St Petersburg

Is the Petersburg mythos dead? “We can and must study Petersburg culture, but we will not be able to resurrect it. At best, we will be able to put its defiled cemetery back in order.”139 But even this modest goal could be years away or turn out to be too much for an impoverished Petersburg.

The metaphorical cemetery has already been taken over by the entrepreneurs of mass culture, shamelessly manipulating the potent symbols to suit the needs of commerce. Thus, a recent pop hit was one of Mandelstam’s most tragic texts set cynically to disco music:

Petersburg! I do not yet want to die:

You have my telephone numbers.

Having survived repression, the Petersburg mythos is now in danger of becoming a contentless shell. A contemplative Brodsky expressed an idea about the periodic regeneration of Petersburg culture. It occurs every twenty-five or thirty years, he said, drawing a line from Derzhavin to Pushkin and the poets of his circle and then to Nekrasov and Dostoyevsky; from them to the early symbolists and, through Mandelstam, Vaginov, and Akhmatova, to Brodsky’s own contemporaries. This periodic renewal of creative generations is bound to recur, since “the city’s landscape and ecology are fundamentally unchanged.”140

This particular prediction may turn out to be too optimistic. On the other hand, the history of the city’s culture and its mythos gives reason to harbor hope. Petersburg has been buried over and over in folk legends and books. Its demise has been prophesied, and the city truly was on the brink of destruction more than once. But even its most intransigent critics often had ambivalent feelings about it.

When Petersburg’s cultural fortunes seemed to be declining, Tchaikovsky mourned its fate in his music, inspiring a generation of Russian aesthetes. Exiles on distant shores—Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine—dreamed about Petersburg, and their homesickness nourished the legend of a lost paradise.

Gumilyov, Mandelstam, and Kharms paid with their lives for their adherence to the idea of a unique Petersburg culture. Blok, Akhmatova, Shostakovich, Zabolotsky, Zoshchenko, and later Brodsky brought sacrifices to its altar. The sacrifices were not in vain: the blood revived the mythos to a new and richer life.

Legend has it that as long as the Bronze Horsemen is in its place, Petersburg will not perish. In the shade of that monument, miracles seem possible. The new incarnation of the Petersburg mythos may be a surprise even for its devotees and scholars, let alone for general audiences. Brodsky readily accepted the possibility that a new renaissance, if he lived to see it, might be totally alien to him.141

Tradition and stability were always intertwined in Petersburg culture with spiritual ambivalence and creative unpredictability. This unpredictability, pregnant with new achievement, is enshrined in the most dramatic and enduring of Petersburg’s visual symbols—the Bronze Horseman, at once dashing into the sky and rooted in stone. Most people desire to look beyond the line separating today from tomorrow. Very few manage to do so; even a genius like Pushkin stopped at the line to ponder.

But geniuses can at least give utterance to inchoate feelings, to anxieties and cares of confronting the unpredictable, and to secret hopes—as Pushkin did in the lines that seem cast in bronze, which anyone who has ever read the greatest Russian narrative poem feels impelled to repeat when standing, by design or by happenstance, at the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, thinking about the past, present, and future of the magnificent and long-suffering city founded by the legendary emperor and yearning to be immortal:

Where are you galloping, proud steed,

And where will you plant your hoofs?

NOTES

PREFACE

1 Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia (Works), 2 vols., vol. 2 (Moscow, 1986), p. 205.

2 A. S. Pushkin v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (A. S. Pushkin in Reminiscences of Contemporaries), 2 vols., vol. 1 (Moscow, 1974), p. 468.

3 Semiotika goroda i gorodskoi kul’tury (Peterburg). Trudy po znakovym systemam (Semiotics of the City and of Urban Culture (Petersburg), vol. 18 (Tartu, 1984), p. 6.

4 Ibid., p. 28.

5 Doklad t. Zhdanova o zhurnalakh “Zvezda” i “Leningrad” (Comrade Zhdanov’s Report on the Journals Zvezda and Leningrad) (Moscow, 1946), p. 16.

6 Daniil Granin, O nabolevshem (About What Has Been Hurting) (Leningrad, 1988), p. 73.

7 Peterburgskii zhurnal (Petersburg Journal), 1-2 (1993), p. 9.

CHAPTER 1

1 A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works), vol. 10 (Moscow, 1951), pp. 453-54.

2 Ibid., p. 454.

3 Ibid., p. 109.