St Petersburg полностью

Briullov’s painting, which created quite a stir in Europe, was delivered on the ship Tsar Peter to Petersburg, where it was “imperially approved” by Nicholas I and exhibited at the Academy of Arts. Its colossal triumph was greater than that for any other previous Russian painting. “Men of power and artists, socialites and scholars, simple folk and craftsmen—all are imbued with the desire to see Briullov’s painting,” records the supplement to Severnaya pchela for October 21, 1834. “This desire is raging throughout the capital, in all estates and classes, in the suites on the English Embankment, in the workshops and stores on Nevsky Prospect, in the shops in Gostiny and Apraksin Dvor, in the poor quarters of clerks on the Peski and in the offices on Vasilyevsky Island.”4

In Petersburg they called Briullov the “divine Karl.” Pushkin was so excited and charmed by the Last Day of Pompeii that he began a poem dedicated to it (it was left unfinished):

Vesuvius opened its jaws—smoke rolled out—flames

Spread widely, like a battle banner.

The earth is agitated—from shaken pillars

Idols fall! The people, chased by fear,

Under rain of stones, under burning ashes

In crowds, aged and young, flee the city.

Gogol produced an ecstatic article that began, “Briullov’s painting is one of the brightest phenomena of the nineteenth century. It is the resurrection of painting.” The emperor granted the artist an audience and made him a cavalier of the Order of St. Anna. Nicholas liked the mastery of Briullov’s work; they say he also liked the artist’s young wife. The temperamental and proud Briullov, who was very short, became extremely jealous of the gigantic Nicholas. One morning his wife, standing by the window, saw the emperor in a sled pulled by a raven steed drive up to the Academy of Arts, where the Briullovs lived. She cried out, “Oh, it’s the sovereign!” The furious Briullov rushed over and screamed, “So, you recognized him!” and tore an earring from her pierced ear.

The Petersburgers who flocked to see Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii were transfixed by his unabashedly romantic depiction of a natural disaster, which ruined a beautiful city and its inhabitants: a reminder of the precarious position of their own metropolis exposed to the merciless forces of nature. There was something operatic in the drama of Briullov’s painting (Gogol was the first to note it, but he approved—such were the tastes of the period), but Petersburgers squirmed anyway. The artist had touched a deep-seated, unconscious fear.

The dissident Alexander Herzen came up with the words to describe that vague feeling in an article on the traditional “confrontational” theme about the opposites, “Moscow and Petersburg,” which circulated throughout Russia in samizdat some twenty-five years later (and which had been read aloud at meetings of the socialistic Petrashevsky circle): “Briullov, who developed in Petersburg, selected for his brush the terrible image of a wild, irrational force, destroying people in Pompeii—that is the inspiration of Petersburg!”

Briullov’s painting shone and vanished in the pale Petersburg sky like an ephemeral comet. The artist could never repeat his unparalleled success, even though he was surrounded by loyal students, a new generation of artists that, under the influence of Briullov, “a man with wild and uncontrollable passions,” as a contemporary noted disapprovingly, “became enamored of effects and phrases: it shouted about the grandeur of the artist, the sacredness of art, grew beards large and small and shoulder-length hair, and dressed in eccentric costumes to distinguish itself from ordinary mortals—and to top it off, following its teacher’s example, unbridled its passions and drank itself into a stupor.”5

Briullov, who was used to the Italian atmosphere, spent the dreary Petersburg evenings and nights in the company of bohemian bachelors at the house of his friend Nestor Kukolnik, the romantic poet and debauchee. Kukolnik, a braggart and adventurer, was celebrated for his superpatriotic dramatic play (which also had received Nicholas’s approval) The Hand of the Almighty Saved the Fatherland, which described in mystical tones the tumultuous path to the throne of the first Russian ruler from the Romanov dynasty, young Mikhail, who became tsar in 1613.