St Petersburg полностью

Pipes froze. People burned furniture, books, and the wood of their houses for firewood. The avant-garde artist Yuri Annenkov, who later emigrated to France, recalled,

It was an era of endless hungry lines, queues in front of empty “produce distributors,” an epic era of rotten, frozen offal, moldy bread crusts, and inedible substitutes. The French, who had lived through a four-year Nazi occupation, liked to talk of those years as years of hunger and severe shortages. I was in Paris then, too—an insignificant shortage of some products, a lowering of quality in others, artificial but still aromatic coffee, a slight reduction in electric energy and gas. No one died of hunger on icy sidewalks, no one tore apart fallen horses, no one ate dogs, or cats, or rats.128

Petrograders went through all that, but something kept them from total despair. Shklovsky maintained, “This city did not become provincial, it was not taken because it heated itself with its own fire, burned everyone who attacked it. Potatoes and carrots were bought like flowers; poems and tomorrow were sacred.”

The factories stopped smoking, and the sky above Petrograd became cloudless and wrenchingly blue. Artists egocentrically found new beauty in the radically changed urban landscape.

You no longer saw luxurious carriages. The crowd of sated, strolling people vanished. The streets were deserted, and the city that could be seen only knee-high at last stood up at full height. Before that, when you drew it, you sometimes had to wait several minutes for a crowd of people to pass and let you see the pure line of a building’s foundation, of the bottom of a column or statue, or the horizon over the river. Now everything was free.129

But even this incredible transformation did not seem adequate to many artists, especially in the avant-garde. They wanted to feel like the true masters of the former capital, if only for an hour, and play even more boldly with its still majestic and beautiful squares, prospects, palaces, and monuments.

Petrograd was called the Petrograd Labor Commune in those days. The editorial of the first issue in late 1918 of the semiofficial newspaper Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the Commune), whose editor in chief was Akhmatova’s future husband, Punin, was a poem by the futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Orders on the Army of Art.”

Wipe the old from your heart.

The streets are our brushes.

The squares our palettes.

In another poem, which was soon placed in a Communist newspaper, Mayakovsky confidently proclaimed, “A new architect is coming. It is we, the illuminators of tomorrow’s cities.” The radical poet’s declarations were not simply utopian manifestoes; rather, they summed up the fantastic artistic experiments already attempted by the avant-gardists on a citywide scale.

The first grand theatrical demonstration, imitating the legendary festivities of the French Revolution, rolled down the streets of Petrograd on May 1, 1918. Red banners, huge multicolored proclamations, garlands of greenery and flags covered the most important buildings, squares, bridges, and embankments. Giant posters showed soldiers and peasants, painted in bold orange and cinnabar. People’s Commissar Lunacharsky rushed around the city in a car from one mass rally to another.

“It’s easy to celebrate,” he intoned, “when everything is going swimmingly and fortune pats us on the head. But the fact that we, hungry Petrograders, besieged, with enemies within, bearing such a burden of unemployment and suffering on our shoulders, still are celebrating proudly and solemnly—this is our real achievement.”130

At the Winter Palace, renamed by the politically astute Lunacharsky the Palace of the Arts, Mozart’s Requiem was performed for an audience of seven thousand. Many were listening to classical music for the first time, and as Lunacharsky recalled, a small boy in the front row thought that he was in church, sank to his knees, and stayed that way for the entire concert.

Aeroplanes soared overhead. The fleet on the Neva was festooned with thousands of flags. Fireworks blazed in the sky that night and the artillery sounded salutes from the Peter and Paul Fortress. And the memorable celebration ended with a parade of thousands of Petrograd’s firemen in gleaming brass helmets carrying blazing torches—a scene worthy of a new Rembrandt.