Midsummer Leningrad Dreams

...Three months later, the atmosphere became more heated when bulldozers faced several dozen demonstrators, including women with pushcarts...

...While subsequent newspaper stories about the election made no mention of that, it was the first time they reported less than a 99.9 per cent vote for the official list...

...Meanwhile, they are seeking official approval to establish a Center of Modern Art Studies...

...At that time the word perestroïka (reconstruction) was just starting to acquire its figurative meaning of ideological restructuring, and the authorities decided to ignore the popular protest and go ahead with their literal perestroïka of the hotel...

...Such autocratic actions have outraged those who care about preserving the city's culture and historical places...

...One of them, Siberian-born Vassily I. Aksyonov, has already signed for the publication of two of his novels previously put out msamizdat—an extremely rare case of a living writer moving from underground to above ground publishing...

...you understand...

...The hotel had a special significance for Leningraders, because it was there that the poet Sergei A. Yesenin committed suicide in 1925...

...A newly-formed ecological group, Delta, following a strategy conference last May, staged a public meeting to discuss the issue that attracted 700 people (plus 200 who had to be turned away for lack of space in the hall...

...Smolenskoye Kladbishche is an old, picturesque, virtually unattended Russian Orthodox cemetery on Vasilevsky Island in Leningrad's northern district...

...Before very long, they say, censorship in the Soviet Union could be limited to sensitive moral and military matters, and the bottleneck in publishing would then be press capacity...

...Formed six years ago as an offspring of the Leningrad branch of the Soviet Writers' Union, Club-81 was provided a space in the decrepit basement of Number 5 Pavia Lavrova Street (entrance from the yard...

...They would further like to interest the Soviet Endowment for Culture (Fond Kultury) in launching a museum of modern art, and a series of seminars on contemporary currents in poetry—'la fonction poétique, panimayesh...

...But a casual Sunday stroll off that main avenue unexpectedly brings one into close contact with a different side of lif e in this city once known as St...

...Delta members responded that the dam would raise the watertable, threatening the foundations of the buildings on the banks of the Neva, and preventing impurities from being carried away with the Gulf's current...

...But initial investments have already been made, and some 7,000 people are in jobs related to the dam construction...

...Accordingly, they are toying with the idea of setting up a duly registered printing cooperative...

...Seventy years later, in Leningrad at least, some people are more than ready (o move into the kitchen...

...As he prepared a huge pot of tea for the volunteers, Pyotr V. Kajebnikov, the leader of Delta, told of the so far fruitless exchange of correspondence with the authorities on the subject...

...Some 50 young people (plus a few babushkas) were cleaning the grounds —trimming overgrown ivy, burning garbage, and renovating a little chapel...

...Nevertheless, this damp room is known among Leningrad's intelligentsia as the site of many legendary meetings...

...An almost identical profanation is portrayed in Tengiz Abuladze's film Repentance, currently playing in Leningrad—except that it is supposed to be denouncing mistakes and deviations belonging to the past...

...Petersburg...

...Pyotr Kajebnikov was nominated by the literary Club-81...

...At voting office Number 11 in the northern district, his friends were permitted to write in his name on the ballot and cross out the "strongly suggested" Communist Party candidate...

...At the cemetery, a petition was circulated asking that an expert study of the project be made by the Soviet Academy of Sciences before any further work is done...

...In addition, he is editor-in-chief of the samizdat translation periodical Predlog (Pretext), whose 10 issues have featured texts by such authors as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess, Julio Cortazar, and John Updike...

...The adjective "social" (obshchestviennaya) being rather imprecise, three groups of varying interests whose status ranges from permitted to unofficialbut-tacitly-accepted fielded candidates (more to test the authorities' good will than to actually elect someone...

...Two other founding members of Club-81, Boris V. Ostanin and Arkadi T. Dragamoshchenko, are also cautiously optimistic...

...The first sights one sees walking along Nevsky Prospekt might be typical news footage from the USSR: queues at the railway station, a crowd around an icecream vendor, a waiting line several blocks long at the Hermitage Museum, packed buses and, on a side street, a traffic snarl caused by the breakdown of a streetcar...

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Midsummer Leningrad Dreams BY ANNA HUSARSKA Leningrad Describing the White Nights of his native Leningrad in "A Guide to a Renamed City," Joseph Brodsky says: "On such nights it's hard to fall asleep because it's so light, and because any dream will be inferior to this reality...

...Vladimir Ilyich Lenin declared in 1917 that "Each cook has to learn how to govern the state...

...Soviet electoral law permits social organizations to propose their own candidates in local contests, but until this year none had ever dared to do so...

...Thus the Sunday volunteer workers, now loosely coordinated by an unofficial council for cultural ecology...

...In 1985, however, the Sovietsky Pisatyel publishing house issued a 312-page anthology, Circle, consisting of works by Club-81 members...

...Early this year, Sovietsky Pisatyel has offered individual contracts to two poets and two writers associated with Club-81...

...With more subjects being taken off the blacklist, he adds, carbon-copy publishing may yet become unnecessary...

...Pyotr's most recent distinction has been to stand as one of the three independent candidates in the local Council elections held June 21...

...Several of his verses have appeared in the United States, but he has been repeatedly refused a visa to travel to this country at the invitation of the University of California Poetry Center and the Detroit Institute of Art...

...The precedent was set by taking advantage of a legal loophole...

...He has to his credit Russian versions of works by Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, and Carson McCullers...

...Supporters of the project stressed that Leningrad is built on low-lying marshes and therefore subject to frequent flooding...

...Although the Angleterre battle was lost, for many it served as a kind of baptism of fire...

...Consequently, when the authorities announced that they were proceeding with another controversial project, the building of a dam on the Gulf of Finland, they faced much tougher opposition...

...They were fewer and less organized when the authorities decided to demolish the very old Angleterre Hotel and have a Finnish firm construct a concreteand-glass building in its stead...

...Dragamoshchenko, a samizdat poet, is a night guard at a city gas plant...

...Because of samizdat's limited circulation, Vassily says, he prefers to publish in state-owned houses, especially given that the censor's cuts in his story included in Circle were minor...

...Ostanin, a mathematician who earns his living as a heating system watchman, is a devoted translator...

...Pyotr is in fact fighting his own boss, since he is employed on a ship in the Gulf belonging to the company that is building the dam...

...Both men feel the official press is at the moment more interesting than samizdat...

...Perhaps more than Brodsky could imagine, the reality of Leningrad's nights (and days) in the summer of 1987 confirms the feeling he expresses in his 1979 essay...

...AnnaHusarska, aprevious NL contributor who has also written for Le Monde and the Spectator, is the translator of Essays by George Orwell into Polish...

...It was the third Sunday they were doing this volunteer work without any punishment, or any recognition either, from the local bureaucracy...

...In his spare time he writes short stories that circulate insamizdat(oneof them was included in the 1979 anthology Metropol), and he has helped to edit the first two issues of the underground periodical Mercury, devoted to ecology and protecting historic monuments...

...For despite its affiliation and officially assigned headquarters, the Club is composed of writers, poets and translators whose works until recently could be read only insamizdat...

...One can only hope they will realize their dreams...

...And it was there, of all places, that I got my first glimpse of the activities mushrooming nowadays in the ever-growing space between what is permitted and what is forbidden...

...A modest street protest against the planned demolition took place last December...

...The authorities have no regard for the burial place: They are constructing apartment houses that invade its space, discarding grave stones, and have even installed a machinery cleaning workshop in the cemetery's church...