Alexander III died in 1894. Between 1881 and his death, St Petersburg had become the scene of immense creativity. Industrially, the capital was steaming ahead with an energy worthy of Peter the Great. But St Petersburg was also galloping towards tragedy, and the apogee of its artistic triumph would be short. Meanwhile, some ardent revolutionaries were losing sight of the communal mir and were following the dictatorial example of their tsarist adversaries. They were starting to place a political system – an abstraction – above the needs or feelings of the people.
10
DANCING ON THE EDGE
1894–1905
The 1905 Revolution touched everybody. On ‘Bloody Sunday’ in early January, the promising young dancer Vaslav Nijinsky was coshed by a Cossack rampaging to disperse a crowd. Months later, a law student named Igor Stravinsky was mistakenly arrested with a group of protesters while walking through Kazansky Place.1 Members of the imperial ballet came out on strike in October – among the leaders, three of the greatest dancers of the age: Tamara Karsavina, Mikhail Fokine and Anna Pavlova. Meanwhile a ‘semi-naked young girl y . . . in a semi-transparent Greek tunic, giving full freedom to her movements’2 had astounded St Petersburg. Sergei Diaghilev-a portly man from Perm, with a stylish shock of white hair and a taste for young men – immediately understood that a presentation by the American dancer Isadora Duncan could change the course of dance in Russia. The symbolist poet and novelist Andrei Biely viewed one of Duncan’s ‘shocking’ performances in the company of the woman who had nearly driven him to suicide – the wife of his dear friend, the poet Alexander Blok. Biely saw, in the freedom of Duncan’s gestures, ‘the symbol of the new, young revolutionary Russia’.3
The decade leading up to the year when Russia danced on the edge was dominated by Nicholas II, an intransigent tsar and the last of the species. Stravinsky remembered him as a ‘colourless’4 figure flanked by dour guards whose job it was to keep people at bay. Nicholas refused to consider the idea that an emperor could consult with elected representatives. The rift between autocracy and progressive thought – deepening since the accession of Nicholas I – had become abysmal. Anti-Semitic like his father, Nicholas II considered that pogroms were justified by the high proportion of Jews to be found in revolutionary groups, and so ‘brotherhoods’ of right-wing thugs were not discouraged from attacking ‘kikes’ and ‘lefties’.
Nicholas II was dominated by his wife, Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt. As a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she spent a good deal of her childhood in the shelter of Kensington Palace in London. Taking the name of Alexandra Feodorovna when she converted to the Orthodox Church, she was introspective, stiff and unpopular. Her intelligence – like that of her husband – was limited, and the couple avoided their terrorised capital as much as possible.5 Sir Cecil Spring Rice, chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy, sounded a note of exasperation in a letter to his friend, Mrs Theodore Roosevelt, wife of the American president: ‘The Empress has a bad ear, the emperor won’t attend to business and no one can do anything at all. What becomes of the U.S. when your ear aches?’6
Nicholas and his family spent the spring at Tsarskoe Selo and the early summer at Peterhof. A cruise on the imperial yacht was next on the agenda, followed by a sojourn in Crimea at their neo-Renaissance palace at Livadia. This annual progress terminated at their hunting lodges in Poland, before the season of official functions brought them – for the briefest interval to the capital.7 They were reluctant hosts. The last costume ball held in the Winter Palace was in February 1903, part of the bicentennial celebrations for the founding of a city that was so soon to shake off its imperial carapace. Three hundred guests dressed in the costume of Peter the Great’s father, Alexis. There was a performance of Boris Godunov, which had been banned from imperial theatres for political reasons during the reign of Alexander III.8 After the performance, guests sat down to eat. Dinners were interminable, with up to twelve fatty soups sitting tepid on the table, as if to signal that the whole imperial binge had gone on too long. The 200th anniversary of the founding of the city was celebrated by its 200th flood. Although not on the scale of the city’s worst deluge in 1824 – the water rising only half as much – warning guns boomed from the fortress. The wind howled. The Neva rose above the quays. The streets were awash. Throughout the two preceding centuries, flood warnings had tolled with monotonous regularity, and every year winter ice landlocked St Petersburg. Latterly a new threat had settled. In the Romanov capital, a staggering number of people had grown sick and tired of the regime. The one ball held each year in the Great Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace had an air of tiresome familiarity. Braziers flamed around Palace Square as carriages and open sledges – for ‘those officers who did not fear the cold’ – arrived. Shortly after 8.30 in the evening, as their majesties came ‘in full procession of state, from the Malachite Room, the orchestra plunged into a polonaise’9 – Glinka’s perennial tonic for tone-deaf tsars. But the last court ball ever held in the Russian Empire was in January 1904. Such celebrations seemed less appropriate after the birth of the haemophiliac tsarevich, the military disaster in the Far East and the affront of the 1905 Revolution.10
As ever, looking back was one way of holding on to a fast-disappearing life, and that was provided in the curious context of an innovative arts magazine, Mir Istkusstva, or The World of Art. The enterprise began with a rather precious group of young men who quaintly named themselves the Nevsky Pickwickians. Their leader was the painter, theatrical designer, art critic and historian Alexandre Benois. His engagement with the elegance of Petersburg’s past was a family affair – which made it an appropriately European affair. On his mother’s side, Benois was descended from Catterino Cavos, the Venetian director of music to the imperial theatres and father of Alberto Cavos, architect of the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi in Moscow. Alberto’s daughter married the half-French, half-German Nicholas Benois, a gold medallist in architecture at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. St Petersburg’s history was clearly in Alexandre Benois’s blood. The Nevsky Pickwickians formed in the 1880s, while Benois and his two friends, Dmitri Filosofov and Walter Nuvel, were studying at the private May School in the capital. Just before graduating in 1890, they befriended a Jewish art student, Léon Rosenberg, who would gain fame as a revolutionary stage designer under the safely non-Jewish name of Bakst. He burst upon the scene in 1900 with sets for a ballet presented so successfully in the Hermitage Theatre that it transferred to the Mariinsky. Towards the end of that same year, Filosofov’s dynamic cousin, Sergei Diaghilev, arrived in the capital and took charge of the Nevsky Pickwickians, transforming them into Mir Istkusstva, a group of aesthetes who mounted exhibitions and produced an influential magazine. Mir Istkusstva displaced the social focus of the peredvizhniki with a fin-de-siècle ‘art for art’s sake’ mentality – ‘a world of art’ which was a world apart. All too aware of the flat philistinism of Nicholas II’s reign, Mir Istkusstva delighted in the capital’s rich architectural history.11 In ‘Painterly Petersburg’, an article he wrote for their magazine, Benois challenged the familiar epithets ‘putrefying swamp’, ‘absurd invention’ and ‘regimental office’ with the declaration that he loved the capital.12 ’
Published as a large-format magazine, Mir Istkusstva was devoted to St Petersburg architecture as well as to older forms of Russian building and decorative arts. Well placed in society, the Nevsky Pickwickians met fascinating figures such as the decadent scientist Alfred Nurok – devourer of de Sade and erotic verse. He introduced them to the work of the art-nouveau English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, whose subsequent influence on their magazine and on contemporary Russian graphics was considerable. After a French diplomat acquainted the group with the latest in French painting, they enthusiastically presented Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne to art lovers in Russia, at a time when these artists were derided or barely known to the public in France. Thus Diaghilev introduced Post-Impressionism to Petersburg and kick-started the short-lived modernist re
volution in Russia. He began to organise important exhibitions. ‘English and German Watercolours’ was presented in the two-floored hall of Maximilian Messmacher’s sumptuous and eclectic neo-Renaissance Stieglitz Museum. Diaghilev mounted a show of ‘Scandinavian Painters’ in 1897 and of ‘Russian and Finnish Painters’ in 1898, in which contemporary Russian artists such as Isaak Levitan, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel and Viktor Borisov-Musatov were shown.
Diaghilev capped these important Stieglitz exhibitions with the huge 1905 display of 3,000 Russian portraits at the Tauride Palace. The walls of the exhibition space were specially painted in deep colours, and Bakst created a garden effect, with statues placed to break up the endless rows of pictures.13’ It proved to be a sensation with privileged sections of society. Benois was, however, astonished by the indifference of the emperor to images of his antecedents. The utter boorishness of the Romanovs was demonstrated when the Grand Duke Nicholas put his foot through a portrait during the hanging of the exhibition. Trying to shrug off his faux pas, the grand duke superciliously suggested that the work needed restoration. As the public poured into the exhibition, Diaghilev sensed a frisson of ‘alarm and foreboding’ as people passed through the room full of portraits of the unstable Paul I. The great irony was that this extensive celebration of the Romanovs was presented just as the regime was on the point of collapse. Diaghilev sensed as much. Speaking at a Tauride banquet given in his honour, he described the exhibition as a great ‘moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us and which will also sweep us away’.14
Maximilian Messmacher’s Stieglitz Museum.
Despite the fact that the bulk of Russia’s huge population remained illiterate and hopelessly poor, there were parts of the country that were modernising. As it moved into the twentieth century, Russia’s commercial isolation was eroded by the ongoing initiatives of the progressive Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte, who secured the rouble by going onto the gold standard and – between 1893 and 1904 – brought Russia into the orbit of international capitalism. Expanding rapidly during the boom years of the 1890s, when industrial growth was high,15 St Petersburg became the largest manufacturing complex in the Russian Empire, its architectural treasures prey to pollution, its skyline spoilt by belching soot from workshop chimneys. As Biely wrote, a ‘many-thousand swarm’ plodded towards the factories each morning. Out of a population of 1.5 million, nearly 300,000 worked in industry. Building could not keep pace with the influx of workers from the provinces and rents rose. When boom turned to bust in 1900, labour felt the pinch. Even when the economy bounced back, stimulated by the misguided and highly unpopular Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the population had little to celebrate. Russia’s intrusion in the Far East was badly timed. In 1898, Port Arthur in southern Manchuria had been seized to secure a naval and trading base. Two years later, the Boxer Rebellion against Western imperialism broke out in China, and the tsar was forced to send 170,000 troops into Manchuria to protect Russia’s eastward expansion along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Meanwhile Japan – victim of Western arrogance since the mid-nineteenth century – had colonial dreams of its own. In a tactic that it would repeat in 1942 against the American Navy, Japan launched a surprise attack on Russia’s Pacific squadron in Port Arthur in April 1904 and laid siege to the town. As the Japanese army pressed on into Manchuria and defeated a superior Russian force, the tsar’s Far Eastern ambitions shrivelled.16
Superficially, for the middle classes, life in St Petersburg seemed untouched by all this. Top hats and ‘the froth of ostrich feathers’ still promenaded on the Nevsky. Art nouveau – or stil moderne as it was called in Russia – came to the capital. Never architecturally as exuberant as its Moscow counterpart, Petersburg remained close to the stone-hewn folk world of the Finnish take on the movement. The art-nouveau Eliseev Brothers’ Trading House – which sold ‘all kinds of fruit and native and foreign dainties”17 – went up on the Nevsky between 1902 and 1903. The asymmetrical, almost palatial and splendidly detailed interior of Vitebsk Station was created in 1902–4. The American Singer Company constructed the first metal-frame building in the capital, a technique that enabled the use of large windows.18 But the most accomplished and forward-looking art-nouveau structure was the mansion built by Alexander Gogen between 1904 and 1906 on Kronverksky Prospekt for Matilda Kschessinskaya, the ballerina who had been collecting noblemen and a sizeable fortune. When Prince Radziwill observed that Kschessinskaya must ‘be proud to have two grand dukes’ at her feet, she replied that it was not strange – ‘I have two feet.’19 As a result of her considerable talents, Kschessinskaya became so wealthy that she was accompanied by a special bodyguard and held court, entertaining lavishly at her country estate or in her stylish mansion overlooking Troitskaya Square.
The top of the Singer Building on the Nevsky – the first metal-frame building in the city.
St Petersburg Stil moderne with echoes of Finnish art nouveau.
In terms of furniture design and decoration, St Petersburg’s stil moderne was eclectic. Friedrich Meltzer, one of the capital’s two leading firms, decorated Empress Alexandra’s bathroom in the Winter Palace in ‘the English style’, its upper walls in white chintz with pale pink irises. Meltzer’s rival, Svirsky, designed the children’s apartments on the imperial train using a bright floral pattern. The apartments of the empress in the Winter Palace and at Tsarskoe Selo were also decorated in stil moderne. Imperial egg-maker Carl Fabergé went through an art-nouveau phase between 1889 and 1902, and Alexandra bought Gallé glassware and instructed the Imperial Porcelain Factory to make unique pieces of fake Gallé exclusively for the royal family. Prince Sergei Shcherbatov and Baron Vladimir von Meck – inspired by the art-nouveau Maison Bing in Paris – set up Contemporary Art on the Bolshaya Morskaya in early 1903 in order to promote stil moderne. But despite their energy in organising exhibitions, the prince and the baron only sold one chair and, after eighteen months, shut it down. Nonetheless, Stil moderne made its appeal to the nouveau riche. Its use of swirling floral motifs20 – suggesting the gentle play of water on fronds in a clear pool – acted as a palliative to the harsher St Petersburg experience of water.
Nineteenth-century traditions and pleasures were still flourishing in the rapidly changing capital. The novelist Marta Almedingen remembered the fairs held on Vasilevsky Island, with paraffin-smelling sweets, honey-stewed apples, hot waffles and plaster busts of the imperial family for sale. Tamara Karsavina recalled the fire watchtowers, the horse-drawn fire engines and the brass helmets and bugles of the firemen. Stravinsky recalled the smell of horse and leather from the droshkies, the reek of gas and paraffin lamps that slowly disappeared as the city electrified, and the pervasive scent of Mahorka tobacco, which had been imported from Spain through Holland since the founding of the capital. Karsavina remembered the enthusiastic, accomplished and inexpensive Jewish tailors she visited with her parents in the glass-roofed Alexandrovsky market,21 while the spoilt young Vladimir Nabokov recorded the city’s ongoing Anglophilia – his family bought Pears Soap, Golden Syrup, fruitcakes, striped blazers and smelling salts from the English Shop on the Nevsky Prospekt. The poet Osip Mandelstam insisted that the streets of St Petersburg demanded spectacle and that their architecture inspired him ‘with a kind of childish imperialism’. He recalled the May Parade in the Field of Mars, with its gleaming swords and bayonets, silver trumpets and bugles. It seemed to him ‘that in Petersburg something very splendid and solemn was absolutely bound to happen’.22
Nevertheless, Nicholas II did much of his official entertaining in the safe and imposing palaces roundabout. The King of Siam – whose troupe of dancers inspired Fokine and Bakst was entertained at Peterhof, as was President Félix Faure of France and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Karsavina recalled a gala Swan Lake with Kschessinskaya dancing Odette/Odile – presented to another French president, Emile Loubet, in Catherine the Great’s Chinese Theatre at Tsarskoe Selo, where all the lacquer pan
els, the red and gold rococo chairs and porcelain flowers remained unusually radiant.23 Splendid as such occasions may have been, there was something hollow about the capital, drained of its imperial purpose. St Petersburg had been a stage erected for the pageant of the Romanovs but, as tsars and their ministers became increasingly intimidated by revolutionaries, Mandelstam sensed ‘the quiet misery . . . of the life that was dying’. He smelt ‘the humid air from mouldy parks’ and suffered ‘the rubbery aftertaste of Petersburg’s boiled water’, drawn from what Biely described as the greenish ‘turbid germ-infested waters of the Neva’. It was a city whose streets in autumn were tormented by an icy drizzle which saturated pedestrians until the flu ‘crawled under the raised collars’ of clerks and students and pursued them indoors, where the Petersburg street flowed in their ‘veins like a fever’24
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