The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Symbolist and Modernist world-building 189

Kremlin itself will be incorporated into a vast, slick new mall with majestic vistas, porticoes, and arcaded fac¸ades. The plans indicate no turrets or onion domes.30 It remains to be seen if any aspects of the older, more organic and black-soil traditions of the Moscow Myth can survive this onslaught of high technology and commercialization.

These single-city novels by Bely, Zamyatin, and Bulgakov, together with the loosely defined urban myths generated by each, provide a bridge to our next chapter, which will cover some of the same years (1920s–50s) from the perspective of a more politically approved ideology, socialist realism. In early Leninist terminology, the geographical opposition of “city” (proletariat) versus “countryside” (peasant) was often expressed in terms of “consciousness” versus “spontaneity.” Consciousness in this Marxist sense meant not individual creativity, inspiration, or (as it often did for Dostoevsky) the freedom of personal will and the responsibility of choice, but was applied more narrowly, to mean an awareness of the dialectical shape of history and the inevitable victory of the proletariat. Opposedtothis party-mindedawarenesswas “spontaneity”:people reacting anarchically, instinctively, out of their immediate anger or blind need, peasants burning manor houses or peasant-soldier recruits deserting the Imperialist War of 1914–17, voting for peace with their feet. Both energies, Lenin knew, were essential for revolution. But which energy would control and exploit the other? Hundreds of early Bolshevik-era novels were constructed around this dichotomy. Many believed that a symbiotic relation between these two forces was possible, at the level of the individual body as well as the body politic.

Russian Futurists, Constructivists, Cosmists, Nietzschean god-builders, and other immensely creativerevolutionaryvisionaries desiredtoturn thebody into something healthy, expressive, coordinated, and free.31 The Bolshevik 1920s were an era of genuine lyricism about the possibility of the machine to liberate human labor and everyday life, not into inhuman regimentation or totalitarianism but into a kind of disciplined rhythmic dance. The enemy was not the Crystal Palace or OneState, which no one had ever seen, but the chaotic filthy sweatshop and the germ-laden tenement, which were everywhere.32 Ready to sweep the old factory and slum away were the ideals of efficiency, hygiene, and technological beauty.Inthe aesthetic sphere, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) trained his acting company in “biomechanics,” a course in athletics and bodily self-discipline that incorporated eurhythmics, labor-efficiency studies, stylized use of gesture, and even the reflexology of Pavlov’s laboratories toward the ideal of a standardized, externalized, and thus democratized expression of emotion. In the 1930s, this theatricalization of the body would be regimented into sports parades, mass physical culture extravaganzas, and military exercises.