«St Petersburg: A Cultural History»

St Petersburg: A Cultural History (fb2) - St Petersburg: A Cultural History 4256K (книга удалена из библиотеки) скачать: (fb2) - (epub) - (mobi) - Соломон Моисеевич Волков

OTHER BOOKS BY SOLOMON VOLKOV

Young Composers of Leningrad (Leningrad and Moscow, 1971)

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (New York, 1979)

Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet and Music (New York, 1985)

From Russia to the West: The Music Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein (New York, 1990)

Joseph Brodsky in New York (New York, 1990)

Remembering Anna Akhmatova: Conversations with Joseph Brodsky (Moscow, 1992)

FREE PRESS PAPERBACKS

A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1995 by Solomon Volkov

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Free Press Paperbacks Edition 1997

FREE PRESS PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by REM Studio, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Volkov, Solomon.

St. Petersburg: a cultural history/Solomon Volkov; [translator] Antonina W. Bouis.

p.   cm.

Includes index.

1. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—Civilization.   I. Title.

DK557.V65   1995

947′.453—dc20   95-24116

CIP

ISBN 0-02-874052-1

eISBN: 978-1-451-60315-6

0-684-83296-8 (Pbk)

To Erwin A. Glikes (1937-1994)

For eighteen years my publisher, mentor, friend

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1 describing how the great city of St. Petersburg was built, how the mythos of this wonder was created, and how classical Russian literature from Pushkin to Dostoyevsky boldly and brilliantly interpreted the image of the city and, in the end, profoundly changed it.

CHAPTER 2 which describes how the mirror that reflected St. Petersburg for almost one hundred fifty years was passed from the hands of the writers to musicians and then artists, and in which the reader learns how a Queen of Spades, if felicitously played, could influence the charms of an imperial capital.

CHAPTER 3 in which we learn how merry it was living in Petersburg in 1908, how that merriment was soon interrupted, and how the city first lost its name and then its status as capital of Russia and, almost dead of hunger and cold, tried to remain faithful to itself. This is the Petersburg of Anna Akhmatova.

CHAPTER 4 in which a young hero—renamed, like the marvelous city in which he was born and grew up—undergoes quite a few exciting adventures and mind-boggling experiences in that amazing city, so that when he quits his native shores hastily, he becomes at long last a celebrated choreographer and, along with his fellow émigrés Stravinsky and Nabokov, carries the glory of his birthplace to distant America. This is the Petrograd of George Balanchine.

CHAPTER 5 in which our long-suffering city is renamed after a tyrant, undergoes dreadful ordeals in the Great Terror and the most horrible siege in recent history, and turns from a “crazy ship” into a “ship of the dead,” to be mourned in elegies and sung in requiems. This is the Leningrad of Dmitri Shostakovich.

CHAPTER 6 in which the city becomes the hero of the Poem Without a Hero and, surviving against all odds and nurturing its own mythos in the underground, wins the right to get its original name back. The Bronze Horseman continues its eternal gallop into history—but where to? This is the Petersburg of Joseph Brodsky and his friends in creativity—the independent and tenacious poets, writers, artists, and musicians on whom the spiritual fate of this astonishing city depends.

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

PREFACE

… absence is the best medicine for forgetting … but the best way to forget forever is to see daily …

ANNA AKHMATOVA 1

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

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

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

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

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

A translucent veil covers The fresh turf and melts unobserved.

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

In me reposes the sadness which King David Regally bestowed upon the millennia.