St Petersburg полностью

Everyone was astounded by Benois’s magical ability to recreate the charms of the imperial capital—in the naive words of another poet, “as if the artist had just been there, in the streets of Petersburg of centuries past, and is now telling us what he had seen.”100 But, of course, the series of drawings was not a guidebook to old Petersburg. It was also not really illustrative of Pushkin’s work. The best drawings, especially those depicting the statue come to life and pursuing its victim down the empty streets of the city at night, are truly dramatic; as one of the first reviewers noted, “It is profound, it is sometimes as horrible as a dream, with all the naïveté and simplicity of a dream.”101 Benois did not attempt to comment in his illustrations on Pushkin’s grand musings on the fate of Russia, its mysterious capital, and its suffering subjects.

Rather, Pushkin and his Bronze Horseman strike the ideal keynote, as always, for testing the new sounds of the song about Petersburg. The music of that song in the Benois interpretation and that of his friends had little in common with the original Bronze Horseman. That is precisely why Benois did not get into the questions that worried Pushkin and his commentators so much, that is, who was right, who was guilty, and was the tragedy of the Horseman’s poor Yevgeny accidental or preordained. Benois’s desire was to elicit pity and love for Petersburg, not for Yevgeny. The literary tradition of the “little man” was of no use for this purpose.

As we know, Pushkin was not quite sure about Petersburg’s role in Russia’s destiny. For Gogol and Dostoyevsky, the verdict in the “Petersburg case” was clear: “Guilty!” The force that initially moved Benois to try to overthrow this unjust verdict was Tchaikovsky’s music. Alas, the members of Mir iskusstva could not find another ally in contemporary Russian culture. The disciples of the Imperial Academy of Arts continued dutifully to glorify the capital, but for them it was a matter of sheer routine, not conviction. The Wanderers, taking literature’s lead, attacked Petersburg ferociously out of ideological and social hatred. The aesthetics of the city were pushed to the background and became completely irrelevant.

By forging an alliance with music unique in Russian culture, Mir iskusstva achieved the impossible—it turned the tide. Its members led the counterattack on a wide front, in all areas of culture. Russian culture, and in particular art, almost suffocating from the weight of strident ideology, started to reclaim its own language once again. At the same time the perception of aesthetic grandeur and the deep emotional and psychological significance of Petersburg was gradually resurrected. The mythos of the capital gained new luster, and once again one could faintly hear the clanging of hoofs under The Bronze Horseman.

The members of the Benois circle were called “retrospective dreamers.” They looked into the future, but their hearts, as befitted real romantics, belonged to the past. And as for all romantics, music was their guiding light. In Benois’s travels to the era of imperial Petersburg his constant companion became Tchaikovsky.

A great deal united the two men, who never met. Tchaikovsky and Benois both idealized the role of superman (or, rather, the super-person) in history, particularly in Russian history. For them Petersburg was not simply an incomparably beautiful city but a magical place inhabited by “living shadows”: Peter the Great, the amazing Russian empresses (and for Benois, there was also mad Paul I, whose image so intrigued him). Thus the imperial longings of both Tchaikovsky and Benois had an aesthetic and personal character. They personalized their monarchist feelings, so that, for example, Alexander III, who patronized Tchaikovsky and maintained a kindly relationship with the Benois family, embodied the Russian monarchy for both of them. Imperial Petersburg of the present and the past blurred into one for composer and artist.