St Petersburg

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

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

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.

Alexander Pushkin was nervous and angry. The poet was in the second week of his self-imposed exile in Boldino, the small steppe estate of his father some six hundred miles from Petersburg. Pushkin’s purpose in coming here was to write poetry, in solitude and peace, far from the bustle of the capital. But the verse, spitefully, wouldn’t come. His head ached, his stomach hurt; could it be the heavy Russian diet—potatoes and buck-wheat groats?

He was worried about his substantial debts. The only way to get rid of them was to hope for inspiration from God, to produce something significant, and then sell that “something” profitably to his Petersburg publisher. But it was difficult for Pushkin to concentrate on poetry; he was tormented by jealousy, obsessed with worry about his young wife, who remained in Petersburg. The famous beauty, Natalya, was flattered by the attentions of the social lions, while the temperamental Pushkin naturally climbed the walls. He crudely berated his wife in a letter from Boldino: “You’re pleased that studs chase after you like a bitch, their tails stiff up in the air and sniffing your ass; nothing to be happy about! … If you have a trough, the pigs will come.”1

The dreary autumn weather would have plunged anyone into deep depression. But Pushkin, despite his African ancestry, loved the northern clime. He hoped that the Russian autumn would bring him inspiration, as it always had. It tormented him first, then paid off; verse finally came. The happy poet awoke at seven in the morning, worked in bed until three in the afternoon, then rode horseback in the mud for two hours, cooling off his head, overheated with ideas.

“I started writing and have already written tons,”2 he announced proudly to his wife in a letter to Petersburg dated October 30, 1833. The next day at dawn, in his quick but beautiful hand, he finished the fair copy of his narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman. We know that because of the notation on the final page: “five after five a.m.” (that is, contrary to his habit, the poet had worked all night).

Pushkin rarely documented his work with such accuracy. Apparently, even he, who never underestimated his genius, understood that in those twenty-six October days he had achieved something unique and extraordinary. (Which may also be why he asked five thousand rubles from his publisher upon returning to Petersburg, an unheard of sum in those days.) The poet’s intuition did not fail him: The Bronze Horseman is still the greatest narrative poem written in Russian. It is also the beginning and at the same time the peak of the literary mythos about St. Petersburg.