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MAGUIRE
The city
Russia is unique among European states for having had two capitals during
much of its modern life: St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first was founded
in 1703 by Peter the Great, and became the administrative, political, and
cultural capital. In these respects, it displaced Moscow, whose history went
back at least four hundred years. But Russians continued to regard the
older city as the spiritual center of the country; even the tsars, who presided
in Petersburg, went to Moscow to be crowned; and the Bolsheviks
reconfirmed its traditional importance by moving the government back
there in 1924. Each city has come to represent very different and often
conflicting values, as we shall see, and each has functioned as a pole around
which the vexed question of Russia's character and destiny has revolved.
Since the early nineteenth century, St. Petersburg and Moscow have
figured prominently in the Russian novel. But many of the issues that
attach to them are far older. In Kievan Rus, the first East Slavic state, cities
were not only centers of culture, but enclosures against domestic and
foreign enemies. It is instructive, and perhaps psychologically significant,
that in Slavic languages, the word for "city," as in Russian gorod and
Church Slavonic grad, has no etymological connection with the Latin civis
and its derivations in English and the Romance languages, but instead goes
back to the Indo-European root designating an enclosed place. Counter-
parts are found in such words as English "garden," Latin hortus, and Irish
gort ("cultivated field"). Russians were hardly unique in feeling that the
world at large was hostile and must be shut out. What is unusual is the
persistence of this feeling throughout the nation's history. The sources of
potential danger were early identified in ways which have also persisted.
Under the year 862 (AD) in the Primary Chronicle (twelfth century), we
read that the Eastern Slavs, unable to govern themselves, turned west to the
Varangians, or Vikings, with the following request: "Our land is great and
bounteous, but there is no order in it. Come to reign and rule over us."'
The result was Kievan Rus. A century later, according to the same source,
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tional literary movement that reached Russia late in the 1700s. Nature
came to be identified as the locus of vitality and authenticity; the city, of
artificiality, insincerity, and deception. Nikolai Karamzin's short story
"Poor Liza" (1792) has been exemplary for generations. And it was
Karamzin, in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia ( I810-1 I ) , who
was one of the first to deconstruct the eighteenth-century view of St.
Petersburg in these terms. He chided Peter for setting the city "amidst
rippling swamps, in places condemned by nature to be unpopulated and
barren. . . . H o w many people perished, how many millions and how
much labor were expended to realize this objective? One might say that
Petersburg is founded on tears and corpses . . ." The lesson for this
Sentimentalist was that "man shall not overcome nature!" Less familiar in
this context, but destined for an equally long life, was the exemplum of a
genuinely Russian city, which he set forth many pages earlier and obviously
expected his reader (primarily Tsar Alexander I) to prefer to Petersburg: "A
small town that was barely known before the fourteenth century. . . raised
its head and saved the fatherland (by defeating the Mongols). Honor and
glory to Moscow! . . . The Moscow princes accomplished this great work
not by personal heroism . . . but solely by virtue of a wise political system
that was consonant with the circumstances of the time."2
When Pushkin employed these same contrasts, he could count on
practiced responses in his readers. Evgenii Onegin, a "novel in verse"
(1823-31), opens in St. Petersburg. There are just enough mentions of
landmarks, climate, and real-life personalities to make it instantly recogniz-
able to any Russian: the Summer Garden, the Nevskii Prospect, the white
nights, Talon's French restaurant, a cluster of turn-of-the-century play-
wrights. It is largely an upper-class and therefore Europeanized city that
Onegin and the narrator frequent, with its tireless round of parties, balls,
and evenings at the theater. Like the city itself, Onegin is a composite of
foreign fashions, ideas, and styles. Now and then Pushkin introduces the
lower orders - coachmen, merchants, peddlers, bakers, cabbies - mainly by
way of ironic contrast with the idle aristocracy. Presently, however, a more
familiar contrast is introduced, as Onegin, bored with Petersburg, goes off
to his country estate: "For two days," we are told, "he found novelty" in a
landscape imported in effect from the eighteenth-century idyll, "lonely
fields,/ The coolness of a densely shaded grove,/ The babble of a quiet
brook" (I, 54). But soon he is no more satisfied there than any of his
numerous literary progeny would be, and, in his relationship with the
neighboring Larin family, he turns destructive, breaking Tatiana's heart and
killing Lenskii, her sister's fianck, in a duel.
Outlined this way, the plot draws on conventions that would evoke an
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The city
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ROBERT A. MAGUIRE
of St. Petersburg has shaped much of Russian urban literature. The main
character, Akakii Akakevich, is a "little man" in the mold of Pushkin's
Evgenii, but undergoes considerable development. As a copy-clerk, he at
first simply accepts what he has been handed, and performs his mindless
routines contentedly. Once he leaves his office, however, he is at the mercy
of the city, which is bleak and hostile. Still, there are hints that he is capable
of a kind of creativity that makes the city unchallenging, even congenial.
"But if Akakii Akakevich did look at anything [Gtside his office], on it he
saw his neat, evenly copied lines." The comment has greater point when we
remember that much of Petersburg is laid out rectilinearly, and that across
the river, on Vasilevskii Island, the streets are called "lines." Akakii's gift, if
not necessarily a parody of the "great thoughts" that enabled Peter to make
of the real world anything he wanted, establishes him as a character who
presumes that he can deal with his surroundings, even change them for the
better. But this apparently harmless fantasy proves to be the kernel of larger
ambitions, which end by destroying him. Their instrument is the new
overcoat, which comes to represent for Akakii something more than a
protection against the icy winter wind: full acceptance by his fellow-clerks,
perhaps an opportunity for sexual fulfilment, in short, qualities that most
human beings take as their due. In Gogol's world, however, aspirations to
social and psychological mobility always involve enormous risks; hubris, or
overstepping, is as unwise there as in ancient Greece. Punishment soon
follows. The coat is stolen off Akakii's back as he walks through late-night
streets and enters "an endless square, its houses barely visible on the far
side, looking like a fearful desert." In spiritual literature, the desert is often
a place of illumination and self-discovery. In Gogol's story, Akakii discovers
a self that is stripped of illusion; but the sudden illumination (ironically,
nocturnal, as in "Nevskii Prospect") of his true state is too overwhelming
for him to survive. Just as Petersburg itself (following Pushkin) no longer
functions as an enclosure against hostile nature, so the overcoat can no
longer conceal Akakii's ordained position in life, which, Gogol seems to
say, is that of mere copy-clerk.5
Gogol's Petersburg is phenomenologically unreal. Perhaps that is why
there are so few topographical markers in his urban landscapes, and few
references to such traditional motifs as enclosure. Ultimately, he regards
this city as deeply un-Russian, even as non-place. We might expect him to
hew to convention and advance Moscow as a vital native alternative. He
does so only once, in an article of 1837, where, in a detailed comparison of
the two cities, Moscow comes off as unmistakably Russian in its open-
hearted, slovenly, "feminine" ways. But even here, Gogol has reservations.
Perhaps borrowing from Evgenii Onegin, he philistinizes "femininity" to
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The city
mean a profusion of marriageable girls and a craze for fashions. And even
while deeming Moscow's intellectual life more vigorous than Petersburg's,
he reminds us that it too is largely imported from a b r ~ a d For . ~ truly
Russian settings, Gogol turns to small provincial towns, but he finds them
even less vital. When he did eventually focus, in Dead Souls, on the
question of the national identity, his reference point was not Petersburg or
Moscow, but all of Russia - and a phantasmal Russia of the future at that.
By this time, it was clear that many different kinds of verbal discourse -
histories, guidebooks, newspapers, even popular anecdotes - had begun to
contribute to the developing myth of St. Petersburg. But belles-lettres were
by far the most important, not only because they now occupied a central
position in the national culture, but because they tended, especially in the
form of the novel, to exploit and absorb other genres. The work of Fedor
Dostoevskii is crucial in these respects. He was born in Moscow, but
received his higher education in St. Petersburg, spent most of his life there,
and made it the setting of many of his works. Moscow does not really
figure in his fiction; other cities and towns are either provincial or foreign;
his urban geography therefore resembles Gogol's. Several Petersburgs are
evident in his early writings: fantastic and menacing, as in The Double
(1846); enchanting and magical, as in "White Nights" (1848); sordid and
harsh, as in The Insulted and Injured (1861). In Notes from Underground
(1864), the narrator aphorizes a conventional theme when he calls Peters-
burg "the most abstract and premeditated city on the surface of the earth.
(There are premeditated and unpremeditated cities.)"' He finds evidence at
hand in the form of trendy contemporary issues like socialism, science, and
utilitarianism. Against them he deploys caprice, anger, and even compas-
sion, which are Dostoevskii's versions of the "irrational" sides of the city
that Pushkin had found in vengeful nature, and Gogol in drives for power,
sex, and self-aggrandizement.
Of Dostoevskii's four great novels, it is Crime and Punishment (1866)
that most creatively draws on tradition to create a haunting picture of
nineteenth-century Petersburg. Among the major ingredients are Western
influences, the impoverished orders of society, and enclosure. But in every
case, Dostoevskii takes these elements to an extreme, and gives them a new
slant. For example, Raskolnikov is chock-full of the social, political and
anthropological ideas of the day, despises them as the products of "other
people's intelligence" - thereby raising the borrowing motif long associated
with Petersburg - yet uses them to justify his murder of the old pawnbroker,
only to discover that his motives for the crime involve far more than ideas,
whatever their source. Urban poverty had been registered by Pushkin and
Gogol, but in Dostoevskii's novel, it establishes an overwhelming presence,
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R O B E R T A. LMAGUIRE
with a relentless series of shabby rooms and stinking streets. Like Dickens,
with whom he is often compared, Dostoevskii is well aware that poverty
has no history. That is perhaps why he offers few glimpses of the famous
sights and monuments, which would of course open into the past. He keeps
us focused on the present; and by compressing this present into a mere two
weeks, he creates a suffocating psychological enclosure from which escape
seems impossible. While taking full advantage of the enormous variety of
human types present in any large modern city, he contrives to have all the
characters touched in one way or another by Raskolnikov's thoughts and
actions. Yet by adopting a third-person narration, he makes the point that
Raskolnikov himself is subject to larger forces, and is not simply projecting
his own mind onto the city. In this hermetically sealed literary world,
objects, events, and people are intertwined; any action, however trivial, can
generate enormous consequences, like the conversation Raskolnikov over-
hears in the eating-house between two people he does not know (part I,
chapter 6 ) , which he takes as permission to commit the murder. Ironically,
Raskolnikov, once convicted of the crime, exchanges the prison of Peters-
burg for the "freedom" of exile in Siberia. But as his dreams in the Epilogue
show, the city, and all it has come to stand for, cannot be readily forgotten.
Indeed, Dostoevskii, in a major revision of the tradition, does not regard
Petersburg as an aberration. He offers no mitigating or contrasting order,
be it the countryside, nature, or Moscow; the city focuses and intensifies
what is happening in Russia at large. As Luzhin puts it: "All these
innovations, reforms and ideas of ours - all these have touched us in the
provinces too; but in order to see everything and see it more clearly, one
must be in P e t e r s b ~ r ~ Many
. " ~ later writers would take note.
Dostoevskii's achievement as an urban novelist is all the more striking
when we consider the far more conventional Petersburg set forth in the
writings of three of his illustrious contemporaries, Ivan Goncharov, Ivan
Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoi. In Goncharov's first novel, A Common Story
(1847), Aduev, a naively idealistic young man, moves to the capital from
his country estate in hopes of becoming a famous writer. But he cannot
cope with the pitiless demands of the city and with the cynicism of his
wealthy uncle, and settles for an undistinguished existence. Oblomov
(1859), Goncharov's masterpiece, restates many of the same situations in a
far more mature and compelling way. Ilia Ilich Oblomov comes to St.
Petersburg from Oblomovka, his estate, to take up a job in the civil service,
and to find a wife. He abandons the first after two years, and fails totally
with the second. When the novel opens, a decade later, he occupies a
spacious, centrally-located apartment, but remains uninvolved in the life of
the city, which casts only a shadowy presence throughout. Instead, he lies
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future, and even into an astral "fourth dimension." One consequence is the
appearance in fictional present time of characters and events from Russian
history. Peter the Great - man and equestrian statue - is the most
important. Belyi also draws heavily from earlier Russian fiction, thereby
reminding us how much of the identity of Petersburg has been created by
writers. "Was that the shadow of a woman darting onto the little bridge to
throw herself off?" the narrator asks at one point. "Was it Liza?" in an
allusion to the heroine of Tchaikovsky's operatic version of Pushkin's story
"The Queen of Spades" (1833). "No, just the shadow of a woman of
Petersburg." But it could have been Liza too, in the world as Belyi arranges
it. He not only makes no attempt to conceal his borrowings, but ensures
that we see them too. This is very much in keeping with the Russian
tradition of "literariness" (literaturnost'), which does not prize "origin-
ality" in the sense that most non-Russian Western cultures do. The
character of the old senator, Apollon Apollonovich, is the richest bene-
ficiary of this tradition, embodying as he does certain attributes of the god
Apollo, after whom he is named, the greenish ears of Anna Karenina's
husband, the devotion to bureaucratic drudgery of Gogol's Akakii Akake-
vich, and the reactionary politics of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the real-life
Procurator of the Holy Synod. Belyi also avails himself of much of the
complex mythology that had grown up around the city by his time, with
heavy doses of the Bible, Rudolf Steiner, and German philosophy. It finds
forceful expression in the images of enclosure, East, and West, all of which
are intertwined. Most particularly they are associated with Apollon Apollo-
novich. He regards Russia as a vast, threatening expanse, an "icy plain"
that is "roamed by wolves," and is frightened by the rising tide of violence
in the country, which he identifies not only with revolutionaries, but with
"Eastern" elements variously defined as Mongolians and Turanians. These
fears prompt him to seek refuge behind apparently secure enclosures, like
Petersburg itself, the thick walls of his magnificent house, Comtean
positivism, and the undeviating routines of domestic and official life. But
everything he tries to exclude is either already present within any given
enclosure, himself included, or gains easy access to it; and at any moment
he can find himself whisked out of his rooms, his city, and his body into the
fourth dimension.
What is true of Apollon holds for Belyi's novel at large. Nothing is
clearly delineated; everything blends and blurs, so that conventional
markers like "fact" and "fiction," "past" and "present" are ultimately
meaningless. Even Belyi's system of language relies on polyvalence and
ambiguity, as we might expect in a Symbolist writer. In these ways too,
Petersburg reveals the presence of the same impulse that drove all the
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one, their task made easier by the fact that literary Moscow had tradition-
ally functioned mainly as an antithesis to Petersburg, had never developed a
particularly specific code of its own, and, in any event, was probably too
ancient and potent a symbol of Russian nationalism for accommodation to
the needs of a supposedly internationalist age.
An early case in point was Boris Pilniak's The Naked Year (1921). To be
sure, it is set in a provincial town, not a metropolis. But this town has a
kremlin, or fortress, as did many others; and Pilniak uses it to evoke
Moscow, which in turn displays several of the conventional features of
Petersburg. The most striking is "Chinatown," whose name derives from an
early confusion of the word for "China" (Kitai) with kita, the sixteenth-
century term for the wooden fence (later a stone wall) that delimited the
central part of Moscow. At one stroke, Pilniak combines the motifs of
Easternism and enclosure, insists that they coexist with "Western" phe-
nomena typified as bowler hats and briefcases filled with stocks and bonds,
and suggests that the Revolution, for all its vaunted novelty, merely enacts
these familiar images and ju~tapositions.'~If Andrei Belyi read this novel,
he must have given a smile of recognition.
Enclosure and Easternism, however, proved unproductive in other
Moscow novels, perhaps because of the new emphasis on internationalism.
The themes of urban crime and squalor did pass over, with Leonid Leonov's
novel The Thief (1927) among the most notable instances. So did the
themes of bureaucracy and technology, along with many familiar character-
types. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1928-40) makes
more extensive use of these materials than any Soviet novel set in the
capital.
Here we see a mostly middle- and lower-class city of the late 192os,
where lawlessness and chaos prevail. To judge by newspaper accounts of
the time, this Moscow had a basis in actuality. But in Bulgakov's hands,
such actuality soon proves elusive and evanescent, spun as it is out of
rumor and gossip, projected onto ever-shifting temporal and spatial planes
(even a "fifth dimension"), constantly invaded by supernatural powers, and
narrated in a variety of styles and dictions, including an interpolated
historical novel about Christ and Pilate. Most striking is its "literariness,"
as evinced in massive and obvious importations from fictions of centuries
past, both Russian and foreign, such as Alice in Wonderland and The
Golden Ass. As in Belyi's Petersburg (always a powerful presence), all are
as "real'' as anything else in this nightmarish city. Especially important as a
theme and an engine of the plot is demonism, which also imbibes
generously from literary sources. Readers will easily recognize Dosto-
evskii's Double (1846), Gogol's "Overcoat", and some of his Dikan'ka
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country as a whole. In these senses, Envy prepared the way for at least
three decades of Socialist Realist novels, which would revive the centuries-
old theme that Moscow is more an idea than a place.
Actually, Pilniak had been among the first, in Naked Year, to foresee this
development when he depicted provincial towns as mini-Moscows. By the
early 193os, the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism obliged all writers to
do the same. Thus, in Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned
(1932-60), Davydov, a metal worker by trade and a Communist by
conviction, is sent from the city to bring order to a collective farm.
Although he has a lot to learn about rural life, the Party takes for granted
that his political attitudes, urban to the core, are adequate to any situation,
regardless of locale. Ultimately the lines between city and country were to
be erased altogether, at least in theory. But it did not follow that a
politically enlightened farmer could function just as effectively in the city:
the chronic Bolshevik distrust of rural Russia prevailed. (Significantly,
Davydov is killed by enraged peasants.) The country was becoming
progressively urbanized, with Moscow setting the political, social, intellec-
tual and technological norms. Eventually this tendency found expression in
the notion of "agro-cities," which was proposed by Nikita Khrushchev in
the T ~ S O but
S , never went very far.
Urban settings continued to predominate in Soviet literature during the
so-called "Thaw," that period of comparative political relaxation which got
under way around 1956. The better writers, however, began to find more
interesting ways of handling them, now that they were freer to disregard
the dictates of Socialist Realism, with its penchant for generalization and
typology. Many showed an interest in recording the trivia of life, which
would not have been possible under Stalinism. Iurii Trifonov, for one,
specialized in representing the ordinary, frequently banal routines of
domestic life as lived out in Moscow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has also been
a meticulous recorder of quotidian details. Far more than Trifonov or most
of his contemporaries, however, he is interested in myth-making, often in
terms that are familiar to readers of earlier urban literature. One of them is
enclosure. One Day in the Life of lvan Denisovich (1962) is set in a forced
labor camp, as are the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (1973-75);
Cancer Ward (1968) takes place mainly in a hospital located in a large city.
The First Circle (1968) unfolds in Moscow and environs, with many
different enclosures: the city itself, the Kremlin, the Liubianka prison, the
sharashka, or special labor camp, the tight world of the Party privileged.
All overlap, and together comprise the gigantic enclosure that is the Soviet
Union. This Moscow bears no resemblance to the nurturing, authentically
Russian city of old. It is more like literary Petersburg from Pushkin through
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events," but is itself "the real heroine of a long story," the most Russian of
subjects, indeed a "holy city," the embodiment, we might say, of an
authentically Russian life that knows no polarities, but is organic, unitary,
and vital. The similarity to medieval views of lMoscow, and, more recently,
to Tolstoi's view in W a r and Peace, though unremarked, is o b v i o ~ s . ' ~
There is n o place for Petersburg in Zhivago's world, or, for that matter,
in much of the Soviet literature written since the 1920s. But the theme is
not dead. In 1978 Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House appeared. The edifice that
inspires the title is the famous institute for literary research of the Academy
of Sciences, located on Vasilevskii Island in St. Petersburg. We are therefore
not surprised to find that, in the spirit of Belyi, the novel cites or alludes to
many well-known works of Russian literature, draws characters, situations
and themes from them, and treats them all as part of the ongoing life of the
city in the 1960s. Bitov need not even be very specific about the sights and
landmarks: mere hints and echoes serve to situate any reasonably literate
reader. Yet the novel seems luxuriant, mainly because Bitov relishes the
particulars of ordinary life. For the most part, he treats them with warmth
and affection. That in itself represents a sharp departure from the Peters-
burg literary conventions, and probably explains why he has no need for a
contrasting Moscow or countryside.
Pushkin House was one of the last big novels with a city theme to be
published in Russia. Indeed, novels of any kind are rarer now; literature
itself has fallen on hard times; creative energies are being directed else-
where. But given the traditional importance of fiction for reflecting and
shaping the national mind, it is likely that Russia will again need its
writers, and likely too that the novel, and with it the theme of the city, will
revive and continue to resonate.
NOTES
I. In Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. Nachalo russkoi literatury XI - nachalo
X I I vekov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), p. 37.
2. Karamzin's memoir was published as a supplement (prilozhenie) to A. N. Pypin,
Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii pri Aleksandre I, 4th edn (St. Petersburg:
Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1go8), pp. 491-92, 481, 483. The italics are
Kararnzin's.
3. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Moscow: Nauka,
1962-66), vol. v, pp. 32, 155-56, 163.
4. Ibid., vol. IV, pp. 379-97.
5. In Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR,
1937-52), vol. 111. The quotes from "Nevskii Prospekt" are on pp. 19, 46; from
"Shinel," on pp. 145, 161.
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