The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

26 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

industrialization has a great deal to do with access – with extracting resources or manufacturing goods and then moving them to ports and markets – Russia’s immense physical resources, for most of her history, were not translated into efficient productivity or national security.

It was easier to exile dissidents to Siberia than to integrate them, to trash and move on rather than to recycle, negotiate, and conserve. “Because Russia had become accustomed to solving its historical problems geographically,” Mikhail Epstein writes, “it came to occupy an area so large that finding its place in time became somewhat difficult.”15 In a country this large with an overall climate so severe, transit time is enormous. Setting out, there is no assurance one will ever arrive. In a 1996 essay on Russian destiny and the Russian Idea, Mikhail Ilyin speaks of two governing images for this continental empire, the first “the rush from one valley to another through dangerous and threatening stretches of forest or steppe” and the second, a specter that has proved equally anxiety-laden, that of “roadless space,” or “the myth of the road going nowhere.”16 These two images so debase the movement and goal of any human activity that the end recedes, the reward disappears, and there remains only the texture of an exhausting, short-term present. One recalls the slogans that filled Russian street posters soon after the implosion of communism in 1991: “Seventy-two years on the way to nowhere.”

“Making therush” from one secure valley to another encouraged a distinctive spatial binary in traditional folk consciousness. Cities, those dots on a plain, were protected by their churches and Christian saints; everything outside the city fell under the sway of pagan gods. Space was divided into what was known and protected – what had its patron saint or spirit – and what was unprotected and unknown, the uncharted roaming grounds of various demons, imps, and mischievous spirits. Russian expanse was deified asMoist MotherEarth, but not after the manner of most gods. It is a remarkable fact, one of perennial concern to Russia’s great poets, that this most successful continental empire, which at its zenith covered one-sixth the land mass of the globe, never glorified a god of war and never produced a genuinely affirmative, appropriately chauvinistic war epic.

Theenormity,flatness, insecurity,and low populationdensity ofthe Eurasian continent had socioeconomic consequences that conditioned all domestic Russian narratives. Those who worked the soil did not initially stay put. To guarantee the tillable land its laborers, the army its soldiers, and the state its tax revenues, peasants were tied down to their villages in the late sixteenth century and then gradually enserfed as the personal property of the gentry and noble class. Of course the Russian serf was neither racially marked nor “imported” from another continent, as was the case in the northern hemisphere of the New