POETRY, SCULPTURE, PAINTING, ROCK POETRY IN

1
The cultural Revolution

• POETRY, SCULPTURE, PAINTING, ROCK POETRY IN
  PITER

2
The Second Russian Revolution

• First Russian revolution had been a proletarian
  one the first proletarian revolution in the
  world
• The second was a middle-class (bourgeois)
  revolution that redistributed wealth to a new
  middle class (as in France, USA)
• Political revolutions are preceded by cultural
  ones that change the consciousness of the people
  and separate (alienate) enough individuals from
  the current power

3
Brodsky and Marx

• when I was about ten or eleven it occurred to
  me that Marxs dictum that existence conditions
  consciousness was true only for as long as it
  takes consciousness to acquire the art of
  estrangement thereafter consciousness is on its
  own and can both condition and ignore existence.
• Estrangement (alienation) from existence (Soviet
  reality) is the position of the intelligentsia
  artists, cultural figures, critics of the system

4
Alienationa destructive force in the state

• Soviet system of control predicated on total
  control of the individuals consciousness and the
  suppression of laughter and irony
• Two types of alienation simply being an
  individual and pursuing ones poetic talent
  (Vysotsky, Brodsky)
• Alienation through irony the case of Dovlatov,
  who built his art on the popular response to
  Soviet reality, the anecdote
• Stances of the Intelligent rage, indifference,
  irony, exile

5
St Petersburg as cultural centre

• Russian culture of the 90s as a baroque interplay
  of different discourses - Soviet, pre-Soviet,
  post-Soviet, Russian, American, etc.
• Interplay cannot help but create ironic
  resonances
• The discourses of the Soviet era, even Stalinism,
  lose their teeth and their fearfulness and become
  lyricized, object of affectionate play.
• All forms of expression dress (blue jeans),
  music rock-poetry, painting, sculpture

6
The underground

• After mid-80s a new culture reflects the dizzying
  change in Russian society gap between
  generations talking different languages.
• Instead of being referential, i..e. imitating
  life, (Socialist Realism, Solzhenitsyn), art
  becomes intertextual, reflecting other art,
  creating an interplay of different systems.
• New forms, genres take hold, e.g. rock music,
  experimental film (chernukha), non-figurative
  (abstract) painting.
• Language or discourses. Not just verbal, but all
  kinds visual, cinematic, behavioural.

7
Joseph Brodsky

• 1940-1996
• Poet, exile, Nobel prize-winner for literature
  1987
• Almost an elegy
• Seven strophes

8
Life of a poet

• 1940 Born in Leningrad  
• 1955 Leaves school, begins writing poetry.
• 1963 arrested.

9
Life of a poet

• Sentenced to 5 years exile in Arkhangel'sk
• Nov. 1965 Sentence commuted after protests from
  international community.

10
1964 Tried for "parasitism

• Judge And what is your profession in general?
• Brodsky Poet translator.
• Judge Who recognized you as a poet? Who enrolled
  you in the ranks of poets?
• Brodsky No one. And who enrolled me in the ranks
  of humanity?
• Judge Did you study this?
• Brodsky This?
• Judge To become a poet. You did not try to
  finish high school where they prepare, where they
  teach?
• Brodsky I didnt think you could get this from
  school.
• Judge How then?
• Brodsky I think that it ... comes from God.

11
Life of a poet

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

12
Common themes

• Time- the changes that it brings both small and
  large
• Empires their decline and fall
• Piter (Leningrad) the canals, the decaying
  buildings, the statues left over from the Russian
  Empire
• Venice Piters alter ego
• The sad squalor of everyday life and love
• Poetry and language

13
Naum Blik Brodsky I Sit By The Window by
Joseph Brodsky

• I said fate plays a game without a score,and
  who needs fish if you've got caviar?The triumph
  of the Gothic will come to passand turn you
  on--no need for coke, or grass.I sit by the
  window. Outside, an aspen.When I loved, I loved
  deeply. It wasn't often.I said the forest's
  only part of the tree.Who needs the whole girl
  if you've got her knee?When the dust of the ages
  will make it tire,the Russian eye will rest on
  an Estonian spire.I sit by the window. The
  dishes are clean.I was happy here. But I won't
  be again.

14
I wrote The bulb looks at the flower in
fear,and love, as an act, lacks a verb the
zer-o Euclid thought the vanishing point of the
linewasn't math--it was the nothingness of
Time.I sit by the window. And while I sitmy
youth comes back. Sometimes I smile. Or spit.I
said that the leaf destroys the budthe seed
that falls in barren soils a dudthat on the
flat field, the grassy plainnature spills the
seeds of the plants in vain.I sit by the window.
Hands locked on my knee.My heavy shadow's my
only company.
15
My song had no tune, but because of this lack,at
least no chorus can sing it back.With talk like
this its no surprisethat no one's leg on my
shoulder lies.I sit in the dark by the
window-panewaves roar behind the drapes like a
train.A loyal subject of these second-rate
years,I proudly admit that my finest ideasare
second-rate, and may the future take themas
proof of my struggle against suffocation.I sit
in the dark. And its hard to figure outwhich is
worse the dark inside, or the darkness out. .
16
Death of a poet

• 1996 dies of heart attack in New York
• Buried on San Michaele Island in Venice.

17
Brodsky in Piter
18
from the Nobel lecture

• The poet is language's means for existence - or,
  as my beloved Auden said, he is the one by whom
  it lives. I who write these lines will cease to
  be so will you who read them. But the language
  in which they are written and in which you read
  them will remain not merely because language is
  more lasting than man, but because it is more
  capable of mutation.
• One who writes a poem, however, writes it not
  because he courts fame with posterity, although
  often he hopes that a poem will outlive him, at
  least briefly. One who writes a poem writes it
  because the language prompts, or simply dictates,
  the next line. Beginning a poem, the poet as a
  rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out,
  and at times he is very surprised by the way it
  turns out, since often it turns out better than
  he expected, often his thought carries further
  than he reckoned. And that is the moment when the
  future of language invades its present.

19
Leningrad (Piter) Mitki

• Mit'ki Leningrad group. Expression of the city,
  themes and images. Cultural continuities.
• Appears in mid-80s as group of painters who
  strike out towards primitivism - reflecting
  pre-Soviet avant-garde painting, the Russian
  icon, children's art. Anti-realism, abandon
  external perspective.
• Invade a variety of genres - literature, film,
  rock music.

20
Mitki Album cover
21
Aleksandr Florensky

• Several themes from the period of my heroic
  drunkenness

22
Eltsin, Russia, Mitki

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

23
Viktor TikhomirovPeter made the blackamoor get
married
24
The Piter Underground Shemiakin

• Painting and sculpture Mikhail Shemiakin (b.
  1943)
• Grew up in GDR (East Germany)
• Moved to Leningrad in 1957, entered Art School,
  expelled in 1961
• Forced treatment in psychiatric institution
• 1971 expelled from USSR

25
Shemiakin in exile

• Settled first in France, then US
• Friend of Vysotsky, Vasily Aksyonov (writer in
  exile)
• In 2007 moved back to France
• Frequent visitor to St Petersburg
• Shemiakins website

26
Peter in Piter

• Statue of Peter the Great, founder of St
  Petersburg, in Peter and Paul Fortress
• Ironic take on all-powerful Emperor

27
Monument to the victims of repression
28
Prominent Rock Musicians

• Boris Grebenshchikov (b. 1953 Leningrad)
• Leader of group Aquarium
• Official site of Aquarium

29
Aquarium Train on fire (1986)

• Words

30
Prominent Rock Musicians

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

31
Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000)

• Law professor
• Becomes mayor of Leningrad in 1990
• Joins Democratic groups
• Under his mandate name changed back to St
  Petersburg
• Associated with liberal economists Chubais,
  Kudrin, Gref, who later become Putins ministers