St Petersburg полностью

On October 26, 1892, the writer Dmitri Merezhkovsky gave a lecture in Petersburg on “The Reasons for the Decline of Russian Literature.” A reporter for the mass circulation Novoye vremya summarized it this way: “ ‘We are standing on the brink of an abyss,’ announced Merezhkovsky, recommending that we seek salvation from contemporary French decadents.”86 After many years of dominance by nationalistic, utilitarian, and nihilistic ideas, the Petersburg artistic elite sensed that Russian culture was in crisis. Once again, it turned to the West, wanting to be in step with the latest European cultural developments. And this is what Merezhkovsky really proclaimed. His lecture, which aroused great interest—among the respondents were Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov—actually signaled the appearance of the first fledgling modernist movement in Russia—symbolism.

Merezhkovsky called for “an expansion of artistic impressionability.” This “new impressionability” ought to be learned, he lectured, from Western masters: besides the French symbolists Merezhkovsky also named the then-popular Edgar Alan Poe and Ibsen; but he also included as allies the revered classics of Russian literature. Benois immediately joined Merezhkovsky’s “decadent” movement, and they were even friends for a time. Later the sober Petersburgian Benois would confess that he joined out of a mistaken desire to appear “avantgarde.” “It was the time of the typical fin de siècle, whose preciousness and modernity were expressed in the cult (at least in words) of everything depraved with an admixture of all kinds of mysticism, often turning into mystification.”87

The “anti-bohemian” Benois was particularly put off by Merezhkovsky’s wife, the “decadent” poetess Zinaida Hippius. Always dressed all in white (“Like the princess of Dreams”), a tall, thin, pretty blonde with a Mona Lisa smile always playing on her lips, and never tiring of striking a pose (in Benois’s opinion), Hippius stood in sharp contrast to her short, scrawny, shy husband. The very first question Hippius asked of Benois and his friends was, “And you, gentlemen students, what are you decadent about?”

Ideas for renewal and change were in the air of Petersburg, but no one knew just how to realize them. A few years later Merezhkovsky and Benois, together with Diaghilev, would found a journal, Mir iskusstva (World of Art) that would become the triumphant mouthpiece and at the same time the label of a new direction in Russian culture. But before a new era could start, the old one had to be put to rest. That was done by two unexpected deaths that were felt most painfully.

The first was the still-mysterious demise of Tchaikovsky in Petersburg on October 25, 1893, at the age of fifty-three. With the special permission of Alexander III the memorial service was held at the overflowing Kazan Cathedral. The emperor, though expected, did not attend but he did send an impressive wreath. There were over three hundred wreaths altogether, and the closed coffin seemed to drown in them. The funeral procession was the longest in Petersburg history: hundreds of thousands of people came out onto the streets.

The Imperial Maryinsky Theater, still the bastion of the aristocracy, had recently started to attract new patrons, particularly for performances of Tchaikovsky’s operas and ballets, especially students and young professionals. Tickets were impossible to obtain, and when they tried distributing them by lottery, up to fifteen thousand people a day were among the hopefuls. A huge young audience was created for Tchaikovsky’s music.

So on the day of Tchaikovsky’s funeral all lectures in the city’s schools were canceled to allow the students to say good-bye to their beloved composer. Crowds of students took part in the procession, since the city had dozens of gymnasiums and other schools, and over twenty colleges: the famous Petersburg University and various academies and institutes. Young professionals, the Russian intelligentsia, teachers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and journalists, educated in Russia and in Europe and as a rule liberals, were also out in force. They mourned their idol. It seemed as if the whole of “thinking” Petersburg paid tribute to one of its greatest representatives, intuiting the role that Tchaikovsky’s works would play in evolving the city’s mythos.