St Petersburg

The introduction of émigré literature into Leningrad’s cultural realm was not a painless process. Both sides felt a certain ambivalence, which was expressed on the émigré side by former Leningrader Vladimir Maramzin, who lived in Paris, in an angry and sarcastic open letter to Soviet publishers. “I am disgusted by memories of your state, which dragged me through humiliations and knocked any desire to write out of me for a long time. I don’t want to play prodigal son, happily returned to the wide open arms of the all-forgiving executioner. I do not want to be published in your country. I do not want to visit you.”124

But other Leningrad émigrés accepted with delight the opportunity to be published, to perform, or to exhibit in the homeland. Natalya Makarova and Rudolf Nureyev, whose names had been dropped from the Soviet ballet encyclopedia, returned to dance at the Kirov Theater (whose name was soon to revert to Maryinsky). A major civic event was the June 7, 1991, unveiling—at the Fortress of Peter and Paul, opposite the cathedral where the Romanov tsars were buried—of a monument to Peter the Great by the artist and sculptor Mihail Chemiakin, who lives in the United States.

A huge crowd had gathered, despite the rain, for the solemn ceremony. Musicians in bright red uniforms and white wigs played military marches of Peter’s time. Exactly at noon the white covering slid slowly from the statue, and the audience saw the life-size figure of the emperor seated in an armchair.

Chemiakin’s model was the famous wax figure of Peter kept in the Hermitage Museum, which was made right after the emperor’s death by the Italian Carlo Rastrelli, father of the great Petersburg architect. The postmodern, collage-like aspect of Chemiakin’s sculpture is underlined by the fact that the head is a cast of a life mask of Peter made by Rastrelli in 1719.

We know that the mask, also in the Hermitage collection, was studied closely by Falconet when he created the Bronze Horseman. But the head of the Bronze Horseman, made by Falconet’s student Callot, was idealized in keeping with the requirements of the times, framed by beautiful curls and the traditional laurel wreath. In 1815 the poet Alexei Merzlyakov described the general impression of the monument to Peter the Great, unveiled in 1782:

On a fiery steed, like a god, he flies:

His eyes see all, and his hand commands.

In contrast, Chemiakin’s Peter, with his wigless skull, puffy face, and huge hands, was emphatically unglamorous and static. But there was a mystery about him that brought to mind the sphinxes unearthed in 1820 at the site of Thebes, the ancient capital of Egypt, and brought to Petersburg twelve years later, where they stand in front of the Academy of Arts.

The solemnity of Chemiakin’s work also suggested parallels with the Bronze Horseman and prompted discussion among the observers, some of whom saw the new sculpture as a polemic, conscious or not, with Falconet’s equestrian monument. Some were outraged at the naturalism or found Chemiakin’s interpretation insulting. Debate did not stop even after the sun went down, when the figure of the city’s founder took on an eerie presence. One curiosity of the continuing dispute was the daily appearance of fresh flowers at the pedestal of the new statue. The greatest and most mysterious of Russian tsars remained at the center of the fate of his city.

The controversy surrounding Chemiakin’s work was part of a much larger reevaluation. Seemingly permanent evaluations and conclusions—from development of the Petersburg avant-garde to the number of victims of the siege—were questioned and revised. Blacklisted names were reestablished as great classics. What could only be whispered became, overnight, the rage of the next day. Overblown reputations, formerly supported by the propaganda of the state, burst suddenly.

Countless textbooks, encyclopedias, and reference books became useless. New information came in an avalanche. The Petersburg mythos, finally vindicated after many decades of persecution, surfaced like the city in Pushkin’s description:

And Petropolis surfaced like Triton

Submerged in water to his waist.

The ground beneath the feet of the hard-liners was shaking. The Bronze Horseman of the Petersburg mythos was threatening to knock them down and trample them.

The culmination of these changes was the return of the city’s original name: on October 1, 1991, Leningrad was officially renamed Sankt-Peterburg. But this change had been preceded by tense and unsettling events.