The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Golyad-kin in The Double. That same year he wrote “The Adventures of Chichikov,” a dream-poem in ten entries, in which the hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls turns up in Soviet Moscow during the free-enterprise heyday of the New Economic Policy (NEP). There he finds all the familiar scoundrels alive and well, cheating the state and defrauding the public, and he finds himself a cozy berth too, only to end having his belly slit open by Soviet officials to extract swallowed diamonds.28 Two of Bulgakov’s most famous novellas show Gogolian

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demonologyalready “Muscovized”– thatis, reorientedtowardfertility,botched reincarnations, and the production of biological as opposed to mechanical monsters. When body parts come off in a Gogol Petersburg tale (recall “The Nose”), they strut around the city as incarnated Rank, identifiable not by the face (if there is a face) but by the official shape of the button. When living bodies are rearranged in Bulgakov, they either proliferate out of control or – to the horror of all – become human beings.

Like Chekhov, Bulgakov was trained as a medical doctor. He understood and respected physiology. The first of his science fiction – or science-gone-wrong – tales, The Fatal Eggs (1925), tells the story of a Moscow zoologist’s discovery of a fantastically potent red ray that, when directed at living tissue, causes it to grow exponentially in size and viciousness. When the state requisitions this ray to increase chicken-egg production, a minor bureaucratic accident intervenes: instead of chicken eggs, reptile eggs are radiated, and when they hatch, Soviet Russia is devastated by man-eating dinosaurs. An untimely frost in August kills them off. The second novella, Heart of a Dog, again combines science and reproduction, but more on the model of Frankenstein’s monster than H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods. Also written in 1925, this manuscript was confiscated (together with Bulgakov’s diaries) in a secret-police search of the writer’s apartment in 1926, and first appeared in Russia only in the glasnost year 1987. Its plotline resembles The Fatal Eggs. Another scientist-professor, this time a surgeon, specializes in human rejuvenation via an implantation of youthful sexual organs. But his private passion is more ambitious: to create a New Man. He succeeds in transplanting the pituitary gland and testes of a recently deceased criminal into a mongrel dog. The dog turns into a human being with criminal habits but a canine psyche, the exemplary proletarian, who eventually hints to his aristocratic creator that he is preparing to denounce him to the authorities. Before any harm is done, however, this hybrid humanoid beast is re-operated into a dog. It is no accident that Woland, the enabling hero of The Master and Margarita, is also a professor, albeit of black magic, not body parts. The area of experimentation has now moved from reptiles through the human-canine body to the human soul. This is an appropriate sequence for the biologically inflected myth of Holy Moscow.

Along the lines of these early Gogolian exercises, in his Master and Margarita Bulgakov casts an entire layer of madcap demonic events in the comic, petty-devil zone. But there are important, Moscow-oriented differences. Bulgakov’s madness resides in the fictive characters alone. It does not infect the voice, vision, or sobriety of his narration or his narrator, who reports on gossips and rumors but never, or almost never, is dissolved in them. He addresses the reader

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from a congenial, authoritative distance, as might a responsible historian or an epic poet. Ethically, The Master and Margarita is a traditional humanist novel, with domestic tranquility as its final reward. Its hero and heroine, rescued by Woland from the Stalinist capital but not qualifying as martyrs who might live in the Light, end up crossing a moss-covered bridge to their new home. It is set (we are led to believe) in some quiet rural corner under blossoming cherry trees, in eternally recurring Moscow time.

Can there be a myth of the future? If so, how does Zamyatin’s OneState distribute, on either side of its Green Wall, the mythical essence of Russia’s two major cities? One way of reading the novel We in the context of the Russian literary tradition is to see it as a distilling chamber for several prominent tendencies, or anxieties, associated with the literature of each capital.

The overwhelming binary remains city versus country, the urban factory versus the rural village or steppe. Inside OneState, the architectural principle of Petersburg reigns, albeit grossly exaggerated and essentialized: the triumph of the grid, square, box, the regimented “life in uniform” with its respect for reflecting surfaces, external rank, and standardized norms. It is one of Zamyatin’s masterful twists on the Petersburg tradition to represent the birth of D-503’s individuated consciousness (the birth of an “I” out of a “We,” recounted in entry 16) as the softening up of a mirror. Throughout the Gogol– Dostoevsky line, the anguish of a hero’s isolation, humiliation, and descent into madness is portrayed with the help of mirrors. These poor clerks gaze at themselves, are revolted by what they see reflected in that flat surface, deny that it exists, fantasize a substitute – and as a sign of their madness, a Double emerges. D-503 too resists his own reflection. He has been happy. But his soul flares up anyway. As the doctor explains to his bewildered patient (p. 87):

Take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun . . . But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer – everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world . . . The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you . . . And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever.

This is a Moscow moment, absorptive, dark, and (once begun) unstoppable, when some living impulse “takes root” inside. In Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, mirrors are flat and doubling – a sign of insanity. Inside OneState, a “softened” surface is criminalized. But it is a sign of budding sanity.

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If inside OneState is the regimented city, then outside is the Big Village. This image, too, is exaggerated. Exiles from the city don’t need houses at all; homes have reverted to the trees out of which they were built. Separating the city of OneState from the forested wilderness is the glass Green Wall. The point of passage is the “Ancient House” – one of those ramshackle wooden homes tucked away down Moscow streets and alleys – presided over by a decrepit old woman who is all wrinkles and smiles, a Baba Yaga in league with the Mephi, able to control the boundary between life and death. Spiritually, I-330 is one of her daughters. Of course Zamyatin, a builder himself, is not advocating the Outside as anything like productive freedom. D-503 describes his visit beyond the Wall as a Dionysian nightmare: “It’s as if they set off a bomb in my head and all around, piled in a heap, are open mouths, wings, screams, leaves, words, stones...Icouldn’tmove, because I wasn’tstanding ona surface, but something disgustingly soft, yielding, alive, green, springy” (pp. 148–49).

The naked humanoids in this fantastic place are covered with glossy fur. They bask in the sun, drink wines, nibble fruit. Much in this wilderness partakes of the Moscow mythic cluster of values: fertility, an abundance of food and drink, natural rhythms and cycles, the sense that the ground underfoot is black earth, not stony pavement. Moscow is what survives when the utopian planners fail and the machines blow themselves up. Within her domain, life is supported at any cost and corporeal reality is never sacrificed for mathematics or a mere disembodied idea. At the last minute, I-330 arranges to slip O-90, pregnant illegally with D-503’s child, beyond the Wall to give birth. There, amid the moss and the screeching of birds, the child will be permitted to live.

Twenty-first century Russia has already worked huge changes on these city myths, which in time will register on the new literary canon of the post-communist era. In 2003, St. Petersburg celebrated its 300th birthday with a massive facelift of all architectural and sculptural monuments and an immersion in its canonical city texts. But partly for this reason, Petersburg, Pushkin’s celebrated “window to the West” and Russia’s City of the Revolution, feels more than ever like a museum, a nostalgic site. Revolution has become an old idea. What is new is where the money and markets now are, which is Moscow in its post-Village phase. This globalized “city of the future,” bristling with anti-Western rhetoric but oriented toward the capitalist corporation, scrubbed clean of its most painful historical events or packaging them as “tours” and theme parks, is planning an ambitious International Business