.
((RETURN TO BLKNZM ST. PETERSBURG FRONT PAGE))
.
Lina Cavalieri went to Russia.
At the end of June 1897, Lina Cavalieri went to Russia to perform in music halls. In her memoirs she wrote:
.
Dawn, in Russia. Through the small rectangle of the window, three-fourths of it covered by the lowered curtain, nature appears to me in one of its most sublime guises. The train irresistibly transports me towards a new world and the first daylight seems to give concrete substance, in superb reality, to the new dawning of my existence.
.
White, white, white. Every so often, a bare, frozen tree, against the pale, still expanse, a lone skeleton on the infinite bed of death!
.
Against the opaline, hazy backdrop, the pearl gray seeks out rosy shades in the first feeble ray of sunlight that does not show itself, but can be sensed, beyond the sky, beyond the void in the impalpable atmosphere.
.
All around: desolation, static, kilometer after kilometer, infinite, silence! The locomotive whistles hoarsely, it’s caught a chill, shrill notes to greet the light.
.
Snow, snow, snow. Not a trace, no footprints. The telegraph poles planted at geometric intervals haughtily defy the frost, and reached, passed, lost along the long route, they fade into the night just left behind, slicing the panorama into short, separate episodes.
This is the first dawn, my sunrise in the “Holy Russia of the Czars.” Short stops along the rapid plunge towards Destiny, the stations of my flight across the snow offer glimpses, with almost cinematic speed, of a few figures of living beings.
They are strange men, wrapped in fur. Big boots leave deep footprints in the snow. Their warm breath wraps them in short-lived vaporous haloes, puffed like whiffs of smoke from their wide mouths with swollen lips.
They are the little subjects of the “Little Father,” the tiny inhabitants of the most vast Empire in the world, the scattered sentinels along the endless road of iron leading to the city of the Czar.
They wait, always, desiring nothing, for the passage of the trains that vanish into the distance, towards lands to them unknown, towards centers of fabulous wealth and pleasure. And I reach Petersburg.
It would take entire volumes to describe, in precise detail and with stenographic summaries of impressions, the Russia of those days. And, above all, it would require the pen of Tolstoy, as well as the space, to exactly convey the sensation.
.
On Sunday, June 6, 1897, a newspaper of Saint Petersburg wrote that a woman would soon be arriving at the Krestovsky Theater, a woman not particularly famous as a singer, but of extraordinary beauty, known in Paris for her grace, and already the talk of the town in theaters around the city. Two days later the Russian press, with reference to the performance at the Krestovsky, mentioned her name for the first time, as follows: “In June there will be new debuts: the renowned beauty Gignory, the acclaimed première étoile of Paris Paola Brebion, and the famous Italian beauty, Lina Cavalieri.”
Credits:
text and images by Barnaba Fornasetti and Valeria Manzi
image processing by Marc V. Kalinka
voice Valeria Manzi
sound mix Gak Sato