Yuri Tynyanov gave a sympathetic review to the anthology of the Serapion Brothers, published in 1922, noting “the decline of the poetic wave.” “Prose must soon take the place that just recently had belonged exclusively to poetry.” In fact, a boom in prose came quickly, and it resulted in a phenomenon I call the “new Petersburg prose,” a term I am introducing to distinguish the “new” from the “old,” which was created in the nineteenth century.
At the turn of the century poetry was decisively ahead of prose, and the leading literary figures were all poets. Prose came into its own in the first half of the 1920s, pulling both poets and theoreticians of literature into its orbit. I call it “Petersburg” not only out of geographic considerations but also because one of its main themes was the city of Petersburg-Leningrad, old and new. It measured itself against the old Petersburg masters, their motifs and symbols, and distorted and parodied them.
It was a powerful movement that yielded more than one masterpiece. Yet it was never gathered under a single literary umbrella. But almost all the creators of the new Petersburg prose knew one another and read and learned from one another. Many even shared the same roof, since they lived at or regularly visited the House of the Arts, founded by Maxim Gorky to bolster the Petrograd intelligentsia, who were dying out from hunger and cold. Before the revolution the enormous dark red building at the intersection of Nevsky Prospect and the Moika River had housed a major bank, the luxurious quarters of the Petersburg millionaire Eliseyev, and also the English Shop, visits to which are described in
It was at the House of the Arts that the Serapion Brothers group was born. There lived the poets Khodasevich and Mandelstam, the ballet critic Volynsky, the literary theoretician Shklovsky, and the writer Olga Forsh, who described the house as a “crazy ship.” This was the title of her experimental roman à clef (even the modern Shklovsky found it “unbalanced”), which compared life in the city to a stormy sea, where the Petrograd Noah’s Ark was buffeted by the powerful waves: “It seemed that the house was not a house at all, but a ship that appeared out of nowhere and was speeding somewhere.” Forsh’s vigorously written book was not made up of traditional chapters but instead was divided into “The First Wave,” “The Second Wave,” and so on up to the ninth, which “washed away” the last refuge of the writers and poets, banned by Petrograd boss Zinoviev.
The ship metaphor, which for a time seemed to have replaced the bronze horseman, was popular in the new Petersburg prose. One of its founders and masters, Zamyatin, began his short story “Mamai,” which was published in 1921 in the
In the evenings and at night, there were no more buildings in Petersburg: there were six-story stone ships. A ship speeds along the stone waves, a solitary six-story world, amid other solitary six-story ships; the ship sparkles with the lights of its innumerable cabins onto the stormy stone ocean of streets. And in the cabins there are no residents, there are only passengers.
The whole city seemed to be a huge ship that had broken away from its anchor and with its desperate passengers was being pulled by an overpowering current to its doom. Mandelstam wrote these apocalyptic lines in that period:
This poem, like many others in those years comparing the former capital to a ship, is undoubtedly tied to the ancient image of the “ship of the dead,” which is how its inhabitants perceived their city. That ship wandered between sunrise and sunset, birth and death. Another traditional image was combined with it—the flood. An ark floating between life and death gave hope for a future rebirth—an important theme of Mandelstam’s poetry and prose about Petersburg.
Mandelstam was one of the strangest and most colorful passengers of the Crazy Ship; according to Shklovsky, “he grazed like a lamb around the building, seeking shelter in the rooms like Homer.” Because he was short and his literary style so imposing, the residents of the House of the Arts called Mandelstam “the marble fly.” In turn, he called Shklovsky the “merry cobbler” because he liked to sing while he worked (and more stingingly, “the professor from the high road,” apparently because of Shklovsky’s strident polemics). Mandelstam saw Zoshchenko almost daily in that period because the latter almost never left the House of the Arts, the cradle of the new Petersburg prose. The atmosphere on the Crazy Ship was aptly described by Annenkov:
