St Petersburg полностью

The question does not arise here of which path was preferable and more in keeping with the spirit of Petersburg. Even far from his home town, Stravinsky, like Balanchine and Nabokov, remained true to it. On the other hand, some of the compromises Shostakovich was forced to make caused him to be criticized for violating Petersburg’s stringent ethical norms. It is important to emphasize that having gone through the Petersburg school, a talent could develop and realize itself both in Russia and beyond its borders. Besides the sense of belonging to a glorious tradition, this school imparted a solid grounding of craftsmanship, professional curiosity, restrained irony, and nostalgia without sentimentality.

The city in which Shostakovich grew up was wide open to the temptations of modern culture. In art, literature, and theater, avant-garde influences from the West cross-pollinated with bold native attempts. In 1923 the first research center in the world for the avant-garde was founded in Petrograd, the State Institute of Arts Culture (GINKHUK). Its director was Casimir Malevich, who had moved to Petrograd from Moscow and continued to develop his visionary suprematist ideas; the institute’s departments were headed by Matyushin, Punin, and Malevich’s eternal rival, Vladimir Tatlin.

In 1923 at GINKHUK Tatlin produced a play based on Zangezi, a “zaumny” (“non-sensical”) dramatic poem by the futurist poet Khlebnikov. In Petrograd, Tatlin also created the much discussed Monument to the Third International: he planned for a gigantic metal spiral (he intended it to be four hundred meters tall) to straddle the Neva River in the middle of the city, like the mast of a huge sailing ship or Utopian spaceship. This bold symbol for the new Petrograd was supposed to have replaced the Bronze Horseman, but it was never built and remained but a model that teased the imagination, delighting Punin and his friends. They already viewed Petrograd as the capital of the international avant-garde movement.

In the twenties Petrograd-Leningrad was visited by many leading modern composers of the West. The most important was Alban Berg, who came to see his opera Wozzeck in 1927. Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Alfredo Casella, and the émigré Prokofiev came to perform. Igor Stravinsky did not show up then, but his works were regularly performed in Leningrad at that time. We know that Shostakovich heard many of Stravinsky’s works, including Renard, Song of the Nightingale, Histoire du soldat, and the opera Mavra, and that he had taken part in the Leningrad premiere of Les Noces in 1926, as the second piano player (Yudina played first piano). Shostakovich also played Stravinsky’s Serenade in A and his piano concerto, which, he said, he sometimes imagined that he himself had composed.

One of Shostakovich’s most influential advisers after he graduated from the conservatory was the inveterate modernist music critic, Boris Asafyev. Asafyev spoke in a soft, hypnotic voice, but his erudite articles, published under the pen name Igor Glebov, silenced his opponents. He was a dedicated proselytizer of avant-garde music in Leningrad. Glazunov considered Asafyev not without justification as the main reason that modernist works were constantly being performed at the city’s two opera houses and the philharmonic. A musician from the hostile camp fumed,

Just look at Asafyev’s subtle tactics: first as the critic Igor Glebov he publishes a detailed article in the newspaper praising and advertising a new decadent work, unknown to anyone; then as artistic consultant to both theaters and to the philharmonic, Asafyev makes sure it is performed. And finally, once again as critic Igor Glebov, he hails that performance in print, handing out medals and honors to absolutely everyone involved. Now, how could the conductors resist?

Asafyev headed the music department at the Institute of the History of the Arts, a research institute founded before the revolution by Count Valentin Zubov, called “the red count” because he cooperated with the Bolsheviks and voluntarily gave them his luxurious town house on St. Isaac’s Square. The institute attracted some of the most brilliant minds of the Opoyaz association for its literature department: Tynyanov, Eikhenbaum, and Tomashevsky. Work was in full swing in the Zubov House; people from all over the city came to hear the eloquent lecturers who proposed new ideas on the cutting edge of modern cultural theory. The theater department, where the idol was Meyerhold, created radical new conceptions of the interaction between actors and audience. Under the institute’s aegis, there were concerts and exhibitions, evenings devoted to playing and discussing the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud, and Satie. Sofronitsky played Scriabin; Yudina and Steinberg gave a recital in memory of Dante. Shostakovich attended these concerts regularly.