The acmeists’ identification of Petersburg’s fate with the fate of Russia took on such a declarative character at the time that in Mandelstam’s poetry, for instance, “the symbol of faithfulness to Russia in her misfortune became St. Isaac’s Cathedral,” 142according to Sergei Averintsev, even though the poet disliked that church from a purely architectural point of view.
Thus, the acmeists helped to usher in a new period in the history of the Petersburg mythos, in which the city began to be viewed as martyr. Anything that could be integrated into this mythos was once again—after a hiatus of one hundred years—regarded positively, even if a particular building or statue was not liked. After the
To suffer together with Petersburg became a ritual. Partly because of this sacrificial rite, for the first time in the history of Russian culture Petersburg’s inevitable downfall was interpreted as the first stage of its inexorable resurrection in some new form.
Thus Mandelstam, describing Petersburg’s decay, simultaneously predicts the city’s postapocalyptic existence:
Grass on Petersburg streets—the first runners of a virgin forest, which will cover the place of modern cities. This bright, tender green, amazing in its freshness, belongs to the new animate nature. Truly Petersburg is the most avant-garde city in the world. The race of modernity is not measured by the existence of subway or skyscraper, but by merry grass breaking through the urban stones.
Akhmatova expressed her feelings for the dying Petersburg with even more mystical force:
Akhmatova’s irrational, almost ecstatic sensation that “The miraculous comes so close” to the collapsing dirty buildings of Petersburg is deciphered by Mandelstam: “Nothing is impossible. Like a dying man’s room open to everything, the door of the old world is now wide open to the crowd. Suddenly everything became common property. Go and take. Everything is accessible: all the labyrinths, all the secret places, all the hidden passages.”
In Mandelstam’s poetry of that period, horror and despair at witnessing Petersburg’s convulsions prevail. There is no one to complain to, and the poet must raise his voice to the heavens:
But in Mandelstam’s essay “Word and Culture,” we can find autobiographical lines that cast a different light on current events. “At last we found inner freedom, real inner merriment. We drink water from clay pitchers as if it were wine, and the sun likes a monastery refectory more than a restaurant. Apples, bread, potatoes—they sate not only physical but spiritual hunger.”
The artist Vladimir Milashevsky, a rather cynical observer, gave an ironic commentary to this sort of almost religious frenzy and obsession with cathartic ideas that were so prevalent in postrevolutionary Petrograd: “Meager nourishment and sluggish functions of the physical body affected the psyche. It gave rise to meager, strange, and distorted ideas. In monasteries the monks made a point of eating little, in order to believe more strongly, to have religious visions. ‘I believe! I believe! I believe rapturously!’”143
By the 1920s Petrograd really did resemble a vision of some religious ascetic. We can judge that from a remarkable cycle of lithographs, “Petersburg in 1921,” by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957). That series was Dobuzhinsky’s farewell to the city he loved more than anything else on earth. Later, as an émigré in the West, the artist would recall, “The city was dying before my very eyes with a death of incredible beauty, and I tried to capture as best I could its terrible, deserted, and wounded look.”144
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