The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Twenty-first century Russia has already worked huge changes on these city myths, which in time will register on the new literary canon of the post-communist era. In 2003, St. Petersburg celebrated its 300th birthday with a massive facelift of all architectural and sculptural monuments and an immersion in its canonical city texts. But partly for this reason, Petersburg, Pushkin’s celebrated “window to the West” and Russia’s City of the Revolution, feels more than ever like a museum, a nostalgic site. Revolution has become an old idea. What is new is where the money and markets now are, which is Moscow in its post-Village phase. This globalized “city of the future,” bristling with anti-Western rhetoric but oriented toward the capitalist corporation, scrubbed clean of its most painful historical events or packaging them as “tours” and theme parks, is planning an ambitious International Business Center, “Moskva-City,” of glass skyscrapers and gleaming pedestrian bridges to the west and southwest of the historic center.29 With the razing of the gargantuan Rossiya hotel, a monolith from the Soviet 1960s that overlooked St. Basil’s Cathedral, the

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Kremlin itself will be incorporated into a vast, slick new mall with majestic vistas, porticoes, and arcaded fac¸ades. The plans indicate no turrets or onion domes.30 It remains to be seen if any aspects of the older, more organic and black-soil traditions of the Moscow Myth can survive this onslaught of high technology and commercialization.

These single-city novels by Bely, Zamyatin, and Bulgakov, together with the loosely defined urban myths generated by each, provide a bridge to our next chapter, which will cover some of the same years (1920s–50s) from the perspective of a more politically approved ideology, socialist realism. In early Leninist terminology, the geographical opposition of “city” (proletariat) versus “countryside” (peasant) was often expressed in terms of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity.” Consciousness in this Marxist sense meant not individual creativity, inspiration, or (as it often did for Dostoevsky) the freedom of personal will and the responsibility of choice, but was applied more narrowly, to mean an awareness of the dialectical shape of history and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Opposedtothis party-mindedawarenesswas “spontaneity”:people reacting anarchically, instinctively, out of their immediate anger or blind need, peasants burning manor houses or peasant-soldier recruits deserting the Imperialist War of 1914–17, voting for peace with their feet. Both energies, Lenin knew, were essential for revolution. But which energy would control and exploit the other? Hundreds of early Bolshevik-era novels were constructed around this dichotomy. Many believed that a symbiotic relation between these two forces was possible, at the level of the individual body as well as the body politic.

Russian Futurists, Constructivists, Cosmists, Nietzschean god-builders, and other immensely creativerevolutionaryvisionaries desiredtoturn thebody into something healthy, expressive, coordinated, and free.31 The Bolshevik 1920s were an era of genuine lyricism about the possibility of the machine to liberate human labor and everyday life, not into inhuman regimentation or totalitarianism but into a kind of disciplined rhythmic dance. The enemy was not the Crystal Palace or OneState, which no one had ever seen, but the chaotic filthy sweatshop and the germ-laden tenement, which were everywhere.32 Ready to sweep the old factory and slum away were the ideals of efficiency, hygiene, and technological beauty.Inthe aesthetic sphere, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) trained his acting company in “biomechanics,” a course in athletics and bodily self-discipline that incorporated eurhythmics, labor-efficiency studies, stylized use of gesture, and even the reflexology of Pavlov’s laboratories toward the ideal of a standardized, externalized, and thus democratized expression of emotion. In the 1930s, this theatricalization of the body would be regimented into sports parades, mass physical culture extravaganzas, and military exercises.

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