St Petersburg полностью

Sonechka Mikhailova was a “Turgenev girl” with a long soft braid and small black eyes, who blushed easily. Once she walked behind Blok for a long time as he returned from some meeting with a friend. Blok was agitated, arguing furiously, and smoking—Sonechka picked up the butts, collected a small box of them, and probably still has them to this day. Dying of love for Blok, she would go to his house. But not daring to enter, she would stand by the door and kiss the wooden handle of the entry, weeping.32

Blok was showered with letters asking for a rendezvous (“It would be the greatest day of my life!”) or demanding advice; one young writer famous in Petersburg circles told Blok that her marriage was fictitious and she wanted to have his child, who most certainly would be a genius. (She offered the same proposal to two other writers at the same time, though.) Many young poets sent their works to Blok; the fortunate ones who got a response—even negative—were undoubtedly proud for the rest of their lives. But his inaccessibility became legendary, and many who wanted to show Blok their work did not dare to do so.

One of Blok’s meek admirers was Marc Chagall, a nineteen-year-old artist from the backwater town of Vitebsk and new in Petersburg. Soon after his arrival Chagall went to the premiere of Blok’s play The Fair Show Booth directed by Meyerhold. In a long room with a small stage, a show unlike anything the Russian theater had ever known went on for forty minutes. Harlequin, Pierrot, and Columbine, the traditional characters of commedia dell’arte, appeared in Blok’s play, but here they were ultramodern and typically symbolist, even decadent. The eccentric and challenging poetry interplayed with the transparent music (composed by the poet Mikhail Kuzmin, who was also an accomplished musician). For Meyerhold this was a wonderful opportunity to realize his ideas of symbolist theater. Later he would write, “The first push toward setting the path of my art was given … by the fortunate invention of the plan for Alexander Blok’s marvelous The Fair Show Booth.”33

Meyerhold himself—tall, lanky, with a hooked nose and abrupt gestures—played Pierrot. In a harsh, almost creaking voice, he shouted at the stunned audience, “Help! I’m bleeding cranberry juice!” At the end of the play Pierrot summed up the action: “I’m very sad. And you think it’s funny?” He then took a flute from the pocket of his traditional white costume with big lace collar and played a simple melody, typically Kuzminian.

As the lights gradually went on, the bewildered audience sat in silence. But then a storm broke out, which another poet described, not without envy: “I had never seen before or since such implacable opposition and such delight in the fans in a theater. The vicious whistling of the foes and the thunder of friendly applause mixed with shouts and cries. This was fame.”34

This highly eccentric spectacle made an indelible impression on the young Chagall. Like many of his peers, he wrote lyric poetry à la Blok, which he didn’t dare show to Blok himself. But Chagall retained the atmosphere, symbols, and images of The Fair Show Booth throughout his life.

Blok societies were appearing all over the country and the cult of the poet was spreading. At parties high school students would read to one another, trying to imitate the author’s monotonous-hypnotic manner, Blok’s most “decadent” verse:

In tavern, alleys, and side streets,

In the electric dream wide awake,

I sought the endlessly beautiful

Who were immortally in love with fame.

Or his poem “The Unknown Woman,” about the mysterious beauty, floating past the poet like a vision, in a cheap suburban restaurant filled with “rabbit-eyed drunkards”—the poem was reprinted in the popular anthology Reader-Declaimer and read all over Russia:

Ancient beliefs waft

From her heavy silks,

And her hat with funereal feathers,

And her narrow hand in rings.

Prostitutes on Nevsky Prospect quickly bought hats with black ostrich feathers and demonstrated they were au courant to potential clients. “I’m the Unknown Woman, would you like to get to know me?” Or even more temptingly, “We are a pair of Unknown Women. You can have the ‘electric dream wide awake,’ you won’t regret it.” The reading public gave Blok the title “poet of Nevsky Prospect.” This was, in the words of a contemporary critic, “the decadence of decadence.”