Premiering two years later, The Rite of Spring had a more complex relationship to St Petersburg. The ballet’s folk rituals evoke Russia before Peter opened a window onto Europe. Yet, reinvented through strange choreography and cacophonic sound, the piece helped to forge the musical and choreographic revolutions of the twentieth century. Stravinsky spent the summer of 1911 at Princess Tenisheva’s arts-and-crafts establishment at Talashkino, working with Nicholas Roerich on the decor of the ballet. Roerich – a neo-Russian artist – was an acknowledged authority on myth and, for his score, Stravinsky took inspiration from Slavic folk song. But there were also more immediate and personal influences. The first music Stravinsky remembered was the brazen taratantara of a military fanfare from the nearby barracks. But a sound that had made an even deeper impression on the boy was the tympanic noise of ice breaking on the Neva.48 This mutated, in the composer’s mind, into the harangue that bursts on the sad, high-pitched bassoon solo which opens The Rite of Spring. Nijinsky’s choreography and Stravinsky’s score were so revolutionary that, when the ballet premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in May 1913, there was cat-calling and booing. Jokers among a shocked audience pretended to summon dentists to treat the obviously stricken dancers. In the fracas, someone was challenged to a duel, and the uproar resulted in a sold-out season. Diaghilev was thrilled and wanted to return home and scandalise the Russian capital, but the only non-imperial theatre that was large enough – the narodni dom, or People’s Palace – had burned to the ground the year before. When the score alone was eventually performed in St Petersburg and Moscow under Sergei Koussevitzky, it stimulated scant enthusiasm or outrage.49 That response, coupled with the confiscations and deprivations of the revolution, effectively severed Stravinsky’s association with his native land. He had grown up in a city where ballet was part of the fabric of life. Yet, however much he loved it, as he matured he felt that dance would not be a viable medium for any ambitious and serious composer.50 How wrong he had been. Through the vision of Diaghilev, not only had dance been revivified, but twentieth-century music had also been born.
After Diaghilev took so much Petersburg talent to the West, artists and entrepreneurs who remained in the city took up the challenges that he had initiated through Mir Istkusstva. In January 1909, Sergei Makovsky, the publisher of Apollon, mounted a huge exhibition of modern Russian art in the Menshikov Palace. Salons featured works by painters as diverse as Benois, Bakst, Alexei von Jawlensky and Vasily Kandinsky. What is striking is the crucial role that some of these artists were to play in the history of modern art. Kandinsky went on to set up the expressionist Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich. Of its six founding members, three were Russian: von Jawlensky who had been stationed in St Petersburg as a young officer had taken lessons with Ilya Repin; Marianne von Werefkin had been born in Tula; and Moscow-born Kandinsky spent his youth in Russia and Europe and made a significant contribution to developing the all-important non-objective nature of modern art, which was every bit as consequential as Stravinsky’s scores were to music.
Theatre in St Petersburg took an exciting turn when the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya began to promote young dramatists and directors – among them Vsevelod Meyerhold. Her productions pushed back the barriers of taste and morality and, in 1908, her production of Salomé – dubbed ‘pornographic’ by the Holy Synod – was banned. The most spectacular pre-war scandal, however, was presented at the Luna Park Theatre in the same year that The Rite of Spring shocked Paris. Victory Over the Sun was an avant-garde spectacle presented by artists and writers who belonged to the Union of Youth. A short-lived Petersburg futurist group, Union of Youth mounted six exhibitions between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War and effectively set the style for art in Russia after the revolution. Victory Over the Sun was Dadaist before its time, for it was not until 1916 that the Dada cabaret at Zurich’s Café Voltaire declared war on the civilisation that went to war. The café stood – coincidentally – in Spiegelgasse, the same tiny but consequential street where Lenin was in hiding. The Union of Youth – product of a society disrupted by seismic fault-lines – pre-empted Dada. The curtain didn’t rise on Victory, it was ripped apart. Kasemir Malevich designed the colourful cardboard costumes of the strongmen who set out to conquer the sun. He credited the experience as the beginning of his Suprematist work, which reached its logical conclusion with his painting White on White of 1918. This presented a square – a form not found in nature – and whiteness. Malevich shed substance and materiality with his revolutionary vision of infinity: a new heaven that ranged beyond the skies of Marian blue in Western religious art. As with The Rite of Spring in Paris, the audience at Victory Over the Sun booed and hollered so much that it was difficult to hear if the craziest sounds were coming from the stage or from the spectators.51
Filippo Marinetti’s provocative Futurist Manifesto was translated into Russian in 1909, and Marinetti visited St Petersburg prior to the First World War to scandalise and proselytise. While some Petersburg aesthetes distrusted Marinetti’s furious ego, his futurism – with its celebration of the machine – resonated in an electrified capital that was beginning to choke on the exhaust of fossil fuel. There were more than 3,000 private cars and motor taxis on Petersburg’s streets. Inhabitants watched as the world’s first four-engined aeroplane, designed by Sikorsky, flew over the capital with sixteen people and a dog on board.52 By the second decade of the twentieth century Russian artists were not just interacting with but were also stimulating the European avant-garde. They created Rayonism, Suprematism and later – Constructivism. Artists such as Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov and Kasemir Malevich worked in a climate of danger, excitement and optimism, believing in the promise of a revolutionary tomorrow.
Over the New Year of 1911-12, the Second All-Russian Congress of Artists was held in St Petersburg. The 200 presentations included talks on education and aesthetics, and debates on neo-Russianism versus the avant-garde. The highlight of the congress was a reading and discussion of Kandinsky’s seminal Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The essay expressed the idea – so fundamental to an understanding of modern art – that, in the attempt to express inner truths, the artist must renounce ‘all consideration of external form’. Form, claimed Kandinsky, was ‘most often expressive when least coherent’ – an idea that ricocheted through the work of Picasso and other giants of the twentieth century. By 1911, Kandinsky had begun to use a kind of shorthand squiggle to hint at figures and objects, and colour sequences to produce ‘intervals’ and ‘harmonies’. Envious of music – the ‘most non-material of the arts’ – Kandinsky was highly influenced by the Wagnerian desire for Gesamtkunstwerk, the synthesis of many arts.53
Moscow-born Alexander Scriabin – towards the end of his short life – attempted to synthesise light, dance, music, colour and incense in his compositions, which were produced on a colour keyboard linked to a turntable of coloured lamps. The ever-powerful Orthodox Church used a similar mix of sensation to carry its message and move souls in its 500 churches spread throughout St Petersburg. During these years, symbolism and the search for transcendence touched painters, poets and even – through the paranormal dabbling of Nicholas, Alexandra and Rasputin – Russia’s stuffy rulers. Indeed, spiritual fads or exotic enthusiasms were the disorder of the day. Esoteric philosophies, yoga, eurythmies and Eastern religions gripped a giddy and unstable population who were desperate for change. Unlikely edifices appeared. With support from the Dalai Lama, between 1909 and 1915 a Buddhist temple was constructed on Primorsky Prospekt facing Yelagin Island, architected by Gavriil Baranovsky, who also created the stil-moderne Eliseev emporium opposite Ostrovsky Square on the Nevsky Prospekt.54
Flights of fancy to escape the material world and dislodge rationalism, and attempts to approach the rich mysteries of inner life, were numerous. The symbolist Andrei Biely wrote a prose symphony and people were astounded by Nijinsky’s leap offstage in Le spectre de la rose. The dancer was seen to go up – but never ca
me down, apparently defying gravity like a Sikorsky aeroplane. If symbolists sought to escape the banality of the terrestrial, then the machine was opening up new worlds of velocity and illumination. Darkness became light on Petersburg’s nighttime streets. Cars whisked people down the Nevsky at speeds unknown only a few years earlier and sound recording made voices sing for eternity.
However, as the capital soared from recession to boom, the lot of the worker did not improve. But it was the disproportionately bloody response to a peaceful march of strikers in the Siberian Lena Goldfields in April 1912 that triggered further unrest in the capital and set off a new succession of strikes. At Lena, 172 workers had been killed and 372 wounded and there was, consequently, a heavy police presence at the sizeable 1912 Petersburg May Day parade. One year on, the march would swell to 100,000, according to the police, or 250,000, according to Pravda. Deepening disgust with the regime resulted in a growing list of pretexts for anniversary demonstrations by workers and organised by socialists – the bungled serf emancipation of 1864, Bloody Sunday, the Lena massacre – to which were added solidarity with stoppages outside the capital, and sympathy for the fifty-two sailors of the Baltic fleet who were accused of revolutionary attitudes and actions in the summer of 1913.55 Soon these manifestations of profound discontent would be augmented by protest marches against Russia’s involvement in the First World War and subsequent food shortages. The right-wing Duma appeared to do little for the workers, and the pace and size of stoppages increased at a rate that testified to mounting grievance and despair. There were nine strikes in 1909, 737 in 1912 and 1,632 in the first half of 1914. Some were merely one-day walk-outs in response to minor incidents, but a substantial number lasted between a week and a month. These were largely disputes over conditions, unfair treatment, wages and working hours, although strikes inspired by the desire for wider political change also touched heavy industry56 – a sector on which the government would need to depend as Europe descended into war.
Trouble was punching at Petersburg’s veneer of affluence and success, yet among the better-off there was a dangerous indifference to the threat. In places like ‘Vaskina Village’ on Vasilevsky Island, slum landlords allowed their tenants to exist in similarly appalling conditions to those first described seventy-five years earlier by Nikolai Nekrasov. Attitudes to the poor hardened. Limited sympathy in certain quarters had now been replaced by fear, and beggars were increasingly identified as pickpockets and thieves. Hooliganism underlined the social divide, and the deployment of destructive ‘hooligan tactics’ by angry workers was blamed on the dismal lack of leadership by the tsar and his government.57
There was a helter-skelter of elation, panic and fear. The novelist Alexei Tolstoy observed the descent of the idle and depressed nouveau riche into depraved oblivion: ‘People doped themselves with music . . . with half naked women . . . with champagne’.58 Even after the war began, British secret agent and diplomat Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart was appalled by the quantity of champagne drunk by saturated officers stumbling through the luxurious bars of the Astoria and the Hotel Europe, when they should have been at the front. On the eve of the revolution, the American reporter John Reed saw gambling clubs where the fizz flowed, the stakes were outrageous and fur-clad, high-class whores paraded.59 Yet, from the vantage point of hotel cocktail bars, it was almost possible – through the alcoholic haze – to see the long queues of ill-clad people snaking round the block, waiting ‘for the bread that never came’.60
With entertaining at court mothballed, the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, recalled only one occasion – apart from the New Year’s reception when he was invited to the Winter Palace, and that was to watch a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal in the Hermitage. He observed that the interval dinner ‘hardly came up to one’s expectations after all that one heard of the splendours of such entertainments in the past. Neither from a spectacular nor from a gastronomic standpoint could it compare with a State banquet at Buckingham Palace.’61 But if the tsar was avoiding his social duties, the St Petersburg elite had stepped into the breach. Baron Rosen remembered the winter season of 1913-14 as ‘one of the most brilliant’62 the capital had ever seen. Fancy-dress and themed balls were fashionable, such as Countess Shuvalova’s Coloured Wig Ball, designed by Bakst. The cakewalk, one-step and foxtrot were popular dances, and the tango craze spawned a sub-genre of films in the fledgling cinema industry.63 Baron Rosen was particularly affected by a dance given during carnival week at the palace of the Grand Duchess Vladimir. Nicholas and Alexandra were invited with their four daughters, who ‘rapturously’ enjoyed ‘their first ball which alas! was to be their last’.64
One rare court celebration was the tricentenary of the Romanovs, and although neo-Russianism was finished as a style, it was appropriately exhumed to celebrate a dynasty about to die. Menus, designed by artists such as Viktor Vasnetsov, were embellished by images drawn from folklore and lettered in archaic script. But compared with what such a celebration would have been in the past, the spectacle was self-conscious and muted. Jubilee Day occurred on 21 February 1913 and, on the eve of the celebration, an unrelenting wind battered and destroyed many of the imperial decorations lining the route between the Winter Palace and the Kazan Cathedral, where Mass was to be celebrated. Mikhail Rodzianko ordered Rasputin – newly back in town – out of the cathedral during the celebration. Conflicting attitudes towards the healer only underlined the administrative chaos in the capital. Rasputin’s telephone was tapped by the government while, at the same time, the tsar arranged for the Okhrana to protect him. Police reports catalogued a new intensity of drunkenness and debauchery, and charted Rasputin’s degrees of intoxication: ‘very’, ‘absolutely’, completely’ and ‘dead drunk’. One can only wonder how many bottles of vodka stood between each classification.
Rasputin went partying till dawn and beyond, and it was not uncommon for him to leave the sexually charged entertainment of Massalsky’s Gypsy Chorus after noon. The popular nightclub Villa Rode was shut down after Rasputin was reported rampaging through the restaurant wearing only a shirt.65 Given the legends, few shirts would be large or long enough to have rendered the holy man halfway decent. According to the American Ambassador, George Marye, Rasputin’s apartments were ‘the scene of the wildest orgies’. Society women – bored by life – rushed to experience Rasputin’s wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am sexual prowess. The poor servant girls living in his building, became victims, while others offered themselves in return for favours as they queued up at Rasputin’s desk for help. Marye found the stories circulating almost too outrageous to be true, but accepted that ‘they are too numerous’ and ‘told by too many credible people not to be believed’.66 The healer exposed himself, to prove his identity, and boasted intimacy with the empress and her daughter Olga. Rasputin – empowered by his court connections and social skills – entered into an informal partnership with the devious homosexual racketeer Mikhail Andronnikov. Melding his sexual appetite with the conviction that knowledge is power, Andronnikov targeted messenger boys and invited them to his apartment on the Fontanka. He offered food, plied them with drink and, more often than not, had sex with them beneath the wrought-iron thorns crowning the camp, sybaritic shrine that housed his bed. While the boys rested, Andronnikov scoured their bags to uncover information that would allow him to blackmail, bribe and influence the movers and shakers of the capital. Until Rasputin became distrustful of Andronnikov, they made a dangerous team.67
Cartoon of Rasputin and a Romanov beading for the banya.
Growing hostility to Alexandra’s spiritual guide, increasing resentment at the distance and indifference of the stubborn tsar, and rising distrust of the military ambitions and menace of Germany were spiralling out of control. It was voiced by progressives in the government, by angry workers and even by a composer known for his conservatism. Rimsky-Korsakov’s last opera, Le Coq d’Or, was unperformable by any imperial theatre. Its vision of the idiot tsar Dodon and his blustering, misguided so
ns was written in 1906—7 as an embittered response to the intransigence of the regime and its stupidity in waging war in the East. Dodon – an out-of-touch tsar who wants to ‘forget peril’, ‘rule from bed’ and has never heard the word ‘legal’ – is a withering buffo portrait of Nicholas II. Impossible material for the censor to approve, it was eventually performed after the composer’s death in Moscow and then at a private theatre in St Petersburg, where it became – according to Stravinsky – ‘a rallying point for students’.68
By the summer of 1914, discontent was seething on the streets of the capital. Among the first impressions registered by the daughter of the British Ambassador, Meriel Buchanan, when she arrived in July, was that of a ‘crowd of dirty, evil-looking men gathered at the corners’. Among them stood ‘a little boy with a torn red blouse’ who ‘shouted out some unspeakable insult and threw an old bit of stick at the motor’.69 During the previous month there had been 118 strikes and these coalesced into a general strike, which coincided with the arrival of the French president, Raymond Poincaré. The visit, along with the Serbian crisis, was the top story in the press, keeping the latest eruption of violence among workers off the front page. Half of St Petersburg’s factory labour had now downed tools. Transport ground to a halt. Two hundred tramcars were overturned or vandalised, and telegraph poles were uprooted, breaking lines of communication. The number of Bolsheviks in the capital had increased tenfold between 1910 and 1914 and, by July of that year, they had control of the Petersburg Union of Metalworkers. On 9 July, the Central Electricity Station came out on strike.70 Meanwhile, French flags fluttered and Poincaré dined at Peterhof, where he presented the tsar with a series of Gobelin tapestries designed by the frothy poster artist Jules Chéret.
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