Where is happiness?

Happiness is in the center of Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square. Three of its ground floor windows overlook the square, and two Malaya Morskaya Street, but on this side it also shines on the adjoining house – before the Revolution, the seat of the famous Marks publishing house, and today the Rolls-Royce showroom in Saint Petersburg –, because its entrance opens from there.


People are weird. Just as God’s address is not widely known, so the seat of Happiness is famous for something completely different. The white marble plaque stands in quite absurd contrast to the happily shining golden name of the pub.

“In the former Hotel Angleterre, on 28 December 1925, the life of the poet Sergey Yesenin was tragically broken.”

Hotel Angleterre/Англетер, in whose room no. 5 Yesenin hanged himself – or, according to some unlikely conspiracy theories, was killed – did not always bear this name. Napoleon Bocquin, who built it around the middle of the 19th century, openend the hotel in his own name. In the first photo of the area, made in 1859 from the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, it still bears this name.


In the next photo, of 1908, the main entrance was moved to the façade in Isaac Square, and the place of today’s Happiness Bar is occupied on the corner by I. Grote’s bookshop and the signboard for the St. Isaac Pharmacy. And the hotel is already called Angleterre, taking that name in 1876, when Theresa Schmidt bought it. For a short while it was called Angliya, then Schmidt-Angliya, but it was soon replaced with the more elegant French version. After the revolution, it was renamed “Internatsional”, but in 1925 it was again renamed Angleterre, just in time for Yesenin to die and to immortalize the hotel under that name.






In the 1920s, in the NEP era, it was mainly a hotel for Western guests, along with the neighboring Astoria Hotel. In this period the renowned poet, children’s book author and translator Samuil Marshak wrote a poem mocking racist bourgeois money bags, which was the second reason to make the hotel widely known.

„Мистер Твистер, Бывший министр, Мистер Твистер, Миллионер, Владелец заводов, Газет, пароходов, Входит в гостиницу «Англетер»”, etc.

„Mister Twister former minister, Mister Twister, millionaire, who has plenty of factories, ships and newspapers, enters the hotel Angleterre.”

You can see the whole poem here as an animated film. However, in this post-WWII film, the hotel cannot be identified, for since 1948 it was called Leningradskaya, and it only returned to its original name in the early 1990s.


Renaming, however, was not the beginning of a new life, but the definitive ending for the old one. During the decades of socialism, the hotel decayed to such an extent that it only functioned as a low-cost worker hostel. The new investors found it impossible to save. Although there was a mass demonstration and a lifeline against its demise, it did not help. In 1991, the hotel was completely rebuilt with a façade imitating the old one, now part of the neighboring Astoria Hotel.

Building the new Angleterre, 1990s

The new Hotel Angleterre, with a sign on the left-hand side shop windows:
Скоро будет Счастье, “Happiness will soon be here”.

Room no. 5 does not exist any more, as no longer does the other room where Yesenin first met his femme fatale, Isadora Duncan, who stayed here in 1921.

Room no. 5. The photo was taken by photographer Presnyakov, just after Yesenin’s death, at the request of his widow Sofia Tolstaya. It is interesting that the curtain’s edges were retouched by the photographer’s hand, since without that, the window opening was similar to a contours of a person.

In the room, Yesenin left a short farewell, one of his most poignant and well-known poems:

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Милый мой, ты у меня в груди. Предназначенное расставанье Обещает встречу впереди. До свиданья, друг мой, без руки, без слова, Не грусти и не печаль бровей, — В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, goodbye, my dear, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part, and then be reunited again. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, no sadness, no furrowed brow – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

Below, I also include its Hungarian translation with the beautiful musical version by Kaláka Ensemble, which drew inspiration from Orthodox church funerals:


Yessenin: Ég veled, barátom – Kaláka. From the LP Fekete ember: Dalok Szergej Jeszenyin verseire (Black Man: songs on Sergei Yesenin’s poems)

Ég veled, barátom, Isten áldjon, elviszem szívemben képedet. Kiszabatott: el kell tőled válnom, egyszer még találkozom veled.

Isten áldjon, engedj némán elköszönnöm. Ne horgaszd a fejedet, hiszen nem új dolog meghalni a földön, és nem újabb, persze, élni sem.

Of course, like all great Russian poems, this one also has a well-known Russian musical version. However, its text is not quite the same as Yesenin’s original. The melody comes from Alexander Vertinsky, the great magician of pre-WWII Russian chanson, and he found it more suited to his genre if he paraphrased the original poem with a hint to Yesenin’s memory:



Alexander Vertinsky: Последнее письмо – The last letter. Sung by Zhanna Bichevskaya (1st version) and by Vertinsky himself (2nd version)

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Мне так трудно жить среди людей. Каждый шаг мой стерегут страданья. В этой жизни счастья нет нигде. До свиданья, догорели свечи… Как мне страшно уходить во тьму! Ждать всю жизнь и не дождаться встречи, И остаться ночью одному. До свиданья, без руки, без слова… Так и проще будет и нежней… В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, good bye, it’s hard for me to live among people. There’s no happiness in this life anywhere, every step just prolongs my suffering. Goodbye, the candles burned to the stump, how terrible to enter the darkness! to wait for a meeting for a lifetime and finally to stay alone in the night. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, it’s gentler this way and easier for me – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

“В этой жизни счастья нет нигде” – “There’s no happiness in this life anywhere”, says Yesenin in Vertinsky’s paraphrase. But reality disproves it. After all, where is Happiness? In Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square.

Women's Day Revolution

“The days of the revolution. Filling out police travel documents”

Everyone knows when the October Revolution was. In November. But when was the February Revolution, which preceded it? Naturally, in March. Namely on March 8, Women’s Day.

Demonstration of the female workers of the Putilov Plant in Petrograd (today St. Petersburg) on 8 March 1917 (according to the Julian calendar, 22 February). The banners read: “Feed the children of the defenders of the motherland!” “Increase payments to the soldiers’ families – defenders of freedom and world peace!”

Women’s Day was first held on 8 March exactly a century ago, in 1914. Although female workers all over America and Europe had celebrated it since 1908 on one of the first Sundays of March, increasingly linking it to the clamor for women’s voting rights, this fell on 8 March for the first time in 1914, on the eve of World War I. And for the second time in 1917, on the eve of the revolution.

On that Sunday nearly fifty thousand female workers of Petrograd – the places of the men who had been called up were largely occupied by women in most factories – took to the streets, demanding bread and the end of the war. The protests continued the next day, and on the third day all the Petrograd plant workers went on strike. The Duma vainly sought help from the Tsar on the front, but he did not perceive the danger, and furiously dissolved the Duma. The troops ordered to defend the capital were increasingly sympathetic to the protesters. On 13 March, recalling the practice of the revolution of 1905, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed. At the request of the Duma representatives, the Tsar resigned, and a provisional government was established. And ten day later, Germany, to further destabilize the situation in Russia, sent home from Swiss exile, with German passports and at German state expense, Lenin and his companions, who in the April theses proclaimed the continuation of the revolution until the final victory of communism.

“The days of the revolution. The sleigh-car of the former Tsar”

The following 54 photos, documenting the first, hectic days of the February Revolution, were only recently published on the internet. The originals are preserved in the Russian State Museum of Political History, and according to the meagre data available, they come from Ion Dicescu’s collection.

“23 March. The funeral of the victims of the revolution. An overall picture of the flags”

Ion Dicescu, Russian name Ivan Osipovich Dik (1893-1938), was born the son of a house-painter in Bucharest. At the age of 18 he joined the Social Democratic Party, and became a journalist for the party’s newspaper. In 1916, when Romania entered WWI, he fought in Transylvania. He was wounded during the retreat, and he was treated in one of the Romanian field hospitals established in allied Russia. At the beginning of 1917 he was taken to St. Petersburg, where he got in contact with the Bolshevik Party. In April he joined the party, and became a journalist for Pravda. From the October Revolution on he fought with the Red Guards. In 1924, together with other Romanian communists in exile, he made a formal proposal for establishing the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, which at that time was only a narrow strip – roughly today’s Transdnistrian Republic – in preparation for the re-annexation of Romanian Bessarabia. In 1938, he was executed on charges of spying.

The photos preserved in the so-called Dicescu collection were probably not taken by Dicescu himself. Their excellent compositions speak of first-rate press photographers, of which – as we will later write – there were more than one in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the century. The captions written on the pictures might suggest that they are editorial duplicates of press photos made or sold to Pravda. It would be worth checking to see if they were published in Pravda or in other dailies. It is certain that after the October Revolution some of them were published in postcard format. But about this we will write more in a subsequent post.

“The days of the revolution. Nevsky Prospect”

“23 March. The funeral of the victims of the revolution. Funeral procession on the Nevsky Prospect.” The banner reads: “You fell victim in the fatal combat”, the opening verse of the workers’ funeral march. On its various versions see our earlier post.

“The days of the revolution. Barricades on the Liteyny Prospect”

This is how the houses see

themselves in the mirror of the canals of St. Petersburg. This is how Vladimir Kolbasov sees them in his fable book on the city.

Krivoy pereulok

Karpovka

Night. Catherine church on Vassily Island

Kommunalki

The apartment doorbells packed without a plan on the door of the old bourgeois flat, all completely different, but slowly assimilated to each other by the layers of time, faithfully reflect the nature of the kommunalki mentioned in the previous post. The коммунальная квартира, the communal flat was a fruit of the revolution of 1917, called to life by the new collective vision of the future shorn of private property on the one hand, and by the pressure of the huge masses of population flowing from the countryside to the cities during the artificially induced urbanization on the other. Between the first and the last years of the Soviet Union the proportion of 20:80% between urban and rural population turned almost exactly to the reverse, but the mass construction of housing estates – the so-called khrushchevki, or even khrushchoby, “Khrushchev-slums” – started only in the 1960s. As a solution of the urgent housing problem, the former large bourgeois flats were divided into several – five to ten – one-room apartments, each for one family, while hallways, kitchen, bathroom and telephone were shared among all the residents.

Dmitry Annekov: I go and call him

Boris Vitkevich: Pusya cat in the communal kitchen

Communal kitchen

“Now the tenants of the large communal apartment in which Lokhankin resided had a reputation for being capricious and were notorious throughout the building for their frequent brawls. Apartment 3 had even been dubbed the “Crow Colony.” Prolonged cohabitation had hardened these people, and they knew no fear. Blocs of individual tenants maintained a balance of power, but occasionally the inhabitants of the Crow Colony would all gang up on some single lodger, and that lodger was in for a rough ride. The centripetal force of litigation would snatch him up, drag him into the lawyers’ offices, swirl him through the smoke-sodden corridors of the law and thrust him into the chambers of the Comradely and Peoples Courts. Long would the defiant lodger roam in search of the truth as he struggled to reach All-Union Elder Comrade Kalinin. And to his dying day he would sprinkle his speech with legalese he had picked up in various judicial offices, saying “punitive measures” rather than “punishment” and “perpetrate” instead of “commit.” He would refer to himself not as “Comrade Zhukov,” as he had been known since the day he was born, but “the aggrieved party.” Most often and with special relish, however, he would utter the expression “file a suit.” And his life, which wasn’t exactly flowing with milk and honey before, would really go sour.”

Ilf-Petrov: The little golden calf

Get acquainted! 1938

Come in! Take care not to knock against the table.

Don’t knock off anything on the corridor! (Savinsky pereulok, Flat No. 5, 1929)

Do not cause congestion in the common spaces!

“There’s no way we can walk through the hallway,” said Selizneva. “I can’t keep stepping over a man. And he sticks out his feet on purpose, and his arms too, and sometimes he turns on his back and stares. I come home from work tired, I need my rest. And he always has nails falling out of his pocket. You can’t walk in the hallway barefoot, if you don’t watch out you’ll puncture your foot.”

“Recently they wanted to pour kerosene on him and light it,” said the super.

“We poured kerosene on him,” said Korshunov, but he was interrupted by Kulygin who said, “We only poured kerosene on him to scare him; we weren’t intending to light it.”

“I would not permit a living person to be set on fire in my presence,” said Selizneva.

“But why is this citizen lying in the hallway,” exclaimed the cop.

“That’s a good one!” said Korshunov, but Kulygin interrupted him and said, “Because he doesn’t have any other space: this room here is mine, and that one is theirs, and this fellow lives there, and Myshin here, he lives in the hallway.”

Daniil Harms: Myshin’s victory

This is the kitchen. Just do not touch the other’s tables!

This one you can, this is ours. The lady next door has hung up the socks above the stove again. How many times we told her not to!

R. Bazhenov: Other’s pot. Krokodil, 1959

Besides an education to community life, the kommunalki also made easier spying on the neighbors, and not rarely also denouncing them.

“She openly listens at other people’s doors, or she stands there and listens to a telephone conversation and then with great relish relates what she heard to people in the kitchen. She’ll say something like, “And I heard her criticizing you through the door. I even stopped to listen.” She has this pose she takes. When she’s on her way back from the kitchen, she stops at her door, leans forward a little, and stands there for a couple of minutes without moving, just listening.”

Communal Living in Russia

To the toilet you go only if absolutely necessary. You can was your hands also here, although there is cold water only:

A. Kulyemi: Kommunalka in Moscow

Save water! (1950)

There, at the end of the hallway, that is our room

Please walk in!

“I had two childhood friends, whom I still meet from time to time. In the flat of one of them there lived seven families, in the other eight or nine ones, I guess. They lived at the two ends of the same street, and I often visited them. The microclimate of these human beehives was quite different. In one of them there lived very friendly bees. Aunt Lena always served us cakes, Uncle Victor repaired our bikes, and the little sister of my friend could be always thrown in for a couple of hours to Aunt Nadia in the next room. But the other was rather like a disturbed nest of hornets, with constant quarrels and swearing because of the cleaning order of the common areas, soap and hair in the soup and other charms plaguing common life. When coming to visit here, I always tried to sneak into my friend’s room as soon as possible, and to settle peeing, sorry for the intimate details, well ahead in time, even in the bushes near the house.”

From Dedushkin’s blog

Maria Tirskaya’s photos

One of the best introductions into the world of kommunalki is the virtual museum Communal Living in Russia, composed in English and Russian by Ilya Utekhin and his companions, with a rich documentation, video and audio material, virtual tours as well as an anthology from the literature and film of the period.


A good impression is offered also by Françoise Huguier’s documentary Kommunalka (2008). The director of the film lived in the late 1990s for months in a communal flat in Petersburg, making friendship with the inhabitants and regularly taking photos of them. Years later she returned to shoot a film, and she still found there the majority of the old residents. The beautifully designed site of the film invites you to see it; its introduction can be watched on YouTube; and the complete film is accessible here with a French introduction and Russian dialogues, but without subtitles.

“It’s better to live in a communal apartment, a large one, in this kind of, in a historic district, a historic Petersburg district, than in a housing complex. There’s some kind of disconnection, life is more boring. I don’t know, it seems to me that people there are completely different. Everybody is on their own. And here we’re like one big family. If someone is in trouble, it gets shared. Or a joy, you share that too. Today one person will be in a bad mood, and tomorrow it will be a different person. We somehow neutralize each other, and it works out very well.”

Communal Living in Russia