"Dogs" dramatization based on the story by K. Sergienko "Goodbye, ravine!" Almost according to Shakespeare: life is a wandering shadow, the shadow of a stray dog On the stage cabaret artists
Topic: “Visiting the poets of the “Silver Age” in the tavern “Stray Dog” Boris Pronin.
Literary evening script.
Participants: students in grades 10-11. Presenters (several people).
Purpose of the event: completing lessons on the creation of new art of the early 20th century, attract students to a literary evening in order to develop their reading horizons and expand cultural knowledge.
Leading. Dear ladies and gentlemen! The evening indicated in the program begins at the Stray Dog cabaret. But first, let me make a short excursion into history.
Early 20th century. Times are complex and contradictory. It’s difficult not only for society as a whole, but also for the creative intelligentsia.
On the literary Olympus there were many literary groups, movements, schools that collaborated, competed and were at odds with each other. But everyone was united by the main thing: the awareness of their era as completely special.
Subsequently, this time was called the “Silver Age” by analogy with Pushkin’s “Golden Age”.
Leading. The poets of the Silver Age, inheriting the traditions of their great predecessors, introduced something new that the time dictated - a new concept of the world and man in this world.
Leading. The poets were very different, each of them lived his own complex inner life, tragic and joyful, filled with quests, feelings, and poems. The overall picture of the literary life of the era is striking in its richness, intensity, and diversity. Not only Russian, but also world culture has never known such an abundance of gifted, bright, original, poetic names.
Leading. It is enough to name some of them: A. Blok, V. Bryusov, A. Bely, F. Sologub, O. Mandelstam, K. Balmont, N. Gumilyov, I. Severyanin, M. Voloshin, V. Khodasevich, M. Tsvetaeva, V. Khlebnikov, A. Akhmatova, S. Yesenin and others. The list goes on.
Leading. The fate of many was tragic. According to Marina Tsvetaeva, “we were resettled...we were lost. They were resettled in the slums of the earth’s latitudes... like orphans.”
And then, in the 10s, many of them just began to create and write. They united in circles.
Leading. The largest literary movement was symbolism, which emerged at the end of the 19th century. It was founded by D. Merezhkovsky, and its ideological inspirer was V. Bryusov, the master of Russian poetry.
Leading. In the 10s, Acmeism arose, “for Acmeists, the conscious meaning of the word... is the same beautiful form as music for the Symbolists.” Nikolai Gumilyov rebelled against symbolic mysticism, vagueness, and vagueness.
Leading. During these same years, another new movement in modernist poetry of the early 20th century loudly declared itself - futurism. It was formed from groups and poets that were completely different from each other and did not agree with each other. This allowed M. Gorky to say at one time that “... there is no Russian futurism. There are simply Igor Severyanin, Mayakovsky, Burliuk, V. Kamensky.”
Leading. Today we had the opportunity to see with our own eyes some of the poets whose names became a symbol of the “Silver Age” eras. The meeting will take place in the literary tavern “Stray Dog” by Boris Pronin.
Before you is Boris Konstantinovich Pronin. An energetic and talented person. “Stray Dog” owes its appearance to him.
Pronin, why “stray” and… “dog”? Explain.
B.P. “The Dog” was entirely my idea... I had the idea that we should create a romantic tavern for artists, painters and writers who could hang out here, feed themselves cheaply, and be at home, wandering, homeless.
Throughout the end of 1911, I ran around St. Petersburg, searching, and eventually came across the ideal premises. Here it is. This is the only island in night St. Petersburg where literary youth, without a penny to their name, felt at home.
Leading. Boris Konstantinovich, why is the name of the cabaret, at first glance, so indecent?
B.P."Homeless dog"? You do not like? But this name perfectly symbolizes the homelessness and restlessness of our generation. That's all.
Leading. Yes, gentlemen, we are now at the Stray Dog cabaret. During its very short life - it existed for only four years - this poetic tavern became a legend of St. Petersburg.
Leading. The decoration of the zucchini was simple and modest. There was always music playing. Literary evenings were held: poets read their new poems. You could drink wine and have a snack.
Leading. Boris Konstantinovich, what is the program for tonight?
Poster. The Stray Dog tavern invites everyone to visit the poets of the Silver Age. Poets: A. Blok, N. Gumilyov, A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky and others. Cabaret artists: N.N. Volokhova and others.
B.P./elegant, in a tailcoat and white shirt, matches the poster - the evening's program/. Reads the poster.
B.P. Here are our first guests, friends. We have Symbolists sitting at this table. Shall we give the floor to the symbolists?
Symbolist table .
Leading. Symbolism, according to Valery Bryusov, “is the poetry of hints. What was fleeting, unsaid, and mysterious became valuable and real. The Symbolists strove for world harmony through coasota, which would save the world.
B.P. Our guest is the symbolist poet Alexander Blok.
Leading. “He was protected from rough life by the care of gentle women...” So his great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, nanny, Aunt Katya stood around him like a warm wall - weren’t there too many adoring women?
The path from the “greenhouse” to people was difficult and complex.
Leading. But Blok was drawn to real life, without embellishment. He had a special talent. He “heard” the movement of history, “heard” the music of life. It is no coincidence that Akhmatova called him “the tragic tenor of the era.”
Leading. Blok entered literature as a symbolist poet, and this, of course, left an imprint on his work. He sought to penetrate beyond the outer shell of the world and comprehend its invisible secret.
Leading. Korney Chukovsky: “At that time of distant youth, the poetry of youth acted on us like the moon on a sleepwalker... his poetry was more intoxicating than wine.”
B.P. Alexander Blok, gentlemen! Welcome!
A.Blok. I would like to present, gentlemen, my new poem “Twilight”. /is reading/.
B.P. Gentlemen, what can you say about the poet’s poem? This is a completely new work.
Exchange of impressions (replicas).
Gentlemen, as a symbolist, the poet has surpassed himself!
- “In the heart are hopes that are not from here...” - beautiful!
- “Spring Twilight”, “clicks on the other side” - how cool!
Gentlemen, what is important here is not the twilight, not the river, not the boat, not the sounds of the song themselves, but what is hidden behind them.
B.P. Sorry, my friends, but let someone alone say.
Okay, I'll say (goes on stage).
Friends, do not forget that we are talking about the poems of a symbolist poet. He is alone on the shore. Dusk is coming. Chilly. The sounds of a song are heard from afar. A boat is visible diving in the waves, the poet runs towards it. But seeing this whole picture does not mean understanding the poem. What matters is what is hidden behind them. Some mystery of existence is taking place. The poet strives for that mysterious and beautiful thing that is about to appear in the world. All these images - lonely crying, reflections, spring twilight, clicks on the other side-acquire symbolic meaning. This is a dream of something lofty, a desire for the beautiful, lofty, unattainable.
Voice from the future . Each poet has his own path in this life. Blok died on August 7, 1921 in Petrograd. Writer Konstantin Fedin recalls: “Blok died young - but it was strange to feel that with Blok the old, old era had passed away.”
B.P. And now, friends, let’s give the floor to the Acmeists.
Acmeist table (one of the symbolists):
Acmeism is a literary movement that was formed as a reaction to the extremes of symbolism. The founder of the movement, Nikolai Gumilyov, rebelled against symbolist mysticism. The motto of the Acmeists is: “Clarity, simplicity, affirmation of real life.”
B.P. So, gentlemen, our guest is the “Workshop of Poets”. Spouses Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. Greetings, gentlemen, Acmeist poets.
Leading. The poetry of the “Silver Age” is unthinkable without the name of Nikolai Gumilyov. The creator of the Acmeist literary movement won the interest of readers not only with his talent, but also with his unusual destiny and passionate love of travel, which became an integral part of his life and work.
Leading. The poet's appearance, according to the memoirs of his contemporaries, is original. “Everything about him is special and especially ugly. An oblong head, as if stretched upward, with an excessively high flat forehead. Hair cut into a clipper, indefinite color, thin eyebrows. Under heavy eyelids the eyes are completely flat. Ash-gray complexion. Narrow pale lips. Sits too straight, with his head held high. Narrow hands with long fingers like bamboo sticks are crossed on the table. One leg is crossed over the other. He remains completely still. Only pale lips move on his face. The slanting flat eyes glow with a special light. Of course, Akhmatova said about him: “From the mysterious dark faces, eyes looked at me.”
Leading. Contemporaries describe “a blond, self-confident young man with a sidelong glance and a lisping speech.” But such an ironic attitude soon changed into respect and universal recognition.
...By nature timid and physically weak, he ordered himself to become strong and decisive. He had to break his character, deny himself the joys of life, go on long risky journeys through the jungles of Africa, the sands of the Sahara, the mountains of Abyssinia, hunt lions and rhinoceroses, volunteer for the front, where he was awarded two St. George's Crosses for his bravery.
Leading. Gumilyov's poetry was also unusual and exotic. The poet’s poems attracted people with their enchanting novelty and boldness, acuteness of feelings, excitement of thought, and his personality with courage and fortitude. He boldly broke the usual norms of life, showed mysterious, uncivilized lands, extraordinary, courageous people: kings and pirates, robbers and warriors.
B.P. Nikolai Stepanovich, please take the stage.
Gumilyov goes on stage and reads the poem “Giraffe”.
Leading. What will the audience say about this poem?
Analysis of the verse (children prepare speeches in advance).
And I won't die in bed
With a notary and a doctor,
And in some wild crevice
Drowned in thick ivy.
These words became prophetic. In 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov was shot. The verdict said: “For participation in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy” /the poet’s innocence has now been proven/.
B.P. Next to Gumilyov is Anna Akhmatova.
Leading. Very thin, tall and pale. The collarbones protrude sharply. Black, as if lacquered, bangs cover the forehead to the eyebrows, dark-pale cheeks, pale red mouth. Thin nostrils are translucent. The circled eyes look cold. All facial features, all lines of the figure are in the corners. An angular mouth, an angular curve of the back... Even the rise of thin, long legs is angled.
Anna Andreevna, we invite you to the stage.
Anna Akhmatova. “I was born in June 1889 near Odessa. My father was at that time a retired naval mechanical engineer. As a one-year-old child, I was transported to the north - to Tsarskoye Selo. I lived there until I was 16.” “...I studied the alphabet of Leo Tolstoy. At the age of 5, listening to the teacher teaching the older children, I also began to speak French. I wrote my first poem when I was 11 years old.” “I studied at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium. At first it’s bad, then it’s much better, but always reluctantly.” “In 1910 (April 25) I married Gumilyov, and we went to Paris for a month.” “In 1912, my first collection of poems, Evening, was published. Only 300 copies were printed.” Criticism reacted favorably to him. On October 1, 1912, my only son Lev was born. In March 1914, the second book of the Rosary was published.
B.P. Anna Andreevna, please read something.
/Anna Andreevna reads the poem “Evening”. sits down/.
B.P. Akhmatova’s work takes its rightful place among the best works of world poetry. Her poems still excite readers. The tender soul of a beloved, mother, daughter sounded in them.
Your opinion, gentlemen. You have just listened to the poem "Evening".
Exchange of impressions (speeches by participants, analysis).
Leading. Akhmatova wrote about simple female happiness. Her lyrical heroine is rejected and falls out of love. But her poetry is not only the confession of a female soul in love, it is also the confession of a person living with all the troubles and passions of the 20th century. Each of her lyrical works is a small novel.
The poet's fate was not cloudless: full of grief and suffering.
1921 – execution of Gumilyov.
1934 – arrest of son, Lev Gumilev and Akhmatova’s husband, N.N. Punin.
1946 - Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on the expulsion of Akhmatova from the Writers' Union as her work did not comply with the Charter of the Union (restored to the Writers' Union only in 1953).
Anna Andreevna died in 1966. “If it were my will, I would erect not one, but many monuments to A. Akhmatova:
To a barefoot seaside girl in Chersonesos;
To the lovely Tsarskoye Selo schoolgirl;
To a sophisticated, beautiful woman with a thread of black agate around her neck in the Summer Garden, where “statues remember her young”;
And also where she wanted - opposite the Leningrad prison. There should be a monument to a woman aged from grief with gray bangs, holding in her hands a bundle with a gift for her only son, whose whole guilt was that he was the son of Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova - two great poets.
B.P. Our guest is another representative of the “Workshop of Poets”. Osip Emilievich Mandelstam, who rightfully took his special place in the brilliant galaxy of Russian poets of the “Silver Age”.
Leading. The puny body has a disproportionately large head. Maybe she is not so big, but she is thrown back so much on an overly thin neck, her soft reddish hair curls so luxuriantly and stands on end (at the same time, there is a bald spot in the middle of the skull - and a decent one), and her protruding ears stick out so much... And the head seems disproportionately large. The eyes are squinted, half-closed, the eyelids are not visible. The movements are terribly unfree.
The suit on the puny body, of course, is checkered, and the knees, of course, are stretched out to the extreme, which does not interfere with the obvious dapperness: a silk handkerchief, a tie on the side, but with a polka dot.
Leading. Contemporaries noted a sharp discrepancy in the personality of the man and the poet: “in life he seemed like a child, capricious, touchy, fussy, and at the same time “he had the real demeanor of an artist.”
Contemporary. I don’t want to say “written” or “composed” about the poet’s poems. They were “created”, sung in one breath, as if overheard by the winds of time.
And the time was difficult. So many currents. Where to join? His soul led him to the Acmeists.
Leading. First book Mandelstam's poems " Kamen b" was published in 1913. Why "stone"? The poet is fascinated by architectural proportion, embodied in the “impassive material” - stone.
Leading. Georgy Ivanov recalls his first impression of Mandelstam’s poems: “The poems were amazing. First of all, they surprised.”
Leading. In 1922 it was published in Berlin new collection of poems Mandelstam " Tristia».
Leading. The third collection of the poet’s poems could only be published in 1928. There will be no more publications during the poet's lifetime.
Contemporary. Even in his youth, the poet wrote about the “fatal and tireless pendulum” that “swings” above him and “wants to be his destiny.”
It became his destiny. Mandelstam writes a poem about Stalin, which “signed his death warrant.”
B.P. Osip Emilievich, we ask you to come to the stage.
Leading. “So this is what he is - Mandelstam!”
Mandelstam is reading.
We live without feeling the country beneath us,
Our speeches are not heard ten steps away,
And where is enough for half a conversation,
The Kremlin highlander will be remembered there.
His thick fingers are like worms, fat
And the words, like pound weights, are true.
Cockroaches laughing eyes
And his boots shine.
And around him is a rabble of thin-necked leaders,
He plays with the services of demihumans.
Who whistles, who meows, who whines,
He's the only one who babbles and pokes.
Like a horseshoe, he gives a decree after a decree -
Some in the groin, some in the forehead,
some in the eyebrow, some in the eye.
No matter what his punishment is, it’s a raspberry
And the broad chest of an Ossetian /November 1933/.
Voice from the future. Then there were years of exile, humiliating procedures of weekly checks, surveillance, persecution, then a new arrest in 1938. Nobody knew anything else about him. He died in a camp hospital near Vladivostok. No one knows exactly where and how he was buried.
Your grave is unknown.
Maybe it's a whole color.
The first “Stone” has such power,
That the last stone is gone. (Inna Lisnyanskaya).
Cabaret performers are on stage. Music. Dance s.
B. Pronin. Now a group of poets will appear who were scolded without mincing words. D. Merezhkovsky said: “A camp of savages, a gang of hooligans.”
Four people take the stage - their clothes contain details designed to shock the public: onion and parsley leaves in the buttonholes of their jackets, multi-colored geometric shapes on their faces, identifying “signs” in their clothes.
V. Mayakovsky. Only we are the face of our time!
D. Burliuk. The past is tight. The Academy and Pushkin are more incomprehensible than hieroglyphs. Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others off the Steamship of Modernity!
A. Kruchenykh. All these Kuprins, Bloks, Sologubs and others just need a dacha on the river. ... We look at their insignificance.
V. Khlebnikov. We order that the rights of poets be respected:
a) to increase the vocabulary...
b) for word innovation...
c) so that it is difficult to write and difficult to read...
Together: “A slap in the face to public taste.”
Represent each other:
1. David Burliuk
2. Alexander Kruchenykh
3. Vladimir Mayakovsky
4. Velimir Khlebnikov
They leave. Enthusiastic applause.
B.P. This is how catchy, bright, scandalous and fun the futurists declared themselves in the 10s of the 20th century.
Leading. Russian futurism had many faces. But most often it is associated with the name of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Leading. The beginning was scandalous. They hooted at him, he attracted torrents of abuse and mockery. Critics, journalists, scandal reporters were choking with indignation. And he is deliberately rude, scandalous, anti-aesthetic.
B.P. Vladimir Mayakovsky! (reads the poem “Nate!”).
Silence reigns at the tables. Then someone whistles hesitantly. The stomping of feet, hissing. Hysterical laughter: “Down!”
Replies from the audience. Mayakovsky's answers.
Mayakovsky! You've already read this.
Poet. Why do you follow me everywhere?
Mayakovsky, there are many poets, but few good poems! Do you agree?
Poet. We are literally experiencing a poetic flood, a natural disaster! Everyone is free to write...
How do you feel in our literature?
Poet. Nothing, it doesn’t press.
How much do you get paid per line?
Poet. I was waiting for this question. But you don't have to worry about me getting rich.
You think very highly of yourself.
Poet. Well, why not! I consider myself just a working horse.
But the biggest?!
Poet. No, you are the biggest horse!
And yet poetry did not spend the night in your poems!
Poet. Mademoiselle! I don’t keep track of who spends the night and where...
Applause.
B.P. Thank you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
Leading. Vladimir Mayakovsky started as a futurist and ended up as a socialist. “An agitator, a loudmouth, a leader” - he wanted “to be understood by his country.” A gentle lyricist, he more than once stood at the throat of his own song.
Leading. On April 15, 1930, a message appeared in the newspapers: “Yesterday, April 14, at 10:15 a.m., the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in his office.”
Don’t blame anyone for the fact that I’m dying and please don’t gossip. The deceased didn’t like this terribly…” - these are lines from V. Mayakovsky’s suicide letter.
Leading. What prompted the poet to take such a decisive step? “Love boat” crashed into everyday life?
Moral crisis?
Creative?
There was no other poet in the poetry of the 20th century who would have attracted such torrents of praise and abuse. But Mayakovsky was one of the best .
Cabaret performers on the stage.
Leading. The work of various poets, including those who did not associate themselves with literary movements, shone in the frame of the “Silver Age”.
B.P. In December 1920, the “Evening of Poets” took place. The audience was noticeably bored. When suddenly... as if from the darkness of a chilly night, a woman in a black dress, similar to a nun’s vestments, in worn felt boots, with a military bag over her shoulder, appeared to the eyes of the warily quiet hall.
Her short hair gave her a defiantly independent face. And she was all breathing with some kind of internal protest.
She walked onto the stage and read the poem “Nailed to the Pillory” (1920).
It was Marina Tsvetaeva.
Leading. She was a poetess who has already begun to be forgotten. Many knew, or rather, guessed, that the revolution did not inspire her. They saw that she avoided the company of young poets. And therefore her appearance, so unexpected, was perceived as a challenge to what was happening.
Voice from the future. Tsvetaeva’s life was full of tragedy: separation from her husband, loss of her youngest daughter, long life in a foreign land. “No one to read, no one to ask, no one to rejoice with.” “My reader is undoubtedly in Russia,” she wrote in her diary.
Returning to her homeland in 1939 did not bring her happiness or long-awaited peace. The husband and daughter were repressed. The war has begun. Deportation to Yelabuga. Complete spiritual isolation. There is no work. No news from friends. And thoughts, thoughts. They incinerate the soul, poison life.
Leading. The fate of many poets was distorted by life. Tsvetaeva was right when she said: “...they resettled us... - they lost us. We were thrown into the slums of the earth’s latitudes like orphans.”
Leading. But the “Silver Age” of Russian poetry has not been forgotten. The voices of those who personified its name, whose work became a symbol of this era, belong to humanity and eternity.
Boris Pronin. Friends, our evening has come to an end. We thank the poets for their poems, and you for your attention. We will be glad if you enjoyed this evening in the cafe.
We talked a lot about poets and poetry of the “Silver Age”, but a real assessment of their work can only be given by TIME, only FUTURE.
And if it is truly sung
And finally, with full breasts,
Everything will disappear - remains
Space, stars and singer.
(Osip Mandelstam).
References.
Karsalova E.V., Ledenev A.V., Shapovalova Yu.M. "Silver Age" of Russian poetry. Moscow, New School, 1996
Boguslavsky M.B., Zagidulina M.V. and others. Russian poets of the 20th century. Collection of biographies. Publishing house "Ural L.T.D.", 2001.
Literary evening script
AN EVENING IN A CABARET
"HOMELESS DOG"
Snetkova Irina Anatolevna,
teacher of Russian language and literature
MBOU Secondary School No. 1 of Pokrov
Petushinsky district
Vladimir region
Introduction
In St. Petersburg we will meet again,
It's like we buried our heart in it,
And the blessed, meaningless word
Let's say it for the first time
In the black velvet of the Soviet night,
In the velvet of universal emptiness,
All the dear eyes of the blessed women sing,
Immortal flowers are all blooming...
Pronin
Ladies and gentlemen! The evening of poets indicated in the program will begin in 5 minutes.
Leading
"Stray Dog" was a cabaret exclusively for artists, artists, and writers. The ringleader in this enterprise was undoubtedly Boris Pronin.
Pronin
I completely came up with the idea for the dog... I had the idea that we needed to create a romantic tavern where all of us, “stray dogs,” could hang out, feed ourselves cheaply and be at home, stray, homeless dogs.
The whole end of 1911 I ran around St. Petersburg, searched and eventually came across the ideal premises: a corner house next to the Mikhailovsky Theater, the entrance is in the second courtyard. The entrance from the street was clogged, and we left it that way. It was the perfect thing for us...
“The Stray Dog” also had its own chronicle in the form of a huge tome, bound in pigskin, lying at the entrance to the cat. all visitors were required to at least enter their names, poets - impromptu, artists - sketches.
But here are the first visitors. Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov! Mikhail Kuzmin! Georgy Ivanov! Gentlemen, it's time to start! The theme of our evening is St. Petersburg.
Anna Akhmatova
We are all hawkmoths here, harlots.
How much fun we have together!
Flowers and birds on the walls
Longing for the clouds.
You smoke an even pipe
The smoke above it is so strange.
I put on a tight skirt
To appear even slimmer.
The windows are forever blocked:
What is it, frost or thunderstorm?
On the eyes of a cautious cat
Your eyes are similar.
Nikolay Gumilyov.
Anna, leave these gloomy thoughts. I have a lot of bright things associated with this city. Petersburg has been in me since childhood. I studied at the Tsarskoye Selo gymnasium, the director and teacher was a cat. was I.F. Annensky. Perhaps it was he who instilled in us a love of literature.
Art. "In Memory of Annensky"
To such unexpected and melodious nonsense
Bringing people's minds with me,
Innokenty Annensky was the last
From Tsarskoye Selo swans,
I remember the days: I, timid, hasty,
Entered the high office,
Where the calm and courteous one waited for me
A slightly graying poet.
A dozen phrases, captivating and strange,
As if accidentally dropped,
He threw into the spaces of nameless
Dreams - weak me.
...I know a bench in the park; I was told,
That he loved to sit on her,
Thoughtfully looking at the blue sky
In the red gold alleys
Anna Akhmatova
As a one-year-old child, I was transported from Odessa to the north - to Tsarskoe Selo. I lived there until I was 16 years old. She studied at the Tsarskoye Selo women's gymnasium. At first it’s bad, then it’s much better. But always reluctantly. My first memories are of Tsarskoye Selo: the green, damp splendor of the parks, the pasture where my nanny took me, the hippodrome where small, fast horses galloped...
Art. "In Tsarskoe Selo" (1)
Horses are led along the alley.
The waves of combed manes are long.
Oh, captivating city of mysteries,
I'm sad, having loved you.
Nikolay Gumilyov.
A meeting took place in Tsarskoe Selo that largely determined my life and work. At the end of 1903, I met high school student Anna Gorenko, my future wife, A. Akhmatova.
Art. “The heart beats evenly and regularly”
The heart beats evenly and rhythmically.
What long years to me!
After all, under the arch on Galernaya
Our shadows are forever.
Through drooping eyelids
I see, I see, you are with me,
And in your hand forever
My unopened fan.
Because they became close
We are in a blissful moment of miracles,
At the moment when over the Summer Garden
The pink moon has risen.-
I don't need expectations
at the hateful window
And tedious dates.
All love is quenched.
You are free, I am free
Tomorrow is better than yesterday -
Above the dark water Neva,
Under a cold smile
Emperor Peter.
Pronin
The lyrics are yours, strict and classically proportionate. Similar to the architectural appearance of St. Petersburg, the solemn turns of its streets and squares, the smooth symmetry of the famous embankments, bordered by golden calligraphy of lanterns, marble and granite palaces, its countless lions, winged griffins, Egyptian sphinxes, ancient Atlanteans, colonnades, cathedrals and shining spiers.
Already the first readers say that you are a classic type of St. Petersburg woman, your poetry is inseparable from the Summer Garden, the Field of Mars, Nevsky Prospect, and, of course, from the White Nights glorified by Pushkin and Dostoevsky.
Georgy Ivanov
And I am attracted by Empire Petersburg with its strict architectural lines, and landscape sketches are full of allusions to the paintings of Claude Lorrain.
Following family traditions, I studied at the Second Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg. Here my passion for the poems that I wrote during lessons awoke in me.
Art. "Peterhof" (2)
Like ancient jubilant glory,
The clouds float and turn to stone,
And an angel from the fortress of Peter and Paul
Looks through them - into the coming centuries.
But the gaze is clear - and it is unknown what is there, -
What dreams, sunsets, cities -
To replace these faded gildings -
What a night will come forever!
Leading
Georgy, how you know how to juxtapose and revive familiar images in a new way, you have the ability to convey visual perceptions in a sculptural and colorful way.
Georgy Ivanov
I want to write a book, perhaps I’ll call it “Sunset over St. Petersburg,” where the history of the great capital of the empire will flash from the days of its greatest prosperity to its slow decline. People who in one way or another contribute to the degeneration of St. Petersburg are personally innocent. None of them are aware of the work of their hands. The capital is becoming smaller, depersonalized - and the people who live in it, manage, build, “protect the foundations” - are also becoming smaller, degenerating. Everyone is involved, everything is guided by fate, if you will, by Rock.
Art. "Isaak again in vestments"
Isaac again in vestment
Made of cast silver.
Freezes in menacing impatience
Horse of Great Peter
The wind is stuffy and harsh
Smoke is sweeping away from the black pipes...
Oh! Your new capital
The sovereign is dissatisfied.
Mikhail Kuzmin
Anna Andreevna, what a love for detail you have. Of course, in moments of extreme danger, when death is close, in one short second we remember as much as cannot be imagined in our memory even in a long hour, when we are in a normal state of mind.
And these memories do not go sequentially, but run over each other in a sharp and burning wave, from which will sparkle: now long-forgotten eyes, now a cloud in the spring sky, now someone’s blue dress, now the voice of a stranger passing by. These little things, these specific fragments of our life torment and excite us more than we expect, and return us to those moments, to those places where we loved, cried, laughed and suffered, where we lived.
In 1884 my family moved to St. Petersburg. After the Volga expanse, the capital city unpleasantly struck me with its greyness, tidiness and lifelessness. However, later I became close to this city and now I think that you can only truly feel at home in St. Petersburg.
Mandelstam enters
I returned to my city, familiar to tears,
To the veins, to the childish, swollen glands......
Leading
Maximilian Voloshin is right - Mandelstam is ridiculous, like a real poet!
Anna Akhmatova
Of course, our first poet.
Pronin
You are just in time: we are talking about St. Petersburg. You are also not indifferent to this city7
Anna Akhmatova
We know the source of Pushkin and Blok, but who can tell us where this new divine harmony came to us, which is called the poems of Mandelstam.
Osip Mandelstam
Since childhood, I have been impressed by the architectural and historical appearance of St. Petersburg, and this city has inextricably entered into the very fabric of my poems. It was here in the spring of 1911. I met A. Akhmatova and N. Gumilev.
Art. "Admiralty"
In the northern capital a dusty poplar languishes,
The transparent dial got entangled in the foliage,
And in the dark greenery a frigate or an acropolis
Shines from afar - brother to water and sky.
An airy boat and a touchy mast,
Serving as a ruler to the successors of Peter,
He teaches: beauty is not the whim of a demigod,
And the predatory eye of a simple carpenter.
In my poems, the image of the city is born from the combination of Pushkin’s Petersburg and Petersburg of the twentieth century: Russian statehood is still “monstrous and cruel”, Onegin’s melancholy is still unbearable, Eugene from “The Bronze Horseman” still curses his fate, and on Senate Square it is miraculous the shine of soldiers' bayonets.
Art. "Petersburg stanzas"
Above the yellow government buildings
A muddy snowstorm swirled for a long time,
And the lawyer again sat down in the sleigh,
With a broad gesture, he wrapped his overcoat around him.
Steamships winter. In the heat of the moment
The thick glass of the cabin lit up.
Monstrous, - like an armadillo in the dock, -
Russia is having a hard time resting.
And above the Neva - the embassies of half the world,
Admiralty, sun, silence!
And the states are yellow porphyry,
Like a hair shirt, rough and poor.
The burden of a northern snob -
Onegin has an ancient melancholy;
On Senate Square there is a bank of snowdrifts,
The smoke of a fire and the chill of a bayonet.
Skiffs and seagulls scooped up water
The marines visited the hemp warehouse,
Where, selling sbiten or cod,
Only opera men wander around.
A line of engines flies into the fog.
Proud, modest pedestrian,
Eccentric Evgeniy is ashamed of poverty,
He inhales gasoline and curses fate.
Art. “The last time we met was then...”
Nikolay Gumilyov.
I feel, I know, we will never be as happy as here, on the banks of the Neva, anywhere.
Mozart's "Requiem" is playing.
Leading
Nikolai Gumilyov in 1921 shot by the Cheka
In 1922 Georgy Ivanov left Russia forever
Mikhail Kuzmin, having escaped arrest and persecution, died in 1936.
Osip Mandelstam died in the Second River transit camp, near Vladivostok on December 27, 1938, and was buried in a common grave.
Anna Akhmatova
Art. "Petrograd"
And forgotten forever
Imprisoned in the capital of the wild,
Lakes, steppes, cities
And the dawns of the great homeland.
In a bloody circle day and night
A cruel languor fills...
Nobody wanted to help us
Because we stayed at home
For loving your city,
And not winged freedom,
We saved for ourselves
His palaces, fire and water.
Another time is approaching,
The wind of death is chilling my heart,
But to us the sacred city of Peter
It will be an involuntary monument.
how they were read at the second birth of the "Stray Dog" basement
The spiritualistic seance took place on August 27, 1991 with a large crowd of people. The city, still preparing to return to its original name, was returning to itself one of the legends - the “Stray Dog” cellar.
For information, please go to the encyclopedia, for facts and memoirs, go to any of the favorites of the “Silver Age”: they all visited the basement with vaults painted by Sudeikin, they all left autographs in the famous “Pig Book”, they all gave part of their energy to this cramped space, which, I want to believe, has not left him to this day.
“We continued to meet at the Stray Dog, an artistic club whose very name indicates the bohemian spirit that reigned there. Artists with sedate habits and constant work, “philistines”, our caste, did not favor “Stray Dog”. Actors who were barely making a living, musicians who were still awaiting fame, poets with their “muses” met there every evening. When I say “muses,” I do not at all want to offend these sweet and glorious women, perhaps only a little unusually dressed, but possessing an extraordinary personality. There was no pretense in the club, there were no boring cliches of tension, and most importantly, they did not attach any importance to the social status of the guest.
One of my friends, an artist, took me there for the first time a year before the war. The meeting arranged for this occasion was even distinguished by solemnity: I was raised up along with the chair, and, completely embarrassed, I had to thank for the applause. This ritual gave me the right to freely enter a closed club-cellar, and although I did not have much sympathy for the life of a bohemian, I found this abode very cozy.
We gathered in the basement of a large house, generally intended for firewood. Sudeikin painted the walls: Tartaglia and Pantalone, Smeraldina and Brighella, and even Carlo Gozzi himself - they all laughed and made faces at us from every corner. The program that was shown here was usually of an improvised nature: some actor, recognized by those gathered and greeted with applause, rose from his seat, sang or recited everything that came to mind. The poets, always happy with the opportunity presented themselves, read their new poems. Often the stage was completely empty. Then the owner began to pluck the strings of the guitar, and as soon as he sang his favorite melody, everyone present picked up the chorus: “Oh Maria, oh Maria, how beautiful this world is!””… So T. Karsavina wrote in her memoirs.
“Bark, “Stray Dog,” - the posters of the artistic basement “Comedian’s Shelter” have long cried out.
But she still didn’t bark. As far as I remember, for many years there was some kind of sluggish struggle for the basement itself in the second courtyard on Arts Square, 5, where Sologub, Gippius, Teffi, Balmont, Mayakovsky, Severyanin, Khlebnikov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Bely, Blok, Kuzmin, Gumilyov, and where in recent years a roofing workshop has worked fruitfully and, less fruitfully, a bomb shelter. Having recaptured the “Dog”, removed thirty truckloads of garbage from the cleared basement, and eliminated the flood a week before the first opening, the current directors of the “Dog” invited guests.
And then she appeared. Her name was Chara. For several years she was a stray dog in these yards, sleeping on the steps of a roofing workshop, and LGITMiK teacher A. Olevanov fed her. One day he saw a dog being stuffed into a van and driven away. He rushed to the dog shelter, found the ungodly shaggy Chara, who understood everything, and became her owner. Now, three years later, the former stray dog, who returned to these yards, greeted the artistic “Dog” with a bark.
It was August 27, the guests gathered in the “Dog”, still not cooled down from the events of the putsch, with their eyes inflamed from television overload. N. Tolstoy pleased some, irritated others with examples of liberal Soviet eloquence, I. Fonyakov greeted “The Dog” with verses, tired spiritualist actors and director A. Bolonin understood, and that they were saved by Nonna Slepakova’s texts, which, with some abbreviations , we publish in this issue.
The “Dog” was reborn as a skit. This is fine. That's the only way it's possible. Don’t seriously recreate the style of the “Silver Age”, giving rise to kitsch! ...Back then I didn’t know that the first “art company” to settle in this dog yard would be our editorial office. That every day, walking in the morning 6 and at night (back) through the yard where fifty 50 stray cats, not dogs, live, we will observe for years the construction work either fading or renewing. That among the old communal apartments, on the third tier of the glassed-in gallery, an editorial closet will appear, where (and not a single member of the magazine will deny this!) the energy of the basement clearly flows (warm air is lighter than cold air...). We love our "kennel".
When this issue is sent to the printing house... in the “Dog” they break down another wall and concrete the floor. Unearthed from the rubble, she begins to breathe, giving her the first breaths of life. Yesterday E. Kochergin came to the basement. I think this is her place, it’s not for nothing that a series of Kochergin’s stories in our magazine is called “Stories of a “Stray Dog.” Maybe he will pick up artistic threads with which to connect eras? And the shadows of the Silver Age will say something again...
M. Dmitrevskaya
THE SHADOW OF NIKOLAI GUMILOV
(She appeared with a stack, in a tropical helmet. She read courageously, sternly, but not without some flirtatious posing, in a slightly nasal voice)
“Listen: far, far away, by Lake Chad,
Exquisite giraffe wanders"
("Giraffe", 1907)
Today, I lower, your gaze is saddened again,
The alabaster nose drooped especially subtly.
Listen: close, on Mikhailovskaya Square, 5,
The lost dog was found
He started a slinger, sitting in a familiar basement.
He is skinny and filthy, but the curves of his tail are marvelous:
One amphibrach, a free and flexible chant,
Matches them! (I chose him for a reason!)
The eyes of dogs are filled with ancient fire,
And the skin is wavy, like a sea of jade.
All the cats here see a lot of things that are not here,
When at sunset he drags the bone into the basement.
She continued bitterly:
I know tales not only about trial and execution,
And I’m ready to describe the “Dog” holiday to you!
But today it’s rainy, and so the spleen has overcome you -
You don't want to believe in anything other than cats.
Which means, alas! - I can’t describe it to you
The basement is renovated, guests are surrounded by bottles and roses...
You are crying? Listen: nearby, on Mikhailovskaya, 5,
The returning Dog is feasting.
THE SHADOW OF KONSTANTIN BALMONT
(She pamperedly wrapped her fur boa around her throat. She read boldly and capriciously).
“I want to revel in a luxurious body,
I want to rip your clothes off!”
(“I want!”, 1902)
I want to be recognized, unforgettable,
I want to taste the nectar of glory!
I want to burst into free barking!
I want to wear dog skin!
After these words, a menacing dog barking and growling came from the darkness. Balmont's shadow stopped, made apologetic gestures into the darkness and continued:
Sorry, dog! No need to bark!
There is no threat here, rather flattery!
After all, I spoke about the skin, wanting
Wear a boa in your honor!
(Showed her boa)
I want to be led by a dog, a cat,
Grass and stone (even brick!)
I want to be famous among every midge!
I want it and I will! I want it so much!
The fame is multiplied, the success is endless,
In the noise of the capital, in the wilderness,
Let me be treated with feminine tenderness,
Water lilies and reeds rustle!..
(She shuffled and disappeared into the darkness)
The shadow of Mikhail Kuzmin appeared in an immaculate tuxedo and immediately began lining his eyebrows and lips in front of his open powder compact. The director of Stray Dog, Boris Pronin, announced its appearance as follows:
Mikhail Kuzmin!.. Known to children too.
That he is dear to us not only for this!
THE SHADOW OF MIKHAIL KUZMIN
“When they say “Alexandria” to me,
I see the white walls of the house.
A small garden with a bed of gillyflowers.
Pale sun of an autumn evening
And I hear the sounds of distant flutes.”
(From "Alexandrian Songs", 1907)
When they say to me: "Stray Dog"
I see the fiery mouth of the fireplace,
Painted vault with roses and birds,
Wine on ice, plenty of food, -
In short, everything that doesn’t exist today.
When they say to me: "Stray Dog"
I see Knyazev’s childish eyelashes,
(She began to preen herself again)
Boy, suicide, poet,
The painter Sapunov's skeptical mouth...
I hear a silent sound, I see a motionless gesture.
When they say to me: "Stray Dog"
I don’t see dirty night courtyards and garbage dumps
vile,
But I remember - this is where it began
Our terrible road of oblivion, blood and torment,
Which I see even then,
When they don't tell me: "Stray Dog"!
THE SHADOW OF OSIP MANDELSHTAM
(She appeared in a tuxedo with a rag with camp number 250891 roughly sewn onto her shoulder. She seemed so exhausted that Director Pronin hastily handed her a glass of champagne and fruit.)
“I returned to my city, familiar to tears,
To the veins, to the swollen glands of children.”
(“I returned to my city, familiar to tears”, 1930)
I returned to my city, miserable to the point of tears,
To the courtyards, to the basements, where the “Dog” hides.
From the grave, from the pit of the native camps
Are you back here?! So swallow it quickly!
(I quickly drank and ate)
Admire the black, damp evening,
Which, due to lack of availability, is not brightened with yolk!
Petersburg, among your deserted palaces
I can’t find the living, I can’t find the dead,
Because (I hope you forgive me!)
You value neither the living nor the dead!
Because I just don't want to die
Why did you decide to call yourself “Petersburg” again!
I wander up the stairs black, but to the temple
A sharp, crazy voice hits me:
At that moment, a deafening recording of the voice of Alla Pugacheva was heard, singing in an arrogant major key a song based on Mandelstam’s shamelessly distorted poems:
Leningrad! Leningrad!
I don't want to die yet!
I still have addresses
For which I will find votes!
This passage was repeated and repeated. Mandelstam’s shadow made indignant gestures, shook his fists in impotent anger, but realized that he couldn’t shout, spread his arms and disappeared into the darkness.
THE SHADOW OF VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY
(She appeared, naturally, in a yellow jacket with a bow at the collar, in a top hat. Director Pronin tried to prevent her from performing, remembering the scandal that Mayakovsky created in the “Dog” in 1915, reading the poem “To you!”. But failed to hold the shadow.)
"To you who live
behind
orgy orgy,
Having a bathroom
and a warm closet!
(“To you!”, 1915)
(of course, chopped and angrily)
To you, who have submitted to absurdity,
Stuffed with paper coupons,
Shame on you, common grease
To smear those who accepted Soviet power?!
Now, finding myself almost free,
You yell, you are no longer kind to us:
“We don’t need these people, like Volodya,
Who sold himself to the Bolsheviks!”
I am not corrupt! It's very strange to me
Shame on you for not understanding
My tragedy of self-deception,
Which your mother knew too!
But to go out of fashion - look for fools!
Fashion changes - I don’t celebrate the coward!
I'm a fashionista! I got out of the yellow jacket -
and climbed into the invisible, red one!..
And suddenly red is against all rules
It grew on me, burned me out, deprived me of my strength...
And I myself made a hole in it with a bullet,
Unraveling it into bloody threads!
Don't put your hands in a bullet wound!
Sort out the hustle and bustle of eras!
Or I’ll hire myself from a stray bitch
Combing out fleas in a dark basement!
(Making a threatening gesture, she disappeared into the darkness)
THE SHADOW OF VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV
(She appeared in footwear with foot wraps sticking out, In her hands she carried a large shopping bag full of scrolls around her neck)
(quietly and modestly)
I, Velimir Khlebnikov, as Chairman of the Globe, standing near the origins and roots of all things, have always loved to play and play with these roots. But, due to my inherent forgetfulness, I have never played with the root of the word “dog”. I'll try it now. (Shadow unfolded one of her scrolls and read, highlighting the root “sob”)
Oh, doggy, doggy!
Why are you losing your mind?
Why are you kidding yourself!
Not the lady's dog - the mansion will not tempt you!
Property, peculiarity -
Not property at all!
Dog lovers and in the basement to get rid of their fellow dogs!
There would be a meeting
And the excess!
Gather in Sobaristans - the special officer will not care!
It would be an event
No co-workers!
Add some brave souls to us,
And especially Sobchakov!
(Then the shadow bowed at the waist and disappeared into the darkness)
THE SHADOW OF ANNA AKHMATOVA
(black tight dress, rosary in hands)
“Somehow we’ll wander through the darkness...
From here we go back to “Dog”.
Where are you going from here? - God knows"
(And she explained majestically: I am from “Poem without a Hero,” 1941. I read further)
Dear ones, I am in the kingdom of shadows.
But without fears and without confusion
From under the stone, from under the plants
Hear my dark voice.
Let it be a sign for you,
What we know is that “Dog” is alive,
Though stray, but, however,
Returning home.
I, too, used to descend
Under the enticing vault of the basement.
Here I was sad and rejoiced.
I have read poetry here more than once.
Remember us, dear ones!
You are not us, you are completely different,
But times are tight for you.
Like the era that was waiting for us.
Those who have passed the judgment of the Lord
Shadows of Heaven and Hell.
We are more settled and freer,
Than those sitting here now.
And, by light or darkness, -
We, from there, go back to “Dog”!
(And asked with bitter sympathy)
From here, where are you going? God knows...
Cave canem! - Be afraid of the dog!
(The Stray Dog motto of 1912 was
placed in the corner of the concert agenda)
“What a damned... damned time!”
“The real difficult moments experienced by all of Russia are so significant and unusual in the entire world history that it would be an unforgivable crime if the people of our time did not capture all the thoughts and experiences that a real world war causes. All of us, participating in certain events, or only contemplating them, are so absorbed in everything that is happening in front of us that we almost do not sum up our feelings,” Baron Wrangel wrote with a soul aching for the country to the novelist Tikhonov (pseudonym Lugovoi), all-mercifully asking him publish a literary collection “Russian life in the days of world turmoil.”
According to a widespread legend, on March 16, 1915, the Petrograd police closed the art club “Stray Dog” because of a fight started by Vladimir Mayakovsky after reading the poem “To You.” B. Pronin recalled this in detail:
“I sat with Vera Alexandrovna, my wife, who really appreciated Mayakovsky. Suddenly Mayakovsky turns to me: “Borichka, give me permission! “And he felt that he was not loved and was not allowed on the stage, that I and Kulbin were the only ones who were for him, and this was his tragedy. “Allow me to go on stage, and I’ll do an “epate” and stir up the bourgeoisie a little.” Then I, embittered that the evening turned out to be sour, say to Vera: “This will be wonderful,” and she says: “Scald!”
To you, who live behind the orgy orgy,
having a bathroom and a warm closet!
Shame on you about those presented to George
read from newspaper columns?!
...Is it for you, who love women and dishes,
give your life for pleasure?!
I'd rather be at the bar whores
serve pineapple water!
In fact, everything was more prosaic. In 1914, the First World War began. St. Petersburg was renamed Petrograd, the City Labor Exchange was organized, a hospital named after Peter the Great was built, a new building of the Main Treasury was erected, first-class cinemas "Parisiana" and "Piccadilly" with 800 seats each were opened. A monument to M. Yu. Lermontov was erected on Lermontovsky Prospekt, the Russian Botanical Society was founded, everything would be fine, but... The irrepressible, endless holiday that lasted in the “Stray Dog” began to contradict the harsh everyday life. Many of the regular visitors to the zucchini went to the front:
Preferring action to words, I am leaving Petrograd.
Here they only talk, and I’m sick of it...
(Far-right deputy Purishkevich, participant in the murder of Rasputin,
regular at "Dogs".)
There were fewer and fewer guests every day. By order of the Petrograd mayor, Major General Prince A. N. Obolensky, who “was a very neat person, loved order, which is especially valuable at such a time” (Dzhunkovsky), “Stray Dog” was closed, and the reason is trivial - for illegal trade in alcoholic beverages during Prohibition, introduced with the advent of the war.
This is how one of the organizers and decorator of the literary and artistic cabaret, Sergei Sudeikin, describes it:
“In the morning, wandering around the city, we came to the “Stray Dog” - Mayakovsky, Radakov, Gumilyov, Tolstoy and me. There was a war... My pockets were full of stolen silver. We sat down in hats and coats at a round table to play cards. Four bear-like, felt-wearing, robed policemen with herrings under their left hands, accompanied by a sheepskin janitor with a badge, entered the unlocked doors and announced that the Intimate Theater Society was being closed for illegal card playing. And so the “Stray Dog” died.”
V. Piast wrote:
“Nowadays a lot of slander is being raised against the poor “dead” “Dog,” and one should remember the deceased with a kind word, not only from the Latin principle that “there is nothing but good about the dead,” but also because of the “Dog’s” merits to art cannot be denied; and its greatest historical merits are precisely to futurism.”
Who knew that almost a century later, here, at the same table, during negotiations with eminent artists about the restoration of “The Dog,” passions would flare up, in intensity no lower than the times of the First World War... “Who are you that Sudeikina with Sapunov and Kulbin to restore here? - the most affectionate words with which the gentlemen of St. Petersburg artists addressed each other. It was clear that if Sudeikin himself had appeared now, they would also have told him: “Who are you?” (From Sklyarsky’s memoirs).
Yes... but the time has passed not far away when the theories of the “flood” and “island art” were extremely fashionable - and one could escape from the general “decay” and “flood” of the philistinism not somewhere, but here, in a small an untidy, always unfinished, unfinished basement with walls painted by decadent artists, realizing one of the cardinal ideas of the early 20th century. – to create elite art for those who “understand”, to create a synthesis of poetry, music, painting, theater. This small basement with the windows boarded up from the inside was surrounded by a kind of mysterious and romantic aura of the “last ark” for representatives of “pure art.”
You smoke a black pipe
The smoke above it is so strange.
I put on a tight skirt
To appear even slimmer.
The windows are forever blocked:
What is it, frost or thunderstorm?
On the eyes of a cautious cat
Your eyes are similar.
Yes, I loved them, those nightly gatherings,
There are ice-cold glasses on the small table.
There is bluish steam above the black coffee,
Fireplace red heavy winter heat,
The gaiety of a caustic literary joke...
And, no matter how skeptical Akhmatova, who glorifies living nature, “... there are piles of vegetables near the beds,” was skeptical about the unnaturalness of that situation - flowers, birds painted on the walls, artificial clouds, cigarette smoke; No matter how hard the Acmeists tried to keep themselves apart, they went exactly there, to the “basement in the second courtyard” on Mikhailovskaya Square (now Arts Square, 5), where their antipodes came with “black pipes”:
Take the pianos outside!
Drum from the window like a hook!
Drum, piano cut,
But let there be a roar. To thunder. –
This, as Akhmatova would later say, flew like lightning, burst into the stuffy hall of the tavern, “a name not yet heard” - Mayakovsky:
- Yell at your guns! Fire your guns! We are our own Christ and Savior!
..the air was not ours at all,
And, as a gift from God, it is so wonderful.
– What do we care about God? Let us rest with our saints ourselves.
...And in the Bible there is a red maple leaf
Laid down to the Song of Songs.
– Drag the Tolstoys who have huddled under the Gospel by their thin legs over the stones with their beards!
...I will open you, smelling of incense
From here to Alaska.
- Go, let's paint Mondays and Tuesdays with blood on holidays!
...And the lake turned deep blue,
Church of the Baptist, not made by hands.
- Let's drag down smart psychiatrists and throw them behind bars in insane asylums!
...Our land will not be divided
For the amusement of the adversary,
The Virgin Mary spreads the white
Over great sorrows.
- Oh-oh-oh-oh! Oh-ho-ho! And And And And And! U U U U U! A A A A A A! Hey! Hey!
– I see time coming through the mountains, which no one sees...
An ordinary basement, formerly a Renskovsky cellar. The walls are colorfully painted by Sudeikin, Belkin, Kulbin. In the main hall, instead of a chandelier, there was a hoop painted with gold leaf, suspended on four chains and decorated with a vine, with 13 electric light bulbs that looked like candle stubs. There are only three rooms: a pantry and two “halls” - one larger, the other very tiny. The brick, half-wall, Faustian fireplace burns brightly. On one of the walls there is a huge oval mirror. Below it is a long sofa - a place of particular honor. Low tables, straw stools. Each person entering had to sign a huge “pig” book lying on a lectern in front of a large lit red candle. “In the “Pig Dog Book” - so strangely called because this thick book of unlined paper was bound in pigskin - in the “Pig” book many excellent impromptu songs were written down, not only by sworn poets of the light genre, but also more serious, including the most interesting poems by Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and how many others!” (Piast).
The public entered from the courtyard and squeezed through the small door, as if through the eye of a needle. The main door to the street was opened only for “our own people.” There are shutters on the windows, on the shutters - fantastic birds in painfully excessive luxury. On the wall between the windows are Baudelaire’s feverish red and poisonous green “Flowers of Evil,” depicted by Sudeikin. “...Both the walls and the fireplace were painted in a brutal manner.” The surface of the walls in one of the rooms was broken by N. Kulbin’s cubic painting; multi-colored geometric shapes, crushing its plane, chaotically overlapped each other. Sudeikin painted another room from the floor to the closing vaults with figures of women, children, arapets, bent in a strange bend” (Tikhvinskaya L.I.).
“It was an amazing institution, this “Stray Dog,” writes Teffi (N. A. Lokhovitskaya), a Russian writer and memoirist (1872 - 1952), in her autobiographical story “The Dog.” – She drew into herself elements that were completely alien to her, sucked in and sucked in. I will never forget one regular visitor. She was the daughter of a famous journalist, a married woman, the mother of two children. Someone accidentally brought her into this basement, and, one might say, she remained there. A beautiful young woman with huge black eyes, as if open in horror, she came every evening and stayed until the morning, breathing in a drunken stupor, listening to the howling recitation of young poets, in whose poems she probably did not understand a word, always silent, somehow frightened ..." - Nature could well have been copied from Akhmatova, because her father, A. A. Gorenko, a naval mechanical engineer, publicist, at one time collaborated in the liberal newspaper "Nikolaevsky Vestnik".
“Dressed in black silk, with a large oval cameo at her waist, Akhmatova floated in, pausing at the entrance so that, at the insistence of Pronin, who rushed to meet her, he could write his last poems in the “pig” book. In a long frock coat and a black regatta, not leaving a single beautiful woman unattended, Gumilyov retreated, backing between the tables, either thus observing court etiquette, or fearing a “dagger” gaze in the back” (B. Livshits). Anna Andreevna herself mentioned the famous cabaret in her later works:
“I assure you, this is not new...
You are a child, Signor Casanova..."
“To Isakyevsky exactly at six...”
“Somehow we’ll wander through the darkness,
From here we go to “Dog”...
“Where are you going from here?” –
“God knows!”
(From the triptych “Poem without a Hero”)
“Et voila comment on ecrit l’histoire!” 1
In Europe, already in the 80s of the 19th century, young poets and writers dreamed of their own club, where they could feel free and completely unconstrained. The Art Nouveau century gave birth to new trends, new ideas in art, which means that the secular salons of previous eras were no longer acceptable. As a result, nightly artistic cabarets appeared in Paris (“Left Bank” by Emile Goudeau, the cult “Chat Noir” - “Black Cat”, the forerunner of “The Dog”), and they also appeared in other European cities - in Munich, Berlin.
After the “timelessness” of Alexander III in Russian culture of the pre-revolutionary time, and then the inter-revolutionary decade, a special need arose for meetings where the most important and exciting topics for thinking people would be discussed.
“The time has come when interviews and arguments in a close circle are no longer satisfying” (Mayakovsky). In 1906, in a letter to Verigina, V.E. Meyerhold writes: “One of the best dreams is the one that flashed at dawn between Pronin and me in Kherson (we went there to buy a ruble). We need to create a Community of Mad Men. Only this Community creates what we dream about.”
In 1908, in Moscow, in Pertsov’s house, at the Moscow Art Theater, the first Russian cabaret “The Bat” was opened. It was a kind of club, a circle of the Art Theater, inaccessible to others. It is incredibly difficult to become a member of the circle. The founding members of “The Bat” are all the main actors of the theater: O. A. Knipper, V. I. Kachalov, I. M. Moskvin, V. V. Luzhsky, T. S. Burdzhalov, N. F. Gribunin, N. G. Alexandrov. The mystery of what was happening in the closed club heightened the curiosity of the theater audience.
The decline of the “Die Fledermaus” cabaret began already in 1910, when it began issuing tickets, they were called merchant tickets - they cost from 10 to 25 rubles and were still shyly called countermarks. Soon the cabaret was filled with the Moscow elite, and theater figures appeared there less and less. From a refuge for artists, “The Bat” turned into a commercial enterprise - this was the end of the history of the artistic cabaret of the Art Theater.
After the decline of Die Fledermaus, Meyerhold organized the House of Sideshows, and again the idea of creating an art club, a community of various artists, ended in failure - the House became a commercial cabaret with a staff of actors, musicians, prop men, lighting technicians, stage workers, a restaurant and a hanger, with a system of sessions: again something completely different from what Meyerhold saw at the beginning. It is this failed idea that will be embodied in “Stray Dog,” which is not surprising, since many participants in the “House of Sideshows” will go there, albeit without Meyerhold: M. Kuzmin, I. Sats, N. Sapunov, S. Sudeikin. The most famous productions at the “House” were the pantomimes “Columbine’s Scarf” by A. Schnitzler (post. Meyerhold - Sapunov) and “Dutch Lisa” based on the pastoral by M. Kuzmin; - this is how the Italian commedia dell'arte burst into the culture of the Silver Age.
By the way, the “dog lovers”, of course, did not forget Meirhold, sending him an invitation to the long-awaited opening of the club: “Dear Vsevolod Emilievich! On the night of January 1, 1912, the “basement” of the Intimate Theater Society will open. You are welcome on our holiday. Arrive any time from 11 pm. Entrance – 3 rubles. Registration for accepting money is only on December 28, 29, 30 at the O-va premises from 12 noon to 8 pm. The number of places is extremely limited. Governing body". “They shouldn’t even mention money, I’m belatedly indignant.” Meyerhold did not come to the opening. Subsequently, an ally of many of Pronin’s ideas, his “patron” Vsevolod Meyerhold never visited the basement, and, according to the recollections of one of his contemporaries, “he bristled because he was very jealous of what he did not invent.”
Only in 1916, after the closure of “The Dog,” did Meyerhold take part in staging performances for the cabaret “Comedians’ Halt” (the next project of Pronin, a brilliant organizer and promoter, as they would say now), although not for long. Doctor Dapertutto (Meyerhold’s nickname) was replaced by the talented director Evreinov, whom the Doctor did not like, and his attitude towards his friend Pronin was not always kind: “I know him very well and I really don’t recommend him. The man is completely incapacitated. A typical product of the actor-student bohemia. In business, serious business, we can’t stand it. While he’s talking, everything is going like clockwork; when the moment comes for the implementation of words and projects, Pronin is not there. And then there is some kind of mania to create projects. It's a disease".
Sudeikin attributes the idea of the name “Stray Dog” to Pronin, and N. Petrov to A. Tolstoy, who exclaimed: “Don’t we now resemble stray dogs who are looking for shelter?” – during a long search for a room for a cabaret; this doesn’t really matter, what’s more important is that the basement in the Jaco House that was eventually found “united noble vagabonds and homeless people on various paths of creative quest” (Mgebrov). Each of the founders of the cabaret (Pronin, Sudeikin (meter), Prince Eristov, architect Bernardazzi (treasurer), directors Evreinov, A. Mgebrov, retired soldier Lutsevich, Podgorny, Uvarova, Zonov, Bogoslovsky - a total of 13 founders) is right in the main thing - the idea, The image, the worldview of the “stray dog” was unusually widespread, even, one might say, dominant at that time.
Two days before the opening of the basement, Count Alexei Tolstoy turned 29 years old. Tolstoy helped the entrepreneur B. Pronin, the first art director of the Stray Dog, to convene the quintessence of artistic St. Petersburg for the New Year's evening that preceded the creative life of the art club: T. P. Karsavina, M. M. Fokin (ballet); Yu. M. Yuriev - First Knight of the Order of the Dog, V. P. Zubov, N. Petrov (theater); K. D. Balmont, Igor Severyanin, P. P. Potemkin, Sasha Cherny, O. E. Mandelstam, M. Lozinsky, Vladimir Narbut, M. Zenkevich (workshop of poets); symbolist Tinyakov (future professional beggar: “Give it to the former poet!”); Teffi’s “satiricon”; composers Ilya Sats, Erenbeng; publisher and critic Sergei Makovsky (Apollo magazine); artist Ilya Zdanevich (Ilyazd).
T.P. Krasavina in "Stray Dog"
Drawing by S.Yu. Sudeikina
The "Stray Dog" basement of the Intimate Theater Art Society was inaugurated on New Year's Eve from December 31, 1911 to January 1, 1912.
There is a basement in the second yard,
There is a dog shelter in it.
Everyone who came here -
Just a stray dog.
But that is pride, but that is honor,
To get into that basement!
Woof!
“When more than one toast had already been raised, and the temperature in the hall also rose in connection with this,” recalled Nikolai Petrov, “the figure of Tolstoy suddenly appeared near the lectern. Wearing an open fur coat, a top hat, and a pipe in his mouth, he cheerfully looked around at the spectators who animatedly greeted him:
“There’s no need, Kolya, to show this nonsense to such a brilliant society,” Tolstoy announced at the last minute (he was referring to Alexei Tolstoy’s one-act play, where the abbot was supposed to give birth to a hedgehog on stage during the action).
Thus began the first season of the Stray Dog cabaret.
“Olga Vysotskaya, actress of the House of Sideshows, was one of the first to arrive, took off a long white glove from her hand and threw it on a wooden circle. Evreinov approached and hung a black velvet half mask on one of the candles” (N. Petrov). “These relics,” with the sanction of N. Sapunov, a magnificent artist and theatrical set designer, “hanged on the chandelier the entire time “The Dog” existed.” Unfortunately, six months later Nikolai Sapunov died tragically, drowning and capsizing along with the boat while walking along the bay in Terijoki near St. Petersburg.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sklyarsky, the permanent director of the art basement revived in the 21st century, recalled:
“The artist Sapunov blamed Pronina in 1912:
“...Boris, don’t let the “pharmacists” here,” to which he reasonably replied: “Boors, who’s going to pay?!” “So, clearly, we can’t do without “pharmacists,” continued Sklyarsky. – Remembering the sad experience of Pronin, who was forced to look for “pharmacists” back in 1915 and left the basement also because of its small size, I, the second hund director, decide to add to the historical part of the basement another, so to speak, new one. dog, thereby legitimizing the institution of “pharmacists”, creating a zone of their accumulation - “pharmacist.”
There is a snowstorm, frost outside,
What do we care?
Warmed my nose in the basement
And the whole body is warm.
They don't beat us with a stick here,
Fleas don't chew!
Woof!
“Perissent nos noms, pourvu que la chose publique soit sauvee” 2
“Either Pronin, or Lutsevich, or Tsybulsky always stood at the entrance. Poets, musicians, artists, scientists were allowed in for nothing. All the rest were called “pharmacists,” and they were charged admission based on appearance and mood” (Sudeikin). There were announced and unannounced evenings. Unannounced events featured impromptu performances by poets, musicians and artists. For an evening announced, that is, prepared (and they often prepared for a month for one evening), the entrance fee was five rubles and more.
Is it possible to describe all the productions of Stray Dog, all the performances? – Sudeikin (1882 – 1946) asked in his memoirs. Everything was decided simply, continues Sergei Yurievich:
– Why not arrange an evening of Zoya Lodiy’s romance?
Why not arrange it?
– Why not have a Wanda Landowska party?
Why not arrange it?
– Why not organize a Dalcroze evening with the Imperial Ballet Competition, an evening of the “Workshop of Poets”, an evening in honor of Kozma Prutkov, an evening of contemporary music, a report on French painting?
Why not arrange it?
“This is how strings of evenings were carried out. We had our own orchestra, in which we played: Bai, Karpilovsky, the Levien brothers, Kheifetz, Elman.”
I especially remember “Puppet Nativity scene. Christmas Mystery" by M. Kuzmin (Christmas Eve 1913) with angels, demons, "Last Supper". “The magnificent Diaghilev came to us for the first time this evening,” recalled Sudeikin. “He was led through the main door and seated at the table. After the mystery, he said: “This is not Amergau, this is real, authentic!”
A delightful dance concert by T. P. Karsavina (March 28, 1914) - “...the evening of the goddess of air. Eighteenth century - music by Couperin. Unprecedented intimate charm" (Sudeikin).
The program “Conference on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the poetic activity of K. D. Balmont” on January 13, 1912 established the tradition of poetry evenings, although Balmont himself was in exile.
The evening “Rejoicing at Yuri Yuryev” on January 16, 1913 (Yu. M. Yuryev is a famous actor of the Alexandrinsky Theater, 20 years of his creative activity were celebrated in the cabaret) laid the foundation for acting evenings.
Musical evenings. For example, on February 2, 1912, a concert took place from the works of E. Grieg, Arensky with the participation of the first theater composer, reformer Ilya Sats, who, unfortunately, died suddenly in October of the same year, working, as eerie as it sounds, on the oratorio “ Death"…
All kinds of cycles (“Meetings of exceptionally intelligent people”), “Wednesdays”, “Saturdays”, meetings, lectures, reports on various topics, ranging from literature (“Symbolism and Acmeism” by S. Gorodetsky, which became the program for Acmeism and the “Workshop of Poets” ) and ending with sun spots.
Week of Caucasian Culture (April 1914) N. Kulbina - “...he returned to St. Petersburg, more than usual excited, filled with impressions of oriental exoticism... He takes a heap of multi-colored fabrics, scarves, a pile of majolica, household utensils, Persian miniatures straight to the “Dog”, where organizes their exhibition” (Tikhvinskaya).
Futurists generally formed within the walls of the “Dog”: “Evening of Five”, “Evening of Mayakovsky”, an evening dedicated to the literary and artistic collection “Sagittarius”, were entirely devoted to futurism. Here V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, N. and D. Burliuk, V. Kamensky, and “epate” V. Mayakovsky (“They don’t eat carrion here!”) read their works.
One of the main achievements of “The Dog” - the theater - was a whole era in the life of cabaret directors N. N. Evreinov (an exquisite esthete in the spirit of Oscar Wilde) and N. V. Petrov. The first by this time had already organized a theater studio, and the second was still only an assistant director of the Alexandrinsky Theater. But, in many ways, it was their creativity in “Stray Dog” that allowed them to become brilliant directors in the future.
The list of artists who began their artistic journey in “The Dog” can be continued endlessly, and we can also talk about their achievements for a long time. But having named only the main names, we already have the right to declare the important role that cabaret played in the culture of the Silver Age.
It’s already late (or still early - they leave by six), two in the morning, do you hear?.. - you don’t even have to break through from the street to the basement if you’re not completely chilled yet; comes from inside:
The sullen rain squinted my eyes
And for
lattice
Clear
Iron thought wires the feather bed,
And on
Her feet lightly rested on the rising stars...
Legs-
line of lanterns
Kings,
In the corona of gas,
For the eyes
Made it hurt more
A warring bouquet of boulevard prostitutes,
And creepy
Just kidding...
Although, if you go down, you will probably experience a feeling of some kind of orphanage, uselessness; It’s a little cold in the basement, and all the frescoes, curtains, furniture upholstery - all the chandeliers, the drum and other meager belongings of the room - all of this smells of white wine fumes. At night, the public brings their smells of perfume, linen, tobacco and other things - it warms the room, overpowering the half-burnt and fumes... There, the Acmeists are clustered and grouped to the side: Akhmatova, Gumilyov, Mandelstam; nearby are the “boys” from the Poets Workshop - Georgy Ivanov, Georgy Adamovich. “Akhmatova is sitting by the fireplace. She sips black coffee and smokes a thin cigarette. How pale she is! Akhmatova never sits alone. Friends, admirers, lovers, some ladies in big hats and with eyeliner..." (Ivanov).
“Do you hear, Vasya, yesterday I read in the English press,” the aspiring scientist Vitya Zhirmunsky called out to his friend.
- What? - Gippius (pseudonym Bestuzhev) turned to him, releasing a stream of smoke.
– Do you remember Rutherford’s saying that the only way to find out what’s inside the pudding is to poke your finger into it?
- So here it is. Rutherford distinguished himself again: “Now I know what an atom looks like,” he said.
The youth burst into laughter.
– It’s not for nothing that I received the award.
– By the way, do you know what Nobel wished for at the end of his life?
“Yes, yes,” answered the friend after another portion of mulled wine. “Or rather, no, no...” grinning drunkenly.
“So, he wished that after his death his wrists would be cut just in case, because once they had already confused him with his deceased brother and even wrote an obituary in the newspaper.
And so on endlessly - from literature to science, then into the jungle of St. Petersburg rumors and gossip; and back to literature...
And if you had arrived an hour earlier, then before Mayakovsky’s speech you would have attended a philological and linguistic, most boring from the point of view of the average person, lecture by Viktor Shklovsky “The Resurrection of Things”. This time the young scientist-enthusiast was talking about the language revived by Velimir Khlebnikov, presenting in the hard shell of a learned nut the most difficult thoughts of Alexander Veselovsky and Potebnya, already cut through by the radio beam of his own “inventions”. With the gift of his powerful, resurrected, living language, he forced to listen, without moving, to a large audience, who had put down their glasses of wine for a while, half consisting of “tailcoats” and low-cut ladies - “pharmacists.”
It’s a pity, we didn’t have time to listen... Nothing, tomorrow, at one o’clock in the morning, Shklovsky (1893-1984) will rush here again, ready for an all-night debate, inspired by lectures banned by the police at the Tenishev School or the Swedish Church: “Bohemia in Literature”, “Rishpen and his works" by Francesa, "The Culture of Enthusiasm" by Verhaeren (who, by the way, ran into "The Dog") or "The Intimate Life of Napoleon" by the outstanding historian and archivist Franz Funk-Brentano. Perhaps tomorrow Vitya will read “The Place of Futurism in the History of Language”, something about Budutlyans... or maybe he’ll include an acrostic poem in his lecture:
AND it lives and has no light,
ABOUT no one tells her...
P If they hit her, she will only blush.
A sometimes he will grumble.
Barking, howling dog anthem
Our basement!
Muzzles up, to hell with spleen,
Live to the fullest!
We bark and howl the dog's hymn,
To hell with every spleen!
Woof!
(Hymn of Vsevolod Knyazev)
There Prokofiev and Shaporin, they are twenty, and they are listening with their mouths open, who do you think? - the great swindler, swindler, Prince Tumanov-Tsereteli himself (though deprived of his title for numerous criminal adventures), once again released from prison, having received his last sentence for the Warsaw banking scam in 1906:
“I’m not a criminal, I’m an artist.” What I did was not a crime, because the banks rob the public, and I rob the banks.
“Many people in Odessa fooled me, but I myself am a kind person and lost everything I “earned” in Odessa at roulette, and gave away part of the money and gave it to the soldiers and the wounded.
“You know, one day Putilin (the head of the St. Petersburg detective police) succumbed to my exhortations to reveal the place where banknotes were made, and for several days he drove me around on trotters, and while waiting for my accomplices to appear, he treated me in taverns. In the end, realizing that the joke had gone too far, I pointed to the Expedition for Procuring State Papers near the Egyptian Bridge: they say, this is where the money is made, your Excellency! Putilin was amazed, returned me to the cell and... did not punish me - they say, my dignity does not allow it - he made a fool of himself.
It’s interesting that the hound director Pronin could never, ever, under any circumstances, get Blok into “The Dog” (unlike his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna). And this is despite the fact that Blok personally treated Pronin very friendly, with boundless sensitivity in the years of his youth and youth he separated people in such a way that he completely excluded others from any communication with himself. Blok firmly and decisively declared about the hound director that he was “not an indecent person” - Blok still remained a “daytime person.”
“Thanks to the Dog,” Piast recalled, “we became completely nocturnal. Although I got to work almost every day at half past one or two, I managed to translate from Tirso de Molina or answer my colleagues a few questions from the science “Petersburgology”, invented by me, allegedly founded by Kurbatov, while the one sitting next to me At the table A.E. Kudryavtsev was hastily preparing “Foreign Review” for “Chronicle”, the magazine of Maxim Gorky, but, returning home at six o’clock, after dinner he fell asleep in order to sometimes get up just in time when it was time to get ready in "Dog".
I remember how I flared my nostrils, absorbing the daytime air, when one Sunday I went to an art exhibition! It began to seem to us (me and Mandelstam) that the whole world, in fact, was concentrated in the “Dog”, that there was no other life, no other interests - than the “Dogs”! To our credit, we must say that we ourselves felt this danger. That is, the danger is that this aberration of “worldview” will take root in our brains.”
From the memoirs of Georgy Ivanov
We got ready late, after twelve. By eleven o’clock, the official opening hour, only “pharmacists” had arrived - in the jargon of “Dogs” this was the name of all random visitors from the adjutant to the veterinarian. They paid three rubles for entry, drank champagne and were amazed at everything.
To get into the “Dog”, you had to wake up the sleepy janitor, walk through two snow-covered courtyards, turn left in the third, go down ten steps and kick in the oilcloth-lined door. Immediately you were stunned by the music, the stuffiness, the diversity of the walls, the noise of the electric fan, which hummed like an airplane. The hanger, piled high with fur coats, refused to take them: “There’s no room!” Ladies were preening in front of a small mirror and, jostling, blocked the passage.
The duty member of the board of the “intimate theater society” grabs you by the sleeve: three rubles and two written recommendations, if you are a “pharmacist”, fifty kopecks - from your own. Finally, all the slingshots have been passed - director Boris Pronin, “doctor of aesthetics honoris causa,” as printed on his business cards, embraces the guest in his arms: “Bah! Who do I see?! Long time no see! Where have you been? Go! - gesture somewhere into space. “All of our people are already there.” - And immediately rushes to someone else. Ask Pronin who he just hugged and patted on the shoulder. Almost, probably, he will throw up his hands: “The devil knows. Some kind of boor!
Beaming and at the same time preoccupied, Pronin rushed around the “Dog”, rearranging something, making noise. A large, colorful tie flew like a bow across his chest from his impetuous movements. His closest assistant, composer N. Tsybulsky, nicknamed Count O'Contrare (they ran a complex household together), a large, flabby man, sloppily dressed, sluggishly helped his friend-partner - the count is sober and therefore gloomy. “...An excellent orator, a remarkable chess player, but he drowned all his talents (very significant in musical composition) in continuous drunkenness” (Piast).
The vaulted rooms, clouded with tobacco smoke, became a little magical by morning, a little “out of Hoffmann.” Someone is reading poetry on the stage; he is interrupted by music or a piano. Someone quarrels, someone declares their love. Pronin in a vest (he regularly takes off his jacket around four in the morning) sadly strokes his favorite Mushka, a shaggy and angry little dog (depicted by Dobuzhinsky on the cabaret emblem): “Oh, Mushka, Mushka, why did you eat your children?”
Rajiy Mayakovsky beats someone at toss. O. A. Sudeikina, looking like a doll, with a charming, kind of doll-mechanical grace, dances the “polka” - her signature number. (Because of his love for her, the author of the “dog” anthem, Vsevolod Knyazev, a hussar and poet, shot himself in 1913. “How many deaths came to the poet, stupid boy, he chose this one,” Akhmatova predicted). “Meter Sudeikin” himself, with his arms crossed in Napoleonic style, stands gloomily in the corner with a pipe in his teeth. His owl-like face is motionless and inscrutable. Maybe he's completely sober, maybe he's drunk - it's hard to decide.
Here many chains are untied -
Everything will be preserved in the underground hall.
And those words that were said at night,
Anyone else wouldn't have said this in the morning.
(Kuzmin)
Prince S. M. Volkonsky, not embarrassed by time and place, passionately expounds the principles of Jacques Dalcroze. Baron N. N. Wrangel, now throwing his monocole into his eye, now dropping (with amazing dexterity), clearly does not listen to the bird chatter of his companion, the famous Pallas Bogdanova-Belskaya (“holy courtesan, sacred prostitute, misunderstood femme fatale, extravagant American, orgiastic poetess" (Kuzmin)), wrapped in some fantastic silks and feathers.
Ugly and faded Gumilyov
He loved to lower pearls of words before her,
Subtle Georges Ivanov - drink delight,
Evreinov - throw himself on the fire...
Each man became sharper,
Sensing the sophisticated Pallas...
(Northerner)
At the “poetry” table there is an exercise in writing comic poems. (Various literary games were constantly taking place in the “Dog”, which were the best proof of the poet’s true talent and required, even from a select few, full attention and composure.) Everyone is racking their brains as to how to invent something like this. Finally, something completely new is proposed: everyone must compose a poem, each line of which must contain a combination of the syllables “zhora”. Pencils creak, foreheads frown. Finally, time ran out, everyone took turns reading their masterpieces... One day G. Ivanov was not allowed to play because he could not provide permission from his parents.
Pyotr Potemkin, Khovanskaya, Boris Romanov, someone else - having driven Mandelstam, who had long since exhausted his credit, from the stage, who was trying to sing (God, in what a voice!) "Chrysanthemums" - begin to depict cinema. Tsybulski provides heartbreaking accompaniment.
Little by little the “Dog” is emptying. Poets, of course, stay the longest. Gumilyov and Akhmatova, Tsarskoye Selo residents, are waiting for the morning train, others are sitting in company. The conversation is no longer flowing well, they yawn more. And only “the villous Mandelstam is heated in front of the barman’s counter, demanding the impossible: to exchange for him the gold that was spent in another basement” (Livshits).
When returning from "Dog" there were often clashes with the authorities. Once Sergei Klychkov boasted that he could climb onto a cast-iron horse on the Anichkov Bridge.
And he got in. Of course, a policeman appeared. Tsybulsky helped everyone out. Taking on a menacing appearance, he suddenly began to advance on the policeman: “Yes, you know who you are dealing with, do you understand... How dare you be insolent to the chief officers’ children,” he suddenly shouted at the entire Nevsky. The guardian of the law chickened out and retreated from the “chief officer’s children.”
The streets are empty and dark. They call for matins. Janitors shovel away the snow that has fallen overnight. The first trams pass. Having turned from Mikhailovskaya to Nevsky, one of the “idle revelers”, sticking his nose out of the raised collar of his fur coat, looks at the dial of the Duma tower. A quarter to seven. Oh! And at eleven you have to be at the university.
And it’s time for us to go home.
Sind's Rosen – nun sie werden bluh'n! 3
How we have grown old! Years pass
Years pass without us noticing...
But this air of death and freedom,
And roses, and wine and the happiness of that winter.
(G. Ivanov)
Almost no materials have been preserved about unannounced, impromptu evenings, and how can one preserve a momentary remark, a gesture, a joke, in a word, improvisation, which in “The Dog” essentially became life itself. First one or the other of the artists will sing, dance, and recite. The audience did not hesitate to joke out loud at the performers; the latter, interrupting themselves, made jokes at the audience.
The crazy nature of the cabaret director manifested itself frantically - Pronin said “you” to everyone. During the evening, he also continued to greet, bow, and sit down at the table: “Oh, and you’re here,” he would appear at someone’s table and, having kissed, sit down with the gathered company. They drank champagne, he drank a glass, and, suddenly noticing friends who had not yet been greeted nearby, rushed to them, then moved on” (Tikhvinskaya).
In general, unimaginable things happened. So, according to the memoirs of G. Ivanov, once, having gone too far, Pronin had a row with one lawyer, and it almost came to a duel, but the next morning good cognac managed to reconcile the offended lawyer and the failed duelist.
The list of guests of only famous names can be continued for a very long time: directors N. Petrov, Evreinov, Miklashevsky; this is the “red commissar” Larisa Reisner and the Socialist Revolutionary Kannegiesser - the future killer of Uritsky; and ballet dancers E. V. Lopukhova, A. A Orlov, B. Romanov; operas - M. Zhuravlenko, E. I. Popova, M. N. Karakash; dramatic artists N. G. Kovalevskaya, Nastya Suvorina, V. A. Mironova; composers N. Tsybulsky, M. Kuzmin (died in Leningrad on the 36th in dire need), Vyacheslav Karatygin, Alfred Nurok, M. F. Gnesin and Anatoly Drozdov; writers S. Auslender, V. Piast - friend of A. Blok, A. Tolstoy, B. Livshits, N. Gumilyov and A. Akhmatova, her friend Olechka Glebova-Sudeikina (died in poverty, in Paris 1945).
G. Ivanov (spent the last years of his life in hunger and suffering in a nursing home near Toulon), G. Adamovich, Severyanin, Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, N. and D. Burlyuk, V. Kamensky, Averchenko; artists V.V. Enne, Yu. Annenkov, author of portraits of many figures of the Silver Age, the Sapunov brothers, A. Klodt, Dobuzhinsky, artist and doctor N.A. Kulbin (“died in early March 1917, having fallen victim to his “dynamism” “The thirst for activity that overwhelmed him” (Pronin)); singer Zoya Lodiy, professor Andrianov, E.P. Anichkov, architects Bernardazzi, Fomin, the common favorite of St. Petersburg, the clown Jacomino, famous lawyers and members of the State Duma known throughout Russia...
This is only a small part of the people who acted in the “Dog” - only selective fragments from the huge mosaic of “friends” of the “Dog”. But even from such a small list, one can conclude what a huge role “Stray Dog” played in the cultural life of not only St. Petersburg, but throughout Russia, and even Europe, and what importance it had for each of the guests and managing members of the Society’s club The intimate theater had a cabaret.
One cannot ignore the visits to Russia of such great figures of European art as Marinetti, the king of the Italian Futurists; Paul Faure, the king of French poets, and Emile Verhaerne, who visited “The Stray Dog” while in Russia.
“Bohemia was a society of exquisitely witty people, and they did not go there to get drunk” (Mayakovsky).
G. Ivanov did not call “Stray Dog” anything other than a gathering of drunken poets: “Four or five o’clock in the morning. Tobacco smoke, empty bottles. Few people sit at the tables in the middle of the hall. More in the corners..."
“In “The Dog” morals were shy, there were no orgies and the nasty things associated with them. Conversations and disputes attracted people here...” (Pronin).
“Nature, politics, love, alcohol, debauchery, mysticism - all this deeply captured me and left indelible marks on my mind and soul” (A. Tinyakov).
“...the very first breath of war blew the rouge from the cheeks of the regulars of the Stray Dog” (Livshits).
January day. On the banks of the Neva
The wind rushes, blowing destruction.
Where is Olechka Sudeikina, alas,
Akhmatova, Pallas, Salome?
Everyone who shone in the thirteenth year -
Only ghosts on the St. Petersburg ice...
(G. Ivanov, from the collection “Roses”, 1931)
“And suddenly - deafening, crazy music. Those who dozed startle. Glasses bounce on the tables. A drunken musician (Tsybulsky) hit the keys with all his might. Hit, cut off, something else plays, quiet and sad. The player's face is red and sweaty. Tears fall from his blissfully meaningless eyes onto the keys, drenched in liquor...” (Ivanov).
We've gone crazy from the easy life:
Wine in the morning, hangover in the evening.
How to stop wasted fun
Is your blush, oh gentle plague?
(Mandelshtam)
How many people have left a piece of their memory, a part of themselves, their shadow in this small “dog” shelter in the second courtyard on Mikhailovskaya Square, and, by the way, they continue to leave it. I want to bow my head, together with you, dear readers, in memory of the bright creative person Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sklyarsky (1947 - 2011), who recreated “The Dog” for descendants, who devoted all of himself, his time and his work for the benefit of the bright word - Poetry! – absorbing the immensity and universal depth of incomprehensibility, the philosophy of artistic meaning. Bow your head and remember everyone who left a shadow...
As Tatyana Tolstaya said about the old generation of “dog lovers” (and there is already a new one!):
“They must have drank a lot of wine in the days of their youth, at the last feast of freedom, under the arches of the Stray Dog.” I hope they feast now, in eternity, where all debts are paid, all insults are forgiven, and youth never ends. I hope they hear my gratitude for having them.” – With these wonderful words I would like to end my short story-memoir, a retrospective of some of the great events of the Silver Age.
And the shadow of “Stray Dog” excites and will excite the minds, it will itch and itch, as the futurists would say, in all creative souls seeking balance, belonging and coordination with the world around them. Happy New Year!!!
O shadow! Forgive me, but the weather is clear,
Flaubert, insomnia and late lilac
You - the beauty of the thirteenth year -
And your cloudless and indifferent day
They reminded me... And this kind of thing to me
The memories don't suit me. O shadow!
(Akhmatova)
1 “And that’s how history is written!” (French)
2 “Let our names perish, so that the common cause may be saved.”
3 If these are roses, they will bloom! (Goethe)
Script "In "Stray Dog"
Boris Pronin
Anna Akhmatova
Nikolay Gumilyov
Mayakovsky
Tolstoy
Gorodetsky
Kuzmin
Northerner
Balmont
Mandelstam
Knyazev
Pharmacists
Romance performers
Yes, I loved them, those nightly gatherings,
There are ice-cold glasses on the small table.
There is bluish steam above the black coffee,
Fireplace red heavy winter heat,
The gaiety of a caustic literary joke...
Akhmatova
Boris Pronin. Gentlemen! Here comes 1913! Our “Stray Dog” is one year old!
Kuzmin.
From the birth of the basement
The year has just flown by,
But "Dog" connected us
In a tight-knit round dance.
Whose soul has known sadness,
Go deep into the basement
Rest (3 times) from adversity.
Pharmacist 1. Do you know how it all started? On one of the stormy evenings in the autumn of 1911, his fellow countryman Boris Pronin, pink as always, with tousled chestnut curls, excited, with incoherent, intermittent speech, rushed into Nikolai Mogilyansky, an ethnographer, like a whirlwind:
You see, a brilliant idea! All is ready! It will be wonderful! The only problem is that you need money! Well, I think you have 25 rubles. Then everything will be in order!
I’ll give you money, 25 rubles, but tell me in a nutshell, what else have you invented and what are you up to?
We will open a “basement” here - “Stray Dog”. It will be neither a cabaret nor a club. No maps, no program! All this will be wonderful!
Mogilyansky took out the money and said:
Elect me as a member of the “Dog,” but I ask only one thing: let it be in my neighborhood, otherwise I won’t go.
Then Nikolai forgot to think about both “The Dog” and Boris. But what a surprise! Receives a summons: “The dog barks at that time, and the address is attached.”
Pharmacist 2. Yes, Stray Dog opened on New Year's Eve, December 31, 1911.
Pharmacist 3. And where are the famous poets and writers, you said that in this cafe you can hear the king of poets Northern, and this courageous traveler Gumilyov, and of course, Balmont, whose fame outshines all others!
Pharmacist 1. They gather late, after 12. Only “pharmacists”, like you and me, arrive at the official opening hour. This is how random visitors from the adjutant to the veterinarian call everyone in the “Dogs” slang.
Pharmacist 2 Ah, here is Vsevolod Knyazev. It was he who composed the hymn to “Stray Dog”!
Knyazev.
There is a basement in the second yard,
There is a dog shelter in it.
Everyone who came here -
Just a stray dog.
But that is pride, but that is honor,
To get into that basement!
Woof!
There is a snowstorm, frost outside,
What do we care?
Warmed my nose in the basement
And the whole body is warm.
They don't beat us with a stick here,
Fleas don't chew!
Woof!
Barking, howling dog anthem
Our basement!
Muzzles up, to hell with spleen,
Live to the fullest!
We bark and howl the dog's hymn,
To hell with every spleen!
Woof!
Pharmacist 1. Count Alexey Nikolaevich Tolstoy!
Tolstoy.
Don't reproach me:
I'm a comic actor.
I have a purple nose
I'm a stray old dog...
The dog will manage without money,
The dog will walk along Nevsky.
Before the warm zucchini
He just stomps on his heel.
Pronin was in St. Petersburg.
He spoke day and night.
From his cheerful words
The stray dog is ready.
This is our stray dog
His nose is cold.
Rub his nose quickly
He won't bite, by all means.
He waves his paw and howls.
Everyone invites strays.
Who has sadness in his eyes?
I'm very sorry for all the dogs.
F3. Look who is this oriental beauty?
F1. Didn't you find out? This is Anna Akhmatova, the wife of the famous acmeist poet Gumilyov.
F2. Yes, she writes poetry too! True, when Gumilyov first read her poems, he advised her to take up dancing, not poetry. But then he changed his mind. “Your poems about a seaside girl intoxicate me,” he wrote to her, returning from his trip to Africa.
F1. Mandelstam wrote about her:
Half turn, oh sadness,
I looked at the indifferent ones.
Falling off my shoulders, I became petrified
False classic shawl.
F 2. She's very young.
F3. However, she is sad and serious amidst the general joy.
F1. Her love is mixed with the thought of death.
Akhmatova.
She clasped her hands under a dark veil...
"Why are you pale today?"
- Because I have tart sadness
Got him drunk.
How can I forget? He came out staggering
The mouth twisted painfully...
I ran away without touching the railing,
I ran after him to the gate.
Gasping for breath, I shouted: “It’s a joke.
All that has gone before. If you leave, I'll die."
Smiled calmly and creepily
And he told me: “Don’t stand in the wind.”
F1. Look, Vertinsky himself is coming to the stage!
Romance based on Tsvetaeva’s poems “I Like...”
F2. And here is Gumilyov. Nikolai! Read your “Giraffe” to us!
Gumilev.
Today, I see, your look is especially sad
And the arms are especially thin, hugging the knees.
Listen: far, far away, on Lake Chad
An exquisite giraffe wanders.
He is given graceful harmony and bliss,
And his skin is decorated with a magical pattern,
Only the moon dares to equal him,
Crushing and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.
In the distance it is like the colored sails of a ship,
And his run is smooth, like a joyful bird's flight.
I know that the earth sees many wonderful things,
When at sunset he hides in a marble grotto.
I know funny tales of mysterious countries
About the black maiden, about the passion of the young leader,
But you've been breathing in the heavy fog for too long,
You don't want to believe in anything other than rain.
And how can I tell you about the tropical garden,
About slender palm trees, about the smell of incredible herbs.
You are crying? Listen... far away, on Lake Chad
An exquisite giraffe wanders.
F3. Gumilev is ugly, but his smile is charming!
F2. Someone said about him: an adult with a childhood secret. Moreover, he is a true gentleman, a man of honor.
F3. And here comes Konstantin Balmont!
F1. All of Russia is in love with Balmont!
F2. Balmont's arrival is always a real sensation.
F3. He enters with his forehead raised high, as if bearing a golden crown of glory.
F2. You know, recently one exalted lady, in a fit of love, declared her readiness to jump out of the window, forgetting that the “Stray Dog” was in the basement.
“It’s not high enough here,” Balmont answered contemptuously, also apparently not realizing that he was sitting in the basement.
F1. Yes, where Balmont is, there are women, romantic love and, of course, poems about love.
Balmont.
The words fell silent on my lips,
The bow flashed, the violin sobbed,
And arose in two hearts
Crazy-light mistake.
And the greedy gazes merged
In a dream that has no name
And intertwined with an unsteady thread,
Yearning, and not afraid of confession.
Among the crowd, among the lights
Love grew and grew
And the violin, as if merging with her,
She trembled, sang, and sobbed.
F2. Recently there was an evening honoring Balmont at Stray Dog. He descended into the crowded hall and his welcoming words were drowned in the noise of applause. Sologub said impromptu:
We all bark, bark, bark,
We call Balmont
And not tea, tea, tea,
We treat him to tea,
And we call “Dog” a paradise...
Balmont immediately demonstrated that his improvisational talent had not faded in his distant travels:
I always thought it was a dog
Not compatible with someone who is a cat
Now I think differently
And I already fell in love a little...
Sologub replied:
Not everything in the world is howling and fighting,
The horizon is not forever in the clouds,
The dog barks affectionately,
Just caress her Balmont.
F3. Amazing! Look, who are these young people?
The futurists enter.
F1. These are futurists. From futurum - future. David Burliuk, Mayakovsky... They also call themselves Budutlyans - poets of the future and want to change the world with the help of art.
F2. They even wrote their own manifesto - “A slap in the face to public taste.” They propose to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy from the ship of modernity!
Mayakovsky. Boris, let me go on stage, and I’ll make an “epaté”, stir up the bourgeoisie a little, it’s a sour evening for you.
Boris Pronin. Scald!
Mayakovsky.
An hour from here to a clean alley
your flabby fat will flow out over the person,
and I opened so many boxes of poems for you,
I am a spendthrift and spender of priceless words.
Here you are, man, you have cabbage in your mustache
somewhere half-eaten, half-eaten cabbage soup;
Here you are, woman, you have thick white paint on you,
you are looking at things as an oyster.
All of you on the butterfly of the poet's heart
10 Perch up, dirty, in galoshes and without galoshes.
The crowd will go wild, they will rub,
the hundred-headed louse will bristle its legs.
And if today I, a rude Hun,
I don’t want to grimace in front of you - so
I will laugh and spit joyfully,
I'll spit in your face
I am a spender and spendthrift of priceless words.
F1. It’s in vain that they attack the young poet. Even Gorky said: There is still something in the futurists!
Singer: Mayakovsky, why are you acting like a rude person! You are a subtle, gentle lyricist. Listen here.
Song based on Mayakovsky's poems "Lilichka..."
Akhmatova:
We are all hawkmoths here, harlots,
How sad we are together!
Flowers and birds on the walls
Longing for the clouds.
You smoke a black pipe
The smoke above it is so strange.
I put on a tight skirt
To appear even slimmer.
The windows are forever blocked:
What is it, frost or thunderstorm?
On the eyes of a cautious cat
Your eyes are similar.
Oh, how my heart yearns!
Am I waiting for the hour of death?
And the one who is dancing now,
Will definitely be in hell.
Romance based on Tsvetaeva’s poems “Under the caress of a plush blanket...”
F2. Osip Mandelstam! Mandelstam, read something.
Mandelstam:
We've gone crazy from the easy life:
Wine in the morning, hangover in the evening.
How to stop wasted fun
Is your blush, oh gentle plague?
Shaking hands is a painful ritual,
There are night kisses on the streets,
When the river currents become heavy
And the lanterns, like torches, burn.
We are waiting for death, like a fairy-tale wolf,
But I'm afraid that he will die first
The one with the alarming red mouth
And bangs falling over the eyes.
Akhmatova: Mandelstam has no teachers, he is a poet from God. Who will indicate where this new divine harmony came to us, which is called the poems of Osip Mandelstam?
Igor Severyanin takes the stage.
I, the genius Igor-Severyanin,
Intoxicated with his victory:
I'm completely screened!
I am completely confirmed!
From Bayazet to Port Arthur
I drew a stubborn line.
I conquered Literature!
He stared, thundering, at the throne!
F3. Igor Severyanin is truly a genius! He was recently proclaimed the king of poets!
F2. Gentlemen! How quickly time flies! It's almost morning.
Boris Pronin. Kuzmin! Read something to say goodbye!
Kuzmin.
Here many chains are untied -
Everything will be preserved in the underground hall.
And those words that were said at night,
Anyone else wouldn't have said this in the morning.
The romance performed by Vertinsky “How beautiful, how fresh the roses were...”
