St Petersburg полностью

In his production Diaghilev restored Petipa’s choreography, which Stravinsky remembered from his childhood. The first performance little Igor ever saw at the Maryinsky Theater was Sleeping Beauty. The ballet delighted the boy, and his devotion to classical dance, in which the mature Stravinsky saw “the triumph of studied conception over vagueness, of the rule over the arbitrary, of order over the haphazard,” never left him.133 (It was this production that also converted Benois, Levinson and Balanchine to the “ballet faith.”) Neoclassical Stravinsky openly proclaimed his “profound admiration for classical ballet, which in its very essence, by the beauty of its ordonnance and the aristocratic austerity of its forms, so closely corresponds with my conception of art.”134

Inspired in part by his work on Sleeping Beauty, Stravinsky wrote his own “Petersburg” one-act opera bouffe, Mavra, in 1921, based on Pushkin’s comic narrative poem “The Little House in Kolomna” and dedicated to “the memory of Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky.” It was a demonstrative act in relation to the West and the East. In Europe none of the three dedicatees were in especially high esteem. In Communist Russia their names were in fact surrounded by a negative aura just then. Pushkin and Glinka were considered monarchists, and Tchaikovsky was dubbed a pessimist and mystic, hostile to proletarian audiences.

Stravinsky, who a few years later would be called by Moscow a “mystic who moved to bestial fascism,” knew all that, of course. But Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky symbolized Petersburg culture to him, and as he strongly felt aesthetic and ethical ties to that culture, he intended to promote it in western Europe. However, his attempts were not overly successful with the Western intellectual elite. The classically oriented art of his Petersburg idols was considered by many in the European capitals as being too traditional. The efforts of Diaghilev did not help, either. His production of Sleeping Beauty in London and its next version, shown in Paris, were both commercial failures.

Purely aesthetic reasons aside, an important role was played by the general political and intellectual climate of the times. The Bolsheviks had won the civil war decisively, and the pragmatic Western politicians began to see Communist Russia as an inevitable and formidable reality. As a result Russian émigrés in Europe began to seem a nuisance. And the avant-garde elite of London and Paris, disillusioned by capitalism, were attracted by Communist ideas. In these conditions all attempts to inculcate Petersburg aesthetics and values on European soil seemed doomed to failure, since they appeared hopelessly obsolete.

Vladimir Nabokov, born in Petersburg in 1899 when it was still the capital of the Russian Empire, exemplifies the cultural hardships of surviving emigration. His father, a prominent Cadet political figure, was expected by some to become minister of culture, after the tsar was deposed. Instead, Nabokov Senior died in Berlin in 1922, shielding the provisional government’s former minister of foreign affairs, his political mentor, from the bullets of right-wing assassins. Young Vladimir made his debut as a poet in Petrograd, but his real literary career developed after he emigrated, in 1919.

Nabokov’s poetic attempts, although not without their admirers, were not up to the level of Tsvetayeva or Khodasevich, who also emigrated, or even of such minor masters as Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov, who had belonged to the acmeists in Petersburg and went on to create the so-called “Paris note” school. But Nabokov’s Russian prose immediately put him in the front ranks, right next to the acknowledged master of émigré literature, Bunin.

In the first twenty-odd years of his European émigré life, Nabokov published some important works, and his experimental novels—Luzhin’s Defense (1930), Despair (1936), Invitation to a Beheading (1938), and The Gift (1938), in which one finds similarities to Proust, Joyce, and Kafka—marked the appearance on the international scene of a Petersburg brand of literary modernism.

Bely’s Petersburg is mentioned most frequently as a precursor to Nabokov, but his work also owes much to the prose of Pushkin and Gogol and the poetry of Blok and the acmeists. The world of exaggerated Petersburg theatricality triumphs in Nabokov’s novels; their refined style, playful inventiveness, and existential significance were evidence of the birth of a great talent. Still, the establishment of London and Paris were in no hurry to recognize Nabokov. Often they refused to translate and publish him simply because he was a refugee from the Bolsheviks, and therefore—in the eyes of the leftist Western intelligentsia—a reactionary.