Crazy Baltic weather of snowstorms and rainbows,
Hyperborean sun skeletizes life...
Severe Finnish granite embankments
Run straight to vanishing point.
Forever ponder “The Bronze Horseman”
And wonder.The puzzle can never be solved.
We have all been bitten by the serpent.
Pushkin,scallywag,see what you have done!
This city,blessed and damned in equal parts,
Indentures questing souls with fierce demands;
No,we are not yet risen from the marsh,
And the dark sea does not relinquish us.
In the end,you are sick of myth and legend,
The niggling past that misses no chance
To intrude a correspondence,a haunting comment
On all that otherwise would simply be.
We are all in the text,this glorious fiction,
Mummers and prompters,born to the stage.
History,destiny: all the grand themes chain us,
The last days of Atlantis ours to await.
Demi-gods and idols all have their shrines here.
Such virulent splendour.Cynicism is no defence.
A paltry sandgrain will grow a pearl,
Outshining and outliving its common shell.
Gogol looked up,and the ground shifted under his feet.
He fell,rose,fell again; the sky wrapped him in its chequered overcoat,
Gave him pen and paper,made him clerk of the universe,
Of the damned soul,scribbling prophecies
Whispered in his ears by weird conflicting voices.
His nose grew and grew like Pinocchio’s
As he danced on strings for the hooded puppetmaster,
Jeered by silhouettes in the fog.
Bone-built city of transfiguration,
Who here is not a martyr, a Christ?
A black widow keeps the sacred flame,
Cupping it in her imperious hands.
Peter in Roman toga and laurel crown
Grapples the reins,his steed rearing
Up at the city he created from his pain.
Stranded in mid-air,he glares down.
Pushkin at Boldino in autumn,nervous,angry,
Self-exiled to write,but the verse still just will not come,
His head buzzes,his gut hurts...
How to clear his debts if he cannot produce
A masterpiece to sell for publication?
But how can he concentrate on poetry
While his wife is alone in Petersburg,
A dozen shameless beaus circling round her...
He sits and dashes off a letter,berating her:
“You’re proud that studs chase after you like a bitch,
Their tails stiff up in the air,sniffing your arse...”
And,eventually,the words,his friends,come to console him,
Each day he awakes early,works in bed till three in the afternoon,
The rides horseback in the muddy fields for hours,
Cooling his overheated brain...
Outrageously the demiurge wagered his will,
Certain that Providence would come to his aid:
Peter plotted the city with ruler in hand,
Geometry of islands,canal and prospects,
Herding myriads of slaves to the dreaded delta,-
Peasants,soldiers,convicts and prisoners of war,-
Driven day and night with the knout,
To perish in their thousands,uncounted,unmourned,
Drenched by rains,attacked by swarming mosquitoes,
Pounding wooden piles into the swamp,
As their master ever urged more haste and more care.
Even before the city was completed,
Rumours and prophecies spread among the people
That Petersburg wascursed,doomed to destruction,
For the baleful kikimora had been seen
Hopping into the belltower of the Trinity church,
Foretelling that this work of the Antichrist
Could not long endure.
Though the Tsar pursued such naysayers
And had them flogged,burned and broken on the rack,
Still he could not stop the evil tongues.
River-twinned,the Winter Palace
Glows against pale northern sky,
White columns marching hypnotically
Through the light blue mind.
Pale and unkempt, champagne glass always in hand,
Glinka wanders through the salons and soirees,
Then returns to his apartment to record in his notebook
The headaches,stomach aches,toothaches and neck aches
That torment him,with the details of all the doctors who attend him
And the effectiveness of their prescriptions.
He adds the odd comment on music,just in passing.
And in his head the Viennese waltz
Is morphing into something Russian,
Curving with elegant desires and spiritual hurt.
One day he leaves Petersburg for good,
Fleeing the awful climate and the poisonous gossips,
The stupid critics and the philistines,
And,getting out of his carriage at the city limits,
Spits on the ground,so unworthy of his genius.
Wine,cognac,vodka...from a gentleman to a bum,
Puffy crumbling face,red nose and bedraggled redbrown hair,
Huge greyblue eyes straring into the void,
Mussorgsky hunches in a tavern,among the drunks,his brothers,
At home in the majestic grotesque...
This torment is the service of higher powers,
This isolation is the nature of God.
Only the godless can be so religious,
Mystical realists fevered with the world
Time to challenge every truism,
To turn the world upside-down and inside-out,
And honour the absurd.
Alexandre Benois,stooped,bald and blackbearded,
Brown eyes vigilant behind pince-nez,
Gazes out from his apartment window
Over the snowy city,-to bring Russia back
Into the arms of Europe! What ballets
The two could dance together!
Let music,art and theatre unite
To revive the city and the soul of man,
All the glorious ghosts returning,
A pageant filling the streets!
(Cosmopolitan romance,as in the English shop
On Nevsky Prospect,full of comforts:
Fruitcakes and Pears soap,picture puzzles,
Striped blazers and football jerseys
In the colours of Oxford and Cambridge).
Receiving guests in her apartment after midnight,
Recumbent on chaise-longue,smoking long scented cigarettes,
And harshly peering through a lorgnette,
Zinaida Gippius-respected,hated and feared-
Presides over the Symbolist movement
With ex cathedra epigrams and Olympian pronouncements.
Long and thin,in floating Snow Queen robes,
Disdainful smile forever on her lips,
She tests young aspirants without mercy
As knights pleading fealty to the Lady,
Offering their lives for a touch of her hand.
In the auditorium of the Geographical Society,
A large crowd gathers to hear a lecture
By Blok,all dressed in monks’ cloaks and high chic,
Fashionable thinkers,writers,artists,and cognoscenti,
As the poet –black-clad like a priest-
Pronounces in hypnotic monotone,
Handsome face haloed with fair curls,
Exalted look in his pale grey eyes,
Beloved icon of all Russia’s women,
Who send endless letters proclaiming their fealty,
Pleading to meet him,to let them bear his children.
(One adoring female fan follows him in the street,
Picking up the cigarette butts he drops,
Colelcting them in a small box,a precious relic to her;
Often she goes to his house,half-mad with love,
And,not daring to ring,stands at the door,
Kissing the doorhandles and weeping).
His every step is avidly observed,his every word
Discussed and analayzed,and every poem
Parsed for clues to the private man.
One morning in October,1919,-
In the winter of hunger,curfews,violence and decay,
With people using their books and furniture for firewood,
And eating dogs,cats and rats to survive,
Even tearing apart fallen horses in the streets
For the precious flesh,while all around
Others drop and die on the icy pavements-
As Blok and Bely walk along Nevsky Prospect,
They come across a bored militiaman,rifle over shoulder,
Standing,pissing,writing his name in urine
In the snow,-and Bely calls out to him:
“I don’t know how to write on snow!
I need just a little ink,and a scrap of paper!”
Only ballet could soothe his cares
And distract him...Nicholas the First,
The martinet attempting to drill all Russia
On the perfect parade ground in his head,
Sits in the dark,his bayonet eyes fixed
On the stage,seeing lines of soldiers
Regimented with uncompromising skill.
Strength and beauty must be united
In this new Russia:thus,for the production
Of La révolte au serial,the Tsar
Sends his own Guards officers to train
The corps de ballet in military techniques,
Demanding from them the same discipline
And subordination as from his troops,
And ,when the ballerinas tire of drill
And grow lazy,he comes to rehearsal
And berates them:”Practise seriously,
Or you will be made to stand outside
In the snow and ice for two hours
With rifles,in your dancing shoes,”
Whereupon the scared dancers return
To their practice with sudden zeal.
The white nights are here:
We shall stay up till dawn,walking round the city,
Talking about everything as we sip beer and champagne,
Caressing the granite embankments
And watching the bridges rise for ships to sail by...
This line we walk is the tightrope
Between order and chaos,
Where sober hearts discover
Their vital madness,
And stoics cry into the heedless dark.
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