St Petersburg полностью

For the authorities, the main criterion separating good cultural fellow travelers from bad ones was the acceptance or rejection of the social commission, that is, the readiness to fulfill “in high-quality artistic form” the current needs of the ideological apparatus. Silence or work “for the desk drawer,” in the Russian expression, were regarded in these circumstances as hostile acts—and were punished accordingly. For many talented and honest intellectuals, the question was, how does one reconcile the conditions of the state’s “social commission” with the demands of creative conscience?

Making his way in the artistic ferment of Leningrad in the twenties, the sensitive and impressionable Shostakovich could observe the innumerable variations of that deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the authorities. His genius was threatened from two sides: it could be stifled while still in its infancy by the state, but it could also be corroded and gradually dissipate as the result of a multitude of small compromises, or one big one, with the authorities. There were more than enough models for both kinds of behavior. Shostakovich chose the course of survival, but not at any cost.

He was in luck: RAPM greeted “Dedication to October” with enthusiasm and embraced the composer. (The modernists were also delighted by Shostakovich’s Second Symphony.) Asafyev tried to persuade Shostakovich to write an opera, because Berg’s Wozzeck, which had come to Leningrad thanks to Asafyev’s efforts, had made an indelible impression on the young composer. After an intensive search for a subject, Shostakovich settled on Gogol’s The Nose, from his cycle of Petersburg tales.

Written in two and a half months, The Nose became the early Shostakovich’s most “Petersburg” composition. Created at a critical moment in the development of the Petersburg mythos, The Nose seemed to sum up the contemporary efforts to destroy that mythos and simultaneously feel around for a path to its continued development. When The Nose was performed in Leningrad in 1930, one critic called it “an anarchist’s hand grenade.” The opera did go off at the height of official efforts to obliterate the mythos. An army of cultural workers was needed for that campaign, but the anarchist Shostakovich slipped from their ranks.

In 1921 the Petrograd journal Dom Iskusstv (House of the Arts) printed an article by Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled “I am Afraid,” which caused a great stir. He openly declared that the Soviet regime was stifling Russian literature, encouraging accommodating hacks and forcing honest writers to be silent. “Real literature can exist only where it is done not by obedient and dependable clerks, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.”

Zamyatin’s passionate protest made an even greater impact because it came from an author loyal to the revolution (he had at one time been a member of the Bolshevik Party) and who was respected for his independence. His incorruptibility was well known in Petrograd. “Fastidious and restrained, he never made a single gesture that resembled kowtowing…. So many writers could, by comparing their behavior with that of Zamyatin, determine unerringly the degree of their deviation from the true and straight path.”66

It was said that Zamyatin carved his works as if out of ivory, weighing and polishing every word, neatly creating a composition that in its mosaic and geometric shape resembled, as D. S. Mirsky pointed out, a cubist canvas. That is the way Zamyatin wrote the symbolic story “The Cave,” in which reviewers saw a requiem for the intellectual dwellers of old Petersburg, doomed to destruction in the grim conditions of the early postrevolutionary years.

The general background of the story is the dying, frozen Petrograd, returned to the Ice Age (by whom? by what?—let the reader decide), and against it, the barely moving shadows of half-dead cultural figures…. The impression is chilling and oppressive. Yes. This is how the intellectual, chilled to the bone by the severe weather of the times, died out in the struggle with the elements.67