Silver Age spirit

A century after its inception, the Stray Dog cafe pays tribute to the past.

By Yekaterina Kravtsova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: January 25, 2012 (Issue # 1692)

ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT The Stray Dog cafe continues the tradition of showcasing young artists, actors, poets and musicians.

This year, the city’s legendary Stray Dog cafe, which endeavors to maintain the spirit and history of the Silver Age within its walls, celebrates its centenary. While the cafe may have changed drastically during its 100-year history, St. Petersburg’s artistic intelligentsia continues to cherish traditions and memories from time spent at the cafe.

An inexplicable confluence of circumstances, fateful clashes and intertwining of lives — often bordering on the fantastical — characterize the short but fruitful cultural period at the beginning of the 20th century known as the Silver Age. The history of the Stray Dog cafe, which became a focal point for the figures and events of the Silver Age, resembles a dramatic legend.

Opened at the end of 1911 and beginning of 1912 by the entrepreneur Boris Pronin with the active participation of the prominent writer Alexei Tolstoy, the Stray Dog cafe became Russia’s first literary and artistic night-cellar. Tolstoy was one of the young artists looking for a cultural refuge in the center of St. Petersburg. Here the first legend was born: Having spent some time searching for such a place, Tolstoy is said to have exclaimed, “So why are we running around like stray dogs?”

The cafe’s location — in a cellar that was not the easiest place to enter on Mikhailovskaya Ploshchad (now Ploshchad Iskusstv) near the imperial Mikhailovsky Theater — was deemed ideal as it was hidden from those not looking for it.

“In spite of this legend, the name of the cafe is associated not with the search for a place, but with the image of a homeless and unsettled artist, who could find refuge in this cellar, warm up by the fireplace and find himself in a friendly group,” said Yevgeniya Aristova, the current director of the Stray Dog cafe.

“The main idea of the cafe was to establish a place where young creative people, maybe not always well known, could get together, talk to each other and become inspired to create something.”

As it turned out, the Stray Dog attracted those who would eventually become a major part of the history of the Silver Age, leaving a deep imprint on world culture.

The poet Anna Akhmatova depicted the Stray Dog era through a large part of her creative works. Futurist writer Vladimir Mayakovsky started his creative path at the Stray Dog, where he read his poetry in public for the first time. For him, time spent at the cafe became a period of searching for new rhythms and dynamics. For Akhmatova’s friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam, the Stray Dog was associated with the classical times of European culture. Composer Arthur Lourié worked on and presented new musical compositions here, while painters including Sergei Sudeikin, Nikolai Sapunov and Nikolai Kulbin searched for new ways to represent human beings. Akhmatova’s husband, the Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was a regular guest at the cafe, as were the writer Velimir Khlebnikov and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

“They were people who carried with them a new creative consciousness, new lifestyle, self-perception as people of a new age, overcoming 19th-century limitations and prohibitions,” said Nina Popova, director of the city’s Anna Akhmatova museum.

In its original form, the Stray Dog cafe existed for just three-and-a-half years — until 1915 — when World War I and the revolutionary atmosphere took Stray Dog regulars — mainly preoccupied by their creativity — by surprise. But war was not the only reason the cafe closed. “The Stray Dog began to turn into a dump, as we would say today, into a typical trashy place where affairs and love triangles began,” said Popova. Mayakovsky poured fuel on the flames with his controversial poem “You!” in which he accused the cafe’s regulars of sitting comfortably in a bar while others fought in the war.

“There was a large scandal after this,” said Aristova. “Many women passed out [after he read the poem at the cafe]. The next morning, all of the papers wrote about the incident, which attracted the attention of the police and eventually led to the closing of the cafe after alcohol was found there, despite a dry law being in place,” she added.

During both world wars, the Stray Dog cellar was used as a bomb shelter. In August 1941, Akhmatova sought refuge in the nearest bomb shelter during an air raid. When she raised her head and saw the ceiling of the bomb shelter, she realized that it was the ceiling painted all those years ago by Sudeikin.

“The Stray Dog existed in their lives, but like some kind of retaliation,” said Popova. “I don’t feel that the Stray Dog period was a period that gave them a lot, it’s more likely that it took something from them. But what it definitely gave them was the impetus to reflect on what the 20th century was for people of their generation.”

“In Akhmatova’s imagination, the image of a cellar appears, not a real cellar, but it became her own perception of space and reality that could be traced in all her poetry,” Popova said. “But she — like all its visitors — never forgot about the Stray Dog, and in 1940 she wrote the poem ‘Mayakovsky in 1913’ about Mayakovsky’s creative activity during the Stray Dog period and about how Mayakovsky never fully fit in with the cafe’s atmosphere.”

The idea of resurrecting the Stray Dog cafe was carried out by Vladimir Sklyarsky, who began the project at the end of the Perestroika era. After many years lying derelict, the once famous cafe had become nothing more than an ordinary basement. It took years to reconstruct the cafe with the help of photographs. After 12 years of repairs, the cafe finally reopened in 2001. Sklyarsky died just a year before the Stray Dog reached its 100th birthday.

“We restored the chandelier,” said Aristova. “The ceiling was covered in plaster — now just a piece of plaster remains, we keep it as a museum piece, but the historic brickwork is original, and remembers those who have been here through its energy,” she added.

Today, the Stray Dog for the most part represents a memorial to its Silver Age guests, but it still hosts literary evenings and exhibitions, and preserves a glorious tradition of the past — showcasing new talent. The Comic Trust theater, theater director Andrei Moguchy and local cabaret rock group Billy’s Band all took their first steps in the Stray Dog.

“Historically and stylistically it’s an absolutely different place,” said Popova. “But it’s important that the name ‘Stray Dog’ is being heard again.

“To come here, to touch these walls, it’s a wonderful feeling.”