The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 187

from a congenial, authoritative distance, as might a responsible historian or an epic poet. Ethically, The Master and Margarita is a traditional humanist novel, with domestic tranquility as its final reward. Its hero and heroine, rescued by Woland from the Stalinist capital but not qualifying as martyrs who might live in the Light, end up crossing a moss-covered bridge to their new home. It is set (we are led to believe) in some quiet rural corner under blossoming cherry trees, in eternally recurring Moscow time.

Can there be a myth of the future? If so, how does Zamyatin’s OneState distribute, on either side of its Green Wall, the mythical essence of Russia’s two major cities? One way of reading the novel We in the context of the Russian literary tradition is to see it as a distilling chamber for several prominent tendencies, or anxieties, associated with the literature of each capital.

The overwhelming binary remains city versus country, the urban factory versus the rural village or steppe. Inside OneState, the architectural principle of Petersburg reigns, albeit grossly exaggerated and essentialized: the triumph of the grid, square, box, the regimented “life in uniform” with its respect for reflecting surfaces, external rank, and standardized norms. It is one of Zamyatin’s masterful twists on the Petersburg tradition to represent the birth of D-503’s individuated consciousness (the birth of an “I” out of a “We,” recounted in entry 16) as the softening up of a mirror. Throughout the Gogol– Dostoevsky line, the anguish of a hero’s isolation, humiliation, and descent into madness is portrayed with the help of mirrors. These poor clerks gaze at themselves, are revolted by what they see reflected in that flat surface, deny that it exists, fantasize a substitute – and as a sign of their madness, a Double emerges. D-503 too resists his own reflection. He has been happy. But his soul flares up anyway. As the doctor explains to his bewildered patient (p. 87):

Take a flat plane, a surface, take this mirror, for instance. And the two of us are on this surface, see, and we squint our eyes against the sun . . . But just imagine now that some fire has softened this impenetrable surface and nothing skims along the top of it any longer – everything penetrates into it, inside, into that mirror world . . . The plane has taken on mass, body, the world, and it’s all inside the mirror, inside you . . . And, you understand, the cold mirror reflects, throws back, while this absorbs, and the trace left by everything lasts forever.

This is a Moscow moment, absorptive, dark, and (once begun) unstoppable, when some living impulse “takes root” inside. In Gogol’s and Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, mirrors are flat and doubling – a sign of insanity. Inside OneState, a “softened” surface is criminalized. But it is a sign of budding sanity.