St Petersburg полностью

The main amusement for this new mass audience was motion pictures. Petersburg was covered with a network of cinemas playing foreign films. It was only in 1908 that the first Russian feature film was made, about the legendary rebel and robber Stepan Razin; in 1964 Dmitri Shostakovich would compose his monumental poem for bass, chorus, and orchestra on this theme so beloved in Russia. But by 1909 there were twenty-three Russian motion pictures; their number grew tremendously and reached five hundred by 1917. Filmmaking and movie theaters had become a profitable part of Petersburg’s nascent entertainment industry.

“Look into the cinema auditoriums. You will be amazed by the makeup of the audience. Everyone is here—students and gendarmes, writers and prostitutes, officers and all kinds of intellectuals in glasses and beards, workers, clerks, merchants, society ladies, modistes, in a word, everyone,”14 mused a journalist. But this was exactly what frightened Chukovsky and his kind. They presented an apocalyptic vision of a coming “culture market,” where the goods would have to compete and the survivors would be “only those that are the most adapted to the tastes and whims of the consumer” (as Chukovsky formulated that “horrifying” prospect in 1908).

For him, as for many Russian intellectuals, the thought of culture as a product was still humiliating and shameful. That ideological puritanism was curious since Chukovsky himself won fame and fortune, appearing regularly in the popular periodical press. And at the turn of the century the more commonsensical Russian journalists freely admitted that “a newspaper is as much a capitalist enterprise as coal mining or manufacturing alcohol.”15

The newspaper boom started in Petersburg in the late nineteenth century. As censorship weakened and printing costs declined, along with the price per issue, the number of readers of periodicals increased. The real explosion occurred in 1908, when the Jewish entrepreneur Mikhail Gorodetsky founded the daily Gazeta-Kopeika (Kopek Gazette). This tabloid really did cost one kopek but managed in its four to five pages (half of which were advertising) to squeeze in some foreign news, national politics, and accounts of life in the capital, naturally with a bent for sensationalism. Each issue had a lot of photographs; the regularly featured novels in installments were accompanied by original illustrations. The publisher’s motto was “Everything that interests the world,” and his politics were quite liberal.

In the beginning the Gazeta-Kopeika printed 11,000 copies, but by 1909 its circulation had grown to 150,000 and by 1910 the street vendors and the hundreds of stores and kiosks were selling 250,000 copies a day of the tabloid. Gorodetsky turned his flourishing business into a powerful newspaper and magazine conglomerate, publishing among others Zhurnal-Kopeika, the humor pamphlet “Kopeika,” the weekly World Panorama, and the illustrated magazine Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia), for which the avowed foe of mass culture, Chukovsky, wrote a column.

All these publications, which were aimed at the widest possible audience, allotted considerable coverage to national culture, particularly literature. For instance, Leo Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday, in August 1908, was celebrated by both the liberal and the right-wing press. Typically a journalist proposed, “It would be good, in honor of Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday, to give up sexual relations on that great day, and donate the money saved thereby [!] to the development of cooperatives.”16 On a more serious note, in 1917 Gazeta-Kopeika offered its readers as a premium the complete collected works of Leo Tolstoy in fifty-six volumes.

Comparatively little has been written about the connections between Russian mass culture and its highbrow literature, even though it was in Russia that popular newspapers and magazines regularly published the works of leading writers. Anton Chekhov began his career with humorous stories in such lowbrow publications as the Petersburg magazine Oskolki (Fragments) and the tabloid Peterburgskaya gazeta. In one newspaper he published a crime novel, The Shooting Party, in nine months of installments.