-off fascist lackeys and criminals come petty little people reaching for their toady’s hunk of meat, “at long last” having reached the West, people who just recently had declared their loyalty to the ideals of pure art and creative freedom, who had bombastically bleated about their love for their Homeland…. And now works like “Pushkin and Brodsky” are being scribbled about these “newest” arrivals, works that elicit nothing but revulsion. Those who are capable of treachery become traitors. They made their choice and took the path of betrayal. They have been turned, not to put it too harshly, into ideological jesters.^{708}

The effect of this propaganda barrage was negligible, however. Soviet Communism had lost its attractiveness, and Western intellectuals no longer had anything against contacts with Soviet nonconformists. The authorities had to resort to crude pressure, which sometimes (more frequently in Europe than in the United Stated) had the desired effect. For instance, the Spoleto Festival withdrew its invitation to Brodsky (whom Soviet propaganda now called “sponger off Western secret services”) after the Soviet ambassador to Italy threatened to rescind the promised performances of the Perm Ballet.^{709}

Despite these minor setbacks, Brodsky’s intellect and erudition quickly made him a member of the American creative elite, so that he had every reason as early as 1976 to write in a poem addressed to his fellow Leningrad émigré and new friend, Mikhail Baryshnikov,

A noted American liberal intellectual once confessed to Brodsky that he had made Soviet nonconformity acceptable to her and to people like her. This acceptability extended to the latest incarnation of the Petersburg mythos, which Brodsky had brought with him from Leningrad.

Culturally, Brodsky became an heir to the three great representatives of the old Petersburg modernism in America—Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Brodsky was once called a “skeptical classicist,” and in that sense his aesthetics are close to that of this great troika. Like them, Brodsky constantly used classical models and mythogeny, transforming and breaking them, subjecting them to ironic reworking and philosophical commentary. Brodsky’s aesthetic, like theirs, was formed in great part by the Petersburg landscape, “so classicist that it becomes tantamount to a person’s mental state. It’s a kind of rhythm, completely conscious.”^{710}

While attesting ironically, “I am infected with normal classicism,” Brodsky subjected it to every possible test of modernism and existential Russian philosophy (his favorite thinkers are Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov). In this he was also following Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Brodsky is a constant experimenter, complicating the shape of his lines, extending or shortening their length, often using complicated or archaic linguistic constructions, introducing exotic rhymes and refined puns. Brodsky deploys these devices with the ease of his Russian predecessors.

On the ideological level, at least one parallel exists between Brodsky’s Petersburg mythos and Balanchine’s work. The imperial theme is important for both. In Balanchine the line is clearly drawn in several of his major ballets, primarily those to music of Tchaikovsky. Identifying Petersburg with the empire was typical of Russian poets as early as the eighteenth century. Two of them—Antioch Kantemir and Gavriil Derzhavin—were particularly dear to Brodsky, for whom the concept of empire became central. In that sense Brodsky, like Mandelstam, can be called a “state-thinking” Russian poet.

The metaphor of empire is attractive to Brodsky because, paradoxically, in the closed imperial hierarchy he imagines, the poet holds a central position along with the emperor. The poet is in opposition to the tyrant, but in the organized space of the empire, they inevitably clash only to be reunited by the imperial course of events.

In Anno Domini, written in 1968 and dedicated to Marianna Basmanova, Brodsky re-created a mythological Roman Empire and with two or three strokes makes the governor general, fallen into disfavor, somehow reminiscent of the Leningrad Party boss Tolstikov, who was teetering on the brink of removal over differences with the Kremlin. He immediately introduces an autobiographical theme that links the fates of the poet and the tyrant: “… him the Emperor does not want to see, nor me—my son and Cynthia.” According to Brodsky, “the idea of an artistic bohemia can be really achieved only in a centralized state, since it appears as a mirror reflection of that centralization.”^{711}

Peter the Great, according to Brodsky, played the role of the first Russian cosmopolite against the background of the “wild sets” of his new capital. One of Peter’s main achievements was his decision to found the capital by the sea—not for a military or economic purpose but for the metaphysical concept of freedom, which comes from the sea when “movement is not limited by the earth.” The literature created in Petersburg is marked by “the awareness that it is all being written from the edge of the earth. And if we can speak of some general concept, or tonality, or tuning fork of Petersburg culture, it would be alienation.”^{712}

These ideas and others about the Petersburg mythos were imparted to Western audiences in Brodsky’s lectures, poetry readings (he gave over sixty in his first eighteen months in America), and especially the series of essays dedicated to his native city (“Less Than One: A Guide to a Renamed City”; “In a Room and a Half”) and its writers: Dostoyevsky (“The Power of the Elements”), Mandelstam (“The Child of Civilization”), and Akhmatova (“The Keening Muse”). The essays were collected in Less Than One (1986), which won the National Book Critics Award for criticism.

Very soon quotations from Brodsky’s Petersburg essays began appearing in Western meditations on Leningrad next to quotations from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. The intellectual elite had apparently absorbed the latest vision of the Petersburg mythos as presented by Brodsky and the image of contemporary Leningrad tied to that vision. Typical is Hortense Calisher’s casual comparison of Leningrad to a “decoratively bleeding heart.”^{713} The Russian and foreign branches of Petersburg modernism finally came together in the minds of Western intellectuals; this was due to Brodsky, who became the link between Mandelstam and Akhmatova on one side and Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine on the other. In the person of Brodsky, the West recognized the contemporary vitality of the Petersburg tradition.

A significant sign of this recognition was the not-unexpected Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his poetry and essays. In his Nobel lecture Brodsky emphasized the successional nature of his work, its ties with the past; he spoke of that in many interviews. But Brodsky told me that the strongest emotional experience connected with professional recognition was the news, arriving while he was still in Leningrad, that the British publisher was preparing a collection of his poems with a preface by W. H. Auden. Everything else, he said, was in a sense an “anticlimax.” He added, “Of course, it’s a pity that my mother and father did not live to see the Nobel Prize.”^{714}

Despite the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev had been head of the Soviet Union for two years by then and perestroika and glasnost had become state slogans, Soviet officialdom greeted the award of the Nobel Prize to Brodsky with suspicion and hostility. A special secret memorandum prepared by the KGB for the Soviet leadership stated that the prize “is a provocative political act by reactionary circles in the West, intended to halt the growing sympathy of public opinion in the world for our country’s peace-loving foreign policy.”^{715}

Damage control went into effect. Nowadays, of course, Soviet ideologists could not act as crudely as they had done during the anti-Brodsky campaign of 1964, when the editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya gazeta announced in New York, “Brodsky is what we call scum, simply ordinary scum.” In 1987 a foreign ministry spokesman was more diplomatic, muttering that “the tastes of the Nobel Prize committee are somewhat strange sometimes.” For internal consumption, however, Moscow decided that the most effective policy would be silence.

The Leningrad intelligentsia received the news of Brodsky’s Nobel Prize with rejoicing. It was recognition and vindication of the “parasite” and “scum” Brodsky and of all of the Petersburg literature that had been stifled from Blok and Gumilyov to Mandelstam and Akhmatova. In Brodsky the international community was honoring the other Petersburg geniuses who had never been so honored.

The prize was a reason for spiritual self-rehabilitation. The intelligentsia had not been able to protect Brodsky from persecution by the authorities either in 1964 or in 1972, and ever since his expulsion to the West, it had felt like a group without a leader and under constant siege. Any excuse to persecute Leningrad intellectuals was seized upon, such as the continuing underground dissemination of Brodsky’s poems. In 1974 Vladimir Maramzin, a satiric writer like Zoshchenko, was arrested for compiling a samizdat collection of Brodsky’s works. Mikhail Kheifetz, who wrote the introduction to the collection, was sentenced to four years in the camps and two years in exile; the sentence read, “Kheifetz’s intentions to undermine and weaken Soviet power is proven by all his actions.”

Brodsky’s trial, with its symbolic overtones, had been enough to put the poet into the mythological ranks of the martyrs of the Petersburg pantheon: Blok-Gumilyov-Mandelstam-Akhmatova. His expulsion to the West completed the process, for in those years the émigrés vanished completely, both physically and spiritually. From those who remained, there could be no talk of return; even public mention of the exile’s name was forbidden.

For Leningrad poetry lovers Brodsky was dead, and the news that sometimes reached them from America was like news from “the other side.” His poetry was perceived as a contemporary classic. The situation was similar to the growth of Gumilyov’s fame after his execution by firing squad in 1921. A contemporary Petrograder commented then, “Whenever the state clashes with a poet, I feel so sorry for the poor state. What’s the worst the state can do to a poet? Kill him! But you can’t kill poetry, it is immortal, and the poor state suffers defeat every time.”^{716}

The youth of Leningrad, seeking new paths, came into contact with the Petersburg mythos through Brodsky’s poetry, whose thought, style, vocabulary, diction, and technique spoke to them. Brodsky is a philosophical poet; his work is founded on Kierkegaard, the existentialists, and early-twentieth-century Russian religious philosophers. This foundation, as well as Brodsky’s complex dialogue with the Judaeo-Christian ethic, attracted the sympathy and interest of new readers of underground literature in Leningrad and throughout the USSR. Many sought in his poems the key to the “secret garden” of the old Petersburg culture, vanished, some thought, forever.

For the elite, one unexpected impression created by the new poems and essays that reached them from the West through clandestine channels was their “westernization.” Even when he lived in Russia, Brodsky had exhibited a lively interest in the English metaphysical poets John Donne and George Herbert and in Robert Frost and W. H. Auden. He also translated Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In the West Brodsky immersed himself further in modern English-language poetry.

Every new Western-influenced work by Brodsky that reached Leningrad was consumed and debated. Readers were fascinated to learn that Brodsky wrote poetry in Russian with a pen and essays in English on a typewriter. The cosmopolitan streak had grown quite weak by then, the result of decades of enforced isolation from any suspicious outside influences. The former “window into Europe” was slammed shut so firmly that Leningraders began calling the once-sparkling capital “a great city with a regional fate.” Brodsky’s work helped the Leningrad intelligentsia pry open a crack in the window.

“The barbarians have taken over a country with a high civilization—that was the message of the life around us,” said a Leningrad writer, thus characterizing the era’s bleak outlook. He added a description of the “Brodsky effect” in Leningrad. “World culture, that was the name of the distant captured land to which our membership was returned to us by Brodsky’s poems. They came as news that not the whole country had been occupied and defiled, that a free island survived somewhere. And that gave birth to a happy guess: perhaps we were not barbarians either.”^{717}

One of the leading cultural figures of Leningrad in these years was the poet Alexander Kushner, specifically Petersburgian in many aspects of his talent. First published in his early twenties, Kushner—unlike Brodsky, four years his junior—released collection after collection of his works through Soviet publishing houses apparently without any obstacles. This surprised many people, since Kushner—Jewish, like Brodsky—did not make ideological compromises with the authorities and did not write odious official verse: his classically oriented works, focused on the fading beauty of his native city, celebrated the twilight world of the Leningrad intellectual.

A bespectacled, almost shy reader, Kushner was loved in Leningrad for the tenderness of his creations, their refinement, and the dignity with which he defended the right to an independent inner life where pompous state propaganda could not intrude.

Kushner recalled how Brodsky maintained that the poet must upset the reader, “grab him by the throat.” Such an attack on the reader would be inconceivable for Kushner, for he and Brodsky are poets of diametrically opposed temperaments. Brodsky noted with understanding that Kushner’s works were marked by “a restrained tone, an absence of hysteria, loud pronouncements, and overwrought gesticulations.” Others described the obvious incompatibility of the two poets as Sergei Dovlatov did. “The difference between Kushner and Brodsky is the difference between sadness and anguish, fear and horror. Sadness and fear are reactions to the times; anguish and horror, reactions to eternity.”

Kushner and Brodsky share the theme of inner freedom and its attendant imperial strain, as well as the “longing for world culture” about which their idol Mandelstam spoke. But fate kept Kushner within the limits of Leningrad, and it increasingly became the main subject of his works.

Kushner was making a ritual journey in his poems “from Leningrad to Petersburg,” taking with him a contingent of fellow travelers. For him this imaginary transport was becoming a narcotic. For Leningrad readers, too, Kushner’s poetry was an escape because in it they could meet the shades of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Dostoyevsky, Blok, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. Kushner, in a typically Petersburg manner, sowed his works with literary images, parallels, and allusions. In some poems, those in the know found a hidden portrait of exiled Brodsky.

While Kushner’s works may have been a kind of literary drug, real narcotics and alcohol were flooding intellectual Leningrad. This too was a long-standing Petersburg tradition. The city’s founder, Peter the Great, had been a tireless drinker. Alexander Menshikov, Petersburg’s first governor, was also a drunkard. The sprees and binges of the aristocracy became a cliché in Petersburg’s artistic circles as a sign of independence and challenge to the government.

A high official of Nicholas I’s regime recalled that “in close familiarity with all the innkeepers, whores, and wenches, Pushkin represented the filthiest debauchery.”^{718} For Pushkin and his contemporaries, immoderate imbibing among friends was tantamount to a symbolic sacrifice on the altar of liberty. The first major Petersburg artist to die of alcohol abuse was Mussorgsky. A contemporary bitterly recalled that “drunkenness was almost inevitable for a talented man of the period.”^{719}

The Russian reforms of the 1860s—the emancipation of the serfs and its attendant circumscribed liberalization—brought confusion and ferment to the minds of the Petersburg intelligentsia described by one observer thus:

The more sensitive, more responsive writers in society saw that the freedom they had imagined was not at all what they got in reality, that individuality was still enslaved, that arbitrary rule still reigned in Mother Russia along with the most shameless, most vile brute force. And these wise men, the salt of the Russian earth, all of them young and life-loving, were driven to drink from the goblet of green wine.^{720}

Almost one hundred years later in Soviet Leningrad, vodka (as well as some narcotics, like morphine, which could be gotten at hospitals) was still a potent symbol of confrontation with the authorities. The poet Lev Loseff admitted that “we drank fantastic amounts,” explaining, “I owe everything good in my life to vodka. Vodka was the catalyst of spiritual emancipation, opening doors into interesting cellars of the subconscious and at the same time teaching me not to be afraid—of people, or the authorities.”

Sergei Dovlatov commented on the Dostoyevskian world of the Leningrad cultural underground. “The years of miserable existence affected the psyche. The large amount of mental illness is evidence of that. And of course, the constant companion of the Russian writer reigned here—alcohol. We drank a lot, indiscriminately until we passed out and hallucinated.” Dovlatov, who had periodic bouts of wild drinking himself, described how the esoteric Leningrad poet Mikhail Eryomin stepped out of a window when drunk and became crippled for life after landing on the concrete courtyard below. The tempestuous Gleb Gorbovsky, who called himself a “never-drying jester” and admitted to drinking any liquid with alcohol in it (including varnish, cologne, and dandruff lotion), later lamented the destructive role of vodka in the lives of Leningrad nonconformists: “So many brilliant talents died, broken halfway on the road to self-discovery!”

Gorbovsky recalled the fate in the early 1960s of Rid Grachev, the avant-garde prose writer and student of French existentialism, “The last time I saw the man was in a nuthouse, where I was with the D.T.’s. I remember it clearly: down the corridor of the former women’s prison comes Rid Grachev toward me and, despite everything, smiling. Not at me—at the whole world.”

Andrei Bitov, the major writer in the Petersburg tradition of recent decades, considered Grachev a leader and one of his teachers in prose. Bitov started out as a poet in the late fifties in one of the many literary associations in Leningrad—at the Mining Institute where Bitov was a student. Bitov and his friends were joined by Kushner and Gorbovsky, who later maintained that this collective of young poets put “the accent of its creative efforts on fighting official literary policy, on participation in the spiritual renewal of society in the fog of the moral thaw of those times.”

Leningrad’s Party authorities watched those young poets closely, and when censors found poetry with “hidden anti-Soviet subtext” in their first collection, of which 300 copies had been printed, the books were publicly burned in the courtyard of the Mining Institute.

Despite such measures, the popularity of the budding poets grew, and in the best Petersburg traditions, they joined aesthetic battle among themselves but mostly in the underground. The Mining Institute poets were jealous of the “magic choir” around Akhmatova (Rein, Nayman, Bobyshev, and Brodsky), considering it too refined. Some of the Akhmatova circle, in turn, were not very kind to the young Leningrad “avant-gardists,” who were yet another grouping, which consisted of Vladimir Ufliand, Loseff, Eryomin, and Viktor Krivulin.

When in 1957 the Mining poets invited the leading older female poet to meet them, it was not Akhmatova they asked, but the bard of the siege of Leningrad, Olga Berggolts. To invite Akhmatova “was just as unimaginable as inviting Princess Trubetskaya from the Decembrist era to a communal flat.”^{721} But the young poets felt Berggolts was one of them: approachable, unaristocratic, someone who brought them “the truth about the desperate unsettledness of the hungry and disorganized world.”^{722}

They particularly loved Berggolts’s unpublished poems (which were widely known in samizdat) about her horrible years in the Great Terror, when the then-pregnant poet was arrested by the Leningrad secret police shortly after her former husband, Boris Kornilov (lyricist of Shostakovich’s song for the film Counterplan). Kornilov was shot, but they released Berggolts after cruelly kicking her in the belly over and over. She miscarried and lost the ability to bear children. After this suffering and the siege, Berggolts took to the bottle and was almost never again seen sober.

I came to Berggolts’s apartment in the 1960s to interview her. She opened the door herself; she was still in her fifties then. I had an idea of her condition, but I was still rather frightened to see a woman in a robe tossed over her naked body, her hair limp and sticky, her gaze unfocused. She could barely stand and hoarsely invited me into her room.

The conversation, which wandered at first, inevitably came to Kornilov’s death. She lit a cigarette and spoke about his suffering and her own with interruptions from a hacking cough. This Dostoyevskian image was far from Akhmatova’s majesty. But it was as the drunken madonna of Leningrad that Berggolts attracted the compassion of the Mining poets, including Bitov.

Bitov recalled the “strange friendships” with older Leningrad writers, who during the Khrushchev thaw

suddenly gained the childlike ability to talk about what interested them, and in us they found a grateful audience. Since they were richer, they could put a bottle of vodka and some food on the table and invite the young people. Kushner used to visit Lydia Ginzburg, the last surviving student of Tynyanov. Then he brought me to see Ginzburg. We did not know then that she wrote excellent prose. We were also invited by one of the Serapion brothers, Mikhail Slonimsky. We visited Professor Berkovsky, erudite and charming. They all enlightened us.^{723}

Leaving poetry for prose, Bitov was one of the first to present and analyze the character of the new “superfluous man” in Russian literature, the young Leningrad intellectual, disillusioned by official ideals and clumsily feeling his way, tripping at every step, toward a still inchoate system of moral values. (Bitov was particularly attentive to the description of tiny moral vacillations.)

Bitov’s hero, usually a first-person narrator, aimlessly wandered the streets of the city and, in the classical tradition, tried to stifle the depression gnawing at him in skid row dens frequented by local bums. “Here they smoke and here they drink vodka, here they live their ended lives. Here is hubbub and familiar faces. And apparently even the liquor authorities understand that it is useless to try to combat this. The red vending machine spits out my beloved Volzhskoe wine and will spit it out as often as I want it. I want it more times than I can remember.”

Even though Bitov’s work had, from the very beginning (he was first published in 1960, when he was in his early twenties), a marked autobiographical character, a distance was maintained between the narrator and the author, a distance that Bitov probably wanted to dissolve in the flow of lyric prose. He did it by developing his own form of the Russian travelogue genre, covering the entire Soviet Union in search of creative stimuli and impressions—in particular, joining geological expeditions in the Kola Peninsula, beyond Lake Baikal, in Central Asia, and in Karelia.

This was a fashion of the times, probably started by Brodsky. For Brodsky (unlike the professional mining engineer Bitov) such an expedition was a way of “breaking out” of the system and simultaneously achieving poetic self-assertion. Thanks to Brodsky, who boasted that he “filled geological expeditions with schizophrenics, alcoholics, and poets,” this not easy but romantic way of making money was taken up by many Leningrad writers, including Gorbovsky and Kuzminsky. It was an escape.

But for Bitov distant travels were an opportunity to describe sensibilities and problems in a more multifaceted way. In that sense, Bitov’s travel sketches (particularly popular were his descriptions of voyages to Armenia and Georgia), often marked by the more or less direct influences of Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, and ruminating on the common cultural and political dreams of the peoples who inhabited the country, were a direct continuation of the imperial theme of Russian literature, which went back to Pushkin. Even on the outer limits of the empire, Bitov remained an unmistakably Petersburgian type: restrained, observant, ironic, and uncertain about matters great and small.

Petersburg—both the imperial city of Pushkin and its Leningrad mutation—became one of the main characters of the experimental novel Pushkin House, planned by Bitov as a requiem for the Petersburg intelligentsia. He sat down to write it in 1964, at the very end of the Khrushchev period, sensing, as he called it, the despair of a dying era. (He later admitted that the despair could have also been the shock of Brodsky’s trial, which Bitov attended as a frightened spectator.)^{724}

The novel’s hero, the young philologist Lev Odoevtsev, worked at Pushkin House, the Institute of Russian Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, the oldest research institution of its kind in the country. It had been praised by Blok in a 1921 poem, a line from which is used as the novel’s epigraph. But the title Pushkin House (Bitov had considered A la Recherche du destin perdu and Hooligan’s Wake) carried symbolic significance: this was all of Petersburg, all of Russia, and most important, all of Russian literature.

The introduction of the classics of the Petersburg canon into the novel’s fabric is a constant factor: epigraphs, citations (open and hidden), borrowings, and allusions to Pushkin (particularly The Bronze Horseman), Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, and Zoshchenko collide, re-creating the inner world of a hereditary Leningrad intellectual of the late twentieth century.

It was important for Bitov that his hero be an aristocrat, a prince, but perhaps more important, that both his hero’s father and grandfather be professional philologists. This provided an opportunity to draw parallels between the history of the Odoevtsev family and the history of twentieth-century Russian literature as well as to decorate his otherwise static plot with a garland of essays about great Russian writers.

The lot of Pushkin House was a hard one, simultaneously typical and not; what Bitov called “a strange life.”^{725} The novel grew in fits and starts and was completed in the fall of 1970. Bitov recalled how after a sleepless night spent finishing the last few pages, he went out to bring the manuscript to a publishing house and on Nevsky Prospect ran into Brodsky (“who was no Nobel laureate then, but just a hoodlum like the rest of us,” Bitov added). Brodsky asked, “Where are you going?”

“I’ve just finished my novel; it’s called Pushkin House; I’m taking it to the publisher.”

“I got a postcard today from Nabokov about my Gorbunov and Gorchakov” said Brodsky.

“And what did Nabokov have to say?”

“That in Russian poetry one encounters such meter extremely rarely.”

Having boasted to each other in this way, Brodsky and Bitov parted. Bitov’s hopes, however, were not justified: the publishing house refused to print his novel.^{726} Thus began Pushkin House’s existence as a samizdat text.

Bitov persisted in getting at least parts of the novel past the censors. And by hook and by crook, after agreeing to major changes, he did manage to publish a series of excerpts under various titles, making up only a third of Pushkin House. It was a humiliating experience. The novel’s key moments—including the culminating scene of the hero’s Homeric drinking bout that precedes a duel with ancient (Pushkin) pistols—never reached the average reader, and the symbolic aspect of Pushkin House as a wake for the Russian intellectual remained hidden.

After waiting a few more years and concluding that further compromises were unacceptable, Bitov took a daring step: he allowed Pushkin House to be published (in Russian) in 1978 by Ardis, the American publishing house whose authors included Nabokov and Brodsky. Bitov later recalled his emotions when he finally held a copy of this version of his long-suffering novel: “astonishment, then fear, then hope—‘maybe I’ll get away with it.’”^{727}

Though not openly subjected to repressions, Pushkin House remained on the “proscribed list” of the Soviet censors until 1987, when, seventeen years after its completion, it was printed by the Moscow journal Novy mir and became a sensation of the glasnost era.

Over the years Pushkin House became larded with author’s comments, notations, and essays that belonged to the pen of either Bitov or his philologist hero. In this postmodernist structural openness Bitov’s work somewhat resembled Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, which curiously Bitov had not originally appreciated. After Akhmatova had given Bitov a typewritten variant of Poem Without a Hero to read, he returned it with a sheepish remark about “not being a master of compliments.” Akhmatova quickly sized up the situation: “Well, why aren’t you a master?” and slammed the door in his face. The dialogue had failed.^{728}

The structural manipulations of Pushkin House, which transformed the novel into an essentially open text, as well as the author’s descriptive experiments and use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness, place Bitov’s work among the landmark modernist prose works about Petersburg, including Bely’s Petersburg, Vaginov’s novels, Kharms’s Incidents, Zoshchenko’s stories, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.

Gorbovsky once compared the rhythm of Bitov’s prose with “the movement of a solitary swimmer among the waves of a commonplace emptiness when the swimmer seems about to drown, but again and again his head is seen above the surface; the loneliness of such swimmers is no tragedy, nothing sad about it, but almost a world-view or even a religion.” Bitov’s experience of “outsideness” had as one source Petersburg’s outside location and position vis-à-vis the rest of the country.

Bitov’s earliest memories involved the siege of Leningrad (“bombs, corpses all around—that wasn’t scary, what was scary was being hungry”). Like many others, he felt that he had been raised by the city itself. “We read Leningrad like a book.”^{729} A contemporary of Bitov’s, Viktor Sosnora, the author of tragic, surrealist poems and historical prose about Petersburg, confirmed that sense. “Petersburg’s scenery and sets create a special psychological climate that basically forms you as a writer.”^{730}

In Pushkin House Bitov described—and mourned—the defeat and destruction of the Leningrad intellectual by a hostile cultural machine. In some ways he thus summed up the fate of his generation. The dark convolutions of Leningrad life became the main theme for Bitov’s contemporaries and friends in the “radiant underground” (as Bitov dubbed their precarious existence), including the absurdist writer Viktor Golyavkin and the lyrical stylist Valery Popov, whose works combine naturalism and bizarrerie. As Alexander Volodin, whose melancholy autobiography Notes of an Unsober Man was begun in those years, commented, “Life, its most secret vices and illnesses cannot remain unreflected in art. Like twin stars, life and art are joined by an invisible thread. If an attempt is made to stretch that thread, sooner or later it will break, and art will strike a belated and thus particularly cruel blow.”

Leningrad’s older generation of writers—Yevgeny Shvarts, Nikolai Chukovsky, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Lydia Ginzburg—were also at that time working at their memoirs (“interstitial literature” was Ginzburg’s term) and circulating them in intellectual circles (through private readings, samizdat, and the rare publication). According to Bitov, “These were common efforts to create a Petersburg prose for new times: based on fact, but at the same time artistic, psychological, and strange. The city was giving birth to this. And what is important, all this was not bought up by the authorities, as it often happened in Moscow.”^{731}

Despite the iron curtain, the desire for cultural communication “Soviet,” and the Slavophile tendencies were persecuted. The Party’s misgivings were confirmed when during an official holiday parade in Leningrad, a few young Slavophiles were observed crying out “Down with Khrushchev’s clique!” instead of the approved slogans. The proletarian crowd, not listening closely, mechanically responded with “Hurrah!” Serious measures were taken against the young bohemians.^{732}

Khrushchev’s false thaw was quickly replaced with cruel frosts, which were then followed by the long hibernation of Leonid Brezhnev, famous for his inarticulate speech, bushy eyebrows, and fantastic corruption. In the stagnant atmosphere of those years, many Leningrad rebels—poets, artists, and philosophers—renewed the Russian tradition of “going to the people.” Rejecting intellectual professions, they went to work as loaders on the Leningrad docks, sailors on small freighters, janitors, and night watchmen. Some took jobs as stokers in the city boiler rooms (Dmitri Bobyshev called them “the copper youth”). Most were heavy drinkers; drugs were also popular. Clashes with the police and frequent arrests were commonplace. The poet Sosnora, who spent six years as a metalworker in a factory, wrote, “I’m off—so long!—on a beeline through the bars!”^{733}

Bravado and daring were present here but also a tragic sense of marginality. The poet Kuzminsky commented, “This is how we felt: if you’re making us into outcasts, then we’ll be even bigger hooligans. We became professional lumpen proletariat.”^{734} The colorful Kuzminsky, with his yellow leather pants and walking stick, could be seen loudly declaiming his futurist-influenced poems at the favorite bohemian gathering place—a café informally called Saigon. Kuzminsky (later, in American exile, he put together a large anthology of Russian nonconformist culture) thus explained the café’s name: “The café was yet another ‘hot spot’ on the planet. It was the home for all of Leningrad’s drug addicts, black marketeers, lumpens, poets, and prostitutes.”^{735}

This was already the second generation of postwar Leningrad bohemians; its pioneers had been a group of neorealist artists (and their bard, Roald Mandelstam—no relation to Osip Mandelstam—a samizdat poet who died young) headed by Alexander Arefyev, a charming man fond of wearing a striped sailor’s shirt, who had served two terms in the camps and was under constant police surveillance. Arefyev, whose energy awed those about him, had by the early 1950s led his fellow thinkers—Vladimir Shagin, Rikhard Vasmi, Valentin Gromov, and Sholom Shvarts (all of whom were under twenty-five)—onto the streets of Leningrad, which became their main subject.

They depicted the city’s underbelly: its Dostoyevskian courtyards and stairs, its brutal dance halls, seedy steam baths, and depressing factory suburbs. Shagin, for instance, did a sketch in the Stalinist years of a policeman dragging an arrested man. Nothing like that could ever appear at an official exhibit in those years. Moreover, even to sketch such a scene was dangerous, and the artists in Arefyev’s group were held by the police more than once.

The Leningrad neorealists were early Russian beatniks and led an ascetic life (their rooms held only books and records) with a tendency to psychedelic experimentation. Arefyev and Shagin slept in cemetery crypts and lived on the deposits of bottles and cans that they collected. They did not even try to reach an audience and exhibited publicly for the first time at the December 1974 exhibit of Leningrad’s unofficial art at the culture club of the Kirov Plant.

The authorities reluctantly agreed to this exhibit under pressure from the growing international publicity around Russian nonconformist artists and in the hope of compromising the underground once and for all. Announcing that they would not allow paintings that were “anti-Soviet, pornographic, or religious,” the overseers ended up permitting the exhibition of close to two hundred works by fifty-two painters, but only for four days.

Given the total absence of advertising, no one expected that, under the vigilant eyes of police units, long lines would form before dawn, lines of people eager to learn about nonconformist art in Leningrad. They were hustled into the building in groups and given only fifteen minutes to see the entire exhibit. And yet they had time to see the canvas of Igor Sinyavin, where they were invited to sign their name with a marker; the conceptual presentation—an iron nail in a board—by Yevgeny Rukhin, who died in a suspicious fire a few years later; and the canvas by Vadim Rokhlin, in the middle of which was a mirror framed by four aggressive male figures. (Another nonfigurative painter of the period, Yevgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, refused to exhibit his works out of sheer contrariness.)^{736}

Those four days in December were important in Leningrad’s modern cultural history because they were the first time that the Leningrad underground surfaced, even briefly, and attracted a sympathetic audience. The authorities were furious. One prominent cultural bureaucrat attacked Arefyev and Shagin at the exhibit, shouting, “We don’t need artists like this!”

The stamina and self-dramatizing behavior of the Leningrad bohemia looked back to the futurists and Bakhtin’s “carnival” and forward to the early 1980s appearance of a group called Mitki. The name was the nickname of one of its founders, the artist Dmitri Shagin (son of the neorealist Vladimir Shagin and therefore a second-generation bohemian). Mitki embodied a stylized, local variant of Western hippie culture with a strong Russian accent. The younger Shagin was joined by the artists Vladimir Shinkarev and Alexander Florensky and his wife, Olga, who revived the craft of “lubok,” folk pictures with clever captions.

The main artistic achievement of the group was its ritualized lifestyle, described by its “ideologist” Shinkarev in a witty manual called Mitki, which was widely circulated in samizdat. According to Shinkarev, Mitki dressed like outcasts: striped sailor shirts (the Soviet bohemian uniform inherited from the Leningrad neorealists), old quilted jackets, Russian felt boots, and mangy fur hats with earflaps. Mitki drank from morning till night, but only the cheapest vodka and rotgut wine, and snacked on pasteurized cheese. When the members drank with outsiders, they used three main strategies for dividing up the alcohol: “share equally” meant each got the same amount; “share like brothers” meant Mitki got the bigger portion; and “share like Christians” meant Mitki got it all.

But even when drunk, Mitki remained friendly and gentle because aggressiveness was organically alien to them, as was the desire to have a career. Mitki communicated primarily through quotations from popular television shows. Still, Shinkarev’s manual quoted Henry David Thoreau and contained references to Brueghel the Elder and to Mozart, whom the author actually considered predecessors of Mitki, adding that “Mozart was Russian.”

Mitki found a like-minded person in the poet and artist Oleg Grigoryev, who composed short, grim poems in the style of the early Leningrad dadaist Oberiuts:

Grigoryev’s absurdist and irreverent humor was unacceptable for official publications, and so his poems were circulated primarily in samizdat. But some things were published (just like the Oberiuts in the 1920s and early 1930s) in children’s books, attracting attention thereby and recalling the heyday of children’s literature. Living in slum rooms, which he decorated with masks of his own making, Grigoryev led the typically desperate life of a Leningrad bohemian. Constant confrontations with the authorities, arrests, time in the camps, and heavy bouts of drinking eventually led to the poet’s early death in 1992.

“The seventies…. Dead, inert times. Fatal for art’s breathing.” The poet Gorbovsky thus described the Leningrad situation in the Brezhnev era. There was little left to breathe in Leningrad—even literally, thanks to unchecked industrial pollution in the city. Freshly fallen snow turned black overnight. The chemical-laden Neva was covered with toxic green sludge.

The stifling atmosphere hastened the disintegration of talent and led to an increase in suicide and early death among the young, including the promising poet Leonid Aronson. Some potential intellectual leaders emigrated to the West, and many of the remaining were forced to make humiliating compromises with officials. Censorship seemed all-powerful.

A terrible blow fell on the budding Soviet feminist movement, which for a while had been centered in Leningrad. Women had long been cultural leaders in the city: Akhmatova, Yudina, Ermolaeva, Berggolts, Ustvolskaya, Ginzburg, and the translator Tatyana Gnedich. In the 1960s a group of original women poets appeared—Elena Kumpan, Nina Koroleva, Lydia Gladkaya, and a bit later, Elena Shvarts. Maya Danini and Inga Petkevich wrote interesting prose. So the late-1970s appearance in Leningrad of the first Russian samizdat feminist magazines, Woman and Russia and Maria, was natural.

“Our magazine caused such a sensation, such a furor, which even I had not expected,” recalled one of the editors of Woman and Russia, Tatyana Mamonova. “People passed around our little volume, it was retyped over and over.” The secret police reacted with searches, interrogations, and harassment. Mamonova was expelled to the West, as were other Leningrad feminists—Tatyana Goricheva, Natalya Malakhovskaya, and Yulia Voznesenskaya.

The writer Alexander Zhitinsky compared the Leningrad authorities with a boa constrictor. “We froze, like rabbits, in the stare of the state’s unsleeping eye.”^{737} Cultural Leningrad was demoralized. At that moment there appeared a new and unprecedented force—Russian rock and roll; as Zhitinsky recalled, “Rock and roll burst into our country at the most terrible time, when freedom seemed unnecessary, and we invented the stagnation period for ourselves, so we could sit quietly.”^{738}

The rock movement in Leningrad, which started in the mid-sixties, owed its birth to the influence of the Beatles, who created a revolution in the consciousness of young Russian nonconformists. The popular Leningrad rocker Mikhail (“Mike”) Naumenko sang about this later in his hit, “Right to Rock”:

Records by the Beatles, which quickly reached Leningrad through tourists and seamen, excited musically receptive young people. The Beatles craze engulfed even Brodsky, who translated “Yellow Submarine” into Russian in the 1960s.

The pioneering Leningrad rockers, who had more or less mastered their homemade instruments (the necks of their guitars were sometimes sawed out of the headboards of their parents’ beds) and slavishly imitated Western bands, performed primarily in schools, dormitories, and cafés. They did not become a strong social presence until the early 1970s, when they began composing original music on topical Russian texts. The trailblazer was the band Sankt-Peterburg, led by Vladimir Rekshan, the self-styled “first real star of rock music in Russia.” Official propagandists were offended by the group’s name and immediately charged the band with monarchist leanings.

Rekshan described the expansion of the Leningrad rock scene: “Rock groups multiplied like rabbits, and every Saturday there were concerts in dozens of places. Daring fans exhibited the ingenuity of urban guerrillas in getting into concerts. The most successful got in through women’s toilets. Others climbed up rainspouts. Sometimes they took apart the roof and came in through the attic.”^{739}

Emboldened by their young audiences, Leningrad rock bands became more defiant in their songs, reflecting “the taste of those years—astringent, with a touch of rebellion, through which the new generation in the big cities, lost in the thickets, tried to find themselves.”^{740} The rockers sang about the alienation of young people from Soviet society, which they saw as hypocritical and hostile, about their distrust of the official system of values, and their vague search for alternative paths.

For Leningrad’s apparatchiks all this was totally unacceptable. The authorities, trying to isolate the rockers from their audience, organized a hostile campaign, both backstage and in the media, whose main theme was sarcastically summarized in a song by Konstantin Kinchev, a devotee of the poetry of Gumilyov and Brodsky.

Despite the official attacks (or thanks to them) the influence of rock on Leningrad’s youth spread like wildfire. This phenomenon, which eluded state control almost completely, was largely due to magnitizdat, homemade tapes circulated like manuscripts in samizdat. Leningrad became the center of Russian magnitizdat, perhaps because of the city’s desire to register its achievements promptly and reflect upon them intensely.

The roar of local rock bands deafened almost every courtyard in Leningrad, scaring away the ghosts of Dostoyevsky’s Petersburg novels. What the rocker Yuri Shevchuk had promised had come to pass: “The star of Russian rock will rise over our Northern Palmyra!”

One of the brightest stars was Boris Grebenshikov. When the tall, slim Grebenshikov, who resembled David Bowie, ran out on stage in his white suit, the audience would roar with delight.

When he was eleven, Grebenshikov first heard the Beatles and “understood the point of living.” He organized his rock band Aquarium in the early 1970s, becoming its guitarist, lead vocal, poet, composer, and driving force. Grebenshikov’s lyrics show the influence of the acmeist poets of the start of the century (Innokenty Annensky, Gumilyov). The official cultural ideologists noted the influence quickly, and their reaction to Aquarium’s early performances was, “This is some sort of symbolism! Akhmatovism!”

This odd connection between the rocker Grebenshikov and the classical Petersburg tradition was further expressed in his preference for sophisticated melodies arranged in the style of folk rock; he also made his performances seem like absurdist rituals. In his Bob Dylanlike tenor Grebenshikov would sing,

They used to say in Leningrad that Aquarium wasn’t simply a rock band but a way of life. Members of the group and fans close to them lived as a family, sharing Grebenshikov’s literary, philosophical and religious interests, including American sci-fi, the writings of Lao Tzu, and Zen Buddhism. A meeting with Mitki, important for both groups, increased the nationalist tendencies in Aquarium’s music and led to a democratization of the band’s image.

In the late 1980s Grebenshikov’s popularity in Leningrad had reached enormous proportions and became the subject of a dadaesque prose by Shinkarev, one of the Mitki, who were also gaining a large following in the city.

Oh, yes, dear brothers, there’s nobody poorer than Boris Grebenshikov.

He’s even afraid to go outside—can you imagine!

The family says: go get some milk and take out the garbage. Just try to get past the fans with the garbage pail! Nobody’s going to offer, “Boris, I love your music, so let me take out your garbage.” No way! “Here,” they say, “here’s a glass, have a drink with me, and I’ll tell everybody that I got high with Grebenshikov.”

But Grebenshikov’s face is red enough to light a butt with already from all that expensive cognac he’s had, his hands shake so hard he can’t hold a guitar. He can’t stand the sight of those glasses, it makes him puke.

So he comes to the door with the garbage and listens: it’s quiet. He peeks out: nobody there.

Grebenshikov quick slips out the door, but as soon as he steps on the landing, someone grabs him from behind and forces his head back. The garbage pail spills, he falls, his feet in the slops, and before he can call for help, they force his teeth open with a knife and pour in a glass of moonshine.

Boris lies there gasping, half-blind, battered—while his fans grin and go down the stairs satisfied: they had a drink with Grebenshikov!

Mocking the idol-worshiping young and the cult of the “mysterious Slavic soul,” this narrative reflected, nevertheless, the dark side of Leningrad rock, with its major presence of alcohol and drugs. Rekshan posed a rhetorical question, “And who can explain why it’s easier to get drugs in Leningrad than toilet paper?”^{741} He recalled how one of his musician friends, high on drugs, decided to commit suicide: he fastened two scalpels point up on a table and then dropped his face onto them, trying to get them into his eyes. He lost one eye and went completely mad. Life on the edge led to early death for some stars of Leningrad’s rock movement: “Mike” Naumenko, Viktor Tsoy, and Alexander Bashlachev.

Grebenshikov liked to say, “Rock is subversive by definition. If it’s not subversive, it’s not rock.” The energy and ferocity of Leningrad rock shook up the stagnant city that Grebenshikov described in song:

The appeal of rock as an unsanctioned cultural movement was a remarkable sign of coming ideological and political changes in the Soviet Union. The totalitarian system created by Lenin and Stalin, which had seemed eternal to many, was beginning to crack under the pressure of external and internal factors. Mikhail Gorbachev—the new Party leader who came to power in 1985, younger and more pragmatic and energetic than his ossified Politburo colleagues—tried to cope with the crisis, which had suddenly become apparent to all, through a series of political and economic measures. He introduced words that soon became current even in the West—perestroika (which referred to structural changes in the centralized administration of the country) and glasnost (which referred to substantial liberalization, at least in Soviet terms, in culture and mass media).

One of the last Leningrad Party bosses of the Brezhnev “stagnation period” (1964-1982) was the dogmatic Grigory Romanov, who spent thirteen years in his post. His surname led to many sarcastic parallels with the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled Russia for over three hundred years (it was founded in 1613 by Mikhail Romanov, Peter the Great’s grandfather, and ended only with the revolution of 1917). One joke was quite popular in Leningrad. A workman enters a grocery store with absolutely empty shelves, loses his patience, and starts cursing Romanov. He is immediately arrested and asked why he was attacking comrade Romanov. “Because,” the workman answered, “the Romanovs were in charge of Russia for three hundred years and they couldn’t store up enough food to last for even seventy.”

This joke was taken quite seriously by Anatoly Sobchak in his sweeping reinterpretation of the history of Soviet rule. (Sobchak, an economic law professor and prominent politician in the perestroika and glasnost years, was elected Leningrad city council chairman in 1990 and later mayor.)

For seven decades we lived by exploiting what had been amassed by the people and nature herself, and we wanted to enter the Communist future through the momentum of former development. We consistently depleted the country’s human, social, natural, and moral resources. Without exception the “successes” of the Communist doctrine—from the victory over Hitler to space flights, from ballet to literature—were all taken out of the pocket of Russian history.^{742}

This tirade reflected the spirit that swept through Soviet society when the Communists, unable to control reforms that had taken on a momentum of their own, began to lose their many monopolies, not least the monopoly on information. Political, economic, and cultural information broke through the dam, washing away old dogmas that had so recently seemed immutable.

This ideological liberation brought decisive changes in the way of life of the new Petersburg mythos. In the years of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, it had existed as something semiforbidden. The intellectual elite nurtured it but quietly, among themselves. The mythos could not be publicly formulated or debated, and its greatest works were either unpublished, like Akhmatova’s Requiem, or appeared only with major cuts by the censors, like her Poem Without a Hero (whose hero was Petersburg, of course).

In order to bring the poems of Akhmatova or Mandelstam to a wider audience, some courageous television journalists in Leningrad tried various subterfuges; for instance, they used banned verses in voice-overs to nature footage without naming the authors. The ruse worked because ignorant Party censors never expected to hear banned poets on television. Émigré literature remained out of bounds in Leningrad; the works of old émigrés, like Zinaida Hippius, Merezhkovsky, Zamyatin, and Nabokov, and of new ones, like Brodsky, still circulated only in the underground.

All this started to change under Gorbachev. “The process was under way,” as Gorbachev liked to say, beginning with the rehabilitation of the poet Gumilyov. His works had not been printed in the Soviet Union in over sixty years; even in the early 1950s charges of having a picture of the “counterrevolutionary” author could lead to ten years’ exile in Siberia. But Gumilyov’s underground fame and reputation remained high all those years thanks to manuscript copies of his poems that circulated from hand to hand.

Gumilyov’s hundredth birthday fell in 1986, and though Soviet journals and newspapers published his poetry (thanks, it is said, to the support of Raisa Gorbachev, a fan) and articles about him that gave him his due as a poet, they mentioned his execution very gingerly. It was only in 1990 that the materials on the “Gumilyov affair” (from the archives of the secret police) were published. It became clear that Akhmatova had been right in insisting that the charges against Gumilyov of “active counterrevolutionary activity” were largely fabricated.

Gumilyov had remained, throughout the decades of Soviet rule, a hero and martyr of the underground Petersburg mythos; therefore, his rehabilitation by the state signaled changes in the status of the mythos. At the same time, the authorities began reviewing the cases of a large number of victims of the Stalinist political terror, whose reputations had remained in a social limbo ever since the Khrushchev thaw. This meant the recognition of the innocence of such political groups as the “Leningrad opposition,” led by Grigory Zinoviev; of those arrested and exiled after Kirov’s murder; and of the victims of the postwar “Leningrad affair.”

It became possible to speak openly of Mandelstam’s death in the Stalinist camps, of the extermination of the Leningrad dadaists from the Oberiu group, and Zoshchenko’s death in 1958, hounded and half mad, writing in his last letter to Chukovsky, “A writer with a frightened soul has lost his qualifications.”

Published in the spring of 1987, almost half a century after its creation, Akhmatova’s Requiem, that poetic memorial for all the dead of the Great Terror, and one of the most important documents for the new Petersburg mythos and its image of the city as martyr, was at last freely available to the ordinary reader.

Every such step met fierce opposition from Party hard-liners. A battle ensued over the reputation of Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s ideologue. As recently as 1986 Soviet newspapers had referred to him in glowing terms. “In the city of Lenin, the cradle of socialist revolution, he unfolded his marvelous abilities and special gifts as a political figure. His name is treasured in the national memory.” But by 1988 it was possible to write, “There are many thousands of streets, plants, factories, ships, universities, kolkhozes, schools, even kindergartens and pioneer palaces (in Leningrad as well) named for Zhdanov. Stalin’s name is almost gone, but Zhdanov’s name is all over the place. This is a record of sorts. But a record of what? A record of the cynicism of those who consciously do not wish to stop glorifying that name?”^{743}

When the Party orthodox saw that further defense of Zhdanov’s heritage was unfeasible, they reluctantly gave it up. The infamous Zhdanov resolution of the Central Committee, directed against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, was rescinded in 1988, forty-two years after it was passed. Zhdanovism in culture, with its demagogic labels and accusations of formalism, cosmopolitanism, and kowtowing to the West, was officially proclaimed a mistake; and Zhdanov Leningrad State University (founded in the Pushkin era) became simply Leningrad State University.

Zhdanov’s role as leader of the defense of Leningrad was also re-evaluated. Sobchak made public the information that, as multitudes starved, peaches were flown in to Zhdanov in the winter, while anyone who “spread rumors” about Leningrad’s hunger was in danger of the camps and almost certain death.^{744} The truth about the blockade, with all its attendant horror and suffering, began to emerge. This new understanding hastened the legitimization of the image of Leningrad as martyr city.

Attention was again focused on the Silver Age, that cultural flowering at the beginning of the twentieth century, which Zhdanov in his report of 1946 had called, misquoting Gorky, “the most shameful and most mediocre decade in the history of the Russian intelligentsia.” Zhdanov’s label was for years the mandatory one. It was memorized and quoted in school examinations and chewed over in innumerable articles and books. A welcome contrast was the mass reprinting in the mid-eighties of the works of the Russian symbolists, acmeists, and futurists to the great delight of the reading public. A typical reaction was, “The Silver Age is turning out to be, speaking in the language of analogy, the key to the treasure box of the twentieth century.”^{745}

The hundredth birthdays of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, celebrated with great solemnity in 1989 and 1991, respectively, aided the consolidation of their reputations as national classics. In 1990 a foreign tourist at a Leningrad police station on business was astonished to see on a young policewoman’s office wall not the obligatory pictures of Lenin and Gorbachev but a large poster with Nathan Altman’s 1914 portrait of Akhmatova. Poem Without a Hero was recognized as a monument to the Silver Age and as the philosophical encapsulation of the fate of the Petersburg legend in the twentieth century. A special room in the Akhmatova Museum, opened in Leningrad in 1989, was devoted to Poem Without a Hero; another held the materials relating to Requiem.

In the perception of the general public, the Petersburg text expanded swiftly. The movies of Lenfilm’s leading directors—Ilya Averbakh, Alexei German, and Alexander Sokurov—which had been banned or shelved during the era of stagnation, received wide distribution and high praise. The works of the Oberiu group—Kharms, Oleinikov, and Alexander Vvedensky—previously available only in samizdat, were now properly published. The surrealistic novels of Vaginov and the early satiric stories of Zoshchenko were reprinted. And Nabokov, who had been strictly forbidden even recently (his name could not be mentioned in print)—“Nabokov descended on us like an avalanche,” a Soviet critic announced. “Nabokov’s gigantic heritage, the whole baker’s dozen of his novels, and everything around it—has fallen on us all at once. This means that everything that we could have handled naturally over fifty years of regular and timely reading is now coming at us like a flow, a flood.”^{746}

The effect of this belated and dramatic meeting with Nabokov on the Petersburg mythos was profound. Of the three émigré giants the first to reappear was Stravinsky; soon after him came Balanchine. But their impact, while extraordinary, was short-lived. Stravinsky was played and praised cautiously. Balanchine’s ballets appeared in the Kirov’s repertoire only in 1989, thanks to its chief choreographer, Oleg Vinogradov.

But intellectual Russia has always been and remains logocentric. It was therefore only the “discovery” of Nabokov that led to broad discussion of the role of the émigré culture in shaping the new Petersburg mythos and its enormous significance in the making of Petersburg modernism.

The assimilation by the Petersburg mythos of the achievements of modernism was particularly problematic for the general reader. The eccentric dadaist texts were accepted with much less resistance (but perhaps more superficially). A lively polemic developed around Nabokov’s work: much in it seemed self-consciously “aesthetic” and condescending. Responding to accusations against Nabokov, Andrei Bitov noted, “It is not clear what there is more of—pride and snobbery or shyness and modesty.” Bitov, whose Nabokovian novel Pushkin House had reached a wide audience by then, continued, “I do not believe that Nabokov taught English to the Russian language, but to some degree he managed to teach Russian to the English language, and that is no small feat. Perhaps this will be said someday of Brodsky, too, who for now continues teaching English to the Russian language.”^{747}

The name of Brodsky, as the heir to the American line of Petersburg modernism, is often mentioned nowadays alongside Nabokov’s. The first Soviet edition of Brodsky’s poetry appeared in 1990 and quickly sold out its printing of two hundred thousand copies. It was followed by many other printings. But Brodsky’s work elicited hostile reviews as well: the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda maintained that one poem was “imbued with the most inappropriate irony, which extends literally to everything” and another was just “a flood of rhymed banalities, tackiness, and cynicism.”^{748}

Some sympathetic readers were surprised at the absence of overt homesickness, which even sophisticated Russians expect from émigré literature. This unfamiliar discretion was characteristic of other former Leningrad writers who had moved to the West. Sergei Dovlatov, who died in New York in 1990, ten days before his fortyninth birthday, wrote graceful, ironic stories, which emphasized detail, narrative rhythm, and the significance of each word. He never used two words starting with the same letter in a sentence. The reader, as a rule, does not notice this limitation: Dovlatov’s prose flows easily and naturally as it limns the tragicomic adventures of Leningraders at home and abroad.

The mythos underwent a deconstruction in the refined, postmodernistic poetry of the New Hampshire hermit Lev Loseff. Though Brodsky was speaking of Dovlatov when he said that he was “remarkable, first of all, in his rejection of the tragic tradition (which is just a grandiose name for inertia) of Russian literature,” his words are just as true of the skeptical, philosophical poems of Loseff. The polar opposite, stylistically and emotionally, of the émigré literature about Petersburg is the religious poetry of Dmitri Bobyshev, dedicated to the blessed Xenia of Petersburg. Canonized by the Russian Synodal Church in the United States, Xenia was an eighteenth-century holy fool whom the devout Bobyshev hailed as a heavenly protector of the city.

The introduction of émigré literature into Leningrad’s cultural realm was not a painless process. Both sides felt a certain ambivalence, which was expressed on the émigré side by former Leningrader Vladimir Maramzin, who lived in Paris, in an angry and sarcastic open letter to Soviet publishers. “I am disgusted by memories of your state, which dragged me through humiliations and knocked any desire to write out of me for a long time. I don’t want to play prodigal son, happily returned to the wide open arms of the all-forgiving executioner. I do not want to be published in your country. I do not want to visit you.”^{749}

But other Leningrad émigrés accepted with delight the opportunity to be published, to perform, or to exhibit in the homeland. Natalya Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev, whose names had been dropped from the Soviet ballet encyclopedia, returned to dance at the Kirov Theater (whose name was soon to revert to Maryinsky). A major civic event was the June 7, 1991, unveiling—at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, opposite the cathedral where the Romanov tsars were buried—of a monument to Peter the Great by the artist and sculptor Mihail Chemiakin, who lives in the United States.

A huge crowd had gathered, despite the rain, for the solemn ceremony. Musicians in bright red uniforms and white wigs played military marches of Peter’s time. Exactly at noon the white covering slid slowly from the statue, and the audience saw the life-size figure of the emperor seated in an armchair.

Chemiakin’s model was the famous wax figure of Peter kept in the Hermitage Museum, which was made right after the emperor’s death by the Italian Carlo Rastrelli, father of the great Petersburg architect. The postmodern, collage-like aspect of Chemiakin’s sculpture is underlined by the fact that the head is a cast of a life mask of Peter made by Rastrelli in 1719.

We know that the mask, also in the Hermitage collection, was studied closely by Falconet when he created the Bronze Horseman. But the head of the Bronze Horseman, made by Falconet’s student Callot, was idealized in keeping with the requirements of the times, framed by beautiful curls and the traditional laurel wreath. In 1815 the poet Alexei Merzlyakov described the general impression of the monument to Peter the Great, unveiled in 1782:

In contrast, Chemiakin’s Peter, with his wigless skull, puffy face, and huge hands, was emphatically unglamorous and static. But there was a mystery about him that brought to mind the sphinxes unearthed in 1820 at the site of Thebes, the ancient capital of Egypt, and brought to Petersburg twelve years later, where they stand in front of the Academy of Arts.

The solemnity of Chemiakin’s work also suggested parallels with the Bronze Horseman and prompted discussion among the observers, some of whom saw the new sculpture as a polemic, conscious or not, with Falconet’s equestrian monument. Some were outraged at the naturalism or found Chemiakin’s interpretation insulting. Debate did not stop even after the sun went down, when the figure of the city’s founder took on an eerie presence. One curiosity of the continuing dispute was the daily appearance of fresh flowers at the pedestal of the new statue. The greatest and most mysterious of Russian tsars remained at the center of the fate of his city.

The controversy surrounding Chemiakin’s work was part of a much larger reevaluation. Seemingly permanent evaluations and conclusions—from development of the Petersburg avant-garde to the number of victims of the siege—were questioned and revised. Blacklisted names were reestablished as great classics. What could only be whispered became, overnight, the rage of the next day. Overblown reputations, formerly supported by the propaganda of the state, burst suddenly.

Countless textbooks, encyclopedias, and reference books became useless. New information came in an avalanche. The Petersburg mythos, finally vindicated after many decades of persecution, surfaced like the city in Pushkin’s description:

The ground beneath the feet of the hard-liners was shaking. The Bronze Horseman of the Petersburg mythos was threatening to knock them down and trample them.

The culmination of these changes was the return of the city’s original name: on October 1, 1991, Leningrad was officially renamed Sankt-Peterburg. But this change had been preceded by tense and unsettling events.

There had been talk of returning to the traditional name since the early years of glasnost. The idea, which had first seemed utopian, was gathering popularity. It was being discussed—with growing boldness—at work, in lines, and even at meetings. Then, in 1991, through the efforts of reform-minded deputies in the Leningrad city council, it was brought to a citywide referendum, and the campaign turned into a political and cultural war.

The poet Alexander Kushner wrote expectantly, “I had the fortune to be born in Leningrad and I will die, God willing, in Petersburg.” His opponents were much more resolute. A member of the hastily organized Committee for the Defense of Leningrad announced, “The idea of renaming Leningrad is political speculation serving evil goals and promoting an increase in societal confrontation. Many people recall that the German name ‘St. Petersburg’ was on the maps of Hitler’s commanders and that they intended to rename Leningrad right after they took it. What the fascists did not manage to do, the deputies of the Leningrad city council want to achieve.”^{750}

Reformers were accused not only of fascism and disrespect for the memory of the victims of the siege but also of monarchism. Typical was a letter published in the pro-Communist Leningrad newspaper Sovest’ (Conscience), “Why rename our city? So that dead tsarism can breathe on us?” The Communist Party in a special appeal called on people “not to allow mockery of the name of glorious Leningrad, a hero city, a warrior city, and a laborer.” A leading Communist, Yegor Ligachev, said that the Party considered a return to the traditional name “unwise.” “Leningrad earned its name with its blood.”^{751} Gorbachev’s official position was the same.

But the opponents of the Communists were growing stronger. A conservative newspaper complained, “Strange things are happening here in Leningrad. Almost the entire press of the city has become ‘democratic’ It’s become good manners to predict civil war, to propagandize a total renaming of all the streets, and to publish caricatures of Lenin.”^{752} A popular Leningrad television program regularly featured a picture of Lenin with the word “Enough!” written in bold letters across it. Liberals organized a noisy demonstration in front of the Maryinsky Theater, shouting, “Lenin’s name is a shame for a great city!”

These efforts were supported by the Russian Orthodox Church. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who also considered a change necessary, nevertheless spoke out against using St. Petersburg, which was foreign, and suggested a Russified rendering: SvyatoPetrograd. This was the first time a change in a city’s name had become the subject of such an all-encompassing discussion. The passions aroused showed that people saw an apparently symbolic act as one that was profoundly important. “They are invoking the most mysterious part of Russian history,” an observer noted.^{753}

It seemed that many residents of the city had instinctively grasped the significance of this act. Names play a central part in every mythos. But in the Petersburg mythos the part was particularly obvious. The first time it changed its name, the city was subjected to horrible trials. A second change produced the same result.

The power in the name “Petersburg” was evidenced by the fact that, despite everything, everyone stubbornly called the city Piter. As Brodsky put it, “The reason for our loyalty to the word ‘Petersburg’ was not our anti-Sovietism but the nonsemantic content of the name. Even from the point of view of pure euphonics, the word, especially in its final ‘g,’ has a certain solidity, like a rock, for the Russian ear.”^{754} Faith in the power of a name, of a word per se, is typical of Russian intellectuals. In returning an old name to a great place, they passionately hoped to see a rebirth of its old grandeur.

The result of all this wrangling and soul-searching was a narrow victory at the referendum, held in June 1991, for the proponents of the name change. Mayor Sobchak reacted reasonably: “I think that the city’s residents made the right choice, and my position was the same. A city, like a person, must bear the name given it at birth, like it or not. By the way, Peter the Great had named our city in the Dutch manner, not the German.”

A delighted Brodsky gave his unconditional support. “After all, we are talking about a continuity in culture. Returning the city’s previous name is a means of at least hinting at continuity, if not establishing it. I am extremely pleased by this event. Because I am thinking not so much about ourselves as of those who will be born in St. Petersburg. It is much better for them to live in a city that bears the name of a saint than that of a devil.”^{755}

The referendum, however, was still nonbinding. An official decision on the fate of the city’s name could be made only by the Soviet parliament. Given its makeup, it could not be expected to act anytime soon. But history acted in its own way. In August 1991 the hardliners in Moscow attempted an anti-Gorbachev coup. The attempt failed, but as a result, the Soviet Union, already creaking at the seams, collapsed completely. The isolated Gorbachev lost power, and the leader of the new independent Russia became its recently elected first president, Boris Yeltsin. Russia was free of Communist Party rule after more than seventy years. Yeltsin replaced the Communist symbol, the red flag and star, for the prerevolutionary tricolor flag. Leningrad, which had supported the new leader, was granted its wish this time. It became St. Petersburg once again. The wheel of history had made a complete revolution.

This was a dizzying moment for the city of five million. During the August coup attempt, Mayor Sobchak managed to organize the biggest pro-Yeltsin demonstration in the country; this decisive act brought Petersburg back, after a long hiatus, into the political arena. The courageous, dignified speech, before 250,000 attentive listeners on Palace Square, of the eighty-four-year-old academician Dmitri Likhachev, a noted Christian scholar and soon after the first honorary citizen of the new St. Petersburg, gave the demonstration a cultural and symbolic focus characteristic of the city.

Far-reaching and interesting experiments in privatization soon began. The economic importance of the city as a major port grew sharply after the Baltic republics broke off from the new Russian nation. Alluding to the traditional description of Petersburg as “the window into Europe,” Sobchak said pointedly, “In connection with the changes in the borders, our city is now taking on special significance. It is the only Russian door to Europe.”

As seldom before, ties with Europe became a political priority. Even before the ruble became a convertible currency, post-Communist Petersburg was prepared to restore to circulation the “golden coin of the European humanistic legacy” (in Mandelstam’s phrase). Predictably, this movement created an acute polarization of the city’s political forces.

Opposing the pro-Western and promarket reformers was a small but extremely vocal nationalist movement that flourished in Petersburg. In the fall of 1991 it held a demonstration on Palace Square. Orators assured the crowd that the country was in the grip of a “terror of democrats, faithful servants of world Zionism,” and they declared, “Do you think that St. Petersburg was given its old name in honor of a Russian tsar? No, it is in honor of the Jewish Apostle Peter!”

A witness described a similar gathering: “A woman stood in a crowd, with tight curls, mean eyes, and a squeaky voice—but she spoke and the crowd listened. ‘I am a biologist, I work at the University. We did an analysis in our university laboratory of Jewish blood and listen, it all has a gene of hatred for the Russian people!”^{756} Attacks on other “foreigners” became more frequent, particularly on cultural matters. Petersburg’s ultranationalistic element was displeased that the new conductor of the Philharmonic after Mravinsky’s death was Yuri Temirkanov, a Kabardian, and that the artistic director of the Maryinsky Theater was the Ossetian Valery Gergiev.

One leading proponent of nationalist thought was Lev Gumilyov, the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. When his historical studies began appearing, they found an interested audience. Gumilyov’s thesis was that the Russian Empire had not been a “prison of nations,” as the liberals had traditionally maintained, but a natural and voluntary association of European and Asian peoples under the benign protection of the tsars. According to Gumilyov, “a united Eurasia headed by Russia was traditionally opposed by Europe in the West, China in the Far East, and the Muslim world in the South.”^{757} Russia, he thought, did not share a path with Europe, since Russian ideology was based on standards of behavior that were alien to Europeans and borrowed significantly from the Mongols—absolute discipline, ethnic tolerance, and religious fervor.

Paradoxically, the views of Gumilyov, who died in 1992 before his eightieth birthday, restored the line of Slavophile philosophy broken by the Soviets and transplanted it onto Petersburg soil. The fact that his anti-European theories found such sympathy in Petersburg showed how volatile the intellectual atmosphere had become even in so traditionally pro-Western and cosmopolitan a city. A sensation was caused by the premiere in Petersburg of Bell Chimes, a nationalistic “symphony-ritual” (as the composer called it) by Valery Gavrilin, a follower of Georgy Sviridov, a leading Slavophile musician (and former student of Shostakovich) and composer of the Petersburg Songs, set to the poetry of Blok.

To be sure, the imperial theme was always strongly present in Petersburg culture, going back to the first panegyrists of Peter the Great. But bearing in mind Russia’s geographic situation, its size, its multiethnic populations, and its relations with its neighbors, such a circumstance is hardly surprising. Russia has always striven for imperial position. The question is whether this imperial principle is manifested through crude force or cultural influence. As Lev Gumilyov put it, “Every nation has the right to be itself.”^{758}

Brodsky countered, “You can try to save yourself from imperial excesses only through culture, because culture alone transforms us into civilized men who subsequently give rise to the democratic system.” Bitov addressed the same issue: “Democracy is work and freedom is work. It is the work of everyone. Skepticism is the cheapest trick possible, especially for the intelligentsia.”^{759}

The role of Petersburg and the Petersburg mythos in this process is potentially enormous. One of the city’s ambitions, which can again be spoken aloud, is its desire to be the spiritual capital or, at least, the cultural arbiter of the new Russia. The foundation for such an aspiration is the city’s brilliant past and its tragic mythological aura.

But the spiritual impulses of Petersburg, a city that appeared at a tyrant’s whim and developed haphazardly, are in the end unpredictable. Many Petersburgers would like to see it as the anchor of a Western-oriented Russia, but in certain circumstances, the city could easily become lost and bewildered, as it did in the tumultuous years of the revolution.

The search for the new may end in the loss of the past, in isolation from reality and civilization. Built on the line separating order from chaos, Petersburg has always been on the edge of the abyss. Any reader of the Petersburg texts is familiar with the view. The émigré philosopher Georgy Fedotov, who died in New York in 1951, proposed an original interpretation of one of the central images of The Bronze Horseman—the flood threatening to swallow Petersburg. Fedotov noted that Pushkin depicts the flood as almost a living force. He drew a parallel between the flood and the snake that Peter the Great’s horse tramples in the middle of the city. “The snake and the flood represent the irrational, the blind aspects of Russian life, that which was shackled by Apollo and was always ready to break out: into sects, nihilism, anti-Semitism, rebellion. Russian life and Russian statehood are constant and tortuous mastery of chaos through reason and will.”^{760}

This confused and not always progressive movement to a distant goal cannot hope to succeed without drawing on the tradition of Petersburg culture, at least on that line whose principles were enumerated by Brodsky: “Sobriety of consciousness and sobriety of form; a desire for freedom inspired by the spirit of the place and the architecture of the place; aesthetic stoicism and the thought that order is more important than disorder, no matter how much the latter is congenial to our perception of the world …. This is a case where the sets determine the actor’s repertoire. The problem lies only in who the actor is and how prepared he is for those sets and, therefore, for his role.”^{761}

Public opinion polls have consistently shown that up to 20 percent of the inhabitants of Petersburg are prepared to go to the West—either for work or permanent resettlement—showing that even such an unusual city can lose its attraction for a substantial number of its residents. The ostensibly victorious Petersburg mythos is still threatened.

First of all, the very physical existence of Petersburg is in danger, its fifteen thousand historic mansions and palaces falling apart. “Hundreds of old Petersburg buildings are dead … the colors are fading before your very eyes and the gilt is peeling,” sighs an observer.^{762} Decades of neglect have damaged the city’s beauty, its loveliness is wearing thin.

The authorities cannot afford major restoration work, and there is no certainty that the hoped-for investment from the West will go to preserve the city’s landmarks. Everyone is aware of crumbling Venice, but Petersburg probably faces a graver crisis, one worsened by economic and political instability.

No less troubling are the signs of spiritual malaise. The Petersburg mythos is no longer underground, but this very circumstance predictably is depriving it of its inner dynamic. Praising persecuted geniuses of the past and celebrating their posthumous anniversaries do not of themselves add vitality to modern Petersburg culture. Bitov admits that “we are now speaking the truth looking backwards. And as a result, we are standing in place.”^{763}

Is the Petersburg mythos dead? “We can and must study Petersburg culture, but we will not be able to resurrect it. At best, we will be able to put its defiled cemetery back in order.”^{764} But even this modest goal could be years away or turn out to be too much for an impoverished Petersburg.

The metaphorical cemetery has already been taken over by the entrepreneurs of mass culture, shamelessly manipulating the potent symbols to suit the needs of commerce. Thus, a recent pop hit was one of Mandelstam’s most tragic texts set cynically to disco music:

Having survived repression, the Petersburg mythos is now in danger of becoming a contentless shell. A contemplative Brodsky expressed an idea about the periodic regeneration of Petersburg culture. It occurs every twenty-five or thirty years, he said, drawing a line from Derzhavin to Pushkin and the poets of his circle and then to Nekrasov and Dostoyevsky; from them to the early symbolists and, through Mandelstam, Vaginov, and Akhmatova, to Brodsky’s own contemporaries. This periodic renewal of creative generations is bound to recur, since “the city’s landscape and ecology are fundamentally unchanged.”^{765}

This particular prediction may turn out to be too optimistic. On the other hand, the history of the city’s culture and its mythos gives reason to harbor hope. Petersburg has been buried over and over in folk legends and books. Its demise has been prophesied, and the city truly was on the brink of destruction more than once. But even its most intransigent critics often had ambivalent feelings about it.

When Petersburg’s cultural fortunes seemed to be declining, Tchaikovsky mourned its fate in his music, inspiring a generation of Russian aesthetes. Exiles on distant shores—Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine—dreamed about Petersburg, and their homesickness nourished the legend of a lost paradise.

Gumilyov, Mandelstam, and Kharms paid with their lives for their adherence to the idea of a unique Petersburg culture. Blok, Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Zabolotsky, Zoshchenko, and later Brodsky brought sacrifices to its altar. The sacrifices were not in vain: the blood revived the mythos to a new and richer life.

Legend has it that as long as the Bronze Horsemen is in its place, Petersburg will not perish. In the shade of that monument, miracles seem possible. The new incarnation of the Petersburg mythos may be a surprise even for its devotees and scholars, let alone for general audiences. Brodsky readily accepted the possibility that a new renaissance, if he lived to see it, might be totally alien to him.^{766}

Tradition and stability were always intertwined in Petersburg culture with spiritual ambivalence and creative unpredictability. This unpredictability, pregnant with new achievement, is enshrined in the most dramatic and enduring of Petersburg’s visual symbols—the Bronze Horseman, at once dashing into the sky and rooted in stone. Most people desire to look beyond the line separating today from tomorrow. Very few manage to do so; even a genius like Pushkin stopped at the line to ponder.

But geniuses can at least give utterance to inchoate feelings, to anxieties and cares of confronting the unpredictable, and to secret hopes—as Pushkin did in the lines that seem cast in bronze, which anyone who has ever read the greatest Russian narrative poem feels impelled to repeat when standing, by design or by happenstance, at the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, thinking about the past, present, and future of the magnificent and long-suffering city founded by the legendary emperor and yearning to be immortal: