The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Lisbon and Alexandria are two of the world’s great, doomed “edge cities,” but for Russia, the prototype is St. Petersburg. This city of stone was founded in 1703 by a fiat of Peter the Great as a military beachhead on a stoneless, uninhabited watery inlet. Built by conscripted labor, it fostered portents of catastrophe and death – especially by floodings and sinkings – from its earliest years. But also (and somewhat counterintuitively), its very artificiality and abrupt genesis came to represent rational utopia, the grandeur of imperial will. As one legend relates, since the swamp sucked everything in, Peter forged the city in the air and then laid it gently down on the soft earth. An airborne artificial city can do without a foundation, without organic history from the bottom up. In similar manner, the myth of Petersburg began not on the solid ground of lived experience but in literature and oral legend – which then fed into its history and in fact created that history.

Petersburg was illusory, phantasmagorical, a stage set. Gender ratios and demographics added to the sense of artifice. Petersburg exploded in size and population during the nineteenth century (whereas Napoleon’s invasion and burning, plus cholera epidemics, checked the growth of Moscow). Owing to so many military personnel, males outnumbered females in Petersburg by almost three to one, and this high number of wifeless men assured a huge population of prostitutes and attendant diseases.20 Masquerades, uniforms, military and civilian ranks – all forms that cover up and standardize the body – were the norm. In the early Bolshevik years, the fashion for public spectacles that reenacted historical scenes as street theatre further blurred the distinction

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 181

between an actual event and its stylization for posterity. Outside those rituals, masks, and tightly fitting costumes was chaos: invisibility and the abyss.

In this startling set of images from urban semiotics, we see the outline of a Nietzschean dichotomy.Petersburgis anunstable,apocalypticcity of Dionysian energies, barely contained by an Apollonian crust of rock and granite. This tension sits like a coiled spring at the center of Bely’s Petersburg. Its first chapter contains a section, “Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes,” in which the senator ApollonApollonovich–aman“bornfor solitary confinement,” modeledonthe real-life obscurantist Procurator of the Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827–1907) – rushes out to work through the fog along rectilinear streets in the black cube of his carriage; “proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves.”21 The Dionysian revolution creeps in, however, in the form of conspiracy, his son’s red silk domino, the ticking of the bomb, and the ominous rising waters of the Neva.

Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely provided the myth with its pedigree in prose, but Pushkin the poet is its founder. His 1833 narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, part ode and part personal tragedy, is based on the devastating flood of November 7, 1824, in which the Neva River rose six feet above street level in a single hour and claimed hundreds of lives. The poem opens on Peter the Great envisaging his great city rising from the wilderness. It closes on the corpse of a poor government clerk, Evgeny, driven mad after losing his sweetheart to the flood. The bereaved clerk had dared to shake his fist at the statue of Peter on Senate Square, which clattered down off its pedestal and chased its puny challenger around the city. The flood was nature’s vengeance against the very idea of building a city in such a wild unnatural place, but the imperial city could withstand it; the defeat and death of the poor clerk by the statue of Peter became a symbol of this double-pronged attack against the helpless, unheroic little man by outraged nature and merciless autocrat. Pushkin’s 1829 notebooks contain a startling sketch of the statue – without its rider. The specter of the Riderless Horse has haunted Russians ever since: the Bronze Horseman was death-dealing, certainly, but where would their country gallop without a powerful despot in the saddle?

In Petersburg, power erupts unexpectedly and punitively: the emperor, the river, a conspiracy, a sudden frost. These eruptions cause personal losses that can drive residents out of their minds. But before that moment, there is a flash of insight more profound than anything that could have evolved in a gentler way. During one of the extended drunken hallucinations in Bely’s Petersburg, the Bronze Horseman descends once again from his pedestal and pays a visit to the revolutionary terrorist Dudkin. Glowing white hot, the statue of Peter “pours intohisveins in metals” the resolvenecessary to murderthe doubleagent

182 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature