Russia on the Edge

Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity

Edith W. Clowes

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780801477256
• eBook ISBN: 9780801461149
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Russian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.

Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book.

In Russia on the Edge, literary and cultural critics will find the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture. For intellectual historians, cultural geographers, and political scientists the book is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold. The book introduces nonspecialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia's writers and public intellectuals.

1 DECONSTRUCTING IMPERIAL MOSCOW

Look, Orlov, since we don’t live forever,

It would be a shame to miscalculate

That you and I live at the edge of the world

And that somewhere out there really is Moscow

With its gulfs, lagoons, mountains

With its events of global import

And its Muscovites, proud of themselves

But no, Moscow is where you and I are standing

Moscow will abide where we tell it to

The real Moscow is wherever we put it!

That is—in Moscow.

—Dmitry Prigov, Moscow and Muscovites (1982)

Creative moments in the lives of the world’s major cities often come during times of identity crisis. Even before the return of Soviet Russia’s capital to Moscow in March 1918, the imperial Russian capital, St. Petersburg, experienced a crisis of identity—it had always been, as the great historian V. O. Kliuchevskii allegedly remarked, the “center on the periphery.”1 In his path-breaking novel Petersburg (1916), Andrei Belyi brought to the surface the fissures in identity that had been widening throughout the nineteenth century—Asia versus Europe, center versus periphery, Mongol versus Slav, revolutionary versus bureaucrat. In Belyi’s rendition, St. Petersburg as center is full of borders and rifts that render it dysfunctional. New life would open up, the novel’s young characters dreamed, through detonating a bomb and assassinating a highly placed government bureaucrat in whom these divisions were personified. In another famous novel, Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, written during the Russian Civil War, the dystopian One-State—based in part on Andrei Belyi’s novelistic portrait of Petersburg and the realia of revolutionary Petrograd—is depicted as a center that has walled itself off from its periphery and has the most repressive relationship to that periphery.2 By the 1960s and 1970s when Andrei Bitov wrote his experimental novel Pushkin House (1978), the old capital had become a moribund, former center on the periphery, now a city-museum, stunning but fixed in time, and surrounded by a wasteland of crumbling, prefabricated Soviet apartment houses.

Like St. Petersburg in the early twentieth century, Moscow of the late twentieth century experienced an identity crisis, and along with it a creative surge. Starting in the 1980s Moscow, the Soviet capital and imperial hub of the communist universe, the so-called second world, was a center starting to worry about its increasingly peripheral nature. The deconstruction of Moscow myth—Muscovite, Soviet, and otherwise—was becoming prominent as both a literary and a critical theme. This chapter investigates this literary and critical deconstruction of Moscow, which opened the dialogue about Russian identity.

Historically, in contrast to St. Petersburg, Moscow has rarely suffered a debilitating crisis of identity. Since its founding in 1147 it gladly played the role of the upstart, the youngest, the most dynamic, and aggressively militant of Russian cities. In the early sixteenth century Muscovite propaganda arrogated to Moscow the position of inheritor of the recently fallen Constantinople and the center of the Eastern Orthodox world. Even when Peter the Great moved the imperial capital to St. Petersburg in 1712, Moscow remained the capital closest to Russian hearts and, with the founding of Moscow University in 1755, the intellectual center of Russia. By the 1830s it had become the home base for Russia’s nationalist Slavophiles, bent on preserving distinctive qualities of Russian history and culture against the incursions of Peter’s and Catherine’s Westernization.3

The current crisis of identity arose in the late-Soviet literary and critical resistance to the city of Moscow as a people-crushing imperial center, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the subsequent repression of the Czechoslovak experiment in liberal socialism, the Prague Spring. The invasion marked the end of the post-Stalinist wave of utopian hopes. Rethinking Moscow played out in variations on two utopian themes—the myth of the insular community and the Atlantis myth of the lost, sunken city.

One approach to rethinking Moscow can be found in late- and post-Soviet satires portraying the center as an island unto itself possessed of remarkable centripetal force, which blocks relations with the periphery. The first example is Venedikt Erofeev’s brilliantly playful 1969 novella Moscow-Petushki (Moskva-Petushki), written directly after the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring.4 Russia’s premier satirist Vladimir Voinovich, working in exile, framed his hilarious futuristic spoof Moscow 2042 (Moskva 2042) in 1982, the year of Leonid Brezhnev’s death.5 Most recently the island/isolation motif combines with the motif of the hidden city in Tatiana Tolstaia’s postmodernist utopian parody, Slynx (Kys′, 2000).6 Instead of dealing with the oppressive imperial overlay in Moscow, as the “sunken city” works do, these works focus on the issue of the center’s self-isolation from all peripheries and neighbors and its subsequent degradation.

The Atlantis myth builds on a concept of the psychologically or politically repressed, the forgotten, and the authentic. It often appears as the image of a hidden community, in some way remembered and revealed, which undermines the oppressive center, exposing its inauthenticity. I take this image of the “sunken Atlantis” from Galina Belaia’s series of conversations and essays published in Ogonek in 1991 under that title.7 The sunken city motif emerges in 1982, in the cycle Moscow and Muscovites (Moskva i moskvichi) by the Moscow Conceptualist artist and poet Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007). Around 1990 it reappears in the cultural criticism of the deconstructionist philosopher Mikhail Ryklin, particularly in his seminal essay on the Moscow metro, “Bodies of Terror” (1990).8 Near the same time Viktor Pelevin in his 1991 story “Vera Pavlovna’s Ninth Dream” (Deviatyi son Very Pavlovny), gives the motif another twist, combining it with the biblical myth of the flood. In all these works what is underground, hidden, or sunken becomes an important challenge to the outer and visible signs of empire above ground.

As a center, Moscow differs from concepts of the center in postmodern and postcolonial theory. Paradoxically—since it is geographically contiguous with its peripheries—Moscow is relatively disconnected from its hinterlands. It stands out because of its disconnectedness from its peripheries. In this way it resembles the utopian and dystopian traditions of the island or insular city that we find, for example, in Thomas Moore’s island of Utopia, Campanella’s seven-walled city on a hill in City of the Sun, Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s glass and aluminum palace in What Is To Be Done?, and Zamiatin’s glass-walled city in We. At other moments it resembles an encircled camp. The “metautopian” experimental fiction of the last three decades of the Soviet period—to which Erofeev and Voinovich contributed—did a great deal conceptually to break apart the closed, fixed utopian borders of the Soviet state and to open up this “utopian” zone of fixed thinking to the fluidity of other perspectives and alternatives.9

It is important to point out that the two late-Soviet works that begin the process of deconstructing Moscow as a self-isolating city, spinning in its own sphere, are written from an “eccentric” perspective, by émigrés who were looking in at the center from the outside. The internal émigré, Venedikt Erofeev, and the more usual kind of émigré, Vladimir Voinovich, both view the totalitarian center from the periphery and focus on the overwhelming centripetal force of the center that allows for no real periphery or, at most, just the fantasy of a periphery, which is ultimately smashed.

The drunken narrator of Moscow-Petushki, Venichka, tries to escape Moscow, the Kremlin, and its oppressive ideology, to Petushki. Although a real town outside Moscow, Petushki represents for Venichka a private, pleasurable land of Cockaigne. He imagines taking the suburban commuter train (elektrichka), only to realize at the end that he never left the Kursk Station in Moscow. In the last four chapters settings in Petushki overlap with familiar locations in Moscow—Kursk Station Square, the Garden Ring, and finally the Kremlin. In distinction to the “progress” or journey on which it is loosely modeled, Aleksandr Radishchev’s eighteenth-century Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, there is no “progress”; there is only a mental journey that ends up in the same place it started. At the end Venichka imagines his own death, like Evgeny in Aleksandr Pushkin’s poem, “The Bronze Horseman,” chased down by the twentieth-century equivalent of the Bronze Horseman, Vera Mukhina’s 1937 statue of “The Worker and the Collective Farmer.”10 Absurdly, given that he has just died, he manages to write about the moment of his death.

Moscow in this work is a space of squalorous liquor stores and dark, dirty stairwells, a city inhabited by the dark shadows of thuggish policemen and dominated by a powerful nerve center—the Kremlin. Venichka claims never to have seen the Kremlin; when he goes in search of it, he ends up at Kursk Station, which opens the way to his imagined escape from Moscow’s centripetal force to his own private utopia in the village of Petushki. At the end, confused by the impression that his destination of Petushki looks suspiciously like familiar parts of Moscow, Venichka finally arrives at the Kremlin, even as he is being chased and beaten by thugs. There is no escape.

In Voinovich’s novel Moscow 2042, Moscow is an isolated enclave, walled off from everywhere, even its suburbs; nominally ruled by a despot; and entertaining false pretensions to being cutting-edge and high-tech. The protagonist and first-person narrator Vitaly Kartsev, who has been living in emigration in Munich for several years, time travels in 1982 to Moscow sixty years hence in order to do research for a science-fiction novel he is planning about the future Moscow. Arriving in the Moscow of 2042, he finds a foul, dirty city, masked by a healthy dose of self-delusion. Although everything is built of plastic and cardboard and food is made of excrement, citizens believe that they are living in an advanced society. This future Moscow is built around three ring roads known as the “Communist Rings” or “KK” (Kol′tsa Kommunizma), which resemble the three ring roads familiar in present-day Moscow. To go across each ring requires a special visa. The further one gets from the small inner sanctum inside what we know as the Boulevard Ring, the more unbearable life becomes.

It is significant that Moscow 2042 marks the shift in the conceptualization of identity from temporal categories to spatial, territorial ones. Here, as in many postmodernist works, the interaction of history, time, and power becomes the object of parody. Control over Moscow’s isolation extends beyond physical barriers to temporal barriers. Deliberately planning (or having planned, depending on one’s temporal perspective) his science-fiction novel to end with the fall of the regime current in 2042, Kartsev finds himself being strongly pressed during his time-travel visit to alter his version of history. Incongruously, Moscow’s 2042 rulers already have the published version of the book that Kartsev has come to “research” and insist that he change the ending so that their “utopia” will not be invaded by a Solzhenitsyn-like, underground leader, Karnavalov. Even through time these rulers absurdly attempt to hold writers, even exiled writers, under control and to preserve Moscow’s independence and isolation.

The point in both of these tales is that Moscow as a centripetal force has isolated itself in three ways: ideologically, through its closed, single-minded leadership; physically, through building walls and barriers; and temporally, by controlling the narrative about its history. Moscow is so powerful vis-à-vis its periphery that it sucks in everything around it to its center, leaving the periphery all but non-existent, even in the minds of those attempting to escape it or change it. There is no place to escape.

The sunken or hidden city theme in Dmitry Prigov’s Moscow and Muscovites hints at the opposition of the hidden “imagined community” of thinking, creative people and the visible “imperial” city with its stone monuments and buildings and ubiquitous police force. Moscow and Muscovites plays with the myths underlying what cultural historians now call the “Moscow text,” that complex of city mapping, history, creative images, interpretations, and narratives that give the city its particular identity.11 In a brief prose foreword the poet mock-seriously states his immodest culturological goals: “This book undertakes to lay the methodological groundwork for the study of the Moscow theme through poetic media in correlation with the historiosophical concepts of our time” (I, 28).12 That this preface is a parody b...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 DECONSTRUCTING IMPERIAL MOSCOW
• 2 POSTMODERNIST EMPIRE MEETS HOLY RUS'
• 3 ILLUSORY EMPIRE
• 4 RUSSIA’S DECONSTRUCTIONIST WESTERNIZER
• 5 THE PERIPHERY AND ITS NARRATIVES
• 6 DEMONIZING THE POST-SOVIET OTHER
• CONCLUSION