As the tall, elegant poet Benedikt Livshits, whose admirers claimed that the nine muses always danced around him, recalled, “The basic premise of The Stray Dog existence was the division of humanity into two unequal categories—representatives of the arts and ‘pharmacists,’ with the latter label covering all other people, no matter what they did and what their professions were.” Writers and artists were admitted free of charge, while the “pharmacists” had to pay a hefty admission, up to 25 rubles per head. They were glad to pay—where else could they see the prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina on a giant mirror performing numbers choreographed by Michel Fokine, or watch the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the pose of a wounded gladiator, lying in his famous striped shirt on a huge Turkish drum and triumphantly striking it at the appearance of each bizarrely arrayed comrade in futurism?
The futurists and their shocking behavior got a lot of press in Petersburg. Thus a prospering “pharmacist”—lawyer, stockbroker, or dentist—could show how up-to-date he was by recounting his “personal” meeting at The Stray Dog with those “horrible modernists”—but of course he might then add, “Maxim Gorky himself said, ‘There’s something to them!’”
The futurist Vasilisk Gnedov was notorious for his
But the tone at The Stray Dog was set nevertheless not by the futurists but by the acmeists and their friends. They usually gathered after midnight and left around dawn. In that little cellar they lived “for the audience,” playing the role of the bohemians of the imperial capital. Livshits left a seemingly sarcastic but actually affectionate description of that “intimate parade,” at which the poets transformed themselves into stage actors, and the audience took a voyeuristic ride.
Wrapped in black silk, with a large oval cameo at her waist, Akhmatova floated in, stopping at the entrance so as to write her latest poem in the “pigskin book” at the request of Pronin, who was rushing to greet her, with the unsophisticated “pharmacists,” their curiosity piqued, wildly guessing who’s who in the poem.
Attired in a long frock coat, not leaving a single beautiful woman without his attention, Gumilyov retreated, moving backward among the tables, either to observe court etiquette or to avoid “dagger” looks at his back.
Under the vaults of The Stray Dog, painted with flowers and birds by the artist Sergei Sudeikin, what Diaghilev called “intimate art” was made nightly. “Pianists, poets, and artists who were present were simply invited on stage. Voices would call, ‘We want so-and-so,’ and almost no one refused.”79 Musical improvisation took on great importance here. Cultural Russia of that era lived under the strong impression of Alexander Scriabin’s grandiloquent musical statements. His ecstatic works were consonant with the poetry of the symbolists. In the casual ambiance of The Stray Dog several people worked on music they considered alternative to Scriabin’s overheated visions.
One of them, Arthur Lourié, was a composer of enormous potential that was partially realized later, when he fled Soviet Russia for France and then to the United States. But only one other man from that informal association that I would call the musical circle of The Stray Dog was a professional composer. Ilya Sats was renowned for his music for the plays at the Stanislavsky Art Theater.
Sats was apparently the first to experiment with the “prepared” piano, again anticipating similar experiments by John Cage, which were conducted thirty years later. Sats placed sheets of metal and other objects on piano strings to change the sound. The traditional “sound palette” was not enough for him, and Sats sought new timbers and techniques of producing sound as well as new untempered sounds, similar to what would later be called
