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The Urban Theme in Recent Soviet Russian Prose: Notes Toward a Typology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

George Gibian
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Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:

These notes were found later among his [Zhivago's] papers: “When I came back to Moscow in 1922 I found it deserted and half destroyed. So it has come out of the ordeals of the first years after the revolution: so it remains to this day. Its population has decreased, no new houses are being built, and the old ones are left in disrepair.

But even in this condition it is still a big modern [sovremennyi] city, and cities are the only source of inspiration for a new, truly modern art.

The seemingly incongruous and arbitrary jumble of things and ideas in the work of the Symbolists (Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman) is not a stylistic caprice. This is a new order of impressions taken directly from life. Just as they hurry their succession of images through the lines of their poems, so the street in a busy town hurries past us, with its crowds and its carriages at the end of the last century, or its streetcars and subways at the beginning of ours. Pastoral simplicity does not exist in these conditions. Its pseudoartlessness is a literary fraud, an unnatural mannerism, a bookish phenomenon, not inspired by the countryside but taken from the shelves of academic archives.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 40 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1978

References

1. Translation slightly altered by George Gibian from that by Max Hay ward and Manya Harari, Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York: Signet Books, 19S8), pp. 406-7 (Russian original, University of Michigan edition, 1958 [?], p. 500). This was not a freak, isolated statement by Pasternak. In his autobiography he made a similar remark, not in Zhivago's name, but in his own: “How that style [Blok's] seemed to agree with the spirit of the age … the language of conspirators of which the chief character was the city and the chief event the street” (Boris Pasternak, / Remember [New York, 1959], p. 50). The Zhivago poem “The Earth,” the late poems “Na rannikh poezdakh” (1941) and “V bol'nitse” (1957), and others also speak of the urban theme in similar language.

2. Iurii Nagibin's sketch, “So Much of Moscow in That Sound” [ “Moskva tak mnogo v etom zvuke” ], Novyi mir, 1976, no. 11, deals with the city of Moscow but displays the same emotions of nostalgia for what is old, unspoiled, and natively Russian as Soloukhin and other authors of village prose show in writing about the countryside.

3. See, for example, Marilyn S. Fries, “The Significance of Spatial Constructs in the Literature of the City,” in The City and Sense of Community, ed. Sander L. Gilman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Center for Urban Development, Cornell University, 1976); and Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, Mensch and Raum (Stuttgart, 1971)Google Scholar.

4. On the first introductory page of Kollegi (1961), Aksenov states with defiant bluntness what the dominant situation will be in that book. The remark applies to many others: “This is a tale about young colleagues—doctors, seeking their place in life and finding it, a tale about the young generation, about its thoughts, feelings, love.”

5. Turgenev called Grigorovich's Village (Derevnia, 1848) the first attempt “at bringing our literature close to national ﹛narodnaia) life” (quoted in A., Ninov, Sovremennyi rasskas [Leningrad, 1969], p. 25)Google Scholar.

6. In a questionnaire in Voprosy literatury, Aksenov answered the question “Which traditions in classical and contemporary literature are close to you?”: “The traditions of Russian classical literature, the traditions of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Soviet literature of the twenties and early thirties interests me enormously. Reading Babel’ and Andrei Platonov— that is a good school. Hemingway, Faulkner, Boll, Salinger—that is also a first-class school, besides the pleasure which the reading of their books gives one.” 7. Iunost', 1963, no. 2, pp. 31-S7; and in book form, Pervyi den’ novogo goda (Moscow, 1965).

8. Translated from Aksenov, , Katapul'ta (Moscow, 1964), p. 115 Google Scholar.

9. Anatolii, Gladilin, Prognos na zavtra (Frankfurt: Posev, 1972, p. 12 Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., p. 186.

11. Manuscripts in the possession of George Gibian.

12. Bitov wrote a meditative travelogue, Journey to Armenia (Puteshestvie v Armeniiu), and The Wheel (Koleso), a “New Journalism,” Tom Wolfe-like account of the world's capital of motorcycle racing on frozen lakes, Ufa. Perhaps most important of all, he also wrote a long, complex, sophisticated novel about three generations of people, with a hero who is also a literary scholar, Pushkinskii dom. This book is hitherto unpublished; only a few fragments have been printed. Those who have read the manuscript report that it is a very literary, self-conscious work, reminiscent of Nabokov's Dar1, compounded of many genres and couched in a variety of narrative techniques. Until we can read it and consider it carefully, we cannot make any judgment about its qualities—or its urban themes. In this complex work, it seems that not space, but time is the subject.

13. Semin, V, “Asia Aleksandrovna,” Novyi mir, 1965, no. 11, p. 78 Google Scholar.

14. George, Gibian, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature During the Thaw, 1954- 1957 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1960 Google Scholar, especially chapter 2, “The Scientist as Hero, Saint, and Martyr,” and chapter 4, “Versions of a Soviet Inferno.” Vera Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass values in Soviet fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), illustrates in great detail this and many other aspects of the sociological documentation discoverable in Soviet literature.

15. Interview in Literaturnaia gaseta, in 1974, with Iurii Trifonov, “Sovremennosf— splav istorii i budushchego.”

16. Pushkin-Kritik, ed. N. V. Bogoslavskii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1939), pp. 92-93.

17. Quoted in A., Ninov, Sovremennyi rasskaz, p. 22 Google Scholar.