“What Became of Peter’s Dream?” is the
beguiling but ultimately unanswerable question posed by the
exhibit recently opened at Middlebury College Center for the Arts.
The rest of its title is “Petersburg in History and the Arts,” and
it is part of the larger, semester-long Clifford Symposium
commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Russian city of St.
Petersburg.
The event kicked off on September 18 with a
series of lectures, panel discussions, a concert of Russian music
featuring cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han, and a
screening of Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Shot entirely
in the Hermitage Museum, the new film provides a 90-minute glimpse
of Russian history in one astonishing, uninterrupted
take.
Since 1993, the Clifford Sympo-sium, named for
retired history professor Nicholas R. Clifford, has traditionally
opened Middlebury’s academic year by selecting a single historical
topic “that can be approached from the perspective of a number of
disciplines:” visual, documentary, theoretical and so on. In the
case of St. Petersburg — called Leningrad by the Soviets and,
briefly, Petrograd by the tsars — you need to add music, theater,
dance and the fine arts. Not to mention “murders and adultery,
blood and mud, the block, the rope and poison,” what the last
French ambassador to tsarist Russia called “the true emblems of
Russian autocracy.”
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| A PHOTO BY ALEXEY
TITARENKO |
“When speaking about
Russia,” said the philosopher Chaadayev, Pushkin’s teacher and a
man declared insane by the tsarist regime for asking too many
questions, “people always assume that they are speaking of a state
which is similar to others. In actual fact this is not true at
all,” he continued. “Russia is an entirely special world, obedient
to the will, arbitrariness and fantasy of one man. Whether he be
called Peter or Ivan is of no import: In all cases it is the same
— arbitrary rule personified.”
Chaadayev wrote these words in 1836, some time
after Petersburg’s first centenary and four generations after
Peter the Great first opened his “Window on the West.” It was
artificial, sui generis, willed to exist on a fumy, fetid,
mosquito-ridden swamp where the Neva River meets the Gulf of
Finland. No one had ever thought of putting down roots until Peter
said they had to.
The tsar needed a port for his expanding trade
with Europe and as a defense in Russia’s Great Northern War with
the Swedes; the first stone of what is now the Peter and Paul
Fortress was laid on May 16, 1703, and within a decade St.
Petersburg was born. “Sankt Pieter Burkh,” as it was first called,
was a tribute both to Peter’s patron saint and to the Dutch
seafarers and shipbuilders whose industry he so greatly
admired.
“St. Petersburg is a Russian pyramid,” said the
poet Yevtushenko, by which he meant that it was built on the backs
of slaves and that none of the materials required for its
construction are found anywhere in the natural environs of the
city. The story is told of workers from the countryside bearing
loads of dirt on their pummeled backs and then being buried in the
ground they carried when at length they died from
exhaustion.
Tens of thousands of people, possibly hundreds
of thousands, are supposed to have perished during the raising of
the city. Floods and fires were an everyday menace, and if you
weren’t carried off by scurvy or malaria, there were wolves in the
streets to make you wish you’d stayed in Moscow.
So many people died to give Peter his city —
the “Venice of the North” it’s also called, as well as “Northern
Palmyra” and “Babylon of the Snows” — that St. Petersburg is still
referred to among Russians as a city “built on bones.” The tsarist
capital was founded “in principle,” said Dostoyevsky, “in contrast
with Moscow and its entire concept,” and the important thing to
remember about the “Window” idea is that it looked in only one
direction — out.
Petersburg was the face, the mind, the brain
and the style of the Russian empire, until the Soviets, during the
civil war in 1918, moved the capital back to Moscow and banished
“Leningrad” to an incongruous, Vienna-like existence on the
fringes of national life. Like Austria after the fall of the
Hapsburgs, Peter’s creation was suddenly irrelevant, all head and
no rump, a “City of Palaces” with nothing to rule.
The exhibit now on display at Middlebury
glitters and flashes quiet lights of fire under the expert hands
of museum designer Kenneth Pohlman and Anne Odom, curator
emerita of the Hillwood Museum in Washington, D.C. It
focuses on the celebration of the city’s second hundred years in
1903 — the last, peaceful years of its history under the reign of
Nicholas II, before “Bloody Sunday,” the First World War and the
Bolshevik takeover of 1917. Included are paintings, drawings,
photographs, portraits, ceremonial and religious objects and
“luxurious household items,” as the catalogue states, some of them
designed by Fabergé and once belonging to the Russian imperial
family.
These items have come to Middle-bury from two
sources. The Hillwood Museum is the former home of cereal heiress
Marjorie Merriwether Post — yes, as in Post Toasties — which today
houses the largest collection of 18th- and 19th-century Russian
imperial art outside of Russia. Among Post’s many marriages was
one to Joseph E. Davies, an early ambassador to Soviet Russia from
the United States and the author of Mission to
Moscow.
In the early Soviet years, Russian imperial
treasures were selling for a song; after her residence there, Post
never ceased to add to her collection. As Odom remarks in her
catalog notes, “Despite the decline of its power [in the 20th
century], the artistic legacy of the tsar’s court was significant
and is still wildly popular” — an understatement, given the
current passion (and staggeringly high prices) for anything
related to the Russia of the tsars.
But Middlebury has it own collection of Romanov
memorabilia, some gifted and some on loan, that once formed part
of the family treasure of the Russian Grand Duke George
Mikhailovitch and his wife, Grand Duchess Marie, a daughter of the
king of Greece. Both were cousins of Nicholas II. Grand Duke
George was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1919, while Marie escaped to
England with their two daughters, Nina and Xenia.
It was Xenia’s daughter, Woodstock resident
Nancy Leeds Wynkoop, and her husband, Edward, who in 1994
presented Middlebury College with many of the Romanov artifacts
now on display. These include formal and informal portraits of the
imperial family, a bowl made of bowenite, silver gilt and rubies,
ivory frames from the House of Fabergé, gold and silver serving
utensils, vases from St. Petersburg’s Imperial Porcelain Factory,
tumblers from the royal yachts — all things that used to sit
rather casually in the Wynkoops’ Woodstock houses and which would
have been found in any Romanov household at the time of the
Revolution.
Indeed, what Nancy Wynkoop has called her
“beloved treasures,” “most of them small and suitable for sitting
out on bureaus, tabletops and desks,” were given by one Romanov to
another on birthdays, holidays, anniversaries and so forth. They
provide the most compelling sense of what life at the Russian
court was actually like in those twilight years — more so than the
larger pieces and works of art on display. Among the latter are
drawings and paintings by Valentin Serov and Leon Bakst, leaders
of Diaghilev’s “World of Art” movement at the turn of the 20th
century (with Diaghilev, Bakst was also a founder of the Ballets
Russes).
The “private” pieces are more telling because
they give a sense of real people, trapped in a cataclysmic
upheaval and forced out of Russia more or less in their
nightgowns. And because nothing but a trip to St. Petersburg can
give you an idea of the vastness of the place, its sheer size and
scale, and its utter incongruity in the middle of the Neva
swamp.
“Petersburg streets possess one indubitable
quality,” wrote Andrei Bely in his Symbolist epic, Petersburg
(1914), still the most reliable guide to the secret heart of
the city: “They transform passersby into shadows.”
Helpfully, in this regard, a second exhibit
gives a taste, at least, of what Bely meant. Next to the exquisite
imperial geegaws, soup spoons and whatnots — and actually entitled
“City of Shadows” — are photographs of contemporary St. Petersburg
by Alexey Titarenko, a native who’s been photographing the city
since his early teens.
“Profoundly influenced by Dostoyevsky,”
Titarenko continues in the tradition of Russian modernism with
pictures, as he says, that express “his own emotions.” The
curators add darkly that this was “a calculated risk during the
Soviet era of Titarenko’s youth,” and of course it was. But the
results are thrilling — haunting, dreamlike, sad and yet still
hopeful, as Petersburg now slowly emerges from the Soviet
nightmare and begins its long journey of reconstruction.
