St Petersburg полностью

Even Benois and Diaghilev’s comrades at Mir iskusstva— Merezhkovsky and his wife, Hippius—did not go beyond what Gogol had begun and Dostoyevsky had developed in their attitude toward Petersburg. Hippius wrote skillful poetry and Merezhkovsky full-blown entertaining historical novels that were very popular (among them the eloquently named Antichrist, subtitled “Peter and Alexei,” dealing specifically with Peter the Great), and whose contents, despite all pseudo-philosophical trappings, could be easily reduced to the forthright conclusion by Dostoyevsky that Petersburg was an alien phenomenon in Russia and therefore doomed to destruction. “SanktPeterburg will stand empty!” In the amusing middle-brow interpretation this old curse had turned into an ideological cliché.

A much more ambitious and significant attack on the imperial capital was the novel Petersburg, written by the symbolist Andrei Bely, who was born in Moscow in 1880 and died there in 1934. This monumental work, finished in its first version in 1913, is unquestionably the peak of Russian symbolist prose. Nabokov held Bely’s Petersburg on a par with Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, an opinion shared by many specialists.

Bely’s attitude toward Petersburg is profoundly negative, and in that sense he is a faithful adherent to the Gogol-Nekrasov-Dostoyevsky tradition. “Europe’s culture was imagined by the Russians; the West has civilization; there is no Western culture in our sense of the word; such culture in embryonic form exists only in Russia.” Such Slavophile passages are not unusual in the Muscovite Bely’s writing. Therefore Bely’s admission, made in a letter to his friend the Petersburger Blok, should not surprise us: “In Petersburg I am a tourist, an observer, not an inhabitant.”134

The fact that the most famous modernist text about Petersburg belongs to a Muscovite is paradoxical only at first glance, for the essence of Bely’s Petersburg, no matter how one turns it or interprets it, consists of artistically humiliating and philosophically destroying the “illegal” capital. No wonder Bunin irritatedly rejected Bely’s novel. “What a vile idea the book has—‘Petersburg will stand empty.’ What did Petersburg ever do to him?”135 And Akhmatova in her later years often said, “The novel Petersburg for us Petersburgers is so unlike the real Petersburg.”

One of the impulses for writing the novel came to Bely with the unveiling in Petersburg on May 23, 1909, of the equine statue of Emperor Alexander III on Znamenskaya Square. Created by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoy (1866-1938), who was born in Italy of an American mother and was the scion of one of the noblest Russian families, the monument caused a storm of controversy. It presented the heavy, gloomy emperor sitting on a stolid draft horse.

Many saw a political caricature in that statue, but Trubetskoy, who was famous for never reading books or newspapers and didn’t know a word of Russian, replied to the question, “What is the idea of your monument?” with, “I don’t care about politics. I simply depicted one animal on another.”

To general amazement, the widow of Alexander III, Maria Fyodorovna, supported the project, since she believed the statue greatly resembled her late husband, and her son, Nicholas II, was forced to agree. As soon as the monument was erected, jokes began circulating around Petersburg. One ditty went as follows:

On the square stands a commode,

On the commode, a behemoth,

On the behemoth, an idiot.

The ill-starred statue annoyed Nicholas so much that he wanted to move it to the Siberian city of Irkutsk but gave up the idea when he was told the latest bon mot going around town—the sovereign wanted to exile his father to Siberia. Ironically, the Soviets fulfilled the last Russian emperor’s wish. In 1937 Trubetskoy’s work was removed from its pedestal and exiled not to Siberia but to the backyard of the Russian (formerly, Alexander III) Museum.

Whenever I went through the museum, I always stopped at one of its big windows to look out at the monstrously heavy silhouette of the rider and horse, which was such a contrast to Falconet’s Bronze Horseman. This contrast was felt even more acutely in 1909. In this respect Trubetskoy’s monument was for many viewers, including Bely, just another proof of the dead end into which Peter the Great had led Russia. (In 1994 this equestrian statue at last found a home—erected not on its former site, but in front of one of the palaces of St. Petersburg.)