Letter from K.

Pavel Verbianski

Talk about disaster. Walking the streets of this city, you are immersed in it. It never leaves you—or it does, for a hundred metres, only to confound you again when you turn a corner.

There are not many ways to reach Kaliningrad. Due to sanctions, there is no regular international flight. You must arrive by land from Poland or Lithuania, or fly in from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, or a handful of other Russian cities. Once here, take a taxi to Krasnaya Street—literally ‘Red’. The route will likely carry you along Leninsky Prospekt (Lenin Avenue) to Prospekt Mira (Peace Avenue), then turn onto Krasnaya Street—not long ago, Schrötterstraße of Königsberg. This is a street that has absorbed within it the history of the calamitous twentieth century, a street steeped in nearly the full measure of the city’s beauty and tragedy.

Take a walk.

You will see handsome middle-class apartment buildings, constructed in the Heimatstil and Jugendstil traditions, lining a rather narrow cobbled street with wide sidewalks and abundant greenery. If you have ever been to West Berlin, you will find the scene basically indistinguishable from its quieter streets (insomuch that my father, a born-and-bred Kaliningrader, feels at home there). On your left you will find the Gustav Grossman cafe and antiques shop where you can buy a ticket to the Altes Haus museum: a restored flat showcasing early 20th-century German life, complete with the decor of the period and a restored tiled stove, located in the same building.

It is a one-bedroom flat with high ceilings, originally intended for a lower-middle-class bachelor or perhaps a childless couple with only visiting help. There is an entrance hall, a spacious living room, a bedroom, a small kitchen with a cold pantry, and a bathroom. During the Soviet era, three families lived within these same walls. The spacious living room was partitioned into two bedrooms—one per family—such was the cramped reality of the kommunalka. 

Walk further up the street. Pause at the Khomliny café, a cosy, wood-panelled place centred on the lore of the Khomliny—a newly-invented tale of a family of kind, small humanoids, much like the Smurfs, but city-dwelling, scattered around local landmarks in the form of small brass figurines. The lore does not run deep, and it is hard to tell how it came about. Perhaps people need myths, but here German myths are problematic and Russian ones feel out of place. So, someone invented the Khomlins.

Now notice how the houses on your left grow more concrete, geometric, and functional, bearing elements of New Objectivity and Brick Expressionism. Built after the devastation of the First World War, their features are sterner, their windows smaller, their ceilings lower – their original inhabitants likely faced the economic ruin of the 1920s. These houses received their ornaments from Soviet architects during post-war restoration. The festoons on their oriel windows appear too plump and rounded, awkwardly executed in a kind of Stalinist Empire style. Such houses then often got a new ‘year of construction’ at the top, such as 1953, though they had clearly been built much earlier. No doubt it was ideologically wrong to display the original year.

Go a bit further on, and on your right you will see two buildings from the early Khrushchev era. They are utterly devoid of ornament, yet the flats inside retain high ceilings—around three metres. The structures are built from concrete panels, a material that would come to dominate residential construction from the 1960s onward. Opposite them stands an objectively ugly Brezhnev-era grey panel block, with some of its balconies now sheathed in white plastic for warmth. The flats inside are infamous for their low ceilings and small rooms, leaving one with the feeling of entering a den or a cave—an experience that is cramped, oppressive, and, as a friend of mine once poetically observed, leaves ‘no room for the soul’ This perhaps explains the modern-day local obsession with high ceilings and spacious rooms, usually found only in the older buildings.

That was the last building on the street before it crosses Karl Marx Street and stretches on for some distance as a mishmash of old German, Soviet, and new Russian construction. The most recent addition stands out for its disproportionate scale and the vast, multi-level parking lots that surround it—yet it is curiously marketed as ‘elite’ housing for the upper-middle class. Curiously, I cannot remember how that building looks now that I’m writing this. That, perhaps, is worse than the dark-grey apparitions of the Brezhnevki—at least those provoke a reaction. In our time, everything seems to drift toward the indescribable, the featureless, the almost invisible.

Except for lower Amalienau, which is still full of old German villas, most of the Amalienau and Hufen districts are like that. Old beautiful buildings and grey ugly ones often stare at each other across the road, immersing the passerby in a peculiar cognitive dissonance, making them crane their necks to look only at one side. Many historical buildings are now being properly restored with respect for detail and authentic materials, which only highlights the astonishing mismatch with the occasional grey Brezhnevka just across the street.

In this city, Beauty and Ugliness meet in their pure, unadulterated forms. The distinctions are so clear, the borders so well-drawn, that one cannot help but become an aesthete—a rather bitter one, perhaps. But then, as Joseph Brodsky said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, ‘Aesthetics is the mother of ethics’. We, the residents of Kaliningrad, may perhaps find our consolation in that.

Brodsky visited the city twice in the 1960s, leaving behind three poems inspired by his time here. In the poem titled ‘A Postcard from the Town of K.’, the city’s name is not spelled out. As Brodsky’s friend, the Lithuanian poet and scholar Tomas Venclova writes, ‘Königsberg, which was reduced to ruins, has become anonymous, has lost its landmarks; it has been reduced to a letter.’ Another poem, ‘Einem Alten Architekten in Rom’ (‘To an Old Architect in Rome’), depicts a ghostly traveller’s journey—echoing Karamzin’s Letters of a Russian Traveller—through the former Königsberg by carriage, moving among ruins and shadows.

In Brodsky’s poem, Königsberg’s architecture has suffered a fatal loss:

Acanthi, nimbi, doves (both male and female),
atlantes, cupids, lions, nymphs, all hide
their stumps behind their backs, plainly embarrassed 

Language is forgotten by all but those who will never speak it:

The trees are vaguely whispering in German.

A new history, complete with new military heroes, is forced upon the city, but any mention of war feels out of place in a place so wounded by it:

In the midst of vacant lots,
among vast ruined buildings powdered over
with broken stone, astonished, you behold
a modest bust of Field Marshal Suvorov. 

And yet, life continues in spite of everything:

Life rages from both sides of broken walls,
though lacking trait of stone or face of granite.
It looks ahead, since there’s no wall behind [literally ‘since it has no back’]
Although the bushes are alive with shadows. 

Brodsky wonders how we may overcome the ruins of a city, language, history, and the human soul:

But if you are no apparition, if
you are living flesh, then take a note from nature.
And having made a sketch of this terrain,
find for your soul a wholly different structure.
Throw out dull bricks, throw out cement and stone,
battered to dust—by what?—a winged propeller.
And lend the soul that open, airy look
remembered from your classroom’s model atom. 

Like nature, which ‘has no back’, we must not give up hope but look forward:

It’s possible in this atomic epoch,
when cliffs tremble like reeds, for us to save
both hearts and walls—if we will reinforce them
with that same power that now portends their death.
I trembled when I heard the words ‘My darling’. 

That power, which the Song of Solomon describes ‘as strong as death’, is love.

But let us continue our excursion. Let us visit Kneiphof, now called Kant’s Island. Once, there were 304 houses, 28 streets, three squares, two markets, and a tram line. It was a town of its own, with its own coat of arms, protected by water and walls. Now there is only a park and a lonely cathedral that miraculously survived the war and was, no less miraculously, restored from ruins in the 1990s.

The vast majority of houses on Kneiphof and in Königsberg’s other central districts were bombed and burnt during the RAF raids of August 1944. Bomber Command estimated that 20% of industry and 41% of housing were destroyed. Approximately 25,000 people, most of them women and children, perished. This tragedy is not as well-known as Dresden’s, but humanity experienced a loss there in no lesser measure. The subsequent Battle of Königsberg only compounded the devastation. Almost 80% of the city was lost, and its entire remaining population was later deported.

Perhaps these events are meant to make us think, to accept the weight and guilt of the tragedy as our own, regardless of nation or political faction. Ruins have something to say to each of us—and they are uniquely eloquent in their expressions. The force of Ruin, that echoing nothingness, compels not only pity and grief, but also a deeper listening and thought.

No one in Kaliningrad under the age of sixty knows who Kalinin was. Kant is far better known, if only as a brand or, indeed, a city mascot. But perhaps the name ‘Kaliningrad’ fits best, after all—a name that encapsulates the lunacy and tragedy of the twentieth century, serving as a stark admonition for the twenty-first.

The city sits in one of the world’s most sensitive geopolitical areas, and it is acutely conscious of the threat of war—the war that will end all wars by ending humanity itself. Set in the grey concrete of blown-up bridges and anonymous ruins, K. cries out in its silent voice. But will we hear it?

Pavel Verbianski is a writer and editor-in-chief of КИПЕНЬ // SPUME.