St Petersburg полностью

The Leningrad dadaists were persecuted with particular cruelty. Oleinikov died in prison. A friend recalled that Oleinikov had come to visit a few days before his arrest and said nothing, even though the friend could see he wanted to talk. “What about? That he was certain of his doom and, like everyone else, could not move, was just waiting? What to do? His family? How to conduct himself—there? We’ll never know.”95 The same fate befell the poet and member of Oberiu Alexander Vvedensky, who disappeared without a trace. Kharms was arrested in August 1941, soon after Germany attacked the USSR. He was declared mentally ill and sent to a prison psychiatric hospital, where he died two months later—it is not known whether of hunger or forced “treatment.”

Zabolotsky survived prison and the camps, his health ruined by heavy forced labor. Then he lived in exile in Kazakhstan and was released in 1946 through the efforts of friends, but he was not rehabilitated until five years after his death, in 1963.

Zabolotsky went through his incredible trials attempting to maintain a sense of his own dignity and the restraint that had been typical of him since youth. Those who knew him commented that there was very little of the poetic about him: a smooth pink face and, behind round bookkeeper glasses, almost expressionless eyes with short lashes. But he soon became the most famous poet of Oberiu, with a special interest in contemporary Petrograd.

A born Petersburger, Kharms was worried by the disappearance of his city. Peter the Great and Nicholas II appear in his Comedy of the City of Petersburg. Nicholas poses the rhetorical question: “O Peter, where is your Russia? Where is your city, where is pale Petersburg?” The echoes in Kharms’s work of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman are not even the typical dada parody but more of an homage. These parallels with the classics were important for Kharms, which is why he made a point of bowing to every ancient lamppost when he strolled through the city: for him those lampposts were animate creatures that had seen, perhaps, Pushkin himself.

Zabolotsky, who viewed the transformation of the Petersburg mythos as a personal trauma, also loved The Bronze Horseman and considered Kharms’s Comedy to be the author’s best work. But Zabolotsky saw the city with the eyes of a provincial visitor, bowled over by the ugly contrasts of life in the metropolis, with the “drunken paradise” of its noisy bars, the hypocrisy of Nevsky Prospect “in glitter and dreariness” (almost a Gogolian image), and simple-minded but crowd-pleasing entertainments at the People’s House (where a few years earlier Balanchine and a friend had presented the “Polovtsian masses” in Prince Igor for the unsophisticated audience). Zabolotsky describes the city circus, which “shines like a shield” ;wandering musicians, singing in narrow Petersburg courtyards, “amid tall dug-out pits” and a wedding where “the pound-heavy wine glasses roared.”

Zabolotsky created one of the most poignant images to convey the mystical effect of the white nights, using the new surrealistic imagery:

Thus a fetus or an angel,

opening its milky eyes,

sways in a formaldehyde jar

and begs to be returned to the skies.

But he brings along the fantastic picture of a flea market on the Obvodny Canal, with its brazen speculators, crippled beggars, and the coach drivers who resembled sultans. This is the world of Zoshchenko, whose heroes Zabolotsky regarded with markedly naïve astonishment. It is not surprising that it was Zoshchenko who noted in an early review of Zabolotsky’s poetry, “But this is seeming childishness. Beyond the naive verbal picture there is almost always visible a bold and clear stroke. And that naïveté works as a justifiable device.”

This defense of Zabolotsky by Zoshchenko is characteristic of the cultural state of affairs in Leningrad during the late twenties and early thirties, when experimental authors demonstrated solidarity in the face of the ever-growing hostility from the authorities. They all knew one another, meeting constantly at literary, artistic, philosophical, and religious salons and circles, entering loose creative associations that formed, then fell apart. Zabolotsky admired Shostakovich, and Filonov was one of his favorite artists. In turn, Filonov and his students were brought into the production of Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General by the poet and director Igor Terentyev, one of the brightest figures in avant-garde Leningrad.