The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

184 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

energy of their revolutionary city, Moscow was a retreat. It looked back, not forward; inward, not beyond. After Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) introduced her fellow poet Osip Mandelstam to Moscow in 1916, taking him on tours of ancient churches and cemeteries and persuading him that Russian history was as worthy of his pen as ancient Greece or medieval France, Mandelstam’s cosmopolitan poetry broadened its scope to include Russian architecture, history, and fate.25 Tsvetaeva herself wrote a cycle of poems in spring and summer 1916, “Verses about Moscow,” that self-consciously juxtaposed the two cities as male–female, imperial–provincial, prideful–humiliated, the seat of power versus the ringing bells of faith. Its fifth poem declares:

But higher than you, tsars, are the bells.

As long as they thunder forth out of the sky-blue depths –

Moscow’s primacy is indisputable.

– And the entire forty times forty churches

Laughs at the arrogance of tsars!

In two brilliantly mocking poems from her 1931 cycle “Verses to Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva portrays her great predecessor’s relationship to Petersburg as that of rebellious poetic genius against the arrogant Tsar Nicholas I – “butcher, censor, poeticide.” Moscow was a messy city, not in official uniform, and thus her virtues were more than skin deep.

Inwardness, warmth, darkness, and moistness – the qualities of fertile soil – are central to the myth of Moscow as a regenerative site. It was in Mother Moscow (restored as Russia’s capital in 1918) that the first underground metro system was constructed in the Soviet state between 1931 and 1935, an enormous showcase task.26 To compensate for a scarcity of skilled technicians and a rushed timetable, the government resorted to prison labor bolstered by cults of heroic sacrifice and youthful enthusiasm. The “metro-builder” became a new national hero, an unprecedented type of frontiersman who would conquer the underworld much as arctic explorers conquered the North Pole and cosmonauts would later conquer outer space. The underground stations – at unheard-of depths of twenty to thirty meters, designed to double as bomb shelters – were to resemble palaces, radiant with light. Taming the damp, at times recalcitrant earth for the metro project became Moscow’s equivalent to taming the floodwaters of the Neva for the Petersburg Myth.

Moscow, first mentioned in the Kievan chronicles in 1147, is three times as old as Petersburg. But the myth feels somehow younger, more diffuse, greener, and – one might say – more promiscuous. Moscow’s huge city houses were old, wooden, walled in with shabby fences behind which their owners cultivated large vegetable gardens, after the manner of the Russian village. People lived not