St Petersburg полностью

It’s hard to imagine that this Masonic exposé, which Grigoryev called “The City,” was published in 1845, twelve years before Les Fleurs du Mal. And it appeared in the popular and fully loyal Petersburg journal with the pompous title Repertoire of the Russian and the Pantheon of All European Theaters, controlled by the ambition-driven government spy Faddei Bulgarin. And then this virulently anti-Petersburg work by Grigoryev was praised (“a marvelous poem”) by the liberal guru of that period, the leading literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky. That’s how wide the gamut of anti-Petersburg moods ranged then in Russian culture—from the extreme right to the extreme left….

The irony of subsequent events led to the situation a bit more than a century later in Khrushchev’s Leningrad, when I could not bring this poem of Grigoryev’s into school to discuss it with my literature teacher because its spirit, aesthetics, and symbolism would have seemed subversive and I could have provoked serious trouble.

Naturally, I debated “The City” fiercely (though not very loudly) with my best friend. And, of course, we immediately sensed the viciousness of its attack: the mystical and democratic Grigoryev denied the image of the white nights painted by the rationalistic and aristocratic Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman.

In the second half of the nineteenth century it became possible to denigrate not only Pushkin and his idealized Petersburg of the introduction to The Bronze Horseman but also Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter I, which had inspired Pushkin. Typical is the impromptu verse of the cynical and sharp-tongued epigrammist Nikolai Shcherbina (1821-69). Shcherbina had the snake under the horse’s hoofs of Petersburg’s founder elicit associations that were directly the opposite of the noble imagery of the eighteenth century:

No, it wasn’t a snake the Bronze Horseman

Trampled, galloping forward,

He trampled our poor people.

He trampled the simple folk.

And this was not written by someone from the opposition but a major government official! In folktales Falconet’s monument had long been compared to one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. It was clear that the people’s view of Peter and his reforms, so long stifled and suppressed, had become firmly rooted in public cultural life, that oral tradition had been transformed into the literary tradition, and the opinion from “below” and from “above” on Petersburg had merged and almost coincided.

“Sankt-Peterburg will stand empty!” That legendary curse was now discussed in the salons of Moscow and Petersburg, but it also became the topic of popular poems such as “Underwater City” (1847) by Mikhail Dmitriev, which predicted with unsuppressed glee the coming inexorable flooding of the capital, unimaginable not only in Pushkin but even in Gogol.

Now the belfry spire

Is alone visible from the sea.

The government tried to stop the anti-Petersburg literary flood. The head of the vicious Third Division and the chief of the gendarmerie, Count Alexander Benkendorf, issued guidelines, eerily similar to the ones proclaimed a hundred years later by Stalin’s ideology chief, Andrei Zhdanov: “Russia’s past was amazing, its present is more than marvelous, and as for the future, it is greater than anything the wildest imagination could picture; that is the point of view for examining and writing Russian history.”

The hack writer Alexander Bashutsky, fulfilling the commission from the literary police, issued an idealized “Panorama of Saint-Petersburg”: incredible descriptions of a lovely city in which cleanliness and order reigned, without brawls, fights, drunkards, prostitutes, or beggars. Planning a luxurious edition, Bashutsky ordered special engravings from London, but the ship delivering them sank. So did the Panorama: no one bought it and Bashutsky lost a lot of money. The sophisticated public in the capital did not accept descriptions of Petersburg cooked up from recipes by the gendarme chief.