St Petersburg полностью

Lourié was in solidarity with Sats and proposed a theory that he grandly called the “theater of reality.” Its essence was that everything in the world was proclaimed art, including the sound made by every object. Lourié also experimented with quarter-tone music and proposed a new type of piano with two settings of strings and a double (three-color) keyboard. But for lack of such a new instrument, Lourié had to settle for playing at The Stray Dog, where he “extended his hands, nails chewed down to the half moon, with a suffering look toward the Bechstein, smiling like Sarasate might, having been offered a three-string balalaika.”81

Arthur—he took the name in honor of his favorite philosopher, Schopenhauer, adding a second name, Vincent, in honor of van Gogh—Lourié, who had converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager at the Petersburg Maltese Chapel, once gave an influential lecture at The Stray Dog, calling for “overcoming impressionism” and achieving synthesis by using the primitive. The esteemed Petersburg music critic Vyacheslav Karatygin, also a regular at The Stray Dog, explained, “The more certainly and energetically the process of ‘specification’ and ‘purification’ of particular art forms proceeds, the more acutely do we sometimes feel a strange longing for the possibility of their ‘synthesis.’ Such synthesis is realizable only with the help of an artificial primitivization of the main elements of those being synthesized.”82

This program resembled the ideas of the French composer Eric Satie, propounded at about the same time, which were later realized in the works of Les Six and in what Satie called la musique d’ameublement. Satie himself wrote laconic piano pieces in the 1910s and also little waltz songs that were popular in Parisian cafés.

Independently of Satie, and in some ways preceding him, Stray Dog regular Mikhail Kuzmin, called “the greatest of minor poets” in Petersburg, made similar experiments. Akhmatova asked Kuzmin to write the introduction to her first book. Kuzmin was a great poseur, and there were many contradictory legends about him in Petersburg, summed up by a female contemporary this way:

Kuzmin is the king of aesthetes, the arbiter of fashion and taste. He is the Russian Beau Brummell. He has three hundred sixty-five vests. In the morning high school students, lawyers, and young Guardsmen come to his “petit lever.” He is an Old Believer. His grandmother is Jewish. He studied with the Jesuits. He was an apprentice in a corn-chandler’s shop. In Paris he danced the cancan with the models of Toulouse-Lautrec. He wore an ascetic’s chains and spent two years as a penitent in an Italian monastery. Kuzmin has supernatural “Byzantine eyes.” Kuzmin is a monster.83

Kuzmin was the first to introduce an openly homosexual theme into Russian poetry and prose. His novella Wings, which appeared in 1906, was attacked as pornographic. But characteristically for the Petersburg of that period, the leading modernists immediately came to Kuzmin’s defense. Blok published an article that announced, “Kuzmin’s name, surrounded now by such coarse, barbarically trivial talk, is for us a charming name.”

Kuzmin had spent several years at the Petersburg Conservatory in Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition class, but did not graduate; he explained his transformation into a poet this way: “It’s easier and simpler. Poetry falls ready-made from the sky, like manna into the mouths of the Israelites in the desert. I never rewrite a single line.”84

But Kuzmin didn’t drop music. He was the much discussed composer for Meyerhold’s memorable production of Blok’s pioneering drama, The Fair Show Booth. Kuzmin’s songs became popular among the Petersburg elite. He sang them, accompanying himself on the piano, first in various salons, including Ivanov’s Tower, and then at The Stray Dog. Kuzmin liked to say of his work that “it’s only little music, but it has its poison.” One visitor to The Stray Dog confirmed the charming impression Kuzmin’s songs created:

Cloyingly sweet, wanton, and breathtaking languor overtakes the audience. In a joke you hear sadness, in laughter, tears—

Child, do not reach for the rose in springtime,

You can pick the rose in summer, too.

In early spring you must pick violets,

Remember, there are no violets in summer.

The banal modulations blend with the velvety tremolo voice and it’s not clear how and why, but the simple, childish words take on a mysterious significance.85