By the time Bulgakov began his novel, the political climate had become decidedly inhospitable to latter-day Petersburgs. No doubt that is one reason why it was not published until the late 1960s. Far more cautious, and ultimately, far more representative, was the picture of Moscow in one of the greatest works of the 1920s, Iurii Olesha's Envy (1927). Like many Soviet writers of the time, Olesha exploits the conflict between the "old" values of tsarist Russia and the "new" values that inspirited the Revolution and the developing Soviet system. He embodies them in six characters and sets them in a Moscow of his own time. The "old" have obvious antecedents in the literature of Petersburg: Ivan Kavalerov, as an impractical dreamer, resembles Oblomov; Kavalerov, the ne'er-do-well and failure, looks back to many a Dostoevskian character; and Annechka is a devouring female of a type frequently found in Gogol. The "new" people embody the "correct" attitudes of the Soviet 1920s: a dedication to urbanism, a transformation of the world through technology and purposeful labor, and the elimination of negative thoughts and feelings. Yet here too Olesha looks to prototypes in the literary Petersburg of old: Andrei, the commissar, is a jumped-up Akakii Akakevich; and Volodia and Valia, the ideal Soviet youths of the future, resemble the antiseptically purposeful people, often revolutionaries, that populate such nineteenth-century novels as Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? (1863). Olesha's version of the "new" Moscow is also highly ambiguous. He makes scarcely a mention of the realia that mark the city for even a casual reader; except for a few place-names, we could be in any large modern urban center. Possibly he may be reminding us, no doubt ironically, of yet another politically correct idea of the 1920s: that Moscow, as the headquarters of the world Communist movement, should have no purely Russian coloration. This may be why only the "old" characters are so intent on relishing palpable, local objects, whether charming (Kavalerov's trodden blossom or almond sliver), menacing (Ivan's humanized machine Ophelia), or wondrous (Annechka's bed). But such details are not particular to Moscow, or for that matter, to Russia; the city loses its specific identity, and begins to stand for the
country as a whole. In these senses, Envy prepared the way for at least three decades of Socialist Realist novels, which would revive the centuries-old theme that Moscow is more an idea than a place.
Actually, Pilniak had been among the first, in Naked Year, to foresee this development when he depicted provincial towns as mini-Moscows. By the early 1930s, the official aesthetic of Socialist Realism obliged all writers to do the same. Thus, in Mikhail Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned (1932-60), Davydov, a metal worker by trade and a Communist by conviction, is sent from the city to bring order to a collective farm. Although he has a lot to learn about rural life, the Party takes for granted that his political attitudes, urban to the core, are adequate to any situation, regardless of locale. Ultimately the lines between city and country were to be erased altogether, at least in theory. But it did not follow that a politically enlightened farmer could function just as effectively in the city: the chronic Bolshevik distrust of rural Russia prevailed. (Significantly, Davydov is killed by enraged peasants.) The country was becoming progressively urbanized, with Moscow setting the political, social, intellectual and technological norms. Eventually this tendency found expression in the notion of "agro-cities," which was proposed by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, but never went very far.
Urban settings continued to predominate in Soviet literature during the so-called "Thaw," that period of comparative political relaxation which got under way around 1956. The better writers, however, began to find more interesting ways of handling them, now that they were freer to disregard the dictates of Socialist Realism, with its penchant for generalization and typology. Many showed an interest in recording the trivia of life, which would not have been possible under Stalinism. Iurii Trifonov, for one, specialized in representing the ordinary, frequently banal routines of domestic life as lived out in Moscow. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has also been a meticulous recorder of quotidian details. Far more than Trifonov or most of his contemporaries, however, he is interested in myth-making, often in terms that are familiar to readers of earlier urban literature. One of them is enclosure. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovicb (1961) is set in a forced labor camp, as are the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago (1973-75); Cancer Ward (1968) takes place mainly in a hospital located in a large city. The First Circle (1968) unfolds in Moscow and environs, with many different enclosures: the city itself, the Kremlin, the Liubianka prison, the sharashka, or special labor camp, the tight world of the Party privileged. All overlap, and together comprise the gigantic enclosure that is the Soviet Union. This Moscow bears no resemblance to the nurturing, authentically Russian city of old. It is more like literary Petersburg from Pushkin through
Belyi, a conglomeration of isolated individuals whose identity is largely shaped by a bureaucracy obsessed with dehumanizing trivia.
Many other writers of this period - and Solzhenitsyn himself to some extent - began to rediscover the countryside as a contrasting realm of salubrious moral values. In Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1957), the countryside is where the title character goes to escape the privations and dangers of a Moscow torn by Revolution and Civil War. There he learns that all life, large or small, past or present, human or vegetable, is interconnected and sacred, that essentials lie in homely daily details, and that authentic humanity and true art depend on one's ability to achieve a "tranquil and broad outlook which elevate(s) the particular instance to a universality that is familiar to all." But Pasternak enriches this "country" theme by introducing an "Eastern" motif, which had been virtually absent from Soviet urban fiction since the 1920s. Not only does Zhivago settle far to the East, in the Urals region, but just before he leaves Moscow, he sees a mysterious boy "with narrow Kirghiz eyes, in an unbuttoned reindeer coat with fur on both sides, the kind people wear in Siberia or the Urals." He understands that this boy is his "death," meaning, perhaps, the death of an old way of life, and rebirth into a new one. If so, then what Pasternak draws on here is the tradition of the vital, life-affirming, and essentially Christian East that goes back to the Primary Chronicle. The literary conventions of the nineteenth century might lead us to suppose that once Zhivago abandons Moscow and embraces the rural east, he achieves personal fulfillment. Pasternak refuses such an easy and obvious solution. Zhivago's life in Moscow is shown to be a necessary preparation for his spiritual and artistic discoveries. It is there that he begins to see that the whole edifice of pre-revolutionary culture has been false, that the Revolution has been beneficial in knocking it down and revealing essentials, as expressed in the "joy of living" an "ordinary" existence, and that he is powerless to interfere in the processes of history or the natural rhythms of life. And it is to Moscow that he ultimately returns, like most of the surviving characters in the novel. He understands that despite its shabbiness and poverty, Moscow is "still a big, modern city," and that such cities are "the only inspiration for a truly new, modern art," speaking as they do the "living language of our time . . . the language of urbanism," which is "incessantly stirring and rumbling outside our doors and windows." Zhivago himself does not live long enough to turn these insights into art. Perhaps it is just as welclass="underline" he retains something of the aesthete in his makeup, and Pasternak would not have us think that the city is simply material for a good poem. Perhaps that is why his death is followed by an epilogue in which the narrator states that Moscow is not merely "the locale of these