St Petersburg

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.59

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.”60

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.61 Shvarts recalled this, too. “Love was still love, life was life, but every moment was imbued with horror. And the threat of shame.”62

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.”63 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.”64

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.