events," but is itself "the real heroine of a long story," the most Russian of subjects, indeed a "holy city," the embodiment, we might say, of an authentically Russian life that knows no polarities, but is organic, unitary, and vital. The similarity to medieval views of Moscow, and, more recently, to Tolstoi's view in War and Peace, though unremarked, is obvious.15
There is no place for Petersburg in Zhivago's world, or, for that matter, in much of the Soviet literature written since the 1920s. But the theme is not dead. In 1978 Andrei Bitov's Pushkin House appeared. The edifice that inspires the title is the famous institute for literary research of the Academy of Sciences, located on Vasilevskii Island in St. Petersburg. We are therefore not surprised to find that, in the spirit of Belyi, the novel cites or alludes to many well-known works of Russian literature, draws characters, situations and themes from them, and treats them all as part of the ongoing life of the city in the 1960s. Bitov need not even be very specific about the sights and landmarks: mere hints and echoes serve to situate any reasonably literate reader. Yet the novel seems luxuriant, mainly because Bitov relishes the particulars of ordinary life. For the most part, he treats them with warmth and affection. That in itself represents a sharp departure from the Petersburg literary conventions, and probably explains why he has no need for a contrasting Moscow or countryside.
Pushkin House was one of the last big novels with a city theme to be published in Russia. Indeed, novels of any kind are rarer now; literature itself has fallen on hard times; creative energies are being directed elsewhere. But given the traditional importance of fiction for reflecting and shaping the national mind, it is likely that Russia will again need its writers, and likely too that the novel, and with it the theme of the city, will revive and continue to resonate.
NOTES
1. In Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. Nachalo russkoi literatury XI - nachalo XII vekov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), p. 37.
2. Karamzin's memoir was published as a supplement (prilozhenie) to A. N. Pypin, Obshcbestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii pri Aleksandre I, 4th edn (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1908), pp. 491-92, 481, 483. The italics are Karamzin's.
3. A. S. Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati totnakh (Moscow: Nauka, 1962-66), vol. v, pp. 32, 155-56, 163.
4. Ibid., vol. iv, pp. 379-97-
5. In Gogol, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1937-52), vol. in. The quotes from "Nevskii Prospekt" are on pp. 19, 46; from "Shinel," on pp. 145, 161.
6. Gogol, "Peterburgskie zapiski 1836 goda," in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol.
VIII, pp. 177-79-
7. In Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972-90), vol. v, p. 101.
8. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 115.
9. In Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1929-64), vol. ix, p. 258; vol. xii, pp. 3, 211; vol. xi, pp. 96-97.
10. Victor Terras, "Gorky," in Victor Terras (éd.), Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 181.
11. Belyi, Letter to Aleksandr Blok, December 28, 1912 (January 10, 1913), in V Orlov (éd.), Aleksandr Blok i Andrei Belyi. Perepiska (Moscow: Izd. Gosudarstvennogo Literaturnogo Muzeia, 1940), pp. 301, 309. For the quotations from Belyi's Petersburg, see the 1928 edition as published in Moscow (Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), pp. 58, 78.
12. The quotations are taken from the first edition, as published in Krasnaia nov', 1 (1923), 74; 2 (1923), 55, 57. Most of the passages cited were removed from subsequent editions of the novel, and "Petersburg" was changed to "Petrograd" - all understandable "improvements" in light of the new political climate. "Universal happiness" in the last quotation sounds peculiar - perhaps it is a misprint for "unhappiness" - but it does not alter Tolstoi's idea that technology has its limitations.
13. For a detailed discussion of Zamiatin's indebtedness to Petersburg, see Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, "The Legacy of Petersburg. Zamiatin's We," in John Elsworth (éd.), The Silver Age in Russian Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), pp. 182-95.
14. In Pilniak, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura), pp. 46-47-
15. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 465, 211, 500, 501, 530-31.
3
HUGH McLEAN
The countryside
Certainly since the time of Theocritus, and doubtless long before that, weary city dwellers have sought - or at least thought about seeking -escape from their noisy, bustling, confining urban world into the tranquillity, spaciousness, and presumed leisure of the countryside. In such moods nature generally appears to them in her most benign aspects: warm but not hot, green, fertile, vivifying, motherly. The country resident, on the other hand, may feel an equally powerful impulse to escape: from the isolation, boredom, discomforts, and dangers of rural life to the security, social connectedness, and relative cultural richness of the town, where people can collectively defend themselves against a nature often not at all benign, as well as against less than benign fellow creatures.
The anti-urban urge has been a theme of literature almost since literature has existed at all. The Western tradition offers a long procession of passionate pastoralists, from Theocritus and Vergil down to Rousseau and beyond. Despite the fact that only a tiny minority of them actually lived in cities, the Russians absorbed the pastoral tradition enthusiastically if belatedly, themselves producing such elegant poetic celebrations of the bucolic life as Gavrila Derzhavin's delightful idyll "To Evgenii; Life at Zvanka"(1807).
In the novel, celebration of the countryside makes a splendid beginning in Evgenii Onegin, Pushkin's great novel-in-verse, the progenitor in theme if not in form of so many distinguished descendants. Evgenii Onegin embodies that triangle of vividly contrasted settings later powerfully exploited by Tolstoi: majestic, imperial, "European" St. Petersburg; comfortable, historic, ultra-Russian Moscow; and a lyric countryside filled with idyllic nests where the gentry played at realizing the Theocritan ideal. "Flowers, love, countryside, idleness, / Fields! I am devoted to you with all my heart"1 proclaims the narrator-poet, marking this as a distinction that separates him from his hero, who soon tires of live-in "eclogues." It is an attachment the narrator shares with his nature-loving heroine, Tatiana,
who even in her last incarnation as a Petersburg grande dame still longs to return to her bucolic birthplace. Despite the boredom, however, Onegin does settle down easily enough to the life of a country squire, in a prototypical setting the narrator describes as a "charming little place,"2 complete with a manor house perched on a hill, a brook, meadows, fields of grain, and a garden serving as "the refuge of meditative Dryads."3 There Onegin lives the life of an "anchorite," amusing himself with reading, horseback riding, wine, "fairly inventive" dinners, and on occasion the "young and fresh kiss"4 of one of his dark-eyed serf girls.