The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Traditional narratives 77

for two decades, nothing went up. Construction accidents were common. In the popular imagination, the denuded site was seen (with a mix of irony, superstition, and reverence) as “sacred” and thus its new profane mission cursed; it was rumored that a local holy fool visited the construction pit and predicted that nothing would rise out of it. In 1958, Khrushchev ordered the huge hole in the ground refitted as a heated swimming pool. Considerable public debate over the future of the site went on during the glasnost years, beginning in the mid-1980s: suggestions ranged from an empty site with a play of light to a small chapel or museum commemorating the victims of Stalinism. The Millennial Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus'(988-1988) gave fresh impetus to a “sacred” solution. The final decision to rebuild the cathedral, taken by secret decree, played in to a massive revival of Moscow’s elaborate mythology of sacred towers, Kremlin walls, and twelve gates - proof of her status as the Third Jerusalem, heir to Constantinople, in fulfillment of the Heavenly City prophesied in the Book of Revelation.16 The completed structure is topped by a huge golden cross on its cupola, symbolizing the repentance of the Russian people; its underground levels feature a business center, oversized parking lot for foreign cars, luxury sauna, and restaurant. The reconsecration of the cathedral in 1997 was a major victory for the energetic and enterprising patriarch, the culmination of his campaign to return nationalized property to the Church and reassert control over confiscated saints’ relics. This reclamation of “lost” relics was relatively easy for Aleksy to arrange, since he had been elected Patriarch in 1990 after thirty-two years in the church hierarchy with simultaneous service in the ecclesiastical subsection of the secret police, the KGB. Without such collaboration, he could not have risen through the ranks of the Church to wage battle with the remnants of the atheistic state.

Lotman’s second essay devoted to the East-West divide deals more with psychology than with the demonics of time-space. It has an intriguing title: “‘Contracting’ [dogovor] and‘The handing over of oneself [vruchenie sebya] as Archetypal Models of Culture” (1980). To grasp the dynamics of this peculiar binary, we should review the distinction between two pre-modern explanatory strategies: magic and miracle.

Magic (incantations, charms, spells, curses, talismans) is a formula, a “contract” drawn up with a concrete goal. It should be distinguished from divination - the reading of stars, moon, thunder, numbers, marks on the body-which is the “attempt to predict something or to reach a correct decision about it rather than to cause it.”17 Magic always works against a fixed or closed future: it desires to make something happen. It presumes that the proper recipe or artifact, invoked by a qualified practitioner, will produce that desired result. If a given charm fails to work, this does not mean that charms don’t work, only that