When Alexandre Benois first met Nijinsky, he was surprised to see a ‘rather thick-set little fellow . . . more like a shop assistant than a fairy-tale hero’.14 At the Imperial Ballet School, other students had found the young dancer dull-witted and had ridiculed his Tartar bone-structure. Although Nijinsky’s professional debut was striking, his meagre pay at the Mariinsky necessitated giving ballroom dancing lessons to the children of the rich. This precarious situation changed when the homosexual socialite Prince Pavel Lvov took Nijinsky to bed. Suddenly part of a smart set, frequenting nightclubs such as the Aquarium or the Alcazar and after-show parties at Cubat’s restaurant on Kamenny Island, Nijinsky was introduced to Diaghilev by Lvov in the autumn of 1908. The dancer’s account of the consequences of that meeting were given in his Diary, written in 1918, when he was married and on the verge of insanity.15 Nijinsky remembered that when he was summoned to the Hotel Europe on the Nevsky Prospekt by Diaghilev, ‘I allowed him to make love to me. I trembled like a leaf. I hated him, but pretended, because I knew that my mother and I would die of hunger otherwise.’ He declared that Diaghilev was ‘a bad man’ who loved boys, suggesting that one ‘must stop men like him by any means’. Nijinsky’s disgust erupted into disturbed utterances: ‘Gogol: masturbation was his downfall,’ ‘I am no longer Nijinsky of the Russian Ballet, I am Nijinsky of God,’ ‘I want the death of the mind’16 – a desire reflected by the implicit absurdity and spontaneity of the burgeoning Russian avant-garde. However, before Nijinsky was hospitalised with schizophrenia, his artistic collaboration with Diaghilev allowed him to become one of the most celebrated dancers of all time and the physical manifestation of modernism – a tightly wound spring so powerfully captured by Auguste Rodin in a small plaster maquette for a bronze.
Preparing for the 1909 Russian Ballet season at the Châtelet in Paris, Diaghilev ran into difficulties. When Nijinsky appeared onstage at the Mariinsky with the crotch of his tights stuffed with handkerchiefs, the royal family were shocked and Diaghilev was held to account. Up till then his troupe had been allowed to rehearse in the Hermitage Theatre, where Karsavina remembered being served tea or chocolate by liveried servants. The fallout from the Nijinsky scandal, and the displeasure of the mighty Matilda Kschessinskaya over Diaghilev’s casting, resulted in the authorities cutting their funding and withdrawing permission to use the royal palace. But the French, wary of investing in revolutionary Russia, were willing to support its revolutionary art. Nijinsky and Pavlova were dancing Les Sylphides in Paris that May. The Ballets Russes would return to the French capital over the next years to scandalise and triumph. It was, as Karsavina observed, an ‘invasion of Russian art into Europe’.17 Meanwhile the departure of Diaghilev and his pleiad, the urgent struggle against the regime and the tensions of driving industrialisation left the greying Russian capital decidedly less polished and sophisticated.
Soon after the Second Duma – which included members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – began to sit at the Tauride Palace in February 1907, the ceiling of its debating chamber caved in.18 The delegates were not in session at the time, but the feisty socialist contingent – with their vigorous attacks on the government – soon brought down the assembly. After weeks of agitation for reform, the police arrived in early June to arrest Bolshevik and Menshevik delegates. New guns were sited on the ramparts of the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Okhrana launched an offensive. The ferocity of the clampdown forced extremists such as Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev to flee to Switzerland, where radical exiles were, nonetheless, kept under the prying eyes of the Paris-based foreign branch of the Okhrana. After dismissing the rebellious Second Duma, the authorities secured a Third Duma stuffed with businessmen and noblemen.19 As with its predecessors, the speaker’s chair was placed pointedly in front of a domineering portrait of the tsar. This Third Duma lasted five years, and Count Kokovtsov claimed it was the only one that made a constructive contribution to government.20
With the revolution ‘crushed’, St Petersburg industrialists went on the offensive. A recession meant that bosses were able to disregard their promised wage rises and forget the eight-hour day.21 Time sheets were introduced, an hourly wage replaced the daily rate, and time-and-motion studies attempted to increase productivity. Disheartened, membership of the Bolshevik Party dwindled from nearly 7,000 in early 1907 to a mere 500 by 1911, when industrial output rose to satisfy the hunger for modern artillery and, once again, turned St Petersburg into a boom town. Foreign investment poured in, after strike action imploded – walkouts came down from about 1,000 in 1907 to just eleven in 1910.22 Among the wealthier inhabitants of the city the pace of life accelerated. In the centre of what was now Europe’s fifth-largest ‘unhealthiest and most expensive capital’, there was an increasing number of motor cars. The affluent Nabokovs had a Benz and a Wolseley in the city and an Opel convertible, which shot along country lanes at more than ninety kilometres an hour.23 A Moscow-St Peters-burg-Moscow motorbike rally became popular, along with other sports and gymnastics. The British community enjoyed excellent tennis courts and a yacht club on Krestovsky Island, and an American-style roller-skating rink opened in 1913.24 Biplanes took off from Kolomiagi Aerodrome in Vyborg, and hydroplanes bump-landed on the choppy Neva. These first aircraft were imported but, by 1913, Igor Sikorksky was designing and assembling them at the Russian-Baltic Aeroplane Factory. There were also electric doorbells, lifts in lacy cages and – most beguilingly – ‘electric palaces’ or cinemas. A film theatre first opened in May 1896, and fifteen years later there were more than 130 in the city, of which twenty-three were to be found on the Nevsky Prospekt. Electric trams appeared in September 1907, serving more affluent areas and causing accidents as idling pedestrians underestimated the enthusiasm of the drivers.25 But passengers living in the suburbs still had to use the antiquated horse-tram network to make the slow commute from their muddy streets and their dwellings, void of sanitation. Already split by extremes of culture and ignorance, enormous wealth and abject poverty, St Petersburg was now divided by the emerging technology of the twentieth century. Pollution was increasing. Marta Almedingen recalled the inhabitants of the Petersburg Side seeming as if ‘they had never seen a sunrise in their lives’.26
Functionalist principles of design had been championed by the Society of Architects and the Institute of Civil Engineers since the 1880s. By 1910, their triumph over nostalgic neo-Russian building and all the whimsies of stil moderne was visible in the emergence of a modern take on neoclassicism. During the first two decades of the new century Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt on the Petersburg Side was developed with fashionable bourgeois multi-storey apartment blocks, which gentrified the street, if not the quarter. The Mertens Trade House on the Nevsky and the Azov-Don Bank offered mighty modern structures worthy of determined capitalism.27
Trams on the frozen Neva, the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress Cathedral and factory chimneys beyond.
There were still some 14,000 street traders in St Petersburg, but increasingly retail trade was conducted in markets or in the new department stores. The gostiny dvor traded in quality goods, as did Passazh, which boasted sixty individual outlets selling elegant furnishings and high-class fashion. Modelled on the nineteenth-century Parisian passages couverts, the gallery included a Café de Paris and a branch of the Crédit Lyonnais bank. Petersburg’s new department stores sold all the paraphernalia for an emergent bourgeoisie – many designs confirming that stil moderne had gone beyond the boutiques to reach a wider market. Elsewhere along the Nevsky, luxury items replaced the food and consumer goods that were prevalent half a century earlier. Beauty became big business. Countless shops were dedicated to the pursuit of youth and there were interminable adverts in magazines for lotions and potions.28 But that is to view a troubled capital cosmetically.
There was a new sensationalism and brashness. Hoardings and adverts spread like acne across the elegant buildings of the Nevsky. Men paraded with sandwich boards, providing advertising on the move. N
ewspapers reduced their content for publicity. The population began to crave tales of sex and violence, and the Petersburg press enthusiastically reported muggings – if the victims were beaten to a pulp. Armed robbery and aggressions against women spiralled during the first decades of the twentieth century and, between 1908 and 1913, there was a steep rise in indictments for murder. Pulp fiction revelled in the erotic. The titillating and sadistic novel The Sex Market, of 1908, offered a Temple of Eros where people of all ages met for group sex.29 As an insight into the mores of the age, Alexei Balabanov’s disturbing 1998 sepia film Of Freaks and Men – set in the twilight of the imperial capital – captures the sadomasochism, sexual exploitation and fervour of a bourgeois world of fringed standard lamps and antimacassars. The film’s fascination with physical aberration also harks back to the obsessions of the city’s earliest rulers – Empress Anna’s jesters and Peter the Great’s collection of curiosities in the Kunstkammer.
Student unrest continued to flare. Agitators intent on revolution used ‘noxious gases and other terrorist measures’ to disrupt those who wished to study. Female students – derided by reactionaries as ‘street girls’, and scorned for doing something as ‘unfeminine’ as studying – were discouraged from mixing with their male counterparts, lest they became radicalised. But they did, and they were. Medicine alone was considered suitable for women and, by 1910, Russia had 1,500 women doctors.30 They were badly needed in St Petersburg. Despite ‘placards with glaring red letters’ posted ‘on house fronts, inside tram cars’ and in most public places, warning people against ‘drinking raw water’, workmen continued to slake their thirst by scooping it in their greasy caps from the foul canals.31 In 1907, typhoid struck in the poorer quarters. The following year, a cholera epidemic struck 8,000 people and it was noted that 2,500 victims of the typhus outbreak of 1908 were sleeping rough or were long-term inhabitants of one of the city’s thirty-four dosshouses. The capital still lacked an adequate underground sewage system. There were still cesspools and rubbish in the courtyards and streets. St Petersburg was ninety million roubles in debt,32 awash with vice and corruption and – with its leaders constantly jockeying amongst themselves – little seemed to get done.
St Petersburg soup kitchen, 1910.
The Russian Society for the Protection of Women became one of the city’s chief pressure groups against prostitution, but it fought a losing battle and many of the city’s 500 brothels remained dangerous for prostitutes and patrons alike, as well as being a constant nuisance to their neighbours. Residents of Kronstadt petitioned the authorities to move a brothel whose clients – loud, crude and drunk – habitually accosted women on the surrounding streets. Punters completely blinded by booze often forced entry to the wrong house, yet no action was taken and the brothel remained open. In fashionable parts of the city, the owners or managers of hotels, shops, bars and restaurants pimped their female staff – often not even paying them a wage, but expecting them to make money by selling their bodies. If the middle-men didn’t skim off too much commission, the pay was high. Two girls of nine and eleven, who were rescued by the House of Mercy, were earning five times what a female factory hand earned. But the price they paid was monstrous. Illegal abortions multiplied. White slavers operated.33 A report to the Congress for the Struggle against the Trade in Women claimed that 13 per cent of the capital’s prostitutes killed themselves, and that nearly 40 per cent who registered for the first time in 1909 already suffered from venereal disease. Overloaded clinics meant that thorough inspections were impossible. Sometimes an examination consisted of no more than the lifting of a dress. In two of the city’s three damp and dirty clinics there was no access to hot water, and the pressure of work meant that doctors often neglected to clean speculums between inspections. An estimated 50,000 prostitutes contended with police corruption, abuse, alcoholism and enslavement and both suffered from and spread syphilis.34 Into this world came a monk from the Urals who – far from denouncing and saving this Gomorrah – would revel in its amorality.
After producing four daughters, the empress had given birth to the haemophiliac tsarevich, Alexei, in 1904. The condition – which prevented blood from clotting was passed on from his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Distressed and desperate for a solution to the tsarevich’s frailty, Nicholas and Alexandra turned to the magical powers of a convicted rapist, horse-rustler and holy man, Grigory Rasputin,35 who decided it was his mission to save the dynasty and, thereby, the country. Sizeable, strong and increasingly well dressed, Rasputin had an exceptional talent for manipulation, which made fashionable St Petersburg putty in his hands. Despite the fact that he behaved like a peasant, wiping his mouth with his satin blouse and leaving orts stranded in his straggling beard, he was a guest at the most fashionable tables, where he proved capable of manipulating the most sophisticated listener. He held court, controlling the discussion by constantly shifting his attention or changing subject, while his topics of conversation ranged from the risqué to the downright indecent.36 He was suspected of belonging to the ecstatic sect known as the Kristovovery or Khlysty,37 who believed they had a hotline to the Holy Spirit. Such power of prayer appeared to help Rasputin staunch the flow of the tsarevich’s blood, but it also gave him a licence to debauch. When one of his close associates Chionya Berlatskaya accused Rasputin of raping her on a train, he claimed that he had merely exorcised a devil. Morality – he maintained – was merely a cowardly screen to protect people from temptation. It was only through sinning with passion that a person could repent and hence receive salvation. Rasputin offered himself as the catalyst for sin.38
Prime minister Stolypin had Rasputin followed by the Okhrana, but by the summer of 1911 Stolypin was out of the way, murdered at the Kiev opera by a double-agent, Mordko Bogrov, who had been assigned to safeguard him.39 By the end of the year, the St Petersburg press and city gossips were becoming obsessed with the charismatic spiritual leader, who – it was rumoured – spent bath and bedroom time with the emperor’s children and had seduced their nurse. The chairman of the Third Duma circulated hectographed copies of letters written to Rasputin by the empress and her daughters, and it is easy to see why Alexandra’s sentiments were questioned: ‘I kiss your hands . . . To fall asleep forever on your shoulder, in your arms . . . Come quickly . . . I am tormenting myself for you.’40 Meanwhile her younger daughters admitted that they often dreamed about the healer. Young boys who had been hawking pornography up and down the Nevsky for some years added to their stock faked scenes involving Rasputin and the Romanovs. Bolsheviks sold pamphlets detailing lewd encounters, and projected faked pictures in the cinema and onto street-corner cycloramas.41 When the First World War broke out, German Zeppelins showered images over the Russian trenches of the empress and the holy man, and of Nicholas nesting on Rasputin’s genitals. Rasputin vied with reactionary ministers and various Romanovs for the title of the most-loathed figure in the capital.
Count Kokovtsov – anxious that press attention gave Rasputin too much publicity and ‘played into the hands of all the revolutionary organisations’ – summoned the ‘Siberian tramp’. During their encounter he was ‘shocked by the repulsive expression’ in Rasputin’s puckered, deep-set eyes, which fixed on the minister as if in an attempt to hypnotise him. When Kokovtsov suggested that the healer disappear, so as not to harm the monarchy, Rasputin screamed, ‘It is all lies, calumnies! I do not insist on going to the palace – they summon me.’42
The press and the Duma intensified their campaign against Rasputin, and the empress demanded that Kokovtsov silence them. However, when Mikhail Rodzianko, President of the Duma, reported to Nicholas II on 26 February 1912 that ‘no revolutionary propaganda could achieve as much as Rasputin’s mere presence at court’,43 and provided numerous examples of people corrupted and driven to distraction by his behaviour, the tsar was understandably upset. The Ministry of the Interior plotted an assassination – but the minister lost his nerve. Fleeing the capital, Rasputin returned to Siberia, where he
indulged himself sexually and practised distance-healing on the heir to the throne.44
With Petersburg agog with scandal and increasingly unstable, many people began to express nostalgia for a world that was fast disappearing. Alexandre Benois – who became Vice-President of the Society for the Protection and Preservation of Russian Monuments of Art and Antiquity – recalled that, as a child, he became delirious whenever he ‘heard the loud, nasal cries of the travelling showman, “Here’s Petrushka! Come, good people and see the show!”’ As an adult, Benois decided to celebrate the magic of the mid-nineteenth-century Butter Week fair, which had enchanted inhabitants and visitors alike. In the 1860s, Lord Redesdale had recorded that, during Maslenitsa, the area around the Admiralty was ‘entirely taken up by booths, circuses, giants and dwarfs, cheap pantomimes and ballets, boneless contortionists and the inevitable Hercules of the Fair with his weights and clubs’.45 As that had all vanished by the early years of the twentieth century, Benois was determined to recapture it. Ironically, his evocation of old St Petersburg, with the ballet Petrushka, served as a testimony to the city’s striking cultural diaspora. He may have conceived and designed the work in the capital, but Stravinsky wrote the music on the Côte d’Azur, Fokine and Diaghilev rehearsed it in Rome, and it premiered in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 13 June 1911. With western Europe increasingly anxious about the possibility of revolution in Russia, there was an appetite for visions of the old, picturesque St Petersburg, and the ballet was a hit.46 Stravinsky remembered that Enrico Cecchetti, the legendary ballet master who played the magician, was so old that a long false beard was unnecessary. Nijinsky’s Petrushka, was ‘the most exciting human being’ the composer had ever seen onstage.47
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