St Petersburg

In Pushkin House Bitov described—and mourned—the defeat and destruction of the Leningrad intellectual by a hostile cultural machine. In some ways he thus summed up the fate of his generation. The dark convolutions of Leningrad life became the main theme for Bitov’s contemporaries and friends in the “radiant underground” (as Bitov dubbed their precarious existence), including the absurdist writer Viktor Golyavkin and the lyrical stylist Valery Popov, whose works combine naturalism and bizarrerie. As Alexander Volodin, whose melancholy autobiography Notes of an Unsober Man was begun in those years, commented, “Life, its most secret vices and illnesses cannot remain unreflected in art. Like twin stars, life and art are joined by an invisible thread. If an attempt is made to stretch that thread, sooner or later it will break, and art will strike a belated and thus particularly cruel blow.”

Leningrad’s older generation of writers—Yevgeny Shvarts, Nikolai Chukovsky, Mikhail Slonimsky, and Lydia Ginzburg—were also at that time working at their memoirs (“interstitial literature” was Ginzburg’s term) and circulating them in intellectual circles (through private readings, samizdat, and the rare publication). According to Bitov, “These were common efforts to create a Petersburg prose for new times: based on fact, but at the same time artistic, psychological, and strange. The city was giving birth to this. And what is important, all this was not bought up by the authorities, as it often happened in Moscow.”106

Despite the iron curtain, the desire for cultural communication “Soviet,” and the Slavophile tendencies were persecuted. The Party’s misgivings were confirmed when during an official holiday parade in Leningrad, a few young Slavophiles were observed crying out “Down with Khrushchev’s clique!” instead of the approved slogans. The proletarian crowd, not listening closely, mechanically responded with “Hurrah!” Serious measures were taken against the young bohemians.

Khrushchev’s false thaw was quickly replaced with cruel frosts, which were then followed by the long hibernation of Leonid Brezhnev, famous for his inarticulate speech, bushy eyebrows, and fantastic corruption. In the stagnant atmosphere of those years, many Leningrad rebels—poets, artists, and philosophers—renewed the Russian tradition of “going to the people.” Rejecting intellectual professions, they went to work as loaders on the Leningrad docks, sailors on small freighters, janitors, and night watchmen. Some took jobs as stokers in the city boiler rooms (Dmitri Bobyshev called them “the copper youth”). Most were heavy drinkers; drugs were also popular. Clashes with the police and frequent arrests were commonplace. The poet Sosnora, who spent six years as a metalworker in a factory, wrote, “I’m off—so long!—on a beeline through the bars!”

Bravado and daring were present here but also a tragic sense of marginality. The poet Kuzminsky commented, “This is how we felt: if you’re making us into outcasts, then we’ll be even bigger hooligans. We became professional lumpen proletariat.”109 The colorful Kuzminsky, with his yellow leather pants and walking stick, could be seen loudly declaiming his futurist-influenced poems at the favorite bohemian gathering place—a café informally called Saigon. Kuzminsky (later, in American exile, he put together a large anthology of Russian nonconformist culture) thus explained the café’s name: “The café was yet another ‘hot spot’ on the planet. It was the home for all of Leningrad’s drug addicts, black marketeers, lumpens, poets, and prostitutes.”110

This was already the second generation of postwar Leningrad bohemians; its pioneers had been a group of neorealist artists (and their bard, Roald Mandelstam—no relation to Osip Mandelstam—a samizdat poet who died young) headed by Alexander Arefyev, a charming man fond of wearing a striped sailor’s shirt, who had served two terms in the camps and was under constant police surveillance. Arefyev, whose energy awed those about him, had by the early 1950s led his fellow thinkers—Vladimir Shagin, Rikhard Vasmi, Valentin Gromov, and Sholom Shvarts (all of whom were under twenty-five)—onto the streets of Leningrad, which became their main subject.

They depicted the city’s underbelly: its Dostoyevskian courtyards and stairs, its brutal dance halls, seedy steam baths, and depressing factory suburbs. Shagin, for instance, did a sketch in the Stalinist years of a policeman dragging an arrested man. Nothing like that could ever appear at an official exhibit in those years. Moreover, even to sketch such a scene was dangerous, and the artists in Arefyev’s group were held by the police more than once.