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Moscow after the Apocalypse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Mark Griffiths
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Abstract

This article focuses on the apocalyptic images of Moscow that not only proliferated in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union but that have also persisted during the 2000s. Mark Griffiths analyzes Tat'iana Tolstaia's Kys' (2000) and Dmitrii Glukhovskii's Metro 2033 (2005), comparing and contrasting the roles of Muscovite space in these narratives. Riddled with misinterpreted ideas and mutated remainders, turned upside down by ideological volte-face, and haunted by uncanny vestiges of preapocalyptic life, these postapocalyptic worlds are not tabulae rasae but pastiches that reflect post-Soviet transformations. In Kys', Moscow's concentric circles are connected to temporal cyclically, disrupting narratives of progress. In Metro 2033, the fragmentation of Moscow's metro system allows Glukhovskii to thematize the splintering of the post-Soviet city. Both novels evoke the long-standing opposition between Moscow's center and periphery but unveil the darkness of the hollow core, raising questions about the city's past, present, and future.

Type
Moscow: A Global City?
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 3 , Fall 2013 , pp. 481 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2013

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References

With sincere thanks to Seth Graham, Phil Cavendish, Julian Graffy, Polly Jones, and Susan Morrissey for all of their help and advice during the shaping of this work, and to Mark D. Steinberg, Oliwia Berdak, and the anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review for all of their ideas and comments that allowed me to improve this article. I would also like to thank Sarah Hudspith and the participants of the conference “Moscow: A Global City,” University of Leeds, for their insightful suggestions and for making this publication possible. My thanks also go to the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research. Epigraph from Rudyard Kipling, “Cities and Thrones and Powers,” in David Cecil and Allen Tate, eds., Modern Verse in English (London, 1958), 111.

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8. The “Blast” at the center of Kys’ is never explicitly described as nuclear, but the widespread annihilation, the radiation poisoning that blights the local fauna and flora, and the unusual mutations that affect both survivors and their children all strongly imply a nuclear catastrophe.

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26. Ibid., 205.

27. I use here Mircea Eliade's term, hierophany, for, in his view, people have always sought to found their universe on stable, sacred space. Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Trask, Willard R. (New York, 1959), 22 Google Scholar.

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36. Ibid., 204.

37. The seven gates are a clear reference to Campanella's seven-walled City of the Sun.

38. Tolstaia, , Kys', 284–85Google Scholar.

39. Ibid., 169.

40. As Mumford informs us, the original cities were constructed to be a symbolic “world,” a “walled urban container,” at the center of which would be the citadel. Mumford, , The City in History, 1, 34Google Scholar.

41. Tolstaia, , Kys', 201 Google Scholar. “Postmemory” is used here in the sense in which Marianne Hirsch employs the term, as memories transmitted to the next generation. Hirsch, Marianne, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), esp. 22–23 Google Scholar.

42. As in Bendikt's vision, Petia imagines a bright civilization, including “white palaces with emerald, scaly roofs, stepped temples with tall doorways, […] enormous golden statues and marble staircases.” iana Tolstaia, Tat’, “Svidanie s ptitsei,” Liubish ‘—ne liubish’ (Moscow, 1997), 66–67 Google Scholar.

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44. Tolstaia's evocation of the lost island of Atlantis is reminiscent of the moment when Zamiatin's D-503 finally breaks through the Green Wall. Surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, D-503 conjures the analogy of stumbling upon “a sixth, a seventh continent in the ocean, some Atlantis.” Zamiatin, My, 137.

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46. Marshall Sahlins, “Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History,” American Anthropologist, n.s. 85, no. 3 (September 1983): 525. Eliade posits that the elevating and ordering of profane space into transcendental space also results in the transformation of “concrete time into mythical time.” Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Trask, Willard R. (Princeton, 1991), 21 Google Scholar.

47. Moskva 2042 concludes with a similar moment of revolution and regression. Effigies of the former ruler are burned, his supporters are mercilessly crucified, the Solzhenitsyn figure returns on a white steed, and a new set of medieval rules are put in place. Voinovich, , Moskva 2042, 314–16, 325-26Google Scholar.

48. Tolstaia, , “Nepal ‘tsy,” 419 Google Scholar. In the novel's English translation, Jamey Gambrell emphasizes the association with rys (lynx), entitling the work The Slynx.

49. Ibid., 422.

50. Tolstaia, , Kys, 10, 95–96,139–40, 376Google Scholar.

51. Ibid., 16,19,26,35,47, 69.

52. Andrei Nemzer, “Azbuka kak azbuka: Tat'iana Tolstaia nadeetsia obuchit’ gramote vsekh buratin,” at http://www.ruthenia.ru/nemzer/kys.html (last accessed 31 May 2013). view with Dmitrii Glukhovskii (interview given at the London Book Fair, London, 12 April 2011).

53. Nikita Eliseev, review of Kys’ by Tat'iana Tolstaia, Novaia russkaia kniga, no. 6 (Winter 2000), at http://www.guelman.ru/slava/nrk/nrk6/ll.html (last accessed 31 May 2013). Boris Kuz'minskii similarly highlights the time between the novel's inception and publication, labeling Kys’ a “retro-dystopia” (retroantiutopiia). Boris Kuz'minskii, review of Kys’ by Tat'iana Tolstaia, Shvedskaia lavka 5 (18 October 2000), at http://old.russ.ru/krug/vybor/20001018.html#knl (last accessed 31 May 2013).

54. Tat'iana Tolstaia, “Miumziki i Nostradamus: Interv'iu gazeteMoskovskie novosti,” in Tolstaia, Nataliia and Tolstaia, Tat'iana, Dvoe: Raznoe (Moscow, 2001), 426 Google Scholar. Tolstaia confesses that the work lay dormant for long stretches of time, once going untouched for four years, but she stresses how her ideas evolved while working as a university lecturer and commentator for American magazines. Tat’ iana Tolstaia, “Nepal ‘tsy i miumziki: Interv’ iu zhurnaly Afisha,” in Tolstaia, and Tolstaia, , Dvoe, 419 Google Scholar.

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56. Aleksandr Ageev highlights the overlap of the novel's ideas with Tolstaia's 1992 article in The Guardian on Russian nationalism and her review of Elena Molokhovets's nineteenth-century cookbook, Podarok molodym khoziaikam (Kursk, 1861), which he believes inspired the multiple culinary references found in Kys'. Aleksandr Ageev, “Golod 45,” Russkii zhurnal, 2 August 2001, at old.russ.ru/krug/20010802.html(last accessed 31 May 2013). See Tatyana Tolstaya, “A Short Tour of the Russian Asylum,” The Guardian, 19 March 1992,25, and Tolstaia, Tat'iana, “Zolotoi vek,” Den': Lichnoe (Moscow, 2001), 450–68Google Scholar.

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58. The forgetting of Pushkin and the ascribing of his works to the autocratic ruler echo a Soviet joke at the time of the centennial of Pushkin's death. It suggested that a monument of Pushkin reading Byron was rejected for being “politically false,” another of Pushkin reading Stalin was “historically false,” hence the final, “historically and politically accurate” monument simply showed Stalin reading Stalin. Geldern, James von and Stites, Richard, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, 1995), 329 Google Scholar.

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60. For his online site and forum, see http://www.metro2033.ru/forum/ (last accessed 31 May 2013). Rejected by ten different publishers, Glukhovskii's novel garnered such popularity on his Web site that its publication in paper became possible in 2005. The 2005 version of Metro 2033 reflects the influences of the online community: in the face of popular demand, Glukhovskii altered the trajectory of a stray bullet that killed his protagonist and extended the work by eight additional chapters. Angus Kennedy interview with Dmitrii Glukhovskii (interview given at the London Book Fair, London, 12 April 2011).

61. Grant McMaster is the first international writer to join the project with Metro 2033: Britannia. His work tracks the adventures of Ewan, who survived the nuclear apocalypse in Glasgow's underground system.

62. The metro's first line opened on 14 May 1935, connecting Sokol'niki to Gor'kii Park.

63. Pike, , Metropolis on the Styx, 1–16 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Mark D. Steinberg for suggesting that I consider the similarities between Glukhovskii's vision of the metro and the imagery analyzed by Pike.

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68. Buck-Morss, “City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe,” 22.

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70. Beyond the Strugatskii brothers, Glukhovskii consciously draws upon the postapocalyptic and dystopian canons, stressing the importance of “global literature.” Emphasizing his particular admiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Glukhovskii evokes in his own work the catastrophic “blast” (the cholera epidemic) at the heart of Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Dmitrii Glukhovskii, “Bestselling Genre Fiction in Russia” (seminar at the London Book Fair, London, 12 April 2011). For a reading of Love in the Time of Cholera as postapocalyptic, see Buehrer, David, “A Second Chance on Earth': The Postmodern and the Post-Apocalyptic in Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 15–26 Google Scholar.

71. In the revelation of the wall's porosity and the center's emptiness, there are echoes of Franz Kafka's short story “The Great Wall of China,” in which the narrative of confinement is of greater significance than its actualization. Kafka, Franz, “The Great Wall of China,” Description of a Struggle and The Great Wall of China, trans. Muir, Willa et al. (London, 1960), 76–82 Google Scholar.

72. Glukhovskii, Dmitrii, Metro 2033 (Moscow, 2011), 312 Google Scholar. Glukhovskii thus deconstructs not only the subterranean Soviet imagery but also the symbols aimed at projecting the ideology into the sky. For more on the construction and symbolism of the Kremlin stars, see Julia Bekman Chadaga, “Light in Captivity: Glass, Spectacular and Power, Soviet in the 1920s and 1930s,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 82–105 Google Scholar.

73. Here, Glukhovskii evokes Stalin's language (zhit’ stalo veselee) to emphasize the continued resonance of broken dreams. Glukhovskii, , Metro 2033, 94 Google Scholar.

74. Ibid., 502-6.

75. Glukhovskii explicitly expressed the belief that one “apocalypse” has already occurred in Russia with the loss of the Soviet system of values. Angus Kennedy interview with Dmitrii Glukhovskii.

76. Omon Ra was written in Moscow in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and first published in 1992. Pelevin, Viktor, Omon Ra: Povest’ (Moscow, 1992)Google Scholar.

77. Moskoviada was first published in Ukrainian in 1993, a year after Omon Ra. Andrukhovych, Iurii, Moskoviada, trans. Brazhkina, A. (Moscow, 2001)Google Scholar.

78. Angus Kennedy interview with Dmitrii Glukhovskii.

79. Glukhovskii, , Metro 2033, 14 Google Scholar.

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82. I use here Walter Benjamin's description of the Parisian Métro, whose “labyrinthine halls” give rise to “troglodytic kingdoms.” Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 519 Google Scholar.

83. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Massumi, Brian (London, 1988), esp. 3–28 Google Scholar.

84. I use here the concept of the “heterotopia” as defined in spatial terms by Michel Foucault. Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Miskowiec, Jay, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85. In modern-day Moscow, the Filevskaia liniia has recently been extended, with new stations at Delovoi tsentr and Mezhdunarodnaia, facilitating access to the growing “Moscow-City” business district. Glukhovskii, however, envisages the opposite fate for this line, which is irradiated by its close proximity to the surface. He thus harks back to fears during World War II, when a Nazi bomb damaged Arbatskaia, and during the Cold War, when the line's effectiveness as a bomb shelter was queried. Glukhovskii, , Metro 2033, 11 Google Scholar. Baudrillard, , Selected Writings, 166 Google Scholar.

86. Baudrillard, , Selected Writings, 166 Google Scholar.

87. The metro map resembles Michel de Certeau's image of the modernist city from the viewpoint of the voyeur-god who treats the space as a totalized, mappable whole. From this elevated vantage point, momentum is arrested, time ceases, and historical complexities are transformed into a transparent, legible text. Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley, 1984), 91–110 Google Scholar.

88. Glukhovskii, , Metro 2033, 271–74, 431Google Scholar.

89. Ibid., 186.

90. Ibid., 14.

91. Ibid., 186.

92. Boym, , Future of Nostalgia, 49 Google Scholar.

93. Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94. Brade, Isolde and Rudolph, Robert, “Moscow, the Global City? The Position of the Russian Capital within the European System of Metropolitan Areas,” Area 36, no. 1 (March 2004): 70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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96. I use here J. G. Ballard's description of a postapocalyptic Pacific island. Ballard, J. G., “The Terminal Beach,” in Miller, Walter M. Jr. and Greenberg, Martin H., eds., Beyond Armageddon: Survivors of the Megawar (London, 1987), 129 Google Scholar.