The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

188 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

If inside OneState is the regimented city, then outside is the Big Village. This image, too, is exaggerated. Exiles from the city don’t need houses at all; homes have reverted to the trees out of which they were built. Separating the city of OneState from the forested wilderness is the glass Green Wall. The point of passage is the “Ancient House” – one of those ramshackle wooden homes tucked away down Moscow streets and alleys – presided over by a decrepit old woman who is all wrinkles and smiles, a Baba Yaga in league with the Mephi, able to control the boundary between life and death. Spiritually, I-330 is one of her daughters. Of course Zamyatin, a builder himself, is not advocating the Outside as anything like productive freedom. D-503 describes his visit beyond the Wall as a Dionysian nightmare: “It’s as if they set off a bomb in my head and all around, piled in a heap, are open mouths, wings, screams, leaves, words, stones...Icouldn’tmove, because I wasn’tstanding ona surface, but something disgustingly soft, yielding, alive, green, springy” (pp. 148–49).

The naked humanoids in this fantastic place are covered with glossy fur. They bask in the sun, drink wines, nibble fruit. Much in this wilderness partakes of the Moscow mythic cluster of values: fertility, an abundance of food and drink, natural rhythms and cycles, the sense that the ground underfoot is black earth, not stony pavement. Moscow is what survives when the utopian planners fail and the machines blow themselves up. Within her domain, life is supported at any cost and corporeal reality is never sacrificed for mathematics or a mere disembodied idea. At the last minute, I-330 arranges to slip O-90, pregnant illegally with D-503’s child, beyond the Wall to give birth. There, amid the moss and the screeching of birds, the child will be permitted to live.

Twenty-first century Russia has already worked huge changes on these city myths, which in time will register on the new literary canon of the post-communist era. In 2003, St. Petersburg celebrated its 300th birthday with a massive facelift of all architectural and sculptural monuments and an immersion in its canonical city texts. But partly for this reason, Petersburg, Pushkin’s celebrated “window to the West” and Russia’s City of the Revolution, feels more than ever like a museum, a nostalgic site. Revolution has become an old idea. What is new is where the money and markets now are, which is Moscow in its post-Village phase. This globalized “city of the future,” bristling with anti-Western rhetoric but oriented toward the capitalist corporation, scrubbed clean of its most painful historical events or packaging them as “tours” and theme parks, is planning an ambitious International Business Center, “Moskva-City,” of glass skyscrapers and gleaming pedestrian bridges to the west and southwest of the historic center.29 With the razing of the gargantuan Rossiya hotel, a monolith from the Soviet 1960s that overlooked St. Basil’s Cathedral, the