Grigory Kaganov. Harvard: Trehsotletie St. Petersburg-6

Harvard: Tercentenary of St. Petersburg-6
Grigory Kaganov

Date of publication: October 8, 2003

Not only American museums (which was already discussed in one of the previous materials), but also American universities, in addition to their direct purpose, also serve as impressive monuments of private charity. Not only on every building and on every piece of territory there is an inscription chiseled on stone or carved on copper, perpetuating the name of the one with whose money it was built. The same inscriptions are on gates, auditoriums, halls, stairs, flower beds, fountains and even windows. Not to mention libraries. And these are not just signs that no one reads. No, these are living names that are constantly on the lips and ears of everyone who works, studies and visits the university campus. These are the clearest landmarks when moving around campus, as all places have names. When they explain the way to you, they list from which name you need to go to which one. So the memory of the benefactors lives on in the everyday life of the university and thus forms part of the culture.

The entire Harvard University is a monument of just this kind. It bears the name of John Harvard, a young (and soon deceased) priest who came to New England from old England in the mid-1630s. He joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony and bequeathed exactly half of his inheritance, so many pounds, shillings and pence, to the college (future university) that the colonists had just founded in the town of Cambridge “for the encouragement of literature, arts and sciences.” This humanitarian concern of the new settlers, engaged in the development of an unfamiliar land at their own risk, is noteworthy. Along with pounds and shillings, Rev. Harvard bequeathed 400 volumes of its library to the college. A hundred years later, they burned down along with the building where they were kept, all but one - one of the students took it to read the day before. It was wonderfully called: “The Christian War with the Devil in the World and in the Flesh.” Now it is one of the most valuable relics of the university.

Speaking of libraries. On the way to the building where the tricentenary of St. Petersburg was celebrated, one of the landmarks was Houghton, that is, Houton Library. In Russian it would sound like the Library named after. Houghton, but in English there is no such solemn-memorial distance: not the “name”, but simply Houghton. "Houghton" is a huge collection of rarities, not only rare books, but also manuscripts, drafts, drawings, engravings, everyday things, Greek shards, Egyptian papyri and in general everything that is involved in the literature of the last few thousand years. All these treasures do not lie dead weight somewhere in hiding places, but are constantly on display - something constantly, something replacing each other. There are permanent exhibitions of famous writers and poets, including the world-famous "John Keats's Room" or "Emily Dickinson's Room". The latter contains the entire environment (monastically meager) in which the life of the famous recluse took place, so sensitive that she could talk to other people, even close ones, only from her room, through the slightly open door, without leaving or seeing them.

These two rooms contain something without which current Western culture would not exist in the form in which we know it and in which it partly determines our cultural consciousness, whether we like it or not. I remember how John Updike put it on this matter: “I myself am fascinated by the drafts and worksheet of other writers. Unfolding, say, the first version of Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” [it lies in Houghton, in the “Keats Room” - G.K. ], you find yourself close to that sacred flame, that furnace of spiritual concentration in which a masterpiece is being molded, not yet hardened. There is something prayerful in touching such materials." It should be added that the most important international scientific events dedicated to the work of Keats take place in this room, among those cabinets and tables where almost all the original materials of the great poet are located. I’m trying (but I can’t) to imagine that the world congress on Pushkin’s work would be held in the room where all his manuscripts lie.

The Harvard Tercentenary of St. Petersburg began with a small ceremony in a Pushkin-era building, in the modest-looking Faculty Club. However, only in appearance. Inside, this teaching club is similar to those old aristocratic “clubs” of Moscow and St. Petersburg, in which the entire elite of both capitals constantly met and spent time. Here, a somewhat ritualistic decorum is surprisingly combined with complete ease; no one ever has a feeling of awkwardness or inappropriateness. And it’s exactly the same in the interiors: everything is furnished with antique furniture and things, but they sit quietly on all this, put what they need on the tables and put it on them. The walls are hung with paintings, watercolors and maps of museum quality. But the Russian eye notices that there are no Cerberus anywhere, jealously and grumpily watching over everything and prohibiting something. The ideal order is somehow maintained by itself. No staff visible. I remembered how in Germany many years ago my wife and I, amazed by the universal cleanliness there, kept trying to see who was cleaning and washing the entire city - and we couldn’t find it, although we were on the streets not only during the day, but also in the dead of night. But we noticed how the townspeople clean up random trash after themselves. What struck us most was one day two drunkards in the station buffet: having drunk everything, they got up with some difficulty and, staggering, walked towards the exit, but halfway there they suddenly returned and carefully pushed their chairs towards the table. So order was maintained not by a miracle, but by the population. I think this is the most solid foundation of culture.

There are many simultaneous events happening everywhere in the Faculty Club. Since I didn’t know about this, when I saw a crowd of well-dressed people in the first living room, I decided that this was the 300th anniversary, and began to stomp around, waiting for familiar faces. There were so many smiles and friendly nods addressed to me that there was no doubt. Only when everyone began to move into the hall did I realize from her appearance that this was not it. The first one to whom I expressed my bewilderment and my goal asked someone else, and he asked someone else, they took care of me and eventually found out where I should go. Hey, bearer of culture and an open bottle of beer on Nevsky, shouting in Nozdrev-like delight about American lack of culture, tell me, this concern for a stupid stranger and all other goodwill, and at the same time commitment and the ability to not be late - we will also enter all this in the column " There is no culture in America"?

As for the anniversary event itself, which took place in an academic building named Emerson Hall, what struck me most was the number of people crammed into the spacious auditorium. The audience sat and stood in all the aisles. I admit that I never expected this. The number of people crowded into every square meter seems to me the most accurate measure of the relevance of the St. Petersburg theme.

The audience's reaction to everything that was said and shown was extremely lively. They listened in complete silence with full attention. All eyes were fixed on the speaker. No one was bored, no one dozed off, no one leafed through a magazine, no one chatted with a neighbor. This is generally typical of the American audience: if people come, it is by choice and not to check in, but to listen - and listen carefully, trying to learn something for themselves. Although in this case, as they later explained to me, a significant part of those present were of Russian origin, in their behavior they were all typical Americans. Well, that means we have joined American culture (yes, yes, nostrils with a bottle, it’s culture that you can’t put in another column).

All my notes are, thank God, not a review, so, with the reader’s permission, I will not retell the reports. Please take my word for it that they were much livelier and more interesting than at most domestic events in honor of the above-mentioned 300th anniversary. By the way, I can’t help but remember one small but interesting fact. A colleague from Kyiv attended one of these St. Petersburg events. Upon his return, he described (in Russian!) his impressions and submitted them for publication. The editor who told me about this accepted the text, but decided to correct a typo in the title “Zooletie St. Petersburg” and called the author about it. He asked not to correct anything, there was no typo here.

The anniversary celebrations at Harvard ended with the screening of Alexander Sokurov's " Russian Ark " with a nice foreword by Mikhail Piotrovsky. This took place in a concrete building called the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's only structure in the United States. The film, which is equally fiercely criticized and praised in its homeland, looks remarkably appropriate in America. Much more appropriate than in St. Petersburg (where it turned out to be impossible to see it). It’s strange, but there, in St. Petersburg, everything with which you disagree would come to the fore, but here, at Harvard, on the contrary, everything with which you agree. But in any case, the hand of the greatest master is immediately visible. And you can hear it right away: the indistinct rustle of voices, the meaninglessness or insignificance of most of the lines constitute no less important quality of a superbly made film than excessive visual clutter, than cramped and incomprehensible or, on the contrary, strangely empty spaces, than sudden close-ups in which there is nothing to see , and vice versa, distant plans, where something not very legible, but exciting, is happening. The viewer-listener is presented not with some kind of storyline, but with a convincing, like a dream, environment of cultural memory, where everything, according to the word Anna Akhmatova , "not like people." The point is not in the notorious staged kunststück - one passage of the camera - but in recreating the internal spaces of this very memory of ours, which makes us people of a certain culture, namely the culture of the “St. Petersburg period of Russian history,” as they liked to put it at the turn of the last century and the century before last. . The strange and clearly drawn-out triumph of Valery Gergiev , which ends the “drive” through the dream environment of this memory, is not so strange if you rummage through it and look for what else the city can seriously boast of today, having survived the past century with difficulty and losses and that’s all who has retained the traits of greatness, just as an old aristocrat preserves the noble traits of his breed.

Of course, one can find other manifestations of the cultural usefulness of today's St. Petersburg. In my opinion, the amazing, almost frightening dance of Ulyana Lopatkina with its plastic expressiveness or the equally amazing, completely unexpected baroque music, reconstructed and authentically performed by the virtuoso violinist Andrei Reshetin, produce an incomparably greater impression than Gergiev’s conducting (in the film) of an unremarkable orchestra , performing unremarkable music. And one can only rejoice for the great city if it continues to generate miracles of art, even if they were underestimated or not even noticed by such a great and subtle master as Sokurov . In the end, all the better for the city. Gaudeamus igitur, as they sang and still sing in the old student anthem: “Let us rejoice.”