St Petersburg

“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.”92

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.”93 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.”94

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.95