St Petersburg

Another unique cross section of Petersburg culture and an invaluable source of information about the era was revealed to me when I moved to the West. Here I had the good fortune to meet with some quintessential Petersburgers, who managed to preserve despite the tribulations of exile and their advanced years a clear memory of the events of their youth. These gentle souls met me sympathetically, in large part because they were pleased by my enthusiasm for the city that they themselves continued to consider the greatest and most beautiful in the world. A part was also played by the fact that they at last had an opportunity to discuss and savor with a new arrival from Russia the details of their precious impressions of the distant past—in their native tongue! I was very touched by one interlocutor who had described in all particulars a performance he had seen in prerevolutionary Petersburg and suddenly admitted that he had not discussed that topic for about sixty years.

Then, in the late 1970s, the old émigrés and I, a new one, knew that the barbarous, artificial division of Russian culture into “Soviet” or “metropolitan,” on the one hand, and “abroad” or “émigré,” on the other, which began with the Communist regime in Russia and was propagated with great ferocity, would continue if not forever then for an unbearably long time. We feared we would not live to witness the reunification of Petersburg culture or the recognition in Russia of the greatness of the Petersburg mythos.

In predicting the fate of the Soviet empire, we were not the only ones to be mistaken: almost the entire world was wrong. Few had expected the suddenness and speed with which the empire collapsed and the startling changes that would occur in Russia in the late 1980s. Unprecedented political, economic, social, and cultural shifts shook the country and turned it upside down. For the city on the Neva they meant, among other things, an almost inconceivable salvaging of the Petersburg mythos from beneath the sea, as if the legendary Atlantis had reemerged before the very eyes of its descendants. The names of vilified individuals and artistic phenomena returned from oblivion; authors whose works it had been a punishable offense to distribute just a few years earlier were declared overnight to be classics and were printed in great numbers; and the canvases long hidden in dusty warehouses were once again glowing with their vivid colors at festive exhibitions.

The culmination of this dizzying process was the return on September 6, 1991, of the city’s historic name—St. Petersburg. Petersburg culture celebrated its unexpected and thus all the more satisfying triumph.

I thought about this gift from fate as I strolled along the streets of Petersburg in the fall of 1993: how fleeting it had been, like a mirage, and how important it was to preserve it in my heart—for myself and in memory of those old Petersburgers, native and émigré, who had not lived to see the changes for which they had desperately hoped.

Joseph Brodsky liked to say, “You cannot enter the same river twice, even if it is the Neva River.” In vain I whispered to myself a line from Mandelstam’s poem, “I have returned to my city, familiar to the point of tears.” I did not recognize the city; rather, I recognized it with difficulty, gradually—like a slowly developing photograph. Many years ago I had left Leningrad, where I had studied, fallen in love, played the violin, and started writing; now I had returned—albeit very briefly—to Saint Petersburg.

Yes, the changes were striking. There wasn’t a single state-owned store or café on the legendary Nevsky Prospect, and its glorious panorama brought the poems of Nikolai Zabolotsky to mind: “There the Nevsky is in glitter and dreariness, changing its skin in the night.” The street names familiar from my youth were gone—their original names had been reinstated. Now, ironically, the constructions, monuments, and heroes of the Soviet era were swiftly receding into history.

The city clearly wanted to part as quickly as possible from its recent humiliating existence, and a writer, yesterday a Leningrad and today a Petersburg writer, observed, “In moments of acute historical changes we fall under the influence of ideas, brilliant in their simplicity and obviousness—ideas of a symbolic revenge on the past. They brought Lenin into the Mausoleum—we will take him out; they blew up the church—we will build it again; they called the city their way and we will return its former name.”7

Sometimes it seemed to me that the only constant of the city was its visual symbol, the Bronze Horseman, that only at its pedestal could I understand the multitude of doubts, questions, regrets, and recollections that assailed me. The physical and spiritual dynamism that animates this sculpture could lift the spirits of the most hidebound pessimist. The Bronze Horseman is in an eternal leap, connecting Petersburg soil with the Baltic sky above it.