St Petersburg полностью

This was one of the most startling and magical moments in the evolution of the nearly two-hundred-year-old Petersburg mythos. That mystique had begun with paeans to Peter the Great’s imperial ambitions. Then Pushkin in his Bronze Horseman tried to weight the scales. Which would weigh more: a new capital or the fate of the pathetic clerk crushed by Peter’s will? Neither Gogol nor Dostoyevsky after him ever bothered with that question. Gogol’s grotesque city and Dostoyevsky’s supposedly realistic cauldron of hell were both places where “little” people suffered and died. The city as mirage, as giant octopus, great and heartless deceiver, eternal foreigner on Russian soil—that was the image of Petersburg inherited from Gogol and Dostoyevsky. In Russia’s literature-centered culture of the 1880s, that terrible image became almost universally accepted.

Any casual description of Petersburg in those days had to begin with Gogol and Dostoyevsky (and usually end there); crowds of imitators exploited and vulgarized the imagery of their illustrious predecessors, and Petersburg under their pens turned from a mysterious and fateful capital into a prosaic and boring place. The fantastic realism of Dostoyevsky’s urban landscapes turned into dreary naturalism with his followers. The mirage dissipated. The formerly imposing Petersburg houses, no longer concealing mystical or criminal revelations, turned into gray, empty shells. Sometimes it seemed that if Petersburg were to vanish suddenly, in accordance with Dostoyevsky’s feverish wish and stark prophesy, no one would notice. Even the once-commanding mystique of Petersburg was close to disappearing, because there was no longer any mystery about the city.

Benois and his friends not only reinvigorated that mythos, they managed to give it a new content. This transformation, itself miraculous and unique, had its own inner logic.

The first shifts can be seen with a close look at the universe of Dostoyevsky himself, a writer who was obsessive but not at all dogmatic. Dostoyevsky was a passionate nationalist, but he also had a trait that Osip Mandelstam would later term “a longing for world culture.” In his famous speech on Pushkin, given in 1880, Dostoyevsky called for the Russian “to become brother to all men, uniman, if you will.” The result of his musing on the “European” essence of Pushkin’s work, this neologism represented Dostoyevsky’s conclusion that Pushkin’s works held a prophetic call to “universal unity.”

Dostoyevsky’s speech, hailed throughout the land with unprecedented acclaim, was the milestone from which some of his younger contemporaries marked the new period in Russian culture: they saw in it a rejection of the nationalist-isolationist path, which was leading to a dead end, and an appeal for the expansion and therefore the renewal of the Russian artistic tradition.

Dostoyevsky’s ideas were particularly compelling for Tchaikovsky, who reacted morbidly to the Mighty Five’s criticism that he was not “Russian” enough. In his memoirs Benois states that in “progressive” musical circles “it was considered obligatory to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West.” Tchaikovsky, naturally enough, knew this. That is why in his notebook covering 1888-1889, amid addresses and other notations there is a note made by the composer before his trip to Prague, where he would have to appear frequently at various receptions in his honor: “Start speech with Dostoyevsky’s uniman.”

Tchaikovsky was, probably, the first great Russian composer to think seriously about the place of Russian music in European culture. He regularly conducted his compositions in the West, forming close business and friendly ties with many of the leading musicians of Europe and the United States; for Russians this was also new and unusual. Typical is a letter from Paris, in which Tchaikovsky somewhat wistfully tells his patroness, Nadezhda von Meek, “How pleasant it is to be convinced firsthand of the success of our literature in France. Every book étalage displays translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky…. The newspapers are constantly printing rapturous articles about one or another of these writers. Perhaps such a time will come for Russian music as well!”85

This remark clearly shows Tchaikovsky’s impatient anticipation of a person like Diaghilev, whose central idea would be the promotion of Russian culture in the West. Young Diaghilev’s manifesto might have been his memorable words: “I want to nurture Russian painting, clean it up and, most important, present it to the West, elevate it in the West.” Subsequently, Diaghilev did exactly this and, of course, for much more than just painting.