St Petersburg полностью

The director Nikolai Evreinov made music in a similar style at The Stray Dog. Arnold Schoenberg, visiting Petersburg, heard Evreinov’s “Second Polka” and asked sarcastically, “Und warum es notwendig ist, diese Sekunden?” Schoenberg had reason to consider himself a connoisseur of cabaret music. For several years he had conducted the orchestra at the famous Überbrettl, Ernst von Wolzogen’s Berlin cabaret.

Karatygin, one of the guiding spirits of the Evenings of Contemporary Music, performed at The Stray Dog as accompanist and also as author of musical jokes “with a strong dose of musical pepper in the form of sharp rhythms and brazen harmonies, strung onto curious and silly words.”86 Ilya Sats went even further in that direction, composing parody operas with names like “Revenge of Love, or The Ring of Guadelupe” and “Oriental Delights, or The Battle of the Russians and the Kabarda.” Karatygin wrote about Sats’s music, “I never saw such a musical mirror. By itself, it’s nothing, zero. But light candles all around it and suddenly this music will shine and sparkle like fire. Isn’t that enough?”87

Sats, rumpling his thick black hair and nervously chewing at his walrus mustache, wrote his biggest opus at The Stray Dog, the ballet The Goat-legged, first performed in Petersburg in 1912. Balanchine’s future mentor, the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov, was present at the premiere and as he confessed to me in a conversation in 1967, he “didn’t understand a thing in Sats’s music—all dissonance.” I asked him about Boris Romanov’s choreography. “Very daring, borderline pornography. It was a much more revealing spectacle than The Afternoon of a Faun with Vaslav Nijinsky,” Lopukhov replied thoughtfully. “But Romanov was a very talented man. He experimented with free dance àla Isadora Duncan. And he found a beautiful dancer who wasn’t even a professional. She was very, very sexy.”88

Lopukhov meant Olga Glebova-Sudeikina, whose performance in The Goat-legged created a sensation in Petersburg. The wife of the artist Sudeikin, who had decorated The Stray Dog’s interior, and closest friend of Akhmatova, Olga was one of the “fragile Europeans” (Mandelstam’s expression) who scintillated in the capital. Arthur Lourié tried to describe her. “Glorious golden braids, like Melissande or Debussy’s La Fille aux cheveux de laine, enormous gray-green eyes, sparkling like opals, porcelain shoulders and a ‘Diana’s bust,’ nearly revealed by her deeply décolleté dress, charming smile, lilting laughter, flying, light movements—who is she? a butterfly? Colombine?’89

Discussing the Petersburg era with me in 1976, Vera Stravinsky, who married Sudeikin after taking him away from Olga, was rather pejorative about her. “She was no actress, she couldn’t sing or dance, and basically was a rather empty-headed thing whose only interest was suitors.”90 Lourié, however, wrote that Olga Sudeikina “was one of the most talented characters I had ever met.”

Lourié maintained that she was exceptionally musical, could read poetry unforgettably, particularly Blok, and successfully translated Baudelaire into Russian. Lourié also recalled that Sudeikina “knew the style of every epoch and her taste was impeccable. I remember how she liked to go to the Alexander Market, where she knew all the shopkeepers. She would bring back all sorts of incredible things dug out from the flotsam—old porcelain, snuff boxes, miniatures, knickknacks.”91

For Lourié and the other bohemians of the capital, Olga Sudeikina was the personification of the sophisticated Petersburg style of the 1910s, its soul and its muse. She “expressed the refined era of Petersburg of the beginning of the twentieth century just as Madame Récamier expressed the early Empire.”92 Nadezhda Mandelstam said wryly,

Akhmatova considered Olga the embodiment of all female qualities and was constantly giving me recipes for household work and for charming men according to Olga…. Dust rags must be gauze—you dust and rinse it out… cups must be thin and the tea strong. Among the beauty secrets the most important was that dark hair should be smooth and blond hair must be fluffed and curled. Kchessinska’s secret for getting along with men was never to take your eyes off “them,” hang on every word, “they” love it…. Those were the Petersburg recipes at the start of the century.93

Sudeikina and Akhmatova quoted Mathilda Kchessinska, the notorious star of the imperial ballet, for good reason. In prerevolutionary Petersburg, Kchessinska, the mistress first of Nicholas II when he was heir to the throne, then of two grand dukes, was the symbol and proof of the success to which an artist, a woman from the demimonde, could aspire.