St Petersburg полностью

The terrible flooding of Leningrad in September 1924 was seen by many as a punishment for the name change. Olga Freidenberg, the poet Boris Pasternak’s cousin, recalled, “The city was turning into a vessel. The water rose from the bottom up to the sky. We stood by the window and watched floors of buildings disappear. Even though our apartment was on the fourth floor, the terror we felt is impossible to describe.”8 Veniamin Kaverin described the foreboding of Leningraders when suddenly “the water imposed chaos and a silence unknown in the city from the days of its founding. When the lights went out in all the houses. And the signal cannon boomed every three minutes. When the schismatics, trapped at the common graves on the Field of Mars prayed loudly, rejoicing that at last the time had come for the destruction of the city, built by the Antichrist on the swamps.”9

Shostakovich hastily informed his Moscow friend, the pianist and composer Lev Oborin, that “the city, especially the Petrograd Side and Vasilyevsky Island, are badly damaged. Huge boats lie on their sides on the embankments. It’ll take colossal amounts of money to clean it all up. Lots of valuable sets and scenery were soaked and washed away from the Maryinsky Theater. Lots of animals perished in the zoo and the botanical gardens are totally destroyed. It’s a disaster.”10

Pasternak immediately pointed out the historical and poetic parallels: “A strange coincidence. It’s exactly the hundredth anniversary of the flood that was the basis of The Bronze Horseman.”11 The famous flood of November 7, 1824, had given rise to numerous symbolic and mystical interpretations. The fact that Alexander I died almost exactly a year after it was a favorite point. In 1924 rumors connected the flood with Lenin’s death and the subsequent renaming of the city. Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman was more popular than ever.

Just a half century before that, the attitude toward The Bronze Horseman was much more ambivalent. Pushkin’s status as the national poet was in doubt, under direct attack from the nihilists. They criticized The Bronze Horseman, which according to the radical guru Chernyshevsky, had “no characters, only pictures.”

That makes it all the more noteworthy that in 1863 the nineteen-year-old coast guardsman Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov used The Bronze Horseman as an example in the arts in a letter to his mother, sent to Petersburg from aboard the clipper Almaz while cruising the Baltic Sea. He had started his first symphony and commented,

As for whether the public will like my symphony, I can tell you that it will not. It’s tricky for a decent work to please the audience. There are exceptions, but they are due to effective orchestration and a more or less dance rhythm, like, for instance, Glinka’s Jota aragonesa. It combines both prerequisites, but I doubt that the audience appreciates its true beauty. That is also the situation with my symphony.12

These lines show many characteristics of the young Rimsky-Korsakov, scion of a noble family, whose father was a highly placed official under Nicholas I and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were admirals in the Russian Navy. They evince his confidence in his talent, his direct nature, common sense, rational approach to art, tendency toward a technical analysis of music, and even his love of Glinka. Most interesting, two of the most popular works by Rimsky-Korsakov in the West, the symphonic show pieces Capriccio espagnol (1887) and Scheherazade ( 1888 ), are in fact orchestrated most effectively and propelled by a strong rhythm, particularly Capriccio. The orchestral innovations of these works were used by the French: Debussy, Ravel, and Paul Dukas.

In Russia, Rimsky-Korsakov is particularly revered for his fifteen operas (as many as Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky wrote together); the most popular are the touching fairy tale The Snow Maiden (1880-1881); the vivid and melodic Sadko (1894-1896), based on an old Russian epic; and the entertaining and dramatic Tsar’s Bride (1898). His lofty The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1903-1904) is considered a masterpiece of Russian spiritual music; its mystical revelations are all the more astonishing because the composer was an agnostic. Now, as before the revolution, Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic overture Svetly prazdnik (Easter Overture) is played during the Easter holidays, a musical interpretation, the author explained, of the transition “from the dark and mysterious night of Holy Saturday to the unfettered pagan-religious merriment of the morning of Easter Sunday.”13