The cult of Petersburg began with poetic odes. The problem of Petersburg was first posed in a narrative poem. The dismantling of Petersburg was also performed by literature. For over one hundred thirty years literature reigned almost unchallenged there.
Opera and ballet flourished in imperial Petersburg in the early nineteenth century, but they did not have a substantial impact on the Petersburg mythos. They were exotic flowers that ornamented the grim reality of Nicholas’s Petersburg but did not confront the “damned questions” the city asked its residents.
The situation gradually began to change. The way was prepared by the general upsurge in Russian culture, a revolution that took place by the middle of the nineteenth century in music and then in art. This revolution changed contemporaries’ perceptions of Petersburg. For too long it had been reflected in the mirror of literature. Of course, the mirror had been held by geniuses—Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoyevsky. The crystalline mythological image of a majestic, beautiful city, the imperial capital, was replaced in that mirror, thanks to these writers, with another reflection—phantasmagoric, with horrible but still beautiful features. Little by little even that image began shattering, fading, disappearing.
Then the mirror in which Petersburg was seen came into the hands of different people: musicians and after them, artists. Their lives were no less eccentric, mysterious, and strange than the fate of the city in whose palaces and cramped apartments they lived, on whose luxurious and beckoning prospects they strolled, lost in thought, on whose granite embankments they stood in quiet joy or in profound, black depression, and whose captivating legend they transformed decisively, irrevocably.
And this is how it happened.
* A typical ukase intended to protect the wooden streets of Petersburg and signed by Peter read, “from this time on all clamps and nails used on men’s and women’s shoes may no longer be sold and no one may have any; just as no one, no matter his rank, may wear shoes or boots shod this way; and if someone does have shoes or boots shod this way, he will be fined harshly, and the merchants who keep such clamps and nails will be sent to hard labor and their property confiscated.”
* As Russia’s most popular poet after Pushkin, Alexander Blok wrote in 1910, underlining the nervous instability that transfixes the reader,
* At this time the population of St. Petersburg was rapidly approaching a half-million.
* Dostoyevsky also selected the victim’s profession with great care, paying attention to the circumstances of contemporary Petersburg. Usury became a widespread phenomenon in the capital during the 1860s.
* Stalin once expressed his concern in a heart-to-heart with a favorite actor: “Peter didn’t kill enough of them.”
CHAPTER 2
Throughout Petersburg reigns an astonishingly profound and wonderful musicality,”1 marveled Alexander Benois, an artist who in the early twentieth century played a unique role in restoring the Petersburg mythos to its glory. His younger contemporary, the musicologist Boris Asafyev, affirmed the presence of music in the St. Petersburg legend even more resolutely.
The Petersburg culture now cannot be crossed out of the history of Russia and humanity. And music plays perhaps the dominant role in that culture. Especially the work of Tchaikovsky, inspired by the illusions of the Petersburg white nights and the stark contrasts of winter: black tree trunks, the snow cover, the oppressive weight of granite, and the precision of cast-iron fences.2
That passage, written by Asafyev in 1921 in a hungry, dying Petrograd, is remarkable, since it describes Tchaikovsky’s music as if it were a masterly drawing by Alexander Benois, and it makes clear the collision of music and art in the creation of a new image of Petersburg. Taking the lead, in this respect nineteenth-century Petersburg music also had a powerful influence on European and world culture; the Russian visual arts of that period could not even dream of such a role.
