The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 171

Zamyatin’s “sailor aloft in the storm” could not differ more profoundly from Tolstoy’s sailor with a compass in Anna Karenina, who points out to adulterers their singular, cart-drawn course.

Modernist time-spaces and their modes of disruption

Our sampling of the Symbolist–Modernist period will be organized around three great novels (and in passing, some poetry) associated with two myth-laden cities. The first novel, set in the imperial capital, is Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916–22). The second, set in Moscow, is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928–40). The third, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), unfolds in the fantastic glass metropolis of OneState in the twenty-sixth century – and might be said to distribute, in concentrated and exaggerated form on opposite sides of the Green Wall, the myths of those two archetypical Russian cities. These three novels did not “influence” one another. Only one, Petersburg, was published in Russian during its author’s lifetime. We appeared abroad in the 1920s first in English and then in Czech; it was published in Russia in its original Russian only in 1988. Bulgakov finished The Master and Margarita during the dark Stalinist years; he could not have imagined its publication in the USSR as he knew it. The novel first appeared, posthumously and heavily censored, in the thaw year 1966.

Although these three works belong to different stylistic traditions, intriguing comparisons can be made. Each novel disorients and disrupts the flow of the narrative, to achieve the “estrangement” and displacement so important to the texture of post-Realist prose. Bely’s Symbolist novel Petersburg is a productive starting point, for it combines arcane theories of cognition with a hallucinating Dionysian subconscious. For Bely, the very act of naming creates a primary aural reality, a “third world” of sound that enables the poet to access previously non-existent realms.10 Complicating these ambitions in Petersburg, however, is the narrator’s deflating, endearing irony, which unexpectedly humanizes the plot at crucial moments and turns it into something approaching comedy – a signature technique of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line. The plot of Petersburg can even be seen as a variant on the political conspiracies of Demons (a novel that at one point obsessed Bely) with a nod to the parricide in The Brothers Karamazov. The time is the revolutionary year 1905. The philosophy student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov has made a rash promise to a splinter terrorist group to assassinate his own father, Apollon Apollonovich, a senator of high rank. Horrified when he is actually summoned to plant a bomb in his father’s house, the son tries to decline, but he is compromised by a double agent. So the son sets the mechanism; the bomb, hidden in a sardine tin, starts to tick.