We asked another young iconoclast, Alexander Knaifel, to set to music Lenin’s letter (of which we were all sick and tired, forced to memorize it at school) in which he called for the start of revolution in Petrograd. The innocent-looking Knaifel brought us a score in which the words, familiar to every Soviet citizen from childhood, were sung menacingly by a unison chorus of basses. The effect was hilarious, absolutely surrealistic. Rumors of Knaifel’s musical satire quickly reached Leningrad Party headquarters, from which came an edict banning its performance. They shut down our enterprise for good, despite the fact that the popular bass Yevgeny Nesterenko, soon to become famous with the premieres of Shostakovich’s late vocal works, was part of our group. This time, the last laugh belonged to the authorities.
One of the first people to whom we showed the just-completed
Young Shostakovich wrote appropriately impertinent music for Akimov’s production. A scandal ensued that almost destroyed the director’s career. However, things were smoothed over, and despite the “formalist” label that followed Akimov throughout his life, his Comedy Theater, situated in the center of Nevsky Prospect, remained one of the city’s most popular theaters. Audiences laughed at his productions of French farces and American comedies, while catching the hints about the absurdity of Soviet reality in his productions of Leningrad playwrights.
Akimov’s brilliance as a theater designer played an enormous part in the success of his productions. Sometimes Akimov the artist outshone Akimov the director, from the first costume sketches to the lobby posters advertising the next premiere. In the 1950s and 1960s Akimov may have been the most famous and beloved artist in the city: his colorful posters, depicting in an intriguing way the essence of the play and the production, stood out in the quotidian atmosphere of those days, eliciting delighted attention from thousands of Leningraders.
Akimov had to wage exhausting battles with the censors over each poster. As he later recalled, “No one banned posters in general, but almost each poster specifically was banned. The excuses were quite subtle: ‘Does not express the play’s idea,’ ‘insufficiently optimistic,’ ‘the text is not visible from a distance,’ ‘the title is too aggressively presented,’ and the favorite, which fit any occasion, ‘isn’t there some formalism here?’ ” For one play Akimov drew Moscow at night; the authorities perceived it as an attempt by a Leningrader to undermine Moscow’s international reputation as a sunny city and consequently termed it a “crude political error.”
As a painter (he adored doing grotesque portraits of his friends and left a huge series depicting Leningrad’s intellectual elite), Akimov was a major representative of the prerevolutionary Petersburg neoclassicism that grew strong under the aegis of the Petersburg Academy of Arts. The academy, founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth, was given the title “imperial” by Catherine the Great a few years later, reflecting the traditional Russian idea that art must serve the monarch and the state.
Even in Petersburg, which readily assimilated all things foreign, the Academy of Arts remained an exotic flower, embodying a taste for the nude in a city where religion, climate, and mores were obstacles to unclothed bodies. Perhaps that is why the academy, having trained several artists like Karl Briullov, capitulated so quickly in the mid-nineteenth century to the attacks of Ivan Kramskoy and his fellow Wanderers. It reestablished its authority only in the early twentieth century, when the pedagogue Dmitri Kardovsky turned it into a bastion of Russian neoclassicism, “setting the eye and the hand,” as the professionals put it, of such outstanding masters as Boris Grigoryev, Alexander Yakovlev, Vassily Shukhaev, and Boris Anisfeld.
The clear-thinking Kardovsky stressed drawing, and his best students bore comparison to the greatest artists of the past. Soon after the revolution Anisfeld emigrated to the United States and Grigoryev, Yakovlev, and Shukhaev went to France. They all were successful in the West, cleverly responding to the demand for the neoclassical with a touch of the exotic just as everyone’s attention was caught by the corresponding works of Igor Stravinsky.
