St Petersburg полностью

Dobuzhinsky’s contemporaries had noticed early on that alongside the Petersburg of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky in literature appeared “Dobuzhinsky’s Petersburg” in the visual arts. “When they looked at a foggy sunset in London, people said, like Oscar Wilde, that it was ‘a Turner sunset,’ and when they looked at the blind stone backs of Petersburg buildings, they saw ‘Dobuzhinsky walls.’ It was as if we were given different eyes for some objects, different glasses.”146

Akhmatova once wrote that she observed her beloved city “with the curiosity of a foreigner.” Dobuzhinsky’s friend Milashevsky found something comparable in the artist’s Petersburg works. “Dobuzhinsky has the feeling of a man seeing Petersburg for the first time. You have to be born elsewhere to see it in all its strangeness. Dobuzhinsky was not born in Petersburg like Somov, Benois, or Blok; he saw it for the first time as a young man and then as an adult artist. But Petersburg became the hometown of his soul.”147

Dobuzhinsky readily admitted how enormously Dostoyevsky had influenced his artistic vision of Petersburg. It is through the prism of Dostoyevsky that Dobuzhinsky first saw the imperial capital, and so he started to capture its “nonimperial” aspects—the outskirts, dimly lit, empty, and sad. In Dobuzhinsky’s work, Petersburg’s walls, roofs, and chimneys formed fantastic landscapes filled with anxiety and anticipation.

Dobuzhinsky expressed his admiration for Dostoyevsky by illustrating his White Nights, which the writer had subtitled A Sentimental Novel. The seventeen stark, transparent drawings Dobuzhinsky did for White Nights in the early 1920s are his masterpiece. The exquisite drawings, with their sensitive contrasts of black and white, creating an atmosphere of quiet despair, can easily be called the best illustrations of Dostoyevsky. At the same time, they create probably the most inspired visual paean to Petersburg in all of Russian art. In that sense, Dobuzhinsky’s series still has no rivals in Russian culture.

His album of lithographs, “Petersburg in 1921,” is another incomparable document capturing the tragedy of the former capital. The artist fixes the city’s farewell with Western civilization, which Akhmatova expressed in poetry in those same years:

In the West the winter sun still shines

And rooftops still glitter in its rays,

While here death covers houses with crosses

And calls the ravens, and the ravens come.

It is hard to imagine the shock Dobuzhinsky, usually slow to action and regally calm, so in love with Petersburg, must have experienced to give in to the hardships and humiliations of postrevolutionary life, pack his bags, and emigrate to the West while it was still possible, leaving behind forever the city and his friends, among them Akhmatova, and dying eventually, a heartbroken old man, in New York City.

In late 1920 and early 1921 decrees were issued in Petrograd eliminating fares on public transportation and admission to the steam baths and making apartments, water, and electricity free for residents. The problem was that the trolleys rarely ran then, the water froze, and washing at home, much less at the baths, was rare. Money didn’t mean anything anyway, because there was nothing to buy. Food was distributed in ration parcels at work.

People who were not employed in factories or Soviet offices received a bread ration of half a pound a day, which was called “hunger rations.” In order to survive, intellectuals started “ration hunting,” finding parcels wherever they could.

The artist Yuri Annenkov, who drew the very successful cubist illustrations for the first edition of Blok’s The Twelve, became the champion ration hunter. As a professor in the reorganized Academy of Arts, he received “scholar’s rations,” and as a founder of the cultural and educational studio for militiamen, he got their parcel, too. Annenkov found a job there for Dobuzhinsky, who lectured the militia on the Petersburg architectural monuments they were supposed to guard. Lecturing sailors guaranteed Annenkov the “special” rations parcel of the Baltic fleet. (The archives contain the topics of lectures sanctioned by the Bolsheviks for sailors in the winter of 1920: “The Origins of Man,” “Italian Painting,” “Mores and Life in Austria.”148) But the most generous rations—for a breast-feeding mother—were given to Annenkov at the Maternity Center, now called the Rosa Luxemburg Drops of Milk, for lecturing the midwives on the history of sculpture.