St Petersburg полностью

Sokolovsky encouraged direct interaction with the audience, and the actors had the right to change the text while onstage, depending on audience reaction. Often as they started a performance, the actors did not know how they would end it—for instance, whether the heroine would die or whether they would decide to let her live. (This was called “total freemenry” in TRAM jargon.)99 As a result, each TRAM performance was a passionate improvised dispute that included the audience and often dragged on until dawn.

Shostakovich was attracted by the theatrical form of Sokolovsky’s productions and the bubbling atmosphere around them. For three years he was the musical director of the Leningrad TRAM and wrote the incidental music for several of its productions. For Shostakovich, brought up in the severe “intelligentsia” tradition, the intoxicating carnival life of TRAM was liberating, a source of important new creative impulses. Participating in Sokolovsky’s effervescent productions gave the composer the illusion of continuing his voyage on the Crazy Ship.

The word “carnival,” according to some lexicographers, is tied etymologically to the image of a ship on wheels, the ancient ritual chariot (carrus-navalis in Latin). In the mid-twenties in Leningrad a philosophical-religious circle met at the home of the pianist Maria Yudina and at a few other apartments. Its leader was Mikhail Bakhtin, an original and influential humanist thinker. As Yudina told me, even then one of Bakhtin’s favorite themes was the influence of the carnival on world culture. Bakhtin later developed this idea in his classic work on Rabelais. But the concept of the liberating function of the carnival was polished in the private discussions in a city for which one of the basic metaphors in those days was a flying ship. “The carnival is a spectacle without footlights and without separating into performers and viewers. In a carnival everyone is an active participant,” Bakhtin later wrote. In those words we can hear the echo of theatrical performances in Petrograd in the early postrevolutionary years. Sokolovsky, the creator of the carnival-like TRAM, would have signed that statement.

Bakhtin noted once that the carnival life “is life taken out of its usual ruts.” It would be difficult to imagine a city more torn out of its usual trajectory than Petersburg after the Russian Revolution. In that sense it was the quintessential carnival city. All the hierarchical barriers that had formed over centuries were broken down there, traditional values were tossed out the window, religion was subjected to “carnival” profanation, and numerous eccentrics of various types floated to the surface. These were all important signs of a carnival culture, according to Bakhtin. They were reflected in Shostakovich’s music, Zoshchenko’s prose, Zabolotsky’s poetry, and Kharms’s eccentricity. Filonov’s paintings are also filled with the carnival spirit. This is urban art, just as Bakhtin’s philosophy was urban.

Bakhtin’s discussion group was a phenomenon of underground culture, typical of Leningrad in those years. A network existed in the city of unofficial literary, philosophical, and religious societies, often consisting of just a few people each.100 Feeling a threat to their ideological monopoly, the authorities ruthlessly persecuted these underground groups, even though they were not anti-Soviet organizations by any stretch of the imagination. Bakhtin’s circle discussed Kant, Henri Bergson, Freud, Christian theology, and Eastern philosophy.101 Although disabled by osteomyelitis, Bakhtin was a charismatic figure. A major thinker whose ideas influenced literary and social history, linguistics, the philosophy of culture and language, psychology and anthropology, Bakhtin was also an inspiring lecturer. Few people knew about Bakhtin outside his narrow circle of friends, but among them were the leading lights of Leningrad’s intellectual elite.

In 1929 the Leningrad publishing house Priboi released Bakhtin’s book Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Creative Works, with Nathan Altman’s engraving of Dostoyevsky on the cover. In this groundbreaking monograph Bakhtin offered a new interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s novels. In Bakhtin’s opinion, Dostoyevsky had created a type of novel that Bakhtin called “polyphonic.” In a polyphonic novel the author does not predominate; the narrative develops as a result of the constant dialogue of many voices that exist independently of the author.

The concept of dialogue is central to Bakhtin’s cultural philosophy. His ideas on dialogue are exemplified by a megalopolis where people talk to each other without listening and pass each other without seeing. Thus Bakhtin describes the existence of the hero of Crime and Punishment as follows: