The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

One recent study of physical Petersburg opens on the observation that its middlespaces arefew.24 Surprisingly, perhaps,forthe officialproletariancapital of the world, industrial spaces like factories were not welcomed into the literary myth but exiled to its margins (either to the outskirts of the city, or to the Urals and the south). In Petersburg stories proper, the copy clerk Akaky Akakievich and his pre-industrial quill pen are recycled up through the twentieth century. Huge urban castle-fortresses, once the luxury residences of aristocrats and the royal family but now decaying, subdivided tenement houses, suggest anything but a modernizing “window to the West,” which was the ideal city of the Petrine Imperial Project. In this time-space, urban rumor is always frenetic. A Petersburg text foregrounds Gogol’s truth (which Dostoevsky then made a point of honor): that once uttered, any story will almost inevitably circulate, incorporate new and usually nastier elements, and become gossip or slander serving the interests or pathologies of its most recent speaker (the urge to re-speak out of one’s own perspective being universal). Such runaway, randomly multiplied words are arguably the collective hero of Bely’s Petersburg. The old senator has always assumed that words generate reality. However, in the midst of the “Dionysian” crises of 1905, the senator suddenly realizes that he controls and creates nothing at all with his words: “History has changed. The ancient myths are not believed, and Apollon Apollonovich is not the god Apollo. He is a civil servant” (ch. 7, p. 231). After the general strike began, although he continued to sit in his office and “order after order promptly sped off into the darkness of the provinces . . . he felt himself a skeleton from which Russia had fallen away” (p. 232). This flesh-and-blood Russia, the “darkness of the provinces” over which he had no control, was anti-Petersburg. Most of this vital untracked space is rural, forest, or steppe. But if it has an urban image at all, it is Moscow.

What is the Moscow Myth, and how does Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita contribute to it? Gogol was among the first to point out, in 1836, the symbolic importance of Petersburg being masculine gender in Russian (it ends in a consonant), and Moscow [Moskva], with its -a- ending, feminine. The roundness of the city center, its confluence on several inland trade routes, its bulbous domes and bulging cacophonous bells, the concentric circles spiral-ing out from the Kremlin and the fact that it was, until 1812, largely a city of wood, have all helped to connect the city with a womb: all-encompassing and organic. If Petersburg poets like Blok found themes of bleakness, abandonment, the arbitrary violence of power and blinding white snow compatible with the

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energy of their revolutionary city, Moscow was a retreat. It looked back, not forward; inward, not beyond. After Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) introduced her fellow poet Osip Mandelstam to Moscow in 1916, taking him on tours of ancient churches and cemeteries and persuading him that Russian history was as worthy of his pen as ancient Greece or medieval France, Mandelstam’s cosmopolitan poetry broadened its scope to include Russian architecture, history, and fate.25 Tsvetaeva herself wrote a cycle of poems in spring and summer 1916, “Verses about Moscow,” that self-consciously juxtaposed the two cities as male–female, imperial–provincial, prideful–humiliated, the seat of power versus the ringing bells of faith. Its fifth poem declares:

But higher than you, tsars, are the bells.

As long as they thunder forth out of the sky-blue depths –

Moscow’s primacy is indisputable.

– And the entire forty times forty churches

Laughs at the arrogance of tsars!

In two brilliantly mocking poems from her 1931 cycle “Verses to Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva portrays her great predecessor’s relationship to Petersburg as that of rebellious poetic genius against the arrogant Tsar Nicholas I – “butcher, censor, poeticide.” Moscow was a messy city, not in official uniform, and thus her virtues were more than skin deep.