Prepared Surroundings 2025: All the Beautiful Stories
One day..
One day, your interest will turn to Shanghai in the 1930s. What kind of place was it? Who lived there? What atmosphere reigned? You will be beckoned by a warm anemoia - a nostalgia for a time and place you have never known, yet where you felt so at good. The Japanese call it akogare (憧れ). The Germans - Sehnsucht.
Secretly, hidden from friends and colleagues, you will uncover copies of antique newspaper clippings, testimonies of people long vanished. Before sleep, you will compare historical descriptions against modern satellite maps. You will become obsessed with the Shanghai of the 1930s. What was this place?
It was not merely a city, but a fracture in reality, the only floodgate on the world map that opened without visas or questions asked. Not simply an "Interzone" for the marginalized - Shanghai was "Tangier on steroids." You will see it as a neon labyrinth, soaked in rain and jazz, where the laws of physics yielded to the laws of luck. It was a Babylon stitched together from scraps: cross the street from the French Concession to the International Settlement, and you were invisible to the police; vanish into the Chinese City, and you were invisible to the world.
In your reveries, the shadows of the "passionaries" cast upon this shore by history will come alive. You will see Russian countesses dancing for food in smoke-filled cabarets, and Cossack generals serving as bouncers for opium kings. You will smell the heavy, sickly-sweet scent creeping from the dens of the "Green Gang," where fates were turned by Big-Eared Du, the godfather who held prayer beads in one hand and the entire criminal underworld of Asia in the other.
There, in alleyways slick with monsoon rain, British spies exchanged glances with German agents, while Jewish refugees shared shelter with colonial tycoons raising their Art Deco palaces right on the edge of the abyss. You will wander the floors of the "Great World" - a six-tiered temple of vice, where bets were placed on the first floor, hashish smoked on the third, and from the roof, ruined gamblers stepped out into the void.
Decades prior, marking Shanghai with a pitch-black pentagram, Aleister Crowley wrote: "The spirit of China is a spirit of infinite tolerance for vice." And through the opium fog, you will glimpse the scurrying shadows of alchemists, theosophists, mystics, and adventurers of every stripe.
But above all, you will feel the electricity of doom. It was a feast in the time of plague, the last ball of the "Paris of the East." Champagne flowed like a river to the sounds of swing, while on the outskirts, Japanese soldiers were already marching, and in the mornings, the streets were silently cleared of those who had not survived the night. It was a beautiful, dangerous, and absolutely free life, one second before the lights went out.
One day..
One day, digging through a heap of archival photographs, you will suddenly spot a familiar face. How unexpected - but who is it? Yes, it is him. Amidst the scoundrels and aristocrats, fugitive officers, magnates, and mystics - in the Shanghai of the 30s, his voice resounded. That voice sang songs, or rather, as he called them, "little songs." Thus you will discover unique photographs where Alexander Vertinsky was accidentally captured forever in that universal cradle of noir - mid-century Shanghai.
From the black abyss of cozy, gothic melancholy, his cold gaze stared at us from cardboard vinyl sleeves in our childhood. And now, that same face of a ghostly Pierrot without makeup stares from the corner of an overexposed antique photo. It was one of those lavish evenings hosted by the famous "Gatsby of Shanghai" - Victor Sassoon. And here is a photo where he and Vertinsky sit side by side in elegant suits.
But here is the most mysterious photo of all: in it, Vertinsky is dancing with a young girl whose face we cannot see. She has coquettishly turned away from the camera, remaining forever a mystery to us.
Just like in childhood, Vertinsky looks us straight in the eye, but now from there - from the center of the sweltering, teeming Shanghai of the 30s. He gently embraces the girl, holding her hand. Her skin is smooth and warm, her hair gleams, and a modest pearl necklace falls from her graceful neck. She is whispering something in his ear..
I am the Phoenix bird. I will sing sweet songs to you.
Quiet happiness… Quiet happiness… Quiet happiness...
Sources:
1) original article by Katya Knyazeva about the Russian Cabaret "Arcadia" in Shanghai
2) post by Katya Knyazeva with photos of the evening where Vertinsky was spotted