St Petersburg полностью

The reigning formula then was “history is politics turned on the past,” and consequently the sole task of historical prose was to be the direct proof of the legitimacy of the Bolshevik revolution. Before it conditions in the country were so bad that the only way out was the overthrow of the ancien régime, with the consequent destruction of all its roots. Dozens of Soviet historical works can be reduced to this simpleminded thesis.

Tynyanov ostensibly accepted this paradigm but used it in his work in an unexpected way. He was one of the first Soviet writers to use historical prose effectively to create anti-Bolshevik allusions. His story “Lieutenant Kije,” based on a true incident from the days of Emperor Paul I about a nonexistent officer created by a clerical error who successfully rose up the army ladder while a live man accidently listed as dead lost the right to exist, turns this anecdote into an allegory of life in Stalinist Russia, where the bureaucratic document became more important than the individual. In The Waxen Effigy, published by Tynyanov in 1932, the parallel was clear between his description of the wax figure of Peter the Great being installed in the Petersburg Kunstkamera in 1732 and the placing of Lenin’s mummified body in a special mausoleum by the Bolsheviks. In Tynyanov’s novella, Peter’s comrades betray his ideas immediately after the emperor’s death, the harsh lifestyle dehumanizes the people, and denunciations and torture reign across the land. For the careful reader, these hints were very clear.

A Leningrader wrote, “Tynyanov’s books, which appeared every few years, were read by the intelligentsia eagerly and anxiously.”80 Nikolai Chukovsky, the son of Kornei Chukovsky, felt as did many others that Tynyanov’s main theme was the clash of Russian statehood with the individual trying to protect his dignity and rights, that is, the theme of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. He recalled that Tynyanov’s “stories about the past agitated contemporaries more than stories by others about the present, because the Bronze Horseman was still galloping after the fleeing Yevgeny and with every year the ringing hoofbeats sounded louder along the stunned cobblestones.”81

Tynyanov’s heroes were not one-dimensional political caricatures. Tynyanov, who died in 1943 at the age of 49 after a twelve-year struggle with what must have been Alzheimer’s disease, was a writer with a virtuoso literary technique who drew on his knowledge of historical material. As demanding a critic as Dobychin considered Tynyanov a great master.

In Leningrad’s cultural circles the cult of mastery and craftsmanship still reigned. That cult was characteristic of the new Petersburg prose as well. Surprisingly, the regime accepted this for a time. The censors passed Tynyanov’s barely veiled historical allegories. Proletarian writers pretended that Zoshchenko’s stories (which Russian émigrés reprinted with delight as satirical depictions of the collapse of morality under the Bolsheviks) were close in spirit to proletarian literature. This created a special cultural climate in Leningrad that allowed some exotic plants to flourish. Among them was Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, which began with this rather unusual dialogue for the opera stage but natural enough within the corpus of Gogol’s work:

“Ivan Yakovlevich, your hands always stink.”

“Why would they stink?”

“I don’t know, brother, but they do.”

Many people at the Leningrad premiere of The Nose in 1930 were stunned. Gogol’s absurdist story from his cycle of Petersburg tales, published by Pushkin in his Sovremennik magazine in 1836, had not lost its ability to shock; even in 1930 one critic called it “a clumsy, delirious joke.” It was even more shocking as an opera. Shostakovich, who did not follow the current fashion of totally rewriting the classics, re-created Gogol’s plot rather faithfully: Petersburg Major Kovalyov suddenly loses his nose, which then brazenly walks around town in a uniform trimmed in gold and in a plumed hat. Kovalyov confronts his nose at the Kazan Cathedral, where the nose is praying “with an expression of great piety,” but he is unable to persuade his nose to return to him. Kovalyov is in despair, but the city police capture the nose, which was “already getting into a carriage and planning to go to Riga.” Once his nose returns, Kovalyov cannot figure out how to stick it back on his face. But then the nose miraculously rejoins the face of the boundlessly happy Kovalyov. In conclusion, Gogol mockingly noted that such stories as his bring “no benefit whatever to the homeland.” With a total lack of humor, the Soviet critics almost a century later posed a question after the premiere of Shostakovich’s opera: Could this work “attract the attention of the progressive laborer?” They answered with a resounding, “Of course not.”