That choir included, besides Brodsky and Rein, the poets Anatoly Nayman and Dmitri Bobyshev, who took closer to heart some of the acmeist principles of Akhmatova’s work, such as her demand that the poet be brief. Brodsky constantly violated this principle. Some of his poems stretched to two hundred lines and more; after a while even Akhmatova began to like them. She said of Brodsky’s poetry that she had not read anything like it since Mandelstam, and she used one of Brodsky’s lines as an epigraph to her poem “The Last Rose.”
What Akhmatova liked in Brodsky was his furious poetic temperament. She jokingly called him “a cat and a half”: she had given that nickname to a neighbor’s cat, a huge, noisy, orange beast. When Brodsky was arrested and tried, Akhmatova actively took up his defense and grieved at his punishment. At the same time, she noted acerbically that the authorities who persecuted Brodsky so maliciously were helping him. “What a biography they’re creating for our redhead! You’d think he hired them.”
The repressive Leningrad apparatus was not misguided in selecting Brodsky as the focus for punishment, even though his poems were not overly political. They did give off, as did Brodsky himself, a specific Petersburgian air of liberty and independence that the authorities perceived as threatening. Brodsky wrote about this later, recalling his Leningrad friend, the writer Sergei Dovlatov, “The idea of individualism, a man on his own, all by himself, was our proud property. But the possibility of realizing it was minuscule, if it existed at all.”
Once at a debate, Viktor Shklovsky, a leader of the Petrograd Opoyaz circle of formalists, sarcastically asked his Marxist critics, “You have the army and navy on your side, and we’re just four people—why are you so worried?” In fact, the answer was clear to both Shklovsky and his opponents: with its position consolidated, the Soviet regime wanted absolute obedience, and to get it, the state generously wielded the stick and the carrot. In the 1920s and 1930s, the authorities not only broke up Opoyaz but to varying degrees forced some of its members to compromise. This they did not manage to do with Brodsky.
Of course, the pressure was not as focused in the 1960s as it had been in the Great Terror. But Brodsky’s “existential nonconformism” and his unwillingness to collaborate turned out to be unusually steadfast. In 1964 Brodsky went north to exile unintimidated and unrepentant.
The city that Brodsky left behind lived a contradictory cultural life. Creative processes of considerable vitality survived, but for the most part they were hidden from the national and international communities.
Though local authorities did everything they could to prevent the unpredictable in Leningrad, the performing arts flourished. It was in this area that the characteristics of Petersburg culture could thrive: high professionalism, refinement, and a reliance on long-standing European tradition.
The Leningrad Philharmonic prided itself justly on being the only world-class orchestra in the country. It was headed for a record fifty years, until his death in 1988, by the greatest Russian conductor of the twentieth century, the Petersburger Yevgeny Mravinsky. Scion of an old noble family, the tall, thin, haughty, and taciturn Mravinsky was an imposing figure. The musicians were in awe of their leader, whose endless rehearsals and attention to detail were legendary. Mravinsky’s interpretations were frequently illuminating and structurally revealing.55
Mravinsky’s repertoire was a bit small by Western standards. His favorite composers were Tchaikovsky (whose portrait the conductor carried like a talisman) and Shostakovich; Mravinsky’s performances of their music were incomparable. His recordings of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, particularly the
Mravinsky and Shostakovich had a close-knit relationship. In 1937 the composer trusted Mravinsky with the premiere of his Fifth Symphony. It was a triumph. The conductor subsequently premiered another five Shostakovich symphonies, including the monumental Eighth, which was dedicated to him. In Mravinsky’s performances, Shostakovich’s symphonies seemed more like Greek tragedy than modern drama.
