By Alexander Nazaryan

There were signs, white-hot premonitions of calamity, but they were either missed or ignored, and only after the city lay smoldering did anyone realize that blood and brick could have been subject to such meticulous destruction. Still, by most accounts, that last week of June 1941 was a pleasant respite from Baltic downpours, and the citizens of Leningrad could not have suspected that by autumn their city would be mired in the longest siege in modern history, one that would claim more than a third of its three million residents.

The city would survive, but the wages of endurance would prove brutal. Lipstick and beauty powder were used to make bread while toothpaste served to thicken pudding; portions of flesh missing from the bodies that littered the streets probably served as the only meat some Leningraders consumed during the siege. Half a century later, my grandmother—a school administrator who participated in the evacuation of children from Leningrad—cannot speak of that time without shedding tears.

The siege was lifted in 1944. Succumbing to the same fate as Napoleon, Hitler was defeated by the Russian winter and an army that was not beyond thrusting machine guns into the hands of women and children. By 1946, life was returning to normal, and Stalin awarded the city the Order of Lenin for its “courage and heroism.”  

In August of that year, Andrei Zhdanov, the head of the Community Party in Leningrad, summoned the city’s writers for a speech. Writers were central to the survival of this city whose mythology is inextricably linked to the written word, but instead of even the most perfunctory praise, they received an excoriation of historic proportions, an ominous harbinger of the repression that would characterize the lifeless postwar years.

Zhdanov reserved his greatest scorn for poetess Anna Akhmatova, calling her “a crazed lady, chasing back and forth between boudoir and chapel…both whore and nun, whose lust is mixed with prayer.” The satirist Mikhail Zoschenko, whose work remains woefully unknown in the West, was branded a “literary hooligan” and “scoundrel of literature” who depicted “people…as vile, lustful animals.”

Art in Petersburg would never be the same, and though there were signs of cultural regeneration when I returned to “Pieter” in 2003 for the first time since immigrating as a child in the late 1980’s, it was not the same city that Pushkin and Nabokov had showered with such finely-crafted affection. It was not even worthy of the righteous scorn of Gogol or Dostoyevsky, whose hatred of the city fueled some of their finest creations. Hitler could not level Petersburg, but the Communists succeeded in something far more insidious—they rendered it irrelevant.

Like so many former Petersburgers, I call New York my home, which is why I cannot help browsing the slew of excellent books that have treated Petersburg without thinking about what has been happening in Manhattan, specifically at Ground Zero. Plenty of ink has been spent on scrutinizing the future of the site, and I have no desire to contribute to the cries of, “Do something!” and “Is this the best we can do?” However, some recent events have made me wonder if the fortune of my adopted city will not come to resemble that of my native one.  

Early last summer, the Daily News initiated a series of shameful attacks on The Drawing Center and the International Freedom Museum, two of the cultural organizations designated to receive space at Ground Zero. Performing a public service that would have made the editors of Pravda proud, the Daily News “exposed” that the Drawing Center had once featured the work of an artist who questioned the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. The prospect of displaying this “nutty…kooky and anti-American art” got the attention of Governor Pataki, who wasted no time in showing himself a man of principle.

“His voice rising and his resolve steely,” according to the Daily News, Pataki chastised both institutions for failing to realize that, just like Ground Zero itself, freedom at the site would have its boundaries narrowly defined. “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America,” the governor announced, “denigrates New York or freedom or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11.” By fall, under a withering stream of criticism, both organizations withdrew their bids.

The drawing that caused such outrage was no “Guernica,” and I am surely not the only New Yorker who found the idea of a museum dedicated to freedom more than a little mawkish. But how these institutions were handled remains sickening, and it is impossible not to recall Leningrad after the war, suffocated by the rigors of a senseless ideology. Of course, the comparison is necessarily imperfect. September 11th was a singular act of misguided rage, while the “900 days” were a sustained atrocity extending well beyond whatever justifications warfare can summon. And while George Pataki is no Joseph Stalin, the hapless governor would have surely found a cozy position beside Zhdanov and other bland Kremlin apparatchicks with a penchant for the occasional denunciation. Yet there is reason to believe that the episodes described above, alike in the singular terror they inspired, point to a similar fate for the artists of these two cities.

New York and Petersburg are unique in the role art and literature played in the creation of both cities. I do not mean the literal toil involved, but the more subtle and no less essential task of writing the city into existence, creating a mythology to serve as the foundation upon which everything else will rise.

The mythology of Petersburg began when the city was still a hamlet situated precariously on the Baltic swamps, prone to an attack from the Swedes that would destroy it. “Climate, comfort and convenience were not what…Peter the Great had in mind when he decided to build a new capital in the muddy marshes of the Neva River delta,” wrote the historian W. Bruce Lincoln in Sunlight at Midnight: A Cultural History of St. Petersburg.

Nor was the city Russian in any sense of the word. Much like New York, Petersburg bore little resemblance to the vast country on whose cusp it stood. Educated in Europe, Peter took deep offense at the retrograde ways of his empire, which had never truly recovered from a Mongol invasion that kept the country in pre-modern conditions and struggling to catch up with Europe. Built almost entirely by Italian architects and German engineers, the rectilinear streets and baroque palaces of Petersburg signaled that a model European city could thrive in this still-savage land.

Peter and the rulers who followed succeeded beyond imagination. Walking the streets of Petersburg I cannot help but feel a sense of alienation, a subtle emptiness known to anyone who has ever lingered too long on Midtown’s nightmare grid. Like New York, Petersburg was erected primarily through will and force, the human factor subservient to a stubborn dream of conquest over anything crude and natural.

From the first, writers seized upon this sui generis creation: There was artistry in how these cities arose, two manuscripts scribbled through the night. In his paean to the beloved city he left for New York, Volkov points out that “the miracle of the almost instantaneous appearance of the capital of a huge empire on the inhospitable northern soil was so striking, and the cost…in human lives so high, and the personality of its creators so extraordinary that Petersburg quickly inspired both praise and condemnation of a mystical character.”

It’s striking how closely the literatures of Petersburg and New York hew in this regard. Although Bartleby worked among the cliffs of Wall Street, his crepuscular office may as well have been lodged in the labyrinthine chambers of a bureau on Nevsky Prospect, the Brodway of Petersburg and Gogol’s favored object of derision. (“Oh, do not believe this Nevsky Prospect! Everything is deception, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems to be!”)

The dislike Dostoyevsky expressed for Petersburg—“I’m sorry, I don’t love it. Windows, holes—and monuments”—is uncannily like that which Henry David Thoreau felt for New York. “I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that I behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined…even the best people…talk coolly about it,” he wrote during a stay in Staten Island.

But probably the finest expression of disgust with Petersburg and the alienation it enforced is Andrei Belyi’s phantasmagoric masterpiece, Petersburg. Through a plot in which a young anarchist is charged with assassinating a government official who happens to be his own father, Belyi explores the surreal nature of Petersburg at the turn of the century. A sense of illusion permeates the novel: “But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist.” This was a city growing out of its celebrated adolescence. As Lincoln writes, “In Belyi’s vision, St. Petersburg became a nightmarish industrial city peopled by men and women with ‘small, compressed, cubic souls.’ Here amidst ‘blackish-grayish cubes’ of buildings that could barely be perceived through the ‘greenish-yellow fog’ that hung over them, Belyi found a ‘human swarm of many thousands that dragged itself to many-chimneyed factories every morning.”

A strikingly similar sentiment was echoed on the other side of the Atlantic by Thomas Wolfe, who called Brooklyn “a vast sprawl upon the face of the earth, which no man alive or dead has yet seen in its foul, dismal entirety.” But while catastrophe seemed certain for Petersburg from the onset of the 20th century, New York enjoyed a period of relative gaiety before Wolfe’s vision of an ambling, besotted metropolis took hold.

New York’s fading, brilliant twilight is best captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his essay “My Lost City,” a poignant tribute to New York. Like so many others, he was a transplant from the Midwest, moving to New York upon his return to the United States after the Great War. His New York, triumphant in the wake of the war, is difficult to imagine, so full of unreflective gaiety that it seems nothing like the city of today, where even the smallest delight is caught in a web of self-awareness and scrutiny.

Back then, “New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world…Finding no nucleus to which we could cling, we became a small nucleus of ourselves and gradually we fitted our disruptive personalities into the contemporary scene of New York. Or rather New York forgot us and let us stay…We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn.” With the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald would be launched into a literary celebrity that would allow him to spend the following years traipsing drunkenly around Europe with his wife.

He returned to the city several times during the twenties: “There again was my lost city, wrapped in cool mystery and promise,” he wrote upon once such visit. By 1929, it was clear that New York was changing, a decade of booze and stock speculation having effaced whatever Fitzgerald had once found enticing. “The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cake and circuses, and a new expression ‘Oh yeah?’ summed up all the enthusiasm evoked by the announcement of the last super-skyscrapers.”

Two years later, the city was lost to Fitzgerald. Standing on the roof of the Plaza Hotel, Fitzgerald came to a damning conclusion: “Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits.”

I suspect that even the most acerbic attacks on Petersburg or New York are tinged with a bit of admiration or backhanded affection. Something about these two hulking slabs imposed on the earth entices and beguiles more than any other place. One does not, after all, read too many invectives against Minsk or Cincinnati.

A recent article in the New York Times showered hosannas upon Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his patronage of the arts. “[H]is administration has done more to promote and support the arts than any in a generation,” Jennifer Steinhauer wrote in a prominent Sunday feature that, coming less than a month before the recent mayoral election, was sure to raise Bloomberg’s stature with the liberal artistic elite of the city.

“Under Mr. Bloomberg,” Steinhauer continued, “public art has flourished in every corner of the city—from ‘Element E,’ a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture in the center of the former Tweed Courthouse, to a classic limestone statue in the Bronx, to ‘The Gates,’ set up by Christo and Jeanne-Claude last winter in Central Park.”

Nor does the article neglect his largesse: For the last three years, Bloomberg has annually given $10-20 million to the Carnegie Corporation, which has in turn dispensed his donations to some 150 smaller arts not-for-profits. Compared with Giuliani—who inspired comparisons to Mussolini after his outrage at the “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum—Bloomberg can seem like a veritable Medici.

I find the trend of Bloomberg-praise thoroughly sinister, regardless of how many garlands are placed on his head. So does anyone, apparently, who was here for the “bad old days” of New York—the crime ridden years of the 1970s and 1980s, which seem to inspire a particular affection among many who had the privilege of living through that time.

In an enticing portrait of those years in the Village Voice, Tricia Romano wrote, “Of course, New York City wasn’t always this difficult for artists. Consider 1978: Studio 54 is in its heyday. The Loft is going strong. Club culture is thriving. Apartments in the East Village go for $220 for a one-bedroom. [DJ Danny] Krivit, a lifelong New Yorker, remembers when high-end Balducci’s was a ‘rotten food stand’ in the West Village, and when a cab across town cost $3. Clubs didn’t charge a cover, and you could go out with $30 in your pocket and come home with change.”

Romantic reveries of ages gone—especially those whose hardships we did not have to experience first-hand—may be a welcoming trap in which to tumble, but who doubts that what Malcom Cowley called “the proletariat of the arts” in Exile’s Return is a relic of another city, a New York that bears no resemblance to this one?

A recent study by Downtown NYC! found that 15% of artists surveyed have either left or are considering leaving the city, while 13% are contemplating a career outside the arts. Erstwhile artistic enclaves like Soho, Tribeca and the East Village have become fashionable destinations, the shabby exteriors of warehouses and tenements masking multi-million-dollar apartments.

So now we are losing artists to places like Peekskill and Chicago. Crain’s Business reports that after September 11, both cities offered affordable housing for artists and received 100 and 150 applications from New York artists, respectively.  “For the first time in memory,” Crain’s wrote last year, “many artists are skipping the move to other boroughs altogether and choosing to leave New York City… arts executives estimate that close to 1,000 artists have left the city in the last two years. Thanks to… skyrocketing real estate prices, fewer artists are coming in.” What a stark and painful contrast to Cowley’s city, where “living was cheap…[and] it seemed New York was the only city where a young writer could be published.”

Like many artists of the Silver Age—those last, tremulous years before the October Revolution—Anna Akhmatova was a regular of the Stray Dog, a basement cabaret in the heart of Petersburg that functioned as a crucible of artistic freedom, where Vladimir Mayakovsky would read his futurist poems and experimental theater was routinely performed.

Akhmatova’s early poems are expressions of mundane and religious love, and had her oeuvre consisted of only that, her stature in modern poetry would not have been so immense. But like her counterpart W.B. Yeats, she had the perspicacity to recognize that her sentiment was at its most relevant when applied to her native land, especially the city of St. Petersburg, and she consequently progressed from a poet of deep feeling to the Cassandra of Soviet Russia.

“We are all carousers and loose women here,” Akhmatova wrote in 1913 of life at the Stray Dog. “[T]hat woman dancing now / Will be in hell, no doubt.” The dancing woman may have been Akhmatova; hell an unexpected Communist uprising. It would get worse with a civil war casting Russia deeper into the bloody tides of anarchy.

Akhmatova was fated to watch the metamorphosis of her city into something that she would no longer recognize. Requiem, maybe her finest work, is a defiant dirge that offers testimony of the Great Terror. It opens with a prose passage in which Akhmatova is standing before a Leningrad prison where her son is interred, hoping to pass him a package. Huddled amidst women with similar intentions, the famous poet is recognized:

Then a woman…woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I answered: “Yes, I can.”

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what once had been her face.

The passage is a searing indictment of what has transpired in Petersburg, where the function of the poet has been reduced to the primitive task of recording the most inhumane behavior humanity has to offer—more mortician than artist. Here, in a city that once prided itself on celebrating culture with no less splendor than Rome, it had become an occasion for a poet simply to write.

Thus, two visions of New York have been pitted against each other. One is a vast and brandished public museum, where an astronomical tax base in formerly shoddy neighborhoods—the West Village and Upper West Side, to name two of several—commands works of art like the anemic sculptures of Tom Otterness that have been deployed to spruce up the concrete slabs of Lincoln Center. The other New York—diminishing and almost gone—lacks veneer or polish, its thriving confined to individuals for whom the creative process is a singular, maybe even lonely, act of expression. That second New York may be a romantic urban vision, something like the dark and rambling Paris of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, but I am certain that the New York being crafted by Mike Bloomberg and his cohorts is far more likely to conform to the final vision of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is bound to become a city of limits.

I wonder if the New York that rises from the ashes of September 11 and its aftermath will have a place for writers and artists, or if their role will be diminished to the point of irrelevance.  Will the “incalculable city” of Fitzgerald finally solve itself out of existence?