The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

28 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

mythical, without gradation. Roads were (and are) a disaster. There is little tradition of the civilized suburb. To this day, surprisingly close to the city limits of Petersburg and Moscow, “the provinces” begin – unmowed, unpaved, out of touch. To leave Moscow or Petersburg has always meant not only to go out in space but also to go back in time. This too reinforces the sense of space being primary and pockets of time negotiable, set down like the cities, as islands in a sea.

Even this excessive, untamable Russian space had its edges. In 1829, Pushkin slipped out from under police surveillance to visit the Russian army skirmishing on the Caucasus–Turkish border. As he later described this episode in his droll travel notes, A Journey to Arzrum (1836), en route to join the Russian troops he happened upon asmallriverwhich, a Cossack informed him, was theboundary. “I had never before seen foreign soil,” Pushkin wrote of this encounter. “The border held something mysterious for me . . . Never before had I broken out from the borders of immense Russia. I rode happily into the sacred river, and my good horse carried me out on the Turkish bank. But this bank had already been conquered: I was still in Russia.”17

Pushkin was never allowed out. This scenario of sealed borders around an immense, unmappable world became another theme, both hair-raising and comic, that lasted right up until the end of the Soviet Union. Russia, so this thesis went, is so big, her borders so impenetrable, her censorship so pervasive, her people so gullible, and her ability to construct whole countries inside herself (with space to spare) so difficult to detect, that the authorities could simply fake the existence of everywhere else. In his 1992 novella Omon Ra, Viktor Pelevin (b. 1962) tells the story of a young Muscovite training for a suicidal space program, only to discover that there is no program, no broadcast from outer space, only a shabby stage set strewn with empty vodka bottles down in the metro and a black drape with holes poked out for stars. In a chapter titled “Imaginary West,” the cultural anthropologist Alexei Yurchak discusses this fantasy-zone in terms of a “politically faked travelogue,” a literary genre productive as late as 2002. A simple factory worker from the Urals circa 1970 is finally allowed to go to Paris. But “after a few euphoric days in the French capital” he bumps into a painted canvas stretched on a huge frame. It had all been a theatrical backdrop, “Paris simply did not exist in the world. It never

had.”18

If a real and inaccessible outside perhaps did not exist, then an “accessible inside” to Russia has proven itself real on several levels. I have in mind Russian spatialutopias. Mostcultures,Russia’sincluded, haveutopias in time – a Golden Age in the past, a Promised Kingdom in the future. But Russia also has a vital minor tradition of timeless, salvation-bearing utopias in space. These