The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

180 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

personify its surroundings – such was the historical experience of Rome – or it could become the antithesis of that surrounding space, perceived to be in an antagonistic relation to the wilderness it ruled. In the former “absorptive” model,the citybecomes a symbol for the organic core of the universe. Nomatter where on the map the city is actually located, it feels like the “center,” a nested place. Such concentric cities are static and eternal, often situated on hills, and believed to mediate between heaven and earth. Examples are Jerusalem, Rome, and Moscow. (There is logic to Moscow’s two epithets, “New Jerusalem” and “Third Rome.”) Opposed to such concentric cities are eccentric ones, often situated on the threatened edges of empires, built as outposts on seized or conquered land. Born in violence, eccentric cities frequently have apocalyptic myths attached to their ends. They seem “willed” and inorganic, driven by crisis and subject to floods, earthquakes, and aggressive invasions. When they win, they become symbolic of a victory of mind over matter, but when they lose they spread doom, rumors of the Antichrist, and reinforce the principle that surrounding nature is hostile to human habitation and will always do battle with it.

Lisbon and Alexandria are two of the world’s great, doomed “edge cities,” but for Russia, the prototype is St. Petersburg. This city of stone was founded in 1703 by a fiat of Peter the Great as a military beachhead on a stoneless, uninhabited watery inlet. Built by conscripted labor, it fostered portents of catastrophe and death – especially by floodings and sinkings – from its earliest years. But also (and somewhat counterintuitively), its very artificiality and abrupt genesis came to represent rational utopia, the grandeur of imperial will. As one legend relates, since the swamp sucked everything in, Peter forged the city in the air and then laid it gently down on the soft earth. An airborne artificial city can do without a foundation, without organic history from the bottom up. In similar manner, the myth of Petersburg began not on the solid ground of lived experience but in literature and oral legend – which then fed into its history and in fact created that history.

Petersburg was illusory, phantasmagorical, a stage set. Gender ratios and demographics added to the sense of artifice. Petersburg exploded in size and population during the nineteenth century (whereas Napoleon’s invasion and burning, plus cholera epidemics, checked the growth of Moscow). Owing to so many military personnel, males outnumbered females in Petersburg by almost three to one, and this high number of wifeless men assured a huge population of prostitutes and attendant diseases.20 Masquerades, uniforms, military and civilian ranks – all forms that cover up and standardize the body – were the norm. In the early Bolshevik years, the fashion for public spectacles that reenacted historical scenes as street theatre further blurred the distinction