The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapter 7

Symbolist and Modernist world-building: three cities, three novels, and the Devil

1904–05:Russo-Japanese War, ending in Russian defeat

1905:The “first Russian revolution” (general strike, establishment of

State Duma)

1914–17:Great War with Germany and Austria (later called World War I)

1914:Zamyatin, a naval engineer, in England supervising the

construction of Russian icebreakers 1917 (spring): Strikes, war losses, and corruption at court force abdication of

Romanovs; installation of Provisional Government

1917 (fall)Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (St. Petersburg)

1918–21:Civil War between Reds, Greens (peasants), and Whites (tsarist

forces)

1921:New Economic Policy (NEP) partially restores capitalism at retail

level

1925:Bulgakov begins eleven-year association with Moscow Art

Theatre

1927:Closing down of private publishing houses

1931:Zamyatin emigrates from USSR

1931–33:Collectivization and resultant famine claims 1 million lives

1936–38:The “Great Terror” (two million Soviet citizens repressed)

1937:Death of Zamyatin of heart disease at age fifty-three

1937:Death of Bely at age fifty-four

1940:Death of Bulgakov at age forty-nine, blind from uremia, after

dictating final draft of “The Master and Margarita” (first publ.

1966)

In 1893, eight years before publishing his magisterial study “L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,” the Symbolist critic Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941) wrote a curious essay titled “On Reasons for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature, and on its New Tendencies.”1 It is often taken to mark the end of the Age of the Novel and the beginning of the Symbolist era. In this essay, Merezhkovsky discusses the arrival in Europe of Impressionism, an artistic movement – he approvingly notes – that cared more about mystical content and a heightened

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