St Petersburg

In the perception of the general public, the Petersburg text expanded swiftly. The movies of Lenfilm’s leading directors—Ilya Averbakh, Alexei German, and Alexander Sokurov—which had been banned or shelved during the era of stagnation, received wide distribution and high praise. The works of the Oberiu group—Kharms, Oleinikov, and Alexander Vvedensky—previously available only in samizdat, were now properly published. The surrealistic novels of Vaginov and the early satiric stories of Zoshchenko were reprinted. And Nabokov, who had been strictly forbidden even recently (his name could not be mentioned in print)—“Nabokov descended on us like an avalanche,” a Soviet critic announced. “Nabokov’s gigantic heritage, the whole baker’s dozen of his novels, and everything around it—has fallen on us all at once. This means that everything that we could have handled naturally over fifty years of regular and timely reading is now coming at us like a flow, a flood.”121

The effect of this belated and dramatic meeting with Nabokov on the Petersburg mythos was profound. Of the three émigré giants the first to reappear was Stravinsky; soon after him came Balanchine. But their impact, while extraordinary, was short-lived. Stravinsky was played and praised cautiously. Balanchine’s ballets appeared in the Kirov’s repertoire only in 1989, thanks to its chief choreographer, Oleg Vinogradov.

But intellectual Russia has always been and remains logocentric. It was therefore only the “discovery” of Nabokov that led to broad discussion of the role of the émigré culture in shaping the new Petersburg mythos and its enormous significance in the making of Petersburg modernism.

The assimilation by the Petersburg mythos of the achievements of modernism was particularly problematic for the general reader. The eccentric dadaist texts were accepted with much less resistance (but perhaps more superficially). A lively polemic developed around Nabokov’s work: much in it seemed self-consciously “aesthetic” and condescending. Responding to accusations against Nabokov, Andrei Bitov noted, “It is not clear what there is more of—pride and snobbery or shyness and modesty.” Bitov, whose Nabokovian novel Pushkin House had reached a wide audience by then, continued, “I do not believe that Nabokov taught English to the Russian language, but to some degree he managed to teach Russian to the English language, and that is no small feat. Perhaps this will be said someday of Brodsky, too, who for now continues teaching English to the Russian language.”122

The name of Brodsky, as the heir to the American line of Petersburg modernism, is often mentioned nowadays alongside Nabokov’s. The first Soviet edition of Brodsky’s poetry appeared in 1990 and quickly sold out its printing of two hundred thousand copies. It was followed by many other printings. But Brodsky’s work elicited hostile reviews as well: the popular newspaper Komsomolskaya pravda maintained that one poem was “imbued with the most inappropriate irony, which extends literally to everything” and another was just “a flood of rhymed banalities, tackiness, and cynicism.”123

Some sympathetic readers were surprised at the absence of overt homesickness, which even sophisticated Russians expect from émigré literature. This unfamiliar discretion was characteristic of other former Leningrad writers who had moved to the West. Sergei Dovlatov, who died in New York in 1990, ten days before his fortyninth birthday, wrote graceful, ironic stories, which emphasized detail, narrative rhythm, and the significance of each word. He never used two words starting with the same letter in a sentence. The reader, as a rule, does not notice this limitation: Dovlatov’s prose flows easily and naturally as it limns the tragicomic adventures of Leningraders at home and abroad.

The mythos underwent a deconstruction in the refined, postmodernistic poetry of the New Hampshire hermit Lev Loseff. Though Brodsky was speaking of Dovlatov when he said that he was “remarkable, first of all, in his rejection of the tragic tradition (which is just a grandiose name for inertia) of Russian literature,” his words are just as true of the skeptical, philosophical poems of Loseff. The polar opposite, stylistically and emotionally, of the émigré literature about Petersburg is the religious poetry of Dmitri Bobyshev, dedicated to the blessed Xenia of Petersburg. Canonized by the Russian Synodal Church in the United States, Xenia was an eighteenth-century holy fool whom the devout Bobyshev hailed as a heavenly protector of the city.