Петербургские зимы

by Georgy Ivanov, Георгий Иванов

Последним миротворцем Петербурга можно назвать колоритнейшего представителя `серебряного века`, замечательного поэта и прозаика Г.Иванова. К какому жанру отнести `Петербургские зимы`? Воспоминания в них соседствуют с вымыслом, документальные факты со слухами и сплетнями, атмосфера блистательного города с апокалипсическими предчувствиями... В результате получился феерический сплав: проза Г.Иванова `Петербургские зимы`.

Genres: Russia, Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov (Russian: Георгий Владимирович Иванов; 11 October 1894 – 26 August 1958) was a leading poet and essayist of the Russian emigration between the 1930s and 1950s.

As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his young manhood in the elite circle of Russian golden youth. He started writing pretentious verses, imitative of Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, at a precocious age. Although his technique of versification was impeccable, he had no life experience to draw upon. The favourite subjects of his early poetry were Rococo mannerisms and gallant festivals. Unsurprisingly, he named two of his books "The Embarkment for Cythera", alluding to Watteau's great painting.

After dallying with a puerile variety of Russian Futurism, as promoted by Igor Severyanin, Ivanov came to associate himself with the Acmeism movement. Although not considered a major talent, the 20-year-old was addressed or mentioned in the poems by Osip Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova. Georgii Ivanov was also considered to be one of the best pupils of the informal Guild of Poets school organized by Nikolay Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky.

Ivanov was the only prominent member of this circle who emigrated to the West. His natural arrogance and peremptory judgements easily won him respect and admiration from his younger contemporaries. He self-consciously promoted himself as the only remnant of the highly sophisticated milieu of the Russian Silver Age. To augment his standing, he issued a book of memoirs, entitled Petersburg Winters, which contained a fictionalized or widely exaggerated account of his experiences with the Acmeists. The book alienated Ivanov from his elder contemporaries but won instant acclaim from his disciples.

Together with the fellow critic Georgy Adamovich and his own wife Irina Odoyevtseva, Ivanov became the principal arbiter of taste of the emigrant society, forging or destroying literary reputations at will. However, their literary taste was somewhat deficient: they inadvertently dismissed Tsvetayeva's genuine lyrics (when anonymously submitted by her to a poetry contest) as a crude imitation of Tsvetayeva's manner. They enthusiastically feuded with Berlinese Russian litterateurs, with Vladimir Nabokov becoming the favourite target of their attacks. Nabokov revenged himself by satirizing Ivanov in one of his best known short stories, Spring in Fialta, and by subjecting them to a clever mystification, which resulted in Adamovich's immoderate praise of Nabokov's verses printed under an alias.

Afflicted with alcoholism and suffering from despondency, Ivanov sank ever lower. It was in conditions of abject penury and total despair that Ivanov's best poems were created. The more he let himself go down as a person, the more he rose as a poet. His art culminated in his last cycle of poems, written in the days preceding his death. In one of his last pieces, Ivanov prophetically promised "to return to Russia as poems". Actually, his wife returned to Leningrad during the Perestroika and died there in 1990.

Following Ivanov's death, his reputation has been steadily augmented. His "poetry of brilliant despair", as one critic put it, is taken by some to presage the tenets of French Existentialism.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Out of all these people who had left, one way or another, Remizov and Zaitsev remained, very quiet, very tired and old, undermined by war, by the burden of making a living and by solitude, and Georgy Ivanov, who in those years wrote his best verse. He made his personal morbid fate (poverty, illnesses, alcoholism) into a kind of myth of self-destruction, where, passing beyond our ordinary boundaries of good and evil, of the permitted (by whom?) and the taboo (for whom?), he moved in utter sordidness far beyond those who once were called ‘poètes maudits’ and all literary down-and-outers, from Apollon Grigoriev to Marmeladov (of Crime and Punishment)…” Nina Berberova – The Italics Are Mine
Petersburg Winters is a colourful portrayal of the literary and rowdy epoch.
It’s 1920… Petersburg… Winter…

It is said that a drowning man at the last moment forgets fear, stops suffocating. Suddenly he feels free, easy, blissful. And falling unconscious he sinks to the bottom smiling.
In the year 1920 the Petersburg was drowning almost blissfully.
Everyone had been afraid of famine only until it has set ‘seriously and permanently’. Then people just ceased to notice it. Mass shootings were also no longer noticed.
– How did you go home yesterday, after the ballet?
– Normally, thank you. We weren’t even robbed. However we were obliged to wait in the cold for half an hour in the court. There was a raid. No one was allowed to enter.
– Was anybody arrested?
– Yes, a young tenant and a visiting student were busted.
– They will be shot, probably.
– They probably will be.

This is just a banal talk of men in the street…
Then Georgy Ivanov begins to recall his youth… He’s sixteen – first poetical experience, first poetic acquaintances – futurists, impressionists, avant-guardists…
He’s seventeen…

It was a spring of 1911. I was seventeen. Several poems of mine were published in a couple of journals. Mikhail Kuzmin, Sergey Gorodetsky and Alexander Blok already were my literary acquaintances, I was full of literature and poetry.

He befriends Igor Severyanin… He knows Nikolay Gumilyov… Anna Akhmatova… There are fabulous artistic harbours “Stray Dog” and “A Den of Comedians”… Phantasmagoric bohemian existence…

All disappears
But space and stars and singer still remain.

Exotic personages… Drinking bouts from dusk till dawn… From hangover to hangover…
He admires Osip Mandelstam… “I am a gardener, I am a flower too. I’m not alone, the world is ringing true.” Poetry and poets… Rhymes stand for beauty…
Fyodor Sologub is fraught with deadly gloom… “Many springs passed me by, The new one comes for sure, Our world is a sty, The spring is so poor.” Alexander Blok is dead… Nikolay Gumilyov is shot… Everything is swept away by the wildfire of the revolution…
Revolutions need no poesy, revolutions need decrees and propaganda.

[Twyrink · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Петербургские зимы" feels like being introduced to Georgy Ivanov's various friends and acquaintances. There's a lot of poetry, too, (not as a means of coping with hard reality of revolutions, hunger, and deaths, but more as a language of that society of Saint-Petersburg's poets). (Though as I read more and more, I see more functions of poetry here: mystification, preservation of imagined Petersburg, voices of "characters," fighting and dying for life/poetry.)

Is it real? Is it a fantasy? Are those memories or stories? "75% of fiction, 25% of truth." "Есть воспоминания, как сны. Есть сны – как воспоминания. И когда думаешь о бывшем «так недавно и так бесконечно давно», иногда не знаешь – где воспоминания, где сны." Plus, we the readers are ought to recognise the distorted optics of an emigre: his Petrograd/Petersburg is gone, he is bitter and mourning.

Not all "characters" here are sane. Somebody prays in the name of demons-черти and sends this prayer to Nikolai Gumilev (who will be killed in 1921). Generals-doctors of poetry: a general becomes a patron of futurists. A concert for mute people. Some people (in the tradition of Russian classics with cities N. and misters N.) are not given full names, which reinforces Ivanov's mystification. A wake for a suicide victim, живом среди мертвецов. Drunkenly looking at Nicolas 1st's portraits. Mandelstam is afraid of dentists, but tears up Cheka's orders. Vladimir Narbut (Saratov's "орангутанг") tries to mount Clodt's horses and cries, looking at the Sistine Madonna. Poets (full of "coffee") go to Tsarskoye Selo at night to look at Annensky's bench (in the carriage Mandelstam is on Ivanov and Gorodetsky's lap); on Annensky's bench sits Komarovsky who's mentally ill and will die when he will read about the outbreak of WWI. In 1921 Sologub's wife Anastasia was desperate to emigrate, but threw herself off the bridge and drowned in Neva; Sologub stays in Russia and calculates with maths that afterlife exists and he will be reunited with his wife. The head of the Petrograd Cheka was killed by a poet. Block's методичность as "самозащита от хаоса." Yesenin dreams of utopia and glory, and Georgy Ivanov sees Yesenin's poetry as a key to combat bolshevism (и на радостях написал фанфик про Есенина и Дункан...). So many of them were so so so young and miserable, but with such a dedication to poetry.

Отборные анекдоты для авторской экскурсии, but don't go to serious museums and ask them about "is it true that [something something from Ivanov's book]."

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Иванов оценил соотношение выдумки к правде в своей книге 75-25. По моим ощущениям, а я читатель доверчивый, пропорция обратная, но конечно автору и тем, кто описанных людей знал и кто с его оценкой согласился, виднее. Интересные, незлые, но и не такие добрые, как у его жены, зарисовки из Петербурга начала прошлого века. Самый запоминающийся и судя по частым отсылкам к нему очень точный портрет -- крестьянского поэта Николая Клюева. Портреты Гумилева и Блока смазанные, но тем не менее с любопытными деталями. Любителям мемуаров Серебряного века прочитать однозначно стоит.

[Yuliia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Мне очень нравятся стихи Иванова, но проза.. Как то не очень. У его жены это получилось в сто раз лучше, мне кажется Одоевцева передала ту атмосферу гораздо лучше чем которую эта книга хотела передать.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Карикатуры серебряного века.

Концерт вне-слуховой музыки Цыбульского и подпевающие Девятой симфонии глухонемые. Растерянная и гордая жена Гумилева, помимо написания стихов ещё и прелестно, по словам мужа, вышивающая по канве. "Народная школа" Городецкого, пополняемая каждый сезон "соблазненными мужичками", среди которых подрумяненный, с подвитыми волосами Есенин с пучком васильков. Смешливый и обидчивый Мандельштам, беззащитный, боящийся кожаных курток и — бесстрашный. "Апостол петербургских эстетов" Кузмин, "идеал денди с солнечной стороны Невского". Лакеи, жирандоли и "ваше сиятельство" в одном предложении.

И только одна глава, о Блоке и Гумелёве, серьёзна и печальна.

[Aleksandra Ershova · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've ever read... I found it very moving and it made me feel nostalgic and home-sick and also inspired immensely to read more of the poets of the Silver Age of Russian poetry.