The most famous wall newspaper “Culture” was born in the walls of the Leningrad Institute of Technology at the height of that time, which was named after Ehrenburg’s novel “The Thaw”. Surprisingly, at the prestigious technical university, future famous poets Evgeny Rein, Dmitry Bobyshev, Anatoly Naiman, artists Andrei Myagkov and Tamara Abrosimova, the future author of the rock opera Orpheus and Eurydice, Yuri Dimitrin, and even the future artistic director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Vitaly Fomin, studied engineering at the same time. Boris Zelikson, the then Komsomol leader of Technolozhka, suggested to them and other institute humanities scholars that they publish a wall newspaper that would contain answers to the most pressing questions of our time.
I was also a humanitarian, I wrote poetry from the age of 13, and after reading Martin Eden by Jack London in 5th grade, I firmly decided to become a writer. But my mother, an art critic, explained to me that the twentieth century is the age of technology, and humanitarian education is the path to poverty. She reminded me that Chekhov was a doctor, Pisarev was a mathematician, and Alexey Tolstoy graduated from the Institute of Technology, where it would be nice for me to enroll.
I listened to my mother, and when I was a first-year student at this institute and learned that a wall newspaper called Kultura was being prepared, I wrote an enthusiastic review for her on the novel I had just read by the South African writer Gerald Gordon, “May the Day Perish…”; the topic of apartheid then worried me almost as much as the hero of the novel.
A month later, the first issue of the newspaper was posted on the landing of the main staircase on a huge billboard, so it was impossible not to notice it. And she was even noticed: from morning to evening, students and teachers crowded around the newspaper; to my great joy, my opus was also present there, although, admittedly, few people were interested.
The newspaper opened with an editorial titled “By way of discussion,” which featured the following statements: “We need to figure out art ourselves,” “Don’t be afraid if your opinion goes against someone else’s authority,” “Go your own way, without a load of prejudice.” This was followed by texts about Dostoevsky, who, at Lenin’s instigation, was considered “arch-criminal” yesterday, and about the repressed Mikhail Koltsov, who seemed to have been forgotten forever. There was also a note by Eugene Rein about the painting of Paul Cezanne, who was then considered one of the pillars of hostile Western art. The Cinema section featured Anatoly Naiman’s review of the Belgian film “Seagulls Die in the Harbor” (“… The modernity in which this film was made once again showed how diverse the ways of developing world art are”).
At that time, admiration for modernity was perceived as sedition, but the most seditious article in the newspaper was Dmitry Bobyshev’s article about the young poet Vladimir Uflyand, where there was such a statement: “He (Uflyand) does not grab his reader by the scruff of the neck and does not drag him, tired after work, to fight and fight. He kindly invites the reader to enter his moods, giving him an initial impulse for reflection.”
The issues of the newspaper were discussed in the office of the Komsomol committee, where a real literary club arose, in which they talked about new literature, and most importantly, they read poetry – their own and others’. I remember how Tolya Naiman read his own, in the words of Dima Bobyshev, “pretentiously repulsive, but funny” called “Brats”: “A man was born with a freak, / only a human mouth, / the rest is not that shapeless, / just somehow absurdly shaped. / And the wife is to blame for everything, / because she has to give birth.” In the end, this freak found some kind of freak, and they had a girl: “Nothing, she looks pretty. / It always happens with brats. / And moral honest people / don’t have children at all.” Bobyshev later wrote that “experts noted the political analogies of the “Brats” with the party and the Komsomol, and the biblical and mythological ones with Adam and Eve.”
Evgeny Rein was considered the main poet of the Technolog. He read very nasally, for which, at one of the poet’s tournaments, he was awarded an epigram combined with a burime (with the prescribed rhymes “nega – cart” and “nose – pump”): “The Rhine read with a lot of nega, but a little in the nose. He’s as talented as a cart, but he worked like a pump.”
Soon, the editorial office of the wall newspaper Kultura started having trouble. An article by an offended reader appeared in the institute’s Technologist newspaper, according to which “the newspaper in separate articles directly slanders our reality with the incomprehensible liberalism of the institute’s party committee, which has not yet taken action.” There was a modest caption under the article.: “J. Lerner, member of the CPSU.”
This was the same Lerner who, a few years later, would become famous for an article about Brodsky’s “Near-literary Drone” in the newspaper Evening Leningrad, ending with a philippic: “Someone like Brodsky has no place in Leningrad.” And with this article, he immortalized his name as an antihero.
The accusations of a serious sin – liberalism – had to be reacted to, and numerous discussions took place in the party committee. Which eventually led to tragedy: an associate professor of the Department of Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, who was accused of condoning the ideologically erroneous activities of the editorial board of the wall newspaper, shot himself with a personalized pistol…
And soon an outraged letter appeared “About the mistakes of the newspaper Kultura,” which asked questions like “What kind of culture can a student talk about who has never passed exams without twos in any session and is reprimanded for using a cheat sheet?”. But the main rebuke in the letter was addressed to Komsomol member Zelikson, who “tried to set his ‘special opinion’ against the opinion of the party committee.”
Angry articles about the Kultura wall newspaper also appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Leningradskaya Pravda. In contrast, one of the foreign radio stations reported on her sad fate, after which the newspaper was removed, and Komsomol meetings swept through the institute, at which senior comrades stigmatized the editorial board and especially Zelikson. He had to leave his high Komsomol post.
He considered himself an indomitable Leninist, but over time he began to read Samizdat literature. One day, they brought him a book “From the dictatorship of the bureaucracy to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in which the authors explained why everything is not as bequeathed by the great Lenin. He liked the book so much that he began to show it to his numerous acquaintances, some of them knocked it right. And the former Komsomol leader ended up in the KGB: then the court and the Mordovian camps, after which he left public activity forever.
I learned about Zelikson’s untimely death from a newspaper obituary, where, among other things, it was said that by the end of his life he had more than 200 inventions and scientific papers.
Of the other members of the editorial board of Kultury, Evgeny Rein suffered the most – he had to complete his technical education at another, less prestigious university.
Later, Rein, Naiman and Bobyshev met Brodsky, and together they entered the history of Russian literature as the “Akhmatova orphans.” This expression was first heard in Dmitry Bobyshev’s poem “All four”: “And on the cemetery cross of the nail, / the soul sawed: in a series of losses / Osya, Tolya, Zhenya, Dima / enter Akhmatova orphans in a row.” And although by the time this verse was written, each of them had already gone their own way, that’s how these four are still called “Akhmatova orphans.” Two of the “orphans” – Brodsky and Naiman – are no longer with us.…
These young poets were Anna Akhmatova’s inner circle in the last years of her life: they took care of her, dedicated their poems to her and saw her off on her last journey. There is a photograph at her coffin, where Brodsky’s face is imprinted with horror, from which he seems to be trying to shield himself with his hand. His words about Akhmatova, spoken on behalf of all four: “On all of us, like a kind of spiritual tan, lies the reflection of this heart, this mind, this moral strength and this extraordinary generosity that emanated from her.”
