The brawl grows louder. Then Evgeny takes up a knife, and in a trice he cuts down Lensky. Horrid shadows loom thickly; then a piercing cry has broken forth … The hut is reeling … And Tania, horrified, awakens … She looks: it’s light now in her room, and through the window’s frosted glass a crimson ray of dawn is dancing. Her door has opened …
This passage is included here at such length because it provides the necessary backdrop for a fuller understanding of such later writers as A. Remizov and B. Pilniak. At the same time it shows that Pushkin’s roots in the Russian mythic tradition, which incidentally incorporated bear worship, run deeper than Zhukovsky’s. Also, it is not for naught that the country girl Tatiana falls in love, yet has such a horrid dream about a city dandy. On the one hand, Evgeny Onegin pays thematic homage to Karamzin’s sentimental elegy in prose, Poor Lisa (1792), which shows the impossibility of lasting love between a city slicker and a country girl. On the other, Pushkin’s novel-in-verse involves themes a great deal more complex than love doomed by social inequality (for one thing, Tatiana and Evgeny are both aristocrats). Pushkin’s Evgeny is one of the first characters in Russia to sound a pre-existentialist note: he rejects human civilization as expressed by city life, but as a product of that life is powerless to imagine an alternative. Since the times of the Roman poet Horace rural life had been priviledged over the artificiality of urban life. The punning Latin epigraph to the novel’s second chapter which equates rural Russia with Horatian rusticity offers Evgeny a fundamental choice, but, tragically, he is too corrupted by the city to take advantage of it. Fortunately for his readers Pushkin succeeds in reinvesting the Russian countryside with the Horatian ethos, without the putrid idealizations of the concept of “natural man,” as advanced by J. J. Rousseau (1712-1778).
The theme of an individual’s alienation from the city is strengthened by the tale of another Evgeny, in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (included in our Pushkin section). The protagonist of this work is literally crushed by the march of civilization as envisioned by Peter the Great who decided to build a new capital for Russia on a par with the great cities of the West. For strategic reasons, he chose a spot on the north-western border of Russia on the banks of the River Neva and Gulf of Finland. The area was marshy and boggy and also quite a distance from the center of civilization, in short, a very difficult place on which to build a city. Nevertheless Peter went ahead with his plan and created what has indeed become a magnificent city, today’s St. Petersburg, but he did so at a great human cost: thousands of workers and craftsmen died of disease and over-work in this remote marshland. Ever since then St. Petersburg has been regarded as a special order of city and symbol—a magnificent edifice raised on the misery and agony, indeed the bones, of common men.
The city then began to evoke in Russia very powerful and ambivalent feelings. Even during Peter’s own lifetime, Old Believer schismatics (the heirs of Archpriest Avvakum) regarded the Petersburg as an “unnatural” city, and its founder to be the Antichrist. But the literature of the ruling class—now transplanted from the ancient capital of Moscow—viewed St. Petersburg for the most part with awe and admiration. Following Peter’s death in 1725, the eighteenth century witnessed Russia’s rise to an unprecedented level of recognition by Europe, and nowhere else was this rise more evident than in the incredibly swift development of St. Petersburg, which soon came to challenge the most advanced cities on the European continent. Successive Russian rulers invited the most pioneering 18th-century architects to oversee the building of Russia’s new capital, which soon grew to prominence as a technological and artistic marvel of its time, deserving the epithet “The Venice of the North.” As the century came to a close, St. Petersburg’s newly founded, lasting enchantment was recorded by Derzhavin, in the prologue to his exquisite poem, The Murza’s Vision. Here, through the persona of an Eastern sage Derzhavin delivers the first poetic apostrophe to Russia’s new and enigmatic Western-style capital:
Within the ether’s dark-blue ocean,
Down casting silver from on high,
The golden moon was floating lonesome;
She, gleaming from the northern sky,
Brought light to my house through its windows,
And with the palest of her beams
Traced down the glazing’s golden sheen-glow
Flat on my lacquered flooring seams;
Sleep, with its languorous, silent hand
Poured forth the dew of dreams engendered
In douce oblivion’s distant land,
Enchanting thence my family members;
Now sunk in slumber was the district:
Petropolis amidst its spires,
Neva in granite urn, all glistened,
The Baltic coast bore twinkling fires;
And Nature, in her silent twilight,
Sunk deep into her mighty dream,
Seemed dead to hearing and to eyesight;
Yet from the heights and depths unseen
Cool zephyrs wafted ‘round blue ether,
And brought refreshment to my heart.
As he does in other areas, Derzhavin—with whom we start the main body of texts in our collection—stands at the core of modern fantasy-weaving in Russia. Significantly, he identifies within a very short space in this prologue the thematic locus of a dichotomy between the City (the domain of Man), and Nature (as created by God). This dichotomy was to plague much of 19th-century Russian fiction, including fantasy fiction. The two domains are held in a delicate balance in the poet’s waking dream, which obliterates any sharp borders separating them, and in this poem Peter’s creation is not threatening. Indeed Peter’s grand-daughter by marriage, Catherine II, appearing in goddess form to the poet later on, firmly unites all man-made and divine aspects of human existence in this city in one utopian vision of emotional and material plenitude.
A far more qualified depiction of Petersburg is given by Russia’s greatest 19th-century poet, A. S. Pushkin, with whom we continue unfolding our volume. In one of his most accomplished narrative poems, The Bronze Horseman, Peter the Great appears both as a historical personage and also as an active participant in a dream which drives the poem’s only human protagonist to madness. Peter’s image, represented concretely by the equestrian statue which Catherine II had erected in his honor in 1782, is transmuted into the image of the City itself: Petersburg, Peter’s town, his creation and achievement. This feat is sung by Pushkin in his famous apostrophe which begins with the celebrated line “I love Thee, Peter’s true creation …” and continues for many more, all of which practically every Russian knows by heart. But if Derzhavin in A Murza’s Vision introduced a similar and sustained notion of Petersburg as a eutopic dreamscape, accessible through his poetry, in Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman the city is also seen as an eerily unnatural construct, the product of one man’s obsession (in Notes from Underground Dostoevsky termed it “the most intentional city in the world”).
While not a direct participant in any sense, Petersburg does function as an important setting in another Pushkin masterpiece entered in this anthology, The Queen of Spades. In contrast to The Bronze Horseman, it explores the ramifications of an obsession of a different kind—that of cards and money—but an obsession which is inseparably linked to the society inhabiting Peter’s city over a century later. This superbly crafted mock societytale, which subtly parodies within a short narrative space a plethora of social and literary conventions, is certainly Pushkin’s best known prose work. It also served as a source for many literary types and themes developed by later Russian authors and as a stimulus for an opera by Chaikovsky, a film, and several TV productions. In all of these, just as at its very inception, St. Petersburg becomes a kind of mythological city, a city fraught with symbolic meaning which will be re-explored in Gogol’s, and above all in Dostoevsky’s and Bely’s fiction. Bely in particular will restate Petersburg’s enigma in terms very different from Derzhavin’s or Pushkin’s.
The first Russian writer after Pushk
in to leave a lasting legacy regarding the Petersburg myth was N. V. Gogol, with his most accomplished cycle of stories, known as Petersburg Tales. This cycle began with the publication of a book entitled Arabesques (1835), a miscellany of essays on art and literature combined with occasional examples of fictional prose. The latter consisted of the famous stories, The Portrait, Nevsky Prospect, and the Diary of a Madman, which were subsequently revised, published and discussed as separate works, deriving their unity from the Petersburg setting common to all. There is much to be gained, however, when their original context—the entire set of entries published in book called Arabesques—is kept in focus. It is during their writing that Gogol began seriously tinkering with the romantic notion of genius. Perhaps on account of his growing fame from his earlier literary accomplishments, but certainly connecting to turn-of-the century Germany’s fascination with the topic, he freely supplied in the Arabesques his own views on the role of the exceptional in painting, architecture, design, music and dance. But in 1834—as his Arabesques were being stitched together—Gogol’s personal world was a world in crisis, which stemmed from Gogol’s inordinate wish to fuse the ideal with everyday reality. On the one hand, he contemplated (a-la-Wackenroder and Tieck in Germany) the world of ideal existence, while on the other, and quite unlike his German models, he wished to represent its relevance for the “real” world as well. Whenever he did—and this happened in the aforementioned “fictional” segments of Arabesquess—his excursions into the Sublime shifted tonality and portrayed a world grotesquely warping such sublimity, a world of darkness, fog and blurred vision. The perfectly rectilinear streets of Petersburg became modern-day labyrinths for its inhabitants and perfectly average clerks in this city began to imagine themselves to be the Kings of Spain and heard dogs talking in human voices. Such characters, by the very setting they inhabited, hardly fitted into the scheme of things imagined from the sublime world and, significantly, all Gogol’s fictional representations of the “little folk” were originally presented as cases of wasted genius (the first two tales depicting poor artist-painters, the protagonist of the third was initially a musician). Indeed, the discrepancy between the real and imagined worlds became so patent, so insistent, for Gogol in these years that he could no longer accept the Romantic imagery which contemplated the ideal world imagined in the essayistic component of Arabesques. At the same time, he was extremely loath to give it up and accept the real world. A tension developed in his imagery between the two worlds on which he formerly focused as separate, the ideal and the real: they ceased to interact and began to merge and fuse. Brilliantly anticipated in the fictional parts of his Arabesques, most importantly in “Diary of a Madman,” a new alternate world arose from these polarities: a mixed-up world in which the motivation of the fantastic and the real became the same—a world of the absurd.
Gogol’s fiction and drama single-handedly shaped the themes and images which were to infuse most of Russia’s literature until well after the era of Sputnik. Moreover, much of Gogol anticipates the characteristic fictional worlds of other writers from Dostoevsky to Andrei Bely and Franz Kafka, and, later on, to Jorge Luis Borges and the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With the advent of the symbolist epoch, literature dealing with apparitions, time-travel, and excursions into altered states of reality became a commonplace in Russian literary culture and often formed a conscious return to some of the preoccupations of Russian and Western romanticism. Nonetheless, the fin de siècle fascination with the romantic past harbored in some cases the seeds for the “romanticization” of possible futures, as in S. Belsky’s Under the Comet (Pod kometoi, 1910), a book which could be said to be a thematic return to V. F. Odoevsky’s The Year 4338. Similarly, A. Kuprin’s Liquid Sunshine (1913) is based on the presumed technological feasibility of capturing the energy of the sun in order to secure the future for the inhabitants of a cooling Earth. The project fails due to an insignificant but fatal mistake of its creator—a perfectly romantic touch of irony at the ending of the story. Kuprin’s work is also significant in the sense that it is one of the first Russian literary creations bearing the unmistakable influence of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, whose works were to be imitated in the Soviet Union particularly during the twenties.
A curious blend of fantasy, science fiction and fairy tale was provided for Russian readers of the 1910s in F. K. Sologub’s Created Legend (Tvorimaya legenda) where the protagonist Trirodov succeeds in raising dead children from the grave to a zombie-like state, reducing his enemies to prisms, and transforming his gothic estate into a spaceship capable of defying gravity. Sologub’s fiction will be represented in this volume with the short story A Little Man, a masterpiece blending fantasy, social satire and literary humoresque. In it Sologub gives a tongue-in-cheek treatment of topics with eminently literary significance. Set very much in a neo-Gogolian universe, it deals a final blow to the theme of the little man with which Russian literature had been obsessed ever since Gogol’s The Overcoat.
Ultimately, it could be said that the arrival of the 20th century brought about two conceptually opposed forms of depicting the future. For some adherents of a materialistic doctrine, the future offered nearly limitless possibilities due to advances in science, and often implied the conquest of space. The planet Mars seems to have been a particularly fascinating subject at the time. A. Bogdanov’s utopia Red Star is perhaps the most accomplished work on this theme, incorporating the aforementioned view of the future. First published in 1908, it was followed by a less successful sequel, Menni, the Engineer (Inzhener Menni), five years later. Bogdanov utilized his novel to foreshadow the Earth’s future by presenting his readers with an account of Mars’ past (a fairly transparent rehashing of Earth’s history from the Marxist viewpoint) and present, using the context of the novel as a guide to social institutions of the future. At the same time the book raised the possibility of space flight to Mars. Interestingly enough this was reinforced several years later by K. E. Tsiolkovsky’s famous first theoretical designs for rocket propulsion, which made interplanetary flight plausible.
On the other hand, as early as the middle of the second half of the 19th century, some important Russian writers and philosophers were taken by the apocalyptic notion of the future particularly evident in the work Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s famous philosopher of the time. In some of his prophecies Solovyov was amazingly on the mark. He envisioned a United Nations Organization (the name in Russian for the United Nations is nearly identical to the one used by Solovyov), the creation of the state of Israel prior to the Antichrist’s arrival, and an Ecumenical World Council of Churches (Solovyov in fact envisioned the erection of a monumental church in which churches of various rites would pray in different rooms to one Deity). The last days would be characterized by a world conflict on such a grandiose scale and with such advanced weapons as only likely in an all-out nuclear war. It is from Solovyov’s cup that many well-known Russian symbolists such as V. Briusov and A. Bely drank in their own assessments of plausible futures.
Bely’s famous novel Petersburg exploits the ambiguities and uncertainties of Russian life in the first decade of the 20th century. The author does not make clear the actual future he foresees as the outcome of the cataclysm about to engulf the Petersburg society of 1905. But it is patently obvious that physical actions within his fictional world will have metaphysical consequences along the lines envisioned by Solovyov. Briusov also views the future with the profoundest misgivings in works such as The Republic of the Southern Cross published in a volume entitled the Earth’s Axis (1907). As opposed to Bely’s veiled portrayal of the future, Briusov provides us with an outright anti-utopia in The Republic of the Southern Cross, set at the South Pole, as scientific advances have enabled the population to be protected from the rigors of the Antarctic climate. The society is living in a controlled climate with an arching dome above it—that same “Crystal Palace” which Dostoevsky had rejected some forty years earlier. Like Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground
, Briusov’s work expresses his belief that material conditions alone are insufficient for human happiness. The inhabitants of the republic become possessed by a disease which forces them to exhibit anti-social tendencies and the entire population abandons its controlled environment.
The allusion to the crystal palace forcefully re-emerges after the Bolshevik Revolution in Zamiatin’s dystopia We, perhaps the most famous Russian work on the subject in that century. For Zamiatin, imagination is one of the prime ingredients of the human personality, with or without metaphysical connotations. The protagonist is a representative of another Crystal Palace society which to a large measure has succeeded in reducing its members to the level of robots. They work, sleep, and make love according to a prescribed schedule, punching their time cards; they do not have names, only numbers. They live in transparent quarters. The protagonist, a representative of the society and an engineer on a futuristic space-ship that is meant to conquer other worlds, experiences a personality split under the influence of love. His object of desire is a female member of a “free” society settled beyond the wall that surrounds and confines the so-called Integral society within, and is one of the subversive elements intent on destroying the Integral. The plot proves abortive, and at the end of his diary, the protagonist undergoes an operation that surgically removes his faculty of imagination. As in More’s Utopia, we are introduced to two coexisting forms of social order, but neither is portrayed as desirable.
Needless to say, We did not sit well within the framework of the future promised to the masses by the Bolshevik government which took control of Russian society in 1917. While it can be said that literary history rarely coincides with the official history of any state, in the genre of literary utopia the year 1917 marks a clear caesura. Although the new regime overwhelmed the populace with the promises of political Utopia in the near future, it could not tolerate any expression of a view challenging its own promises. In other words, the political reality of Soviet Russia made it soon impossible for Russian writers to publish works of fiction with a gloomy view of the future because any admonitory utopia would simply undercut the very foundation of Soviet rhetorical persuasion. While it is true that some writers too much respected to be touched by the regime, such as Bulgakov, were successful in writing science fiction of dystopic character in the twenties (in Bulgakov’s case particularly The Heart of a Dog and Fatal Eggs), their voices were stifled by the early 1930s.
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