St Petersburg полностью

Shostakovich’s music accompanied the crystallization of the new legend of Leningrad the victim city, martyr city, city of suffering. A hundred years earlier, Gogol and then Dostoyevsky had created the image of Petersburg as the cold, inhuman colossus, the center for oppression and humiliation of simple folk. Years passed; bearing blow after blow, the city lost the prerogatives of power and grandeur: first it ceased to be the capital, then it was devastated by the Great Terror. The German siege was supposed to destroy Leningrad completely. But a miracle happened: even though it was physically broken, the city’s spirit soared, buoyed by the sea of compassion from the nation and world.

Once upon a time the anti-Petersburg legend grew in the national consciousness, deep underground, and only later burst to the surface in the prose and poetry of leading Russian writers. In the twentieth century the mythos of the martyr city was also born in the underground, this time not in folk legends but in such brilliant and sophisticated works as Vaginov’s novels and Akhmatova’s Requiem. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was conceived in the same vein, a hidden message about Leningrad’s tragic fate. A dramatic zigzag in history turned that symphony from an esoteric into an exoteric work. Talk of Leningrad’s horrible fate grew louder. The joint efforts of Hitler’s and Stalin’s censors failed; rumors of the starvation and destruction of Leningrad spread widely and it was impossible to suppress them. The underground legend surfaced and, breaking through official barriers, became a national one.

Akhmatova was one of the first to sense it. It was much too soon to think about publishing the anti-Stalinist Requiem, but she did manage to publish a cycle of poetry dedicated to the Leningrad of the war years, when there was a brief window of opportunity, in which she discreetly incorporated some of the main themes from Requiem. For the rapidly changing Petersburg mythos, this was a historic moment: the whole country heard Akhmatova’s great tragic poem, perceived by all as a requiem for the victims of the Great Terror and the martyrs of the 900 Days.

And you, my friends of the last draft!

My life was spared to mourn you.

Not to stand like a weeping willow over your memory,

But to shout your names out for the world to hear!

But then, names or no names, you’re always at our side!

Everyone, on your knees!—the crimson light pours in,

And Leningraders pass again through gloom,

The living with the dead: glory has no dead.

CHAPTER 6

in which the city becomes the hero of the Poem Without a Hero and, surviving against all odds and nurturing its own mythos in the underground, wins the right to get its original name back. The Bronze Horseman continues its eternal gallop into history—but where to? This is the Petersburg of Joseph Brodsky and his friends in creativity—the independent and tenacious poets, writers, artists, and musicians on whom the spiritual fate of this astonishing city depends.

On January 26, 1945, on Stalin’s command, the highest award of the land, the Order of Lenin, was bestowed upon Leningrad “for outstanding achievements by the workers of Leningrad for the Motherland, for the courage and heroism, discipline and steadfastness displayed in the fight with the fascist invaders under the difficult conditions of an enemy blockade.” Stalin did not wish the city well, but he had a genius for propaganda, and at that moment the promotion of Leningrad suited his political tactics. His main goal was a complete victory over Hitler, and Leningrad had made a signal contribution to that end. For this, Stalin officially designated Leningrad a “hero city,” an accolade that even Moscow had not yet been awarded.

For a brief time Stalin’s acolytes chorused songs of glory and praise to Leningrad. Typical was Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s radio address to the nation in 1946: