The sense of doom permeates Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. This feeling, absolutely uncharacteristic of Dostoyevsky, also betrays the composer’s attitude toward Petersburg. In mourning himself, solipsistic Tchaikovsky mourns the demise of the world. That is why the Sixth Symphony can be seen not only as a requiem for the individual but also for the city and its society. Tchaikovsky’s musical soul was among the first to perceive the coming cataclysms of war and revolution. No one understood yet that the culture of Petersburg was doomed. Tchaikovsky did not understand it, either. He just felt the breath of doom’s approach. This breath tinged his music, as it would a mirror, making it foggy and ambiguous. Nonetheless, it did register a recognizable picture of St. Petersburg.
Dostoyevsky, for his part, hated Peter the Great and his creation—this alien colossus, a city hostile to the Russian spirit, a foreign body forcing itself into Russian space and subjugating it to its evil will. Dostoyevsky’s passionate desire was Petersburg’s total obliteration. Mussorgsky, too, shared much of Dostoyevsky’s attitude toward Peter and his reforms; one can find ample evidence in Khovanshchina, in which the anti-Petrine forces are presented with understanding and profound sympathy. Tchaikovsky, by intuitively grasping and emotionally experiencing the imaginary destruction of the empire and of Petersburg as if it were real, went beyond Mussorgsky and Dostoyevsky. Tchaikovsky felt somehow that doom was around the corner, and, being a composer, he shouted it out as loudly and clearly as he could, filling his music with hysterical warning.
In this reaction, Tchaikovsky became the first Russian composer with a profound nostalgia toward Petersburg. The nostalgic motifs of his music, intertwining with delight for Mozart and the eighteenth century, gave us Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra (1876) and the Mozartiana suite (1887), so beloved by Balanchine. But Tchaikovsky’s nostalgia, his intuitive horror before the coming revolutionary catastrophe, and his pity for Petersburg were reflected with particular power in his ballets and his opera The Queen of Spades. It was in these works that the transformation of the Petersburg mythos began to crystallize in the late 1870s and early 1880s.
Yet the city still stood and was reflected in the steely Neva River, apparently unperturbed by the tumult surrounding it. Its mythology had begun before its history, developed in time with it, and was transformed from the imperial to the romantic to an evil and fatalistic aura by men of genius. And still it stood, prepared for the next transformation, stately and seemingly impassive.
This new transformation was driven in tandem by music and the visual arts, a pairing which was highly unusual for Russia, where literature had always reigned supreme. Russia was and still is a logocentric country, however strange that idea may seem to Western fans of Russian music, ballet, and the Russian pictorial avant-garde. Therefore, it was only natural that the original mythos of Petersburg emanated from literature: first the Petersburg of Pushkin, then of Gogol, and of Dostoyevsky, each building upon, enriching and ultimately displacing, if not entirely replacing, the preceding. By the early 1880s, the Petersburg of Dostoyevsky, subsuming the imagery of Pushkin and Gogol, reigned unchallenged in Russian culture.
And then Tchaikovsky appeared on the scene. His music gave a new impetus to the Petersburgian theme in art, freeing it of the dictates of literature. Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades is the prime example of this trend.
Pushkin’s prose novella The Queen of Spades (1833) is one of his most Petersburgian works. This is a tale about Ghermann, the obsessed gambler trying to learn the secret of the three winning cards from the old countess; eventually he loses his fortune and his love and goes mad. Pushkin’s story contains many of the motifs found in the predominantly literary mythos of Petersburg. Pushkin’s narrative is restrained, dry, almost ironic; it makes the reader more willing to believe that anything is possible in the city described, including the appearance of a dead countess. Here, in Pushkin’s characteristically laconic form, even the landscape of Petersburg foreshadows the future, much wordier depictions of Gogol and Dostoyevsky: “The weather was awful: the wind howled, wet snow fell in big flakes; the lamps glowed dimly; the streets were empty.”
