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From: Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
A cultural feast
BALTIMORE THROWS A PARTY TO CELEBRATE 300 YEARS OF ARTS INSPIRED BY ST.
PETERSBURG
Scott Shane
Sun Staff
February 9, 2003
What if you could invite all of St. Petersburg's artistic geniuses to dinner one
night -- poets, novelists, composers, painters, dancers? Vanquish time, forget
mortality. Borrow somebody's mansion, and round them up for an evening.
Do it soon, while Baltimore is throwing Vivat!, a remarkable 300th birthday
party for the Russian city, quite possibly the biggest celebration of St.
Petersburg ever held outside its own boundaries. Gather them all in one place --
these people who pioneered psychological fiction, abstract painting, modern
dance. Get a look at the artists whose influence is all around you, even if
you've never set foot in Russia.
But how would you seat them? Alphabetically?
Put, say, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novels drew their existential agony from the
garrets of the 19th-century! city, next to Sergei Diaghilev, ballet impresario
whose Ballets Russes revolutionized dance in the 20th. See what develops.
(And in case he needs rescuing from the intense Fyodor Mikhailovich, seat at the
same table a couple of Diaghilev's star dancers, Anna Pavlova and Vaslav
Nijinsky. And perhaps they would like to meet their successors at the Kirov
Ballet, the defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.) Or, play it
safer. Seat the greatest of the 19th-century composers together, Peter
Tchaikovsky with Modest Mussorgsky.
On second thought, maybe not. Tchaikovsky thought Mussorgsky, the
anti-establishment rebel, vulgar and untrained. Mussorgsky returned the
feelings, scorning Tchaikovsky as a mercenary product of the St. Petersburg
Conservatory.
All right: put Tchaikovsky with Anton Rubinstein, first director of the
conservatory and founder of a tradition of Russian piano virtuosity that is
still with us today. (Note: Make sure the mansion has a! grand piano; coax
Rubinstein to play something.)
Move Mussorgsky next to Alexander Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet, whose
tragic drama Boris Godunov Mussorgsky turned into a powerful opera. They'd have
something to talk about.
On second thought, scratch that. Pushkin died in a duel, Mussorgsky was a heavy
drinker. ... It could end badly.
(Note: Invite the man who serves as conductor of both the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. If things get truly out of
control, perhaps Yuri Temirkanov can lead everybody in Russian folk songs.)
OK, who else?
You could match up some of the great 20th-century exiles: Marc Chagall, a
revolutionary in painting, with Igor Stravinsky, a kindred spirit in music, and
with Vladimir Nabokov, prose virtuoso of Lolita. All were educated in St.
Petersburg, then headed West to abandon Russia forever -- except in their work,
which remained forever obsessed with that country.
Who! 's left out? The 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol -- peculiar fellow, no
question, but one whose short stories are unsurpassed in world literature for
sheer Twilight Zone eeriness. Put him next to Nabokov, a big fan who wrote in
his book on Gogol: 'Passing as it were through Gogol's temperament, Petersburg
acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century.
The composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is a big hit with Americans -- plus, unlike
the rest, he's been to Baltimore before, aboard a warship dispatched by the czar
in 1863 to show support for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Seat him with
Dmitri Shostakovich, whose defiant Leningrad Symphony rallied the suffering city
during World War II -- they can compare centuries, compare czarism with
Stalinism.
Speaking of Stalinism... an invitation must go to Anna Akhmatova, whose
courageous poetry documents both the Stalinist terror and the unspeakable horror
of the 900-day Nazi siege.
If you're inviting Akhmatova, surely you should include Osip Mandelstam, another
world-class St. Petersburg poet who died in a Gulag transit camp in 1938. His
fate was all the more poignant because of his famous remark about art and the
regime: 'Only in our country is poetry respected -- they'll kill you for it.
And how about Joseph Brodsky, the late, great contemporary poet imprisoned for
'social parasitism' in the 1960s (Leningrad judge: 'Who included you among the
ranks of the poets?' Brodsky: 'No one. And who included me among the ranks of
the human race?'). Kicked out of the Soviet Union in 1972, he settled in the
United States, where he won the Nobel Prize for literature and became U.S. poet
laureate, helping launch a project to give out tens of thousands of poetry
anthologies at bus stations, schools and hotels. (The Gideon Bible shouldn't
object, he quipped; they've been cooped up with telephone books all these
years.)
Whoever else you might add -- a! nd how much vodka and steamed crabs can you
afford? -- there is no question about who would have to be seated at the head
table. Towering over this crew of eccentric aesthetes would be the 6-foot-7
Peter the Great himself. Impetuous, brutal, crude, he was nonetheless the first
of St. Petersburg's great artists, for his masterpiece was the fabulous city
itself.
No one who sees them will forget any time soon the pastel facades of the palaces
along the gray-green water of the Neva River, the gold pinnacle of the
Admiralty, the web of canals and bridges, the formal gardens and elaborate
ironwork.
It's a shifting, dreamlike place, whether in the half-light of short winter days
or the long twilight of summer nights. Not even the name holds still: renamed
Petrograd during World War I to shed the Germanic suffix; then renamed Leningrad
in honor of the man who famously arrived at the city's Finland Station in 1917,
bringing revolution; returned to St. Petersburg by refe! rendum in 1991. All
along Russians have simply and affectionately called it 'Peter.
In the number, variety and originality of the artists it has produced over the
last 180 years, St. Petersburg rivals any city in the world. But what made it so
productive of art? What, Nabokov might have punned, made St. Petersburg such a
culture dish?
'There's a really interesting link between Petersburg and creativity,' says
Jeffrey Brooks, a cultural historian of Russia at Johns Hopkins University.
'It's one of those amazing places where culture just blossoms. ... But no one
has really been able to explain it.
In Russian literature, Brooks says, the order of an autocratic society is often
posed against the freedom that bursts out in the temporary oblivion of the
binge, the (usually vodka-soaked) prazdnik or holiday. Against the regimented
background, St. Petersburg, he says, 'is often imagined as one of those spaces
where freedom is possible, a place that's chaotic and! wild.
In a country whose politics to this day cycle between outward-looking
Westernizers and inward-looking Slavophiles, this most European of Russian
cities had a fertile mix of cultures.
'That fusion of Russian and European identities is at the heart of the great
Russian renaissance of the 19th century,' says Orlando Figes, an historian at
the University of London who explores the idea in Natasha's Dance, his mammoth
study of Russian culture.
St. Petersburg gave artists 'a sense of being part of a universal, classical
culture,' he says. 'But underlying this notion of Petersburg as an ideal city is
the notion of Petersburg as an apocalyptic city, a sense of living in a
civilization which is fragile.'
One reason for the fragility was the class structure, which always threatened to
explode in revolutionary violence.
'The contrast between the Europeanized elite and the workers who just came from
the country created a tension,' says Steven G.! Marks, a Clemson University
historian of Russia. 'It's a tension that symbolizes the modern world. ...
Petersburg was a troubled place, but there was a vibrancy because of it.'
Finally, there's the origin of the city. St. Petersburg was an idea, an absurd
dream forced in defiance of logic onto a hostile landscape -- a swamp at the
latitude of mid-Hudson Bay.
'It's the city of infinite possibility, because Peter invented it out of the
mud,' Brooks says.
Appalled by Russia's backwardness, the czar was inspired by what he saw on his
1698 grand tour across Europe with 250 pals and servants. His traveling motto
was: 'I am a pupil and need to be taught.
(That admirable modesty did not extend to his conduct: he borrowed a mansion
outside London and trashed the place, burning the furniture, smashing the
windows, and using the paintings for target practice.)
Impressed by all he saw, Peter decided to wrench Russia by brute strength into
Europe, star! ting with a new capital.
Pushkin's great poem 'The Bronze Horseman' (whose title refers to the statue
that has become the city's enduring symbol: Peter on a rearing horse atop a
massive granite base) describes the giant czar brooding over his plan.
Any Russian can recite the opening from memory (though Pushkin loses almost
everything in translation):
At the edge of the desolate waves, He stood, full of deep thoughts, And looked
into the distance... Here we are destined by nature To break open a window to
Europe....
But while portraying Peter as a titanic figure, Pushkin chooses as his hero a
nobody, a minor clerk named Evgeny who loses his beloved in the floods that
plague the city. In the background is the haunting fact that, even as an army of
workers built Peter's imagined city, at least 10,000, possibly 20,000 or more,
succumbed to accidents, disease and cold.
'Built on bones,' Russians say of the city. The human cost of constru! ction
would only prefigure the violence that has repeatedly shadowed St. Petersburg's
elegance.
This duality is literally built in to the city: across the Neva from the
magnificent Winter Palace and Hermitage (which houses the czars' matchless
collection of Western art) stands the Peter-Paul Fortress, where dissenters were
imprisoned and executed.
Scholars credit Pushkin with creating Russia's literary language. The works he
completed before his death at 38 rival Shakespeare's plays in richness of
language, range of characters and emotional power.
One of those he inspired was Gogol, whose St. Petersburg stories lend a
phantasmagoric quality to even the city's bustling main boulevard, Nevsky
Prospect. Their fantastic plots involve peculiar people: a timid clerk dies of
fright and grief after his new coat is taken; a man's nose goes missing, turning
up in a barber's loaf of bread. A reader barely begins to read 'The Overcoat'
before reality begins to leak ! away: 'In the department of... but it is better
not to name the department.
From Gogol, Dostoyevsky inherited a sense of the human mind as a torture
chamber.
'I swear that too great lucidity is a disease,' says the neurotic narrator of
Notes from Underground, written in 1864. 'For everyday needs, the average
person's awareness is more than sufficient, and it is half or a quarter of that
of the unhappy nineteenth century intellectual, particularly if he's unfortunate
enough to live in Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on earth.
To read Crime and Punishment (1866), grandfather of all psychological thrillers,
is to sympathize with an ax murderer -- to understand why the destitute
Raskolnikov does what he does and thus feel complicit in it.
The flowering of literature helped define St. Petersburg as a separate realm
where the rules of the universe appeared to be suspended.
'In Gogol, anything -- anything at all -- can happen on! Nevsky Prospect,'
Brooks says. 'In Dostoyevsky, the streets and canals are a moral theater where
the unthinkable can be done.
This notion of St. Petersburg as a distinctive place is tied up with the
Slavophile belief in Russia's spiritual superiority.
'I make no attempt to compare Russia to the Western nations in the matter of
economic or scientific renown,' Dostoyevsky said in a famous 1880 speech at the
unveiling of a Pushkin monument. 'I say only that the Russian soul, the genius
of the Russian people, is perhaps among all nations the one most capable of
upholding the ideal of a universal union of mankind.
But there's another school, one that views lofty talk about the Russian soul as
a bit of a con job. What counts, according to this cold-eyed theory, is money.
'I'm a little bit cynical about this mystical St. Petersburg stuff,' says Blair
A. Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute, a leading Russian studies center in
Washington. 'My own view! is that culture really is a product of wealth.
By moving the seat of government and the court to St. Petersburg, Ruble says,
Peter guaranteed a concentration of wealth unmatched in the empire. The key to
the city's artistic output, then, is not the Russian soul but the Russian throne
-- sometimes occupied by German nobility, he notes.
St. Petersburg's elite not only built incomparable palaces but also patronized
artists and endowed a series of arts institutions that had huge influence, even
when great talents rebelled against them: the Academy of Arts (1757), the
Mariinsky Theater of opera and ballet (1860) and the Conservatory (1862), and
the Russian Museum (1895).
Russia's greatest 19th-century painters, known as the Wanderers, broke with the
Academy and its stilted classical subjects and began to paint the real Russia:
stunning canvases of historical and village scenes, some of which approach
photographic realism. Americans might know Ilya Repin's Vo! lga Boatmen.
Likewise the composers known as the 'Mighty Handful' -- including Mussorgsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov -- rebelled against the staid Conservatory with a
self-consciously nationalist music.
But it's probably fair to say they would not have existed without the traditions
they rejected. They found their own patrons among wealthy Russians, sometimes
among the emerging mercantile class rather than the landed nobility.
Diaghilev was a bankrupt nobleman with entrepreneurial instincts. He realized
that, two centuries after it began importing from the West, St. Petersburg was
ready to export original art.
His creation, the Ballets Russes, would rivet the attention of European
audiences. For a decade or so, St. Petersburg would join the avant-garde of
world art.
'The whole of modern dance can be traced back to the Ballets Russes,' says
Marks, the Clemson historian and author of How Russia Shaped the Modern World.
Leaving St. Petersburg for Eur! ope in 1909, Diaghilev's troupe set a pattern
that would drain great artists from Russia through the Soviet era. But they were
not yet leaving out of fear.
'They left because they were convinced the world needed to see Russian art,'
Marks says. 'And because Diaghilev convinced them they were going to make a
killing.' (He was right.)
Among Diaghilev's brilliant collaborators was Leon Bakst, a designer whose sets
and costumes were hugely influential, going beyond theatrical arts to fashion
and interior design, Marks says. In the winter of 1922-23, Bakst came to
Baltimore and designed a small theater at Evergreen, the mansion of railroad
heiress Alice Garrett.
By no means did all of St. Petersburg's avant-garde artists flee the city after
the Bolshevik revolution. For a time, an extraordinary arts scene flourished in
the new Soviet Union, though the center of gravity shifted to Moscow after the
capital moved there in 1918.
Sergei Eisenstein, who trai! ned as an engineer in St. Petersburg and set some
of his films there, pioneered the new art of cinema. Painters such as Kasimir
Malevich, who invented the abstract, geometric style called Suprematism ('Black
Square'), were 'the cutting edge of the cutting edge of European art,' Brooks
says.
He calls it a 'tragic moment,' because the avant-garde artists deluded
themselves into thinking they had something in common with the avant-garde
politicians: 'These artists were flattered that the Bolsheviks paid them
attention.
By the late 1920s, Eisenstein, Malevich and many others collided with the
Stalinist demand for Socialist Realism -- inspiring, storytelling art to
instruct and galvanize the 'new Soviet man.
Russian artists had always struggled with the state; Czar Nicholas I once
informed Pushkin that he would serve as the poet's personal censor. But Stalin
and his successors were far narrower in their taste and deadlier in enforcing
it.
For St. Peter! sburg, suffering through the Stalinist purges and the Nazi
blockade in which more than 500,000 people died of starvation and cold, the
nadir for artists came during the grim rule over Soviet culture of Andrei
Zhdanov, Stalin's brutish Leningrad Communist Party chief.
After the war, Zhdanov crushed every hint of creative independence, denouncing
the poet Akhmatova as 'half nun, half harlot.
He also attacked Shostakovich, declaring that 'a melody that can be hummed' was
the key to great music.
Zhdanov's reward, upon his death in 1948, was to have Leningrad State University
named for him; his name was quietly removed only after the collapse of Soviet
rule in 1991.
'My feeling is that the purges and the war actually devastated Petersburg and
made it a second-rate cultural city,' says Ruble, of the Kennan Institute. If
that's true, of course, the rest of the world was the beneficiary, as writers,
artists and dancers fled abroad and thrived.
In r! ecent years, there have been modest revivals -- a vibrant rock music
scene, a few young writers of striking originality -- accompanied by hard times
for institutions that the Soviet government had supported, including the
Conservatory and the Kirov Ballet. As in the West, painters drive cabs;
composers wait tables.
Artists today have more liberty, and less material support, than at any time in
the city's three centuries. Perhaps the oligarchs of the new era will try
patronage to polish their image, the creative ghosts that haunt the city on the
Neva will inspire a new generation, and the artists of St. Petersburg will be
heard from again.
The Baltimore Sun
_______________________________________________________________________________________
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*
A cultural feast
BALTIMORE THROWS A PARTY TO CELEBRATE 300 YEARS OF ARTS INSPIRED BY ST.
PETERSBURG
Scott Shane
Sun Staff
February 9, 2003
What if you could invite all of St. Petersburg's artistic geniuses to dinner one
night -- poets, novelists, composers, painters, dancers? Vanquish time, forget
mortality. Borrow somebody's mansion, and round them up for an evening.
Do it soon, while Baltimore is throwing Vivat!, a remarkable 300th birthday
party for the Russian city, quite possibly the biggest celebration of St.
Petersburg ever held outside its own boundaries. Gather them all in one place --
these people who pioneered psychological fiction, abstract painting, modern
dance. Get a look at the artists whose influence is all around you, even if
you've never set foot in Russia.
But how would you seat them? Alphabetically?
Put, say, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novels drew their existential agony from the
garrets of the 19th-century! city, next to Sergei Diaghilev, ballet impresario
whose Ballets Russes revolutionized dance in the 20th. See what develops.
(And in case he needs rescuing from the intense Fyodor Mikhailovich, seat at the
same table a couple of Diaghilev's star dancers, Anna Pavlova and Vaslav
Nijinsky. And perhaps they would like to meet their successors at the Kirov
Ballet, the defectors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.) Or, play it
safer. Seat the greatest of the 19th-century composers together, Peter
Tchaikovsky with Modest Mussorgsky.
On second thought, maybe not. Tchaikovsky thought Mussorgsky, the
anti-establishment rebel, vulgar and untrained. Mussorgsky returned the
feelings, scorning Tchaikovsky as a mercenary product of the St. Petersburg
Conservatory.
All right: put Tchaikovsky with Anton Rubinstein, first director of the
conservatory and founder of a tradition of Russian piano virtuosity that is
still with us today. (Note: Make sure the mansion has a! grand piano; coax
Rubinstein to play something.)
Move Mussorgsky next to Alexander Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet, whose
tragic drama Boris Godunov Mussorgsky turned into a powerful opera. They'd have
something to talk about.
On second thought, scratch that. Pushkin died in a duel, Mussorgsky was a heavy
drinker. ... It could end badly.
(Note: Invite the man who serves as conductor of both the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. If things get truly out of
control, perhaps Yuri Temirkanov can lead everybody in Russian folk songs.)
OK, who else?
You could match up some of the great 20th-century exiles: Marc Chagall, a
revolutionary in painting, with Igor Stravinsky, a kindred spirit in music, and
with Vladimir Nabokov, prose virtuoso of Lolita. All were educated in St.
Petersburg, then headed West to abandon Russia forever -- except in their work,
which remained forever obsessed with that country.
Who! 's left out? The 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol -- peculiar fellow, no
question, but one whose short stories are unsurpassed in world literature for
sheer Twilight Zone eeriness. Put him next to Nabokov, a big fan who wrote in
his book on Gogol: 'Passing as it were through Gogol's temperament, Petersburg
acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century.
The composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is a big hit with Americans -- plus, unlike
the rest, he's been to Baltimore before, aboard a warship dispatched by the czar
in 1863 to show support for Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Seat him with
Dmitri Shostakovich, whose defiant Leningrad Symphony rallied the suffering city
during World War II -- they can compare centuries, compare czarism with
Stalinism.
Speaking of Stalinism... an invitation must go to Anna Akhmatova, whose
courageous poetry documents both the Stalinist terror and the unspeakable horror
of the 900-day Nazi siege.
If you're inviting Akhmatova, surely you should include Osip Mandelstam, another
world-class St. Petersburg poet who died in a Gulag transit camp in 1938. His
fate was all the more poignant because of his famous remark about art and the
regime: 'Only in our country is poetry respected -- they'll kill you for it.
And how about Joseph Brodsky, the late, great contemporary poet imprisoned for
'social parasitism' in the 1960s (Leningrad judge: 'Who included you among the
ranks of the poets?' Brodsky: 'No one. And who included me among the ranks of
the human race?'). Kicked out of the Soviet Union in 1972, he settled in the
United States, where he won the Nobel Prize for literature and became U.S. poet
laureate, helping launch a project to give out tens of thousands of poetry
anthologies at bus stations, schools and hotels. (The Gideon Bible shouldn't
object, he quipped; they've been cooped up with telephone books all these
years.)
Whoever else you might add -- a! nd how much vodka and steamed crabs can you
afford? -- there is no question about who would have to be seated at the head
table. Towering over this crew of eccentric aesthetes would be the 6-foot-7
Peter the Great himself. Impetuous, brutal, crude, he was nonetheless the first
of St. Petersburg's great artists, for his masterpiece was the fabulous city
itself.
No one who sees them will forget any time soon the pastel facades of the palaces
along the gray-green water of the Neva River, the gold pinnacle of the
Admiralty, the web of canals and bridges, the formal gardens and elaborate
ironwork.
It's a shifting, dreamlike place, whether in the half-light of short winter days
or the long twilight of summer nights. Not even the name holds still: renamed
Petrograd during World War I to shed the Germanic suffix; then renamed Leningrad
in honor of the man who famously arrived at the city's Finland Station in 1917,
bringing revolution; returned to St. Petersburg by refe! rendum in 1991. All
along Russians have simply and affectionately called it 'Peter.
In the number, variety and originality of the artists it has produced over the
last 180 years, St. Petersburg rivals any city in the world. But what made it so
productive of art? What, Nabokov might have punned, made St. Petersburg such a
culture dish?
'There's a really interesting link between Petersburg and creativity,' says
Jeffrey Brooks, a cultural historian of Russia at Johns Hopkins University.
'It's one of those amazing places where culture just blossoms. ... But no one
has really been able to explain it.
In Russian literature, Brooks says, the order of an autocratic society is often
posed against the freedom that bursts out in the temporary oblivion of the
binge, the (usually vodka-soaked) prazdnik or holiday. Against the regimented
background, St. Petersburg, he says, 'is often imagined as one of those spaces
where freedom is possible, a place that's chaotic and! wild.
In a country whose politics to this day cycle between outward-looking
Westernizers and inward-looking Slavophiles, this most European of Russian
cities had a fertile mix of cultures.
'That fusion of Russian and European identities is at the heart of the great
Russian renaissance of the 19th century,' says Orlando Figes, an historian at
the University of London who explores the idea in Natasha's Dance, his mammoth
study of Russian culture.
St. Petersburg gave artists 'a sense of being part of a universal, classical
culture,' he says. 'But underlying this notion of Petersburg as an ideal city is
the notion of Petersburg as an apocalyptic city, a sense of living in a
civilization which is fragile.'
One reason for the fragility was the class structure, which always threatened to
explode in revolutionary violence.
'The contrast between the Europeanized elite and the workers who just came from
the country created a tension,' says Steven G.! Marks, a Clemson University
historian of Russia. 'It's a tension that symbolizes the modern world. ...
Petersburg was a troubled place, but there was a vibrancy because of it.'
Finally, there's the origin of the city. St. Petersburg was an idea, an absurd
dream forced in defiance of logic onto a hostile landscape -- a swamp at the
latitude of mid-Hudson Bay.
'It's the city of infinite possibility, because Peter invented it out of the
mud,' Brooks says.
Appalled by Russia's backwardness, the czar was inspired by what he saw on his
1698 grand tour across Europe with 250 pals and servants. His traveling motto
was: 'I am a pupil and need to be taught.
(That admirable modesty did not extend to his conduct: he borrowed a mansion
outside London and trashed the place, burning the furniture, smashing the
windows, and using the paintings for target practice.)
Impressed by all he saw, Peter decided to wrench Russia by brute strength into
Europe, star! ting with a new capital.
Pushkin's great poem 'The Bronze Horseman' (whose title refers to the statue
that has become the city's enduring symbol: Peter on a rearing horse atop a
massive granite base) describes the giant czar brooding over his plan.
Any Russian can recite the opening from memory (though Pushkin loses almost
everything in translation):
At the edge of the desolate waves, He stood, full of deep thoughts, And looked
into the distance... Here we are destined by nature To break open a window to
Europe....
But while portraying Peter as a titanic figure, Pushkin chooses as his hero a
nobody, a minor clerk named Evgeny who loses his beloved in the floods that
plague the city. In the background is the haunting fact that, even as an army of
workers built Peter's imagined city, at least 10,000, possibly 20,000 or more,
succumbed to accidents, disease and cold.
'Built on bones,' Russians say of the city. The human cost of constru! ction
would only prefigure the violence that has repeatedly shadowed St. Petersburg's
elegance.
This duality is literally built in to the city: across the Neva from the
magnificent Winter Palace and Hermitage (which houses the czars' matchless
collection of Western art) stands the Peter-Paul Fortress, where dissenters were
imprisoned and executed.
Scholars credit Pushkin with creating Russia's literary language. The works he
completed before his death at 38 rival Shakespeare's plays in richness of
language, range of characters and emotional power.
One of those he inspired was Gogol, whose St. Petersburg stories lend a
phantasmagoric quality to even the city's bustling main boulevard, Nevsky
Prospect. Their fantastic plots involve peculiar people: a timid clerk dies of
fright and grief after his new coat is taken; a man's nose goes missing, turning
up in a barber's loaf of bread. A reader barely begins to read 'The Overcoat'
before reality begins to leak ! away: 'In the department of... but it is better
not to name the department.
From Gogol, Dostoyevsky inherited a sense of the human mind as a torture
chamber.
'I swear that too great lucidity is a disease,' says the neurotic narrator of
Notes from Underground, written in 1864. 'For everyday needs, the average
person's awareness is more than sufficient, and it is half or a quarter of that
of the unhappy nineteenth century intellectual, particularly if he's unfortunate
enough to live in Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on earth.
To read Crime and Punishment (1866), grandfather of all psychological thrillers,
is to sympathize with an ax murderer -- to understand why the destitute
Raskolnikov does what he does and thus feel complicit in it.
The flowering of literature helped define St. Petersburg as a separate realm
where the rules of the universe appeared to be suspended.
'In Gogol, anything -- anything at all -- can happen on! Nevsky Prospect,'
Brooks says. 'In Dostoyevsky, the streets and canals are a moral theater where
the unthinkable can be done.
This notion of St. Petersburg as a distinctive place is tied up with the
Slavophile belief in Russia's spiritual superiority.
'I make no attempt to compare Russia to the Western nations in the matter of
economic or scientific renown,' Dostoyevsky said in a famous 1880 speech at the
unveiling of a Pushkin monument. 'I say only that the Russian soul, the genius
of the Russian people, is perhaps among all nations the one most capable of
upholding the ideal of a universal union of mankind.
But there's another school, one that views lofty talk about the Russian soul as
a bit of a con job. What counts, according to this cold-eyed theory, is money.
'I'm a little bit cynical about this mystical St. Petersburg stuff,' says Blair
A. Ruble, director of the Kennan Institute, a leading Russian studies center in
Washington. 'My own view! is that culture really is a product of wealth.
By moving the seat of government and the court to St. Petersburg, Ruble says,
Peter guaranteed a concentration of wealth unmatched in the empire. The key to
the city's artistic output, then, is not the Russian soul but the Russian throne
-- sometimes occupied by German nobility, he notes.
St. Petersburg's elite not only built incomparable palaces but also patronized
artists and endowed a series of arts institutions that had huge influence, even
when great talents rebelled against them: the Academy of Arts (1757), the
Mariinsky Theater of opera and ballet (1860) and the Conservatory (1862), and
the Russian Museum (1895).
Russia's greatest 19th-century painters, known as the Wanderers, broke with the
Academy and its stilted classical subjects and began to paint the real Russia:
stunning canvases of historical and village scenes, some of which approach
photographic realism. Americans might know Ilya Repin's Vo! lga Boatmen.
Likewise the composers known as the 'Mighty Handful' -- including Mussorgsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov -- rebelled against the staid Conservatory with a
self-consciously nationalist music.
But it's probably fair to say they would not have existed without the traditions
they rejected. They found their own patrons among wealthy Russians, sometimes
among the emerging mercantile class rather than the landed nobility.
Diaghilev was a bankrupt nobleman with entrepreneurial instincts. He realized
that, two centuries after it began importing from the West, St. Petersburg was
ready to export original art.
His creation, the Ballets Russes, would rivet the attention of European
audiences. For a decade or so, St. Petersburg would join the avant-garde of
world art.
'The whole of modern dance can be traced back to the Ballets Russes,' says
Marks, the Clemson historian and author of How Russia Shaped the Modern World.
Leaving St. Petersburg for Eur! ope in 1909, Diaghilev's troupe set a pattern
that would drain great artists from Russia through the Soviet era. But they were
not yet leaving out of fear.
'They left because they were convinced the world needed to see Russian art,'
Marks says. 'And because Diaghilev convinced them they were going to make a
killing.' (He was right.)
Among Diaghilev's brilliant collaborators was Leon Bakst, a designer whose sets
and costumes were hugely influential, going beyond theatrical arts to fashion
and interior design, Marks says. In the winter of 1922-23, Bakst came to
Baltimore and designed a small theater at Evergreen, the mansion of railroad
heiress Alice Garrett.
By no means did all of St. Petersburg's avant-garde artists flee the city after
the Bolshevik revolution. For a time, an extraordinary arts scene flourished in
the new Soviet Union, though the center of gravity shifted to Moscow after the
capital moved there in 1918.
Sergei Eisenstein, who trai! ned as an engineer in St. Petersburg and set some
of his films there, pioneered the new art of cinema. Painters such as Kasimir
Malevich, who invented the abstract, geometric style called Suprematism ('Black
Square'), were 'the cutting edge of the cutting edge of European art,' Brooks
says.
He calls it a 'tragic moment,' because the avant-garde artists deluded
themselves into thinking they had something in common with the avant-garde
politicians: 'These artists were flattered that the Bolsheviks paid them
attention.
By the late 1920s, Eisenstein, Malevich and many others collided with the
Stalinist demand for Socialist Realism -- inspiring, storytelling art to
instruct and galvanize the 'new Soviet man.
Russian artists had always struggled with the state; Czar Nicholas I once
informed Pushkin that he would serve as the poet's personal censor. But Stalin
and his successors were far narrower in their taste and deadlier in enforcing
it.
For St. Peter! sburg, suffering through the Stalinist purges and the Nazi
blockade in which more than 500,000 people died of starvation and cold, the
nadir for artists came during the grim rule over Soviet culture of Andrei
Zhdanov, Stalin's brutish Leningrad Communist Party chief.
After the war, Zhdanov crushed every hint of creative independence, denouncing
the poet Akhmatova as 'half nun, half harlot.
He also attacked Shostakovich, declaring that 'a melody that can be hummed' was
the key to great music.
Zhdanov's reward, upon his death in 1948, was to have Leningrad State University
named for him; his name was quietly removed only after the collapse of Soviet
rule in 1991.
'My feeling is that the purges and the war actually devastated Petersburg and
made it a second-rate cultural city,' says Ruble, of the Kennan Institute. If
that's true, of course, the rest of the world was the beneficiary, as writers,
artists and dancers fled abroad and thrived.
In r! ecent years, there have been modest revivals -- a vibrant rock music
scene, a few young writers of striking originality -- accompanied by hard times
for institutions that the Soviet government had supported, including the
Conservatory and the Kirov Ballet. As in the West, painters drive cabs;
composers wait tables.
Artists today have more liberty, and less material support, than at any time in
the city's three centuries. Perhaps the oligarchs of the new era will try
patronage to polish their image, the creative ghosts that haunt the city on the
Neva will inspire a new generation, and the artists of St. Petersburg will be
heard from again.
The Baltimore Sun
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