The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

City myths: Petersburg, Moscow, OneState

What is the Petersburg Myth, and how does Bely’s novel named after that city contribute to it? This question was formalized as a research area in the mid-1980s, when Yury Lotman and his fellow semioticians turned their attention to the “Petersburg text” as exemplary of the cultural symbolism of cities.19 With Russian space in mind, they drew up several robust distinctions. First, the city as a demarcated site could stand in one of two relationships to the undeveloped territory surrounding it. Either it could spread out to absorb and

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personify its surroundings – such was the historical experience of Rome – or it could become the antithesis of that surrounding space, perceived to be in an antagonistic relation to the wilderness it ruled. In the former “absorptive” model,the citybecomes a symbol for the organic core of the universe. Nomatter where on the map the city is actually located, it feels like the “center,” a nested place. Such concentric cities are static and eternal, often situated on hills, and believed to mediate between heaven and earth. Examples are Jerusalem, Rome, and Moscow. (There is logic to Moscow’s two epithets, “New Jerusalem” and “Third Rome.”) Opposed to such concentric cities are eccentric ones, often situated on the threatened edges of empires, built as outposts on seized or conquered land. Born in violence, eccentric cities frequently have apocalyptic myths attached to their ends. They seem “willed” and inorganic, driven by crisis and subject to floods, earthquakes, and aggressive invasions. When they win, they become symbolic of a victory of mind over matter, but when they lose they spread doom, rumors of the Antichrist, and reinforce the principle that surrounding nature is hostile to human habitation and will always do battle with it.

Lisbon and Alexandria are two of the world’s great, doomed “edge cities,” but for Russia, the prototype is St. Petersburg. This city of stone was founded in 1703 by a fiat of Peter the Great as a military beachhead on a stoneless, uninhabited watery inlet. Built by conscripted labor, it fostered portents of catastrophe and death – especially by floodings and sinkings – from its earliest years. But also (and somewhat counterintuitively), its very artificiality and abrupt genesis came to represent rational utopia, the grandeur of imperial will. As one legend relates, since the swamp sucked everything in, Peter forged the city in the air and then laid it gently down on the soft earth. An airborne artificial city can do without a foundation, without organic history from the bottom up. In similar manner, the myth of Petersburg began not on the solid ground of lived experience but in literature and oral legend – which then fed into its history and in fact created that history.

Petersburg was illusory, phantasmagorical, a stage set. Gender ratios and demographics added to the sense of artifice. Petersburg exploded in size and population during the nineteenth century (whereas Napoleon’s invasion and burning, plus cholera epidemics, checked the growth of Moscow). Owing to so many military personnel, males outnumbered females in Petersburg by almost three to one, and this high number of wifeless men assured a huge population of prostitutes and attendant diseases.20 Masquerades, uniforms, military and civilian ranks – all forms that cover up and standardize the body – were the norm. In the early Bolshevik years, the fashion for public spectacles that reenacted historical scenes as street theatre further blurred the distinction

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between an actual event and its stylization for posterity. Outside those rituals, masks, and tightly fitting costumes was chaos: invisibility and the abyss.

In this startling set of images from urban semiotics, we see the outline of a Nietzschean dichotomy.Petersburgis anunstable,apocalypticcity of Dionysian energies, barely contained by an Apollonian crust of rock and granite. This tension sits like a coiled spring at the center of Bely’s Petersburg. Its first chapter contains a section, “Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes,” in which the senator ApollonApollonovich– aman“bornfor solitary confinement,” modeledonthe real-life obscurantist Procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827–1907) – rushes out to work through the fog along rectilinear streets in the black cube of his carriage; “proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves.”21 The Dionysian revolution creeps in, however, in the form of conspiracy, his son’s red silk domino, the ticking of the bomb, and the ominous rising waters of the Neva.

Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely provided the myth with its pedigree in prose, but Pushkin the poet is its founder. His 1833 narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, part ode and part personal tragedy, is based on the devastating flood of November 7, 1824, in which the Neva River rose six feet above street level in a single hour and claimed hundreds of lives. The poem opens on Peter the Great envisaging his great city rising from the wilderness. It closes on the corpse of a poor government clerk, Evgeny, driven mad after losing his sweetheart to the flood. The bereaved clerk had dared to shake his fist at the statue of Peter on Senate Square, which clattered down off its pedestal and chased its puny challenger around the city. The flood was nature’s vengeance against the very idea of building a city in such a wild unnatural place, but the imperial city could withstand it; the defeat and death of the poor clerk by the statue of Peter became a symbol of this double-pronged attack against the helpless, unheroic little man by outraged nature and merciless autocrat. Pushkin’s 1829 notebooks contain a startling sketch of the statue – without its rider. The specter of the Riderless Horse has haunted Russians ever since: the Bronze Horseman was death-dealing, certainly, but where would their country gallop without a powerful despot in the saddle?

In Petersburg, power erupts unexpectedly and punitively: the emperor, the river, a conspiracy, a sudden frost. These eruptions cause personal losses that can drive residents out of their minds. But before that moment, there is a flash of insight more profound than anything that could have evolved in a gentler way. During one of the extended drunken hallucinations in Bely’s Petersburg, the Bronze Horseman descends once again from his pedestal and pays a visit to the revolutionary terrorist Dudkin. Glowing white hot, the statue of Peter “pours intohisveins in metals” the resolvenecessary to murderthe doubleagent

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(ch. 6, p. 214). Such is the fate of consciousness in this odd urban site, which the Underground Man calls, at the beginning of his Notes, “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world”: it progresses by flashes, leaps, and fevers. And it dies without descendents; only the words of the myth remain.

If the “Bronze Horseman” launches the imperial nineteenth-century Petersburg Myth, then The Twelve, by the Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok (1880– 1921), inaugurates the Soviet era. This long narrative poem, composed in three weeks in January 1918, is set in the howling winds and snowdrifts of the revolutionary capital. Twelve Red Guards are patrolling the city, firing into the darkness. One of them, Petka, catches sight of his former girlfriend Katya on a sledge with her new (and wealthier) beau. Petka fires his rifle at them – she is killed, the new lover gets away, and whatever temporary remorse the murderer feels is mocked out of him by his comrades.

Throughout the poem, Blok imitates or partially quotes snatches of folk song, popular spiritual verse, Bolshevik slogans, staccato-like curses, robber and gypsy songs, urban romances. In his lectures on Russian literature from the mid-1920s,Bakhtin hadcuriousthingstosayabout themultivoiced,decentered quality of speech in Blok’s Tw e l v e .22 “The poem is unified around the theme of revolution,” he notes.

But any justification of The Twelve can only be that of a drunken soul, nailed to the countertop of a pub, the justification of a jester [shut] . . . Here Blok is a pure Romantic: he who is fastened down to some definitive thing will not seek anything; he who has nothing can acquire everything. God loves those who are not fastened down by anything, who have nothing. The absence of positive qualities places them closer to God, makes them heralds of the Divine.

Bakhtin’s musings here help explain the end of the poem, which surprised the poet himself. A starving dog trails behind the twelve guards. A blood-red banner precedes them. And invisible in the snowstorm, invulnerable to bullets, “In a white wreath of roses – / Up ahead, Jesus Christ.” This idea of invisible transcendence, exemplified by a dozen rowdy soldiers being led by a force in which they themselves do not believe, was glossed by Blok in an