The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 183

sleeping-ledge.”23 A new hero was born out of the Nietzschean binary between Dionysus and Apollo: the Bolshevik recruit as trigger-happy unholy fool.

One recent study of physical Petersburg opens on the observation that its middlespaces arefew.24 Surprisingly, perhaps,forthe officialproletariancapital of the world, industrial spaces like factories were not welcomed into the literary myth but exiled to its margins (either to the outskirts of the city, or to the Urals and the south). In Petersburg stories proper, the copy clerk Akaky Akakievich and his pre-industrial quill pen are recycled up through the twentieth century. Huge urban castle-fortresses, once the luxury residences of aristocrats and the royal family but now decaying, subdivided tenement houses, suggest anything but a modernizing “window to the West,” which was the ideal city of the Petrine Imperial Project. In this time-space, urban rumor is always frenetic. A Petersburg text foregrounds Gogol’s truth (which Dostoevsky then made a point of honor): that once uttered, any story will almost inevitably circulate, incorporate new and usually nastier elements, and become gossip or slander serving the interests or pathologies of its most recent speaker (the urge to re-speak out of one’s own perspective being universal). Such runaway, randomly multiplied words are arguably the collective hero of Bely’s Petersburg. The old senator has always assumed that words generate reality. However, in the midst of the “Dionysian” crises of 1905, the senator suddenly realizes that he controls and creates nothing at all with his words: “History has changed. The ancient myths are not believed, and Apollon Apollonovich is not the god Apollo. He is a civil servant” (ch. 7, p. 231). After the general strike began, although he continued to sit in his office and “order after order promptly sped off into the darkness of the provinces . . . he felt himself a skeleton from which Russia had fallen away” (p. 232). This flesh-and-blood Russia, the “darkness of the provinces” over which he had no control, was anti-Petersburg. Most of this vital untracked space is rural, forest, or steppe. But if it has an urban image at all, it is Moscow.

What is the Moscow Myth, and how does Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita contribute to it? Gogol was among the first to point out, in 1836, the symbolic importance of Petersburg being masculine gender in Russian (it ends in a consonant), and Moscow [Moskva], with its -a- ending, feminine. The roundness of the city center, its confluence on several inland trade routes, its bulbous domes and bulging cacophonous bells, the concentric circles spiral-ing out from the Kremlin and the fact that it was, until 1812, largely a city of wood, have all helped to connect the city with a womb: all-encompassing and organic. If Petersburg poets like Blok found themes of bleakness, abandonment, the arbitrary violence of power and blinding white snow compatible with the