Dmitry Tsilikin. St. Petersburg girl forever

St. Petersburg girl forever
Dmitry Tsilikin

Date of publication: October 24, 2000

Accidents are laid out in a pattern, which is a manifestation of a pattern. If something “coincidents”, think about why it happened. As we know, there are no coincidences.

For example, I was born in St. Petersburg, I’ve lived here all my life and have no plans to move. On the other hand, I am engaged in a rather non-Petersburg business: I work in a newspaper. However, between work (which, of course, does not have to be pleasant) and life (which, on the contrary, has turned out quite happily: to stay without a deadline where you feel good is not happiness?) sometimes strange rapprochements occur.

On Sunday, official necessity brought me to the show of the new collection of St. Petersburg clothing designer Liliya Kiselenko. And on Monday people from a certain TV program called me and asked me to talk on camera about... well, in general, it’s awkward to even say what... About whether St. Petersburg should be the capital, and more broadly: about the St. Petersburg spirit, style, mentality and all that other stuff - that is, about matters, discussing which you inevitably intrude into, as Thomas Mann put it, the tragically vast sphere of the banal. The people, however, were nice, and I began to think about the given topic. And at the same time - to unravel the impressions of what happened on the eve of the show. The impressions were strong, but vague, as if Lilya had hit you at some point in the subconscious, which you clearly feel, but cannot define - as if you hear a smell that reminds you of something memorable, almost painfully, but what?

And the TV people, like good psychoanalysts, called “this” a word - yes, of course, Kiselenko derived one of the plastic formulas of the damned St. Petersburg spirit.

Her show was accompanied by all sorts of stylish (Japanese, it seems) chants, but a completely different song was spinning in her head. Remember, from the repertoire of the group “Secret”: “Alice knows how to knit, Alice draws in an album, Alice can’t be found visiting, Alice is almost always at home . ” This work is wonderful, just like any work of pop culture that captures the image of the times is wonderful, for example, the radio program “Good Morning!” and the voice of its presenter Galina Novozhilova is the sound essence of the late 60s, and the work of Yuri Antonov - the second half of the next decade. "The Secret" expressed a more local, more intimate phenomenon: the atmosphere of a company of teenagers from intelligent Leningrad families living in the center, approximately in the late 70s - early 80s. Families, as befits the intelligentsia, are slightly, partly or completely Jewish and therefore not alien to some kind of implicit dissidence. Or even obvious ones - if they were not refuseniks themselves, then their acquaintances were. These people worked in scientific institutes, mostly in the humanities, or were engaged in some kind of creative professions, or, in any case, they had some brief acquaintance with representatives of creative professions. The children grew up: fragile in the St. Petersburg way, frail in the Mandelstam way, breathing from childhood "the ether of colds, sublimate of pneumonia . " They went to English and French schools, studied music, regularly spent Sunday mornings at the Philharmonic and the Kirov Theater, thanks to languages, they early learned about “another life” and early absorbed that same spirit of dissidence (at that time, bohemianism itself was not without a bourgeois connotation was already dissent). At twelve they read “The Master and Margarita” and Akhmatova, at fourteen - Brodsky and Nabokov in the Ardis edition brought by someone and thanks to this they looked at the Soviet order as an inevitable and even cheerful absurdity. One such girl, for example, had a school notebook on which she wrote: “Alyonochka Novosiltseva’s notebook for all subjects.” But the schools themselves also did not shy away from liberalism, so there was nothing for Alyonochka - but somewhere in Grazhdanka or in Kupchino in an ordinary large-panel school one could not even imagine such a thing.

The beat quartet "Secret" (which three-quarters consisted of those same grown-up golden youth) wrote a song that, for the uninitiated, is just sweet, albeit somewhat pretentious. In fact, it was a digest of signs from a certain circle of people: where Alice knows how to knit and, presumably, does it not very skillfully, but in the spirit of the latest requirements of Parisian fashion, and Christina celebrates her name day (not her birthday!), and is given oranges and roses, and something else completely impractical, but very stylish, Sarah Marabou from a children's book is remembered joyfully, because only those who had a bad childhood are ashamed of their childhood, and those who had a happy one - on the contrary, they do not break the connection between themselves "in childhood" and "now", it is alive and organic for them. Etc.

And now Kiselenko released this Alice and this Christina and all their friends onto the podium. Before the start of the show, journalists tortured the designer: what does the phrase from the press release “The collection contains motifs of urban folklore” mean? What is urban folklore? Lilya explained somewhat confusingly. But as soon as you see the models, it’s immediately clear. Using modern fabrics, she subtly parodied all the then Yugoslav coats, trimmed at the seams with some kind of brown leatherette, and faux fur coats, and “foreign” “bohemian” blouses with laces. But here, of course, not only a parody - Kiselenko caught the hidden passionate sexuality of stunted St. Petersburg girls, their not entirely healthy blush, sometimes flaring up somewhere on their cheekbones... Moreover, this is the fall-winter of 2001, because the girls are the same, but the reason blush can easily be considered not only consumption, but also ecstasy.

Again, it would be a multiplication of banalities to say that this city is most accurately portrayed and expressed by visitors. The best St. Petersburg belongs to Gogol and Dostoevsky. Or Petipa's. Or Yuri Shevchuk. Why go far for examples: recently I witnessed a conversation between a thoroughly St. Petersburg lady and a certain literary critic, an exquisite connoisseur of the poetry of the Silver Age: “Looking at your sophistication, it seems like several generations of local ancestors. There is not a trace of your Dnepropetrovsk childhood and youth in you.” “This is probably because I live in the house of Vladimir Benediktov, and his spirit somehow took possession of me,” he answered.

Fashion designers, for some unknown reason, declared themselves kings and idols, and confused the people with their Talmudic rules for displaying all sorts of summer-winter collections - as if they were not sewing clothes, but performing some kind of mysterious and complex cult. In fact, if a designer is a tailor, then he either sews well or poorly. And if he is an artist, his work obeys the general laws of artistic creativity. In particular, he expresses in an unknown way something that cannot be known to him personally. So, one must think, the spirit of this city, or rather, that part of it that “is made of emptiness and glass, from the hot babble of some digressions, from St. Petersburg influenza delirium,” has taken possession of the native of Kaliningrad, Kiselenko .