essay he wrote during that same month of January 1918, titled “The Intelligentsia and Revolution.” He noted that “the great Russian artists – Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy – were immersed in gloom” but had endured it because they believed in the light and knew the light. Now the Russian people are bolder. They believe simply in life, in “doing everything themselves,” in “awaiting the unexpected” and believing “not in what exists but in what ought to exist,” now that the Russian people, “like Ivan the Fool, has jumped down off its
sleeping-ledge.”23 A new hero was born out of the Nietzschean binary between Dionysus and Apollo: the Bolshevik recruit as trigger-happy unholy fool.
One recent study of physical Petersburg opens on the observation that its middlespaces arefew.24 Surprisingly, perhaps,forthe officialproletariancapital of the world, industrial spaces like factories were not welcomed into the literary myth but exiled to its margins (either to the outskirts of the city, or to the Urals and the south). In Petersburg stories proper, the copy clerk Akaky Akakievich and his pre-industrial quill pen are recycled up through the twentieth century. Huge urban castle-fortresses, once the luxury residences of aristocrats and the royal family but now decaying, subdivided tenement houses, suggest anything but a modernizing “window to the West,” which was the ideal city of the Petrine Imperial Project. In this time-space, urban rumor is always frenetic. A Petersburg text foregrounds Gogol’s truth (which Dostoevsky then made a point of honor): that once uttered, any story will almost inevitably circulate, incorporate new and usually nastier elements, and become gossip or slander serving the interests or pathologies of its most recent speaker (the urge to re-speak out of one’s own perspective being universal). Such runaway, randomly multiplied words are arguably the collective hero of Bely’s
What is the Moscow Myth, and how does Bulgakov’s
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energy of their revolutionary city, Moscow was a retreat. It looked back, not forward; inward, not beyond. After Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) introduced her fellow poet Osip Mandelstam to Moscow in 1916, taking him on tours of ancient churches and cemeteries and persuading him that Russian history was as worthy of his pen as ancient Greece or medieval France, Mandelstam’s cosmopolitan poetry broadened its scope to include Russian architecture, history, and fate.25 Tsvetaeva herself wrote a cycle of poems in spring and summer 1916, “Verses about Moscow,” that self-consciously juxtaposed the two cities as male–female, imperial–provincial, prideful– humiliated, the seat of power versus the ringing bells of faith. Its fifth poem declares:
But higher than you, tsars, are the bells.
As long as they thunder forth out of the sky-blue depths –
Moscow’s primacy is indisputable.
– And the entire forty times forty churches
Laughs at the arrogance of tsars!
In two brilliantly mocking poems from her 1931 cycle “Verses to Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva portrays her great predecessor’s relationship to Petersburg as that of rebellious poetic genius against the arrogant Tsar Nicholas I – “butcher, censor, poeticide.” Moscow was a messy city, not in official uniform, and thus her virtues were more than skin deep.
Inwardness, warmth, darkness, and moistness – the qualities of fertile soil – are central to the myth of Moscow as a regenerative site. It was in Mother Moscow (restored as Russia’s capital in 1918) that the first underground metro system was constructed in the Soviet state between 1931 and 1935, an enormous showcase task.26 To compensate for a scarcity of skilled technicians and a rushed timetable, the government resorted to prison labor bolstered by cults of heroic sacrifice and youthful enthusiasm. The “metro-builder” became a new national hero, an unprecedented type of frontiersman who would conquer the underworld much as arctic explorers conquered the North Pole and cosmonauts would later conquer outer space. The underground stations – at unheard-of depths of twenty to thirty meters, designed to double as bomb shelters – were to resemble palaces, radiant with light. Taming the damp, at times recalcitrant earth for the metro project became Moscow’s equivalent to taming the floodwaters of the Neva for the Petersburg Myth.
Moscow, first mentioned in the Kievan chronicles in 1147, is three times as old as Petersburg. But the myth feels somehow younger, more diffuse, greener, and – one might say – more promiscuous. Moscow’s huge city houses were old, wooden, walled in with shabby fences behind which their owners cultivated large vegetable gardens, after the manner of the Russian village. People lived not
in the streets, cafe?s, or paved squares, but at home. Unlike Petersburg, full of bureaucrats and military personnel, Moscow has been traditionally associated with tradesmen, families, and children.
A good introduction to the Moscow Myth was provided after the 1997 celebration of the city’s 850th birthday by the cultural historian Svetlana Boym, an eyewitness to the festivities.27 Boym claims that the myth of the city was consolidated during that jubilee year as never before in its history. In a series of mass spectacles aided by the latest technology, Russian tradition was reinvented alongside a nostalgic tribute to Soviet grand style. The tradition invoked was dual: Moscow as the Third Rome, and Moscow as the Big Village. In the first myth, initiated by a seventeenth-century monk more as a warning against abuse of power than as glorious prophecy, Moscow was declared the heir to both Christian Rome and Byzantium, an image of heavenly Jerusalem. She was to be the final Rome; “a fourth there shall not be.”
The “Big Village” myth was equally fraught. Moscow’s mayor since 1996, Yury Luzhkov (who, we recall from Chapter 3, sponsored the reconstruction of Christ the Savior Cathedral in the early 1990s) has a passion for monumen-talization. Not any monument will do, however: only those in accord with a healthy, regenerative, slightly childlike and na??ve vision of the city. Neither the imperial fac?ades of Petersburg nor the unhappy post- communistwork of memory and grief is appropriate for the refurbished Moscow Myth. A serviceable common language was found, however, in the cozy, intimate characters from rural Russian folklore, in a mix of commercialism with the cartoon, church bells with pagan ritual. This sense of Moscow as both wonder tale and Christian terminus is central to Bulgakov’s
As prosewriterandplaywright,Bulgakov waspermeatedbyGogoliantexts. In 1924,he published thestory “Diaboliad,”where a Soviet versionofGogol’spoor clerk Akaky Akakievich goes mad after the manner of Dostoevsky’s
