Dobychin’s work was an extreme expression of the attempts by some masters of the new Petersburg prose to achieve simplicity and a laconic tone. At the opposite pole was the loquacious surrealist story, “The Ratcatcher,” by Alexander Grin, perhaps the best “mythologized” depiction of Petrograd’s dangerous life in the early 1920s.
Grin, described by his neighbor Shklovsky as being “gloomy and quiet, like a convict in the middle of his term,” also lived in the House of the Arts. Grin rarely left his small, cold room and the denizens of the house quipped that he must have been training his cockroaches. Grin worked furiously on his manuscripts at a kitchen table, jumping up occasionally to pace in order to warm up. Back in February 1914 he had published a visionary story about the destruction of Petersburg by earthquake. There was still half a year before World War I, but Grin’s vivid prose was already painting prophetic pictures of chaos and destruction. Their prophecy was recalled in the horrible days of the German blockade of the city in 1941-1944:
Frozen in place, I saw an abyss opening into the bowels of the earth; people, crumbling walls of buildings, corpses and horses, fell and vanished in the gaping emptiness with the speed of a waterfall. The sundered earth shook…. Blasts like cannon fire roared from every direction; it was the sound of houses falling, flattened to the ground. Following that overwhelming roar came another, growing like an avalanche—the screams of dying Petersburg.
Grin had close ties to the Serapion Brothers in his passion for entertaining and avant-garde fantastic subjects, which he made seem quite plausible through the use of numerous convincing details, both descriptive and psychological. For his “Ratcatcher,” which ostensibly described an incredible event that took place in Petrograd in the spring of 1920, Grin used a real but eerie-looking scene he had observed in the building where he lived. As Mandelstam recalled, “The rooms were underheated, but the building had virgin reserves of fuel: an abandoned bank, around forty empty rooms knee-deep in thick bank cardboard boxes. Anyone could go pick them up, but we didn’t dare, however Shklovsky would sometimes go into those woods and return with his quarry. The fireplace would crackle with mounds of office papers.” Grin regularly accompanied Shklovsky on these expeditions for lifesaving paper for the fire, and he placed the hero of “The Ratcatcher” in the endless corridors and passages filled with paper snowdrifts and made him meet the evil and powerful rats, who could take on human form at will, and who were planning to conquer Petrograd. It was a powerful allegory for the struggle for survival in that quickly emptying and dying city.
The House of the Arts was also the theme of Khodasevich’s memoir, published in the late 1930s in Paris. In describing the Petrograd of the early 1920s he expressed an idea that was very important for understanding the genesis of the new Petersburg prose: “There are people who grow better-looking in the coffin; I think that was the case with Pushkin. Undoubtedly, that was the case with Petersburg. That beauty is temporary, ephemeral. It is followed by the terrible ugliness of decomposition. But in contemplating it there is an inexpressible, thrilling pleasure.” Khodasevich also compared the House of the Arts with “a ship, sailing through darkness, blizzard, and rain.”
Writers had an acute sense of the moment’s historical significance and tried to capture Petersburg’s image in unprecedented transition before it was too late. No other comparably brief period of time—just a few years—in the city’s history had elicited such an upsurge of memoir and quasi memoir that was stylistically and ideologically intertwined.
Shklovsky reminisced about life on the Crazy Ship in his best book of memoirs,
Imagine a strange city.
They don’t distribute firewood. That is, they do somewhere, but a line a thousand people long is waiting and can’t wait long enough. They create red tape to make a person give up and go away. There’s not enough anyway.
And all they give is one bundle.
Tables, chairs, cornices, and butterfly boxes have all been burned.
A friend burned his library. But that is terribly hard. You have to tear the books up and burn the pages in wads.
