A considerable body of writing celebrated medieval Moscow as the corporealization of the national idea. Despite its enormous vitality, however, this city-state felt frequently beleaguered from both East and West. Only gradually did it open itself to the world outside. The most spectacular of these openings came with the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703. Military, commercial, and cultural considerations figured in Peter's decision, but the city soon acquired deeper meanings, which writers were quick to exploit. A notable instance is Vasilii Trediakovskii's poem "Praise to the Izhorsk Land, and to the Reigning City of St. Petersburg" (1752). Here the city is treated, in typical eighteenth-century fashion, as a monument to enlightened reason. This was the view that prevailed for nearly half a century thereafter. Gradually, however, darker sides began to emerge, particularly in response to the poetics of Sentimentalism, anorner interna-
tional literary movement that reached Russia late in the 1700s. Nature came to be identified as the locus of vitality and authenticity; the city, of artificiality, insincerity, and deception. Nikolai Karamzin's short story "Poor Liza" (1792) has been exemplary for generations. And it was Karamzin, in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia (1810-11), who was one of the first to deconstruct the eighteenth-century view of St. Petersburg in these terms. He chided Peter for setting the city "amidst rippling swamps, in places condemned by nature to be unpopulated and barren. . . . How many people perished, how many millions and how much labor were expended to realize this objective? One might say that Petersburg is founded on tears and corpses . . ." The lesson for this Sentimentalist was that "man shall not overcome nature!" Less familiar in this context, but destined for an equally long life, was the exemplum of a genuinely Russian city, which he set forth many pages earlier and obviously expected his reader (primarily Tsar Alexander I) to prefer to Petersburg: "A small town that was barely known before the fourteenth century. . . raised its head and saved the fatherland (by defeating the Mongols). Honor and glory to Moscow! . . . The Moscow princes accomplished this great work not by personal heroism . . . but solely by virtue of a wise political system that was consonant with the circumstances of the time."2
When Pushkin employed these same contrasts, he could count on practiced responses in his readers. Evgenii Onegin, a "novel in verse" (1823-31), opens in St. Petersburg. There are just enough mentions of landmarks, climate, and real-life personalities to make it instantly recognizable to any Russian: the Summer Garden, the Nevskii Prospect, the white nights, Talon's French restaurant, a cluster of turn-of-the-century playwrights. It is largely an upper-class and therefore Europeanized city that Onegin and the narrator frequent, with its tireless round of parties, balls, and evenings at the theater. Like the city itself, Onegin is a composite of foreign fashions, ideas, and styles. Now and then Pushkin introduces the lower orders - coachmen, merchants, peddlers, bakers, cabbies - mainly by way of ironic contrast with the idle aristocracy. Presently, however, a more familiar contrast is introduced, as Onegin, bored with Petersburg, goes off to his country estate: "For two days," we are told, "he found novelty" in a landscape imported in effect from the eighteenth-century idyll, "lonely fields,/ The coolness of a densely shaded grove,/ The babble of a quiet brook" (1, 54). But soon he is no more satisfied there than any of his numerous literary progeny would be, and, in his relationship with the neighboring Larin family, he turns destructive, breaking Tatiana's heart and killing Lenskii, her sister's fiancé, in a duel.
Outlined this way, the plot draws on conventions that would evoke an
immediate response in any reader of "Poor Liza." But Tatiana is no simple peasant girl, and no ordinary victim of urban lust: her view of life derives not so much from good instincts as from the perusal of foreign novels, and is therefore suspect. Pushkin also plays with the Moscow/Petersburg contrast. Tatiana's family, worried about her spinsterhood, takes her to Moscow to meet eligible men. If Petersburg is Onegin's city, and Onegin has proven unworthy of Tatiana, then Moscow, we suppose, is bound to yield an authentically Russian man who will help Tatiana discover the authentically Russian woman beneath the foreign veneer. Pushkin bolsters our expectations with a brief portrait of "white-stoned Moscow" that is far more appealing and more "Russian" than his Petersburg. He cites the "golden crosses" of the "ancient cupolas" that "blaze like fire," the nostalgia that this view inspires in the poet when he is in exile, and even the name itself, "Ah, Moscow! . . . How much the Russian heart finds blended in this sound!" (VII, 36). The poet does not fail to remind us of the city's refusal to submit to Napoleon during the invasion of 1812 - a rejection, in effect, of foreign ways - and he provides a rapid tour of the main thoroughfare, where bustle and disorder prevail, in contrast to the austere grandeur of Petersburg. The social scene that engulfs Tatiana looks like a warm, extended family, mostly female, unlike the chilly, male-dominated haut-monde of Petersburg. But instead of feeling at home, Tatiana "looks and does not see,/ She loathes the stir of this society;/ She feels stifled here" (VII, 53); and she yearns to be back in the country. She might as well be in Petersburg, where everyone seems to be unhappy; and that in fact is where we find her as the poem ends, married to a prince, ornamenting society, and painfully aware that her existence is empty. In his ironic way, Pushkin undoes the traditional contrast by pronouncing the two cities essentially the same, and even making us wonder whether the old urban/rural contrast really holds, if Onegin and Tatiana cannot find fulfilment in either place.3
Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman (1833) is far shorter than Onegin, but it left a far deeper mark on the developing theme of Petersburg in Russian literature. The Introduction begins with Peter the Great standing in a mist-shrouded, barren landscape, and, "filled with great thoughts," vowing to establish a city that will "strike terror in the Swede" and "cut a window through on Europe." This rehearses the eighteenth-century idea that intention is father to the deed. Suddenly "a century has passed," perhaps in response to the question Trediakovskii had posed in his poem, "What will it be like after a hundred years have passed?" There follows an elaboration of wonders also remarked by the earlier poet: the magnificent symmetries of "palaces and towers," the steady flow of visitors "from all corners of the earth," and the displacement of Moscow. Had Pushkin left matters at that,
the poem would be merely a superior imitation of an eighteenth-century model. But with part I, the imagery and tonality undergo an abrupt change, as a flood falls "like a frenzied beast" upon the city. Evgenii, a humble civil servant, is introduced, the first of the "little men" that were to populate Russian literature for the next century. He escapes the devastation, but goes mad when he discovers that his fiancée has perished. Thereupon he roams the city, "A stranger to the world . . . Neither beast nor man/ Neither this nor that, neither a denizen of the world/ Nor a dead spectre," hereby becoming the progenitor of hundreds of literary spectres in Petersburg settings. Finally he encounters the equestrian statue of Peter the Great in the Senate Square, and threatens it: "Just you wait!" Thereupon the statue leaps off its pedestal, and pursues him through the city until he dies. Legions of Russian writers and critics have puzzled over the meaning of this encounter: the individual sacrificed to the stern, impersonal purposes of the state, retribution visited on the subjects of those power-mad rulers who presume to challenge the forces of nature? In any event, Pushkin once again opens the conventions to serious question.4