St Petersburg полностью

These musings became the leitmotif of Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films, in which the texts, in unorthodox translations by Boris Pasternak, sounded like commentaries on the news. In Hamlet, done in severe black and white, the visual metaphor of Elsinore as prison permeates the film. The cult of personality of the pathetic usurper is juxtaposed with the proud independence of Hamlet, played nobly and impetuously by the popular Innokenty Smoktunovsky. Shostakovich himself was often compared to the prince, and Hamlet-like traits had been noted in his works since the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich wrote a harsh, elliptical score for Kozintsev’s film, some critics consider it the most successful musical interpretation of Hamlet, and many see it as one of Shostakovich’s best works. Kozintsev, who understood the enormous role played by Shostakovich’s music in shaping the hidden message of his Hamlet, had considered calling the film a “cinema symphony.”

Kozintsev, who died in 1973, summed up his life’s work, as well as that period of Lenfilm history, in King Lear. The film was shot in black and white, like Hamlet, but was even more severe, with several shocking naturalistic scenes. Kozintsev personified the avantgarde roots of Lenfilm, the studio’s youth and early maturity when Stalin was its main patron. Kozintsev—like few other directors—though a favorite of Stalin’s, still appealed to mass audiences and elicited respect from critics both in the Soviet Union and in the West even in the post-Stalinist period. His Hamlet and King Lear are rightfully considered treasures of world film as treatments of Shakespeare. Kozintsev, an ambitious and proud man, knew full well the impact of Shostakovich’s music. “Without it, and without Pasternak’s translations, I could not have made the Shakespeare films.”28

Kozintsev tried to formulate why Shostakovich’s music was so important to him, a Leningrader of the new era.

What seems most important in it? The sense of tragedy? Philosophy, universal thoughts about the world? … But still, another quality is most important. A quality that is hard to write about. Goodness. Kindness. Charity. But a special kind of kindness. We have an excellent word in our language: fierce. There is no goodness in Russian art without a fierce hatred of what destroys man. In Shostakovich’s music I hear fierce hatred of cruelty, the cult of power, the oppression of truth. This is a special kindness: fearless kindness.”29

In the late forties and early fifties Akhmatova and Zoshchenko lived in Leningrad like shadows. They were expelled from the Writers’ Union, they were not published, and they maintained an impoverished existence, shunned as lepers. Former friends crossed the street when they saw them coming. They expected to be arrested at any moment.

One contemporary theory was that Stalin allowed Akhmatova and Zoshchenko to remain free in order to continue the ideological campaign ad infinitum.30 The Party resolution of 1946 directed against them was “studied” at innumerable meetings all over the country and then made part of the school curriculum so that class after class of Soviet youngsters learned it by heart. To millions of Soviet people, Zoshchenko was a “literary hooligan” and Akhmatova “either a nun or a whore” whose poetry was corrupt and decadent.

Leningrad in those years lived by inertia. Everything it had been proud of was taken away; many cultural figures were in disfavor, others moved to Moscow. Stalin’s fabricated Leningrad Affair clouded the city. Even the glory of the 900-day siege was now being belittled. The popular Museum of the Defense of Leningrad, founded in 1946, was shut down in 1949, its administration arrested, and many precious exhibits destroyed.

The main sentiment of that difficult time was hopelessness. These were probably the gloomiest years in the history of Leningrad culture. People felt that the stifling monotony, brightened only rarely by an anniversary or some still-tolerated icon of national culture, would reign forever.31 The self-awareness and self-esteem of the city on the Neva seemed past all hope of renaissance.

Yet even then there existed (at least in outline) a work that foretold the fate of the Petersburg legend in the second half of the twentieth century. I am referring to Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero, begun at the end of 1940 and completed in first draft in 1942. The fate of Poem Without a Hero is unusual: Akhmatova continued working on it for some twenty years, adding lines, prefaces, dedications, and commentaries. As a result, the final version is almost twice as long as the first. And the text has the additions of Prose About the Poem and sketches for a ballet libretto intertwining various themes from Poem Without a Hero.