The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

76 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

ancient heritage, in an attempt to start the culture anew. Before we survey this eighteenth-century divide in Chapter 4, can any generalizations be made about Russia’s traditional dual-faith culture?

Medieval versus post-Petrine Russia is often discussed as part of a larger question, “Russia versus the West.” Yury Lotman, together with his colleague in cultural semiotics Boris Uspensky, offered a highly provocative and controversial schematization of this binary in two now-classic essays from the late 1970s.14 The first essay, “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture” (1977), argues that traditional Russian culture had no concept of “progress” in the tentative, gradualist, Western sense of the term. It could not, they reasoned, because the archaic Russian mentality does not acknowledge “neutral zones” where value has not yet been assigned. Either a space is “protected” and monitored by theappropriatesaint, or “unprotected”and open to all manner of devils and mischievous spirits. How a given culture organizes its profane time-space is reflected in the structure of the otherworld or afterlife that it projects. And it is significant, so Lotman and Uspensky argue, that the Russian Orthodox wing of Christianity never accepted the Roman Catholic concept of purgatory, nor developed its own analogue for it.

Purgatory shares with other transitional chronotopes the idea of a “surplus,” a “free tomorrow” during which the nature of our destiny can be altered by our own efforts (or by the efforts of those praying for us). Precisely that idea was lacking. Rather than such linear progress, historical motion in the Russian context more resembled an oscillation between fixed positive and negative poles. If, in tenth-century Kiev, a pagan temple was torn down, the Christian equivalent had to be built on the same site, in order that the pagan or heathen god be literally and spatially replaced, squeezed out of its space. The Russian impulse is not to “try it out and see” in pragmatic fashion, but rather to define, cleanse, and re-occupy.

“Doubled” or superimposed sites are rich concentrators of meaning, but they are fragile. In the blink of an eye and with no explanations or intermediate steps, they can flip from godly to demonic, from clean to unclean – and back again. One good example, consonant with the temples mentioned by Lotman and Uspensky, comes from the early, ebullient post-communist 1990s: the rebuilding of Moscow’s gargantuan Cathedral of Christ the Savior, demolished by Stalin’s order on December 5, 1931.15

In 1994, on the initiative of theRussian Orthodox Patriarch AleksyII together with Moscow’s ambitious Mayor Luzhkov, it was resolved that an exact replica would be reconstructed on the precise site of the original cathedral. The church had been dynamited to make way for a massive Palace of Soviets, eight meters taller than the Empire State Building, topped by a 6,000-ton statue of Lenin. But