The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Models, readers, three Russian Ideas 29

utopias refuse to accept the reality of Russia’s physical defenselessness, the porousness of her borders, her inability to protect her population from chronic and devastating invasion. And thus they manipulate space – that inexhaustible Russian resource – to overcome the vulnerability of space.

Yury Lotman, who devoted a good portion of his scholarly life to spatial topographies, discusses this mythical geo-ethics as codified in Russian medieval texts.19 The model has had impressive lasting power. Dostoevsky drew on it in his great novels (reverently for his righteous persons like the Elder Zosima, symbolically for his seekers like Raskolnikov, in travestied form for his petty devils), and traces of this value system survive in Stalin-era socialist realist texts. Geo-ethics combines the high status of physical matter in the Eastern Orthodox Church with the moral implication of the compass. Lands to the east are pagan, to the west are heretic: only at the Russian center can one find holiness. Righteous persons [pravedniki] wander through this space, colonizing it with their humility and charity, aware that all corruptible matter encountered down below can be resurrected in a heavenly space that is continuous with it. Eternity is not the absence of matter or the transcending of matter, but its absolute triumph. Up there, matter lasts forever. Lotman sees this “eternally thing-like” nature of salvation as an intensely Russian invention. Among the most celebrated sites of geo-ethics in Russian culture is the Invisible City of Kitezh on the bank, or the bottom, of Lake Svetloyar.

Great Kitezh was built in the Yaroslavl-Volga region northeast of Moscow in the twelfth century. In 1239 it was destroyed by the Mongol Khan Batu, grandson of the great Ghengis. No contemporaneous account of the battle mentions any survivors; the city simply vanished. To counter that unacceptable fact, popular legend decrees that the city exists but at the final moment was “transposed,” not lifted to Heaven but sunk into the lake to be saved, where its bells and golden domes are still audible and visible to the righteous person. In successive Russian times of trouble, the Kitezh legend revives and Lake Svetloyar becomes again a place of pilgrimage.

ThepopulistVladimirKorolenko(1853–1921)wroteanethnographicsketch on the region in 1890. The Symbolist Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1865–1941), in his 1905 novel Anti-Christ. Peter and Alexis, linked the invisible city to all in Russian culture that Peter the Great had attempted to destroy. In his pantheistic opera The Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (1904), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created Russia’s most perfect artistic tribute to dvoeverie, dual pagan-Christian faith, with a final scene set in the radiant deathlessness of the resurrected city. The Symbolists warmed to the apocalyptic resonance of this miraculous place, and twentieth-century history bore them out. A “Kitezh poem” was written by Maksimilian Voloshin in August 1919, when General