The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

To this confluence of philosophy, science, physiology and metaphysics we must add two crises of a different sort: the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution on the ruins of Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, and an intensification of political terrorism. After decades of isolated terrorist acts against the government – which some in the artistic avant-garde applauded, but most deplored – revolutionary violence against officials suddenly rose steeply.8 There were 9,000 targeted casualties throughout the country between 1905 and 1907. Terrorist attacks and banditry became so common that they were no longer featured individually in the newspapers but listed in special sections devoted to that day’s assassinations and “expropriations.” The type of terrorist also changed. In the nineteenth century (except in the fictive visions of Dostoevsky, who foresaw everything at its most ecstatic and terrible), an aura of self-sacrificing asceticism still surrounded such violent acts, as if they were the work of a righteous person, a pravednik. The four assassins of Tsar Alexander II, hanged in 1881, enjoyed this status. The twentieth century saw an influx into the terrorist ranks of cynical, profiteering, pleasure-seeking and criminal types. Their perfect representative was the double agent who extorts equally from both sides. This perverse climate was exacerbated by certain elite fin de sie`cle fashions: for suicide, sexual experimentation, opium, and alcoholism as a path to higher truth. To Tolstoy this was all the most revolting decadence, the result of a craze for losing control of one’s body. To others, however, the “Dionysian” element in Russian consciousness and society seemed at last to be breaking forth on its own, releasing otherwise inaccessible energy. This zone, both horrifying and thrilling, expanded to embrace the entire country during the next two decades: world war, revolution, civil war.

In 1923, Evgeny Zamyatin, a naval engineer, wrote an essay summing up the effectsonRussian Modernism of Nietzsche’s Dionysianism, Einstein’srelativity, and the campaigns against the “illusion of realism.” He titled it “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.” His opening question was: “Ask point blank: ‘What is revolution?’” His answer:

Revolution is everywhere, in everything . . . A literature that is alive . . . is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck.

In a storm, you must have a man aloft. Today we are in the midst of a storm . . . Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (a genre scene); but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? . . . Let yesterday’s cart creak along the well-paved highways . . . What we need today are automobiles, airplanes, flickering, flight, dots, dashes, seconds.9

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Zamyatin’s “sailor aloft in the storm” could not differ more profoundly from Tolstoy’s sailor with a compass in Anna Karenina, who points out to adulterers their singular, cart-drawn course.

Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption

Our sampling of the Symbolist–Modernist period will be organized around three great novels (and in passing, some poetry) associated with two myth-laden cities. The first novel, set in the imperial capital, is Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916–22). The second, set in Moscow, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928–40). The third, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), unfolds in the fantastic glass metropolis of OneState in the twenty-sixth century – and might be said to distribute, in concentrated and exaggerated form on opposite sides of the Green Wall, the myths of those two archetypical Russian cities. These three novels did not “influence” one another. Only one, Petersburg, was published in Russian during its author’s lifetime. We appeared abroad in the 1920s first in English and then in Czech; it was published in Russia in its original Russian only in 1988. Bulgakov finished The Master and Margarita during the dark Stalinist years; he could not have imagined its publication in the USSR as he knew it. The novel first appeared, posthumously and heavily censored, in the thaw year 1966.