St Petersburg полностью

Shklovsky’s evocative, crisp style is typical of the new Petersburg prose. Borrowing his title from his favorite writer, Lawrence Sterne, Shklovsky uses a quotidian voice to speak of the most terrible things. Khodasevich noted that in the face of impending separation with the past, you develop a desire to preserve memories of it as thoroughly as possible. That emotion urged Shklovsky to write stylized, ironic memoirs. Shklovsky’s colleague in Opoyaz, Tynyanov, also a leading theoretician of the formalist school, expressed that feeling of farewell to an era in intense fiction disguised as history, even though it was in fact filled with contemporary allusions.

People of the twenties had a hard death, because the age died before them.

In the thirties they had a certain sense of when a person was to die. Like dogs, they chose a comfortable corner for dying. And they no longer expected either love or friendship before death.

What was friendship? What was love?

They had lost friendship back in the previous decade, and all that was left was the habit of writing letters and appeals for guilty friends—at that time there were many guilty ones.

This excerpt from Tynyanov’s historical novel, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, written in 1927, ostensibly describes the harsh ending of an era after the Decembrist rebellion was crushed in 1825. In fact, of course, he is also talking about the tragic situation one hundred years later, when Tynyanov and his comrades were feeling the iron pressure of Soviet ideology, which constantly sought more “guilty ones” with the inexorability of the Inquisition.

The era of the Crazy Ship was receding into the past. The ship had already sunk by then, and its passengers had scattered—some slipped away to the West, some vanished, destroyed by the Soviet regime, some were in hiding, and some went on working, trying to make sense of the dizzying changes and to preserve their ties with the past. The real fate of the city no longer depended on them, at least that is how the situation must have seemed to them in those trying years, but they were still able to mold its image.

The new Petersburg prose took an active part in the transformation of the Petersburg mythos. The contributions of Mandelstam, Shklovsky, and Tynyanov were the most significant. Mandelstam, according to Akhmatova, “saw Petersburg as semi-Venice, semitheater.” Akhmatova explained that Mandelstam “managed to be the last writer about Petersburg’s mores—precise, vivid, dispassionate, and unique. In his writings the half-forgotten and many times vilified streets reappear in all their freshness.” Undoubtedly, Mandelstam’s Noise of Time influenced the later prose memoirs of Akhmatova and also Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. The Russian émigré press printed many reactions to Mandelstam’s work when it appeared, and O. S. Mirsky noted in 1927 in The London Mercury that Mandelstam’s Petersburg “is crystallized into images of gem-like colour and hardness. It is a book apart, and one of our generation’s greatest contributions to the nation’s literature.”78

In the same article Mirsky called Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey the most representative book of the new Russian literature, drawing readers’ attention to the unbearable but inspired life of intellectuals in dying Petrograd. Shklovsky’s book, first published in Berlin in 1923, also elicited enormous interest among Russian émigrés and became one of the most influential works in the creation of Petersburg’s new image as victim city. And even though Sentimental Journey was later banned in the Soviet Union and not reprinted for over sixty years, the sections on Petrograd were frequently retold and repeated by Shklovsky in his other books, thereby constantly setting the conceptual tone for descriptions of the city in the revolutionary era.

Tynyanov’s role may have been even more substantial. After the revolution, the tsars and tsarinas were sharply criticized, and almost all their actions were pronounced useless or harmful. Petersburg as the creation of the tsars was also undone. One of the innumerable examples of that occurred in the speech of a well-known theoretician of proletarian literature, Vladimir Yermilov: “You know that there was a lot of construction done under the empress Catherine II. But, comrades: compare the scope of construction of Catherine and Peter with the unprecedented scope of the resolution of the Central Committee and the government on socialist Leningrad—and the work of the nobility will seem pathetic, impoverished, and skimpy to us.”79