Russian Sufferings
I was going to Venice with natural impatience, because for a long time and often I had mentally pictured how I would finally see St. Mark's Cathedral, the Doge's Palace, the resurrected Campanile tower, the Rialto Bridge, the treasures of the Academy, and partake of a worldly miracle, even if for a week forgetting the sticky everyday routine. I quoted Khodasevich to my wife:
And everything will disappear irretrievably,
Not in a purifying fire,
But simply - in light and pleasant
Venetian chatter.
But I went. And with prejudice - because certain fragments of Venetian history evoked persistent aversion. I could not forgive the sacking of Byzantium, which occurred after the cunning Doge Enrico Dandolo set Christian crusaders against their brothers in faith. I was indignant at how pragmatically (for PR purposes, to speak in modern language) Saint Mark was appointed patron of a city that did not exist at all during his lifetime. And I read with sadness how one of the first republics in Europe gradually degenerated into an oligarchy, where everyone informed on everyone else, feeling wild fear not of the formally first person in the country - the Doge - but of the trio of inquisitors. Associations, associations...
Probably no other city has had such a powerful influence on the thoughts and feelings of the Russian intelligentsia as Venice. Having analyzed 3,700 works about nature by 130 Russian poets, literary scholar Mikhail Epshtein concludes that it is the only city deserving mention in the subsection 'Countries and Continents' as a landscape image. Pushkin, who never visited Venice, in the first chapter of 'Eugene Onegin' confidently insists that the 'magic voice' of the Adriatic waves is not only familiar to him, but native. Alexander Sergeevich's unfinished fantasy about how 'the old Doge sails in a gondola with a young Dogaressa' still provokes competition for the best ending of the poem. And how to explain why Dostoevsky at 15 years old 'incessantly composed in his mind a novel from Venetian life'? Why did Bryusov confess: 'Here I am a stranger, but once my soul lived here. I understood this, recalling the black bodies of gondolas.' And is it accidental that on the nearby cemetery island of San Michele, the most famous dead are from Russia: Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Brodsky?
Perhaps the explanation is banal. 'There is no more magnificent absurdity than Venice,' writes Herzen in 'My Past and Thoughts'. 'To build a city where a city cannot be built is in itself madness; but to build in this way one of the most elegant, most grandiose cities - that is genius madness.' Genius madness - is that not the most reliable bait for Russians?
Even now Venice prompts our man to extraordinary deeds. In the number of tourists in the 'most serene' [republic], our compatriots seem to yield only to five or six nations, with the traditional Japanese at the top of the list, but unlike the latter they do not always behave mechanically collected and purposeful. For example, in the winter of 2004, the previously unsung 36-year-old Viktor Sobolev staged a real 'Bondiad' here. Having drunk heavily and, by his own admission, greatly missing the sea, he stole a water bus (vaporetto) standing at the pier of St. Mark's Square and dashed off wherever his eyes led. The perceptive police quickly realized that they obviously were dealing with a suicide bomber - a member of the notorious Al-Qaeda group, who wanted to ram the petrochemical complex in the port of Marghera, but for an hour and a half they unsuccessfully tried to catch Vitya, who scattered all the gondolas and boats in his path! Only an intricate maneuver with jumps at high speed from boat to boat allowed them to neutralize the domestic 'terrorist', who, having sobered up, repented.
The Passions of Moses
Fortunately, Vitya did not drown. But Venice itself is gradually sinking. Since the beginning of the 20th century it has 'sunk' by 23 cm. If in the 1950s tides raised the water by one meter 30 times a year (the so-called acqua alta - high water), now it is more than a hundred times. Flooding of St. Mark's Square begins with a sea level rise of just over 60 cm (this now happens 250 times a year!), and it is completely under water on average every fourth day. Previously such a thing in May was extremely rare, but on May 5 of this year it happened. By 11:30 p.m. the water had risen 104 cm, and my wife and I, serenely looking for a dry path to the hotel after visiting the city's best restaurant 'Osteria da Fiore' (you should book a table there about two weeks in advance), were thrown into horror by the deep sound of a siren that seemed to moan from somewhere at the very top of the Campanile. The next day acqua alta continued to rage, but the siren no longer sounded. The Adriatic rose 'only' 92 cm, and a young Venetian tradition says: less than a meter - we don't panic.
True, some gondoliers' nerves are giving way. Because of the rising water level in the canals, it is increasingly difficult for them to penetrate the semi-oval gaps under the Venetian bridges, and recently about 20 rowers, enraged, 'amputated' the sacred - the 'risso', the beautiful metal curve that crowns the stern. The head of the governing organization of gondoliers 'Ente Gondola', Franco Vianello Moro, choking with indignation, called on the activists of the restructuring 'not to vulgarize the symbol of Venice', but words alone cannot prevent the castration of boats.
The worst flood in the history of Venice occurred on November 4, 1966, when the waters rose almost two meters. Thousands of works of art stored in basements were irretrievably lost, and the total damage from the disaster exceeded $6 billion.
To save the city, in May 2003 implementation began of a project under the code name "Moses" with a comparable cost of $4-5 billion. This system - the favorite brainchild of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - consists of 78 steel gates connected to each other with a total length of more than a kilometer and a half. The area of each structure, covered with bright yellow anti-corrosion paint, is about 600 square meters, thickness - 4.5 m, and weight - 300 tons! Importantly, whenever the waters of the Adriatic rise, the gates, attached on hinges to a reinforced concrete foundation, will float up from the seabed on the very approaches to the lagoon, and not in St. Mark's Bay. City traders have joined forces with property owners and vote with both hands for "Moses," but this project, which promises the creation of thousands of jobs, still has plenty of opponents. The latter are convinced that the gates will destroy the lagoon's ecosystem. But on May 22, 2004, the court rejected the lawsuit of the World Wildlife Fund, "Italia Nostra" and other organizations that tried to put a stop to construction.
If everything goes according to plan, the steel gates of Moses will begin functioning as early as 2011. However, a number of experts warn that the continuing rise in water levels in the Adriatic will render this shield useless within the first hundred years of operation, and so there is no shortage of alternative ideas for saving Venice. For example, a group of scientists led by Professor Giuseppe Gambolati from the University of Padua proposes to protect the city using technologies applied in oil extraction. His plan involves injecting ordinary seawater into the sandy soil layer located at a depth of 600-800 m beneath the lagoon floor - between clay below and impermeable cap rock above - which would literally lift Venice. If you inject the water slowly over, say, ten years, you can achieve that by the end of the period the city "floats up" by about 30 centimeters, and all this will happen harmoniously, without cataclysms, Gambolati is convinced. But this idea has not yet inspired enthusiasm among local residents.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Like many other states of the Old World, Italy is sinking into a demographic crisis. According to UN data, by 2050 the population of this country will decrease from the current 57.5 million people to 45 million, and the average age will approach 50 years. But in Venice the problem is even more acute. Its number of inhabitants has decreased in recent decades by more than 100,000 people - to a striking 53 thousand. And if the dynamics do not change, then by 2030 the city will simply be empty. Or rather, only tourists will remain in it.
The number of tourists, by the way, is so great - 13-15 million people come here every year - that the narrow Venetian streets are not always able to accommodate all passersby. Trying to regulate the Brownian movement, the city authorities even came up with a "Tourist Code" consisting of ten points. The wishes there are quite specific. Point No. 1: get yourself a map. Point No. 2: do not forget that St. Mark's Square is not all of Venice. Among other recommendations of the compilers: when walking around the city, do it on the right, do not stop on bridges, etc. The excess of tourists is especially noticeable during the carnival period, when an additional one and a half million people arrive in Venice. For several years now, on these days the municipality has temporarily introduced one-way pedestrian traffic on some streets. And in February 2004 it even established fines for violating this regulation. The fines are substantial: went the wrong way - you immediately pay 25 euros. If you refuse to pay on the spot, they will recover all 500 through the court! For almost a year, another unusual fine has been in effect in Venice: sit on the steps near St. Mark's Cathedral - say goodbye to 50 euros.
Therefore I strongly recommend: if you want to rest, wait your turn and take one of the tables at Cafe Florian, the oldest coffee house in Europe, opened back in 1720. It was here that Goldoni, Byron, Rousseau, Goethe, Dickens, and Proust spent their hours, and Casanova hunted for the unseduced (at that time Florian was the only coffee house where women were allowed).
However, to assume that Venetians do not like foreigners is an oversimplification. The "Serenissima" very much likes to relieve tourists of large sums of money, and they do it with a sympathetic and benevolent expression on their faces. One of the marketing tricks of the 2004 season targeted at Americans I particularly liked. In a number of expensive hotels, citizens of the last "superpower" are offered to pay for rooms at a rate of one dollar to one euro. Psychologically, many fall for it, but then they are forced to grit their teeth and accept that the cost of breakfasts and other services not mentioned in the "unique offer" more than compensates for the damn favorable exchange rate of the US currency. "The game with currencies," it seems, has generally pleased Venetians. Professor Giancarlo Marini of the University of Rome notes that after the transition from lira to euro, prices in Venetian restaurants jumped sharply, sometimes - without any explanation - by as much as 100%!
Transgenic Life
"Traveling around Venice," wrote Denis Fonvizin to his relatives in May 1785, "you imagine a funeral, especially since these gondolas resemble coffins and Italians ride in them lying down." "Gondolas, silent coffins" stirred Blok's imagination. "How to escape this festive death?" Mandelstam asked. The 21st century gave an unexpected answer. There is something fateful in the fact that it was in "beautifully dying," as Gogol put it, Venice, in Venice of Mandelstam's "festive death," that the European Centre for Living Technology began its work several months ago. This center was established by the European Union as part of the implementation of an expensive project to study the "programmable evolution of an artificial cell" and in fact aims to create artificial life. Where else but in Venice would you dare to imagine yourself as God?
Scientists are convinced that the first "artificial unit of life" might be created within 5-10 years, and they consider the risk of that new life getting out of human control to be negligible. First, they say, if anything, bacteria will eat everything anyway. Second, it is assumed that the life of artificial cells will depend on chemical preparations that do not exist in the natural environment around us. But for some reason, one still feels uneasy.
In the purgatory city, where, as Brodsky noted, "a foot leaves no trace - like a canoe on still water," many things in general make one reflect on the future of humanity and on how it changes, confusing what is Caesar's and what is God's along the way.
When we were packing our suitcases, news arrived that at the port of Chioggia, adjacent to Venice, a group of activists from the local branch of Greenpeace, chaining themselves sometimes to an anchor, sometimes to cranes, was trying to prevent the unloading of a ship from Argentina carrying 40,000 tons of genetically modified soybeans. Every year Italy imports 4.2 million tons of these soybeans for livestock feed, 3 million of which are transgenic. Since 1998, the European Union has allowed neither the experimental nor commercial cultivation of any new genetically modified grains, nor the import of new types of such products. However, even before the approval of these strict and, in my view, quite reasonable rules, the companies creating mutants managed to obtain permission to sell 18 "improved" plants, including soybeans.
In a sense, the battle against genetically modified products has already been lost, although the consequences of this defeat may remain unknown for several decades. Globalization has made resisting transnational corporations futile, and its consequences have even affected one of Venice's main attractions - the Rialto fish market. The fact is that not all the fish at this celebration of the sea's bounty comes from coastal waters. Gourmet chefs are outraged by the sight of mummified tuna carcasses brought here in vacuum packs after being treated with sulfites, from Indonesia. But this fish is cheaper, and people buy it. Turbot farmed in Holland costs half as much here as the local variety of this most tender fish. Perhaps the most characteristic story is what happened to the local edible mollusks, called "caparossoli" by Venetians - an essential component of seafood pasta. At first they began to die out due to environmental pollution, and now they are being pushed out by vigorous Manila counterparts, deliberately introduced here several years ago. Not as tasty, the Manila ones are three times cheaper than caparossoli, and they also reproduce three times as often. Alas, only a true expert can tell them apart by sight.
But the efforts of environmentalists are nevertheless yielding some results. For instance, over the past ten years, the number of waterfowl in the Venetian lagoon, which has a total area of 500 square kilometers, has more than doubled. According to the latest census, almost 200,000 ducks, great cormorants, swans, herons, and gulls now feed here. This is seemingly a good result, especially considering that next to the lagoon, in the industrial mainland area of Marghera, there are still at least 17 burial sites of harmful industrial waste. True, skeptics maintain that the increase in bird populations is more a consequence of global warming than human effort, and fishermen, already concerned about the influx of cheap imported fish, curse the same cormorants and herons for devouring their favorite delicacies.
And how behavioral stereotypes change! The space between the columns of Saint Mark and his predecessor as patron saint of Venice, Saint Theodore, was long considered to bring bad luck - better not to cross it. On this spot in the "most serene" city, criminals were executed, sometimes buried alive head down. But the modern crowd, standing in long lines for the right to enter the cathedral or Doge's Palace, is indifferent to those ancient superstitions. People are concerned about something else. When the famous Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava recently presented Venetians with a design for an 80-meter bridge across the Grand Canal, he met with opposition because the author had not provided for how people in wheelchairs could cross the majestic structure of glass and steel. "I don't dispute that this bridge is a work of art," said Franco Buonpezzi, in particular, one of the activists of the movement against construction. "But its design does not take into account the interests of all those who are not supermen. Of course, no one thought about the disabled when the Rialto Bridge was built. But these days that trick won't work anymore." Dismayed Calatrava, the author of 40 exceptionally beautiful bridges in historic city centers around the world, took a long time-out...
Speaking of supermen. While sailing around Venice, I was surprised by the abundance of rainbow flags with the simple inscription "PEACE" on the windows of local residents. As the gondolier Mario, pictured in the photo, proudly explained, "most of us are against the war in Iraq." According to a poll conducted for the newspaper La Repubblica, about 60% of Italians are of this same opinion, but the government does not intend to be guided in its activities by this statistic. The three-thousand-strong Italian contingent in Iraq will remain there, as Berlusconi said, "until the very end." The end came on May 17 for 23-year-old Venetian Matteo Vanzan. He became the first Italian to die in Iraq in actual combat. The other 19, who passed away, were "simply" blown up in November of last year.
The Immodest Charm of Carnival
Know that Venice is not only one of the most luxurious cities in the world, but also the most erotic! If St. Petersburg, which many try to compare with Venice one way or another, has a definitively masculine principle, then Venice is definitively feminine. Indeed, local artists depicted her as a woman — Tintoretto, Veronese. "Everything about her is feminine, starting with the name itself," writes Turgenev in the novel "On the Eve." But this is not a girl seized by first love. My Venice, I conclude by the end of a week-long celebration, is a mature woman who knows what she wants and how little time remains. She possesses not faded, as Fet believed, but fading beauty. This departing beauty is shameless. Venice is alien to primness; she does not intend to waste time on platonic love and empty preludes; she is unrestrained and that is what attracts. Probably, only in Venice could Pietro Aretino, the first European publicist and pornographer who made a living exclusively by literary work, write his dialogues shocking with cheerful cynicism in the first half of the 16th century.
Moreover, in olden times, Venetian carnivals had nothing in common with masquerades. As the researcher Pecherskaya subtly noted, "if carnival delineates the boundaries of human freedom, then masquerade delineates the boundaries of the individual's lack of freedom." The Venetian carnival erased differences between the powerful and commoners, and carousing became increasingly unbridled, reaching the peak of permissiveness by the end of the 18th century, when sometimes they lasted up to six months. Only the evil genius of Venice, Napoleon, put an end to them, burying the republic in 1797. When the carnivals resumed in 1979, their tourist-oriented nature was obvious, but the lustful masks depicting a large number of mortal sins, and above all adultery, quickly found their place.
In Venice one clearly should not get married — it seems that marriage here is a priori doomed to failure by the atmosphere of an unfinished vicious carnival that rustled through the crooked streets for several centuries in a row and somewhere in a parallel space continues to this day. Nevertheless, people increasingly come here specifically to get married. Just last year the city earned about 200 thousand euros from these ceremonies. Most of all, Germans like to register in Venice (every fifth entry in the register of ringed foreigners), as do the British and Americans. As in all other cases, Venetians are happy to inflate prices. If concluding a civil marriage during working hours on a weekday costs EU citizens 310 euros, then on weekends it is twice as expensive. Well, if you are from the CIS or the USA, be prepared that you won't get away with less than 1,240 euros. Even three thousand euros for "special service" during "elite time" is quite possible.
Newlyweds are a gift for gondoliers devoid of romance. "Need a singer? For an additional fee." By the way, the number of gondolier licenses in Venice is strictly limited — 425. A father can pass the license to his son, and no one has the right to interfere. And the work, as it is easy to guess, is not dusty and is profitable. On average, after paying taxes, a gondolier pockets a decent amount monthly — now about three thousand euros, and as a result, dynasties flourish. For example, Mario said that his family has been professionally carrying all those who wish for 400 years. "Renewal of staff" occurs only if a gondolier has no male descendants or if those descendants do not want to take up the oar (such a thing is extremely rare). Only then is a full opportunity given to one of the 80 "wait-listed" people to reveal their talents, who all other times "row as backup," or rather, vegetate awaiting when one or another license holder either goes on vacation or falls ill. There are ten gondolier companies in Venice in total, each of which controls specific "points." And God forbid any poor fellow drops a tourist at a "foreign" pier!
However, lovers are unlikely to care about all these nuances. Apparently, they would be more pleased to learn something else: according to legend, the gondola is a crescent moon that, so as not to interfere with its light with the passionate embraces of couples, fell from the sky and turned black as soon as it touched the cold waters of the lagoon.
...The last sunrise before departure. The perfectly white church of Santa Maria della Salute, located on the opposite side of the Grand Canal, fills with morning colors and throws them in a beam into the open window of the hotel room. Lord, how I don't want to leave!
In the distance beyond the boat mooring,
Reality was born in the remnants of sleep.
Venice, like a Venetian woman,
Threw herself from the embankments into the water.
(Pasternak)
"See Venice and die" is a kind of cliché not worthy of this city. But to die without having seen Venice would undoubtedly be a mistake.
Dmitry VOSKOBOYNIKOV,
Europe magazine.