St Petersburg полностью

At that time people in Petrograd were starving, and basic necessities were lacking. But Mayakovsky zealously supported Zheverzheyev’s idea. At a meeting of the Petrograd Art Collegium, which under the Bolsheviks managed the day-to-day business of the arts, Mayakovsky said that the proposal to publish Markov’s book came “from comrade Zheverzheyev, whom we all know: during the darkest reactionary times, he held the banner of art high.”70 The history of the culture of the twentieth century will note that in 1919 in Petrograd, where the plumbing had frozen, public transportation had stopped, and a horse that had fallen on the street was stripped down to the carcass by hungry citizens, one of the world’s first serious studies of African art, Art of the Negroes, with a cover designed by Altman, was published through the joint efforts of Zheverzheyev, Mayakovsky, and Punin.

A unique and curious child born of the bizarre combination of events in revolutionary Petrograd was propaganda porcelain: dinner services and commemorative plates depicting the slogans and symbols of the new regime, as well as portraits of its leaders. In a period of extreme shortages of many necessities, including paper on occasion, Petrograd’s porcelain factory miraculously discovered large supplies of unpainted plates left over from imperial days.

Russian porcelain production was one of the oldest in Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century it had lost its artistic attractiveness. New ideas in this field, as in others, were presented by members of the Mir iskusstva group, primarily Sergei Chekhonin, an accomplished artist of mousy appearance whom friends called a “lurking mosquito.”

Chekhonin’s imagination blazed after the revolution, when, working in his factory studio, he painted virtuoso renditions of revolutionary appeals on porcelain plates and cups intertwined in intricate designs. This paradox could not exist anywhere but the Petrograd of those years, a hungry city in which exquisite dishes worthy of the most luxurious table were decorated with blunt Communist slogans, rendered with the greatest imagination.

Chekhonin collected a group of innovative artists around him, and the Bolsheviks wisely decided to use that creative potential for their propaganda goals as well as profit. The dinnerware and figurines produced in Petrograd were sold in the West for much-needed hard currency. As a result, Western collections today display the exquisite porcelain plates painted by Chekhonin, Dobuzhinsky, Altman, Kustodiev, and even such avant-garde artists as Malevich and Nikolai Suetin.

Another paradox of that terrible and fantastic era was the proliferation of theaters. Zheverzheyev, who had a wealth of experience as a producer, became the head of a new theater, the Hermitage. He and Meyerhold had come up with the idea of it together. The Hermitage Theater was registered as the forty-fifth in the city; at that time in dark, hungry Petrograd, over forty different productions were available almost every evening.

Zheverzheyev had worked with Meyerhold before, when the latter had produced Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe in Petrograd for the first anniversary of the Communist revolution. Malevich did the scenery. His sketches for Mystery-Bouffe did not survive and they are rarely mentioned now.

Meyerhold had begun experimenting in his studio on Borodinskaya Street in Petrograd, even before the revolution, in the area of “people’s theater,” that is, a theater with mobile troupes that could, theoretically at least, perform on public squares, in the streets, and at fairs. Meyerhold worked with his actors on improvisation and acrobatics and took them to the circus, suggesting that they study with the jugglers. He devoted a lot of attention to pantomime with musical accompaniment, and he always made his students move “on the music,” and not “to the music”—subsequently one of the most important elements of Balanchine’s aesthetics. Among the numerous guests of the studio, the young Sergei Radlov, the dandy and future avant-garde director, stood out. Leaning casually against the door jamb, Radlov closely observed Meyerhold’s experiments.

After the revolution Meyerhold spoke with unfeigned enthusiasm of art for the broad masses. But his proposal to present plays for the mass audience at the Hermitage Theater apparently had not been wholly serious; the charming hall, built in the late eighteenth century and then reconstructed by Carlo Rossi, had only two hundred seats. Plays for the imperial family were staged there, and sometimes its members took part.