St Petersburg полностью

In Petrograd in 1916 perhaps it wasn’t. But in New York in the second half of the century, it became very important indeed—to remember and tell others, with delight and nostalgia. Balanchine in America, along with the Russian émigrés Igor Stravinsky and Vladimir Nabokov, created a powerful mythos of Petersburg: the New Atlantis that sank beneath the sea in the stormy twentieth century. The mythos, which eventually flourished in the West, was basically musical and balletic at its roots. In Europe it was initially planted right after the Bolshevik revolution by Diaghilev and his colleagues, of the formerly influential art group Mir iskusstva.

The intertwining of the Petersburg mythos with music and ballet was, of course, no accident. Alexander Benois of Mir iskusstva had maintained that Petersburg’s soul could be made manifest only through music. He added that the musicality of the Russian capital “seems to be encapsulated in the very humidity of the atmosphere.” Petersburg’s “theatricality” was considered just as organic. It could be seen as a magical consequence of the city’s architecture.

It was noted long ago that the architectural ensembles of Petersburg resemble stage scenery in their majesty. In 1843 the splenetic Marquis de Custine informed the civilized world, “At each step I take I am amazed to observe the confusion that has been everywhere wrought in this city between two arts so very different as those of architecture and decoration. Peter the Great and his successors seem to have taken their capital for a theatre.”3

The sharp-tongued marquis cut to the essence of the problem. Peter the Great had founded Petersburg with a dramatic gesture, and it is not surprising that his theatricality remained with the city forever.

From an architectural standpoint, one of the main reasons for Petersburg’s beauty is that its buildings are stylistically unified throughout many parts of the city. In that respect the Russian capital differed radically from other great cities, which developed gradually over centuries. The comparative suddenness of the Russian imperial capital’s appearance also added to the dramatic sensation.

The city’s inhabitants were aware of that effect. In one of the first Russian historical novels, Roslavlev, or the Russians in 1812, written by Mikhail Zagoskin in 1831, the hero, arguing with a French diplomat in Petersburg, exclaims proudly, “Look around you! Tell me, did your ancestors build over the many centuries what we have erected in the course of one? Doesn’t it remind you of a quick change of scenery in your Paris opera, this appearance of magnificent Petersburg among impassable swamps and deserted northern expanses?”4

At the start of the twentieth century, the theater metaphor was taken to an extreme by the members of Mir iskusstva. For Benois, the resemblance of Petersburg’s architecture to scenery was so incontrovertible that he traced its existence to the effects of theater performances: “After the Russian people received such pleasure for the brief span of an evening theater spectacle, they felt it necessary to immortalize it in constructions of stone and bronze.”5

Petersburg for the Mir iskusstva crowd, who in a typically Petersburgian mix were imperially oriented though politically liberal, was a gigantic stage, “the arena of mass, state, and communal movements.”6 “Street theater” (in the words of Benois) was constantly taking place there: stunning parades, solemn, pompous funeral processions, ritualistic public dishonoring of criminals. Even the changing seasons for Benois and company were “theatrically effective”; after the sudden, “violent” spring, which Stravinsky recalled at the end of his life as “the most wonderful event of every year of my childhood,”7 came resplendent summer, then dramatic autumn led in terrifying winter.

Benois stressed yet another Petersburg tradition that had a theatrical aspect: “In the winter months, the Petersburg ‘season’ flourished—theaters played, balls were given, the main holidays were celebrated—Christmas, Epiphany, Mardi Gras. The winter in Petersburg was always harsh and severe, but in Petersburg people learned as nowhere else to turn it into something pleasant and splendid.”8

The opera and ballet, both foreign flowers that had been transplanted in Russian soil in the first half of the eighteenth century and then quickly flourished, were the high points of the Petersburg season. In 1791 a Russian critic still had to justify ballet: “This art is not as vain as many imagine,”9 but fewer than fifty years later Gogol in his article “The Petersburg Stage in 1835-36” was proclaiming, “The ballet and opera have completely conquered our stage. The public listens only to opera and watches only the ballet; the public talks only about opera and ballet. Thus it is extremely difficult to obtain tickets for the opera and ballet.”