very foundations of mechanics, and eliminate all the imperfections of the world's economic system."
Aleksei Tolstoi was not alone among writers of the 1920s in abhorring raw nature, seeing cities as models for an ideal society, and assuming that they could be created on this earth. The trick was to find the right people to run them. Nor was he alone in celebrating technology, and identifying it as an urban phenomenon: that was to be a Soviet habit of mind right up to the end of the system in 1991. In Russia, as elsewhere in the industrialized world, there had been considerable discussion, since the late nineteenth century, of the impact of technology on human beings, for better or worse. The best-known exponents of a kind of technological Romanticism were the so-called "Smithy" poets of the 1920s, like Gastev, Kirillov, Kazin and Gerasimov, and the novelist Fedor Gladkov in Cement (1925). At first glance, Tolstoi should be numbered among them. Yet he tells us, in an odd turn of phrase, that Los "did not really believe that any conceivable combination of machines was capable of solving the tragedy of universal happiness."12 This puts Tolstoi in the camp of the skeptics, who were numerous in the 1920s. Most prominent among them was Boris Pilniak, who explored the man/machine relationship in a number of novels. And in Evgenii Zamiatin's We (1921), skepticism spilled into sheer hostility to create the most celebrated dystopia in Russian literature.
The time is the remote future; the place, the Single State, a technologically advanced, rigidly regulated city, which has been surrounded by a green glass wall to keep out the untamed world beyond. It looks like the kind of society that Apollon Apollonovich had dreamed of creating. In fact, Zamiatin draws heavily, though silently, on Belyi's novel for particulars of setting, characterization, imagery, and themes.13 However, he reduces these particulars to the absurd, especially in his treatment of science and technology, which in any event are virtually absent in Petersburg. Technology has built the Single State, and has also devised a rocket ship (described in the imagery of industrial Romanticism) to export "happiness" to other worlds. One catch is that technology has become oppressive, as graphically demonstrated in the Machine, the State's instrument of execution, which punishes the crime of individuality by disintegrating the perpetrators.
We was deemed subversive by a Bolshevik political culture that glorified cities and technology, and it was not published in the Soviet Union for many years. With the removal of the capital to Moscow in 1924, however, writers found a less dangerous and more productive setting for many of these same themes. We might have expected them to devise a new literary code. Instead, they simply borrowed parts, large or small, of the Petersburg
one, their task made easier by the fact that literary Moscow had traditionally functioned mainly as an antithesis to Petersburg, had never developed a particularly specific code of its own, and, in any event, was probably too ancient and potent a symbol of Russian nationalism for accommodation to the needs of a supposedly internationalist age.
An early case in point was Boris Pilniak's The Naked Year (1921). To be sure, it is set in a provincial town, not a metropolis. But this town has a kremlin, or fortress, as did many others; and Pilniak uses it to evoke Moscow, which in turn displays several of the conventional features of Petersburg. The most striking is "Chinatown," whose name derives from an early confusion of the word for "China" (Kitai) with kita, the sixteenth-century term for the wooden fence (later a stone wall) that delimited the central part of Moscow. At one stroke, Pilniak combines the motifs of Easternism and enclosure, insists that they coexist with "Western" phenomena typified as bowler hats and briefcases filled with stocks and bonds, and suggests that the Revolution, for all its vaunted novelty, merely enacts these familiar images and juxtapositions.14 If Andrei Belyi read this novel, he must have given a smile of recognition.
Enclosure and Easternism, however, proved unproductive in other Moscow novels, perhaps because of the new emphasis on internationalism. The themes of urban crime and squalor did pass over, with Leonid Leonov's novel The Thief (1927) among the most notable instances. So did the themes of bureaucracy and technology, along with many familiar character-types. Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1928-40) makes more extensive use of these materials than any Soviet novel set in the capital.
Here we see a mostly middle- and lower-class city of the late 1920s, where lawlessness and chaos prevail. To judge by newspaper accounts of the time, this Moscow had a basis in actuality. But in Bulgakov's hands, such actuality soon proves elusive and evanescent, spun as it is out of rumor and gossip, projected onto ever-shifting temporal and spatial planes (even a "fifth dimension"), constantly invaded by supernatural powers, and narrated in a variety of styles and dictions, including an interpolated historical novel about Christ and Pilate. Most striking is its "literariness," as evinced in massive and obvious importations from fictions of centuries past, both Russian and foreign, such as Alice in Wonderland and The Golden Ass. As in Belyi's Petersburg (always a powerful presence), all are as "real" as anything else in this nightmarish city. Especially important as a theme and an engine of the plot is demonism, which also imbibes generously from literary sources. Readers will easily recognize Dosto-evskii's Double (1846), Gogol's "Overcoat", and some of his Dikan'ka
Tales as well, especially "A Bewitched Place" (1832), which could serve as an unofficial subtitle for the whole novel. But it is the figure of Woland, a refugee from Goethe's Faust, who neatly conflates the old Petersburg themes of foreignness, literariness, and demonism. He is the most "positive" of all the weird and unsavory characters in that he at least provides a way of escaping the oppressive enclosure that is everyday Moscow. The chief beneficiary is the heroine, Margarita, who becomes a witch, with decidedly Gogolian characteristics. Presumably she is dead, but there is no telling for sure.