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Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution
One of the most creative periods of Russian culture and the most energized period of the Revolution coincided in the fateful years 1913–1931. During this time both the Party and the intellectuals of Petersburg strove to transform backward Russia into a nation so advanced it would shine like a beacon for the rest of the world. Yet the end result was the Stalinist culture of the 1930s with its infamous purges.
In this new book, Katerina Clark does not attempt to account for such a devolution by looking at the broad political arena. Rather, she follows the quest of intellectuals through these years to embody the Revolution, a focus that casts new light on the formation of Stalinism. This revisionist work takes issue with many existing cultural histories by resisting the temptation to structure its narrative as a saga of the oppressive regime versus the benighted intellectuals. In contrast, Clark focuses on the complex negotiations between the extraordinary environment of a revolution, the utopian striving of both politicians and intellectuals, the local culture system, and that broader environment, the arena of contemporary European and American culture. In doing so, the author provides a case study in the ecology of cultural revolution, viewed through the prism of Petersburg, which on the eve of the Revolution was one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Petersburg today is in the national imagination of modern Russia, a symbol of Westernization and radical change.
In this new book, Katerina Clark does not attempt to account for such a devolution by looking at the broad political arena. Rather, she follows the quest of intellectuals through these years to embody the Revolution, a focus that casts new light on the formation of Stalinism. This revisionist work takes issue with many existing cultural histories by resisting the temptation to structure its narrative as a saga of the oppressive regime versus the benighted intellectuals. In contrast, Clark focuses on the complex negotiations between the extraordinary environment of a revolution, the utopian striving of both politicians and intellectuals, the local culture system, and that broader environment, the arena of contemporary European and American culture. In doing so, the author provides a case study in the ecology of cultural revolution, viewed through the prism of Petersburg, which on the eve of the Revolution was one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Petersburg today is in the national imagination of modern Russia, a symbol of Westernization and radical change.
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First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Katerina Clark
15 books3 followersKaterina Clark is B. E. Bensinger Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her books include Moscow, the Fourth Rome; Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution; and, with Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin.
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March 30, 2016
p.74 – On Saturday, February 25, 1917, a new production of M. Lermontov’s play Masquerade (1835) opened at the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theatre. The play – very approximately a Russian Othello in that it is a tragedy in which the hero is tricked into believing his wife is unfaithful to him and learns his mistake only after he has killed her – was originally meant to be staffed for the one-hundredth anniversary of Lermontov’s birth, in October 1914, but bureaucratic problems and the outbreak of World War I in August of that year led to a series of postponements, The premiere’s ultimate timing in February 1917 enabled it to mark the twenty-fifth jubilee in the Alexandrinsky of Yuri Yuriev, a famous classic actor who played the leading role in the production. By the time the audience poured out of the theatre at 2am, shots could already be heard on Nevsky Prospect. The February Revolution had begun.
Obviously, this coincidence of events invites dramatic interpretations, but the production of Masquerade was also seen as a historic landmark for reasons not connected with the February Revolution. It is recognized as a milestone in the career of its director, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940). Thus the fact that Serei Eisenstein attended this premiere (while still an engineering student in Petrograd) has the status of an iconic moment in his biographies. The production is also famous for Meyerhold’s collaboration on its opulent sets with an artist from the World of Art, Alexander Golovin. Together they stylized Imperial Petersburg of the 1830s after one of the principal metaphors for the city – the “Northern Venice,.” In a time of disastrous war and concomitant misery, when the “bankruptcy” of Imperial Russia was all too evident, the theatre has spent thirty thousand gold rubels on the staging. The empire was going out in grand style – Empire style, to be exact.
In the years leading up to the Revolution, Russia was a principal player in a pan-European movement for the reformation of the theatre and the performing arts. This movement had become the focus of avant-garde activity and of would-be social reformers as well.
p.77 – Meyerhold’s work on Masquerade, no less than his productions after 1920, can be seen as an exemplum of revolutionary culture as many conceived it at the time. The production was to be a showcase for his kind of new theatre. In the theory and practice of this new theatre that he and others were working out in the 1910s, one can see a sort of synapse between the theories of political and aesthetic revolution.
p.83 – In September 1924 Leningrad was engulfed by a disastrous flood. The Neva broke its banks, covering such landmarks as Nevsky Prospect and Vasilevsky Island. Since so many cultural institutions were situated in the center of town, they were particularly hard hit. In many theatres, for instance, the costumes or the heating and lighting were destroyed; in the case of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, the roof was torn off. The fact that the flood occurred exactly one hundred years after its famous predecessor, the great flood of 1824, did not go unremarked.
Needless to say, comparisons with 1824 need not only be in terms of high-water marks. Since the 1824 flood was the subject of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, the principal text of the myth of Petersburg, this flood brought into sharper focus once again the city’s existential dilemmas, and also the issues of modernization and the authoritarian state that many have assumed to be aired in Pushkin’s poem.
p.184 – The shifts around 1924 were so major that one may talk of the emergence of a post-NEP culture. Of course it was not entirely the case that NEP had disappeared as a force in cultural life, but in literature at any rate stiff taxes and other factors conspired to reduce the number of private publishing houses, and especially the number of their titles. Moreover, the literary groups had begun to disavow the principles of pluralism and creative autonomy that they had insisted on just a few years before.
An obvious starting point for this shift would be Lenin’s death on January 21, which raised the possibility that the new leadership might effect change in cultural policy. The direction this change was to take was not immediately apparent and was to emerge in increasingly heated debates conducted over the ensuing ten years. There were some disquieting signs from the very beginning, however. For instants, in Leningrad the censors became more active.
A palpable sign of change after Lenin’s death was the decree of the Petrograd Soviet on January 24th that the city should be renamed Leningrad.
p.188 – In the new anti-Western climate, hopes for a cosmopolitan or sophisticated urbanist culture were particularly threatened. Symptomatically, the publishing house World Literature was closed in 1924, and in the same year Lunacharsky introduced a new slogan for the theatre: “Back to [the Russian nineteenth-century dramatist] Ostrovsky!”
p.190 – The shift to a more enduring iconography was a crucial development in the evolution of the genus “Stalinist culture.”
Obviously, this coincidence of events invites dramatic interpretations, but the production of Masquerade was also seen as a historic landmark for reasons not connected with the February Revolution. It is recognized as a milestone in the career of its director, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940). Thus the fact that Serei Eisenstein attended this premiere (while still an engineering student in Petrograd) has the status of an iconic moment in his biographies. The production is also famous for Meyerhold’s collaboration on its opulent sets with an artist from the World of Art, Alexander Golovin. Together they stylized Imperial Petersburg of the 1830s after one of the principal metaphors for the city – the “Northern Venice,.” In a time of disastrous war and concomitant misery, when the “bankruptcy” of Imperial Russia was all too evident, the theatre has spent thirty thousand gold rubels on the staging. The empire was going out in grand style – Empire style, to be exact.
In the years leading up to the Revolution, Russia was a principal player in a pan-European movement for the reformation of the theatre and the performing arts. This movement had become the focus of avant-garde activity and of would-be social reformers as well.
p.77 – Meyerhold’s work on Masquerade, no less than his productions after 1920, can be seen as an exemplum of revolutionary culture as many conceived it at the time. The production was to be a showcase for his kind of new theatre. In the theory and practice of this new theatre that he and others were working out in the 1910s, one can see a sort of synapse between the theories of political and aesthetic revolution.
p.83 – In September 1924 Leningrad was engulfed by a disastrous flood. The Neva broke its banks, covering such landmarks as Nevsky Prospect and Vasilevsky Island. Since so many cultural institutions were situated in the center of town, they were particularly hard hit. In many theatres, for instance, the costumes or the heating and lighting were destroyed; in the case of the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, the roof was torn off. The fact that the flood occurred exactly one hundred years after its famous predecessor, the great flood of 1824, did not go unremarked.
Needless to say, comparisons with 1824 need not only be in terms of high-water marks. Since the 1824 flood was the subject of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, the principal text of the myth of Petersburg, this flood brought into sharper focus once again the city’s existential dilemmas, and also the issues of modernization and the authoritarian state that many have assumed to be aired in Pushkin’s poem.
p.184 – The shifts around 1924 were so major that one may talk of the emergence of a post-NEP culture. Of course it was not entirely the case that NEP had disappeared as a force in cultural life, but in literature at any rate stiff taxes and other factors conspired to reduce the number of private publishing houses, and especially the number of their titles. Moreover, the literary groups had begun to disavow the principles of pluralism and creative autonomy that they had insisted on just a few years before.
An obvious starting point for this shift would be Lenin’s death on January 21, which raised the possibility that the new leadership might effect change in cultural policy. The direction this change was to take was not immediately apparent and was to emerge in increasingly heated debates conducted over the ensuing ten years. There were some disquieting signs from the very beginning, however. For instants, in Leningrad the censors became more active.
A palpable sign of change after Lenin’s death was the decree of the Petrograd Soviet on January 24th that the city should be renamed Leningrad.
p.188 – In the new anti-Western climate, hopes for a cosmopolitan or sophisticated urbanist culture were particularly threatened. Symptomatically, the publishing house World Literature was closed in 1924, and in the same year Lunacharsky introduced a new slogan for the theatre: “Back to [the Russian nineteenth-century dramatist] Ostrovsky!”
p.190 – The shift to a more enduring iconography was a crucial development in the evolution of the genus “Stalinist culture.”
October 19, 2021
One of the most sophisticated historians of Russia one is likely to encounter, writing about the most sophisticated cities you are likely to visit.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews