St Petersburg полностью

At the same time it was officially announced that the road to the development of Soviet culture was to be realism, and not ordinary but “socialist” realism. The intention was for Soviet cultural forces to glorify socialism in traditionally realistic forms. An atmosphere was created in which, with growing rigor, any attempt at experimentation in art was declared “formalism,” and “formalist” became the worst label one could hang on a writer, artist, or composer.

The frightened, broken leaders of the Soviet avant-garde capitulated one after the other; in the thirties this was called “perestroika” or “restructuring.” For example, Malevich tried to restructure himself. He stopped working in his suprematist manner and began painting realistic portraits. They are interesting and significant works, but in his heart Malevich must have continued to consider himself primarily the creator of nonfigurative suprematism. When he died in 1935, Lydia Ginzburg described the funeral: Malevich was “buried with music and in a Suprematist coffin. People lined Nevsky, and people said: Must be a foreigner! … The Suprematist coffin was made from a design by the deceased. For the cover he had planned a square, a circle, and a cross, but the cross was rejected, even though it was called an intersection of two planes.”108

The observation that the mass audience perceived the avantgardists as foreigners was a shrewd one. In Russia, experimental art had never taken root. At all times civic-oriented culture was highly valued, and the demand for “realism,” understood primarily as a naturalistic similarity to life and first presented by populists in the 1860s, acquired legitimacy in intellectual circles. As Akhmatova commented bitterly in the 1960s, “The good things that the narodniki (populists) called for, no one accepted. But their ‘realism’ was accepted right away. And for a long time.”109

In the early years of the twentieth century the symbolists and especially the members of Mir iskusstva succeeded in reeducating a significant number of the Russian intellectual elite, particularly in Petersburg, New perceptions about the possibilities and goals of culture started to take root; this Silver Age prepared the soil for the wild flowering of the Russian avant-garde. But the broad circles of intelligentsia, not to mention the general public, remained outside of this process. When the avant-garde captured a few commanding positions for a brief period after the revolution and tried to expand their influence, the cultural counterrevolution was not long in coming.

Petersburg, as the most Western-oriented Russian cultural center, accepted the ideas of the modern sooner than other locales and remained a platform for avant-garde experimentation longer than any other city. In the postrevolutionary years, the cultural “left front” in Petrograd-Leningrad produced dazzling things: the canvases of Malevich and Filonov, the constructions of Tatlin, the theatrical productions of Sokolovsky and Terentyev, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, the choreography of Lopukhov and Balanchine, the new Petersburg prose, Oberiu, and the symphonies and operas of Shostakovich. But this highly original work, the impulse for which came from the innovations of the Silver Age and which the poet Lev Loseff suggested calling the Bronze Age, took place in an unconducive atmosphere, under constant and increasing pressure both from above and below.

The pressure from above came from the bureaucratic state apparatus that grew stronger with every passing month. From below, the peasant masses that poured into the city brought pressure. An aggressively conservative Philistine taste in culture was common at the top and the bottom. In those circumstances, the Bronze Age was doomed in Leningrad and in the rest of the country.

Inside the country the “left front” did not fulfill even a small part of its goals. But it did become immensely popular in intellectual circles of the West. In that sense a comparison with Mir iskusstva is revealing, whose leaders except for Diaghilev did not become cultural icons in the West; the same could be said about the Russian symbolists. Yet inside Russia the cultural goals of Mir iskusstva and the symbolists were realized in large part. Of course, the “socialist realists” managed to crowd out many recognized figures from Mir iskusstva. But this happened later, in the forties and early fifties, and affected Leningrad least of all, where Mir iskusstva’s authority remained unshakable, even in the most difficult years of Stalin’s cultural clamp-down and in defiance of the prevailing attitude.