POETRY, SCULPTURE, PAINTING, ROCK POETRY IN “PITER”

The cultural Revolution

The Second Russian Revolution

• First Russian revolution had been a proletarian one – the first proletarian revolution in the world

• The second was a middle-class (“bourgeois”) revolution that redistributed wealth to a new middle class (as in France, USA)

• Political revolutions are preceded by cultural ones that change the consciousness of the people and separate (alienate) enough individuals from the current power

Brodsky and Marx

• “…when I was about ten or eleven it occurred to me that Marx’s dictum that ‘existence conditions consciousness’ was true only for as long as it takes consciousness to acquire the art of estrangement; thereafter consciousness is on its own and can both condition and ignore existence.”

• Estrangement (alienation) from existence (Soviet reality) is the position of the intelligentsia: artists, cultural figures, critics of the system

Alienation:a destructive force in the state

• Soviet system of control predicated on total control of the individual’s consciousness and the suppression of laughter and irony

• Two types of alienation: simply being an individual and pursuing one’s poetic talent (Vysotsky, Brodsky)

• Alienation through irony: the case of Dovlatov, who built his art on the popular response to Soviet reality, the anecdote

• Stances of the Intelligent: rage, indifference, irony, exile

St Petersburg as cultural centre

• Russian culture of the 90s as a baroque interplay of different discourses - Soviet, pre-Soviet, post-Soviet, Russian, American, etc.

• Interplay cannot help but create ironic resonances

• The discourses of the Soviet era, even Stalinism, lose their teeth and their fearfulness and become lyricized, object of affectionate play.

• All forms of expression: dress (blue jeans), music: “rock-poetry”, painting, sculpture

The underground

• After mid-80s a new culture reflects the dizzying change in Russian society: gap between generations talking different languages.

• Instead of being referential, i..e. imitating life, (Socialist Realism, Solzhenitsyn), art becomes intertextual, reflecting other art, creating an interplay of different systems.

• New forms, genres take hold, e.g. rock music, experimental film (chernukha), non-figurative (abstract) painting.

• Language or discourses. Not just verbal, but all kinds: visual, cinematic, behavioural.

Joseph Brodsky

• 1940-1996

• Poet, exile, Nobel prize-winner for literature 1987

• Almost an elegy• Seven strophes

Life of a poet

• 1940 Born in Leningrad

• 1955 Leaves school, begins writing poetry.

• 1963 arrested.

Life of a poet

• Sentenced to 5 years exile in Arkhangel'sk

• Nov. 1965 Sentence commuted after protests from international community.

1964 Tried for "parasitism”

• Judge: And what is your profession in general? • Brodsky: Poet translator. • Judge: Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled you in the ranks of

poets? • Brodsky: No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks of humanity? • Judge: Did you study this? • Brodsky: This? • Judge: To become a poet. You did not try to finish high school where they

prepare, where they teach? • Brodsky: I didn’t think you could get this from school. • Judge: How then? • Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.

Life of a poet

• June 4 1972 - Deported from USSR• 1980 Becomes US citizen• 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature• 1991 Poet Laureate of the United States

Common themes

• Time- the changes that it brings both small and large• Empires: their decline and fall• Piter (Leningrad): the canals, the decaying buildings, the

statues left over from the Russian Empire• Venice: Piter’s alter ego• The sad squalor of everyday life and love• Poetry and language

Naum Blik: Brodsky” “I Sit By The Window” by Joseph Brodsky

I said fate plays a game without a score,and who needs fish if you've got caviar?The triumph of the Gothic will come to passand turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of the tree.Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?When the dust of the ages will make it tire,the Russian eye will rest on an Estonian spire.I sit by the window. The dishes are clean.I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-o Euclid thought the vanishing point of the linewasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.I sit by the window. And while I sitmy youth comes back. Sometimes I smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf destroys the bud;the seed that falls in barren soil’s a dud;that on the flat field, the grassy plainnature spills the seeds of the plants in vain.I sit by the window. Hands locked on my knee.My heavy shadow's my only company.

My song had no tune, but because of this lack,at least no chorus can sing it back.With talk like this it’s no surprisethat no one's leg on my shoulder lies.I sit in the dark by the window-pane;waves roar behind the drapes like a train.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,I proudly admit that my finest ideasare second-rate, and may the future take themas proof of my struggle against suffocation.I sit in the dark. And it’s hard to figure outwhich is worse: the dark inside, or the darkness out.

.

Death of a poet

• 1996 dies of heart attack in New York

• Buried on San Michaele Island in Venice.

Brodsky in Piter

… from the Nobel lecture…

• The poet …is language's means for existence - or, as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom it lives. I who write these lines will cease to be; so will you who read them. But the language in which they are written and in which you read them will remain not merely because language is more lasting than man, but because it is more capable of mutation.

• One who writes a poem, however, writes it not because he courts fame with posterity, although often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected, often his thought carries further than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the future of language invades its present.

Leningrad (Piter): Mit’ki

•Mit'ki Leningrad group. Expression of the city, themes and images. Cultural continuities.

•Appears in mid-80s as group of painters who strike out towards primitivism - reflecting pre-Soviet avant-garde painting, the Russian icon, children's art. Anti-realism, abandon external perspective.

•Invade a variety of genres - literature, film, rock music.

Mitki Album cover

“Several themes from the period of my heroic drunkenness”

Aleksandr Florensky

The Mitkis’ response to the putsch of 1991 and the demonstrations of support for Eltsin.

Eltsin, Russia, Mitki

Viktor Tikhomirov“Peter made the blackamoor get married”

The Piter Underground: Shemiakin

• Painting and sculpture: Mikhail Shemiakin (b. 1943)

• Grew up in GDR (East Germany)

• Moved to Leningrad in 1957, entered Art School, expelled in 1961

• Forced treatment in psychiatric institution

• 1971 expelled from USSR

Shemiakin in exile

• Settled first in France, then US

• Friend of Vysotsky, Vasily Aksyonov (writer in exile)

• In 2007 moved back to France

• Frequent visitor to St Petersburg

• Shemiakin’s website

Peter in Piter

• Statue of Peter the Great, founder of St Petersburg, in Peter and Paul Fortress

• Ironic take on all-powerful Emperor

“Monument to the victims of repression”

Prominent Rock Musicians

• Boris Grebenshchikov (b. 1953 Leningrad)

• Leader of group Aquarium

• Official site of Aquarium

Aquarium: Train on fire (1986)

Words

Prominent Rock Musicians

• Viktor Tsoy (1962-1990)• Grew up in Leningrad• Vocals for group “Kino”• “Change”

Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000)

• Law professor• Becomes mayor of

Leningrad in 1990• Joins Democratic groups• Under his mandate name

changed back to St Petersburg

• Associated with liberal economists: Chubais, Kudrin, Gref, who later become Putin’s ministers