The Russian Garden Gazette

Cleveland’s Public Auditorium had opened only a few months earlier. The enormous hall, one of the largest in the country, was built to hold ten thousand people.

That evening about nine thousand are in it. On stage is Isadora Duncan. She is forty-five. Behind her lies a whole era: Europe, Russia, the fame of a woman who changed the idea of what dance could be. A few months earlier she married the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, eighteen years her junior. Now they are traveling across America.

Yesenin is in Cleveland. But then, who hasn’t been: Anna Pavlova, Diaghilev, Mayakovsky, Ilf and Petrov… Yet there is one more young poet in this hall. He is twenty-three. His name is Hart Crane.

To a Russian reader the name will most likely mean far less than Yesenin’s. For American literature it is another matter entirely. Within a few years Crane would write The Bridge — one of the boldest attempts in twentieth-century American poetry to create a modern epic of its own: of the city, the machine, the bridge, history, America.

But for now The Bridge does not exist. There is a young Cleveland poet, an unhappy family home and a Sunday evening. And two of his letters.

Crane writes the first on December 10, that very day. He is staying in a hotel for the time being, after yet another quarrel with his mother. He is oppressed by the absence of his familiar world — his books, his pictures, the Victrola and the records of Ravel, Debussy, Strauss and Wagner. He sits in an empty Sunday office. Someone has left sherry there. Crane writes that he has already had two glasses, will probably have two more — and will then go to see Isadora Duncan.

And amid all this — family quarrels, wine, music, loneliness — comes a sentence that suddenly explains a great deal:

So little beauty.

That evening he goes to look for it at Public Auditorium.

The program is Tchaikovsky. Crane would write afterward that Duncan gave the same program she had danced in Moscow. Of what he saw he would say: glorious beyond words. And almost at once: sad beyond words, too.

Why?

Because nine thousand people, by his account, barely responded to the dancer. After the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Duncan came to the front of the stage, her hands held out to the hall. Silence. Crane begins clapping furiously. He cannot bear the thought that from that whole enormous hall not a single human sound will answer her. He hears catcalls, too.

And Duncan goes on dancing.

For now we know how one young poet saw it. To him Duncan was like a wave of life, a flaming gale that swept over the heads of the vast audience and drew no answer.

That evening Cleveland held two poets of nearly the same generation, who would go on to write about the twentieth-century world in entirely different ways. Sergei Yesenin, twenty-seven. Hart Crane, twenty-three. One had come from Russia — a country of the village, of revolution, of song, of an old world passing away. The other grew up in industrial America and would soon make the Brooklyn Bridge one of the central images of his poetry: a vast structure of stone, steel, human labor and human dreaming.

Curiously, a few years later the same bridge would become the hero of a poem by yet another Russian poet — Vladimir Mayakovsky, the very one whose name we have just mentioned among Cleveland’s famous visitors.

One spoke almost no English. The other knew no Russian. As far as we know, they never met. And we have no need to invent a meeting. It is far more interesting to set their lives side by side.

Both were born in the provinces: Yesenin in the village of Konstantinovo, in Ryazan province; Crane in the small town of Garrettsville, Ohio. One was the son of a peasant, the other the son of a candy manufacturer. Both left for the big city very young, to become poets: Yesenin for Moscow, Crane for New York. Neither finished a university; both learned from poems and from the city itself. Both came to fame early — and early came to be at odds with themselves.

And both were given very little time. Three years after that Cleveland evening, in December 1925, Yesenin was dead. He was thirty. Two years after that, Isadora Duncan was killed. And in April 1932 Hart Crane, on his way back from Mexico, stepped over the rail of a steamship in the Gulf of Mexico. He was thirty-two.

Of the three people that evening brought together, none lived ten years beyond it.

There is one more riddle in that evening.

Nine thousand people.

Anyone who organizes cultural events today understands the scale of that number. Public Auditorium was filled nearly to capacity. Who brought them there?

We already know part of the answer. Duncan’s American tour was tied to the great impresario Sol Hurok. It is Hurok whom the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History names as the man who booked the tour that first brought Duncan to perform in Cleveland. But that is not enough.

How was the concert advertised? What did tickets cost? What did the posters promise? Did nine thousand people come to see the great Isadora Duncan — or the woman about whom America had been reading scandalous headlines for months? What did the Cleveland papers write the next morning? And why did a nearly full hall seem so cold to Hart Crane?

We do not know yet.

But we know something else. Two days after the concert the young poet still could not calm down. He sat down and wrote a letter. And thanks to that letter, more than a hundred years later, we find ourselves once again in the enormous new hall on Lakeside Avenue.

Tchaikovsky. Isadora Duncan. Nine thousand people. Sergei Yesenin. And somewhere among them, twenty-three-year-old Hart Crane, who alone, as it seems to him, is desperately clapping his hands. There is still too little beauty for him. And he cannot let it leave the stage in total silence.

On October 3, 270 guests gathered at La Villa to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens — a unique cultural landscape whose history began in 1916 with the Shakespeare Garden.

It was a warm and elegant evening, with performances by opera and ballet artists and a very personal speech by Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, a great friend of the Cultural Gardens.

But the real hero of the evening was perhaps the Gardens community itself — the people who over many years have built the gardens, led them, held festivals, preserved cultural heritage and turned separate nationality gardens into one large Cleveland family.

Special honors that evening went to Dan and Debbie Hanson. Debbie left us far too soon, but her contribution to the Cultural Gardens, and her memory, remain with us.

Among those honored was Paul Burik — a longtime leader of the Czech community, a former president of the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Federation and a man who has served the Cultural Gardens movement for decades. After our mention of Svět, the old Cleveland Czech newspaper, his name takes on a particular resonance in this issue: cultural memory really does live on across generations.

The Russian Cultural Garden was wonderfully represented at the Gala, and it meant a great deal to us to share the evening with friends and colleagues with whom we have worked side by side for many years.

And life in the Gardens goes on right now.

I was asked how I choose the films for the Cleveland Italian Film Festival each year.

In general, in anything I’m involved in, I’m a rule breaker, not a follower. I respect human nature and how humans are naturally wired.

I broke away from the standard film-festival format of showing one film after another, and chose one a week instead. I never enjoyed cramming — seeing a film every night, or two in one day — and felt that when the festival comes, it should be something to look forward to once a week. That has worked out well for filmgoers.

I also aim for the best films instead of picking a few good ones mixed with mediocre ones. It requires more effort, work and time to view many films in order to find three or four outstanding ones to put in the festival.

In the first few years I understood how important it is to listen to the audience. They wanted to be entertained; they did not like violence or depressing films. The audience was seeking an escape from the reality of life. There are other outlets for those seeking that type of entertainment.

Human nature is another element that many try to ignore. The great majority of mankind is wired basically the same: we are happy and satisfied when we experience inspiration, beauty or humor, because it makes us feel in harmony. These emotions fulfill the fundamental core of our being.

Science has shown, for example, that when we view things of a violent nature it changes our blood chemistry, and that our brain has a difficult time separating visual violence from actual danger. That is something I refuse to do, so there are award-winning films I never show. No matter how many awards or David di Donatello prizes — the Italian Oscars — a film wins, if it is full of violence, depression and ugliness for an hour and a half, I’ll ignore it.

I showcase Italy’s well-known comedians and comedies, and the Cleveland public has shown that this is what they really enjoy.

I also look for good dramas, and for historical films that uncover parts of history that are not widely known. The riveting film Vincere revealed Benito Mussolini’s little-known first romance, which produced a child and a marriage. The woman aided his rise in politics; as he became more powerful, he chose to keep her and their son secret, destroying the marriage records and banishing them to psychiatric asylums.

And why do we need to see everything and have every little thing spelled out? Great filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock knew the power of our imagination: they let us put the little clues together, with no need to see every distressing situation. Without intrigue and wonder, a film deprives us of one of the greatest assets we possess — our imagination.