St Petersburg

For me the Bronze Horseman personified the vitality of the Petersburg mythos, its eternal ambivalence, its ascent to the heights of the human spirit, but also the constant threat—from without and within—to the equilibrium, to the very existence of that mythos. Before the Bronze Horseman you unwittingly forget about the zigzags of current politics, about economic problems, and are left alone with time, with the mythos that will live and thrive for a long time to come, I hope.

Here, at the foot of the statue, I recalled with gratitude all those—there were several hundred of them—whose testimony, stories, advice, materials, documents, and photographs helped me prepare this book. Particularly inspiring was my personal contact with the book’s four protagonists—Anna Akhmatova, George Balanchine, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Joseph Brodsky—who in the contemporary world stand as paragons of artistic, intellectual, and ethical standards. Meeting those artists shaped my life and was one of its greatest blessings. For each of those four giants, Petersburg always remained the leading creative symbol and impulse, and each has inimitably played a pivotal role in the creation of the new Petersburg mythos.

I want also to name here some of my interlocutors and correspondents over the last three decades, both in Russia and in the West, many of whom are major figures in Petersburg and Russian culture. They are Iogann Admoni, Nikolai Akimov, Grigory Alexandrov, Nathan Altman, Boris Arapov, Leo Arnshtam, Gennady Banshchikov, Alexander Beniaminov, Olga Berggolts, Andrei Bitov, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Isaiah Braudo, Lili Brik, Nina Bruni-Balmont, Semyon Bychkov, Mihail Chemiakin, Alexandra Danilova, Anatoly Dmitriev, Leonid Dolgopolov, Sergei Dovlatov, Sofia Dubnova, Mikhail Dudin, Orest Evlakhov, Kurt Fridrikhson, Valery Gavrilin, Valery Gergiev, Tamara Geva, Evdokia Glebova, Gleb Gorbovsky, Lazar Gozman, Irina Graham, Daniil Granin, Boris Grebenshikov, Yuri Grigorovich, Lev Gumilyov, Pavel Gusev, Vladimir Horowitz, Anatoly Kaplan, Vasily Katanyan, Aram Khachaturyan, Nikolai Khardzhiev, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Alexander Knaifel, Georgy Kocheyitsky, Yuri Kochnev, Leonid Kogan, Kirill Kondrashin, Maria Konisskaya, Zinovy Korogodsky, Gidon Kremer, Alexander Kushner, Konstantin Kuzminsky, Viktor Liberman, Fyodor Lopukhov, Lev Loseff, Berthe Malko, Mikhail Matveyev, Yakov Milkis, Nathan Milstein, Alexander Mintz, Yevgeny Mravinsky, Anatoly Nayman, Ernst Neizvestny, Yevgeny Nesterenko, Rudolf Nureyev, David Oistrakh, Alexandra Orlova, Boris Paramonov, Nadezhda Pavlovich, Maya Plisetskaya, Boris Pokrovsky, David Pritsker, Lina Prokofiev, Lev Raaben, Rita Rait, Yevgeny Rein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Vadim Salmanov, Dmitri Shagin, Marietta Shaginyan, Veniamin Sher, Vladimir Shinkarev, Viktor Shklovsky, Maxim Shostakovich, Iosif Shvarts, Sergei Sigitov, Yuri Simonov, Sergei Slonimsky, Gennady Smakov, Arnold Sokhor, Vladimir Solovyev, Viktor Sosnora, Vladimir Spivakov, Vera Stravinsky, Georgy Sviridov, Alexander Tcherepnine, Yuri Temirkanov, Boris Tishchenko, Alexander Tyshler, Yulian Vainkop, Mikhail Verbov, Pavel Vulfius, Leonid Yakobson, Roman Yakobson, Mariss Yansons, Maria Yudina, Sergei Yursky, Sergei Yutkevich, Vyacheslav Zavalishin, Kurt Zanderling, Irina Zegzhda, Lydia Zhukova, and Yevgeny Zubkov. I am forever grateful to them for their attention, forbearance, responsiveness, and patience.

Some aspects of my work I also discussed with Peter Vail, Alexander Genis, Roman Timenchik, Lazar Fleishman, and Mikhail Yampolsky. These consultations were of great help.

I thank Adam Bellow and Loretta Denner for their wholehearted support of this project, and my wife, Marianna, for her enormous help as a researcher and photographer.

In 1922 a book was published in Petrograd, The Soul of Petersburg, by Nikolai Antsiferov, a pioneering student of local lore. The author, unlike traditional travel guide writers, did not dwell on dates and details but concentrated instead on the genius loci of Petersburg, a city of “tragic imperialism,” as he put it. Antsiferov’s vivid Soul of Petersburg was the work not of an academic observer with pretensions to covering everything and being “objective,” but a passionate testimony of a participant in Petersburg’s tragedy. Antsiferov’s own fate was unhappy (he was arrested and exiled several times), as was that of his book, which was suppressed soon after publication and reprinted only seventy years later. A precious first edition is one of the items dearest to my heart in my private library.