The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

continent, as was the case in the northern hemisphere of the New

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 27

World. But with Peter the Great, Russia in effect became two countries in an equivalently explosive way. Peasant villages adopted a siege mentality against the cities and towns. When urban outsiders appeared at the edge of a village, it was not to trade, educate, heal, but always to bring the bad news of recruitment or taxes: always to take something away.

Eighteenth-century prose dramas mercilessly satirized country bumpkins. Of equal or greater weight to these comic scenes were the tragic or angry variants. The peasant imprisoned on the plain at the mercy of “city meddlers” became the protagonist of a wide number of narratives, from Mikhail Chulkov’s savage 1792 sketch on the bureaucratic cover-up of a mass peasant murder (“A Bitter Fate”) through the conscience-stricken outrage of Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802), the sentimentalismofNikolai Karamzin(1766–1826), Turgenev’s evocative Sportsman’s Sketches, Tolstoy’s “Alyosha the Pot,” and Chekhov’s rural tales (“In the Ravine,” “Peasants”). In his 1885 story “The Culprit,” Chekhov relates the criminal trial of one Denis Grigoriev, peasant, accused of sabotage against the railways and sentenced to prison because he had unscrewed a nut that held the rails to the ties – for how, mutters Denis, can any decent fish be caught without a sinker? Of course he would not have unscrewed all of them. In his 1905 memoir of Chekhov, Maksim Gorky relates how the author of “The Culprit” was cornered one day by a young, freshly uniformed prosecutor who insisted that progressive society had no choice but to imprison the Denis Grigorievs if Russian trains were to run safely – and how mournful Chekhov became, hearing him out. This image of an uncomprehending and trapped peasant (sometimes innocent, sometimes defensively sly), victimized by a callous city dweller with a sheaf of laws in his briefcase and an arrest warrant in his hand, became a painful nineteenth-century genre scene. This geophysical binary – urban seats of power against the countryside – reached its apogee in the collectivization campaigns of the first Stalinist Five-Year Plan (1928–32). By that time, of course, writers were no longer free to describe it. It has been said that only during the war of 1941–45 did enough Russians succeed in suffering together to heal this split between the tiny, rich, exploiting cities and the broad laboring plain. Surely this was one reason why World War II narratives remained a vigorous literary genre in Russia long after the other combatants in that conflict had moved on to other themes.

This abrupt distinction between city life and life everywhere else has proved tenacious. The refrain of Chekhov’s ThreeSisters,toget somehow“ToMoscow!” so that real life can begin, is gently mocked in that play. But significantly we do not know where the Prozorov family estate is: is it four miles from that dreamed-of Moscow, or forty, or four hundred? Despite the telegraph and occasional stretch of train track, the space between habitations remained

28 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

mythical, without gradation. Roads were (and are) a disaster. There is little tradition of the civilized suburb. To this day, surprisingly close to the city limits of Petersburg and Moscow, “the provinces” begin – unmowed, unpaved, out of touch. To leave Moscow or Petersburg has always meant not only to go out in space but also to go back in time. This too reinforces the sense of space being primary and pockets of time negotiable, set down like the cities, as islands in a sea.

Even this excessive, untamable Russian space had its edges. In 1829, Pushkin slipped out from under police surveillance to visit the Russian army skirmishing on the Caucasus–Turkish border. As he later described this episode in his droll travel notes, A Journey to Arzrum (1836), en route to join the Russian troops he happened upon asmallriverwhich, a Cossack informed him, was theboundary. “I had never before seen foreign soil,” Pushkin wrote of this encounter. “The border held something mysterious for me . . . Never before had I broken out from the borders of immense Russia. I rode happily into the sacred river, and my good horse carried me out on the Turkish bank. But this bank had already been conquered: I was still in Russia.”17

Pushkin was never allowed out. This scenario of sealed borders around an immense, unmappable world became another theme, both hair-raising and comic, that lasted right up until the end of the Soviet Union. Russia, so this thesis went, is so big, her borders so impenetrable, her censorship so pervasive, her people so gullible, and her ability to construct whole countries inside herself (with space to spare) so difficult to detect, that the authorities could simply fake the existence of everywhere else. In his 1992 novella Omon Ra, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962) tells the story of a young Muscovite training for a suicidal space program, only to discover that there is no program, no broadcast from outer space, only a shabby stage set strewn with empty vodka bottles down in the metro and a black drape with holes poked out for stars. In a chapter titled “Imaginary West,” the cultural anthropologist Alexei Yurchak discusses this fantasy-zone in terms of a “politically faked travelogue,” a literary genre productive as late as 2002. A simple factory worker from the Urals circa 1970 is finally allowed to go to Paris. But “after a few euphoric days in the French capital” he bumps into a painted canvas stretched on a huge frame. It had all been a theatrical backdrop, “Paris simply did not exist in the world. It never

had.”18

If a real and inaccessible outside perhaps did not exist, then an “accessible inside” to Russia has proven itself real on several levels. I have in mind Russian spatialutopias. Mostcultures,Russia’sincluded, haveutopias in time – a Golden Age in the past, a Promised Kingdom in the future. But Russia also has a vital minor tradition of timeless, salvation-bearing utopias in space. These

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 29

utopias refuse to accept the reality of Russia’s physical defenselessness, the porousness of her borders, her inability to protect her population from chronic and devastating invasion. And thus they manipulate space – that inexhaustible Russian resource – to overcome the vulnerability of space.

Yury Lotman, who devoted a good portion of his scholarly life to spatial topographies, discusses this mythical geo-ethics as codified in Russian medieval texts.19 The model has had impressive lasting power. Dostoevsky drew on it in his great novels (reverently for his righteous persons like the Elder Zosima, symbolically for his seekers like Raskolnikov, in travestied form for his petty devils), and traces of this value system survive in Stalin-era socialist realist texts. Geo-ethics combines the high status of physical matter in the Eastern Orthodox Church with the moral implication of the compass. Lands to the east are pagan, to the west are heretic: only at the Russian center can one find holiness. Righteous persons [pravedniki] wander through this space, colonizing it with their humility and charity, aware that all corruptible matter encountered down below can be resurrected in a heavenly space that is continuous with it. Eternity is not the absence of matter or the transcending of matter, but its absolute triumph. Up there, matter lasts forever. Lotman sees this “eternally thing-like” nature of salvation as an intensely Russian invention. Among the most celebrated sites of geo-ethics in Russian culture is the Invisible City of Kitezh on the bank, or the bottom, of Lake Svetloyar.

Great Kitezh was built in the Yaroslavl-Volga region northeast of Moscow in the twelfth century. In 1239 it was destroyed by the Mongol Khan Batu, grandson of the great Ghengis. No contemporaneous account of the battle mentions any survivors; the city simply vanished. To counter that unacceptable fact, popular legend decrees that the city exists but at the final moment was “transposed,” not lifted to Heaven but sunk into the lake to be saved, where its bells and golden domes are still audible and visible to the righteous person. In successive Russian times of trouble, the Kitezh legend revives and Lake Svetloyar becomes again a place of pilgrimage.

ThepopulistVladimirKorolenko(1853–1921)wroteanethnographicsketch on the region in 1890. The Symbolist Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), in his 1905 novel Anti-Christ. Peter and Alexis, linked the invisible city to all in Russian culture that Peter the Great had attempted to destroy. In his pantheistic opera The Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1904), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created Russia’s most perfect artistic tribute to dvoeverie, dual pagan-Christian faith,