The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Inwardness, warmth, darkness, and moistness – the qualities of fertile soil – are central to the myth of Moscow as a regenerative site. It was in Mother Moscow (restored as Russia’s capital in 1918) that the first underground metro system was constructed in the Soviet state between 1931 and 1935, an enormous showcase task.26 To compensate for a scarcity of skilled technicians and a rushed timetable, the government resorted to prison labor bolstered by cults of heroic sacrifice and youthful enthusiasm. The “metro-builder” became a new national hero, an unprecedented type of frontiersman who would conquer the underworld much as arctic explorers conquered the North Pole and cosmonauts would later conquer outer space. The underground stations – at unheard-of depths of twenty to thirty meters, designed to double as bomb shelters – were to resemble palaces, radiant with light. Taming the damp, at times recalcitrant earth for the metro project became Moscow’s equivalent to taming the floodwaters of the Neva for the Petersburg Myth.

Moscow, first mentioned in the Kievan chronicles in 1147, is three times as old as Petersburg. But the myth feels somehow younger, more diffuse, greener, and – one might say – more promiscuous. Moscow’s huge city houses were old, wooden, walled in with shabby fences behind which their owners cultivated large vegetable gardens, after the manner of the Russian village. People lived not

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 185

in the streets, cafe´s, or paved squares, but at home. Unlike Petersburg, full of bureaucrats and military personnel, Moscow has been traditionally associated with tradesmen, families, and children.

A good introduction to the Moscow Myth was provided after the 1997 celebration of the city’s 850th birthday by the cultural historian Svetlana Boym, an eyewitness to the festivities.27 Boym claims that the myth of the city was consolidated during that jubilee year as never before in its history. In a series of mass spectacles aided by the latest technology, Russian tradition was reinvented alongside a nostalgic tribute to Soviet grand style. The tradition invoked was dual: Moscow as the Third Rome, and Moscow as the Big Village. In the first myth, initiated by a seventeenth-century monk more as a warning against abuse of power than as glorious prophecy, Moscow was declared the heir to both Christian Rome and Byzantium, an image of heavenly Jerusalem. She was to be the final Rome; “a fourth there shall not be.”

The “Big Village” myth was equally fraught. Moscow’s mayor since 1996, Yury Luzhkov (who, we recall from Chapter 3, sponsored the reconstruction of Christ the Savior Cathedral in the early 1990s) has a passion for monumen-talization. Not any monument will do, however: only those in accord with a healthy, regenerative, slightly childlike and na¨ıve vision of the city. Neither the imperial fac¸ades of Petersburg nor the unhappy post-communistwork of memory and grief is appropriate for the refurbished Moscow Myth. A serviceable common language was found, however, in the cozy, intimate characters from rural Russian folklore, in a mix of commercialism with the cartoon, church bells with pagan ritual. This sense of Moscow as both wonder tale and Christian terminus is central to Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The three cities mentioned by Lotman as prime examples of the embedded, concentric city – Jerusalem, Rome, and Moscow – are precisely the sites, actual or implied, of this novel. But Bulgakov is a complex contributor to the Moscow Myth. He stitches in a great deal that is associated with Petersburg, most noticeably from Gogol.

As prosewriterandplaywright,Bulgakov waspermeatedbyGogoliantexts. In 1924,he published thestory “Diaboliad,”where a Soviet versionofGogol’spoor clerk Akaky Akakievich goes mad after the manner of Dostoevsky’s Golyad-kin in The Double. That same year he wrote “The Adventures of Chichikov,” a dream-poem in ten entries, in which the hero of Gogol’s Dead Souls turns up in Soviet Moscow during the free-enterprise heyday of the New Economic Policy (NEP). There he finds all the familiar scoundrels alive and well, cheating the state and defrauding the public, and he finds himself a cozy berth too, only to end having his belly slit open by Soviet officials to extract swallowed diamonds.28 Two of Bulgakov’s most famous novellas show Gogolian

186 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature