The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Pushkin was never allowed out. This scenario of sealed borders around an immense, unmappable world became another theme, both hair-raising and comic, that lasted right up until the end of the Soviet Union. Russia, so this thesis went, is so big, her borders so impenetrable, her censorship so pervasive, her people so gullible, and her ability to construct whole countries inside herself (with space to spare) so difficult to detect, that the authorities could simply fake the existence of everywhere else. In his 1992 novella Omon Ra, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962) tells the story of a young Muscovite training for a suicidal space program, only to discover that there is no program, no broadcast from outer space, only a shabby stage set strewn with empty vodka bottles down in the metro and a black drape with holes poked out for stars. In a chapter titled “Imaginary West,” the cultural anthropologist Alexei Yurchak discusses this fantasy-zone in terms of a “politically faked travelogue,” a literary genre productive as late as 2002. A simple factory worker from the Urals circa 1970 is finally allowed to go to Paris. But “after a few euphoric days in the French capital” he bumps into a painted canvas stretched on a huge frame. It had all been a theatrical backdrop, “Paris simply did not exist in the world. It never

had.”18

If a real and inaccessible outside perhaps did not exist, then an “accessible inside” to Russia has proven itself real on several levels. I have in mind Russian spatialutopias. Mostcultures,Russia’sincluded, haveutopias in time – a Golden Age in the past, a Promised Kingdom in the future. But Russia also has a vital minor tradition of timeless, salvation-bearing utopias in space. These

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 29

utopias refuse to accept the reality of Russia’s physical defenselessness, the porousness of her borders, her inability to protect her population from chronic and devastating invasion. And thus they manipulate space – that inexhaustible Russian resource – to overcome the vulnerability of space.

Yury Lotman, who devoted a good portion of his scholarly life to spatial topographies, discusses this mythical geo-ethics as codified in Russian medieval texts.19 The model has had impressive lasting power. Dostoevsky drew on it in his great novels (reverently for his righteous persons like the Elder Zosima, symbolically for his seekers like Raskolnikov, in travestied form for his petty devils), and traces of this value system survive in Stalin-era socialist realist texts. Geo-ethics combines the high status of physical matter in the Eastern Orthodox Church with the moral implication of the compass. Lands to the east are pagan, to the west are heretic: only at the Russian center can one find holiness. Righteous persons [pravedniki] wander through this space, colonizing it with their humility and charity, aware that all corruptible matter encountered down below can be resurrected in a heavenly space that is continuous with it. Eternity is not the absence of matter or the transcending of matter, but its absolute triumph. Up there, matter lasts forever. Lotman sees this “eternally thing-like” nature of salvation as an intensely Russian invention. Among the most celebrated sites of geo-ethics in Russian culture is the Invisible City of Kitezh on the bank, or the bottom, of Lake Svetloyar.

Great Kitezh was built in the Yaroslavl-Volga region northeast of Moscow in the twelfth century. In 1239 it was destroyed by the Mongol Khan Batu, grandson of the great Ghengis. No contemporaneous account of the battle mentions any survivors; the city simply vanished. To counter that unacceptable fact, popular legend decrees that the city exists but at the final moment was “transposed,” not lifted to Heaven but sunk into the lake to be saved, where its bells and golden domes are still audible and visible to the righteous person. In successive Russian times of trouble, the Kitezh legend revives and Lake Svetloyar becomes again a place of pilgrimage.

ThepopulistVladimirKorolenko(1853–1921)wroteanethnographicsketch on the region in 1890. The Symbolist Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), in his 1905 novel Anti-Christ. Peter and Alexis, linked the invisible city to all in Russian culture that Peter the Great had attempted to destroy. In his pantheistic opera The Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1904), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created Russia’s most perfect artistic tribute to dvoeverie, dual pagan-Christian faith, with a final scene set in the radiant deathlessness of the resurrected city. The Symbolists warmed to the apocalyptic resonance of this miraculous place, and twentieth-century history bore them out. A “Kitezh poem” was written by Maksimilian Voloshin in August 1919, when General