Dayly Telegraph
Sep. 2nd, 2003 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
favorovАдам Николсон зажигает:
Russia's greatest tragedy in the making
By Adam Nicolson
(Filed: 02/09/2003)
This morning in St Petersburg, it's the second day of term. On
Sunday evening, you could see families returning to the city in cars
and trams, their arms full with the orange and blood-red dahlias and
purple and pink gladioli they had culled from their allotments and
dacha gardens.
Yesterday morning it all became clear: from eight o'clock onwards, the
pavements of the city, the embankments alongside the canals, with
the sunshine glittering up on to the palace faНades beside them, were
filled with rivers of children walking to school for the first day of
term, all with an enormous bunch of these flowers in their hands.
The little girls held them up above their heads as banners, the boys
swung them round as maces. At the school doors, the teachers stood
like opera divas, receiving the tributes from their pupils, the
headmistresses drowning in the biggest bunches, gardenfuls of
flowers clustered to the bosom. It felt like the most exciting fiesta,
the beginning of school, the end of summer.
This is scarcely the picture of Russia which the West nurtures. All
we ever hear about is violence, corruption, decay and darkness, the
fragility or absence of a functioning civil society, the drift towards
authoritarianism, the replacement of a defunct Soviet system with a
kind of mafia-dominated anarchy, the Chechen problem, the terrorist
threat.
But that is scarcely what it feels like when you are here.
Perhaps, as
people have always said, St Petersburg is not Russia, but, in the way
of Manhattan or Venice, an invented stage-set floating on the edge of
rather more sober and severe continental realities.
Nevertheless, this city in its 300th anniversary year - it is a strange
fact that St Petersburg, for all its greatness and suffering, is so young,
more than 70 years younger than New York - seems full of a kind of
grace.
President Putin is a St Petersburg man and $500 million has been
spent on beautifying his city for the anniversary. There is an
assumption in England that Russian-ness is somehow a clumping,
coarse, heavyweight thing, a great Asiatic presence on the fringes of
Europe and by which Europe itself has always been threatened.
But here Russia has put on a glittering, surface-deep show: gilded
domes and spires on churches whose walls are falling apart;
pink-painted faНades on palaces whose innards are decayed; the
canalsides dressed up as stage sets for us all.
As the centrepiece, and to provide Putin with a northern residence,
the government - it is said with private money - has restored at the
cost of $200 million one of the many half-ruined palaces which
stretch in a great Tsarist suburb to the west of the city along the
shores of the Gulf of Finland.
The palace on which the Putin millions have descended is at Strelna.
But the effect here is different, more Dallas that St Petersburg: golf
course-style landscaping, acres of relentlessly bright gilding and
malachite slabs; a faНade painted in an entirely unRussian mixture of
coffee and cream; a weird subsidiary landscape of 20 toy-town
chateau-cottages, designed to house the national delegations to the G8
summit in May and now rentable, at some $3,000 a night, as part of a
five-star hotel which has also been added to the site.
A modern copy of an 18th-century statue of Peter the Great has been
put up in front of the palace but any resonance of the past, any sense
that the new Russia is a continuation of the world before 1917, is
completely absent. In a strange and disturbing way, the vision at
Strelna seems not Russian at all, but a mimicking of America, as
though the ex-superpower is now also supplicant and client of the
only superpower that exists.
A few minutes away from the new-old Putin-Czarist ranch at Strelna,
at Oranienbaum, are two extraordinary survivals from the real and
undistorted world of Czarist Russia. The Chinese Palace, built for
Catherine the Great in the 1760s as a party house, and miraculously
preserved from the ravages of the Nazi armies during the war,
remains the most perfect evocation of Russian gaiety.
It is a delicate rococo beauty. Pink and blue scagliola walls, paintings
of the Muses with rouged cheeks and diaphanous dresses, ivy
tendrils, in plaster and parquetry, or gilded-on pieces of Meissen
porcelain and French furniture, decorate every surface and floor.
Nothing is weighty or overstated; everything is light and balanced.
The whole palace is like a piece of music by Mozart, a Russia from
which the coarse has been banished.
And then, in the wood half a mile away, a curving walk between the
oaks and the elms, the most extraordinary building I have ever seen. It
is in a sad state of repair with the stucco falling off the brickwork in
big scabs and patches, but you can still see it for what it was: like a
slightly mad church in which white columns cluster around bright
blue walls, this was Catherine's Sliding Palace.
From the top floor, 80ft above the ground, a toboggan track, a series
of four or five gradually diminishing switchback curves a third of a
mile long, stretched out along an avenue into the forest, a riproaring
ride on ice in the winter and on wheeled buggies in summer for the
princes and princes of Enlightenment Russia.
Would any of us English ignoramuses have guessed at such an
instinct lurking in the Russian heart? For all the sense of rupture and
cruelty in Russia, of a hole three generations wide stretching across
the bulk of the 20th century; for the tragedy of the biggest country in
the world so damaged that it now has an economy no bigger than
Holland's; for all the knowledge of the brutalities of absolutism, that
the empress whose playthings these were had at least acquiesced in
the murder of her own husband and had then rewarded the man
responsible with the gift of a thousand serfs; for all the strangeness of
Russia, wouldn't the greatest tragedy of all be the drowning of this
unique spirit and sensibility under the kind of coarse-grained,
marble-and-gold-tap materialism which is the worst side of America's
gift to the world?
Ё
Russia's greatest tragedy in the making
By Adam Nicolson
(Filed: 02/09/2003)
This morning in St Petersburg, it's the second day of term. On
Sunday evening, you could see families returning to the city in cars
and trams, their arms full with the orange and blood-red dahlias and
purple and pink gladioli they had culled from their allotments and
dacha gardens.
Yesterday morning it all became clear: from eight o'clock onwards, the
pavements of the city, the embankments alongside the canals, with
the sunshine glittering up on to the palace faНades beside them, were
filled with rivers of children walking to school for the first day of
term, all with an enormous bunch of these flowers in their hands.
The little girls held them up above their heads as banners, the boys
swung them round as maces. At the school doors, the teachers stood
like opera divas, receiving the tributes from their pupils, the
headmistresses drowning in the biggest bunches, gardenfuls of
flowers clustered to the bosom. It felt like the most exciting fiesta,
the beginning of school, the end of summer.
This is scarcely the picture of Russia which the West nurtures. All
we ever hear about is violence, corruption, decay and darkness, the
fragility or absence of a functioning civil society, the drift towards
authoritarianism, the replacement of a defunct Soviet system with a
kind of mafia-dominated anarchy, the Chechen problem, the terrorist
threat.
But that is scarcely what it feels like when you are here.
Perhaps, as
people have always said, St Petersburg is not Russia, but, in the way
of Manhattan or Venice, an invented stage-set floating on the edge of
rather more sober and severe continental realities.
Nevertheless, this city in its 300th anniversary year - it is a strange
fact that St Petersburg, for all its greatness and suffering, is so young,
more than 70 years younger than New York - seems full of a kind of
grace.
President Putin is a St Petersburg man and $500 million has been
spent on beautifying his city for the anniversary. There is an
assumption in England that Russian-ness is somehow a clumping,
coarse, heavyweight thing, a great Asiatic presence on the fringes of
Europe and by which Europe itself has always been threatened.
But here Russia has put on a glittering, surface-deep show: gilded
domes and spires on churches whose walls are falling apart;
pink-painted faНades on palaces whose innards are decayed; the
canalsides dressed up as stage sets for us all.
As the centrepiece, and to provide Putin with a northern residence,
the government - it is said with private money - has restored at the
cost of $200 million one of the many half-ruined palaces which
stretch in a great Tsarist suburb to the west of the city along the
shores of the Gulf of Finland.
The palace on which the Putin millions have descended is at Strelna.
But the effect here is different, more Dallas that St Petersburg: golf
course-style landscaping, acres of relentlessly bright gilding and
malachite slabs; a faНade painted in an entirely unRussian mixture of
coffee and cream; a weird subsidiary landscape of 20 toy-town
chateau-cottages, designed to house the national delegations to the G8
summit in May and now rentable, at some $3,000 a night, as part of a
five-star hotel which has also been added to the site.
A modern copy of an 18th-century statue of Peter the Great has been
put up in front of the palace but any resonance of the past, any sense
that the new Russia is a continuation of the world before 1917, is
completely absent. In a strange and disturbing way, the vision at
Strelna seems not Russian at all, but a mimicking of America, as
though the ex-superpower is now also supplicant and client of the
only superpower that exists.
A few minutes away from the new-old Putin-Czarist ranch at Strelna,
at Oranienbaum, are two extraordinary survivals from the real and
undistorted world of Czarist Russia. The Chinese Palace, built for
Catherine the Great in the 1760s as a party house, and miraculously
preserved from the ravages of the Nazi armies during the war,
remains the most perfect evocation of Russian gaiety.
It is a delicate rococo beauty. Pink and blue scagliola walls, paintings
of the Muses with rouged cheeks and diaphanous dresses, ivy
tendrils, in plaster and parquetry, or gilded-on pieces of Meissen
porcelain and French furniture, decorate every surface and floor.
Nothing is weighty or overstated; everything is light and balanced.
The whole palace is like a piece of music by Mozart, a Russia from
which the coarse has been banished.
And then, in the wood half a mile away, a curving walk between the
oaks and the elms, the most extraordinary building I have ever seen. It
is in a sad state of repair with the stucco falling off the brickwork in
big scabs and patches, but you can still see it for what it was: like a
slightly mad church in which white columns cluster around bright
blue walls, this was Catherine's Sliding Palace.
From the top floor, 80ft above the ground, a toboggan track, a series
of four or five gradually diminishing switchback curves a third of a
mile long, stretched out along an avenue into the forest, a riproaring
ride on ice in the winter and on wheeled buggies in summer for the
princes and princes of Enlightenment Russia.
Would any of us English ignoramuses have guessed at such an
instinct lurking in the Russian heart? For all the sense of rupture and
cruelty in Russia, of a hole three generations wide stretching across
the bulk of the 20th century; for the tragedy of the biggest country in
the world so damaged that it now has an economy no bigger than
Holland's; for all the knowledge of the brutalities of absolutism, that
the empress whose playthings these were had at least acquiesced in
the murder of her own husband and had then rewarded the man
responsible with the gift of a thousand serfs; for all the strangeness of
Russia, wouldn't the greatest tragedy of all be the drowning of this
unique spirit and sensibility under the kind of coarse-grained,
marble-and-gold-tap materialism which is the worst side of America's
gift to the world?
Ё
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 05:10 pm (UTC)Наверно тут так журналист никогда не напишет, поскольку и не предпологает вовсе , что ему кто-то сейчас верит, или верил, что тюрьма.