St Petersburg полностью

In 1919 two other desperadoes joined Slonimsky and Balanchine’s crowd—Boris Erbstein and Vladimir Dmitriev, who were students of the respected modernist painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Academy of Arts and had studied with Meyerhold. Dmitriev, the oldest in the group, soon became its leader. “That young man was not what you call handsome, but he was pleasant in a feminine way. A maiden’s face with gentle contours. It was that Slavic type that was so highly valued at the slave markets of Baghdad—of course, in the era of Scheherazade and Sinbad the Sailor,” was how the artist Milashevsky described Dmitriev, with some extravagance.92 But Dmitriev’s eyes were steely gray. He spoke little, in a low voice and curt phrases—and one sensed the weight and experience behind every word. It was Dmitriev who brought Stendhal’s De l’Amour to his friends, recommending it as “the higher mathematics of love.” According to Slonimsky, they made Stendahl’s book their bedside reading, having discussed it from cover to cover and constantly checking it against “practice.”

The friends also devoured Stefan Zweig’s melodramatic novellas about love; their favorites were Amok and Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life. Alas, the wild, romantic escapades were mostly imaginary; real-life circumstances were much more prosaic. When Balanchine and Slonimsky dared to take two young women from the graduating class of the ballet school to the theater to see the popular American play Romance, by Edward Sheldon, there was a scandal. The next day the school inspectress, known as “hateful Varvara,” ruthlessly interrogated the young women in front of the rest of the school, accusing them of “depravity.” Balanchine and Slonimsky were declared “seducers of young souls.”93

Dmitriev, Slonimsky, Erbstein, and Balanchine spent almost all their free time together attending the theater, exhibitions, lectures, and all kinds of cultural disputations. Dmitriev commented on everything. He could address Meyerhold as an equal as well as Kuzmin, and the artist Golovin, who was a mentor. Dmitriev spoke proudly of a meeting with Blok, to whom Meyerhold himself had introduced him. Blok, of course, was an idol of Dmitriev’s. Slonimsky recalled how the friends had gone to one of Blok’s final appearances in Petrograd, and on the day of his funeral had been present when the body was brought out of the church. They also walked part of the way to the cemetery.

Dmitriev was an inveterate Petersburger. He could lead his friends around the city for hours, reciting from Gogol’s Petersburg Tales or Dostoyevsky’s novels. Dmitriev frequently recalled The Queen of Spades—both Pushkin’s and Tchaikovsky’s. Later, the scenic design for the opera was perhaps Dmitriev’s best work. I remember virtually shuddering when the curtain rose in the Bolshoi Theater, where The Queen of Spades was performed with Dmitriev’s design until the early 1970s, and saw the gloomy grandeur of a deserted Palace Embankment on a snowy Petersburg night. It was a visual symphony of black, dark blue, white, and gold—an unforgettable landscape by a great master, creating a Dostoyevskian atmosphere subtly enhancing the tragic music.

The year 1922 was the hundredth anniversary of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s death. In Dmitriev’s circle the phrase “Petersburg Hoffmanniade” became popular once again, signifying the phantasmagorical aspects of the city’s mythos, which was so fascinating for these young people. The friends found that eccentric Hoffmann touch in Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and in Meyerhold’s staging of Masquerade. Dmitriev used to bring up Bely’s novel, Petersburg. And then, as if to counter the complicated symbolism of that work, he would recite the precise, severe poems of Akhmatova about Petersburg.

But the main topic of conversation by members of Dmitriev’s group was, of course, ballet in all its aspects. They discussed the stars of the Maryinsky Theater; they spoke most of the ballerina Olga Spessivtseva, with whom Dmitriev was madly in love. She died near New York City in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, and was hailed as perhaps the greatest Giselle in the world. Spessivtseva was a legendary figure in Petersburg in the 1920s. “I saw O. A. Spessivtseva in the box and I was stunned. Do you know who she reminded me of? A heroine out of Maupassant,” wrote young Shostakovich to his friend the composer and future critic Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky.

In 1970 in Leningrad, Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who had become my mentor, recalled,