St Petersburg

That fateful transformation was inspired by Nikolai Gogol, who saw Petersburg as a virtual kingdom of the dead, “where everything is wet, smooth, even, pale, gray, and foggy.” For Gogol, Petersburg was a bacchanalia of demonic forces hostile to humans, where the soil was always shifting, threatening to suck up the majestic edifices, the soulless government offices, and the multitudes of petty clerks within them.

Soon the theme of the city’s destruction blocks out all others in the Petersburg mythos. Foreboding and prophecies of doom took on unprecedented power in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Pushkin had interpreted the threatening Baltic waters as a terrible force or a cleansing substance akin to the mythological World Ocean. Dostoyevsky doomed Petersburg, “that rotten, slimy city,” to vanishing along with the fog, like smoke.

The Petersburg mythos, according to a modern scholar, “reflects the quintessence of life on the edge, over the abyss, on the brink of death.”4 A watershed in its existence arose in late-nineteenth-century music, when Peter Tchaikovsky in his ballets and particularly in his “Petersburg” opera, The Queen of Spades (based on Pushkin), combined that sense of life over the abyss with a premonition of his own tragic end and injected a searing nostalgia into the Petersburg mythos.

Never before had music played such a decisive role in the drastic transformation of a great city’s image. Under the influence of Tchaikovsky’s music, Mir iskusstva, led by Alexander Benois and Sergei Diaghilev, began resurrecting the idea of Petersburg as a providential and vitally necessary cultural and spiritual leader of Russia. They shared Tchaikovsky’s foreboding of cataclysms threatening the city. This was the genesis of Bakst’s Terror Antiquus.

The premonitions of sensitive creative artists proved to be prophetic. From the moment of its establishment, Petersburg was subjected to destructive floods. And in the twentieth century its culture and the city itself were in fact in danger of disappearing. It was ravaged by terror and hunger, underwent three revolutions, and suffered a siege unparalleled in modern history. It ceased to be the capital of the country and lost its best people, its self-respect, its money and power, and, finally, its glory.

By the middle of the twentieth century the Petersburg mythos was submerged. One could only surmise its existence, as if the city had become another Atlantis.

Of course, even in Stalinist Russia the works of Pushkin and Gogol were studied, but Dostoyevsky was under deep suspicion. Tchaikovsky’s role in the renaissance of the Petersburg mythos was not mentioned, and Boris Asafyev’s early pioneering works on the subject were banned. There was no possibility of openly discussing the Petersburg texts of the twentieth century—they had vanished into a historical black hole.

Russian modernist movements were branded “decadent” in the Soviet Union. The Silver Age—the brilliant flowering of Russian culture after 1910, or as Akhmatova put it, “The time of Stravinsky and Blok, Anna Pavlova and Scriabin, Rostovtsev and Chaliapin, Meyerhold and Diaghilev,” was officially termed “the most shameful and most mediocre” period in the history of the Russian intelligentsia. The Party verdict on Akhmatova declared, “Akhmatova’s work belongs to the distant past; it is alien to contemporary Soviet reality and cannot be tolerated on the pages of our magazines.”5 This was the attitude toward almost all Petersburg culture of the early twentieth century, with the exception of two or three figures retouched beyond recognition.

It was not simply a question of aesthetics but of politics as well. Both Lenin, who moved the capital back to Moscow from Petrograd in 1918, and Stalin, who subjected Leningrad to terrible suffering, felt nothing but suspicion and hostility for the city, fearing the development there of a hotbed of political and cultural opposition. This unwillingness to tolerate the city in his empire was shared by another notorious dictator of the century, Adolf Hitler.

The assassination in 1934 of Party boss Sergei Kirov in Leningrad, sometimes called in Russia “the murder of the century,” gave Stalin (now believed to be its real perpetrator) the excuse to unleash a squall of terror on the city. After the war Stalin fabricated the “Leningrad Affair,” which put the city back on the political blacklist. As a result, according to the writer Daniil Granin, “the name ‘Leningrader’ was used more and more infrequently. After the Leningrad Affair it sounded suspicious.”6