St Petersburg

Almost one hundred years later in Soviet Leningrad, vodka (as well as some narcotics, like morphine, which could be gotten at hospitals) was still a potent symbol of confrontation with the authorities. The poet Lev Loseff admitted that “we drank fantastic amounts,” explaining, “I owe everything good in my life to vodka. Vodka was the catalyst of spiritual emancipation, opening doors into interesting cellars of the subconscious and at the same time teaching me not to be afraid—of people, or the authorities.”

Sergei Dovlatov commented on the Dostoyevskian world of the Leningrad cultural underground. “The years of miserable existence affected the psyche. The large amount of mental illness is evidence of that. And of course, the constant companion of the Russian writer reigned here—alcohol. We drank a lot, indiscriminately until we passed out and hallucinated.” Dovlatov, who had periodic bouts of wild drinking himself, described how the esoteric Leningrad poet Mikhail Eryomin stepped out of a window when drunk and became crippled for life after landing on the concrete courtyard below. The tempestuous Gleb Gorbovsky, who called himself a “never-drying jester” and admitted to drinking any liquid with alcohol in it (including varnish, cologne, and dandruff lotion), later lamented the destructive role of vodka in the lives of Leningrad nonconformists: “So many brilliant talents died, broken halfway on the road to self-discovery!”

Gorbovsky recalled the fate in the early 1960s of Rid Grachev, the avant-garde prose writer and student of French existentialism, “The last time I saw the man was in a nuthouse, where I was with the D.T.’s. I remember it clearly: down the corridor of the former women’s prison comes Rid Grachev toward me and, despite everything, smiling. Not at me—at the whole world.”

Andrei Bitov, the major writer in the Petersburg tradition of recent decades, considered Grachev a leader and one of his teachers in prose. Bitov started out as a poet in the late fifties in one of the many literary associations in Leningrad—at the Mining Institute where Bitov was a student. Bitov and his friends were joined by Kushner and Gorbovsky, who later maintained that this collective of young poets put “the accent of its creative efforts on fighting official literary policy, on participation in the spiritual renewal of society in the fog of the moral thaw of those times.”

Leningrad’s Party authorities watched those young poets closely, and when censors found poetry with “hidden anti-Soviet subtext” in their first collection, of which 300 copies had been printed, the books were publicly burned in the courtyard of the Mining Institute.

Despite such measures, the popularity of the budding poets grew, and in the best Petersburg traditions, they joined aesthetic battle among themselves but mostly in the underground. The Mining Institute poets were jealous of the “magic choir” around Akhmatova (Rein, Nayman, Bobyshev, and Brodsky), considering it too refined. Some of the Akhmatova circle, in turn, were not very kind to the young Leningrad “avant-gardists,” who were yet another grouping, which consisted of Vladimir Ufliand, Loseff, Eryomin, and Viktor Krivulin.

When in 1957 the Mining poets invited the leading older female poet to meet them, it was not Akhmatova they asked, but the bard of the siege of Leningrad, Olga Berggolts. To invite Akhmatova “was just as unimaginable as inviting Princess Trubetskaya from the Decembrist era to a communal flat.”96 But the young poets felt Berggolts was one of them: approachable, unaristocratic, someone who brought them “the truth about the desperate unsettledness of the hungry and disorganized world.”97

They particularly loved Berggolts’s unpublished poems (which were widely known in samizdat) about her horrible years in the Great Terror, when the then-pregnant poet was arrested by the Leningrad secret police shortly after her former husband, Boris Kornilov (lyricist of Shostakovich’s song for the film Counterplan). Kornilov was shot, but they released Berggolts after cruelly kicking her in the belly over and over. She miscarried and lost the ability to bear children. After this suffering and the siege, Berggolts took to the bottle and was almost never again seen sober.

I came to Berggolts’s apartment in the 1960s to interview her. She opened the door herself; she was still in her fifties then. I had an idea of her condition, but I was still rather frightened to see a woman in a robe tossed over her naked body, her hair limp and sticky, her gaze unfocused. She could barely stand and hoarsely invited me into her room.

The conversation, which wandered at first, inevitably came to Kornilov’s death. She lit a cigarette and spoke about his suffering and her own with interruptions from a hacking cough. This Dostoyevskian image was far from Akhmatova’s majesty. But it was as the drunken madonna of Leningrad that Berggolts attracted the compassion of the Mining poets, including Bitov.