Center, “Moskva-City,” of glass skyscrapers and gleaming pedestrian bridges to the west and southwest of the historic center.29 With the razing of the gargantuan Rossiya hotel, a monolith from the Soviet 1960s that overlooked St. Basil’s Cathedral, the
Kremlin itself will be incorporated into a vast, slick new mall with majestic vistas, porticoes, and arcaded fac?ades. The plans indicate no turrets or onion domes.30 It remains to be seen if any aspects of the older, more organic and black-soil traditions of the Moscow Myth can survive this onslaught of high technology and commercialization.
These single-city novels by Bely, Zamyatin, and Bulgakov, together with the loosely defined urban myths generated by each, provide a bridge to our next chapter, which will cover some of the same years (1920s–50s) from the perspective of a more politically approved ideology, socialist realism. In early Leninist terminology, the geographical opposition of “city” (proletariat) versus “countryside” (peasant) was often expressed in terms of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity.” Consciousness in this Marxist sense meant not individual creativity, inspiration, or (as it often did for Dostoevsky) the freedom of personal will and the responsibility of choice, but was applied more narrowly, to mean an awareness of the dialectical shape of history and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Opposedtothis party-mindedawarenesswas “spontaneity”:people reacting anarchically, instinctively, out of their immediate anger or blind need, peasants burning manor houses or peasant-soldier recruits deserting the Imperialist War of 1914–17, voting for peace with their feet. Both energies, Lenin knew, were essential for revolution. But which energy would control and exploit the other? Hundreds of early Bolshevik-era novels were constructed around this dichotomy. Many believed that a symbiotic relation between these two forces was possible, at the level of the individual body as well as the body politic.
Russian Futurists, Constructivists, Cosmists, Nietzschean god-builders, and other immensely creativerevolutionaryvisionaries desiredtoturn thebody into something healthy, expressive, coordinated, and free.31 The Bolshevik 1920s were an era of genuine lyricism about the possibility of the machine to liberate human labor and everyday life, not into inhuman regimentation or totalitarianism but into a kind of disciplined rhythmic dance. The enemy was not the Crystal Palace or OneState, which no one had ever seen, but the chaotic filthy sweatshop and the germ-laden tenement, which were everywhere.32 Ready to sweep the old factory and slum away were the ideals of efficiency, hygiene, and technological beauty.Inthe aesthetic sphere, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) trained his acting company in “biomechanics,” a course in athletics and bodily self-discipline that incorporated eurhythmics, labor-efficiency studies, stylized use of gesture, and even the reflexology of Pavlov’s laboratories toward the ideal of a standardized, externalized, and thus democratized expression of emotion. In the 1930s, this theatricalization of the body would be regimented into sports parades, mass physical culture extravaganzas, and military exercises.
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The relationship between Modernist aesthetics and the most destructive totalitarian regimes of twentieth- century Europe – Fascism and Stalinism – has long been in dispute. On the Russian front, one transition can be found in the closing sentences of Leon Trotsky’s
Then Trotsky ends his treatise on a vision so mystically romantic that it recalls an utterance from Zamyatin’s D-503 in his most true-believing phase, before the birth of his doubting soul. “Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent . . . to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman,” Trotsky wrote (p. 256):
Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process . . . Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. And above this ridge, new peaks will rise.
Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and murdered in Mexico on Stalin’s orders in 1940. But the utopian sentiments expressed in those final lines continued to inspire, guide, and torment writers throughout the Stalinist years.
The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness
It is always difficult to reconstruct the appeal or the relevance of a losing side. All that remains are the products, without the living, electrifying myths or manipulated audiences that sustained them. The Stalinist period of the Russian literary tradition (1928–53) is one such massively discredited enterprise. Politically, economically, militarily, culturally, the Soviet Union was a “command state”: governed by decrees from above and profoundly unliberal in its professed ideals.
This chapter limits itself to the literary side of the Stalinist experiment. Appalling violence, waste, caprice and lies disfigured those years, but boldness and a thrilling enthusiasm illuminated them as well. We tend to forget how very bad Western capitalism looked in the 1930s and 1940s, with its worldwide depression, unchecked military aggression, abominable race relations – and thus how courageous and appealing many found the Soviet insistence on an entirely new basis for literary and political culture, a fresh slate of heroes
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and plots. Our starting point will be 1934, the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. That Congress
