By the time a lavish celebration for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution was decided a few months later, there were already some attempts to push aside Petrograd’s avant-garde artists. So for this occasion Lunacharsky handed out commissions to a group of some 170 artists, sculptors, and architects, among whom were many traditionalists. But the avant-garde painter Nathan Altman, for instance, still got permission to redesign Palace Square (renamed Uritsky Square, in memory of the recently assassinated prominent Bolshevik), and that symbol of the former monarchy, the Winter Palace, standing on it.
In 1966, Altman told me that he had passionately wanted to turn the square into a huge open-air auditorium, where the revolutionary crowd could at last feel at home. For that he had to “destroy the imperial grandeur of the square.”131 On the palace and other buildings around the square, Altman hung enormous propaganda posters, depicting the “new hegemonic forces”—gigantic workers and peasants. In the center of the square, near the Alexander Column, he placed a rostrum made up of bright red and orange surfaces, which in the evening light created the feeling of a wild cubist flame. This avant-garde rostrum seemed to be blowing up the the Alexander Column, which Altman associated with the old order.
In comparable fashion the avant-garde artists transformed the Hermitage, the Admiralty, the Academy of Sciences, and many other historic buildings of old Petersburg. When I asked Altman in 1966 where he got the material—the panels alone required tens of thousands of meters of canvas—the artist, smiling enigmatically, replied, “They didn’t skimp back then.”
This bold, lavish experiment in ruined Petrograd opened a new page in the history of urban design. But the hungry masses were angered by the “Futurist showings off” of the leftist artists. A contemporary wrote, “Alien and uncomprehending columns of demonstrators walked past the red and black sails thrown onto the Police Bridge by the artist Lebedev, past green canvases and orange curves which covered the boulevard and the column on Palace Square at Altman’s whim, past fantastically deformed figures with hammers and rifles on Petrograd buildings.”132
Even the workers, who supported the Bolsheviks, vaguely felt that Petrograd was being subjected to some sort of ideological violence. For locals the modernist experiments with the city’s squares and palaces in November 1918 did not differ in the least from another mockery carried out that same November of the historical values of the former capital.
Several thousand participants had come to Petrograd for the Congress of Committees of Peasants, and many of them were housed at the Palace of the Arts. When they left after the debates, it was discovered that all the bathtubs of the palace—the official residence of the imperial family before the revolution—and an enormous number of Sevres, Saxon, and Oriental vases of museum quality had been filled with excrement.
Outraged by the contempt of the country’s new masters for its cultural heritage, Maxim Gorky conveyed the shock of the Petrograd intelligentsia: “This was done not out of need—the toilets in the palace were fine and the plumbing worked. No, this hooliganism was an expression of the desire to break, destroy, mock, and spoil beauty.”133
So Petrograd literature rushed to defend the city’s cultural heritage as if it had suddenly sensed the fatal threat to its roots. Music and art had done it first, of course. Predicting the coming cataclysms, Tchaikovsky’s symphonies bewailed the great city in the nineteenth century. Benois and his companions in
I should stress once more that many leading symbolists grew up influenced heavily by Slavophile ideas. So while radically rethinking some of Gogol and Dostoyevsky’s heritage, the literary symbolists remained much more under the influence of their Slavophile ideology than the Russian artists of the turn of the century.
