St Petersburg полностью

In 1899 Marx bought the rights to Chekhov’s works from the author for 75,000 rubles, an incredible sum in those days. Marx did not read Chekhov; nevertheless, his intuition correctly told him he would not lose the advance. He paid leading writers a thousand rubles for what was called a printer’s sheet (approximately six thousand words) and was justly called “the creator of literary fees.” The system of patriarchal and “friendly” relations between publisher and author, by which the fee often was determined by publisher’s whim and not by actual demand in the cultural marketplace, was vanishing.

Marx’s personal tastes were definitely conservative. But Merezhkovsky, the father of Russian symbolism, was published in Niva as early as 1891 and soon became a regular contributor. Other leading symbolists followed and in 1906 the magazine presented twenty-six-year-old Alexander Blok. His poetry then appeared simultaneously in other influential Petersburg publications. For instance, the serious political newspaper Slovo (The Word) published the young poet’s verses four times in February and March 1906. And the popular liberal newspaper Rus’ ran Blok’s works five times in April 1907 alone.

The symbolists, who had started out a mere fourteen or fifteen years earlier as an esoteric group, despised and mocked, suddenly became fashionable. Just recently Blok’s literary debut in a small religious-decadent journal, The New Path, led reviewers to smirk that this “new path led to an old hospital for the mentally ill.” Now it was becoming clear that the symbolists had been accepted by the reading public. Weary of the naturalism and positivism of the last few decades, readers were impressed by the symbolists’ demonstrative aestheticism and mysticism. They also liked the erotic motifs, which were fairly strong in the poems and prose of the symbolists, and so unusual in classical Russian literature.

Eroticism was becoming all the rage in 1908. In Petersburg two editions of Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin caused a sensation that led to polemics in the press and the public. The novel’s eponymous hero was summed up by a contemporary critic as someone who “eats a lot, drinks even more, says many mostly unnecessarily gross things, brawls hard, and artistically seduces beautiful women.”24 The prudish critic did not mention that Sanin’s themes included rape, suicide, and incest.

Artsybashev was officially charged with publishing a pornographic and blasphemous work. This naturally increased interest in the book: most of the reviews of 1908 were of Sanin; a critic wrote, “There is a new ism, Saninism.” Students debated the topic, “Is Sanin right?” Saninist clubs spread throughout the city. All this reflected real market demand.

In early 1908 Chukovsky, incensed by the “wholesale lurid relishing of sexual bestiality,” sounded the alarm. “Thousands of unthinkable, impossible books about sodomy, lesbian love, masochism have flooded the book stores.”25 The “serious” press wrung its hands: the book market, which offered over eighteen thousand Russian-language titles in 1908, was dominated by pornography and crime novels, “and the literature of a progressive tendency is going through a hard year.” The prudish newspaper of the Russian revolutionaries, Pravda, saw an enemy of its political ideals in erotic literature: “In Sanin, Artsybashev spits on any social work and, in effect, proclaims, ‘Vodka and broads!’ instead of ‘Proletarians of the world, unite!’”26

On the contrary, some of the Russian symbolists greeted Artsybashev’s novel with sympathetic interest. For the exquisitely refined poet and essayist Innokenti Annensky Sanin was something “caricatured and metaphysical in a purely Gogolian way. Whether you like it or not is your business, but without a doubt, the caricature turned out to be powerful.” Blok, noting in passing that Artsybashev “has no language of his own,” admitted that in the amoral Sanin he sensed at last “a real man, with an iron will, a restrained smile, ready for anything, young, strong, and free.”

That is more a self-portrait of Blok than a portrait of Sanin. Freedom meant much to the Russian symbolists; freedom from the old, oppressive morality and from the traditional literary conventions. Learning first from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Verhaeren, the symbolists changed the course of Russian poetry with their bold images, metaphors, and unusual rhyme schemes. After many years of the reign of realistic prose, a new mass interest in poetry had been awakened in Russia. In those conditions Blok and his symbolist friends were not only esteemed; they had become brand names that could guarantee readership for a new newspaper or magazine.