COLUMN ONE : Culture: A Russian Tragedy : Artists are reeling from Soviet-era devastation. They are confused by their new freedom and crippled by the withdrawal of state subsidies. But a new and unpredictable generation is slowly blooming.

The good news for culture fans on the Aeroflot flight here from Moscow is that the flight attendants hawk books rather than projecting cinematic tripe. The bad news is that the only books they offered recently were a British bodice-ripper and a tome of home-grown soft-core porn called “The Lascivious Priest.”

This in the country that gave the world Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov--and on the way to what Russia calls its “Cultural Capital.”

St. Petersburg still floats in a lofty atmosphere of art and literature, from the classical columns of the pastel palaces lining its canals to the quotes from Pushkin that the locals drop into their conversations.

Right now, creators and critics say, Russian culture, for all its past and potential greatness, is still reeling from Soviet-era devastation. Paradoxically, with the fall of the Soviet regime, it also finds itself confused by its new freedom and crippled by the withdrawal of state subsidies. Only slowly, haltingly, is it feeling its way forward to some possible, unpredictable new blooming.

“Russian culture is truly a great culture because it has made global achievements in art, literature and music, (in) painting, the Russian avant-garde . . . ,” said Dmitri Likhachev, an 87-year-old literary historian who is to culture here what Andrei D. Sakharov was to human rights, an irreproachable figure of moral authority.

“Russian culture can’t go from great to small,” said Likhachev, seated in his high-ceilinged office beneath portraits of Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev. “But real Russian culture can be crushed--if the libraries are destroyed and if there is general illiteracy.”

And that is just the direction that the country is heading in, many Russians worry aloud. Government budgets that supported whole stables of ideologically correct writers, artists and performers have shrunk to pitiful sums. Much of the country’s creative elite, even as it condemns the horrible damage that Soviet-era repression did by silencing, exiling, imprisoning and even killing nonconformists, is now wringing its hands at the ruthlessness of the raw market.

Instead of the outburst of creativity that many expected when the Soviet regime collapsed, many writers and artists find themselves floundering. Some who opposed the regime lack inspiration now that they have nothing to fight, and many who supported it long for the cultural force-feeding and comfortable life of the old days.

It has become common for Soviet-era literati to lament that Russian high culture is dying. Filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin’s complaint is typical.

“Russia reads nothing any longer. . . ,” he groused recently. “Right before our eyes, it is turning into a spiritless and intensely immoral country. Where can the people and the nation find their spiritual strength if not from culture, literature, theater and art? From where?”

Poet Andrei Dementyev complained in the daily Moscow Times that poetry readings once packed sports stadiums, theaters overflowed and literary journals sold millions of copies. But now, he wrote, “Our life is full of pornography, worries about the future . . . conversations about the fantastic prices and meager salaries.”

These ominous assessments, however, draw little sympathy from St. Petersburg’s leading cultural lights. They feel no trace of nostalgia for communism’s 70-year ideological stranglehold on culture.

As literary historian Alexander Panchenko put it: “Soviet power tried to make everyone go to the ballet, and it didn’t work. Now we’re seeing that it didn’t work.”

Soviet power did far worse than that.

In its early days, it not only muzzled many of the best Russian talents, it killed them in camps or prisons or Siberian exile--as in the cases of poet Osip Mandelstam and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Later, it drove many into foreign exile, among them writers Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky, cellist-conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny.

“The human or the social or the biological race that produced great writers was stamped out of existence in all the period of purges and atrocities,” said Nikita Tolstoy, a physicist and arts enthusiast whose father, Alexei Tolstoy, was a distant relative of the great Leo Tolstoy and one of Russia’s best-loved writers; Nikita’s daughter, Tatyana Tolstaya, is now becoming just as popular an author.

The Tolstoys are a happy exception. More typically, artists and musicians bemoan the loss of whole generations of the cream of Russian culture.

Yuri Temirkanov, head of St. Petersburg’s main orchestra, said that for the last 20 years he has watched his best musicians and instructors leave, whether for greater artistic freedom or simply for softer living.

“An orchestra is like a living organism,” he said. “It needs to be in touch with its progenitors. . . . Youth has to study with somebody.”

The visual arts, too, face a generation gap. Artist Sergei Kovalsky, director of an entire building of creative squatters--from performance artists to jazz groups--at 10 Pushkin St. in St. Petersburg, noted that there is no Russian museum of contemporary art. There is nowhere for young artists to see how Russian artists who spurned the government-imposed style of socialist realism--lots of tractors and happy proletarians--used to paint in the underground, he said.

“We wouldn’t know (pioneering Abstract artists Kasimir) Malevich or (Wassily) Kandinsky if they hadn’t left in time,” Kovalsky said. “This gap between the generations is the worst--it brings a lot of harm to culture.”

The Soviet regime left a more subtly damaging legacy as well. In its repressiveness, it made underground heroes of those willing to defy it. And that, ironically, is creating problems for the heroes themselves, who tend to feel lost without anything to fight.

Boris Grebenshikov, the revered leader of the veteran St. Petersburg rock group Aquarium, recalled that back when rock was persecuted, his late and legendary colleague, Viktor Tsoy, once commented about another musician: “He’s beating his head against the wall. What’s he going to do when he finds himself standing in a field?”

Now, Grebenshikov said, “They have to learn to live without an enemy, and that’s the hardest task.”

Several artists and writers, when asked to define the general mood these days of Russia’s creative cadres, used the word “ rasteryannost “--perplexity, confusion, with a tinge of losing one’s head.

In the old days, “when lyrics were banned, you had to write about the future, when everything would be possible,” said St. Petersburg poet Tatiana Voltskaya. “Now, there’s nothing to write, nothing to say. It’s very tragic. The underground has felt it, and even the official poets like (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko. Now they look like dinosaurs.”

In the theater world, top directors compensate for the current paucity of powerful new dramas by returning to the classics. The recent theater sensations this month were the premiere of a Rimsky-Korsakov opera “The Invisible City of Kitezh” in St. Petersburg’s Marinsky--formerly Kirov--Theater, and the innovative staging of Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull” in Moscow’s Taganka Theater.

But rehashing the classics does little to diminish a sense of disappointment that Russians sense from many Westerners who, impressed by the talent that has emigrated, have been waiting for great things from Russia since the Iron Curtain was lifted.

Avant-garde composer Sergei Kuryokhin says he has been confronted at European festivals by disappointed music hounds with a now-familiar tune: “The borders have been open for a few years now. Where’s the greatness? We want something fresh and bright and something new to the West. Where is it? Why isn’t it happening?”

Part of why it is not happening, critics and artists say, is the horrendous financial plight of most of Russian culture. The Russian government continues to pay subsidies, but the amounts are a mere fraction of what the Soviet system used to give those it favored. Nor, in a market economy, can the arts keep pace with inflation and its impact on consumers of culture.

Kovalsky used to have to worry about secret police raids and harassment; now, he said, “The hard part is different--it’s survival in the market, because there is no art market in Russia.”

Temirkanov said his orchestra, in order to pay its musicians decent salaries, must spend as much time as possible on tour abroad, generally playing endless quantities of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

“We play the same thing year to year, which is of course very bad for the orchestra,” he said.

At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Russia’s oldest music academy, administrators say they have barely enough money to pay the gas bill, and local newspapers have warned that the building is in such poor repair that it could come crashing down on the heads of practicing students.

The Russian Culture Fund, the leading foundation meant to foster hundreds of cultural programs across the country, used to enjoy the support of Raisa Gorbachev. Now it has less than $100,000 in its coffers, according to its head, movie director Nikita Mikhalkov. It is not helped by Russia’s confused tax code, which does little to encourage contributions to charity and the arts.

“The situation is absolutely monstrous,” Mikhalkov said in Moscow. “It’s monstrous because culture is seen as an appendage that will return by itself when the people are fed and clothed and shoed. . . . (But) culture is the mother of the people, and if we lose it and the people are left orphaned, we will not be forgiven.”

If freedom has condemned St. Petersburg’s Philharmonic to endless Tchaikovsky, it has brought a new kind of silence to “Leningrad,” the literary journal that dictator Josef Stalin banned in 1946 after Communist officials decided they did not approve of such 20th-Century literary greats as poet Anna Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Renamed “St. Petersburg,” the journal has put out one hefty edition that included an absorbing surreal short story, memoirs, poetry and essays. But that will probably be it, Editor in Chief Nikolai Kreshchuk said.

Government support for the journal is gone, and the patron company that helped to pay for the first edition has decided to invest in endeavors that could bring more return, he said.

The plight of “St. Petersburg” is typical of much of the publishing industry, which is hard-put to print serious literature in the face of high paper costs and the public hunger for formerly unobtainable romances, science fiction and thrillers.

Complaints about the death of Russian culture come most loudly from among the thousands of “official writers” who lost the soft life of hefty royalties, prestige, cheap vacations and special shops that membership in the Soviet Writers’ Union used to bring.

“There were all these pseudo-writer, pseudo-artists who all served the regime, and now they’re the ones who are crying that culture has died,” Moscow literary critic Benedict Sarnov said. In his view, it is Soviet--not Russian--culture that is dying, and good riddance.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, the Russian reader is getting acquainted with all the thinkers and authors long forbidden to them, from Freud to Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiayev.

“It looks ugly, but it’s a healthy process,” Sarnov said of the publishing crisis. “In culture, freedom is a higher value than finances.”

Similarly, Kreshchuk of “St. Petersburg” is philosophical rather than bitter. Real literature “shouldn’t count on the public. Writers are naturally like marathoners without an audience.”

The works of the 1960s that caused a sensation by daring to hint at problems in the Workers’ Paradise may have faded, but a new generation of Russian writers is rising, Kreshchuk believes, authors of about 30 who are so truly free that freedom is not an issue for them.

For years, he said, Soviet-Russian literature was carried away by themes centered on the hypocritical lives of the Communist elite or the Solzhenitsyn-style horrors of life in prison or in a military construction battalion. The new generation, he said, will be different.

“They might have maybe some religious problems and life experience in some little village and also have real high culture--and with that, a new literature is being formed,” he said. “That’s a normal mix, a rich mix, that was impossible before.”

Panchenko, the literary historian, sees a new emphasis on style as well.

The new Russian writing, he said, might look like this: “A young man meets a girl, he falls in love with her, she falls in love with him, they get married and have a lot of kids and die--but all just very well executed.”

The Russian music world already appears to be living up to their predictions in its own way.

The hottest club band in Russia these days appears to be Dva Samaliota--meaning Two Airplanes--an African-sounding group guaranteed to get audiences on their feet. It has gone to the opposite extreme from the underground poet-bards of the Soviet era--eschewing words altogether and singing in a gibberish that its vocalist used to claim was Swahili.

Grebenshikov, the revered rock artist whose spiritual, subtle lyrics are considered by many to be the best poetry around today, said of Dva Samaliota: “Unfortunately, they absolutely don’t have any substance. They’re some kind of a big joke.”

The joke, however, is full of released energy--a happy energy almost never found in Russia in the old days.

“I like this fresh stream,” said the group’s manager, Arkady Volk. “The ‘Planes send their energy into the hall and create a holiday.”

Kovalsky’s colony of squatter artists at 10 Pushkinskaya is also a testament to the energy of young Russian artists. Known as “the epicenter of the avant-garde,” its walls are covered with poetic graffiti and it serves as frequent host to ‘60s-style happenings, art shows and concerts. St. Petersburg authorities are trying to kick the squatters out, but they show impressive determination to remain.

And for all his worries about the fate of Russia’s libraries, museums and theaters, Dmitri Likhachev too says he lives in anticipation of the next wave of Russian creation--perhaps something to rival the literary boom of the late 19th Century or the Silver Age of poets and artists in the early 1900s.

It will come, he thinks, from the Russian provinces, and from some of the young people who, instead of turning to vandalism, spend their time putting together collections of poetry.

“I have great hope for when they grow up,” he said.

He has much to be proud of now, also, he said--from the solidly good writing of Fazil Iskander, a warmly humorous novelist who some think deserves the Nobel Prize, to Alfred Schnittke, considered Russia’s leading contemporary composer.

Most of all, Likhachev and others appear to pin their hopes on the mystery of the Russian character, which, no matter what changes it undergoes, appears simply to need culture and art more deeply than its Western counterpart.

In America, “Culture is what adds beauty to life,” composer Kuryokhin said. “But for us in Russia, it’s what gives life its point.”