St Petersburg

During my youth, it was impossible to talk about any of this in public. Even the complete truth about the city’s incredible suffering during the 900-day German siege was suppressed by the Soviet authorities. We all lived with the impression that the city had a gigantic gag down its throat. Its past was being destroyed, its present humiliated, and its hopes for the future torn out by the roots.

The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot had this to say about the move of the Russian capital from Moscow to Petersburg: “It is extremely unwise to place the heart on the fingertip.” In the Soviet era, authorities kept cutting off the oxygen to Russia’s former “heart”; it shriveled and almost stopped beating, for it was dying, but no one was allowed to sound the alarm. When I started writing in Russia about art, and particularly when I was preparing my book Young Composers of Leningrad (1971) for publication, I had to deal with this over and over. The very concept of Petersburg or Leningrad culture was being quashed. “What’s so special about this culture? We have only one culture—the Soviet one!”

The Petersburg Atlantis sank to the bottom of the Soviet political ocean. But it stubbornly continued its submerged existence there—in the form of bizarre but beautiful ruins, under terrible atmospheric pressure, in darkness and muteness. To behold these marvelous ruins, one had to dive deep and stay underwater for a long time. Nevertheless, many people in Leningrad did just that, despite the danger. A new Petersburg mythos was ripening in the underground.

Its central figure, and to a great degree its creator, was Anna Akhmatova, the courageous voice of the city on the Neva. In her youth, Akhmatova had a reputation as a Cassandra, prophesying and mourning the destruction of Troy. As early as 1915 she saw Petrograd as a “granite city of glory and misfortune.” Later she wrote,

I brought on death to my dear ones

And they died one after another.

O my grief! Those graves

Were foretold by my word.

In the popular imagination Akhmatova turned into a symbolic “poetic widow,” the keeper of the sacred flame, the mourner for the victims of the revolution, for Petersburg’s lost grandeur. She molded the new Petersburg mythos from one poem to another, and her stiff mixture was bound by blood—living, steaming moisture, without which no sacrifice or prophesy can endure.

Petersburg as a city rose on the bones of its nameless builders. Those victims were part of the legend of the monster capital that stifled the little man. The blood of the new innocent victims, poured out under Stalin’s ruthless terror, gave birth to a new mythos that it also confirmed and strengthened, the Petersburg as martyr, the symbol of Russia’s tragic fate and of its hopes for a phoenixlike rebirth. This metamorphosis had never occurred in history—a radical change in the mythos of a city.

Every mythos has “exoteric” elements, which are comprehensible to many, and “esoteric” elements, which are known only to the initiated. In the Stalin years, Akhmatova created the esoteric mythos of Petersburg the martyr in her works, particularly in Requiem, the poetic distillation of the horrible pictures of mass repressions by their witness. Her Requiem, which was too subversive to commit to writing, was known at first only to a few of Akhmatova’s closest friends, who memorized it, thus turning themselves into living depositories of banned truth.

In contrast, Shostakovich’s Fifth and Seventh (“Leningrad”) Symphonies, even though they revealed essentially the same banned theme, were allowed to resound openly, and they quickly became widely known not only in the Soviet Union but throughout the world. That was one of the paradoxes of the situation: modern symphonic music, in its language seemingly more elitist than descriptive poetry, turned out to be the bearer of the public message of Leningrad’s tragic fate.

Beleaguered but unbroken, Shostakovich continued this Petersburg line in his picturesque Eleventh Symphony, and also in his late quartets, while Akhmatova moved from prophesying a terrible future to the re-creation of the legendary past (“Just as the future ripens in the past,/So the past smolders in the future”) and crowned her construction of the new Petersburg mythos with the monumental Poem Without a Hero, whose true hero was, of course, her beloved Northern Palmyra.