St Petersburg: A Cultural History (Волков) - страница 2

CHAPTER 5 in which our long-suffering city is renamed after a tyrant, undergoes dreadful ordeals in the Great Terror and the most horrible siege in recent history, and turns from a “crazy ship” into a “ship of the dead,” to be mourned in elegies and sung in requiems. This is the Leningrad of Dmitri Shostakovich.

CHAPTER 6 in which the city becomes the hero of the Poem Without a Hero and, surviving against all odds and nurturing its own mythos in the underground, wins the right to get its original name back. The Bronze Horseman continues its eternal gallop into history—but where to? This is the Petersburg of Joseph Brodsky and his friends in creativity—the independent and tenacious poets, writers, artists, and musicians on whom the spiritual fate of this astonishing city depends.

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

PREFACE

… absence is the best medicine for forgetting … but the best way to forget forever is to see daily …

ANNA AKHMATOVA 1

On May 16, 1965, a string quartet of young musicians with their instruments in cases and their folding music stands boarded a cold and uninviting commuter train on the outskirts of Leningrad en route to the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland. It was a Sunday, and they were off to visit the poet Anna Akhmatova, who every spring spent her time in the dacha settlement of Komarovo, the former Kellomäki, some forty kilometers from Leningrad.

I was twenty-one and first violinist of the ensemble, made up of students from the Leningrad Conservatory. Since my youth, I had known by heart many of Akhmatova’s poems, for I considered her the greatest Russian poet alive, as did a multitude of other literature lovers, and I had long wanted to express my delight and deepest respect to her. Finally, I learned Akhmatova’s telephone number, called her, introduced myself, and offered to play whatever she liked. After some reflection, she named Shostakovich, a very fortunate choice for us, because just recently we had been the first ensemble in Leningrad to have learned his latest quartet, the Ninth, and performed it at the Shostakovich Festival in Leningrad with the composer present.

And this work, a half-hour piece not yet published, we performed for Akhmatova at her green dacha, which she called “a booth.” It was probably the most unusual concert performance of my life—for an audience of one, a seventy-five-year-old grande dame in a black kimono worn over a festive pink dress, who sat majestically in a deep armchair, her eyes half shut. She seemed to be absorbing the bitterness, alienation, and tragic intensity of Shostakovich’s music, so compatible with her own late poetry. The dramatic fates of Akhmatova and Shostakovich, closely tied to Petersburg, had crossed more than once. They had both been criticized by the Soviet authorities; they had addressed each other in their works, and in the book of poetry she gave the composer, Akhmatova had written: “To Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, in whose era I live on earth.”