St Petersburg

(Above left) Mikhail Kuzmin was the first of his countrymen to introduce an openly homosexual theme into Russian literature. Portrait by Konstantin Somov, 1909.

(Above right) Matilda Kchessinska, notorious star of the Imperial Ballet and mistress of Nicholas II when he was heir to the throne, was proof of the success to which a woman artist from the demi-monde could aspire in St. Petersburg.

(Right) Alexander Blok, the most famous Petersburg poet of his time: “In those days there wasn’t a single ‘thinking’ young woman in Russia who wasn’t in love with Blok.”

(Opposite top) In her poetry and her person Anna Akhmatova came to symbolize the endurance of the city on the Neva, and she was its courageous voice. Portrait by Nathan Altman, 1914.

(Opposite bottom) Akhmatova with her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and their son, Lev: all three were destined to be swept up in the city’s tragic fate. Photo, 1916.

(Top) Seeing off futurist Benedikt Livshits to war in 1914 after the city was renamed Petrograd. From left: poet Osip Mandelstam, critic Kornei Chukovsky, Livshits, artist Yuri Annenkov. Only Chukovsky lived to an old age in Russia; Annenkov fled to Paris, and Mandelstam and Livshits perished in the years of Stalin’s Great Terror.

(Bottom) At the futurist exhibition in Petrograd of 1915, Black Square by Casimir Malevich is seen hung high up at the corner of the gallery, the position traditionally reserved for sacred icons. It did, in fact, become the icon of abstract art.

(Above) Revolution in Petrograd, 1917: the rubble consists of burned police files.

(Left) Vladimir Lenin moved the capital of the country from Petrograd back to Moscow in 1918. He disliked the city intensely, but, ironically, after his death in 1924 it was renamed Leningrad in his honor. Portrait drawn from life by Nathan Altman, 1920.

(Top) Propaganda porcelain: exquisite dishes in a hungry city. Tray, 1921, by Sergei Chekhonin, who died in exile in 1936.

(Bottom) Propaganda poster, 1920, by Vladimir Lebedev: Petrograd’s revolutionary artists attempted to reinvent the role of art in the city’s life.

(Top left) Daring and innovative: George Balanchine in Petrograd, 1923, partnering his first wife, Tamara Geva, in a pas de deux that he himself choreographed.

(Top right) Levky Zheverzheyev, Tamara’s father and prominent patron of modern art; his role in developing Balanchine’s taste and artistic outlook cannot be overestimated.

(Right) Vladimir Dmitriev, cofounder with Balanchine of the experimental Young Ballet. He received the Stalin Prize for his stage designs four times, but after the arrest of his wife by the secret police he lived in fear and died of a heart attack at the age of 47.

(Above left) The cover of the booklet containing drawings for Fyodor Lopukhov’s neoclassical ballet The Grandeur of the Universe; Balanchine fully absorbed Lopukhov’s bold ideas.

(Above right) “Speaking” costume design for the avant-garde production of Gogol’s The Inspector General in Petrograd, 1927. The policeman’s uniform depicts chains, lock and keys, and prisoners behind bars.

(Right) Vladimir Lebedev’s illustration for a children’s book about a circus; the book was attacked as “formalist” by the authorities. In 1931 a number of Leningrad writers and artists for children were arrested on charges of “counterrevolutionary convictions.”

(Opposite top) Film directors Grigory Kozintsev (at left) and Leonid Trauberg (second from right), founders of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, with their colleagues. Shostakovich wrote music for their films.

(Above left) Dmitri Shostakovich was the darling of the Leningrad artistic élite until Pravda’s 1936 editorial denounced his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as “muddle,” not music. Portrait by Nikolai Akimov, a prominent stage director, 1933.

(Above right) The satirical writer Mikhail Zoshchenko in a 1923 photograph, at the height of his enormous popularity. After party boss Andrei Zhdanov called him a “scoundrel of literature,” Zoshchenko was no longer published. He died in 1958, broken in spirit and half mad.

(Opposite top) Joseph Stalin, with Zhdanov, at the bier of Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov, who was killed in 1934 on—it is now believed—Stalin’s orders. Stalin was hostile to Leningrad, regarding it as a hotbed of political and cultural opposition, and he used Kirov’s murder as a pretext for mass repressions.

(Above left) “Stunned by a blow from the back, I fell, then started to rise; but there was another blowin the face. I lost consciousness.” Thus Leningrad poet Nikolai Zabolotsky described one of his interrogations by the secret police in 1938.