St Petersburg

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.