The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Medieval versus post-Petrine Russia is often discussed as part of a larger question, “Russia versus the West.” Yury Lotman, together with his colleague in cultural semiotics Boris Uspensky, offered a highly provocative and controversial schematization of this binary in two now-classic essays from the late 1970s.14 The first essay, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture” (1977), argues that traditional Russian culture had no concept of “progress” in the tentative, gradualist, Western sense of the term. It could not, they reasoned, because the archaic Russian mentality does not acknowledge “neutral zones” where value has not yet been assigned. Either a space is “protected” and monitored by theappropriatesaint, or “unprotected”and open to all manner of devils and mischievous spirits. How a given culture organizes its profane time-space is reflected in the structure of the otherworld or afterlife that it projects. And it is significant, so Lotman and Uspensky argue, that the Russian Orthodox wing of Christianity never accepted the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory, nor developed its own analogue for it.

Purgatory shares with other transitional chronotopes the idea of a “surplus,” a “free tomorrow” during which the nature of our destiny can be altered by our own efforts (or by the efforts of those praying for us). Precisely that idea was lacking. Rather than such linear progress, historical motion in the Russian context more resembled an oscillation between fixed positive and negative poles. If, in tenth-century Kiev, a pagan temple was torn down, the Christian equivalent had to be built on the same site, in order that the pagan or heathen god be literally and spatially replaced, squeezed out of its space. The Russian impulse is not to “try it out and see” in pragmatic fashion, but rather to define, cleanse, and re-occupy.

“Doubled” or superimposed sites are rich concentrators of meaning, but they are fragile. In the blink of an eye and with no explanations or intermediate steps, they can flip from godly to demonic, from clean to unclean – and back again. One good example, consonant with the temples mentioned by Lotman and Uspensky, comes from the early, ebullient post-communist 1990s: the rebuilding of Moscow’s gargantuan Cathedral of Christ the Savior, demolished by Stalin’s order on December 5, 1931.15

In 1994, on the initiative of theRussian Orthodox Patriarch AleksyII together with Moscow’s ambitious Mayor Luzhkov, it was resolved that an exact replica would be reconstructed on the precise site of the original cathedral. The church had been dynamited to make way for a massive Palace of Soviets, eight meters taller than the Empire State Building, topped by a 6,000-ton statue of Lenin. But

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for two decades, nothing went up. Construction accidents were common. In the popular imagination, the denuded site was seen (with a mix of irony, superstition, and reverence) as “sacred” and thus its new profane mission cursed; it was rumored that a local holy fool visited the construction pit and predicted that nothing would rise out of it. In 1958, Khrushchev ordered the huge hole in the ground refitted as a heated swimming pool. Considerable public debate over the future of the site went on during the glasnost years, beginning in the mid-1980s: suggestions ranged from an empty site with a play of light to a small chapel or museum commemorating the victims of Stalinism. The Millennial Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus'(988-1988) gave fresh impetus to a “sacred” solution. The final decision to rebuild the cathedral, taken by secret decree, played in to a massive revival of Moscow’s elaborate mythology of sacred towers, Kremlin walls, and twelve gates - proof of her status as the Third Jerusalem, heir to Constantinople, in fulfillment of the Heavenly City prophesied in the Book of Revelation.16 The completed structure is topped by a huge golden cross on its cupola, symbolizing the repentance of the Russian people; its underground levels feature a business center, oversized parking lot for foreign cars, luxury sauna, and restaurant. The reconsecration of the cathedral in 1997 was a major victory for the energetic and enterprising patriarch, the culmination of his campaign to return nationalized property to the Church and reassert control over confiscated saints’ relics. This reclamation of “lost” relics was relatively easy for Aleksy to arrange, since he had been elected Patriarch in 1990 after thirty-two years in the church hierarchy with simultaneous service in the ecclesiastical subsection of the secret police, the KGB. Without such collaboration, he could not have risen through the ranks of the Church to wage battle with the remnants of the atheistic state.