The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Revolution is everywhere, in everything . . . A literature that is alive . . . is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck.

In a storm, you must have a man aloft. Today we are in the midst of a storm . . . Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (a genre scene); but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? . . . Let yesterday’s cart creak along the well-paved highways . . . What we need today are automobiles, airplanes, flickering, flight, dots, dashes, seconds.9

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Zamyatin’s “sailor aloft in the storm” could not differ more profoundly from Tolstoy’s sailor with a compass in Anna Karenina, who points out to adulterers their singular, cart-drawn course.

Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption

Our sampling of the Symbolist–Modernist period will be organized around three great novels (and in passing, some poetry) associated with two myth-laden cities. The first novel, set in the imperial capital, is Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916–22). The second, set in Moscow, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928–40). The third, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), unfolds in the fantastic glass metropolis of OneState in the twenty-sixth century – and might be said to distribute, in concentrated and exaggerated form on opposite sides of the Green Wall, the myths of those two archetypical Russian cities. These three novels did not “influence” one another. Only one, Petersburg, was published in Russian during its author’s lifetime. We appeared abroad in the 1920s first in English and then in Czech; it was published in Russia in its original Russian only in 1988. Bulgakov finished The Master and Margarita during the dark Stalinist years; he could not have imagined its publication in the USSR as he knew it. The novel first appeared, posthumously and heavily censored, in the thaw year 1966.

Although these three works belong to different stylistic traditions, intriguing comparisons can be made. Each novel disorients and disrupts the flow of the narrative, to achieve the “estrangement” and displacement so important to the texture of post-Realist prose. Bely’s Symbolist novel Petersburg is a productive starting point, for it combines arcane theories of cognition with a hallucinating Dionysian subconscious. For Bely, the very act of naming creates a primary aural reality, a “third world” of sound that enables the poet to access previously non-existent realms.10 Complicating these ambitions in Petersburg, however, is the narrator’s deflating, endearing irony, which unexpectedly humanizes the plot at crucial moments and turns it into something approaching comedy – a signature technique of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line. The plot of Petersburg can even be seen as a variant on the political conspiracies of Demons (a novel that at one point obsessed Bely) with a nod to the parricide in The Brothers Karamazov. The time is the revolutionary year 1905. The philosophy student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov has made a rash promise to a splinter terrorist group to assassinate his own father, Apollon Apollonovich, a senator of high rank. Horrified when he is actually summoned to plant a bomb in his father’s house, the son tries to decline, but he is compromised by a double agent. So the son sets the mechanism; the bomb, hidden in a sardine tin, starts to tick.

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Apollon Apollonovich wanders in to his son’s study and removes the curious tin to his own room. The son is frantic. At the end of the novel the bomb explodes, but no one is killed.

This anticlimax with the sardine tin is emblematic. Every time one of the novel’s heroes entertains a “creative disguise” or a show of power, something goes wrong: ordinary suspenders flash forth from under a red domino costume; the targeted senator retires from his ministry in humiliated confusion and is reconciled with his unfaithful wife precisely when his death is supposed to be a meaningful political statement; and in a subplot, a minor officer tries to hang himself in disgrace but the plaster cracks, the ceiling falls in, the noose won’t hold. Apocalypse and strong closure are everywhere prepared for during these agitated revolutionary days, but they default to more shabby, compassionate, everyday outcomes. The result is a strange landscape: Bely’s “third world” of transformative word-symbols almost peaks at several points but then unceremoniously peters out. In this aspect, the events of the novel recall Chekhov’s The Duel, where the bumbling intervention of some well-meaning comic figure deflates the word-games poised to kill the antagonists.

This pulsation between tragedy and farce, and between a rational and an intuitive response to the world, is essential to the novel’s rhythm. Bely held that the excellence of an artwork was proportional to its kinship with music. Music is structured emotional flow; the “world of appearances” (that is, palpable, fixed form) is always a constraint on that flow, on our free experiencing through time.11 The author-poet, who works in a medium located halfway between the poles of architecture and music, must balance the claims of space and time. The scenes in Petersburg are chopped and short. Scraps of dialogue appear without a framing context, with ellipses and free-standing punctuation that suggest more an intonation than a communication. Against the unstoppable ticking of the bomb, verbal symbols float and then suddenly disrupt. In a conspiracy novel where double agents, drunkenness, hallucination, and concealed threats play so potent a role, such disruption inevitably has demonic overtones. But the process is also potentially divine, and the apocalypse barely averted cannot be reduced to mere idle cerebral play.

Zamyatin wrote his Modernist novel not under the aegis of Symbolism but under the star of Einstein’s relativity. Zamyatin too is in the Gogol– Dostoevskian tradition of storytelling, in which fictional characters go out of their mind together with portions of the narration containing them. The concern that so occupied Bely, however – the transfiguration of the self through verbal art – is different in Zamyatin. The son of an Orthodox priest, Zam-yatin made rich use of biblical subtexts in We – ranging from Adam and Eve’s

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Fall in the book of Genesis to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who castigates Christ for his reluctance to work the miracles required to guarantee humanity its material security.12 Despite these motifs, Zamyatin was a wholly secular writer, and skeptical as regards divine or mystical allegory. Although authority is everywhere in OneState, neither miracle nor mystery has a place. The world of We is a post-Edenic blueprint, and to drive this point home Zamyatin plays openly, even mechanically, with alphabets and prefixes.

All citizens (“numbers”) of OneState are named with an initial letter plus a numerical digit. Males begin with consonants (the hero is D-503), females with vowels (O-90, I-330). D-, the novel’s Adam, is a mathematician by profession, and his prefix is written in Cyrillic, д, a letter derived from the Greek delta, also the mathematical symbol for change. The novel’s Eve, the seductress I-330, is named not with the Russian equivalent of this vowel, и, but with the Latin ‘I’: the English first-person singular pronoun, the dangerous unit that has broken away from the “We.” The double-agent doctor who is in league with I-330 also carries a Latin prefix, S- (snake, G. Schlange, Fr. serpent), not the less slinky Cyrillic equivalent, C. But the lesson to be learned from these cunningly named heroes and their biblical subtexts is not one of salvation, and certainly not of sexual guilt. Zamyatin was curious in a scientific, “Einsteinian” way about the growth of consciousness out of a multiplication or fragmentation of human perspectives. Thus his novel tells a different cautionary tale than Bely’s.

Zamyatin constructed his We as a series of diary entries that read like an experiment in mechanics. Stretches of narrative are punctuated by the visual play of sharp-edged or intersecting surfaces, panoramic shots followed by abrupt close-ups. Fragments, splinters, emissions and cracks have an ominous texture to them (“A knife. A blood-red bite.” “A microscopic bubble of saliva appeared on his lips and burst”). Material objects and human organisms are chopped up, inventoried, and juxtaposed to one another from various points of view. These episodes list at a forty-five degree angle and flash by as if glimpsed from a speeding