St Petersburg полностью

* Almost eighty years later, Shostakovich would pick up this tradition with his anti-Stalinist Rayok, which documented the suppressed anger of the Soviet intellectual frightened by the “anti-formalist” campaign of 1948.

CHAPTER 3

in which we learn how merry it was living in Petersburg in 1908, how that merriment was soon interrupted, and how the city first lost its name and then its status as capital of Russia and, almost dead of hunger and cold, tried to remain faithful to itself. This is the Petersburg of Anna Akhmatova.

In 1908, there were published and distributed in Petersburg around seven and a half million books, describing the adventures of Nat Pinkerton, Nick Carter, and other legendary detectives. They were thin (several dozen pages) and cheap (10-12 kopeks) editions in colored cardboard covers, with titles like Pinkerton’s Trip to the Other World, The Mysterious Ice Skater, The Steel Sting, and The Murderous Model. For a city 30 percent of whose population was illiterate, such sales figures, even for light fiction, could only be considered astonishing. Just twenty or thirty years earlier the most popular and inexpensive book would have found only a few tens of thousands of readers in the city. For example, Crime and Punishment, published in Dostoyevsky’s lifetime, sold some four hundred copies a year.

Obviously, the primary reason for this incredible expansion of the Petersburg book market was the city’s rapid growth. By 1900, almost a million and a half inhabitants swelled the city, and the number continued to increase rapidly (in 1917 there would be almost two and a half million; that is, the population grew by almost 70 percent in just seventeen years).1 In the gigantic metropolis beautiful buildings, broad squares, granite embankments, and wide avenues filled with fashionable people lay next to ugly, poorly lit neighborhoods densely populated with workers’ families.

Those were two different worlds. The modernist poet Mikhail Kuzmin described in his diary how a friend looked out the window one evening “at the dark factories with such grim fear, as if he were a guard looking down from the city tower at the Huns at the city gates.” Petersburg was the leading industrial center of Russia, its technological laboratory, and its main port. Here steel was produced, steam engines, cannons, and diesel engines manufactured, oil tankers, destroyers, and submarines built. Here with ever increasing speed, powerful social forces unfolded, changing first the cultural and political face of Russia, then of the world.

It was in Petersburg that the first Russian revolution erupted in 1905. Since the turn of the century, a quiet but palpable dissatisfaction had ripened here among the urban masses directed against the young tsar, Nicholas II. The ruling elite felt that to hold off the social explosion, Russia needed a “small, victorious war.” Japan was targeted for the demonstration—no match, it would seem, for the mighty Russian Army. But the war, which began in 1904, did not go the way Nicholas and his generals had planned. The Russians lost one bloody battle after another. The loss of the Russian fleet in the Tsushima Strait, between Japan and Korea, was a horrible shock for Petersburg. Wandering organ grinders lamented the tragedy in the city’s courtyards, eliciting tears and contributions more generous than usual from residents.

At first the liberal intelligentsia merely “gave the finger inside its pocket,” in the words of Alexander Benois, the traditional behavior of the Russian opposition. But, as Benois recalled, “following the tragedy playing in the Far East, following the shame that the nation was forced to feel, the usual ‘mutterings’ turned to something else. The revolution was no longer on the far horizon. Russian society felt the instability and unreliability of everything and sensed the need for radical change.”2 Zinaida Hippius wrote about the same thing: “Something was breaking in Russia, something was being left behind, and something that had been born or resurrected strove forward…. Where to? No one knew…. There was tragedy in the air. Oh, not everyone sensed it. But very many did, and in many things.”3