Anti-Semitism was a fact of Russian life, part of a wider xenophobia that touched even intelligent and creative people. Dostoevsky held the Jews – with their ‘perpetual look of peevish dejection’81 – responsible for the commercialisation and industrialisation of his country. Rimsky-Korsakov labelled Balakirev ‘an implacable Jew-hater’,82 an accusation that could also be levelled against Glinka and Mussorgsky. Nicholas I had not been anti-Semitic, but – driven by his zeal for conformity – wanted Jews to be forced to integrate into Russian life. During the reign of Alexander II, after a pogrom against the Jews in Odessa in 1871, the St Petersburg Vedomosti blamed ‘Jewish exploitation’ for the violence. The anti-Semitic newspaper campaign gathered intensity as the 1870s progressed, and fuelled the violence that was unleashed against peaceful, inwardlooking communities.83 Most dangerously, between the 1860s and the assassination of Alexander II, the number of Jewish revolutionaries had increased. The Jews who crucified Christ had now killed God’s anointed tsar. On the tenth anniversary of the 1871 pogrom, violence against the Jews flared in Odessa and Warsaw. A rumour circulated that Alexander himself had provoked the attacks.84 Nicholai Ignataev, the Minister of the Interior, complained about the Polish Jews who controlled the banks, the judiciary and the press in the capital. The Vedomosti reported that St Petersburg was full of foreigners desperate for the break-up of Russia – the subtext, an attack on Jews. When Alexander appointed his younger brother, Sergei, as Governor General of Moscow, the grand duke shut the Great Synagogue and raided Jewish homes, raping, pillaging and burning. He cleared the city of Jews – allowing Jewish women to remain only as registered prostitutes. Between the accession of Alexander III and the outbreak of the First World War, nearly two million Jews emigrated.85
When Mikhail Pyliaev, in his impressions of St Petersburg, described the crowd strolling around the picturesque point of Elagin Island in 1889, he unashamedly and insistently revealed his anti-Semitism, his remarks interspersed with quips about high-class and low-class prostitutes: ‘There are cavaliers, but also many Jews; there are diplomats, but also many Jews; there are grande-dames, but also demi-dames, and even quarter-dames.’86 The sentence occurs in a passage in which Pyliaev contrasts the people he sees with a romantic vision of earlier visitors. By 1890 there was a noticeable deterioration of behaviour in city parks. Previously places of calm, they were now disturbed by the raucous behaviour of workmen. As for female factory workers out and about in the city, they were frequently mistaken for prostitutes by the wealthy. Child prostitution was an ongoing problem. In 1889, St Petersburg police arrested twenty-two young girls, aged between eleven and fifteen, for soliciting. Among adult prostitutes, clinic attendance was low, and infected workers often tried to fool the medical examiners by disguising vaginal sores with make-up or silver nitrate. Despite the attempt to keep students away from brothels, the poet Alexander Blok – who was at school in the capital during the 1890s – was infected by venereal disease before he was seventeen.87
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Alexander III’s stubborn assertion of old Russian values was responsible for St Petersburg’s most egregious cathedral. The Church of the Saviour on the Spilt Blood was deliberately provocative. Its Muscovite style challenged the architecture of Peter’s city, which was predominantly European and – by extension now associated with dangerous, anti-Russian ideas. Alexander II’s commission suggested that from now on, tsars would be Russian, tsars would be orthodox – in belief, if not in lifestyle. Between 1881 and 1914 more than twenty churches in the nationalistic style were consecrated in the capital – most of them demolished or converted to other uses during the 1930s. Ironically, the chief architect of the Church of the Saviour on the Spilt Blood was Alfred Parland, an Anglican born in St Petersburg to English parents. He worked in collaboration with the archimandrite Ignaty, abbot of a suburban monastery and a student of old Russian architecture. The opulent and extravagant cathedral – not completed until 1907 – boasted more than 7,000 square metres of mosaic on exterior and interior surfaces, after designs by Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel and other important artists of the day. There was also a profusion of ceramic tiles on walls and roofs, and two of the cupolas were of gilded copper.88
The siting of the church necessitated the installation of the first concrete foundation in St Petersburg and included such innovations as steam heating and electrical lighting.89 While the tsar looked backwards stylistically, in an attempt to secure autocracy, the country was undergoing technological change. By 1882 there was a telephone system in Moscow, and five years later there were 7,000 subscribers nationally – by 1911, there were more than 56,000 in Petersburg alone.90 The son of a railway official, Sergei Witte, was appointed Minister of Finance in 1892 and stimulated industrial production with his grand enterprise, the Trans-Siberian Railway. Under Witte, ‘state capitalism’ was developed to finance projects which, in the West, would have been funded by an investing middle class. Witte also secured much-needed foreign capital. After the formalisation of the military-political Franco-Russian Alliance of 1893, French francs fuelled Russian industrial muscle.91 Witte and his colleagues may have been forging railways and expanding heavy industry for the power and prestige of the country, but they were also swelling the ranks of a brutalised proletariat – badly paid, overworked and increasingly eager for change.
Long before the completion of Church of the Saviour on the Spilt Blood, there was an attempt on the life of Alexander III. Using bombs containing pellets filled with strychnine, Narodnaya Volya intended to attack the tsar’s carriage on the Nevsky Prospekt in early 1887. Among the conspirators was a zoology student at St Petersburg University, Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov. Six subversives, including Ulyanov, were caught before they succeeded and were brought to trial and hanged at Schlüsselberg in May 1887. The execution traumatised Ulyanov’s younger brother, Vladimir.92 He read and reread his brother’s copy of Chernyshevsky, and when Vladimir published a manifesto in 1902 calling for Marxists to press on to revolution, he borrowed Chernyshevsky’s title and published What Is to Be Done? by V. I. Lenin. Galvanised by his brother’s revolutionary activity and subsequent death, Lenin’s text proposed that the struggle against the tsar should merge with the fight against capitalism. After arriving in St Petersburg in 1893, Lenin became a leading figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Arrested for sedition in 1897, he survived a three-year exile to Siberia that initiated two peripatetic decades during which he prepared for the Bolshevik Revolution.
The brutality of the tsarist reaction continued. Against the wishes of his minister, Alexander III insisted that the mortal penalty 100 lashes be inflicted on a weakened female prisoner who had merely insulted a gendarme. In his reaction against the continuing unrest, the tsar was aided by the surveillance of the Okhrannye Otdeleniia, or Okhrana – the political secret police. In a tactic that was to be widely used, its chief turned a prominent member of Narodnaya Volya, Sergei Degaev. Subsequent betrayals were so numerous that, when suspicion fell on him, his party demanded proof of Degaev’s fidelity. This he provided by meeting the chief of the Okhrana, Grigory Sudeikin, and killing him.93” Increasingly complex undercover operations involving double and triple agents would complicate the road to revolution.
For a tsar desperate to assert Russian values, it was not surprising that Alexander III was keen to establish a museum in which to display his country’s art. The elegant Mikhailovsky Palace, designed by Carlo Rossi, was chosen as its premises. The young Alexander Benois, who was to play such an important role in the St Petersburg art scene, was selected to catalogue Russian works collected by Princess Tenisheva, the wife of the entrepreneur who enjoyed a monopoly on passenger traffic on Russia’s vast river network. Opened after the tsar’s death by his son, Nicholas II, the museum was known as the Alexander III Museum until the revolution, when it acquired its present name, the Russian Museum. The very fact that such a project was contemplated is a testimony to how much had been achieved by Russian painters dur
ing the nineteenth century. But while championing home-grown art, Alexander did not neglect the Hermitage. He bought the Basilewski Collection of medieval and Renaissance art from a Russian living in Paris. He obtained a vibrant Annunciation by Cima da Conegliano and the Golitsyn Museum from Moscow, where it had been assembled during the previous century.
The tsar’s policy of promoting Russian arts meant that St Petersburg’s once-popular Italian opera was closed, although recitals by singers of international calibre continued.94 The Italian-French soprano and astute businesswoman Adelina Patti came to perform. Pauline Viardot – a singer who had dazzled Turgenev – returned. The Australian soprano, Dame Nellie Melba, appeared in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Mariinsky in the presence of Alexander III in February 1891. In tow, as she toured across Europe, was her lover, Prince Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the Orléanist claimant to the French throne. During the 1888-9 season, an entire Ring cycle was performed several times, and Rimsky-Korsakov noted how Wagnerian tricks became part of his musical vocabulary, as well as those of the young Alexander Glazunov. Russian music was thriving at the time, despite some significant deaths. Mussorgsky, whose conceit had ballooned after the success of Boris Godunov, had gone into a slow alcoholic decay. He was immortalised in his habitually drink-fuddled state a few days before his death in March 1881 in a portrait by Ilya Repin. His last opera, Khovanshchina, which Rimsky-Korsakov continued to work on after Mussorgsky’s death, was presented when Savva Mamontov’s Private Opera Company played St Petersburg to great acclaim in 1886. Months later, on 15 February 1887, Borodin – enjoying a lively evening with invited guests – dropped dead. At once, all the chemist’s incomplete scores were taken to Rimsky-Korsakov, who orchestrated portions of the unfinished opera Prince Igor, before handing it over to Glazunov, who composed the missing sections. In a rich fortnight for Russian opera, Prince Igor was presented at the Mariinsky Theatre on 4 November 1890, just two weeks before the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s first opera in ten years, The Queen of Spades. Happily for Rimsky-Korsakov-who complained that the directorate of the Mariinsky had butchered the score and under-rehearsed Prince Igor – his orchestration of the opera stimulated his own ideas for an orchestral composition inspired by the Scheherazade stories.95 Orientalism in Russian music – which presented the ‘irrational’ and erotic East as a powerful temptation to the ‘Western’ Russian – appeared to argue against the reassertion of pre-Petrine values. At the same time, however, it celebrated the consolidation of the diverse Russian Empire.96
Not only was there a ten-year gap between Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, but there had also been a long interval between the shaky and unsuccessful premiere of Swan Lake in provincial Moscow in 1877 and the first performance, during the 1889-90 St Petersburg season, of The Sleeping Beauty. This ballet, which, as a celebration of the court of Versailles under Louis XIV, could be seen as the glorification of absolute monarchy, was of considerable significance for at least two young people. Léon Bakst – who would later become one of the great theatre designers of the twentieth century – obtained a ticket for the dress rehearsal. Afterwards the young man had the good fortune to meet the urbane and generous Tchaikovsky and claimed that his ‘calling was determined’ that night.97 A little while later, a weak and pale eight-year-old was taken to a performance by her poverty-stricken mother, who scrimped to purchase the tickets. Later, Anna Pavlova remembered that she had been spellbound. When her mother asked if she would like to dance with the performers on the stage, young Anna – revealing the single-minded determination necessary for success – replied, ‘I would rather dance by myself, like the lovely Sleeping Beauty. One day I will and in this very theatre.’ Two years later, the ten-year-old Pavlova passed the medical examination and was admitted to the Imperial Ballet School. By 1895 she was dancing in school performances with Mikhail Fokine, who would later-amidst his innovative and stellar career in dance – choreograph the lucrative Dying Swan for Pavlova’s international tours.98
The imperial ballet was still considered a hunting ground for rich young aristocrats. The brother of Alexander II’s second wife, Vladimir Dolgorukov, gave a son to the ballerina Alexandrova. Pregnancy cut into the short life of dancers. Some, like Vera Legat, were fortunate enough to marry their aristocratic admirer, but others were merely casual playthings for the idle rich. During the 1880s the Italian dancer, Virginia Zucchi, introduced the short tutu to St Petersburg, making performances even more enticing for the young bucks.99 According to Nijinsky’s wife, Romola, there was an old general who ‘knew the shapes of the legs of each ballerina far better than his strategy or ballistics’.100
During the graduation performance at the Imperial Ballet School in March 1890, Alexander III noticed a pretty and gifted young Polish girl called Matilda Kchessinskaya. When she curtsied before the tsar, he instructed her to become ‘the glory and adornment of our ballet’ and invited her to sit next to his son, Nicholas, at supper. After Carlotta Brianza – the first Princess Aurora in Sleeping Beauty – retired, Kchessinskaya took over the part and became the queen of Russian ballet. She also became the mistress of the tsarevich, who – in 1892 – as his father had done before him, rented a house on the English Quay for his lover. When Tchaikovsky’s last opera, Iolanta, premiered before the court in December of that same year and a baritone began to sing the aria ‘Who Can Compare with My Matilda?’, Sergei Diaghilev – who was in the audience – recorded that people were beside themselves, chuckling over the affair between Nicholas and Matilda Kchessinskaya.101
On the same bill that night was Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Despite its origins in the tales of the Prussian polymath, E. T. A. Hoffmann, the opening of the ballet presents a St Petersburg Christmas celebration. As well as taking its young heroine, Clara, from childhood into puberty, the ballet manifests the dream of someone from the cold north being transported to the exotic south – to the palace of the Sugar Plum Fairy, where Arabian and Spanish dances are performed. The Nutcracker heightens the magic of both journeys by moving from mime and social dancing at the beginning of Act I to almost uninterrupted ballet and character dancing in Act II.
St Petersburg nobility, with their greenhouses and double glazing, were desperate to outwit the cold. Christmas celebrations were a declaration of success. The tradition of the Christmas tree had been introduced from Prussia in the early nineteenth century. Baroness Maria Fredericks described the Christmas Eve ritual in the Winter Palace under Nicholas I, during which the ‘sovereign and the imperial children each had their own separate table and tree adorned with all kinds of gifts’.102 The ballerina Tamara Karsavina – a child in the early 1890s – remembers her delight in the Petersburg Christmas markets, which sprung up around churches and along the prospekts with their ‘forests of fir trees’. Her father – a dancer in the imperial ballet – loved choosing a tree with his two children and taking it home to the fifth-floor apartment they rented overlooking a curve in the Fontanka, then decorating it with gilded walnuts, Crimean apples and apricots.103
St Petersburg Christmas. The tradition of the tree had been introduced from Prussia.
With its celebration of Christmas, its militarism and its mice, its love of magic and its stately polonaise, The Nutcracker is a St Petersburg ballet. Audiences travelled to the Mariinsky in carriages through a city laced with snow. They swept past street lanterns and warmly glowing windows. They sped along the Nevsky, the Moika and the Fontanka, the embankment of the Neva – streets that played host to glittering aristocratic, official and military elites. A view down the length of any broad avenue in this winter season, with snow icing the cornices, entablatures and pediments of the harmonious buildings as if they were giant cakes, presented scenes redolent of the enchanted fairy-tale world of Tchaikovsky’s ballet.
The Nutcracker was choreographed by two of the three great ballet masters working in the capital towards the end of the nineteenth century, Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The third was the Italian Enric
o Cecchetti who brought strength and gutsiness to the imperial ballet, upsetting the dominance of the more delicate Franco-Danish tradition. When the Russian Nikolai Legat replaced Petipa as ballet master in 1903 he brought both traditions together, thus blending technical expertise with strength and thereby determining the character of twentieth-century Russian ballet. Not that the work of these great choreographers and teachers was much esteemed by the men who wrote the music for the ballets. Rimsky-Korsakov complained that people like Ivanov and Cecchetti failed to understand any music unless it was ‘of the routine ballet type’. The choreography of the ballet masters was, he complained, ‘invariably ill suited’ to the score.104
The 1892 Mariinsky production of The Nutcracker.
Only nine days after he conducted the first performance of his 6th Symphony on 16 October 1893, Tchaikovsky died, and the Vedomosti reported that the capital was humming with rumour. The composer’s nephew, Vladimir Davidov – one source of the whisperings – recalled going to the Leiner restaurant where, if he was slipped a little something, the owner would admit underage students through the back door. Tchaikovsky loved St Petersburg restaurants, often sitting in a circle with fellow composers till three in the morning, drinking prodigiously without manifesting the slightest sign of intoxication. On the occasion of the postpremiere party, which included Davidov, Tchaikovsky had called for water. Being informed there was no bottled water, he had demanded a glass from the tap. With cholera in the city, no one drank tap water, but Tchaikovsky insisted. Days later, the composer was dead. Glazunov asserted it was suicide. Riccardo Drigo, composer and conductor of the imperial ballet, spoke of homosexuality and suicide. When the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg had met Tchaikovsky some years earlier, he had found the Russian ‘melancholic almost to the point of madness’. If indeed it was suicide, was the death prompted by his attraction for the young Davidov or the result of a more general despair? According to a Soviet musicologist, public exposure of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was imminent and would have stained the reputation of his alma mater. The School of Jurisprudence was vulnerable to scandal, and all the available alumni from Tchaikovsky’s student days were supposed to have told him to kill himself in order to preserve the honour of their school. It was a tall story, which paid no heed to the relatively relaxed attitude towards homosexuality that prevailed, nor to the newspaper reports and doctor’s bulletins monitoring the progress of the composer’s sickness. The scandal – if any – was that cholera was thought to be a disease of the poor.105 Two years after Tchaikovsky’s death from the infection, the first complete and successful performance of Swan Lake, with a new storyline written by the composer’s brother, Modest, was given in St Petersburg. The essence of the tale – death by love and water.
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