The House in Russian Literature: A Mythopoetic Exploration

Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics Volume LIII Edited by J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeij...

Author: Joost van Baak

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Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics Volume LIII

Edited by

J.J. van Baak R. Grübel A.G.F. van Holk W.G. Weststeijn

The House in Russian Literature A Mythopoetic Exploration

Joost van Baak

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2549-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

9 11

PART I. WHAT IS A HOUSE? 1. The House as Archetype and Archetope of Human Culture. Its Origins and Universal Features in Relation to the Indo-European Tradition 2. The House Myth and the House as a Model of the World. Some Observations about the Russian Cultural Tradition 3. The Psychopoetics of the House and Archaic Thinking 4. The House and its Functions in Structuring Narrative and Poetic Worlds: the House as Myth

19 45 53 65

PART II. THE HOUSE MYTH IN 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 1. Two Strong Images 2. The Domostroi and Some Other Old Russian Reflexes: Ostrovskii, Dostoevskii, Leskov, Zamiatin 3. Peter the Great’s Window on Europe 4. Chaadaev’s Homelessness. The Beginning of a Long Tradition 5. Some Diachronic Considerations. The Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The Natural School 6. The Slavophile Domus 7. Pushkin’s Houses. The Craving for Homeliness 8. Lermontov’s Cosmic Homelessness 9. Gogol’. The Bachelor, and the House as a Box

77 79 83 89 95 99 101 139 147

6

The House in Russian Literature: A Mythopoetic Exploration

10. The House Myth Between the Natural School and Realism. From the City to the Countryside 11. The Russian Estate. The Domus Myth and the ‘Nests of the Gentry’ 12. Turgenev and the Domus 13. Goncharov. Homelessness Between Arcadian Dreams and Precipices 14. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Houses of Death 15. Tolstoi and Family Life 16. Bunin. Remembering the House. The Body in the World 17. Dostoevskii. The Underground Man and the Accidental Family 18. The End of Realism. The Onset of Modernism. New Anxieties 19. Garshin’s World as Prison 20. Chekhov. Ambiguous Dachas and Mansions 21. Symbolism. Demonic Urbanism and Catastrophic Expectations 22. Briusov and Blok 23. Belyi’s Cosmic House. The Big Bang and the Temple of the Body 24. From Symbolism to Futurism 25. Guro. A New House and a New Life. The Magic of a Child’s Vision 26. Khlebnikov. The House of Language. A Body to Live in 27. Maiakovskii. Realising the Metaphor. The Self as a House 28. Zabolotskii. Modernist. Archaist 29. The Catastrophe. The Loss of the Centre 30. Pil’niak. Life and Death of the House 31. Zamiatin. The Cave Myth Revisited 32. Platonov’s Paradoxes and Pseudologics. Negative Spaces and Houses on the Move 33. The House and Socialism. Trifonov, Chukovskaia and Akhmatova 34. Anti-Houses. Under the Doom of the Kommunalka. Deformations of the Utopian House 35. Bulgakov. The House as a Metaphysical Home 36. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag World. ‘Matriona’s House’

159 163 171 199 217 231 235 247 257 259 261 281 283 297 309 311 315 323 329 337 341 357 363 377 419 427 437

Contents

7

37. Erofeev. Venichka’s Homelessness in the Soviet Universe 38. Sorokin’s Roman. A Postmodernist Attempts the Destruction of the Domus 39. Makanin’s Underground. Homeless Under a Roof

445

Conclusions

491

Bibliography

495

Index

511

459 471

Acknowledgements This book has been under way for many years. The first ideas for it were developed in the course of my research in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen during the nineteen-nineties. The systematic research and first formulations of the theoretical chapters, as well as of some of the major analytical chapters, were made possible by a fellowship of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar during the academic year 1998-1999. I had the opportunity to finish the book during the winter semester of 2007-8 thanks to a grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO; grant nr. 365-30-031). I am grateful to my colleague Dr Ellen Rutten for her invaluable advice following a critical reading of Chapter II.38, on V. Sorokin. In particular I thank Allan Wilcox for his meticulous work in correcting, editing and polishing my English.

Groningen, October 2008

Introduction Let me begin with a clear statement of what this book is not. It is not a catalogue of, or a descriptive commentary upon, Russian literature’s portrayal of people inhabiting their houses, even though this is a common aspect of novels or poems that are centred around family life; neither is it about the history of Russian architecture, or the interiors of literary houses. However important and interesting these may be in themselves, I shall be dealing with houses on a deeper, more abstract level. The cultural, anthropological and psychological significance of the House does not necessarily rely upon explicit architectural features, however much they may be involved in its artistic representation. The domestic theme derives its great anthropological significance and, as a consequence, its semiotic, literary, symbolic and poetic potential from the fact that it so easily develops and supports an enormous variety of metaphorical and metonymical connections. The main purpose of this book is to analyse and interpret the most important realisations of this potential in two centuries of Russian literature. It is therefore concerned with the house as a social, emotional and ethical concept rather than in its material appearance. It studies the psychological and moral qualities which Russian cultural and literary tradition have invested in the house, or projected on to it. Starting from its literally material foundation, a house, and everything that comes with it (such as a garden), can be defined as an essentially man-made space. One can choose to look at this space from various levels of abstraction. On a very abstract, phenomenological level, we can view the building of a house as the cutting off, or partitioning off, of an amount of space from the rest of the world, and attributing to that piece of space particular preferences and values as the centre of the world from which all other directions and orientations are measured. This partitioning can be viewed as a concrete, historical act of building, but we can also take into consideration the mental act which not only precedes the actual building but defines the attitude of

12


the house dweller towards his or her domestic surroundings as such. For this reason, there is no other image, shape, or complex of space that is, or ever has been, so inextricably linked with the very idea of human culture as that of the House. From this point, a complex system of imagery can be further derived and motivated, underlying a universal poetics of the House and the Personality. The processes involved can be both metaphorical and metonymical, often working simultaneously. Owing to their basically concentric relationship, the House can easily function both as a metonym for the internalised Self and as a metaphor of the externalised Self, the Self being identified with the House or its components. This relationship was beautifully expressed by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard when he referred to the House as ‘the non-me that protects the me’ (le non-moi qui protège le moi; Bachelard 1964, 24). Moreover, the book seeks to develop a fundamental anthropological and cultural concept of the Myth of the House, myths being stories about the worldview, justification of life, and destiny of humankind, presented in their timeless essence. This range of questions will be dealt with in Part I. The analyses presented in Part II are elaborations of this idea in relation to Russian literature and culture. From this approach it should be understood that, on the one hand, the range of analysed texts is representative rather than exhaustive and, on the other, the concept of the House Myth developed and applied here as an analytical and hermeneutical tool is equally applicable to other literatures and cultures. The criteria and distinctions to be used in the literary analyses are complex, and they are discussed at length in the four chapters of Part I. They are founded on insights and data from anthropology and linguistics as well as theories of culture, and they have anthropological and cultural as well as specifically literary implications. The analytical procedure is largely based on the semiotic structuralist approach of the so called Moscow-Tartu school. It is my firm conviction that this methodology represents a sound and productive starting point for the analysis and systematic description of complex cultural phenomena, provides useful and viable tools for the formulation and testing of hypotheses concerning human culture and cognition, and gives a consistent hermeneutic perspective to our intuitions about literature – which is, after all, the central task of the systematic study of that discipline.

Introduction

13

A great deal of Russian literature was written, not in Russia itself, but by emigrants abroad. For many emigrant authors, whatever their reasons or the circumstances of their leaving the motherland, the House, and certainly the loss of it, looms large over their lives even where it does not surface systematically in particular works. Although I discuss at some length the work of one emigrant author (Ivan Bunin; see Chapter II. 16), emigrant Russian literature is in general beyond the scope of this book. It deserves treatment on its own account.1 There are several monographic studies devoted to the study of the House concept, from the general point of view of psychology and anthropology as well as from cultural and literary perspectives. Mathias Hirsch’s Das Haus. Symbol für Leben und Tod, Freiheit und Unabhängigkeit (Hirsch 2006), for example, is a psychological study of the House that emphasises the basic ambiguity of its maternal safety aspect set alongside the conformity and lack of freedom that it imposes, and discusses House symbolism in some psychopathological complaints. He also refers to Bachelard, Freud and others in describing archetypal symbolic relations of transformation or equivalence between the House and the human personality; see Chapter I.3. Our House: the Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture, edited by Gerry Smith and Jo Croft (Smith and Croft 2005) is a varied collection of essays with equally varied approaches to the domestic theme and its reflections in English literature and culture. In these too, there are many points of connection with this study’s categories and distinctions in dealing with the thematic domain of the House and its symbolic and literary functions, and here too there are references to Bachelard. Carsten, Janet & Stephen Hugh-Jones have edited a set of anthropological articles under the title About the House: Lévi-Strauss 1

For a recent account of the role of the House image in the Russian emigrant press of the first and second waves (1919-30), see A.V. Zelenin 2007. He points out that the House concept was indeed an important one in emigrant discourse with which a great variety of values were connected. Zelenin distinguishes, among others, the following meanings connected with the House: the House as country (Дом как страна); the House as land or soil (Дом как земля, почва); the House as the absence of the house (Дом как отсутствие дома, бездомье); the House as family (Дом как семья), and the House as religion (orthodoxy) (Дом как религия (православие)). Most of these aspects can be connected with the basic features of the House Myth that are developed in Part I of this book.

14


and beyond (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995) that I found very useful in drawing up my theoretical chapters in Part I. Witold Rybczynski’s Home. A Short History of an Idea (Rybczynski 1987) is an original phenomenological and historical analysis of the idea of Home in Western European culture. More specifically covering Slavic and Russian culture, A. K. Baiburin is the author of a number of publications, including an authoritative study of the House in the conceptions and rituals of the Eastern Slavs (Baiburin 2005). He covers the field of traditional Eastern Slavic culture, which, although Russian, is barely traceable (if at all) in the thematics and poetics of Russian literature as such. Of primary importance for the history of the House as subject in 19th century Russian culture and literature are V.G. Shchukin’s publications concerning the Slavophile conceptualisations of the House, and the history of the country estate in its literary reflections (for example 1987, 1996a and b, and 1997). Similarly, though taking a different approach, E. E. Dmitrieva and O. N. Kuptsova (2003), respectively a literature and a theatre specialist, give a rich and detailed description of the Russian estate in the broad range of its historical manifestations and its significance for Russian culture, literature and theatre. Amy C. Singleton’s No Place Like Home. The Literary Artist and Russia’s Search for Cultural Identity (Singleton 1997) concentrates (as her title indicates) on the House as Home. Her literary analysis concentrates on Gogol’, Goncharov, Zamiatin, and Bulgakov; see Chapter II.35. I. B. Pavlova has written an interesting study on the theme of the family in the work of Saltykov-Shchedrin as a representative of his generation, including Dostoevskii, for whom this aspect of the House theme was frought with anxiety (Pavlova 1999; see also Chapters II.14 and 17). Finally, T.I. Radomskaia has devoted a study to the connections between the concepts of House and Fatherland in Russian literature of the early 19th century as inspired by religious ideas and traditions. Her book focuses on a specific, historically restricted religious and ideological discourse involving the House image (Radomskaia 2006). In connection with the domestic theme, the metaphor of the prism may be useful in elucidating the scope and structure of my analytical approach. Just as natural light comprises the colours of the spectrum in a ‘synthetic’ fashion, we could also say that a semantic complex such as the House Myth, with its implied multiple thematics, fulfils an

Introduction

15

analogous role as an anthropological and cultural constant in the universe of human life, accompanying it as an equally synthetic, simultaneous presence and potentiality. As soon as certain fundamental (topical, semantic, semiotic, or genre-bound) choices are made in a literary text, the Myth’s prism function can come into play, resulting in the ‘refraction’ of the thematic complex into the ‘spectral’ variation of its individual and separate motifs, from which an author can choose one or more, foreground and develop them, interconnect them, and so on. At the same time, however, we should observe the metaphor’s natural limitations when addressing the cultural question of the demarcation of the House Myth as a conceptual and semantic domain as distinct from other such domains. We can distinguish two types of freedom here. On the one hand there is the author’s freedom to choose, develop and integrate motifs from the domestic and other domains. On the other hand there is the hermeneutic freedom of readers to select and establish specific relations and determine their relevance for themselves. I will not go into this question of interpretative plausibility and its intrinsic limits as a theoretical problem, but simply acknowledge it as a pragmatic fact that also influences my selection process for this study of the House Myth. I only want to stress that, in the diversity of literary texts, we are confronted with varying degrees of textual explicitness and interrelatedness of motifs, as well as with matters such as the local logic and modalities of a particular universe of discourse. Such considerations have been the major determinants in my deciding upon the relative relevance and dominance of this particular thematic domain in a given text. This also implies that, in the context of any particular analysis, interpretative exhaustiveness is, by principle, an untenable and deceptive idea. The historic variety and range of my choice of authors and works is another question. Within the scope of this book’s topic I think I have covered a representative and pertinent variety taken from two hundred years of Russian literature, but I am also bound to have omitted important works. My ultimate choice is the combined result of traditional canonical considerations, personal preferences and the natural restrictions of any one reader’s literary horizon. Part II of this book could probably be expanded to twice its present size or even more, but that would not necessarily increase its explanatory potential.

I

WHAT IS A HOUSE?

1. The House as Archetype and Archetope of Human Culture. Its Origins and Universal Features in Relation to the Indo-European Tradition Although living in a house seems to be as normal and natural as breathing, eating, or sleeping in a bed, it involves a complex range of human social behaviours and values which can be found in symbolic representations, art, and narratives of all cultures and in all ages. During the course of the civilisation process, especially in Western civilisations, the positive and individual aspects of living in houses have become increasingly important, resulting in the ideals of domesticity, privacy and comfort. That these are related to the emergence of bourgeois society, and thus are of relatively recent origin, is shown by such authors as John Lukacs (1970) and Witold Rybczynski (1987). According to Rybczinski, domesticity as we know and value it originated in the social, cultural and visual-artistic context of the emerging Dutch republic at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It should be thought of as ‘a set of felt emotions, not a single attribute. Domesticity has to do with the family, intimacy and a devotion to the home, as well as with a sense of the house embodying – not only harbouring – these sentiments’ (Rybczynski 1987, 75). In this perception, the house provides protection and cover, but adds to that ‘commodity and delight’ (idem, Chapter 4), and thus becomes a home. This quality had become a common element of European life by the time the Russians were systematically and intensively exposed to it under Peter the Great. As with other aspects of that great confrontation, however, the absorption of domesticity and the home into Russian culture exhibits

20


features that are specifically Russian.1 As I hope to show in these introductory chapters, from a cultural and anthropological perspective there is more to the notion of the House than the conception of domesticity on which Rybczynski focuses. Of course it is all a matter of definition: the phenomenon of the House bears an enormous range of significances. As a starting point for this chapter, I shall define the House as the shape, image, or concept of a man-made cultural space. In spite of the importance of the cave metaphor in myth and literature, caves are not houses in this primary sense, even though they may be spaces of habitation, and thus of human culture.2 Some basic notions of house and home may be as old as culture itself (see Hodder 1990, 94), but the scavenger, huntergatherer and fisher stages precede the beginnings of mankind’s agricultural life, which is where his evolution into domesticity begins. There is little evidence of man-made protective structures of any kind during the palaeolithic period (that is, before mankind adopted a mainly-agricultural and sedentary way of life) but this whole area is, at best, highly speculative.3 Archaeologists4 tend to believe that the 1

For example, Rybczynski points out that the word ‘home’ and its cognates in the other Germanic languages, denoting both a physical place and a ‘state of being’, lacks an equivalent in the Romance and Slavic languages (Rybczynski 1987, 62). For a comparable observation see Shchukin (1994, 102), who observes that, in Russian lingual consciousness, ‘house’ (‘дом’) in the sense of ‘family’ (‘семья’) refers not to the ‘spiritual space of ‘the own corner” (духовное пространство “родного угла’), but to a group of people connected by blood-ties. Shchukin also mentions a curious symptom of the Russian adoption of Western comfort and elegance in the eighteen-forties: around Saint-Petersburg, dacha-architecture came under the influence of English fashion, and the words ‘komfort’ and ‘feshenebel’nyi’ (from the English ‘fashionable’) appeared in the Russian language at about the same time (idem, 103). 2 Leroi-Gourhan, in a methodological chapter on the research of fireplaces in prehistoric cave-dwellings, does apply the notion of domesticity to these forms of habitation in phrases such as ‘[…], en vue d’établir la configuration générale d’un habitat qui apparemment comportait plusieurs unités domestiques’(Leroi-Gourhan 1992, 119). 3 According to Leroi-Gourhan there is material proof that paleolithic man had huts or tents, but he is reluctant to identify positively certain types of cave paintings which he calls signes tectiformes (Leroi-Gourhan 1992, 187, 360). In an earlier publication (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, 139), he dates the first combined traces of habitations and graphic signs from between fifty-thousand and thirty-thousand years ago, and significantly observes the joint appearance in history of the first well kept houses and symbolic activities – or, as he calls them here, ‘des premières représentations rythmiques’. 4 I am grateful to the archaeologist Graeme Barker for his helpful advice in this area.

The House as Archetype and Archetope of Human Culture

21

earliest humans, living in groups largely by scavenging, made crude shelters that were not houses in the sense that we would understand them; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 25. The Neanderthals (200.000 – 40.000 years ago in Europe) also seem not to have made house-like structures; their cave fires are more likely to have been made for the purpose of defrosting meat taken from frozen carcasses than for cooking. Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) appears in Europe from about forty-thousand years ago, during the Upper Palaeolithic period, the coldest period of the Pleistocene Ice Age. He was an efficient hunter, using rock shelters and caves but mainly as temporary camps while hunting in much the same way as Nuniamut caribou hunters do in Alaska today. There is evidence of tent-like structures from this period, and at Mezhirich, in the Ukraine, house-like structures dating from around 14,000 BCE have been found, constructed entirely from the jaws, bones, and tusks of mammoths; see Mellars in Cunliffe 1998, 62. The first archaeological evidence of European dwellings, ranging from windbreaks to substantial huts, dates from the Mesolithic period in Europe (the seventh millennium BCE; see Mithen in Cunliffe 1998, 102), but the beginnings of genuine domestication are found in the Near East and date from the Neolithic period (the eighth and seventh millennia BCE), spreading significantly into Europe during the late sixth and fifth millennia BCE. This was probably the beginning of a complex process that included the development of more-or-less permanent houses with hearths, the economic domestication of animals and plants, the use of clay for pottery, and social and symbolic domestication as reflected in the architecture and internal differentiation of houses, the nature and distribution of artifacts, tools, decorations, figurines and cultic objects, and burial sites; see Hodder 1990, 20-43, 48. Hodder’s starting point is that domestication is about bringing ‘the wild’ under the control of what he calls the ‘domus’ (idem, Chapter. 3). This ‘provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial’ (Hodder, 39). He concludes that ‘despite all the variability and difficulty of definition of ‘domestication’, it seems clear that the origins of agriculture take place within a complex symbolic web that centres on the house and on death’ (36).

22


The idea of ‘domus’, both in its pragmatic aspect of everyday, life-sustaining routines and with its more abstract and symbolic connotations, has enormous consequences for the emergence of human society; see Hodder, 44. It will be developed further in this book as a key typological concept of the House. In my analyses of the literary sources, I shall use the conceptual term Domus alongside House, the former conveying the cultural anthropological and archetypal meaning of the House that I have just sketched, and the latter covering the entire range of domestic phenomena that are encountered in the texts. In specific instances these may, of course, coincide. From a non-chronological typological viewpoint, we could characterise man’s fundamental, original way of life as nomadic, sedentary (agricultural) or a combination of the two. It is not the purpose of this chapter to address the ‘genetic’ question of whether one of them could, or should, be considered as older, or more basic, than the other. There will be very few cultures in which houses as fundamental protective structures are not socially, economically and symbolically significant, but the specific cognitive, symbolic and evaluative frameworks in which House concepts function differ markedly between cultures. However, I will not be discussing the problem of cultural universals and the possible formal status of the House concept from that perspective. I rather subscribe to the ethnopsychological and ethnophilosophical view of Wierzbicka on ‘universal human concepts in culture-specific configurations’ (Wierzbicka 1992; see especially her introduction and Chapter 1). She allows for a small set of universal cognitive primitives but relies on detailed linguistic evidence and contrastive semantic analysis when it comes to describing ‘folk concepts’ such as ‘soul’ and ‘mind’(idem 44). My interest is in the characterisation and differentiation of attitudes towards cultural and natural space, and the articulations that result from it, with particular attention to the House and to the structure of that concept in Russian literature. This means that I adopt a phenomenological and semiotic view that has both typological and historical aspects; see Chapter 3. In historic reality there are combinations of nomadic and sedentary lives, and the available archaeological and linguistic data, which are often contradictory, at least make clear that the issue of domestication is a compli-


23

cated one.5 Nevertheless, in my analysis I too make use of insights resulting from the combined study of archaeology and comparative linguistics. On the basis of linguistic and textual evidence, Schrader concludes that the Indo-Europeans were familiar with the building of houses or huts at a very early stage (Schrader 1917, 443). His results suggest that they lived in fortified villages of wooden houses, often in elevated places (Sergent 1995, 185, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 744) or partly embedded in the earth (Schrader 1917, 444-8), typically executed in wattle and daub (idem, 457). From Vedic texts one can conclude that Old-Indian houses or huts were typically simple constructions built around a central pillar, often reinforced with cross beams (Bodewitz 1977). On the strength of prehistoric evidence and reconstruction, LeroiGourhan stresses the importance of the human organisation of space, including that of man’s living space. His argument (Leroi-Gourhan 1965, 150 – ‘L’espace humanisé’) is that the organisation of inhabited space is not only a matter of technical commodity but also, like language, the symbolic expression of human behaviour in general – ‘un comportement globalement humain’. For all known groups of humans, he continues, the habitat answers a triple need: 5

In the Indo-European context, see, for example, Sergent’s conclusion: ‘(…), les Indo-Européens étaient à la fois des éleveurs et des cultivateurs. Ce n’étaient pas des nomades, comme cela a été parfois soutenu: le vrai nomadisme est bien postérieur, et vient d’une spécialisation, d’une adaptation aux conditions écologiques soit de montagnes, soit des steppes froides. Sans doute ce dernier biotope était-il à peu près celui des gens des kourganes; mais ceux-ci avaient une civilisation néolithique primitive: on est loin de la spécialisation des grands pasteurs’ (Sergent 1995, 182). For a diachronic-linguistic hypothesis, see N. D. Andreev’s reconstruction of the IndoEuropean protolanguage as developing from an older ‘boreal protolanguage’ (including Uralic and Altaic). He postulates a boreal root LY-: ‘to stick/adhere to’ (прилипать), ‘to remain’ (оставаться), which in Early Indo-European also acquired the meaning ‘to lead a sedentary life’ (жить оседло), and 'to live' (оставаться живым), and another boreal root, Xy-S-, which denoted a ‘fenced in nomad camp’ (огороженное стойбище), which in EI-E came to mean ‘permanent living place’ (постоянное место обитания); also, according to Andreev, the abstract copula ‘to be’ emerged in EI-E on the same basis (Andreev 1986, 127, 181, 271). Among modern archaeologists there are serious doubts as to the historic reality of the type of migration presupposed by comparative linguistics, and consequently as to the historic reality of proto-IndoEuropeans as well. (Once again, I am grateful for the advice of Graeme Barker in this regard.)

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1. the creation of a technically efficient milieu; 2. a framework for the social system; 3. the establishment of an orderly centre in an apparently chaotic universe. These three issues will be of increasing importance, respectively, in the analytical approach of this book . Any given language and its literature constitutes a growing repository of historical information regarding the culture and world-view of its users. For this reason, I shall now survey the pertinent comparative-linguistic data. The comparative study of Indo-European languages and archaeology has a long tradition. When this is combined with a semiotic approach, the possibility of historically and typologically relevant analyses and reconstructions of cultures is increased, as can be seen in the work of E. Benveniste, O. Schrader, V.V. Ivanov, T.V. Gamkrelidze, V.N. Toporov, Ju. M. Lotman, B. Sergent, N. D. Andreev and the encyclopedia Myths of the World/Мифы народов мира. Analysis of the vocabulary of the House, its semantic structure and related etymological patterns can yield new information regarding the anthropological and cultural significance of the House concept. My sources for this outline are predominantly, but not exclusively, the results of research in the Indo-European area. The primary House terminology, or lexical field, belongs to the oldest layers of the Indo-European vocabulary and their derivatives in the various branches and cognates of that language family; see, for example, Benveniste 1969, Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 741, Fasmer 1986, Van Veen 1989, De Vries 1957 & 1971, Klein 1971 and Sergent 1995. The notion of architecture, of something built, is the dominant feature in the lexical material examined here. Nevertheless, Benveniste finds that in the case of the Domus-complex this should be considered not as the original but as a derivative meaning in the broader context of Indo-European social organisation and its evolution (Benveniste 1969, Vol. 1, Chapter 2, especially 297-308).6 In many of 6

The problem of the I-E. social system, its relations with the House-terminology, and the linguistic evidence in question is very complex. Moreover there are essential differences between the Eastern and the Western I-E. languages. Only a number of elements relevant for this discussion are presented here.


25

the languages involved, he observes a gradual shift from the social concept of ‘maison-famille’, like the Latin Domus (‘house’), to that of ‘maison-édifice’, like the Greek dómos.7 In his opinion this reflects a social change: the breaking up of the large family in a society ordered according to genealogy, and the gradual emergence of a society which is subdivided according to geography (ibidem). His linguistic argument is based on his interpreting the root *dem- as homophonic (see Sergent 1995, 192) and distinguishing between two roots responsible for the development of this semantic distinction – ‘spatial /constructive’ and ‘social’; these are, respectively, *dem (‘to build’) and *dom(ə) (‘to tame, domesticate’, L. domare); see Benveniste, 293.8 Of course, that still leaves us with an extensive network of domestic vocabulary of which the spatial foundation is undeniable, even though non-spatial, sociological and other aspects are also expressed in a variety of ways using the same vocabulary; see Sergent 1995, 192.9 Thus, we have the cosmogonic meaning of house building; for example, in Slavic: Russ. здание < зъдати, and related forms, meaning ‘to create’, ‘to found’, ‘to erect (in stone)’; compare Slov. zidati (‘to build a brick wall’) and Bulg. зид (‘wall’), зидам (‘I build’), etc. There appear to be two main tendencies here, though they may coincide in a particular lexeme. One stresses the building and the closed 7

The absence in Latin of a verb derived from the root *dem- with the meaning ‘to construct’, that is, of an equivalent to Gk. démō, is problematic. (See Benveniste 1969, Vol. 1, 299). An interesting example from Latin is Virgil’s use of both domus and sedes (‘abode, place of residence’) in the same verse (Aeneid VII, 52), suggesting the differentiation in, respectively, ‘maison-famille’ and ‘maison-édifice’: sola domum et tantas servabat filia sedes (alone, to preserve the house and noble home, was a daughter; text and transl. Virgil 1998, 7). 8 Among these, according to him, contamination occurred. In fact he distinguishes three irreducible unities: “1) *domā- ‘faire violence, dompter’ (lat. domāre, gr. damáō, skr. damayati, got. gatamjan, etc.); 2) *dem(ə) ‘construire’ (gr. démō et ses dérivés, got. timrjan); 3) *dem- ‘maison, famille” (Benveniste 1969, 307). Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1984, II, 742, note 3) see no problem in a unified I.-E root *t’e/om. Andreev too, connects both, and reconstructs an Early Indo-European (‘Boreal’ in his system) root Dh-Xy (7), meaning ‘to lay the foundations of ( housing, household building, defensive structure)’, or Dxy- (127), meaning ‘to build a tent by binding together stakes and hides’, or ‘to bundle up things before breaking up camp’, as well as ‘to tame’ (Andreev 1986). 9 Cf. Sergent’s felicitous formulation: ‘Cependant, partout la ‘maison’ comme ‘maisonnée’ (…) inclut explicitement un aspect topographique: c’est un lieu social, une entité sociologique inscrite dans un espace’.

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space of human habitation, implying a certain metonymic relationship of the type container–contained type. The other emphasises the positive evaluative (emotional and moral) semantic components of this concept; that is, its protective, sheltering, and socialising qualities. The first comprises the ‘architectural’ vocabulary complex already differentiated above: Russ. дом, L. domus (‘house’, in spite of the above), Gk. dómos/dōma, -atos, démō (‘house’ or ‘chamber’, ‘I build’), OI. dámas (‘house’), Goth. timrjan (‘to build’), OE. timber (‘to build, timber, a building’), Du timmeren (‘to put together (as a carpenter)’); cf. also Gk. démas (‘bodily frame’); further E. manor, mansion, F. maison < OF. manoir, L. mansio, -onem (‘a staying, remaining; night quarters, station’), manēre (‘to remain’, Late L. ‘to dwell’); in the Germanic languages, G. Haus, E. house, Du. huis (‘house’), hut (idem), ON. hauss (‘skull’), various Old Germanic dialects hûs < I.-E. *qeu, *qeus-, (‘to cover, to hide’), E. hose (‘stocking’), G. Hose (‘trouser’), E. husk < MDu. (dimin.) huuskijn, huusken (‘little house, husk of fruit’), Gk. keuthein (‘to cover’), keuth(m)os (‘shelter, cave’), kutos (‘skin, cover’), skutos (‘leather’), L. cus, cutis (‘skin’), OPruss. keuto ‘skin’, E. hide (n. and v.), Du. huid, G. Haut (idem). Furthermore there is the very interesting and rich anthropomorphic etymology connecting Gk. kefalè (‘head’, metonymically ‘mouth’) and (as the most noble part of the body) ‘person’, (symbolically) ‘seat of life’, as well as ‘origin’, and ‘apogee’ (Montijn 1960, 427); OSax. gibillia (‘skull’, ‘head’), G. Giebel, (‘house front’, ‘facade)’, Du. gevel (idem) (DeVries 1959, Van Veen 1989); and compare also the ON. Hauss (‘skull’) just mentioned. The second is exemplified by the verb ‘to dwell, to reside’ in Germanic languages. G. wohnen, Du. wonen, is related to G. Wonne, or MG. wonne, wunne (‘joy, enjoyment, pleasure, delight’), ON. una (‘to be satisfied, contented’); compare also L. venus (‘love’), OI. vanati, vanoti (‘to desire, to love’). De Vries (1971) points out the broad semantic range of the Germanic root wen, including such meanings as ‘to get used to’, ‘to have a habit, custom, or practice’(Du. gewoon), and refers to Du. wennen (‘to accustom to’, ‘to get used to’),10 and wens (‘wish’), Got. unwunands (‘sad’). He further argues that the meaning of ON una 10

Which suggests an interesting semantic parallel with one part of the other domestic root complex (*dem); cf. L. domare ‘to tame, domesticate’.


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should not be directly connected to the meaning of wonen (‘to reside’, ‘to dwell’), the former having developed from the notion of a ‘fenced -off area’ analogous to OHG winna, ‘meadow’, or ‘fenced-off piece of land where the cattle are kept’ (ibidem). Following J. Trier (PBB 66, 1942, 251), he derives Du. wonen (‘to reside’, ‘to dwell’), for example, from ‘to remain within a fenced-off space’ (of the village community, or of the yard on which the house is built). Spatial features such as these will prove to be characteristic of the House image in a variety of cultural and literary contexts. Although the data discussed here are of a diachronic linguistic nature, their semiotic and typological significance still appears to be general, and therefore exceeds their actual diachronic and etymological (language-bound)11 connections. This suggests that the house is a fenced-off space in relation to the outside world, which is at the same time connected to it in the sense of a territory, and this can be corroborated by other, related facts; see below. According to De Vries then, the concept of ‘closed community, circle’ has given rise to the notions of ‘close company’ and ‘family circle’, ‘living in a settlement’ and the idea of an ‘agreeable and comfortable life in a community’(De Vries 1957). Gamkrelidze and Ivanov agree with Benveniste that the root *t’om (their notation) also resulted in derivations that refer to the ‘head of the house’; cf. OI. dámpati, Lat. dominus, as well as to ‘servants’ (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 742). Equally old and literally central to our theme is the ‘hearth’ complex, which relates the fireplace to the life of the family or the clan; see, for example, Du. haard (idem), OHG. herd (‘rammed down earth before the fireplace’), ON. hyrr (‘fire’), Got. hauri (‘ember’), OI. kudayati (‘scorches’, singes’) and OSlav. курити (‘to smoke’). The hearth is the architectural and social centre of the traditional house, and it is the place where the cult of the fire is concentrated; compare the Latin goddess of the hearth, concord and the safety of the state, Vesta, and her Greek equivalent Hestia, from hestia, ‘hearth’, ‘altar’ and ‘family’. The collocation ‘hearth and home’ (Du. huis en haard, 11

Interestingly, this can even be supported by historic linguistic findings. Sergent states, for example, that a non-Indo-European language such as Turkish must, at a very early stage, have borrowed Indo-European terms from this very lexical field; ‘compare i.-e. *dom-, ‘construire’, turc tam, ‘toit’; i.-e. *gherto-, “enclos”, turc yurt, “maison”, […]’ (Sergent 1996, 398).

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G. Haus und Herd) is symptomatic of their interrelatedness. Schrader adduces comparative linguistic evidence for their metonymic exchangeability, which, according to him, is reminiscent of the time when ‘house’ and hearth’ coincided spatially; compare L. aedis (originally ‘fireplace, hearth’), and Gk. hestia (‘house’) both of which can signify the entire house (Schrader 1917, 455). The importance of the oven in the Slavic cultural context has been studied extensively. From the perspective of this semiotic etymological interpretation, there is an intriguing connection between the Russian печора/пещера, печь, печаль and беспечный (respectively: ‘cave’, ‘stove/oven’, ‘grief/sorrow’ and ‘careless/carefree’); see Fasmer 1986. No less striking is the etymological connection in Russian between the lexemes ‘to cover’, or ‘to roof’ (‘крыть’), ‘roof’ (‘крыша’, ‘кров’) and ‘treasure’(‘сокровище’) (idem), and in Latin between tego (‘to cover, hide’), tectum (both ‘roof’, and ‘house’) and its Germanic cognates Du. ‘dekken’ (to cover) and ‘dak’ (German ‘Dach’). In other words, this is the House concept linguistically modelled as the protective structure par excellence. Such conceptualisations of human habitation presuppose not only a social and material house structure but also hierarchical organisation (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 742), and this too is also reflected in language, as we would expect. The family level (whatever its structure) is inevitably incorporated within a higher community level, which in its turn is structured spatially. The relationship between these two levels appears to be symmetrical, and, to a certain degree, repetitive because both are based on a boundary of some kind and a relationship of enclosure and inclusion. This is evident from a group of words meaning ‘to fence off, enclose’ (from the root *gher-), including, among others, Goth. gards (‘house’), ON. gardr (‘enclosure, fortress, courtyard’), E. garden, Du. gaard (‘enclosed garden’), Oslav. градъ (‘citadel, city, garden’), Russ. город (‘city’), Alb. gardh/garth (‘hedge’) and Lit. gardìs (‘palisade, fence’). Also widely distributed among the members of this language family is the basic technical terminology for fencing-off with poles, wattle and daub, and so on. The spatial opposition ‘closed – open’ is very well represented in the IndoEuropean vocabulary. Sergent points out that the Western IndoEuropean languages are rich in terms meaning ‘village’ or ‘enclosed unit of habitation’ as opposed to open outside spaces (Sergent 1995,


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186-7). He gives an Indo-European root *koymo-, meaning ‘village’; compare Gk. kōmè (‘village, hamlet’), Got. haims (‘village’), E. home, Lit. káima(s)(‘village’). Other examples include *woyk-, giving a term for ‘clan’ in Indian and, in the Western languages, connotations such as ‘enclosure, house, village’(hence L. vicus, Oslav. вьсь, or Du. wijk), and the verbal root *weyk-, ‘to enter’, indicating the enclosed space in which the members of the clan sleep (root *key-, the same as in *koymo-). There is equally abundant ethnographic evidence supporting the importance of the opposition (en)closed – open, in which walls, and particularly thresholds, are sacred and densely beset with rituals and beliefs; see, for example, Sergent 1995, 187-8, and below. Another phenomenon of the lexical and conceptual material discussed here is its metonymic (pars pro toto) potential, as in the above mentioned ‘hearth and home’. In collocations, idioms and sayings in general, as well as in poetic imagery, other parts of the house, the walls or the roof for example, can also easily be substituted for the whole of the house in both social and architectural aspects; compare the Latin tectum (‘roof’ and ‘house’), tecta accipere (‘to be billeted, quartered’) and tecta solida (‘prison’). In the following example from Russian literature, ‘walls’ stand for this comprehensive house concept: У Федора нет ни стен, ни семьи, он последние годы только то и 12 делал, что рвал с людьми.

Outside the Indo-European area there is comparable evidence of the House as a basic and major focus of social and cultural significance. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and beyond (Carsten & Hugh-Jones (eds.) 1995), a collection of essays concerning the significance of houses in South-East Asia and South America, offers an interesting review, as well as a re-evaluation, of the House concept in anthropological theory and description since Lévi-Strauss. With the growth of research, earlier anthropological concepts such as kinship theory were gradually found inadequate for the explanation of actual sociological complexities. Lévi-Strauss had proposed the concept of the house as a social institution because it unites and transcends a number of con12

‘Fedor does not have a house [litt.: ‘walls’] nor a family; all he has done in recent years is quarrel with people.’ (From Tendriakov’s Свидание с Нефертити (Rendezvous with Nefertete); see Academic Russian Dictionary in 4 Vols, vide рвать)

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cepts which traditional kinship theory treated as mutually exclusive13. His sociological notion of sociétés à maison – ‘a hybrid, transitional form between kin-based and class-based social orders’ (Introduction, 10) – was intended to reconcile such contradictions. However, concept of house employed in his theory was a social one14 that disregarded its physical aspects. Part of the purpose of Carsten & Hugh-Jones et. al. is to address these aspects and explicitly draw them into consideration, ‘exploring the physical characteristics of houses and linking these to the role that houses, like bodies, come to play as symbols of social groups [...]’. (Introduction, 21). A particularly interesting topic of their book concerns the anthropological significance of the material, and symbolic analogies between the human body and the house; see especially their Introduction and Chapter 11. Being in the world, ‘being there’, inevitably implies a relationship, whether of association or dissociation, between the self and the world, and this relationship also forms the basis of the psychological (cognitive, emotional), social and cultural division of the world into sensible spaces, shapes, and connections. The house in its own multiple manifestations, together with other articulations of culturally significant space such as walls, paths and roads, gardens and stretches of land, makes up what we can call ‘territory’, or ‘home’. This is the space in which mankind settles down and tries to achieve a harmony between nature and himself, implying the absence of any insoluble conflict between culture and nature. The concept of the garden, as an adjunct to the settlement itself, follows logically from this in its implication of a man-made space and order. This is also reflected etymologically in the Russian lexical complex for ‘garden’ and ‘estate’ – sad and usad’ba, both derived from roots referring to a complex of meanings including ‘tree’, ‘plant’, ‘grove’ and ‘garden’ (as in Old Russian ‘садъ’, idem), 13

Lévi-Strauss: ‘The whole function of the noble houses, be they European or exotic, implies a fusion of categories which are elsewhere held to be in correlation with and in opposition to each other, but are henceforth treated as interchangeable: descent can substitute for affinity, and affinity for descent’. (Quoted from Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995, 8) 14 Compare his definition of the House: ‘a moral person which possesses a domain that is perpetuated by the transmission of its name, its fortune and titles, along a real or fictive line, held as legitimate on the sole condition that this continuity can be expressed in the language of kinship or of alliance, and more frequently of the two together’ (Paroles données, Paris 1984, 190).


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‘to plant’ and ‘to sow’ (Russian ‘сажать/посадить’, ‘садить’ (‘to plant’)), ‘to sit (down)’, ‘to settle (down)’, ‘to (set up) house’ (Russian ‘сесть/садиться’ (‘to sit down’), as well as ‘село’ (‘village’), ‘селение’ (‘settlement’), ‘(по)селить(ся)’ (‘to settle down’); see Fasmer 1986. Such spatial configurations are capable of embodying a sense of orientation towards a centre from which everything else is measured and valued, a sense of belonging, of ownership, and, of course, of the link between individuals and generations through time – hence the evident metonymic connection between the notions of ‘house’ and ‘family’ (‘dynasty’, ‘lineage’, ‘line’), and the individual.15 Mankinds’s sense of origin, of historic beginning, has been linked with the concept of a house and its founding, or building. It is also evident that this connection has been extremely powerful in generating images and symbols in religion, myth and literature as well as, more generally, cultural and anthropological reflection, and philosophy. A quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics Vi, dealing with ‘beginnings’, may serve as a first illustration here. In the opening of this book he speaks about the various meanings of ‘beginning’ and his third, fourth, and sixth definitions read as follows: [...] (c) That thing as a result of whose presence something first comes into being; e.g., as the keel is the beginning of a ship, and the foundation that of a house, and as in the case of animals some thinkers suppose the heart to be the ‘beginning’, others the brain, and others something similar, whatever it may be. (d) That from which, although not present in it, a thing first comes into being, and that from which motion and change naturally first begin, as the child comes from the father and mother, and fighting from abuse. [...] (f) Arts are also called ‘beginnings’, especially the architectonic arts [...]. (Aristotle 1975, 209-211.)

It is interesting to note how Aristotle, in his examples of ‘beginnings’, draws on anthropomorphic analogies between architecture (ships and

15

Compare the idea of being a ‘member’, the anatomic analogy in Russian колено meaning both ‘knee’and ‘generation’ and, in a different, but equally fundamental metaphoric range related to that of the family tree, of being a ‘scion’.

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houses), anatomy (heart and brain) and biology (parent – child).16 As we shall see, such analogies will prove to be of central importance when we focus on literature and poetry. It is a well known observation that mythical thinking, and the semantic strategies underlying poetic language, have characteristics in common (hence the terms ‘mythopoesis’ and ‘mythopoetic’); see, for example, Meletinskij 1976, Frejdenberg 1997, Lotman 1979, Hansen-Löve 1987, Schmid 1987 and Van Baak 1987. Thinking and imagining along lines of (concrete) analogy or homology is one of them, involving structural and symbolic equivalences or associations between disparate realms of signification such as the human body, human habitation and the cosmos, the latter particularly in creation myths. Bollnow, referring specifically to Cassirer and Eliade, summarises the archaic vision of building cities, temples or houses as ‘imitating creation’: ‘Jeder Hausbau ist die Gründung eines Kosmos in einem Chaos [...] Jedes Haus, so betont er (i. e. Eliade), ist ein Bild der Welt im ganzen, eine imago mundi. Die Welt im ganzen spiegelt sich im Hause’ (Bollnow 1964,144). This is reflected in archaic rituals and texts connected with the foundation of the house. In the myth and shamanism of Northwest Amazonia, for example, ‘the nested imagery of womb and child, compartment and family, longhouse and community, territory and neighbourhood group extends outwards to embrace the cosmos and humanity. The longhouse itself replicates and models the structure of the cosmos: its floor is the earth and its posts are mountains that support the roof or sky above’ (Hugh-Jones in Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, 233-4). In Vedic consecratory formulas, the god Indra is supposed to fix the central post around which the house or hut is being constructed because he is associated with the cosmic pillar, the cosmogonic axis mundi. Thus the symbolic analogy is that the space between heaven and earth is created by raising heaven along the axis mundi, a process that is repeated in putting up the house around its central post, also symbolising the centre or navel of the world (Bodewitz 1977, 63, 65)17. It has been established in Indo-European and many other cultures (African, 16

Compare the etymological parallels in Slav. okno, ‘window’, derived from óko, ‘eye’, and the Eng. Window and Old Islandic vindauga, ‘literally ‘wind eye’; see Fasmer. 17 Parallels to this can be found in other, unrelated cultures such as Kabylia (see Bourdieu 1990) or Inuit (see Oosten 1991).


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Chinese, Finno-Ugric, Melanesian) that the foundation of a house, or of a city, was accompanied by specific rites involving human or animal sacrifices. The sacrificial victim was afterwards buried in the foundations, in the walls or under the threshold of the house, thus becoming an integral part of it – apparently a protective ritual to ensure the solidity of the house (Sergent 1995, 188-9). Considering its anthropological, cultural, and psychological significance, the concept of the House can be called an archetype, or archetope; see Van Baak 1990. However, we should not forget the fact that basic notions related to the House archetype need not necessarily imply a material representation of a building or construction as the comparative linguistic argument of Benveniste and Sergent makes clear; see above. Australian aboriginal pictural semiotics present an interesting case in this respect. The Anangu, living in the Western Desert, have a traditional art form called Tjukurrpa, through which they express their myths and religious beliefs visually; see Birnie Danzker 1994. The inventory of ideograms, or pictograms, consists of a number of simple visual elements that are combined in order to map the aboriginal world and its components: animals, objects and natural phenomena as well as the world of the ancestors. A striking feature of this pictorial language is its graphic simplicity, or reductionism, in combination with a strong tendency towards semantic syncretism, either on grounds of visual similarity, as when three parallel, horizontal, wavy lines represent fire, water, smoke, or blood, or according to functional criteria, as when a series of concentric circles denotes cave, campsite, stone, hole, well, fruit, fireplace, food tree or breast, depending on the context. The latter sign can be combined with the symbol for a human being, which has a shape reminiscent of a horseshoe. A combination (syntax) of two or more humans around the concentric circles means ‘sitting people’ and represents a gathering round a fireplace. As such it unites the notions of fundamental human cohabitation, involving orientation towards a centre (however ephemeral), togetherness, shelter, warmth and food. A pictorial equivalent of a material house is absent, but we have a symbolic pictorial rendering of the archetypal human values that have come to be associated with the concept of the House in most cultures. Also absent from these pictograms, however, are other minimal but universal, concrete and spatial features of the House that form the basis of its symbolic potential as a psychological, cul-

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tural and artistic image: interiority versus exteriority, or closedness versus openness. There are many other texts, some more archaic than others, in which the House concept is a forceful generator of images and significance. One characteristic of creation myths and of cosmogonic thinking in general is the fundamental and axiologically significant opposition between chaos and creation, where the created universe is itself characterised by structure. From the earliest times, the dominant traditional views of Chaos have equated it either with ‘the void’ or with ‘humidity’ and ‘water’, in other words with that which is amorphous and disordered, primordial and unstable, endless and all-encompassing. It is from this that Cosmos originates as that which is ordered, structured, measurable, discrete and firm; see Tokarev 1981. This is reflected in archaic, biblical and medieval thinking about the universe: the architectural metaphor in concepts such as firmamentum (Russian equivalent tverd’) and its analogies, including the arch, vault (Genesis 1: 6-8), canopy of heaven and expanse of the sky, and the image of the sky as a roof, as in L. tectum altum caeli. Another consequence of this architectural analogy is the spatial vision of ‘heaven’, or the underworld, as a place to live in the afterlife. Related to the latter is the ‘house of the dead’. A common phenomenon, in Roman culture for example, is the necropolis, with its house-shaped grave or sarcophagus and its epitaphs referring to the expectation that it will be ‘a house for ever’ (domus aeterna). According to Zinn this idea originated in Egypt but spread throughout the world of Antiquity. The Etruscans in particular took great care to have their tombs made to look like actual living-rooms (Zinn 1998, 77). Religious, mythical and moral texts of various sorts have in common their function of attributing sense to the world and human existence in it. In such texts the House is most prominent as a symbol of stability, dynastic power, righteousness and legitimacy. A common model is the combination of two symbolic aspects of the House: the cosmological analogy between creation as a whole and the image of the House, and a patriarchal, hierarchical model of human relations reflected in the image of the ‘House of the Father’. This is, of course, a well known metaphor from both the Old and New Testaments (II Sam. 7, Ps. 132, John 14:2), and it is repeated in such moralistic texts as the Old Russian Domostroi. In the Book of Samuel, we can follow the development of a peculiar network of cosmological and anthro-


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pomorphic images connecting ‘house’, ‘temple’ and ‘tent’ to express the establishment of a new relationship between God, as father, and man (king) as son. This text is also interesting because of the typological and ideological opposition between the nomadic and sedentary types of culture. Since it originated in or about the seventh century BCE, it may well comprise evidence of the profound anthropological significance of this opposition, given that the nomadic phase of the people of Israel had ended around 1200 BCE (J. P. Fokkelman 1990). The idea of the House also plays a role in the Greek myth of Prometheus, which is essentially about the beginnings of man and his culture. Owing to the process by which they were transmitted, Myths, including this one, usually exist in a number of variants that may differ substantially from one another. For example, according to some sources Prometheus was the creator of man; see Tokarev 1982. The most important common elements, however, are that the titan Prometheus was punished by Zeus beause he stole fire from heaven and gave it to man, out of love. With the gift of fire mankind also received the opportunity to learn arts and skills, to control his environment and to emancipate himself from nature. The earliest extant version of the Prometheus myth is the tragedy Prometheus Bound (Promètheus desmōtès, fifth century BCE) by Aeschylus, who ‘found in man the centre of gravity of the world, in man, whose mind, experience, and action are implicated alike in his environment and in those far-off influences that descend to him from successive generations of his ancestors’ (H. W. Smyth, introduction to the 1973 Loeb edition of Aeschylus, Vol. I xiii). In this text, Prometheus claims to have been the creator of man’s human qualities and culture, including thinking and planning, astronomy and astrology, numbers, writing, memory and art, the domestication of animals, sailing, medicine and healing, and house building. Interestingly, the gift of the house is related to the light of the sun; it signifies mankind’s emancipation from the dark cave-dwelling (anticipating Plato’s famous cave simile) and immediately follows the gifts of reason, orientation in space and time, planning and anticipation, the latter being the etymological meaning of Prometheus’ name. The concept of the House symbolically entails consciousness, light, and order, and can therefore be typologically related to creation myth. In the following account of the process, given by Prometheus to the

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chorus, the building of houses out of bricks is the highest of human technical skills (texnè): [...] and I made them to have sense and be endowed with reason. [...] First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but understood not; but, like to shapes in dreams, throughout their length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. Knowledge they had neither of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun, nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves. They had no sign of either winter or of flowery spring or of fruitful summer, whereon they could depend, but everything they wrought without judgement, until such time as I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings [...] Aye, and numbers, too, chiefest of the sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses’ arts, wherewith to hold all things in memory. I, too, first brought brute beasts under the yoke [...]. ‘T was I and no one else that contrived the mariner’s flaxen-winged car to roam the sea. [...] (Transl. Smyth, idem, 255 and 257)

Homer’s Odyssey is the first and greatest story of homecoming. In probably the most touching passage of the epic (book 23) Ulysses, just returned from his perigrinations after the Trojan War, has to prove his identity to Penelope, who is too astonished to recognise him immediately. She thinks of a ruse to test him beyond all doubt by making him tell things about their house that only he can know. She therefore orders a servant to take Ulysses’ bed ‘outside the bed chamber that he himself built’, to which Ulysses reacts angrily: “Wife, I am much displeased at what you have just been saying. Who has been taking my bed from the place in which I left it? He must have found it a hard task, no matter how skilled a workman he was, unless some god came and helped him to shift it. There is no man living, however strong and in his prime, who could move it from its place, for it is a marvellous curiosity which I made with my very own hands. There was a young olive growing within the precincts of the house, in full vigour, and about as thick as a bearingpost. I built my room round this with strong walls of stone and a roof to cover them, and I made the doors strong and well-fitting. Then I cut off the top boughs of the olive tree and left the stump


37

standing. This I dressed roughly from the root upwards and then worked with carpenter's tools well and skilfully, straightening my work by drawing a line on the wood, and making it into a bed-prop. I then bored a hole down the middle, and made it the centre-post of my bed, at which I worked till I had finished it, inlaying it with gold and silver; after this I stretched a hide of crimson leather from one side of it to the other. So you see I know all about it, and I desire to learn whether it is still there, or whether any one has been removing it by cutting down the olive tree at its roots.” When she heard the sure proofs Ulysses now gave her, she fairly broke down. She flew weeping to his side, flung her arms about his neck, and kissed him. "Do not be angry with me Ulysses, [...].” (Transl. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive)

Ulysses here proves himself to have been the builder, not only of his bed chamber but of his house as a whole. It is noteworthy that he chose an olive tree as the centre of it. This is a deeply symbolic choice, connecting the creation of the House with the natural and cosmic order. It is a literary illustration of Bollnow’s statement (quoted above) concerning the archaic vision of house-building imitating creation and the Cosmos. It is also reminiscent of the god Indra, of the Vedic consecratory formulas, who was supposed to fix the central post around which the house or hut was being constructed, thus associating it with the cosmic pillar, the cosmogonic axis mundi (Bodewitz, also quoted above). In the Latin classical tradition, Virgil’s Aeneid presents another example of such cosmogonic House building around a tree.18 Virgil’s case deserves more detailed attention here. His epic is all about founding Houses, dynastic continuity and destiny. It contains interesting examples of the founding of a House in its archaic and symbolic significance of collective identification that could embrace a large group of people – not simply a family, but a clan or a tribe. In his epic as a whole Virgil realises the essential elements of what I call the House Myth, which will be elaborated as a concept in in Chapter I.4.

18

This is no coincidence, given Virgil’s general aspirations as an Augustan Roman poet emulating Homer.

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It is Aeneas’s destiny and duty to guard and transfer his penates,19 the house gods (or rather their effigies) of his family and clan, to Italy after the destruction of Troy. Aeneas’s searching for a new home in a new land stands out in dramatic relief because of the fact that he (like Ulysses in the previous example) is destined first to roam the seas for seven years without a roof over his head and without a house of his own; see Toporov 1993, 170). The transfer of the penates is at the same time a symbolic act, ensuring the future continuity of the House as a dynasty. Aeneas settles in Italy with his people, wages war, marries a local Princess and founds the city of Lavinium, thereby also laying the foundations of Rome. Throughout the Aeneid, Troy is remembered and mourned as the lost home city (especially when Aeneas and his men have to fight for their lives again) that must now be founded anew. Thus, the final settlement of Aeneas and his people in Italy is both a continuation and a new beginning. This is expressed with ultimate terseness in book X, verse 58, where the Trojan Aeneas and his people are called Teucri (after Teucer (Teucrus), the first king of Troy) and are said to ‘seek Latium and a new-born Troy’ (Virgil 1998, 174/5: dum Latium Teucri recidivaque Pergama quaerunt).20 Because of the epic character of the poem, the hero’s story is also the story of a nation’s origins and an attempt at conveying a legitimis19

This is probably comparable to the situation of nomadic shepherds in Israel in the eleventh century BCE, who travelled around with portable images of God in a tent and tabernacle’; see above. Latin knows two types of house gods: lares (of unclear origin; see OLD, Glare 1994) and penates, from L. penus, ‘food’, ‘provisions’ (esp. as the stock of a household): ‘a store-room in a temple of Vesta’ (OLD). OLD gives the following series of translations for the word penates, which in fact comprehensively reflects the essential elements of the house myth (in the Roman cultural context) as well as the myth of Rome’s origins and destiny, which is also the message of the Aeneid: ‘1. The tutelary gods of the Roman larder, regarded as controlling the destiny of the household. 2. The Penates of the State (supposed to be those originally brought from Troy). 3. (trans.) One’s home. 4. A dwelling. 5. A family line’. Cf. also Toporov, who furthermore interprets the word penates as ‘those who feed and raise (воскормители, воспитатели), deriving its etymology from I-E. *pen-, cf. L. penus (Toporov 1993, 85). 20 See also VIII, 36-9, in which Aeneas’s ancestor Dardanus speaks to him reassuringly in a dream: O sate gente deum, Troianam ex hostibus urbem / qui revehis nobis aeternaque Pergama servas, / exspectate solo Laurenti arvisque Latinis, / hic tibi certa domus, certi (ne absiste) Penates; O seed of a race divine, thou looked long for on Laurentine ground and Latin fields. Here thy home is sure – draw not back – and sure are thy gods!


39

ing message in support of the then rulers of Rome. Before Aeneas fulfils his destiny, however, the story tells of the founding of another House on a much smaller scale. At the beginning of book VII, Aeneas and his people land at the mouth of the Tiber, in Latium, the kingdom of the old king Latinus. He has no sons, but he does have a daughter, Lavinia, who is the most courted woman in the land. She is the onlt person who can ‘preserve the house’: sola domum et tantas servabat filia sedes, iam matura viro, iam plenis nubilis annis.21

(verses 52-3)

Besides the use of both domus and sedes (‘abode’, ‘place of residence’), lexicalising the respective distinction between ‘maisonfamille’ and ‘maison-édifice’(see Benveniste, above, and note 7), this episode illustrates the dynastic motif representing the House (Domus) concept as continuity and succession in time. Legend relates the origins of the line of Latinus, via his ancestors Faunus and Picus, to Saturn himself (verses 48-9: sanguinis ultimus auctor). According to the mythological world model of Virgil’s epic, the founding of a House in the sense of actually building it is still a religious, cosmogonic act, which takes account of divine intentions regarding the House of Latinus. In this text these archaic features took shape in the motif of a sacred laurel tree, which Latinus found by chance and around which he built his palace. The tree was thus the symbolic and spiritual centre of the house and, like the world tree, gave assurance of divine protection. Latinus dedicated the Laurel to Apollo, and from it Latinus’s settlers received their name, Laurentes: laurus erat tecti medio in penetralibus altis, sacra comam multosque metu servata per annos, quam pater inventam, primas cum conderet arces, ipse ferebatur Phoebo sacrasse Latinus, Laurentisque ab ea nomen posuisse colonis.22 21

(verses 59-63)

Alone, to preserve the house and noble home, was a daughter, / now ripe for a husband, now full of age to be a bride; text and transl. Virgil 1998, 7. 22 In the midst of the palace, in the high inner courts, stood a laurel of sacred leafage, preserved in awe through many years, which lord Latinus himself, ‘twas said, found and dedicated to Phoebus, when he built his first towers; and from it he gave his settlers their name Laurentes. (Text and translation Virgil 1998, 7-8)

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This succinct passage recounts the foundation of a House in the full sense of Domus as a House Founding Myth (see Chapter I.4), of which it realises and implies essential ‘programmatic’ components. Taking into account some observations made earlier in this chapter we can discern the following interrelated motifs and dimensions: -

-

-

the dynastic beginning and transmission: Latinus’s role as founder – father (pater, like Faunus, Picus and Saturn before him); the founding by this father of the house as a building (primas cum conderet arces); the architectural dimension: the palace, the towers (tecti [...] in penetralibus altis; arces); the religious and moral dimension: the reverence for the sacred laurel tree (multosque metu servata per annos; Phoebo sacrasse); the similarly sacral and creational establishment of social and kinship ties between people by giving a name to the tribe (nomen posuisse colonis); the aspect of power and hierarchy invested in a ruler, which is also related to the dynastic beginning. (According to Gamkrelidze & Ivanov and Benveniste (see above) this is inherent in the root *t’om, and also resulted in old derivations that refer to the ‘head of the house’ (like L. dominus) as well as to ‘servants’. This idea is realised in Latinus’s actantial role as king (See v. 45: rex Latinus) and as subject of the agentive verbs in the quoted passage (building, dedicating, giving (naming): conderet, sacrasse, posuisse). the house (palace) as a construction and concentric structure around the laurel tree. (This is the centre of the world for the people of the Laurentine clan, determining their orientation and selfidentification in relation to the rest of the world (tecti medio in penetralibus altis; ab ea nomen [...] colonis)).

The intriguing role of the laurel tree in these verses deserves further consideration. It is the central object of Latinus’s symbolic founding actions. It is ‘found’ (inventam) by him while he is laying the first foundations of his house (stronghold: primas cum conderet arces), which means that it is a wild tree, found in nature. The tree is then incorporated into the structure of the house and made the centre of worship. The importance of its being taken into the sphere of culture lies


41

in the fact that this emphasises the fundamental anthropological distinction between given nature (the ‘wild’) and the cultural deed of creating the House/Domus. Remarkably, this is exactly the point of the archaeologist Hodder’s thesis concerning the origin and nature of the domus in the context of the process of domestication in general; see earlier in this chapter. He takes as his starting point the observation that domestication is, indeed, about bringing ‘the wild’ within the control of the domus, which is what Latinus does in a highly symbolic manner, ‘domesticating’ the tree by ‘bringing it into the house’.23 The domus, according to Hodder, ‘provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial’ (Hodder 1990, 39). We can consider the process of culture, in so far as it is related to the emergence of the domus, as both man’s emancipation from nature and, after a fashion, his ‘coming to terms’ with it. This implies a double vision of his relationship with nature and his attempts at ‘taming’ it. This also complies with the insights of comparative linguists such as Benveniste concerning the root *dom-(or homophonic *dem- as in Sergent’s analysis), which deals with the social dimension of the domus complex, as in L. domare, ‘to tame, domesticate’, thereby bringing ‘the wild’ within the control of the domus. We shall now return to Aeneas, waiting on the banks of the Tiber to fulfil his destiny. When he recognises the omen as predicted by his father Anchises, he knows that he has found his new home and fatherland, and exclaims: hic domus, haec patria est (‘Here is our home, here our fatherland’; VII, 122). Aeneas himself marks out a preliminary camp, and the newcomers begin to reconnoitre the land. Invited by king Latinus into his palace the Trojan Aeneas, himself a king (VII, 220), tells his host that all he asks for is ‘a scant home for our country’s gods’:

23

Hodder concludes that ‘despite all the variability and difficulty of definition of ‘domestication’, it seems clear that the origins of agriculture take place within a complex symbolic web that centres on the house and on death’ (36); though death is not involved in these verses, the portentous significance of “a complex symbolic web” in them is obvious.

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dis sedem exiguam patriis litusque rogamus innocuum et cunctis undamque auramque patentem.24 (VII, 229-230)

After a long war (which takes up most of the second half of the Aeneid), Aeneas will found a city to be named Lavinium, after Latinus’s daughter, whom he will marry after killing his competitor Turnus. The foundation of the city is presented as analogous to the building of a house by ‘raising walls’, i.e. by separating and enclosing space from nature: [...]; mihi moenia Teucri constituent urbique dabit Lavinia nomen.25

(XII, 193-4)

Thirty years later, Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, or Iulus, will found the city of Alba Longa. This is also predestined according to divine portents, and takes its place in the long, complex but unbroken Trojan chain leading to the foundation of Rome (with its metonymical walls) by Romulus (after whom the Romans are named) and ultimately to the deified ‘Trojan’ Julius Caesar, in whom history reached its apogee and fulfilment in the eyes of this Roman poet of the first century BCE. There is a clear structural parallel between these founding stories, and that of Latinus; all three of them combine the components and dimensions of the Founding Myth of the Domus as analised above: [...], regnumque ab sede Lavini transferet, et longam multa vi muniet Albam. hic iam ter centum totos regnabitur annos gente sub Hectorea, donec regina sacerdos Marte gravis geminam partu dabit Ilia prolem. [...] Romulus excipiet gentem et Mavortia condet moenia Romanosque suo de nomine dicet. [...] Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo.26 (I, 270-77, and 286-8) 24

And now we crave a scant home for our country’s gods, a harmless landing-place, and air and water, free to all. 25 For me, the Teucrians shall raise walls, and Lavinia give the city her name.


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At the beginning of this chapter, the concept of Home was brought up as a fundamental aspect of man’s relationship towards the places where he lives. The difference between House and Home can sometimes seem blurred in linguistic expression, at least in English: American English speaks of ‘setting up house’ and ‘moving home’, while British English refers to ‘moving house’. In other languages this may be expressed in other ways, but a basic conceptual differentiation will certainly be present and coded somehow.27 However, it is essential to realise that the idea of Home is a subjective evaluative component of domestic thematics which is not necessarily inherent in all its occurrences; neither is it restricted to these thematics.28 Significantly, the qualitative feeling or attitude conveyed by the concept of Home can be dissociated from that of House: we can speak, for example, about a place where we ‘feel at home’ that need not even be a building or enclosed, sheltered structure of any kind. In American cultural history, settling in the Great Plains and occupying the West in general has fundamentally shaped American attitudes. Mobility, dynamic heroism and the other qualities of character that were required of the pioneer (and which still constitute an archetype and identification model in American culture) were gradually replaced by the idea of settling, becoming a rancher or farmer, conquering and colonising, subjugating nature, tilling the soil and transforming the wilderness – often with scant regard for its history – into arable land. These people were, significantly, called ‘homesteaders’. They had undergone

26

[Ascanius] shall shift his throne from Lavinium’s seat, and, great power, shall build the walls of Alba Longa. Here then for thrice a hundred years unbroken shall the kingdom endure under Hector’s race, until Ilia, a royal priestess, shall bear to Mars her twin offspring. Then Romulus […] shall take up the line, and found the walls of Mars [= Rome] and call the people Romans after his own name. […] From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall limit his empire with ocean, his glory with the stars, a Julius, named name descended from great Iulus!. 27 This problem is an essential one, but exceeds the scope of this chapter and, indeed, of this book as well. The core of the matter is the question of the relationship between lexemic or semic, and conceptual differentiations between individual languages, and therefore also between cultures. See, among others, the work of Wierzbicka. 28 This is a point on which my approach to the literary sources differs from that of Amy C. Singleton’s No Place Like Home. The Literary Artist and Russia’s Search for Cultural Identity (1997).

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a development from being newcomers and colonisers to home-loving settlers.29 Any discussion of the cultural significance of the house must deal with the question of gender. Specifically, this means contrasting the female and male perspectives in relation to domestic space and thematics. For a number of reasons, archetypal or typological as well as historical, domestic space has always been associated in some way with the feminine in human nature. Even though the act of founding and building a house is usually considered a typically male occupation, domestic life itself, its maintenance and its values, is inconceivable without the female image.30 Rybczynski analyses the development of the cultural value of domesticity in Western Europe and states that ‘if domesticity was, as John Lukacs suggested, one of the principal achievements of the Bourgeois Age, it was above all, a feminine achievement’ (Rybczynski 1987, 75).

29

A trapper’s attitude towards the cabins he would live in would be different in this respect: he could be said to set up house in them, but not move his home to the woods. 30 See also Bachelard 1964: Dans l’équilibre intime des murs et des meubles, on peut dire qu’on prend conscience d’une maison construite par les femmes. Les hommes ne savent construire les maisons que de l’extérieur (74). Concerning the enclosed space and interiority of the house as a female space archetype in Russian literature, see Joe Andrew 1988 and 2007.

2. The House Myth and the House as a Model of the World. Some Observations about the Russian Cultural Tradition In the previous chapter I gave a general overview of anthropologically and linguistically relevant facts and hypotheses concerning the origins of domestic concepts in general but focusing particularly on the IndoEuropean area. As soon as it becomes possible to identify the Russian people, one could also try to identify their specific domestic culture and its development. Such research would inevitably involve folklore. This book does not deal with Russian folklore because its significance for the literature analysed here is only marginal or incidental, but some general observations are justified here. In his book Old Slavic Paganism (Язычество древних славян), B. A. Rybakov undertakes a reconstruction of original Slavic culture and its world-view (Rybakov 1994). He gives a broad and detailed archaeological survey of the prehistory of the Slavic area, and relates this to what is known of Slavic mythology and religion, and to folklore as it had been preserved until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing especially on embroidery and wood carving motifs, and on agricultural rituals. As might be expected, it is a story of mainly agrarian domestic settlements coming to terms both with the specific climate and nature of the region and with various neighbours and invaders; see Rybakov, 225. Archaeologists have identified a number of styles and traditions on the basis of material culture. Taking these data into account together with the results of comparative linguistics, Rybakov identifies the neolithic settlements in an elongated area in Central and Eastern Europe as successively Protoslavic and Slavic. This area, from west to east, stretches roughly between the rivers Oder and Dnepr and then north of the Black Sea into the steppe

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area of the nomadic and semi-nomadic Scythians (Rybakov, 222 ff.). This is obviously not the place even to try to summarise the extremely complex, heterogeneous and largely hypothetical historic panorama of Slavic ethnogenesis, so I will restrict myself to basic elements of this history. According to most comparative linguists, the differentiation of Protoslavic among the Indo-European dialects probably took place as early as the bronze age, during the second millennium BCE (Rybakov, 217-8). An essential textual reference to Slavic tribes around the river Dnepr is generally considered to be Herodotus’ History (fifth century BCE), where he describes Scythia. The Skoloti (Skolotoi), mentioned in Book IV Chapter 6, are supposed to be Slavic tribes. They are identified as an agricultural people, whereas the real Scythians, according to Herodotus, were nomadic herdsmen who did not live in settlements (Rybakov, 226-7 and Chapter 10). A Latin text that contrasts Slavic domestication and the culture of their nomadic neighbours (though only on the western end of their distribution area) is provided by Tacitus in his Germania, Cap. 46. Of the Slavic tribe of the Veneti, he writes: ‘And yet these people are preferably entered as Germans, since they have fixed abodes [...] all of which traits are opposite to those of the Sarmatians, who live in wagons and on horseback’ (Tacitus 1970, 213; see also Schrader 1917 (I), 443). In Chapter 10 of his book, Rybakov tries to connect the reconstructed elements of the earliest, primordial Slavic culture – its pantheon, myths and world-view – with East Slavic (Russian) preChristian, cultural memory, for example in fairy tale motifs, wood carving and rituals. His conclusion is that there remained a strong continuity of very old pagan elements and traditions in eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian rural culture (605). A particular folkloric figure who deserves mention here is, of course, Baba Iaga. She is a Slavic witch or wood spirit who lives in a log cabin that moves around on chicken legs. Her image comprises a particular identification of house and woman that is psychologically ambiguous: the paradox of an unstable and unreliable house in the wood that, by itself, already embodies archetypal danger, inextricably linked with or identical to a dangerous female, a witch. On the other hand, like any archetype, she can turn her good face to the folk hero as well, and reward his brave behaviour.

The House Myth and the House as a Model of the World

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The symbolic and ritual structure of the peasant’s house or hut is the focus of ancient Slavic, and even prehistoric, cultural traditions. This can be concluded from the fact that striking parallels to these symbols and rituals can be found over a very large territory of Eastern and Southern Slavic culture; see particularly Baiburin 2005. The same can be said of the special place of the bathhouse in Russian folklore, myth and popular magic. This traditional Slavic peasant culture proved remarkably resilient under successive cultural, economical and social pressures from outside and, mostly, from above. These pressures manifested themselves in several historical forces or institutions, one of which, from the end of the tenth century, was the increasing authority of the Orthodox Church, which tried to suppress pagan tradition as a persistent competitor in spiritual matters. However decisive and even traumatic the Tatar yoke may have been for Russian culture and history, the fundamental historic processes described above continued to exert their influence. The culture of Muscovite Russia underwent inportant political and cultural changes during the sixteenth century, under the rule of Ivan Groznyi. Around the middle of that century, a unique medieval Russian text took shape: the moralistic codex Domostroi. This originally anonymous text was copied, added to and edited during subsequent centuries culminating in what is commonly known as the Sil’vestr edition (Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia (eds.) 1994). As a genre it belongs to the broader moralistic litererary tradition of the Middle Ages, and more precisely to that of the homily (pouchenie). It takes the form of a homily delivered by a father to a son (поучение от отца к сыну), telling him in minute detail how the house should be run, how the members of the household should obey the master, how they should behave in any situation and what punishments should be administered.1 According to Kolesov, the priest Sil’vestr, who edited the text, was responsible for the title Domostroi, which is probably a more or less direct translation of the Greek oikonomía (< oikonomein, ‘to order, to regulate the house’) adapted to Old Russian idioms since these 1

It is this chapter that was primarily responsible for the ill reputation of the Domostroi text. Beating was no doubt part of it, though to a servant it was a more severe punishment to be sent away from the house (’изгнание из Дома’, see Naidenova 1996, 304).

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occur frequently in the text – ‘дом (двор) строити’ (‘to build, or organise the house’), ‘дома и себя устроивати во всем’ (‘to organise the house and oneself in all respects’), ‘во всяком устрое держати’(‘to keep in good order’) – together with aphorisms such as ‘в доброй дом во устроиной как в рай внитти’ (‘to enter a good, well organised house is like entering Paradise’) (Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia 1994, 306). The Domostroi is a pragmatic, didactic text about order, but it also projects a medieval ideal household and the proper power relations of responsibility and obedience that belong to it. It addressed those in sixteenth century Russian society who ruled over others, and it drew explicit parallels between those in positions of power: God, the Tsar, and the head of the household (Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia 1994, 312-3). From the point of view of typology, the House image in the Domostroi emphasises one of the two basic etymological aspects of the Domus as distinguished in Chapter I.1: the ‘social’ aspect, that of *dom(ə),‘to tame, domesticate’, or, in Benveniste’s terminology, the ‘maison-famille’; see Chapter I.1. Naidenova points out that the Domostroi does not yet have a modern notion of ‘family’ but operates with a concept of ‘house’ in the sense of a ‘single economic, social and psychological entity, the members of which find themselves in relationships of mastery – subordination, but are equally indispensable for the normal life of the domestic organism’(Naidenova 1996, 303). Throughout the text the emphasis is on organising, learning and teaching (Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia 1994, 108). The Domostroi is about the house as the foundation of the state, and the power of its ruler is mirrored in the way the master manages his house. It is about order and rules as opposed to chaos and sin. In its medieval world-picture there is no place for the concept of the individual, whether ruler or ruled. Instead, as Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia point out, the place of the individual (личность) in its social manifestations is taken by a mask (личина), ritually determined by specific functions (334). Thus, we could say that in the Domostroi we have a House image that also has the function of describing, or modelling, social identity in the Russian medieval world. In part II we will come across other instances of the House image as a model of social identity.


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The political and social structure of Muscovite Russia disappeared, but the reception of the Domostroi in later centuries reveals its impact as a world-picture, as an ideology and as a social model; see especially Kolesov’s article in Kolesov and Rozhdestvenskaia 1994. In literature the world of the Russian merchants (купечество) in Ostrovskii’s drama is in many respects reminiscent of the Domostroi world-view, but among nineteenth and twentieth century westernisers and radical political thinkers the Domostroi was not appreciated for its qualities as a medieval text but seen as an emblem of Russian backwardness and injustice, or ‘samodurstvo’; see Chapter II.2. Russian medieval history, the history of the Petrine revolution and the history of serfdom led to the emergence of the ‘classical’ Russian domestic culture of the rural estates (the усадебная культура), the dominant topos of Russian Realism. As we shall see, the rural estate repesents a particularly Russian cultural concept which in many respects can be considered as a Domus; that is, as a more or less autarchic microcosm of Russian culture. Its literary reflections will be discussed in Chapters II.11-16 in particular. The longevity and persistence of pagan cultural elements were a characteristic feature of Russian cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and probably also of the twentieth century. As a consequence the traditional Russian peasant did not adopt Western, rationalist written culture on his own initiative, or develop the sense of history that came with it. He did not partake of the ‘European discourse’ in which most of the Russian elite and intelligentsia became involved as a result of Peter’s revolution. In that sense, the Russian peasant remained outside history, and was reluctant to abandon the ‘longue durée’ of his traditional perception of time and the natural cyclicity of agricultural life. There will, of course, be exceptions,2 but this was the historical tendency. Thus, for the sake of this argument, we can distinguish three basic, successive ‘roots’ of Russian culture that partly merged and partly continued to interfere with each other:

2

See, for example, Leskov in his comments on the reception of his Tale about the Left-Handed Smith (Левша), stressing examples of the successful economic emancipation of former peasants who became energetic self-made men.

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1. the pagan (even prehistoric) Slavic concepts and beliefs. 2. Russian Orthodox Christianity, which partly suppressed, partly integrated 1. The Orthodox Church as an institution became an important mouthpiece for the feudal power structure and its doctrine. 3. Western, or Petrine doctrine and attitude, which in many respects stood apart from both 1 and 2. For these reasons the Russian culture that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not only heterogeneous (which is not exceptional); it was in fact a double culture: there were two coexisting ways of life, one supporting the other, with partly different outlooks but connected, living side-by-side, often even under one roof. The structure of the patriarchal Russian rural estate world, with its archaic, strongly autarchic and dynastic features, could be characterised as a Domus; that is, as a reflection of the structure of that archaic etymological complex that was discussed in the previous chapter. The master and the servant are members of the same world, of the same house and household. Of course, that is an ideal. In the plots of many most works of Russian literature devoted to this topos, conflicts around this structure and the accompanying world-pictures also play a role, as we shall see in Part II. Nevertheless, we can establish that, in that literature, it is the masters’ view that determines the outlook. A prime literary example of such a Domus as a microcosm of society at large is that of the Rostov family in Tolstoj’s War and Peace. It is shown positively as a sheltering and implicitly justified world; indeed it was was exactly these positive qualities that were dismissed by many contemporary critics as anachronistic and unpolitical. As such it is, however, rather the exception than the rule in Russian literature, where we also find its gloomiest counterpart in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovliov Family; see Chapter II. 14. We could say that the abolition of serfdom was as much a legal and moral event as a matter of a new consciousness. This tension particularly underlies the world of the estates in the literature of Realism. We will therefore investigate what the Russian estate meant in terms of domestic life and ideology, whether this is reflected in the Russian literary worlds and, if so, how. Although this exceeds the intended scope of this chapter, I want to make a few remarks here about the


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nineteenth century in anticipation of later chapters – II.11 in particular. During the nineteenth century, some landowners modernised their estates in accordance with Western standards of rationalisation and efficiency, adapting their households and the architecture of their houses. Others resisted this tendency and retained the old patriarchal way of life in their old houses, often hardly more than huts, without regard for comfort, privacy or comparable Western values. An opposition emerges between the former, civilised type of estate – the ‘English’ estate, the well-equipped city apartment and the fashionable type of dacha – and the latter, traditionally Russian type. This opposition is not just a case of innovation versus conservatism; in the context of literature it also becomes the symbolic vehicle of one of the most basic polarities in Russian social philosophy of the eighteen thirties and forties: that between the Zapadniki, or Westernisers, and the Slavophiles; see part II. V. G. Shchukin distinguishes these opposed ways of life as ‘европейский’ (‘European’) versus ‘почвенный’(‘of the soil’). He draws examples from two novels by Goncharov to illustrate this opposition: the ‘Slavophile’ estates of Grachi (in Обыкновенная история, A Common Story) and Oblomovka (Oblomov), and the ‘European’ houses of Petr Aduev and Stolz respectively (Shchukin 1994, 103).

3. The Psychopoetics of the House and Archaic Thinking In this chapter I shall discuss what can be called the psychopoetics of the House, and forms of archaic thinking concerning the notions and images connected with the House and Body, and the House and Soul. By my choice of words in earlier sections of Part I, I emphasised the spatial nature of my topic while at the same time allowing for a variety of non-spatial features and phenomena that are essential to the full range of meanings of the House. These should also be accounted for on the basis of historic evidence. The House fulfils a prominent function as a sign in culture and literature. As I have already shown on the basis of comparative linguistic and anthropological arguments, the House image is a particularly rich ‘focus’ or ‘node’ in which various fields of human interest come together. This means that it can express a range of meanings beyond that of a mere space and locale. We are confronted with a number of possible theoretical and structural approaches that, far from being mutually exclusive, can be seen to complement one another. We can apply the principles of the semiotic tradition of the Moscow-Tartu school and describe literary or artistic secondary modellings of poetic and narrative worlds; we can distinguish metaphorical, symbolic, and mythical forms of signification after the manner of Wellek and Warren (1973, Chapter 15: ‘Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth’), and we can apply the concept of psychopoetics, the study of the connections between stylistic expression and categories of the psyche; see, for example, Wiener slawistischer Almanach 1992, Special Vol. 31). To take the last first and explore the psychopoetic relationship, it is useful to revert to a basic semantic example connecting ‘house’ and ‘body’; see Chapter I.1: Gk. dómos, ‘house’, démas, ‘bodily frame’, démō, ‘to build’, or the Latin corpus. This relationship also plays a

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role on metaphoric, symbolic and mythological levels of signification. For example, in a Vedic text the straw or thatched roof of the house is personified poetically and may be interpreted as the dress of the ‘lady of the house’ because the house or hut has a high roof and very low walls (Bodewitz 1977, 63; see also Chapter I.1). Authors who have paid attention to this relationship from a philosophical and psychological point of view include G. Bachelard, O. F. Bollnow C. G. Jung and S. Freud. In their works one encounters a strikingly rich field of metaphor and analogical imagery relating the house to the human body and soul, or rather to the psychic human faculties in general, as well as to mankind’s relationship to the outside world. Their examples are often of a psychological or psychoanalytical nature, but they also use literary sources. In his book La poétique de l’espace (1964), the phenomenological philosopher Bachelard analyses literary texts and himself generates remarkable psychopoetic imagery1 related to the house. He stresses that the House image forcefully integrates human experience and values: ‘Avec l’image de la maison nous tenons une véritable principe de l’intégration psychologique’ (Bachelard 1964, 18, and also 24 ff.). It can become a ‘topography of our inner self’ (‘la topographie de notre être intime (ibidem), and ‘la topo-analyse serait donc l’étude psychologique systématique des sites de notre vie intime’ (27). He follows Jung, who had pointed this out in analyzing a dream he had had about a house (Jung 1964, 56-7). Jung had come to recognise the Dreamed House as a symbolic expression of his own life story, his own psyche and its conflicts, and to understand its articulations along the vertical dimension, setting the attic and cellar of the unconscious in opposition to one another with their dark and frightful recesses. An example of such an analogy is found in the Sherlock Holmes story, ‘A Study in Scarlet’, where it is used in an elaborate cognitive metaphor comparing the brain and its functioning to a ‘well stocked attic’: “You see”, he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture 1

See also the titles of some his chapters: I. La maison. De la cave au grenier. Le sens de la hutte. II. Maison et univers. III. Le tiroir. Les coffres et les armoires. IV. Le nid. V. La coquille. VI. Les coins.

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as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hand upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brainattic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that the little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.” (Doyle 1981, 21).

Freud made use of the House-Personality metaphor in his work on psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Writing about neurotic disorders, for example, he describes the problems of the ego: The ego feels uneasy; it comes up against limits to its power in its own house, the mind. [...] the ego is not master in its own house. (Freud 1955, 141, 143)

Elsewhere he quotes Scherner on the phenomenon that the human body is often represented in dreams by the symbol of a house and illustrates this with some psychopoetically telling details: According to Scherner, as we have said, the human body is often represented in dreams by the symbol of a house. Carrying this representation further, we found that windows, doors and gates stood for openings in the body and that façades of houses were either smooth or provided with balconies and projections to hold on to. But the same symbolism is found in our linguistic usage – when we greet an acquaintance familiarly as an ‘altes haus’ (‘old house’), when we speak of giving someone ‘eins aufs Dachl’ (a knock on the head, literally, ‘one on the roof’), or when we say of someone else that ‘he’s not quite right in the upper storey’. In anatomy the orifices of the body are in so many words termed ‘Leibespforten’ (literally, ‘portals of the body’). (Freud 1961, 159)

and: [...] dream imagination has one particular favourite way of representing the organism as a whole: namely as a house. Fortunately, however, it does not seem to be restricted to this one method of rep-

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resentation. On the other hand, it may make use of a whole row of houses to indicate a single organ; for instance, a very long street of houses may represent a stimulus from the intestines. Again, separate portions of a house may stand for separate portions of the body; thus, in a dream caused by a headache, the head may be represented by the ceiling of a room covered with disgusting, toad-like spiders. (Freud 1953, 225)

It is obvious that this type of associative-symbolic thinking also underlies much of the verbal creativity we encounter in psychopoetic house imagery, to which part II of this book is devoted. In Bachelard’s interpretation, the things we remember, as well as those we forget and our unconscious, are ‘housed’ or ‘accommodated’ (‘sont logés’), and our ‘soul’ is a home or abode (une demeure; 19). A more traditional type of imagery views the soul as contained in the body, so that the body is the ‘house of the soul’. In different contexts, metaphorical visions involving ‘House’– ‘Soul’ and ‘House’–‘Body’ or, more generally speaking, ‘house’– ‘human being’, can assign to either of the two ideas the role of tenor; that is, ‘underlying, original idea’, or vehicle; that is, ‘what it is compared to’ (Richards (1979, 96-7). So the human attributes can be the tenor and the house the vehicle, as in Bachelard’s example, or the other way round – when human features are projected upon domestic structures, as in the image of a house having ‘eyes’ (the etymology underlying the English ‘window’; see Chapter I.1). However, what is equally important here is the fact that, whatever the role distribution in a particular metaphoric context, the metaphoric meaning is the result of the ‘co-presence of the vehicle and the tenor’ (Richards, 100). Carsten and Hugh-Jones come to remarkably comparable conclusions when they interpret the significance of this ‘Body–House’ relationship for, among others, Amazonian Indian societies on the basis of anthropological research: ‘That houses may be personified and bodies objectified in terms of the house brings us back to the question of the sources of the house’s symbolic power. […] that people talk of houses as outer shells, skins or garments, that the Barasana link architectural features with facial paint and feather ornaments and that in Langkawi the house must be dressed […]. Because both body and house constitute the most intimate everyday environment and often serve as analo-


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gies for each other, it may sometimes seem unclear which is serving as metaphor for which – house for body or body for house’ (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995, 43); ‘the house is sometimes spoken of as a woman: its rounded rear end is her head, the front entrance is her vagina, and the cavernous interior is her womb’ (idem, 233). Parallels to this can also be found in other cultures, such as the Kabyle in Algeria (see Bourdieu 1990, 275 for the proverb ‘woman is the foundations, man the masterbeam’) and the Inuit; see Oosten 1991, 35-9 for analogies between the female body and the igloo. In yet another context, the following text can be found on a memorial stone in the graveyard of Forrabury, Cornwall, which is based on the concentric idea of the mother’s womb as a house (‘my living house’) for her child, with whom she is reunited after death in the same ‘House of the Dead’ (‘my tombe’): JOHAN wife of JOHN TUBB was buried ye 27 of December 1644 JOHN their sonne was buried the 17th day of May 1647. ‘This bee with whom I travelled in my wombe, Takes up his lodgings with me in my tombe. A deare & welcombe guest to whom I gave My living house, Should I denie my grave. Dust rest with dust till that your soules divine You reassume and both in glory shine.’

Bachelard analyses a passage by Rilke (Bachelard 1964, 56-7) concerning a solitary house during a storm on to which features of human courage, suffering and endurance are projected. Examples from Russian literature can be found in Pil’niak’s story ‘The Old House’ (‘Старый дом’), in which an old family house is the central hero (see Chapter II.26), and in Isaak Babel’s story ‘The Rebbe’ (‘Рабби’), where the anatomic analogy is developed on three semantic and symbolic levels: the symbolic image of Hasidism both as a house and as a mother figure, and the damaged house of Rebbe Motalè. Gedali speaks: - В страстном здании хасидизма вышиблены окна и двери, но оно бессмертно, как душа матери... С вытекшими глазницами хасидизм все еще стоит на перекрестке яростных ветров истории. [...]

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- Здесь, прошептал Гедали и указал мне на длинный дом с разбитым фронтоном.2 (Babel’1979, 133)

The philosopher Bachelard speaks about the values of inhabited and sheltering space (Les valeurs de l’espace habité; 24. Ces valeurs d’abri; 31), about the house as ‘the non-me’ protecting the ‘me’ (le non-moi qui protège le moi; 24), about the house being both body and soul (elle est corps et âme; ibid.), a cradle (la maison est un grand berceau; 26) and mother (la maternité de la maison; 27). The house of one’s birth is not only one’s ‘main building’, where one lives (corps de logis), but also the house of one’s dreams and fantasies (with the untranslatable double meaning of the French ‘corps’in the sense of both ‘body’ and ‘group’ or ‘force’ (as in the Latin ‘corpus’; see above): La maison natale est plus qu’un corps de logis, elle est un corps de songes [...] maison onirique (33). Bollnow wrote about the special relationship between man and the world – the special subjective and ‘intentional’ way in which man relates to and ‘is in space’, which is fundamentally different from the mode of being of the rest of the object world: Der Unterschied liegt darin, dass der Mensch kein Ding inmitten der Dinge ist, sondern ein Subjekt, das sich zu seiner Umwelt verhält und das man in sofern durch seine Intentionalität kennzeichnen kann. Der Mensch ist [...] selber nichts Inneräumliches, sondern sein Verhältnis zu den Dingen ist durch seine Räumlichkeit gekennzeichnet. Oder anders ausgedrückt: die Weise, wie sich der Mensch im Raum befindet, ist keine Bestimmung des ihn umschliessenden Weltraums, sondern eines auf ihn als Subjekt bezogenen intentionalen Raums. (Bollnow 1963, 272)

Psychopoetic house imagery as characterised above has a concentric, centripetal tendency towards the identification of the House with the Self, but it can also develop in the other direction, towards equation of the House with the universe, which is reflected not only in archaic concepts of the heavens and creation myths (see above chaper I.1), but 2

The passionate edifice of Hasidism has its doors and windows burst open, but it is as immortal as the soul of a mother. With oozing orbits Hasidism still stands at the crossroads of the turbulent winds of history. […] – Here, whispered Gedali, and pointed to a long building with a broken frontal. (Transl. W. Morison)


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also, as we shall see, in the poetry of later ages by writers such as Lermontov. In his Chapter II, ‘Maison et univers’, Bachelard starts from the other end, so to speak, beginning with the image of the House as centre of man’s universe, as an ‘instrument’ by whose help he can ‘defy’, or ‘confront’ the cosmos: [la maison] est un instrument à affronter le cosmos (56).3 For Bachelard, such a House essentially grants security through its simplicity and solitude. It is this ‘sense of the hut’ (le sens de la hutte; 61) that conveys most strongly the idea of the house as the centre of the universe.4 Fantasy allows the expansion of the House to a cosmic scale, enabling the poet to ‘inhabit the universe’ (Une maison si dynamique permet au poète d’habiter l’univers; 62), or to see, imagine or ‘dream’ houses virtually anywhere.5 Imagination also allows mental transfer of the Self in relation to the House and the world, as in Plautus’ si domi sum, foris est animus, sin foris sum, animus est domi (if I am at home, my mind is abroad; if I am abroad, my mind is at home; Kennedy 1980, 140). The basic sheltering qualities of the House go back to the Cave. That archaic gestalt continues to demonstrate its psychopoetic power in the modern imagination, for example in Zamiatin’s story ‘The Cave’ (‘Пещера’; see Chapter II.31). It is a parallel that can also be detected in Russian Symbolist poetry; see Chapter II.21. Bollnow also refers to ‘der Höhlencharakter des Wohnraums’ (1963, 1925, 2). He sees a striking parallel between original cave-dwelling and modern

3

A very interesting, ironic variant of this is Xavier de Maistre’s allegorical mental experiment Voyage autour de ma chambre. 4 Compare also ‘Aussitôt, la hutte est la solitude centrée (…) Autour de cette solitude centrée rayonne un univers qui médite et qui prie, un univers hors de l’univers. (…) Elle a une heureuse intensité de pauvreté. La hutte de l’ermite est une gloire de la pauvreté. (46); Cette image d’une solitude symbolisée par une unique lumière émeut le coeur du poète (…). Nous sommes hypnotisés par la solitude, hypnotisés par le regard de la maison solitaire. D’elle à nous le lien est si fort que nous ne rêvons plus qu’à une maison solitaire dans la nuit’ (p. 50, concerning a letter by Rilke in which he describes such an experience). 5 In a flower for example; see a poem by Jean Laroche: ‘Cette pivoine est une maison vague / Où chacun retrouve la nuit. / [...] Tout calice est demeure’. (64); see also, in the same book, Bachelard’s treatment of the analogous qualities of ‘the drawer’, ‘the nest’, ‘the shell’.

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urban mass-architecture: ‘und es ist um so mehr, je mehr die modernen Grosstädte sich zu künstlichen Zementgebirgen entwickeln’. So far we have discussed the house and its psychopoetics from a positive, sheltering, ideal, even utopian point of view: it has been seen as a place of safety that we can enter or leave at will – an image that reflects and reinforces our basic trust in the world and in life (Bachelard 1964, 131; Bollnow 1963, 138-9). However, as we shall see in later chapters, like any other archetype the House image can be double-sided and ambiguous both in its identity with the lives of its inhabitants and as a not-entirely-safe haven in itself. The first of these, where the house is made to reflect the lives of its inhabitants, is evident in the long-standing literary tradition of haunted houses, and we are all familiar with the way an oppressive childhood or marriage can easily be associated with the house in which it is experienced, its spaces and the ways of life that support it, so that the house itself becomes oppressive and unbearable. In Turgenev’s novel A Nest of the Landed Gentry, for example, the hero Lavretskii has spent his childhood and youth on two ancestral estates. One of these, the splendid and well-kept Lavriki (where his grandparents are buried) recalls only painful memories for him, and so he settles down in the derelict and poor Vasil’evskoe. Here, the contrastive characteristics of the two houses are decisive in determining the structure of the plot and the hero’s character; see Chapter II.12. Like its happy counterpart, an unhappy perception of a house can dominate memories of childhood and provide a forceful impetus to a very basic plot development: Fleeing the House. Perversion of the House ideal can result in what one could call the Anti-House. Such Anti-Houses can be found in Ostrovskii’s play The Storm (Groza), Chekhov’s story ‘Three Days ‘(‘Tri dnja’) and Platonov’s The Construction Pit (Котлован; see part II.). The second, where the house itself fails to keep its archetypal promise of safety, has an even stronger impact in shattering our basic existential trust. Its message is that the outer world always remains a potential threat.6 A particularly threatening psychopoetic image is that 6

Bollnow (138) quotes Saint-Exupéry (‘Jedes Heim ist bedroht’), and mentions Kafka’s story ‘Der Bau’ (about the futility of trying to completely secure a house against danger from outside) as an example. See also Belyi’s remark that ‘the walls do not protect us against the arrival of the unknown’ (стены не защищают нас от прихода неведомого; Arabeski, 1911, and Jensen 1977, 121).


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of the loss of a house through destruction, water or fire. As we shall see in Chapter II 7, both play a role in the work of Pushkin. In the Izmaragd, an Old Russian text that is close to the Domostroi tradition (see Chapter I,2), the image of a house lost through fire is used to depict the strongest form of punishment imaginable, the fire of hell. A homiletic chapter on justice warns the powerful against corruption and the abuse of power over orphans and widows; God is supposedly speaking through his prophet: Горе обижающему вдову, лучше ему бросить огонь в дом свой, и, запалив, убежать из него, чем за слезы вдов быть вверженным в геенну огненную. [...] и огнь пожрет дома всех берущих мзду.7 (Kolesov & Rozhdestvenskii 1994, 290, Russian translation)

As I have already observed, a very important psychopoetic phenomenon, in folklore as well as in literature, is the representation or identification of a house as a person. This semantic strategy by itself is not restricted to Romantic or Symbolist literature, or to lyrical poetry. In literature of later periods we find examples of personified houses, of houses being heroes in themselves in a more literal sense than would be plausible within the stylistic canon of Turgenev’s Realism. An interesting, thematic example is Pil’niak’s story ‘The Old House’ (‘Старый дом’). We follow the history of an old house situated on the banks of the Volga in which generations of a family succeed one another from the beginning of the beginning of the twentieth century, through the Revolution, the Civil War and part of the Twenties. The personification of the house in Pil’niak’s Modernist style is literal: he uses realised metaphors in describing the house as a hero experiencing the passage of time and standing up to historic catastrophies; see Chapter II.30. Houses, like cities, villages, schools, streets and the comparable places of ones’s past – especially one’s childhood – are fundamental types of human space and usually densely filled with memories. When revisited, these places can become privileged areas of connection with in7

Woe to him who offends a widow. It is better for him to set his house on fire and, having done so, to run from it, than to be cast into the fire of hell because of widows’ tears. […] and fire will consume the houses of all those who accept bribe.

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dividual perceptions, thoughts, values and emotions. Revisiting such places triggers memories, but the simple act of mentally recalling places and spaces can do the same. In such contexts, the shapes and features of a house, the unique impressions of light, sound, smells and tactile sensations provide rich possibilities for synaesthetic or associative imagery. This is often exploited in the literature of memoir and recollection by writes such as Bunin, Pil’niak, Nabokov, T. Tolstaja. The intensity of our relationships with the space of our houses can be ascribed to our physical interiority as occupants of the space, integral parts of the houses, and hence to the psychologically important anthropological and anatomical analogies discussed above. However, the potential of the spaces we live in (Bachelard’s espace habité) to store and evoke memories specifically as images may also be connected with the nature of human cognition and the way memory functions, or at least with the way we imagine it to function. Although the use of synaesthetic imagery can be an important device in literature, our visual faculty is still the dominant one (see Müller 1996, 14) in the construction of what we might call the House of Memory. We can observe here an interesting semiotic parallel with classical rhetoric. In mnemotechnics – the art of memorising, which is a traditional component of rhetoric – the development and handling of visual images is also the most prominent component. In the earliest extant Latin texts on the subject,8 the artificial ordering of the rhetorician’s memory (the artificium memoriae in Auctor ad Herennium; idem, 114) requires the mental construction of a coherent series of fixed places or loci. These must be memorised in such a way that they are immediately retrievable and accessible to the rhetorician at will. In these places are to be stored images representing the parts and elements of his argument. The places should be memorised for ever, whereas the images are temporary and erasable. It is interesting to note that, as the most effective mnemonic loci, this text recommends the house and its fundamental architectonic constituents. It stresses the cognitive value of these localistic mnemotechnics, whereas in the literary examples mentioned above the emotional and moral values at8

The anonymous and enigmatic Auctor (or: Rhetorica) ad Herennium, Cicero’s De oratore (II, 351 ss) and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (2, 1 ss). Müller (1996) finds clear logical fallacies in the first text and has reservations regarding this ‘method of loci’ in the other two (idem, 12), but this is not relevant to our argument.


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tached to house spaces appear to be equally important if not more so. Nevertheless, the phenomenological and semiotic strategies underlying both are strikingly similar in their interrelation of house space and memory space. The ‘House of Childhood’ (see Chapter I.4) is a clear example of this function. The literary exploitation of the House of Memory inevitably poses the question of whether a comparable symbolic analogy also applies for consciousness in general – something like a House–Consciousness relationship together with its transformations. Although this is lesscommonly epresented in the literature investigated here, I believe that prominent examples can be found in the early twentieth century work of the Modernists. In constructing the narrative world of Andrei Belyi’s novels Petersburg and Kotik Letaev (see Chapter II.23) a central role is played by this metaphor and its manifold realisations in what Belyi himself famously called ‘cerebral play’ (мозговая игра). The psychopoetics of Elena Guro’s work also make use of this analogic presentation of the House and the faculties of the psyche; see Chapter II.25.

4. The House and its Functions in Structuring Narrative and Poetic Worlds: the House as Myth Writing about literary settings, and especially domestic settings, as expressions of character, Wellek and Warren stated that ‘A man’s house is an extension of himself’ (Wellek and Warren 1973, 221). This chapter comprises an analysis of the functions of the House as a structural element of literary worlds. This requires a conceptual and theoretical framework for the relevant literary and semiotic phenomena, and the ways in which these are interconnected.1 I take as my starting point the idea, developed by the MoscowTartu school, that semiosis in literature involves secondary modelling in relation to the primary modelling of language. From there I argue that any work of literature, whether it is an epic, an elegy, a novel or a short story, has as its foundation a specific abstract model of the world, a combination of literary semiotic categories that are responsible for such global characteristics as genre. On the basis of this model, a specific literary world-picture is shaped with the help of concrete motifs. In some cases it is possible to identify a particular element of the literary world-picture that stands out as being more responsible than other elements for the conceptual and literary coherence of the verbal world as a whole. On the level of the image – the level which we have been discussing so far – we could say that we are looking at the archetypal and gestalt qualities of images, but now we want to determine their role in the construction of the literary world-picture. This is where myth comes in as a significant category of literature. Myth, in this sense, is not only an archaic cognitive and narrative structure; it has a role to play, however fragmentary or rudimentary, in literary 1

Some of the basic ideas in this chapter were originally discussed in Van Baak 1994, paragraphs 1-4.

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texts of diverse periods and stylistic traditions. We can even argue that the literary modelling potential of images, as well as their expressiveness and aesthetic effectiveness, depends upon the strength of the mythical representations that they convey. At the same time, however, we must be aware that the semantics of the literary text – by comparison with the semantics of primary linguistic modelling – is characterised by a special openness or indeterminacy; see Ingarden’s notion of Unbestimmtheitsstelle. This semantic and cognitive openness results from the polysemy of literature, but it also manifests itself through time in the variability and changeability of interpretation and appreciation of literary works, including their imagery; see the theoretical work of the Prague literary structuralists Mukařovský and Vodičká. Moreover, the range of images and world-pictures that characterises national literatures or the works of individual authors may vary. Once we decide to interpret the image of the House in this context as a myth, we need to determine its properties as such, preferably on the basis of the outcome of the previous chapters. We have seen that, as an anthropologically and culturally relevant image, the House is a complex of spacial, cultural and axiological concepts or representations of the world that also has the potential to bestow sense upon that world. For these reasons we are dealing with a cognitive complex to which we can also apply notions such as archetype and gestalt. Such complex images not only have cognitive, psychological or symbolic meanings; they also have narrative potential. In other words, in the structure of myth, even in its modern ‘rudimentary’ manifestations, the narrative potential of the original myth ‘lies low’. This narrative potential can either be (re)activated in a narration or remain present as a ‘nucleus’ with associative potential. This also means that, in analysing myth on this level, one need not necessarily distinguish between ‘prose’ and ‘poetry’; see also Van Baak 1989. Such an interpretation agrees with the concept of myth according to Aristotelian poetics, distinguishing between ‘mythos’ – ‘plot’, ‘intrigue’, ‘narration’, ‘story’ – and ‘logos’ – ‘discourse’, ‘exposition’ (Wellek and Warren 1973, 190). This means that the ‘House Myth’, besides providing symbolic

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and axiological representations of the spatial world, can also have a function in the construction of narrative plots.2 If we connect this concept of the House Myth with the insights of the previous chapters, we can identify mythical ‘stories of the House’. It will be clear that it is the prime task of this book to research the significance of these, and comparable stories and their mythopoetics, to Russian literature and culture (part II.). Thus, we can speak about ‘stories of the House’ in the context of cosmogonic myths, about the ‘stories’ of founding first dynasties by the gods or the first man, about the ‘story’ of the hearth (the domestication of fire and, more concretely, the meaning of the Prometheus myth; see also Van Baak 1981) and, in a more abstract sense, the anthropocentric, existential ‘story of man,’; that is, of his own position in relation to these and of the relationship of his ‘self’ (or ‘soul’) to his own body. If a myth contains narrative, it will be clear that archaic types of plot will be essential to the narrative structure of myth. The most fundamental, archaic form of plot is that of ‘the road’; see, for example, Toporov on ‘путь’, Tokarev 1982, 352-3). From the anthropological, typological point of view as adopted in the preceding chapters, this type of plot brings into perspective two fundamental ways of perceiving or experiencing space, which we may now more appropriately express as ‘two models of the world’: that of the (typological) nomad, and that of the (typological) sedentary dweller. The ethnologist LeroiGourhan (1965, 155-9; see also Tokarev 1982, 341-2) devised a corresponding typological terminology, setting ‘espace itinérant’ (the hunter’s dynamic, linear perception of space) in opposition to ‘espace rayonnant’ (the sedentary dweller’s concentric perception and hierarchisation of space). This typological opposition can be usefully translated into analogous social and psychological terms as well as into the semiotics of (literary) space; see Van Baak 1983a. So, for example, there is on the one hand the idea of stable order associated with the concentric, ‘own’ domestic centre to which one belongs and with which one identifies, and on the other the situation where such a centre is absent or lost, or where a person lacks such a spatio-evaluative orientation and longs for such a place. In terms of narrative structure, 2

For more detailed and theoretical discussions of the relations between literary space, plot conflict, and myth, see also Van Baak 1983a and b, 1984, 1987a and b.

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the former is typically the case at the beginning of certain types of novel, or of fairy tales: the initial situation is one of balance and harmony; this will be disturbed by conflict (plot events), which in turn will lead to a later situation – the hero forced to leave his home, losing his house, regaining his house or acquiring a new one, to take just a few examples. In some periods and genres, a variant of this typical fabular chain elaborates the fates of houseless heroes. They may be exiles, drifters or vagabonds, abandoned, abducted or illegitimate children, or orphans. It need hardly be said that the Homecoming story is of fundamental importance. Suffice it here to refer to the Odyssey as a model. Its status as a universal and archaic plot type demonstrates the intrinsic, natural connections within the triangle that constitutes the basis of the ‘arch-fabula’: Hero – Road – House (or Home). This triangle implicitly represents a specific world-order in which the House is the invariant ‘centre’ to which all plot developments gravitate. Notwithstanding the above, in most works of literature the House will be (at least) a natural locus, or point of reference within the literary world. It therefore becomes interesting to notice cases where such a house is absent from the world-picture, or out-of-place, or a problem, for example in literary texts which in some way revive a nomadic world-view. The consequences are far-reaching because the absence of the house is bound to entail either a fundamental characteristic of the world-picture being presented or a fundamental violation of the immanent world-order as a whole. This opposition can take a prominent place in the structures of literary plots and settings. We might view the two concepts as mutually exclusive typological opposites. However, when dealing with literary representations we should rather consider them as two poles of the possible range of world-views which can come into conflict, and of which the concrete expression is directly related to literary phenomena such as genre and period characteristics. For example, in the world-view of the Russian estates as reflected in the works of Turgenev or Goncharov, sedentary life is the norm; see also Chapters II.11, 13, 15, and 30 on ‘normative orientation towards the world’. Leaving the estate, coming back, coming of age and exerting one’s rights as a landowner constitute the basic model of the hero’s life plot from which the novel’s conflicts are developed (Van


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Baak 1983b). During the course of that plot, the world of the estates as such remains essentially unaltered. At the other end of the spectrum we can consider the meaning of the Cossack myth and the Scythian myth in Russian culture; see for example, Gogol’s romantic Cossacks in Taras Bul’ba, the revolutionary Cossacks of the nineteen twenties in Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry (Конармия) and the ‘neo-nomadism’ of the image of the Scythian in twentieth century Modernism and Avantgarde (for example Blok, or Pil’niak). In Gogol’s representation, the identity of the Cossacks as warriors is not compatible with living in houses, whose closed, interior, feminine spaces pose a threat to their masculinity; see the analyses of Lotman 1968, and Deutsch Kornblatt 1992, 72. In Babel’s Red Cavalry (Конармия), the revolutionary Cossacks as nomadic warriors bring catastrophe to sedentary domestic life; see Van Baak 1983a, 1987b. The myth of the House was presented above as a fabular invariant in the plots of a basic world-order. Myth is especially concerned with ‘origins and destinies’, and it is ‘a programme’ (Wellek and Warren 1973, 191). In this context it is important to quote Wellek and Warren on the subject of myth in more detail: For literary theory, the important motifs are probably the image or picture, the social, the supernatural (or non-naturalist or irrational), the narrative or story, the archetypal or universal, the symbolic representation as events in time of our timeless ideals, the programmatic or eschatological, the mystic. In contemporary thought, appeal to the myth may centre on any one of these, with a spread to others. (Ibidem)

These formulations offer useful leads in describing the House’s functions in modelling the narrative and poetic world. On the level of narration, the cyclical ‘programme’ of the myth’s implied world-order is translated into ‘events’: plot motifs involving the category of time, actors and circumstances. In its cyclical characteristics, the House Myth becomes manifest in the chain of generations: the dynastic and ancestral principle, heredity, tradition and the responsibilities that come with it. These are, in the terms of Wellek and Warren, ‘symbolic representations as events in time of timeless ideals’. This analysis mainly

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addresses the narrative mode, but, as I have already remarked, the mythic qualities of the House as an image (in the sense of Wellek and Warren) are activated no less forcefully in lyric poetry. We could just as easily say, following Lotman, that in ‘modern’ literature we encounter the double structure of mythical cyclical conceptualisation and the historic mode of successive narration; see Lotman 1979 on the origin of plot in the light of typology, and on the structural relations between archaic myth and modern plot. Here we find houses not only as images but as settings and conflict spaces (see Van Baak 1990ab, 1987b), shaping the diversity and variability of literary world-pictures with their specific qualities. Thus, the concrete enclosure of domestic space can be perceived as positive and valuable, associated with comfort and warmth, protection, refuge and identity, or as negative and oppressive, associated with captivity, coldness, stress, neglect and alienation. According to context and plot, the homeliness of a house can be lost, or changed into its opposite: the House can become a Pseudo-House, or an Anti-House. In advance of the actual analysis of the literary sources, we can already draw up provisional (but reasonably representative) typological classifications of House images, and the basic dynamic fabula motifs connected with the House. Such an inventory, making allowances for combinations or shifts between the valuational categories and variants, might well look something like this: –

– –

– –

The Archaic House, comprising such images as the Womb-House, the Cave-House and the Personified House that can be psychologically ambivalent, but also including the House as a projection of psychic faculties such as the subconscious and memory; The Utopian House, basically positive and uniting the forces of life; The House of Childhood, the Paternal/Parental House, the House and Garden as Paradise, the Old House, the House of Memory and the House of the Future (that is, more genuinely Utopian in the political, or eschatological sense); The Anti-House or Pseudo-House; The Haunted House, the Closed House, the Prison-House, the Madhouse, the Underground House, and the House as Hell;


– – –

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The basically negative or Unhappy House of dysfunctional families; The House of Unhappy Marriage, or, more generally, the House without Love (also for orphans, wards, and the like); The House of Death, where death, destruction, demoralisation and decadence are stronger than the forces of life and perspective in the concrete image of the House as a Grave or Coffin.

What is absent from this scheme is a ‘neutral’, ‘normal’ image of the ‘homely’ House or Home. This does not imply that such a condition would not be a reality. On the contrary, it represents the unmarked, ‘given’ or ‘by default’ mode of the domestic theme as opposed to the literary, secondary modelling given in the above scheme. We could say that the unmarked mode of the domestic theme is, by definition, inherent in literary structures. According to the context, however, it can develop literary prominence as a mythopoetic image or fabular mytheme. In the fabular inventory drawn up below, I also leave out the basic, uninterrupted and ‘self-contained’ routine (or ‘programme’; see above) of the House Myth because that would not result in plot development of the formal kind. This does not mean that ‘uninterrupted idyllic flow’ cannot occur in literary texts. It can, but then it is only temporary, as in plotless narration involving reminiscences and dreams – Oblomov’s famous dream about the Oblomovka estate of his childhood is a good example – and therefore tends to be limited to specific lyrical genres such as the elegy. In saying this, I share Lotman’s view of plot as necessarily involving the crossing of a spatiotemporal, moral or cognitive boundary. The ‘ideal routine’, the basic programme of the House Myth as an uninterrupted, self-contained cycle, does not go ‘out of bounds’ by itself and therefore yields no plot in the usual sense. Even Paradise, as a timeless concept, lacks a plot; it is only when the serpent and Eve come into action that it acquires one. It makes sense to draw up a basic classification beginning with the phases of human life in relation to the house and thereby acknowledging the thematics of ‘origins and destinies’, the moral and the social, as stressed by Wellek and Warren. The following fabula motifs, then, appear to cover the essential variation ‘around the house’:

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–

– –

– –

–


To build, or found a house, both materially and in the sense of a ‘Domus’ (as Aeneas does in the Aeneid, Book 7; see also Chapter I.1). To come into a house by being born, by marriage or simply by moving house. To leave the house or home, either 1. as a phase in life, a ‘rite de passage’ that also involves finding a new house by coming of age, marriage or moving house, or in connection with death; or 2. as a result of conflict, by fleeing or being driven away and possibly becoming a homeless wanderer. To look for and find a new house. To return to a house or home; this includes the homecoming of lost persons (the Prodigal Son, The Odyssey) and the experience of ‘revisiting’ a house or home. To lose a house (through a catastrophic occurrence perhaps involving fire or water), to be evicted from it or to be threatened or killed in it by an invasive agent. Taking into account the dynastic meaning of the House, this motif might be identified as ‘Death of the House’.

The last category is different from the others on account of the position of the hero or house as victim of an external agent. It clearly represents an important group of plots. Individual texts may of course comprise combinations of these motifs, but they may also employ a wide range of variations, or make metaphoric, metonymic, imaginary, personifying or otherwise symbolic transformations of them. This aspect requires further discussion because it is connected with the structure of literary texts on the level of concrete imagery and plot structure. As I have already remarked, the verbal motifs mentioned above are all of a fabular nature. This means, in accordance with the classical formalist theory of Tomashevskii, for example, that they represent dynamic and non-omissible motifs, such as ‘leaving’ or ‘returning’ and their equivalents. Of course, elements of the House thematics can become manifest in connection with such fabular, ‘narration-propelling’ motifs, but they can also become circumstantial, attributive and static sujet motifs of a setting, with psychopoetic, qualifying or digressive


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functions. Numerous literary texts show that houses, and especially certain ‘privileged’ parts of houses such as thresholds, doors, windows and drawing-rooms, are intrinsically linked with the manifestation of the dynamic fabular motifs on the level of the sujet. This is what could be called, after Bakhtin, their chronotopic function, or, in a different terminology, the articulation of the conflict space; see Van Baak 1983a, 1990. It is these articulations and metonymies of the House Myth, on the level of the sujet or in lyrical phraseology, that are the vehicles of the psychopoetic qualities of the house discussed in Chapter I.3. As we should expect, both classifications of house motifs, the dynamic-fabular and the attributive and psychopoetic-digressive, often co-operate in literary semiosis. In Turgenev’s A Nest of the Landed Gentry (Дворянское гнездо), Lavretskii’s life-plot involves a particular chain of the motives classified above. He is the owner of two very different estates on each of which he has spent parts of his childhood: Lavriki, which he detests, and the poor and long-neglected but much-loved Vasil’evskoe, where he settles down. Strikingly, in the novel’s epilogue, where the nowlonely hero is revisiting a third house that has been important to him, the narrator refers to him as a ‘homeless wanderer’ (бездомный странник). We can interpret this as the narrator’s figurative psychological and moral résumé of his hero’s life plot, and draw the conclusion that life did not grant Lavretskii ‘a nest of the landed gentry’; that is, a genuine Domus. From the point of view of the domestic myth we could indeed say that the qualification ‘homeless wanderer’ is a particular, condensed manifestation of the ‘arch-fabula: hero – road – house’, as discussed earlier in this chapter. At the same time it needs to be interpreted against the background of the three House images and their significance for the hero looking back on his life. Only thus can we appreciate the integrating role of the literary House images as they fulfil their psychopoetic function as emotional, or moral, frames within a narrative structure. Another complete and expressive example illustrating the House Myth and its psychopoetic capacity to symbolise and integrate dynastic, emotional and spiritual images is the following passage from the early-twentieth-century memoir ‘My fatherland’ (’Моя родина’), written by the religious philosopher and theologian S. N. Bulgakov:

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Наш дом, в котором я родился, был недалеко от нагорной части над рекой в пяти минутах от Сергиевской церкви. Он был деревянный, в пять комнат, расширявшийся пристройками. Он принадлежал семейству моей матери. Сколько здесь было рождений и смертей - тоже алтарь предков. Он был одноэтажный, серый, выходящий на угол своими многими небольшими окнами. Такой интимный, задушевный. Но я не помню, чтобы в нем праздновались браки, но помню, много похорон. Он был живой этот дом, как будто часть нашего семейного тела и излияния души предков. Когда приходилось приезжать домой издалека, он тихо обнимал странника и нашептывал ему песни детства…. Святая колыбель. Внутри его было бeдно и просто (хотя и выше среднего убогого уровня ливенской жизни.3 (Bulgakov 1992, 365)

In this extract, the motifs of the House Myth are presented as the motifs of life’s cycle and the traditional rituals that come with it: births and deaths, weddings and funerals. The house itself, personified as a member of the family, seen as the embodiment hospitality and as a cradle, provides the emotional and moral framework for the life that is lived there.

3

Our house, in which I was born, stood not far from the high river bank five minutes away from the Sergiev church. It was made of wood and had five rooms, supplemented by outhouses. It belonged to my mother’s family. How many births and deaths had occurred in it – it was also an altar for our ancestors. It had one floor. It was grey, looking out on a corner through its numerous small windows. It was so intimate, so close. I do not remember that any weddings were celebrated in it, but I do remember a lot of funerals. This house had been alive, as if it was part of our family body and of the outpouring of the soul of our ancestors. Whenever someone arrived home from a faraway journey, it silently embraced the wanderer and whispered childhood songs in his ear… A holy cradle. Inside it was poor and simple, though of a higher-thanaverage living standard in Livny.

II THE HOUSE MYTH IN 19 AND 20TH CENTURY RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE TH

1. Two Strong Images In this part, I shall undertake a general survey of the house theme in Russian literature in its historical and cultural context. My discussion will mainly be concerned with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but, as will become clear, the imagery and symbolism of the house that we encounter in that period will often have its roots in earlier phases of Russian cultural history. First I shall discuss Russian variants of the House Myth that appear to function on the most general level of cultural and literary history. In the following chapters, the selected works of literature will be studied in comparison with the typology of the House Myth and its types and motifs, as developed in Part I. This exploration will highlight the dominant tendencies and representative cases. The ultimate motivation for including a work here is its relevance from the point of view of the House Myth and its significance within the development of the house theme in Russian literary and cultural history. The various authors and works do not receive equal amounts of attention owing to individual differences in the prominence and functions of the thematics that are being studied. From the preceding chapters, it should be clear that I consider literature as a semiotic system expressing, among other things, worldpictures, cultural models and values. For the general diachronic perspective used in this chapter, this means that I am looking for continuities and changes in the development of the Russian House Myth. The first of the fundamental ‘building blocks’ of the House Myth is the building of a house. This in its turn gives rise to two strong symbolic and successive images, each of which appears to ‘house’ important aspects of Russian culture in a characteristic way. They are the sixteenth-century Domostroi (the moralistic text already intro-

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duced in Chapter I.2) and the ‘Window on Europe’ (‘Oкно в Европу’). Considering their importance and their interrelationship, I shall discuss them here in some detail.

2. The Domostroi and Some Other Old Russian Reflexes: Ostrovskii, Dostoevskii, Leskov, Zamiatin The moral architecture of the Domostroi represents the patriarchal, immutable and theocratically orientated ideal of medieval Muscovite culture, the foundations of which were inherited from the Byzantine example through what is called (in Byzantine Greek and Russian terminology) the ‘porfironosnaia’ tradition; that is, the symbolism of imperial power expressed in the image of the ‘imperial purple’.1 (We shall come across this again in a poetic context.) This Byzantine world model remained influential throughout the period of the Tatar Yoke, decisively determined the centralist, xenophobic and conservative outlook of the Muscovite state, and motivated its claims to be the ‘Third Rome’ after the fall of Byzantium in 1453. The nineteenth-century Russian historian I. E. Zabelin based his description of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovite Russia on thе Domostroi characteristics of Russian society, and developed its House (or Domus) concept as a historic, social, and political metaphor and instrument of analysis.2 Muscovite culture in all its aspects and social stratifications was based on the closed, patriarchal and patrimonial model of the Domostroi, with the house (дом, двор) and the master (хозяин, господин, господарь) as its nucleus. According to Zabelin, there was no significant qualitative difference between the life of the Tsar’s court and that of other Muscovite households. He pointed out that on this social foundation the specific form of the Russian State developed organi1

See the Greek equivalent of the Russian adj. ‘porfironosnyi’: ‘porfuroforía’; that is, ‘the wearing of purple garments’; see also ‘porfurogennètos’: ‘one born to the purple’, or ‘born after the father’s ascension to the imperial throne’ (Liddell 1968, and OED). 2 See his works: Домашний быт русского народа в XVI и XVII столетиях: т.1. – Домашний быт русских царей в XVI и XVII столетиях (1862); т. 2 - Домашний быт русских цариц в XVI и XVII столетиях (1872).

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cally as the ‘result, the work, of the people’s consciousness’ and as the ‘outward mechanism of public life’; the State grew out of ‘the house’, ‘within the structure of the house’ ((государство) вырастает из ‘дома’, ‘в строе дома’; see Sakharov in his introduction to Zabelin 1990, 30). It is also important to stress that the Domostroi text and its ideology of vertical power and hierarchy are not connected with traditional Russian peasant life but are essentially urban and imperial; that is, Moscow-centred, hence the traditional association of Muscovy (Moscow) with the adjective Byzantine in its various connotations. Apart from its pervading influence on Russian political and philosophical thinking and institutions,3 the Domostroi also left its traces in nineteenth-century Russian literature. In its literary afterlife, the Domostroi culture remains urban, however provincial its outward appearance. It is possible to identify what we might call a Domostroi mentality, and Russian literature (and criticism) of the nineteenth century is largely responsible for its identification with the Russian merchant class, the kupechestvo; see Kolesov 1994. Far from reflecting the Domostroi’s original function as an allegory of the ideal way to govern a household or Domus (‘како дворъ строити’: ‘how to build a house’), this nineteenth-century image became a symbol of extreme backwardness and cruel injustice, and thus could be used as an effective dramatic foil, for example in the critical Realist plays of Ostrovskii. Its roots in reality could be found in the old cities along Russia’s big rivers and in the Moscow district called Zamoskvorech’e, where Ostrovskii himself grew up. It is characterised by a closed, narrow-minded, paternalistic world-view, the unbridled and paranoid exertion of power and an instinctive and fierce opposition to change and ‘otherness’ in general. It is the profile of the ‘samodur’, the petty tyrant in his own house, exemplified by the infamous Dikoi and his equally notorious female counterpart Kabanova in Ostrovskii’s play The Thunderstorm (Гроза). Ostrovskii’s effective use of both the social and constructive aspects of Domus semiotics for dramatic purposes in this play is clear. The samodurs’ unrestrained tyranny over members of their households finds expression throughout the text in 3

Perhaps we should rather stress its role in the deficiency, or even absence, of Russian political and social institutions as compared to those of many Western societies; see also Chapter II.4 on Chaadaev.

The Domostroi and Some Other Old Russian Reflexes

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both the dialogues and the dramatic events themselves, but the distinctive special features of the typical merchant’s house are also dramatically exploited.4 Heavily shuttered, this house is doubly closed: inhospitable to visitors and a Prison-House for Katerina, the heroine. The central series of events that leads ultimately to her tragic death begins, significantly, with a scene (spoken in monologue) that shows her in possession of the key to a back gate that gives access to the precipice where she will meet her lover. Thus the House theme provides the freedom motif: the key, as the means of freeing herself from the prison-house, is both a symbol and a dynamic fabula motif. Dostoevskii, in a number of his works, similarly exploited the negative image of the merchant’s House reflecting the dark and secretive mentality of its inhabitants. The houses of Rogozhin in Идиот (The Idiot) and Samsonov in Братья Карамазовы (The Brothers Karamazov) are clear examples. Leskov also made use of this cultural cliché in his well-known story Леди Макбет Мценского уезда (Lady MacBeth of the Mcensk District, 1865), exploiting to the full its dramatic potential5 as the closed merchant’s house becomes the scene, not only of secrecy, oppression and murder, but also of attempts to hide the traces of the murder.6 Casari 1988 provides an analysis of the merchant’s house and its symbolism in the works of Dostoevskii and Leskov. After the nineteenth century, the Domostroi continued to be viewed in general as a negative reflection of the Russian past (see Naidenova 1996, 290), but the merchant mentality as a national liter4

Naidenova stresses this aspect of the merchants’ house as the spatial expression of the Domostroi identity, marking the private sphere of the wealthy Russian sixteenthcentury city dweller; its premises are enclosed by a high fence; see Naidenova 1996, 296. 5 In a publication of 1863 (‘С людьми древлего благочестия’/‘With People of the Old Piety’, Библиотека для чтения № 11) Leskov says that the family life of the Old-Believers sect of the bezpopovcy (priestless) in Pskov in no way differs from that of the regular merchant or the lower middle class: ‘The same homeric ignorance, superstitious fanaticism and perseverance in ancestral traditions, debauchery and despotism in the family’(‘То же гомерическое невежество, крепость в отеческих преданиях, разврат и семейный депотизм’). 6 Casari (1997, 37-49) discusses two more works by Leskov, both dealing with merchants’ houses as dramatic settings: the story ‘Котин доилец и Платонида’ (‘Kotin the milker and Platonida’), and his (only) play Расточитель (The Spendthrift).

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ary and cultural topos seems to have lost its serious dramatic force. The work of the painter Kustodiev in the first two decades of the twentieth century is interesting in this context, and not only because he inspired the writer Zamiatin. In Kustodiev’s unique and seemingly untimely oeuvre, the merchants’ world undergoes the last phase of its symbolic evolution. It is presented as the central component of an idealised, vanishing Russia, in the process acquiring strangely ironic, mildly nostalgic connotations. Kustodiev’s work was widely acclaimed for its historically accurate, colourful and idealised rendering of old provincial towns and opulent traditional merchant life. His paintings are pictorial references to the nineteenth-century tradition that we have been looking at, but they comment on it from the viewpoint of a catastrophically changed and changing world. The moral sting of backwardness and oppression has been replaced by a peculiar sense of vitality and old world charm. Kustodiev’s artistic stance brought about a shift in perceptions: the former ideological interpretation of the merchant’s House and world was replaced by an essentially aesthetic, positive affective valuation of this Domus as a prototypical setting of traditional Russian culture. We can see it in such paintings as ‘Merchant’s wife with mirror’ (‘Купчиха с зеркалом’, 1920), ‘Merchant in a Furcoat’ (‘Купец в шубе’, 1920) and, especially, ‘Merchant’s Wife Having Tea (on the Balcony)’ (‘Купчиха за чаем (на балконе)’, 1918); see Lebedeva 1997, 42, 43, 45. Zamiatin greatly admired his friend’s creation of this romantically and ironically stylised Russia, and he wrote a short story ‘In Old Russia’ (‘Русь’,1923), inspired by Kustodiev’s oxymoronic nostalgia for old provincial Russia, and using a plot close to that of Leskov’s Lady MacBeth of the Mcensk district (Леди Макбет мценского уезда). For Kustodiev’s pictural stylisation of the old Russian provincial world, Zamiatin coined the term ‘Kustodiev town’ or ‘Kustodiev country’; see Zamiatin in his Litsa collection; see also Van Baak 1993a, 321. Kustodiev himself said of his work ‘all my pictures are complete illusions’ (Dokuchaeva 1991, 42, 179). The most striking example of Kustodiev’s remarkable personal view of the House and its symbolism is his painting ‘The Blue House’ (‘Голубой домик’; 1920; see Van Baak 2008).

3. Peter the Great’s Window on Europe The second grand symbolic House image in Russian culture, as expressed in the phrase ‘Window on Europe’ (‘Oкно в Европу’), appears in the context of the cultural revolution of Peter I. The window is a symbolic metonymy for Peter the Great’s creation of a new ‘Russian house’ oriented toward the West, and it first materialised, of course, in the city of Saint-Petersburg. The emergence of this image is connected with one of the earliest important literary texts in the tradition of the so called Petersburg myth: Pushkin’s poem (or ‘Petersburg tale’ as he himself referred to it) The Bronze Horseman (Медный всадник, 1833). The hero Evgenii, threatening the bronze statue of Peter the Great in his madness, calls him a ‘miracle-working builder’ (строитель чудотворный). In the introduction Peter is portrayed as the founder and the architect of the new city, and it is here that the phrase ‘window on Europe’ actually appears in the text: И думал он: Отсель грозить мы будем шведу. Здесь будет город заложен Назло надменному соседу. Природой здесь нам суждено 1 В Европу прорубить окно.

In a note, Pushkin attributes the coining of the phrase to the Italian traveller Algarotti (Pushkin 1977, t. IV, 288: Альгаротти где-то сказал: “Pétersbourg est la fenêtre par laquelle la Russe (sic) regarde en 1

And he thought: / From here we will threaten the Swede. / Here a city will be founded / To spite our haughty neighbour. / It was ordained by Nature that here we / Should hack through a window on Europe.

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Europe”).2 The stanza continues with a description of the emergence and growth of miraculous Petersburg in the middle of the woods and bogs of a northern wilderness: Прошло сто лет, и юный град, Полнощных стран краса и диво, Из тьмы лесов, из топи блат 3 Вознесся пышно, горделиво;

Although Peter is building a city where there was none before, the window on Europe is to be ‘cut’ or ‘hacked through’; the Russian verb is ‘прорубить’. This suggests the prior existence of some less open building, or at least a wall, rather than the construction of a completely new house, and thus implies the symbolic and pragmatic ‘opening up’ of the closed, defensive wall of the old House of Russian culture (the metaphoric equivalent of the House of the Domostroi) and the decision to look westward.4 This connection with the Old-Russian House image, characterised above as closed, and founded on medieval symbolism and a medieval world-picture, seems to be supported by Pushkin in a remarkable allegory that occurs in the final lines of the same stanza as he sets up a confrontation between the young capital (the river Neva, granite-clad) personified as the proudly dressed new Tsarina, and old Moskva (both the river and the city) personified as a widow empress, almost suggesting rivalry at the Byzantine court: В гранит оделася Нева; Мосты повисли над водами; Темно-зелеными садами 2

See Algarotti 1969, 205: Ma qual cosa le dirò prima, qual poi di questa città, di questo gran finestrone, dirò così, novellamente aperto nel norte, per cui la Russia guarda in Europa? 3 A hundred years went by, and the young city, / Beauty and wonder of the northern countries, / From the darkness of forests, from boggy swamps / Rose splendid and proud; 4 The choice of the active Russian verb prorubit’, ‘cut/hack through’ in preference to the more passive, merely observational French phrase, carries energetic connotations that, if only on the grounds that Pushkin could easily have found other expressions if had wished to, require interpretation. Perhaps it is Peter’s own impetus and energy that is being evoked, possibly personifying the youthful but rude energy of Russia, or the unique abstract quality of Russianness (russkost’) itself.

Peter the Great’s Window on Europe

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Ее покрылись острова, И перед младшею столицей Померкла старая Москва, Как перед новою царицей 5 Порфироносная вдова.

Moscow in the role of ‘purple-robed widow’ (’порфироносная вдова’)6 is a condensed, emblematic sign, pointing to the Byzantine– Muscovite strain in old, pre-Petrine Russian Tsarism, its culture and its mentality, and this is set against Peter’s new world-view, symbolised by the window on the West. Peter the Great’s attempt to transform Russia in accordance with Western models led to fundamental rifts in Russian society, the consequences of which continued to be felt throughout the next two (or even three) centuries. His adoption of Western culture evoked fundamental conflicts with traditional Russian culture, which in this analysis can be classified semiotically along spatial parameters such as verticality versus horizontality, and introversion (concentricity and closedness) versus extroversion and expansion. The Petrine revolution also implied a fundamental change of attitude towards Russian boundaries and the world beyond them. Muscovite culture can be characterised as dominated by verticality on account of its medieval hierarchical, theocratic, and ‘porphyrophoric’ world model, in combination with its concentric (like Monomakh’s cap, the original crown of the Muscovite Princes), centripetal world orientation and its dismissive attitude towards other cultures. Muscovy could not recognise the possibility of cultures beyond its boundaries that were equivalent to its own; indeed its specific medieval and Orthodox vision of the world would only allow for ‘heretics’ and non-human beings outside ‘Holy 5

Neva dressed herself in granite; Bridges hung over her waters; / In dark green gardens her islands were clad, / And before the younger capital / Old Moskva grew pale, / As though before a new empress/ A purple-robed widow. 6 We could also set the elements ‘в гранит оделася Нева’, and the ‘порфироносная вдова’ in opposition to one another. That would evoke a symbolic contrast on the basis of (strong, powerful) building materials: (northern) ‘granite’ versus (southern) ‘porphyry’, because the Greek ‘porfuros’ means both that and ‘purple’. The poetics of gender are interesting here. Only in this allegorical context is ‘Peter’s creation’ (‘Петра творенье’) presented as female (the Neva); otherwise the predominant gendercharacteristic of ‘granite-clad’ Saint-Petersburg and its gestalt, is, of course, male.

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Russia’. An interesting nineteenth-century literary comment on this attitude can be found in Ostrovskii’s aforementioned play The Storm (Гроза). One of the exponents of that merchants’ world is an old woman named Feklusha. Ostrovskii makes her the mouthpiece of a smug, narrow-minded, opportunistic orthodoxy and, through her, criticises and ridicules this medieval Russian, exclusive view of the world beyond the confines of its own ‘house’ and rules: Г л а ш а. А ты, Феклуша, далеко ходила? Ф е к л y ш а. Нет, милая. Я, [...], далеко не ходила; а слыхать много слыхала. Говорят, такие страны есть, милая девушка, где и царей-то нет православных, а салтаны землей правят. В одной земле сидит на троне салтан Махнут турецкий, а в другой салтан Махнут персидский; и суд творят они, милая девушка, надо всеми людьми, и, что ни судят они, все неправильно. И не могут они, милая, ни одного дела рассудить праведно, такой уж им предел положен. У нас закон праведный, а у них, милая, неправедный; что по нашему закону так выходит, а по ихнему все напротив. И все судьи у них, в ихних странах, тоже все неправедные; так им, милая девушка, и в просьбах пишут: “Суди меня, судья неправедный!” А то есть еще земля, где все люди все с песьими головами.7 (Ostrovskii 1974,Vol. 2, 226)

It is important to note that, for traditional Russian culture, the concept of ‘Holy Russia’ (Святая Русь) was not only a religious, moral and ideological idea, but a spatial reality as well: part of the traditional Russian view dividing the world according to its fundamentally binary

7

Glasha: Have you gone to distant places in your wanderings, Feklusha? Feklusha: That I have not, dear girl; it’s my feebleness keeps me from wandering afar. As for hearing, I’ve heard a lot. There’s lands, they say, as has no Christian Tsar to rule them, but is ruled by a saltan. In one such land saltan Makhnut-the-Turk sits on the throne, and in another Makhnut-the-Persian; and they’s the ones as pass judgement on the people, and all their judgements be wrong judgements, and not one judgement can be a right one, being as there’s a limit put on them. All our laws are just laws, and all their laws are unjust; by our law it turns out this way, by their law it turns out t’other way. And all the judges in those lands are unjust; and even in their papers that is how they write, dear girl: “And may I be judged by the laws of the unjust.” And then there’s lands where all the people has heads like dogs. (Transl. Alexander, from Ostrovskii, 1974, 186-7)

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world concept into sacred and profane spaces; see Lotman and Uspenskii 1984. Typologically we could call this the Closed House. The Petrine revolution, on the other hand, implied a radical ideological and cognitive innovation because it accepted the possibility of equivalence between Russian and other cultures. This means that it acknowledged a horizontal, secular and more receptive communicative mode of approaching the surrounding world, opening itself up to foreign learning, technology and institutions. This analysis enables us to appreciate the profound significance of Peter’s ‘horizontal’, secularising decision to transfer his centre of power from Moscow – the heart of the Muscovite state – to the periphery of his realm. This type of culture envisaged a different position for Russia, one in which she acknowledged the existence in the world of competing centres that, even if they were hostile, were essentially equivalent in a basic anthropological sense. Typologically, this could be called the Open House. Considering the recurrent political symbolism of House building imagery on this general level of Russian cultural typology, it is interesting to note that it surfaces again in the context of Russia’s history since 1985. Gorbachev then launched his initiative for innovation under the building metaphor of perestroika, or ‘total reconstruction’.8 Less than an elaborated, practical reform programme in the real sense, it actually functioned, for a while at least, as a specific manifestation of the House Myth: it was presented as a grand collective heroic ideal to reconstruct the House of Russia on all levels. Gorbachev also envisaged Russia’s future on a global scale within another mythical House: the ‘Common European House’ (‘Общеевропейский Дом’). Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn was publishing his views on Russia’s future under the ‘constructive’ title Rebuilding Russia (Как нам обустроить Россию? English translation: Solzhenitsyn 1991). He opens with a statement that sees Russia under Communism as a building in decay, threatening to collapse: ‘Time has finally run out for Communism. But its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled. And we must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty’

8

Perestroika as a symbol of the Soviet construction ideology was used as early as the nineteen twenties, but it was under Gorbachev that it acquired its epochal resonance and even became an international politicological term.

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(3).9 Referring to problems of nationality within the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn uses another negative House image that, as we shall see, has come to dominate most of the twentieth century, the communal apartment or kommunalka: ‘Many of us know only too well, alas, that sharing a communal apartment can at times make life itself seem intolerable. And that is exactly how inflamed things have become in our national interrelationships’ (7); see Chapter II.34. And of course there is the political party that identifies itself as ‘Our House Russia’ (’Наш дом Россия’). In a book about the condition of Russia in the nineteen nineties, the politician Boris Nemtsov also reverted to the image of the reconstruction of the ‘House of Russia’, employing the expression ‘kapital’nyi remont’ (‘overhaul’, ‘major repairs’) to remind people how, during major repairs, life in the house was often hard to bear, but that it was always seen to have been worth the trouble once the end of the process became visible; Russia, alas, was right in the middle of that process (Nemtsov 1996, 51). No less interesting is the revival that the Domostroi image has experienced since the days of the perestroika. In public opinion and the press, it had previously been a symbol of pre-Revolutionary backwardness (‘темное царство’, the ‘realm of darkness’), but in the mid-eighties there was a complete reversal in its evaluation, especially in orthodox periodicals, culminating in the appearance of a new weekly newspaper entitled Domostroi (Naidenova 1996, 290). But it is now time to return to the nineteenth century.

9 In Rebuilding Russia Solzhenitsyn repeatedly applies the term ‘ruin’ to Russia and its institutions. He also uses ‘fabric’ as a metaphor (‘Kazakhstan (…) was stitched together by the Communists in a completely haphazard fashion’, 7) and organic (sickness-health) imagery. The latter can obviously take its place in the tradition of Hobbes’ ‘Bodie Politick’ (Leviathan), and Geopolitics is also influential: alongside the House metaphor for the State in contentinental Russian culture, there is, for example, the traditional Dutch and English maritime image of the ‘Ship of State’.

4. Chaadaev’s Homelessness. The Beginning of a Long Tradition In the early nineteenth-century debate on Russia, P. Ia. Chaadaev’s voice is of great importance. In the first of his famous philosophical letters to a lady, written in French in 1829 and published in Russian translation in the Moscow journal Teleskop in 1836, he gave vent to a scathing criticism of Russian culture and history using the House Myth in an extremely negative manner. The pertinent passage runs as follows: Regardez autour de vous. Tout le monde n’a-t-il pas un pied en l’air? On dirait tout le monde en voyage. Point de sphère d'existence déterminée pour personne, point de bonnes habitudes pour rien, point de règle pour aucune chose. Point même de foyer domestique; rien qui attache, rien qui réveille vos sympathies, vos affections; rien qui dure, rien qui reste: tout s’en va, tout s’écoule sans laisser de trace ni au dehors ni en vous. Dans nos maisons, nous avons l'air de camper; dans nos familles, nous avons l’air d’étrangers; dans nos villes, nous, avons l’air de nomades, plus nomades que ceux qui paissent dans nos steppes, car ils sont plus attachés à leurs déserts que nous à nos cités.1 (P. Ia. Chaadaev 1991, 88)

For all its polemic and elegant exaggeration in passages such as this, Chaadaev’s philosophical letter clearly touched a nerve and stirred de1

Look around you. Don’t you think we are all very restless? We all resemble travellers. There is no definite sphere of existence for anyone, no good habits, no rule for anything at all; not even a home; nothing which attracts or awakens our sympathy or affection, nothing lasting, nothing enduring; everything departs, everything flows away, leaving no traces either without or within ourselves. In our houses we seem to be camping; in our families we look like strangers; in our cities we look like nomads, even more than the nomads who let their herds graze on our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we to our cities. (McNally and Tempest 1991, 20)

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bate and controversy among contemporary readers: soon after its appearance the edition was confiscated by the authorities, the journal was suppressed and Chaadaev himself officially declared insane by the Tsar. For our purposes, the passage is particularly interesting for the way Chaadaev fully exploits the catalogue of essential archetypal meanings of the House complex as a model and centre of the world, but all of it in a negative sense, as something lacking. As projections of their culture, these houses are not homes; they guarantee no permanence, tradition or continuity, no social coherence or emotional gratification, and as far as urban culture is concerned nomads are more ‘at home’ in the Russian steppes. The latter is a grimly ironic echo of Rousseau’s vision of the relationship between nature and urban culture.2 As was pointed out in Chapter I.4, the literary, psychopoetic opposition between the domestic and nomadic cultures could reveal a profound, sometimes catastrophic, division between world-pictures, as the case of the Cossacks in Russian literature shows. Whatever else we may wish to say about it, this passage from Chaadaev’s first philosophical letter is an impressive testimony to the fundamental condition of metaphysical homelessness in Russian culture and history. As we shall see, forms of homelessness and houselessness, both metaphysical and physical, continue to pervade Russian cultural history, and we shall find the condition, together with its moral and existential significance, reflected in Russian literature. So far, this general description of the House Myth in Russian culture and literature has dealt primarily with the fundamental building blocks of this Myth: the building or founding of the house, and its opposite, the absence of the idea of a House. If the Myth in essence is about acquiring, leaving or losing, returning to or regaining the House or its symbolic equivalent, we can also ask whether living in the house also finds a place in the Russian literary variants of the mythical paradigm. Narrative plots are usually dependent upon some minimal chain of dynamic, fabular motifs that include crossing a boundary of some sort, but, as I have already intimated in the discussion at the end of Chapter 1.4, this does not mean that the routine process of living in a house cannot be dealt with in literature. It certainly can, as many 2

At the end of Chaadaev’s letter, a telling indication of the place where it was written is also given: ‘Necropolis’, which stands for Moscow.

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works of fiction convincingly demonstrate. For example, the plot of Gogol’s story ‘Старосветские помещики’ (‘Old-fashioned Landowners’) is dependent upon the dynamics of the framing story and the narrator’s role, point of view and perception of time that are revealed there. The central story, describing the old couple in their daily routines, hardly has a plot in the formal sense. It is a unique realisation of the cyclical core of the House Myth that is the routine, or programme, of ‘living in a house’, where there is no essential difference between the motif chain of one day and that of next. For a more detailed analysis, see Chapter II.9. A very different example is Tolstoi’s War and Peace (Война и мир). In this epic text there is, of course, a great deal of plot, but it is set against the peace that is always implicit in the grand background of Russian life as Tolstoi paints it: the life of an aristocratic family in its seasonal cyclicity, where the apparent variety of guests and celebrations form part of a recurrent social pattern, epitomised by the Rostov family (with the isolated estate of the Bolkonskiis providing a contrast), and reinforced in the first epilogue where the domestic happiness of Pierre and Natasha, Nikolai and Mar’ia provides reassurance that the cycle will be repeated in the next generation of the Russian gentry. War, the most drastic crossing of boundaries conceivable, is the great plot generator: it is this life that is infringed by the French invasion and the catastrophes attending it; see also Van Baak 1983b, 37. The lives of Tolstoi’s exemplary families in War and Peace can be seen as full realisations of the cyclical House Myth or Domus, but Russian literature (like most others) obviously abounds in ‘deficient’ realisations: cases in which deficiencies in the Domus world, particularly variants involving ‘Loss of the House’, are either connected with plot structure or assume symbolic or other literary modelling qualities. In his other major, urban novel, Anna Karenina, Tolstoi provides an impressive example of this motif of the House Myth, though in combination with its opposite, the ‘Founding of a New House’. Thus, in the fatal course of the plot, Anna leaves and loses her house and family, which leads to her increasing social isolation in the urban milieu,3 3

This invites comparison with the image of Vol’skaia in the high society milieu in Pushkin’s prose fragment known as ‘Гости съезжались на дачу...’ (‘The Guests Gatherered at the Dacha…’); here we see, in nuce, an attempt at creating a modern society novel, a ‘physiology’ of the early nineteenth-century Russian aristocratic cul-

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a social death which in turn presages her physical death, but set against this there is the contrasting development along the positive ‘rural line’ of Levin and Kitti, who marry and found a ‘New House’, indeed a new ‘Nest of the landed gentry’; see Chapter II.15. The demonic character of the modern, impersonal city is a general cultural phenomenon that appears in Russian literature along with nineteenth-century European literature in general. In Russian literature it coincides with the emergence of the so-called ‘Petersburg myth’ and the vulnerable civil servant, the underdog, alienated intelligent literary hero who first emerges in Pushkin’s Evgenii, in his verse-novel Evgenii Onegin, and develops via Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich (‘Шинель’, ‘The Overcoat’), culminating in Dostoevskii’s Underground Man and Raskol’nikov. This process is parallelled in a dramatic fashion by House imagery. In those cases, living in the modern city mostly meant living in grey, anonymous poverty, in ghastly tenement-houses. Houses are not always explicitly mentioned, but there is a distinct absence of positive domestic values or a sense of family, belonging and safety which is also the spatial reflection of the hero’s station in life and his predicament as protagonist. The space of such a city, and such a house, is devoid of warmth and the sense of a centre, or ‘hearth’. This is a threat inherent in late nineteenth-century architecture, indeed in any mass housing. Bachelard (1963, 59, quoted by Bollnow 1963, 135) implies this imminent loss of personality and individuality when he states that the houses in big cities are no longer ‘real houses’, that urban citizens live in ‘piled-up boxes’, that skyscrapers, having no basements, therefore lack ‘roots’. Interestingly, Dostoevkii’s choice of a basement apartment as the dwelling-place of his ‘Underground Man’ represents a parallel fascination with this psychopoetic complex; see Chapter II.17. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban settings, together with other forms of modernity, are particularly prone to generate undomestic circumstances and isolated, homeless heroes. Such urbanness and anti-domesticity can be seen, implicitly or explicitly, as the disruption and negation of the House Myth as embodied in the ture, in which the house is as much a programme, with its drawing-room rituals, receptions and balls, as a building; see also Van Baak 1989. Tolstoi professed his great admiration for Pushkin’s fragment, which served him as a model for Anna Sherer’s drawing-room setting in War and Peace.

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original Domus ideal. Parallel to this, urban demonism is also a recurrent phenomenon, with ‘anti-houses’ as projections of the alienated psyche. At the same time, the reverse can also be observed in the search for the presumed wholeness of a lost Domus ideal, as in much Russian village prose of the nineteen seventies and eighties, some of which seems to be restoratively nostalgic if not neoslavophile. However, this particular current of twentieth-century Russian literature is outside the remit of this study.

5. Some Diachronic Considerations. The Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The Natural School The concept of literary schools or periods is to a large extent based on conventional, constructed divisions that are only justifiable for didactic, practical reasons. Nevertheless, works and authors can often be diachronically grouped according to typological, stylistic or thematic similarities and differences. In the course of Russian literary history, the House theme, or House Myth, seems not only to have received various treatments in different works or periods, but also to have been afforded varying degrees of functional prominence. There are literary texts to which the notion of domestic mythopoetic structures simply does not apply because there is no significant or prominent domestic motif, at least within a reasonable interpretative framework. When motifs related to the House are of secondary importance, or remain implicit, they are merely formal spatial elements of the literary setting and do not act as generators of mythopoetic meaning. In terms of literary modelling, we could say that the mythopoetic function entails some marked, or convincingly traceable, semiotic connection between a concrete thematics – here, the semantic field of the House – and other thematic elements in the structure of the literary world of a given text. This connection may be one of analogy or homology; it may be metaphoric, metonymic, symbolic, or ironic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Romanticism in Russian literature predominantly took shape in lyric poetry, which had little or no room for the explicit representation of social settings as such. However, the representation of different types of social milieu did begin to develop as literature increasingly reflected the various layers of Russian social life. Although it is already possible to distinguish, in a nuclear form, the societal chronotype of Saint-Petersburg aristocratic

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society in the lyric poetry of Pushkin, it is evidently in his prose experiments that these thematics really begin to come to the fore and take shape, especially in his efforts to create a contemporary society novel; see Chapter II.7, and Van Baak 1989. The Natural School of the second half of the eighteen forties, with its ‘physiological sketches’, brought about the literary emancipation of new conflict spaces, especially of urban and rural non-aristocratic settings, though urbanism predominates in this literature. Gogol’ introduced images of modern urbanness with his enormous, cramped Petersburg dwellings housing a poor, grey, anonymous population; see also Kuleshov 1991, 240. He set a model for the Natural School as well as for later authors. See, for example, the short, but characteristic description of the Zverkov house in his famous story 'Записки сумасшедшего' ('Notes of a Madman'; 1835. Gogol’ 1984, III, 156): [...] остановились перед большим домом. “Этот дом я знаю, сказал я сам себе. – Это дом Зверкова”. Эка машина! Какого в нем народа не живет: сколько кухарок, сколько приезжих! А 1 нашей братьи чиновников – как собак, один на другом сидит.

The attention of the ‘physiologists’ was directed towards the sociologically typical and representative.2 Their genre was the literary sketch (ocherk), and they depicted the world of the labourer and the craftsman, the janitor and the organgrinder, the coachman, the small civil servant, the petty bourgeois, the poor. The Natural School, under the guidance of Belinskii, was the school of Realism for urban authors such as Dostoevskii.

1

(…) we stopped in front of a big house. “I know this house, – I said to myself. – This is Zverkov’s house.” Such a huge thing! And think of the mass of people living in it: how many cooks, how many strangers! And of our sort, of civil servants – like dogs packed together. 2 Compare Nekrasov’s own introductory words in the Литературная газета (Literary Gazette) about their almanac’s intentions: цель – раскрыть все тайны нашей общественной жизни […], ход и направление нашего гражданского и нравственного образования [...], типические свойства всех разрядов нашего народонаселения… (Our purpose is to disclose all the secrets of our social life [...], the course and direction of our civil and moral education [...], the typical properties of all the ranks of our population; Kuleshov 1991, 228)

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One of these physiologists, Ia. P. Butkov (see Kuleshov 1991, 223), was the author of a two-volume work whose title, Petersburg Heights (Петрбургские вершины) is of interest here. It was published in 1845, the same year as Nekrasov’s prototypical almanac The Physiology of Petersburg (Физиология Петербурга), and caused a sensation. Butkov showed irony in his representations of the well-todo, while his depictions of the poor displayed a heart-felt sympathy. In these sketches he distributes the inhabitants of Petersburg in tiers around the social pyramid of the city, which is modelled on the vertical architecture of the urban house with its cellars and basements, its first and second floors (bel’ètazh) and its ‘heights’ – the attics, garrets, and lofts where the poor are housed (Kuleshov ibidem; also Casari 1997, 31). This master-image of the House is interesting in the context of Russian literature for two reasons. It can be interpreted as a polemical, ideological inversion and ‘deconstruction’ of the verticality of the traditional hierarchy (as represented, for example, in the Domostroi), with the poor ironically (or ideologically) ‘on top’. At the same time it obviously has a common semiotic and topological basis with the psychopoetics of Dostoevskii’s underground and Raskol’nikov’s attic. The spatial ideology of urban housing is the model for the literary worlds, not only of the physiologists but also of a considerable body of later Russian urban literature. It is the world of the powerless and penniless, the socially peripheral, heroes such as Makar Devushkin and Varvara, described with such intense compassion by Dostoevskii in his debut novel Бедные люди (Poor People), published in 1845, the same year as the almanac. ’Петербургская сторона’ (‘The Petersburg Side’) by E. P. Grebenka is another sketch in The Physiology of Petersburg. It is about the poorest, northern districts of the city. The poor but honest, insulted, injured people who find refuge in these houses live in the attics: Вспомните, что в них живут десятки тысяч бедных, но честных труженников [...] и освистанный актер, и непризнанный поэт, и оскорбленная чем-нибудь девушка – все убегают на Петербург-

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скую сторону, расселяются по меззанинам и в тишине предаются своим фантазиям.3 (After Kuleshov 1991, 230)

The connection between our topic and the emergence of the physiological school leads us back to the views of Petr Chaadaev on the position of the Slavophiles; see Kuleshov 1991, 223. Chaadaev was one of the first Russians to use this Western concept of physiology. As we have seen, in his first philosophical letter Chaadaev gives a very negative characteristic of Russia’s cultural condition, using, among other images, the metaphor of the House. He stresses the absolute necessity of a well-ordered or comfortable life; for example, ‘Vous comprenez qu’il ne s’agit encore là [...] tout simplement d’une vie bien ordonnée [...]’ (Chaadaev 1991, 88). The necessary preconditions for this are lacking in Russia but characteristic of European countries. He draws a portrait, a physiology of Western man and Western civilisation, comprising notions of ‘duty’, ‘justice’, ‘rights’, and ‘order’ (Ce sont les idées de devoir, de justice, de droit, d’ordre; 91). For him these represent the ‘atmosphere’ of the west. This is more than history, more than psychology: this is ‘the physiology of the European’ (C’est cela, l’atmosphère de l’Occident; c’est plus que de l’histoire, c’est plus que de la psychologie, c’est la physiologie de l’homme de l’Europe – ibidem). Apparently, the Russians do not have a physiology in this sense, and the Russian Chaadaev concludes with his famous wry physiological aphorism: Nous grandissons, mais nous ne mûrissons pas – We grow, but we do not mature (ibidem).

3

Remember that in these houses tens of thousands of poor but honest toilers live [...] and a hissed off actor, and an unrecognised poet, and a girl offended by whatever it may be – they all flee to the Petersburg Side, settle in the attics and in silence lapse into day-dreams.

6. The Slavophile Domus The Slavophiles, without using or acknowledging the foreign term ‘physiology’, saw great positive qualities in Russian man and his condition, and set great store in the values of family life, domesticity and the Orthodox faith (Kuleshov, ibidem). We could say that the very Domus concept as a utopian ideal was central to the Slavophiles’ philosophy as formulated by its major theoreticians K. S. and I. S. Aksakov, I. V. and P. V. Kireevskii, and A. S. Khomiakov. Discussing the concept of the House and its mythopoetic origins in the thinking of the Slavophiles, Shchukin stresses that their conception of the House largely adopted archaic mythopoetic notions from Russian popular tradition. He subsumes its significance in the metaphors of the ‘redeeming roof’ (‘спасительный кров’, Shchukin 1996b) and the motherly protection provided by the religious symbol of Pokrov – the Protective Veil of the Virgin. Slavophile ideology was a retrospective, ‘soil-based’ (‘pochvennyi’) utopianism, opposed to the rationalism and individualism underlying Western thinking. It was based on a historically idealised and morally purified concept of the Slavic patriarchal rural way of life, simple, steeped in the agricultural, highly autarchic tradition, and ruled by the seasons and by the Orthodox faith and its rituals. It stressed the interdependence of the members of the Russian Domus community, a form of extended family that ideally sacrificed individual interests for the sake of the common good under the natural authority of the pater familias. As such it is reminiscent of the Closed House of the Muscovite and the traditional merchant culture reflecting the Domostroi, as analised in Chapter II.2. Important differences between the two world-views, however, include the fact that in Romantic Slavophile thinking the family principle of the House, far from stressing obedience to the austerity and rigor of

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Domostroi paternalism, is based upon love among the members of the patriarchal family1 and is rather self-centred than closed. Moreover, the Slavophile idea of the family is not based on the principle of genealogy (родовое начало) but is an encompassing, communal one (общинное начало; Shchukin 1996b, 110). According to Shchukin’s analysis, in Slavophile ideology the House is not so much a physical or cultural concept as an ethical one. ‘European’ and ‘individualistic’ material features such as comfort and privacy are unimportant in the ideal Slavophile house; what counts are its qualities as a ‘nest’, allowing people to live together mentally and physically as expressed by a characteristic old proverb such as ‘в тесноте, да не в обиде’, which translates as something close to ‘the more the merrier’; idem, 108. The ideal Slavophile household was, in A.S. Khomiakov’s words, ‘a warm nest’ (‘теплое гнездо’), oriented towards ethical values such as ‘communal brotherhood’, ‘heartfelt simplicity’, ‘lively intercourse’ and ‘an organic bond with the earth’ (respectively: ‘общинное братство’, ‘душевная простота’, ‘живое общение’, ‘органическая свазь с землей’; idem, 112). Shchukin characterises the ideal Slavophile Domus by the metaphorical chain: nest–veil–roof–house–family (гнездо–покров–кров–дом–семья; idem, 113). Interestingly, in Slavophile thinking this metaphoric chain could also be applied on the larger scale of Russia as a whole: ‘на всю ‘земскую’ Россию’ (the whole of rural Russia), a similar homology to the one we noticed in the Domostroi between the house and the state, with the father-Czar at its head. Khomiakov saw the house as the basic entity ‘in the sense of the moral unity of the family, and in the sense of the organisation of society’ (‘в смысле нравственного союза семейства, и в смысле общественного устройства’; idem, 113).

1

See Chapter II.2 on the Domostroi. According to Naidenova, the Domostroi did not yet have a modern notion of ‘family’, but a concept of the house in the sense of a ‘single economic, social and psychological entity whose members find themselves in relationships of mastery–subordination but are equally indispensable for the normal life of the domestic organism’ (Naidenova 1996, 303).

7. Pushkin’s Houses. The Craving for Homeliness Before analysing the significance of house thematics in Pushkin’s work, and the specific poetics of the House that he developed,1 it is important to point out that it is here that the House Myth in Russian literature becomes private. As has been noticed before (M. Lotman 1992b, 457; Pavlova 1999, 34), in Pushkin’s work the House becomes the focus of national and historical life as well as that of the individual, and it is no longer an abstract ‘House in general’, but someone’s own house, unique and real. In a small article entitled ’Поэт нормы’ (‘Poet of the Norm’), devoted to the poets Aleksandr Kushner and Aleksandr Pushkin, Fazil Iskander advances the following laconic thesis (Iskander 1996, 6-7): Всю литературу я разделяю на литературу дома и бездомья. Во главе нашей литературы дома стоит Пушкин. Рядом Лермонтов – начало литературы бездомья. Оба эти направления дополняют 2 друг друга.

A closer look at Pushkin’s poetic oeuvre can certainly provide arguments in support of this view of him and of his work, though not necessarily in such a simple and straightforwardly optimistic sense. As I intend to show, in Pushkin’s work the House Myth fulfils a crucial role as a thematic focus, bringing together the archetypal and the personal in a new way. In addition, Pushkin’s treatment of the domestic complex almost certainly reflects the attitudes and anxieties of his 1

Parts of this chapter have already been published in Van Baak 1998 and 1999. I divide all literature into the literature of the house and the literature of homelessness. The leader of our literature of the house is Pushkin. Next to him stands Lermontov, the initiator of the literature of homelessness. These tendencies complement each other. 2

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generation. For these reasons his work deserves special and detailed attention here. A simple statistical check using Shaw’s concordance (Shaw 1985) reveals that in Pushkin’s poetry the most frequently used lexemes are those that refer to concrete, explicit domestic topics; see, for example, ‘дом’ (‘house’, 64 times), ‘домой’ (‘homewards’, 56 times),‘дóма’ (‘at home’, 40 times), ‘домик’ (‘little house’, 10 times), ‘дверь’ (‘door’, 51 times), ‘окно’ (‘window’, 29 times). The lexical-stylistic traditions and generic conventions of the Russian Sentimentalist and Romanticist codes play their role in his actual phrasing of the domestic thematics of course. In accordance with the characteristic poetic idiom of the period, the universal, the conventional, the abstract and the metonymic dominate over the historically specific and expressive,3 but at the same time we see the development of distinctly individual contexts and collocations. It is obvious that such statistical phenomena, though undoubtedly indicative of the period and indispensable as textual data, do not by themselves determine the significance of domestic thematics in Pushkin’s poetic work. What we are looking for is more profound than lexical distribution: we are seeking the Myth of the House as a semantic and semiotic structure on a higher level altogether. As I have already intimated, in Pushkin’s work the house theme acquires a distinctly private character. In other words, the House also becomes a Home,4 and the question of having a home, or not having one, is directly and expressly related to individual identity. Let us examine some illustrations of this sentiment. Pushkin expressed his thoughts about the importance of a House of one’s own, a Home, in the manuscript of his famous unfinished poem beginning with the line ‘Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит’ (‘It’s time, my friend, it’s time, the heart craves rest’). The manuscript of this poem contains the following notes, probably writ3

Compare such characteristic and conventional poetic metonymies for the house concept as: ‘кров’, ‘кровля’ and ‘крыша’ (‘roof’), ‘келья’ (‘cell’), ‘уголок’ (‘corner’), ‘сени’ (‘hall’); see also below. 4 As may be clear from part I, I would stress that ‘House’ does not necessarily imply the individual and affective qualities of ‘Home’. However intimately linked they may be to one another as psychological concepts, they should not be identified with one another.

Pushkin’s Houses. The Craving for Homeliness

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ten in June 1834 when he was seeking permission to retire to his estate in the countryside, suggesting the motifs and attitudes of the poem’s intended continuation as well as a utopian plan for the rest of his life: Юность не имеет нужды в at home. Зрелый возраст ужасается своего уединения. Блажен, кто нашел подругу – тогда удались он домой. О, скоро ли перенесу я мои пенаты в деревню – поля, сад, крестьяне, книги: труды поэтические – семья, любовь, etc. – религия, смерть.5 (Pushkin 1979, Vol. 3, 463-4; his own italics)

In the poem, this is expressed in the final two lines; the poet imagines himself as a ‘tired slave’ who long ago planned his ‘flight to his distant abode of work and pure comforts’: Давно, усталый раб, замыслил я побег В обитель дальную трудов и чистых нег.

V. S. Baevskii (1990, 101, citing Slonimskii 1959) points out that in Evgenii Onegin the fundamental location in the countryside is the house (‘В топосе деревни основной локус - дом’): the house of Onegin, and the house of the Larin family. Tat’iana’s entering the house that Onegin has fled and reading the books in his library is perceived as her entering his inner world, his soul (Evgenii Onegin, Chapter 7, XVII-XXV) – an outstanding example of symbolic metonymy between the interior of a house and that of its owner. In the poem ‘Зимнее утро’ (‘Winter Morning’, 3 November 1829), an ideal image is given of pure domestic bliss and comfort against the background of a sunny winter’s morning. In poems like

5

‘Youth has no need to feel at home. Maturity is terrified by its own solitude. Happy the one who has found a helpmate – let him retire to his home. Oh, how soon will I return to my hearth and home in the country [literally, move my penates to the countryside] – the fields, the garden, the peasants, books: poetry writing – family life, love, etc. – religion, death.’ It is interesting to note that Pushkin resorts to the English phrase ‘at home’ to express this particular complex, which obviously indicates that English domestic culture was a role model for the Russians in Pushkin’s days. It was, of course, a crucial aspects of Western culture in general; see Rybczinski (1987, 75) and the opening of Chapter I.1 above.

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these, Pushkin indeed reveals himself as a peerless singer of the domestic essence.6 However, the House theme in Pushkin’s work does not always have positive connotations. As we shall see, ambivalence towards and even outright distrust of houses and domestic spaces are equally characteristic of his oeuvre. A light ambivalence is present, for example, in the poem that opens with the telling line: ‘Зима. Что делать нам в деревне?’ (‘It’s Winter. What should we do in the countryside?’; 2 November 1829: one day before ‘Winter Morning’). This poem, which generally affirms the values of rural life, at one point represents rural homeliness as utter boredom and the house as a ‘sad settlement’ (печальное селенье). This boredom, however, turns into joy and elation with the arrival of family and friends. Another example is the attitude described in one of the fragments of 1825: Он вежлив был в иных прихожих, 7 Но дома скучен, сух и горд.

(Pushkin 1979, Vol. 2, 289)

Cases of outright anti-domestic attitudes in Pushkin’s work will be discussed in more detail below. Since it is this book’s purpose to connect the archetypal with the specific and idiosyncratic, I shall now examine further the character of Pushkin’s oeuvre from that perspective. In the introductory chapters (particularly I.4), I proposed the basic content and structure of a House Myth and then drew up a typology of House images and an inventory of the fabular motifs that supported it. If we relate these categories to the individual thematics of Pushkin’s oeuvre, we can distinguish the following series: the House and Hearth, the House as the Centre of the World (further comprising the Ideal House, the House of the Father, the House of Childhood and the House of Memory), the Lack or Loss of the House and the House as Personality (psychopoetic projection). On a more specific motif level, there are also the estate (usad’ba) as a Domus and some particularly Pushkinian variants – the Lyceum as a symbolic House of Friends, the domik (the Little House) 6

For a similar attitude, see his (highly autobiographical) prose fragment entitled ‘Участь моя решена. Я женюсь’ (‘My Fate is Decided. I am Getting Married’; 1830). 7 He was polite in other halls, / But dull, cold and proud at home.


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and what we might call the Poet’s House. In various contexts these functions can, of course, co-exist. Finally, there is, of course, the dynastic meaning of the House. This was of great importance in Pushkin’s view of life, since he often expressed his pride in being a nobleman of old stock. House and Hearth As I argued in Chapters I.1 and I.4, this is one of the most archaic and fundamental images supporting the Myth of the House, underlying the Promethean myth of fire and the creation of human culture as well as the idea of the family as a chain of generations. It goes hand in hand with ideal projections of domestic bliss and harmonious family life. In the first of these capacities, it is fully expressed in the following draft which Pushkin wrote at Boldino, his father’s estate, in 1830: Два чувства дивно близки нам, В них обретает сердце пищу: Любовь к родному пепелищу, Любовь к отеческим гробам. Животворящая святыня! Земля была б без них мертва, Как …… пустыня 8 И как алтарь без божества.

(Pushkin 1979, Vol. 3, 203)

Pushkin here invokes the canonical image of House and Hearth which derives from the same classical tradition as the penates, the ancient Roman gods of the household, worshipped together with Vesta, the goddess of the hearth.9 They also appear in Pushkin’s work as the 8

Two feelings are amazingly close to us; / In them the heart finds nourishment: / Love for its own hearth and home, / Love for the ancestral graves. // Earth, the lifegiving sanctuary! / Would be dead without them, / Like …… a desert / And like an altar without a deity. 9 The word penates is etymologically connected with the Latin ‘penetrare’, ‘to enter’ and ‘penus’, ‘(stock of) food’. A further characteristic of the penates is that they are transferred when one moves house; see also Chapter I.1 on the Aeneid and, later in this chapter, Pushkin’s poem ‘Новоселье’ (‘Your New Home’). As we know, ‘moving his penates’ away from the world of the imperial court, which was so detrimental

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symbol of domestic bliss, for example in the first stanza of the poem ‘Новоселье’ (‘Your New Home’, 1831), which anticipates ‘Пора, мой друг, пора, покоя сердце просит’ discussed above: Благословляю новоселье, Куда домашний свой кумир Ты перенес - а с ним веселье, Свободный труд и сладкий мир.10

(ibidem, 163)

The hearth is the place to which the weary traveller thinks back longingly on a cold winter’s night, as in the fifth stanza of ‘Зимняя дорога’ (‘A Winter’s Journey’, 1826): Скучно, грустно… Завтра, Нина, Завтра, к милой возвратясь, Я забудусь у камина, Загляжусь не наглядясь.11

(idem, Vol. 2, 309)

Under this same category we can also bring together, in one way or another, most of the Повести Белкина (The Tales of Belkin; 1830). Sylvio, the Byronic hero of the first of these stories – ‘Выстрел’ (‘The Shot’) – is a negative example. He is a homeless loner with no family, devoting himself entirely to his obsession with avenging himself against a Count who successfully challenged his authority among his fellow officers. Remarkably, three of the other Belkin stories realise a common basic motif from the House Myth – the young woman leaving the Parental House as a bride and thus going into a New House:12 ‘Метель’ to his creativity, was a major concern of Pushkin. The penates are usually mentioned together with domestic gods of another type, the lares. They were originally protectors of roads and houses, and their effigies were placed near the hearth or at a crossroads. 10 I bless the new house, / To which you moved your / Domestic idol – and with it merriment, / Creative freedom and sweet peace. 11 I am bored, I feel sad… Tomorrow, Nina / Tomorrow, when I will have come back to you, my love, / I will doze off by the fireside, / And will not have enough of looking at you. 12 In Chapter I.4, this particular motif was formulated as leaving the house (home) as a phase in life, a ‘rite of passage’, and finding a new house, for example by coming of age, or by marriage.


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(‘The Blizzard’), ‘Барышня-крестьянка’ (‘The Squire’s Daughter’), ‘Станционный смотритель’ (‘The Postmaster’).13 The woman leaving the Parental House through marriage is a key motif in the grand fabula of the House Myth, and as such it is a positive, life affirming moment, but literature, of course, is about conflict, disobedience and trespass, and this is where the fabular chain of the House Myth transforms into the actual sujet text of literature (to express it in classical formalist terms). These three stories by Pushkin are examples of one of the most widespread clusters of gendered House plots in Western literatures, particularly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the predicament of the woman being married without being asked, against her will, not being free to choose for herself or not being entitled to take initiatives in this respect. From the point of view of the woman in such plots, domestic space – the Paternal House or the New House that she enters through marriage – can easily degenerate into the AntiHouse or the House of Unhappy Marriage.14 The first two of the stories just mentioned, ‘Метель’ (‘The Blizzard’) and ‘Барышня-крестьянка’ (‘The Squire’s Daughter’), are basically riddle stories based on mistaken identity and quirks of fate. The eponymous blizzard in the first interferes with the plans of two young people who wish to marry. Fearing that this is against the will of her parents, they plan to elope and be married secretly. In the confusion caused by the blizzard the prospective husband disappears in the snow storm, and the girl is married mistakenly to a stranger who passes by. It is only by accident that they meet again later, fall in love and happily discover that they are already married to one another. Regardless of the outcome, in preparing herself for the planned elopement the girl experiences the momentous motif of leaving her parental house to be married, and Pushkin includes a literal statement of the House Myth in his narrative: 13

For a discussion of ‘Гробовщик’ (‘The Coffinmaker’) in connection with the House theme, see ‘Domik, the Little House: the House of Anxiety, or a Failed Biedermeier?’ at the end of this chapter. 14 In Chapter I.4 this category was formulated as the Anti- or Pseudo-House, basically negative, comprising the Haunted House’, the Prison-House, the Madhouse, the Underground House, the House as Hell or Grave’, the House of Unhappy Marriage’and, more generally, the House in Which One is Not Loved or Wanted’ (typically orphans, wards and so forth).

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Через полчаса Маша должна была навсегда оставить родительский дом, свою комнату, тихую деревенскую жизнь.15 (Pushkin 1987, 6, 72)

In ‘Барышня-крестьянка’ (‘The Squire’s Daughter’), a country squire’s daughter dresses up and acts as a peasant girl in order to deceive their neighbour’s son. It is interesting to note that the topic of marriage and its domestic consequences in Pushkin’s work has a strong autobiographical motivation in the year 1830. On 6th May of that year, Pushkin and Natal’ia Goncharova became engaged. On 12th and 13th, he worked on the autobiographical prose fragment known as ‘Участь моя решена. Я женюсь…’, (‘My Fate is Sealed. I Am Going to Marry….’). During this sketch Pushkin contemplates his bachelor’s life that is coming to an end. His train of thought is an account of his domestic routine as a bachelor, which was obviously dear to him and, in many ways, reminds us of Onegin’s life style in the first chapter of that novel: Утром встаю когда хочу, принимаю кого хочу, вздумаю гулять – мне седляют мою умную, смирную Женни, еду переулками, смотрю в окна низеньких домиков: здесь сидит семейство за самоваром, там слуга метет комнаты, далее девочка учится за фортепьяно, подле нее ремесленник музыкант. Она поворачивает ко мне рассеянное лицо, учитель ее бранит, я шагом еду мимо... Приеду домой – разбираю книги, [...]. Еду в театр, [...]. Вечер провожу я или в шумном обществе, где теснится весь город, где я вижу всех и всё и где никто меня не замечает, или [...]. Возвращаюсь поздно; (....). На другой день опять еду верхом переулками, мимо дома, где девочка играла на фортепьяно [...] Вот она – моя холостая жизнь... 16 (Vol 6, 389) 15

In half an hour Masha had to leave behind for ever her father’s house, her own room, and her quiet village life. 16 In the morning I rise, and receive whoever I want to see. If I take it into my head to go for a ride, my clever, patient Jenny is saddled for me; I ride through narrow streets and look into the windows of the low little houses: here, a family is sitting at the table around the samovar; there, a servant is sweeping the rooms; further on, a young girl is playing the piano, with the artisan who is her music teacher beside her. She turns her vacant gaze towards me; her teacher is reproving her; I pass by slowly… I come back home – sort out books, [...]. I ride to the theatre, [...]. The evening I spend either in noisy company, where all of the city flocks together, where I see everybody and eve-


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In the Belkin story ‘Станционный смотритель’ (‘The Postmaster’), basic fabular motifs of the House Myth are dealt with in a more intricate and sophisticated way. This is certainly due to the widowed stationmaster’s reaction to the way his beloved and only daughter Dunia leaves his house and follows a suitor who takes her with him to Petersburg. We are told in explicit terms by her father, Samson Vyrin, that she is the very image of her mother, and just as intelligent and quick as she was (да такая разумная, такая проворная, вся в покойницу мать; 90). It is on his second visit, after some years, that the narrator learns of Dunia’s having left her father, breaking his heart and driving him to despair and the bottle. Telling his own lamentable version of the story, the postmaster stresses that her most significant quality was her prowess as mistress of the house: ‘the house was held together by her’ (ею дом держался: что прибрать, что приготовить, за всем успевала; 92). This reference to Dunia’s holding the house together (ею дом держался), taken together with her nubility, is a strong indication of the relevance of the House Myth here. There is a striking parallel with the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, book VII that we discussed in Chapter I.1.17 In this story about the lost daughter who did not return, a second major plot text related to the House Myth clearly plays a role: that of the biblical Prodigal Son, who was lost but then returned (Luke 15; see also Chapter I.4). In his book on Pushkin’s narrative poetics, Wolf Schmid (Schmid 1991) analyses the narrative technique used in the Belkin stories, which is characterised by networks of inter- and intratextual clues of variable explicitness. In ‘The Postmaster’, crucial episodes from the parable of the prodigal son are represented in woodcuts that line the walls of the postmaster’s hut. The narrator describes the episodes in some detail, but without commenting on their possible sigrything and where nobody notices me, or [...]. I return home late; [...]. The next day I again ride on horseback through the narrow streets, past the house where the young girl played the piano [...]. That is my bachelor life… 17 Aeneas and his people, landing at the mouth of the Tiber, in Latium, find themselves in the kingdom of old king Latinus. He has a daughter named Lavinia, who is the most courted woman in the land. She, too, is the one who, literally, will preserve the house (verses 52-3): sola domum et tantas servabat filia sedes,/iam matura viro, iam plenis nubilis annis (Alone, to preserve the house and noble home, was a daughter, / now ripe for a husband, now full of age to be a bride; text and transl. Virgil, 1998, 7).

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nificance to the story he is telling. He simply remembers them vividly along with other details of the humble household setting. As Schmid shows (Part 2, 1, 103-170), Pushkin’s text plays with parallels and oppositions between the biblical sujet and his own in a complicated manner, such that some of the acantial roles of the original are changed or inverted,18 and psychological motivations are obscured. As a result, Pushkin makes an ironic commentary upon the parable (among a range of others), while at the same time constructing a narrative riddle. The central psychological riddle, as Schmid concludes, arises from the fact that the postmaster’s unhappiness is the result of his own misunderstood motivations and his incongruous attitude and behaviour towards his daughter and her suitor. What the text in fact presents is the father’s contradictory lines of action together with his own, misguided vision (blindness, ослепление) of his motivations. He encourages Dunia to accompany the suitor to the church without realising the deepest significance of his own impulse. After they have left for Petersburg and he has visited them there, the father clings to his self-imposed vision of her unhappiness and moral fall despite all evidence to the contrary, and cannot let go of her because of his unacknowledged jealousy of her happiness.19 From the point of view of the House Myth, we can conclude that Puskin’s story turns on a conflict between the exogamic marriage motif from the fabula of the House Myth and the failure of Samson Vyrin to accept this as a fact of life. The father is ‘lost’ because he transgresses a basic anthropological rule, or law, which is part of the House Myth. Pushkin’s very short unfinished ‘Роман в письмах’ (‘A Novel in Letters; 1829) provides interesting examples of gendered House views. The text comprises six letters exchanged between the heroine, Liza, and her confindente Sasha, and a short epistolary exchange between Liza’s suitor Vladimir and one of his friends. It should be noted that the genre of the letter gave Pushkin the opportunity to represent the female view of his heroine. In her first letter, Liza explains to Sa18

Not only is there no son in Puskin’s story, but, according to Schmid (139), the father himself is the unrepentant sinner and the one who is lost. 19 See Schmid, op.cit., 147: Vyrin benutzt die biblischen Geschichten und die Beweggründe ihrer Aktanten, um seine wahren Motiven – vor sich selbst zu kaschieren. Hinter seinen falschen Äquivalenzsetzungen zeigt er sich uns als der blinde Eifersüchtige, der sieht, aber nicht sehen will.


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sha how she feels since leaving Petersburg, with its stifling and artificial society life, and settling down in the countryside with her poor elderly grandmother who needs her company. Here, from the very beginning, the conventional opposition between city and countryside is made the ground on which Liza’s gendered social situation and view of her position are constructed. We learn that in Petersburg society she was raised as a ward in the household of a certain Avdot’ia Andreevna, completely dependent upon her whims and goodness. She complains about that situation to Sasha (Vol. 6, 41): Зависимость моего положения была всегда мне тягостна. Конечно, Авдотья Андреевна воспитывала меня наравне с своей племянницей. Но в ее доме я всё же была воспитанница, а ты не можешь вообразить, как много мелочных горестей неразлучны с этим званием.20

She claims that the wish to flee the house of Avdot’ia Andreevna was her reason for going to her grandmother. It was only with difficulty that she obtained her guardian’s permission to leave. In the countryside, she has acquired both freedom and a position, both of which are expressed in domestic terms. Here we have a positive view of the House from the point of view of the woman who is in charge of it. She stresses that she is at home21 and the khoziaika (‘mistress of the house’):22

20

The dependency of my position has always been distressing to me. Of course, Avdot’ia Andreevna raised me on an equal footing with her niece. But in her house I was still a ward, and you cannot imagine how many petty afflictions are inseparable from that title. 21 Compare Pushkin’s remark, cited at the beginning of this chapter, in relation to his own efforts to obtain permisson to escape Petersburg and retire to his estate the country: ‘Юность не имеет нужды в at home.’ (‘Youth has no need to feel at home’). 22 See Chapter I.1 on this fundamental anthropological aspect of the Indo-European House root *dem-. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1984, II, 742), like Benveniste (1969, Vol. 1, 2, 297-308), point out that the root *t’om (notation according to Gamkrelidze and Ivanov) also resulted in old derivations that refer to the ‘head of the house’( compare OI. dámpati, Lat. dominus /-a) as well as to ‘servants’ (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1984, II, 742).

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Теперь я живу дома, я хозяйка, и ты не поверишь, какое это мне истинное наслаждение. Я тотчас привыкла к деревенской жизни, и мне вовсе не странно отсутствие роскоши.23 (idem, 42; Pushkin’s italics)

This view is reinforced in her third letter to Sasha, expressing her doubts about Vladimir as a prospective suitor as she describes her ideal life, should she ever marry, as the head of her household: Если я когда-нибудь выйду и замуж, то выберу здесь какогонибудь сорокалетнего помещика. Он станет заниматься своим сахарным заводом, я хозяйством – и буду счастлива, не танцуя на бале у гр. К** и не имея суббот у себя на Английской набережной.24 (45-6)

In this letter, Liza states her woman’s view of domestic life as she would wish it to be. In doing so, she explicitly claims for herself a freedom that ‘society’ and its ruling morality would almost certainly deny her: the freedom to choose her own husband. (In this connection, we might compare the gendered House plots of the Tales of Belkin, described above.) In the passage just quoted, the ideological and cultural urban–rural opposition is again prominent, stressing her dependent role in the artificial Petersburg urban culture as opposed to her idealised vision of at least some form of equivalence between partners. Her ideal is for them to have separate fields of action and authority: his outdoors, hers in the house. From what we learn from his two letters to his friend, we conclude that Vladimir is also tired of Petersburg society. He too has left the city for the countryside, although he admits in his second letter that his doing so was for the purpose of seeing Liza, his love for whom increases by the day. In his first letter he expresses his enjoyment of rural life, describing his situation, his feelings and how he sees his fu23

Now I am living at home, I am the mistress of the house, and you wouldn’t believe what a genuine satisfaction that gives me. I immediately grew accustomed to the rural life, and I find the absence of luxury not at all strange. 24 If I ever marry, I will choose some local forty year old landowner. He will busy himself with his sugarmill, I with the household – and I will be happy, without dancing at Count K**’s ball and without having my Saturdays in my house on the English Embankment.


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ture. This Vladimir, a young kamer-iunker, imagines retiring from military or state service to become a country squire, and running his Saratov estate with three thousand souls. In other words, he envisages the traditional career of a Russian nobleman that, we hope, is not incompatible with Liza’s fantasies: a life cycle with the family estate, the usad’ba, 25 as its beginning and end. He even sees his prospective landowning responsibilities as a continuation and extension of his services to the wellbeing of the fatherland: 26 Выйду в отставку, женюсь и уеду в свою саратовскую деревню. Звание помещика есть та же служба. Заниматься управлением трех тысяч душ, коих всё благостояние зависит от совершенно от нас, важнее, чем командовать взводом или переписывать дипломатические депеши...27 (49)

Although only eighteen, he is already looking forward to that final rural phase of his adult life as his ultimate destiny, ensuring domestic happiness on his estate. In an intriguing house metaphor, he connects a vision of Russia with his idea of a gentleman’s course of life (‘8 Владимир** - своему другу’; Pushkin 1978, Vol. 6, 49). Petersburg is the hall or antechamber (prikhozhaia), and Moscow is a maid’s room (devich’ia), but the countryside (derevnia) is the squire’s study (kabinet); that is, the only proper place and space for him to be: Не любить деревни простительно монастырке, только что выпущенной из клетки, да 18-летнему камер-юнкеру – Петербург прихожая, Москва девичья, деревня же наш кабинет. Порядоч-

25

On this aspect, see also ‘The Estate as a Domus’, below, as well as Chapters II.11-16. The rest of the letter is devoted mostly to this young man’s outspoken opinion that the Russian aristocracy has a special responsibility for the peasants, and that the present generation of the nobility is degenerating fast, squandering the family fortunes and not taking seriously the responsibility of guaranteeing the welfare of their families in the coming generations. 27 I will retire, marry and settle in my village in the Saratov province. The rank of landowner means service just the same. Managing three thousand souls whose entire wellbeing is totally dependent on us is more important than commanding a platoon or copying diplomatic dispatches… 26

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ный человек по необходимости проходит через переднюю и редко заглядывает в девичью, а сидит у себя в своем кабинете.28

It is noteworthy that this almost allegorical House-Life image confirms the concept underlying the two ‘Strong Images’ described at the beginning of Part II: the master image of Russia as a House, serving as the model for the Domostroi and the Window on Europe. The origin of this metaphor in Pushkin’s text can be traced back to an aphorism from his 1828 ‘Отрывки их писем, мысли и замечания’ (‘Fragments from Letters, Thoughts and Observations’; Pushkin 1978, Vol. 7, 44): Москва девичья, Петербург прихожая (Moscow is a maid’s room, Petersburg the antechamber).29 The House as the Centre of the World This meaning of the House stresses its function of bringing people together as members of a family or as friends. It can also be the space where one’s intimate, private life takes place. As such, it gives shape to a complex of sentiments that is connected in Pushkin’s work with the so-called ‘druzheskoe poslanie’, the poetic ‘epistle to friends’, a genre popular among the Russian Sentimentalists and early Romanticists who cultivated the idea of friendship. The poem ‘19 октября’ (‘19th October’, 1825; idem, Vol. 2, 2447) is a special case. In its 19 stanzas Pushkin addresses his schoolfriends at the Lyceum he attended, 19th October being the school’s foundation day. He cannot join them for the usual celebration because he lives in exile on his estate, Mikhailovskoe, where he feels like a ‘homeless orphan’, shut out, and punished by the wrath of fate (Когда постиг меня судьбины гнев,/ Для всех чужой, как сирота бездомный; eleventh stanza). He imagines his friends drinking together in 28

Not loving the countryside is unforgivable in a girl raised in a monastery who has just been let out of her cell, but for an eigtheen year old kamer-iunker Petersburg is the antechamber and Moscow the maid’s room, but the countryside is our study. A decent man of necessity passes through the entrance hall and rarely looks into the maid’s room, but he sits by himself in his study. 29 In another aphorism in the same text, Pushkin applies a variant of this metaphor to characterise (or rather debunk) French literature (idem, 45): Французская словесность родилась в передней и далее гостиной не доходила (French literature was born in the antechambre and never came further than the drawing-room).


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distant Petersburg and mentioning his name, while he raises his glass in solitude (‘Я пью один, и на брегах Невы/ Меня друзья сегодня именуют…). With the passage of time, their number decreases, and in this elegiac poem he not only muses on his own present state but mourns friends who have died, are abroad or overseas, dispersed by fate or exiled, like himself, and he especially addresses those who have visited him in his exile. He looks forward to joining next year’s meeting after being released from his exile. The poem’s lyrical space is characterised by a peculiar tension between the Lyceum and Petersburg (brought together in на брегах Невы (‘on the banks of the Neva’)), ‘abroad’ (чужбина), on the one hand, and his country house, which he calls his ‘abode of wild snowstorms and cold’ (в обители пустынных вьюг и хлада; ninth stanza) and ‘the poet’s disgraced house’ (поэта дом опальный; ibidem) on the other. In his ‘desolate monk’s cell’ (в моей пустынной келье; first stanza), he is sitting by the fireside, addressing the wine in his glass, his ‘friend in the autumnal cold’ (А ты, вино, осенней стужи друг). We see the image of Mikhailovskoe presented ambiguously as both a place of negative solitude (exile)30 and a place of comfort and homely feelings (see the first stanza) where one can enjoy the company of good friends, revive the memory of the good old Lyceum days together and enjoy vicariously the real celebration of 19th October: И ныне здесь, в забытой сей глуши, В обители пустынных вьюг и хлада, Мне сладкая готовилась отрада: Троих из вас, друзей моей души, Здесь обнял я. Поэта дом опальный, О Пущин мой, ты первый посетил;

30

An interesting illustration of Pushkin’s ambivalence towards Mikhailovskoe can be found in a letter to Viazemskii, written on the estate on November 9, 1826. Looking back on that period, only two months after his exile had ended, he writes: Деревня мне пришла как-то по сердцу. Есть какое-то поэтическое наслаждение возвратиться вольным в покинутую тюрьму (The countryside has somehow become very dear to me. There is a kind of poetic enjoyment in returning to one’s abandoned prison as a free man).

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Ты усладил изгнанья день печальный, Ты в день его Лицея превратил.31

(9th stanza)

At the same time we see the representation of the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo as a symbolic, ideal House of Friends, as the centre uniting them in the bond of friendship on a global scale, as in the seventh stanza with its famous opening line: Друзья мои, прекрасен наш союз! Он, как душа, неразделим и вечен – Неколебим, свободен и беспечен, Срастался он под сенью дружных муз. Куда бы нас ни бросила судьбина И счастье куда б ни повело, Всё те же мы: нам целый мир чужбина; Отечество нам Царское Село.32

Their union becomes a symbolic House of Friendhip, the muses providing a protective canopy (‘под сенью дружных муз’). The word ‘sen’’ (‘canopy’, ‘cover’, ‘pall’, ‘shelter (provided by a tree)’, ‘roof’) belongs to the traditional poetic vocabulary. It conveys the basic meanings of cover, stability and protection that are inherent in the archetypal House image and also underly the archaic cosmology that sees the expanse of heaven as a canopy; see Chapter I.1, concerning the architectural metaphorics of concepts such as firmamentum and its analogies, the canopy of heaven and the image of the sky as a roof, or tent. These large scale cosmological and ideal qualities of the House of Friendhip in its relation to ‘the world’ form a contrast with the image of the poet’s actual private house; see below.

31

And now here, in these forgotten backwoods, / In this abode of wild snowstorms and cold, / A sweet joy awaited me: / Three of you, friends of my soul, / I could embrace here. You, oh my dear Pushchin, / Were the first to visit the poet’s disgraced house; / You sweetened his doleful day of exile, / You turned it into our Lyceum’s memorial day. 32 My friends, beautiful is our union! / Like our soul, it is inseparable and eternal - / Unshakeable, free and untroubled, / It grew together under the canopy of the friendly muses. / Wherever fate might cast us / And wherever luck might lead us, / We are still the same: to us the whole world is a foreign land; / A fatherland is Tsarskoe Selo to us.


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Crossing the Lyceum’s threshold symbolically marked both their leaving of the House of Friendship and their entrance into the world at large, embarking on life’s journey: ‘Счастливый путь! … С лицейского порога / Ты на корабль перешагнул шутя’ (A happy journey! ... From the Lyceum’s threshold / You took ship with a joke’; fifth stanza, referring to F. F. Matiushkin, who became a seafarer). In his analysis of Pushkin’s lyrical world, Vsevolod Grekhnëv (Grekhnëv 1994) stresses the specific symbolic and moral significance of the private domestic sphere as a characteristic of the genre of the druzheskoe poslanie (poetic epistle to friends). In a chapter entitled ‘Время, дом и мир в посланиях Пушкина’ (‘Time, House and World in Pushkin’s Poetic Epistles’; idem, 45-57), he indicates a contrast in this genre between the restricted private domestic sphere and the world on a large scale; that is, the wide space of the world of social life. Pushkin’s lyceum poetry was evidently indebted to that of the generation of Batiushkov and the Karamzinists; see Grekhnëv 1994, 55. There was a strong sense of genre connected with the poslanie, and the conventional expressions and modalities of the domestic space involved can easily be traced back to Batiushkov and his influential ‘Мои пенаты (послание к Жуковскому и Вяземскому)’ (‘My Penates (epistle to Zhukovskii and Viazemskii)’; 1811). He, in turn, had elaborated upon examples set by Karamzin (his ‘Послание к Дмитриеву’ (‘Epistle to Dmitriev’); see Grekhnëv, 56). This involves such conventional phrases as: ‘тихий кров’ (‘quiet roof’), ‘хижина убогая’ (‘wretched hut’), ‘шалаш простой’ (‘simple cabin’) and ‘смиренный уголок’ (‘humble corner’). As we shall see, in this respect too Pushkin will free himself from the fashion and convention of the period, and develop an individual, private poetics regarding the thematics and symbolism of the House, especially the image of the Little House. In Pushkin’s poslaniia, as well as those of his contemporaries, the large-scale world in its extensiveness and material fulness contrasts with the poet’s ‘modest hut’ and threatens his creative freedom.33 In these epistles, according to Grekhnëv (idem, 54), the large-scale world 33

Cf. Grekhnëv 1994, 53-4: В отличие от “скромной хаты” поэта социальное пространство перенасыщено вещами, избыточность которых явно теснит свободную мысль поэта (In contrast with the poet’s ‘humble hut’, the social space is saturated with things, the abundance of which clearly constricts the poet’s free thought).

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is often presented as a social theatre, full of inhibitions and restraining spiritual freedom, whereas the private domestic sphere is valued because there the masks of social convention can be shed and man can be himself. Thus we have the apparent paradox of the open space of the outside world as the space of restraint and lack of freedom, and the restricted, narrow space of the poet’s abode as that which contains and shelters the expanse of his freedom as an individual and poet. We might compare the early epistle-like poem ‘Городок’ (‘The Small Town’, 1815), in which the poet remarks: Блажен, кто на просторе В укромном уголке Не думает о горе, Гуляет в колпаке, Пьет, ест, когда захочет, О госте не хлопочет!34

(Vol. 1, 84)

This passage is preceded by an idyllic image of the simple little house and garden that he has rented, located in a small town,35 far away from the ‘smart set’ (модный свет), the noise and the worries of the capital. It is an interesting catalogue and sketch of an ideal domestic space or world, with a fireplace at the centre and surrounded by an ideal garden in the classical tradition of locus amoenus and pastorale. The garden, with its shady trees, fragrant spring flowers and even a fast stream running along the fence, receives even more attention than the house. Grekhnëv stresses that in this poem Pushkin was innovative in extending the spatial boundaries of the conventional image and locus of the ‘poet’s abode’ (обитель поэта), making it into the centre of a specific ‘patriarchal microcosm’ (центром своеобразного патриархального мирка; Grekhnëv idem, 56) and, at the same time, introducing a bucolic version of nature. It is a secluded, private world as close to Paradise as one could imagine: 34

Blessed is he that in freedom [lit.: free expanse, space] / In a secluded little corner / Does not think about sorrow, / Walks about with his nightcap on, / Drinks and eats when he pleases, / And does not have to care about a guest. 35 The commentary (Pushkin 1977, 1, 436) stresses that this is not autobiographical. Among Pushkin’s poslanie-like poems, ‘The Small Town’ is the one closest to Zhukovskii’s ‘My Penates’ mentioned above, a major difference being that, instead of Zhukovskii’s conventional poetic imagery, Pushkin gives a variety of realistic domestic detail.


Я нанял светлый дом С диваном, с камельком; Три комнатки простые – В них злата, бронзы нет, И ткани выписные Не кроют их паркет. Окошки в сад веселый, Где липы престарелы С черемухой цветут; Где мне в часы полдневны Березок своды темны Прохладну тень дают; Где ландыш белоснежный Сплелся с фиалкой нежной И быстрый ручеек, В струях неся цветок, Невидимый для взора, Лепечет у забора. Здесь добрый твой поэт Живет благополучно;36

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(83-4)

Here, only an occasional traveller passes by to spend the night: Иль путник, в домик мой Пришед искать ночлега, Дорожною клюкой В калитку постучится…37

We can justifiably claim that Pushkin develops the House Myth as an ideal private world, even including utopian features at times. Its ideal qualities reappear in a number of variants, among them those de36

I rented a house full of light / With a divan and a fire-place; / Three small simple rooms - / There is no gold or bronze in them, / And no carpets, ordered from the capital / Cover the parquet floors. / The little windows look out on a cheerful garden, / Where age-old lime-trees / And bird-cherries flower together; / Where in the midday hours / Shady arches of birch trees / Give me cool shelter; / Where the snow-white lily of the valley / And the tender violet interlace / And a swift little stream, / Its water covered with flowers, / Invisible to the eye, / Babbles along the fence. / Here lives your good poet / Happily. 37 Or a traveller, who, my little house / Approaching in search of lodging for the night / With his walking-stick / Will knock at the wicket-gate.

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scribed earlier as the House of the Father or House of Childhood38 and the House of Memory, as when he is reminiscing ‘… Вновь я посетил’ about the Michailovskoe estate (‘… Again I visited’, written 26 September 1835). The Loss of the House, Homelessness This fabular motif also belongs to the core set that make up the House Myth, as described in Chapter I.4. It is obvious that the loss of one’s house can be one of the basic existential threats to mankind, sometimes almost equivalent to death. This is confirmed in Russian literature, and in Pushkin’s oeuvre in particular we find homeless heroes and other examples of the catastrophic loss of a house; see also Van Baak 1994, 1998. Between October 1832 and February 1833, Pushkin worked on an unfinished novel known as ‘Dubrovskii’ after its eponymous hero. He took the subject from a real incident told to him by Nashchokin, involving a poor White Russian nobleman named Ostrovskii who, as the result of a lawsuit over land, had been expelled from his estate and become a robber (Pushkin 1977, 6, 527). In Pushkin’s story, having lost his estate, Dubrovskii sets fire to the house and disappears, only to return in disguise to take revenge on his enemy. It seems that Pushkin discarded this project (ibid, 528) in favour of another, finished novel, Капитанская дочка (The Captain’s Daughter, 1836). Seen against the background of Pugachev’s uprising, this novel can be interpreted as a case of ‘Finding a New House’ or the ‘Quest for a New House’. Two of Pushkin’s main heroes, both called Evgenii, become homeless, either literally, as in the case of The Bronze Horseman, or in a moral and emotional sense, like Evgenii Onegin. This element of the House Myth is also relevant in the context of the Little House, or Domik; see below. In Pushkin’s lyric poetry, homelessness is equally an important topic. In ’К Языкову’ (‘To Iazykov’, 1824), another epistle, Pushkin’s lyric persona presents himself as a homeless wanderer, driven on by 38

As in, among others, the poems ‘Пора, мой друг, пора, покоя сердце просит’ (‘It’s time, my friend, it’s time, the heart craves rest’), or ‘Зимнее утро’ (‘Winter morning’), discussed earlier in this chapter.


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fate and punished by the autocrat’s will. He is referring to his exile in Mikhailovskoe: Но злобно мной играет счастье: Давно без крову я ношусь, Куда подует самовластье; Уснув, не знаю, где проснусь. Всегда гоним, теперь в изгнанье Влачу закованные дни.39

(Vol.2, 172)

He expresses the same sentiment in the poem we have already discussed, ‘19 октября’ (‘19th October’): Когда постиг меня судьбины гнев, Для всех чужой, как сирота бездомный, Под бурею главой поник я томной.40

(Stanza 11)

and, adopting an ironic tone, in ‘Дорожные жалобы’ (‘A Traveller’s Complaints’, 1829, Vol. 3, 121-2), where a doomed traveller ruminates on the manner in which he will meet his death, not at home but somewhere along the road. The House as Personality (Psychopoetic Projection) This is a symbolic function or transformation of the House that plays a central role in the work of a great variety of poets, Pushkin certainly among them. The obvious psychopoetic significance of this symbolic identification will be made even clearer in further analyses. As a semantic and poetic transformation, the symbolic identification between House and Personality can involve both metaphorical and metonymical relations. Moreover, we are able to distinguish varying degrees of explicitness or implicitness in the identification process. The former type, based on a relationship of similarity, is not 39

But luck plays a malicious game with me: / For a long time I have been roaming around roofless, / Wherever the despotic power might blow me; / When I lie down to sleep, I do not know where I will wake up, / Always routed, now in exile / I drag out my shackled days. 40 When the wrath of fate befell me, / A stranger to everyone, like a homeless orphan, / I hung my languid head under the storm.

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prominent in Pushkin’s work, but the contextual relation of spatial contiguity (that is, metonymy) does play an important role in the emergence of this symbolic image. In Chapter 8 of Evgenii Onegin (1823-1830), for example, Pushkin brings together in one image the rural house of the Larin family and Tat’iana within it: То видит он врагов забвенных, Клеветников, и трусов злых, И рой изменниц молодых, И круг товарищей презренных, То сельский дом - и у окна Сидит она... и всё она!..41

(XXXVII, 9-14)

It is a crucial episode in the hero’s emotional and moral life. Onegin looks back on his wasted life, recognising what he has done, or failed to do, the irreparable turn his life has taken and Tat’iana’s role in it.42 He is haunted by obsessive memories and images of the past. The synthetic image – we might call it a psychological icon – of the Country House containing Tat’iana dominates the landscape of his soul. Considering the place and context in which this image occurs in the novel, we can hardly overestimate its significance as a gestalt in Onegin’s spiritual life, conveying as it does the sense of an irretrievably lost, unattainable ideal, remorse and self reproach. I would venture to add that this image also represents and embodies the House Myth (in the sense of Chapter I.4), admittedly in an extremely condensed shape but nevertheless one that is psychologically essential and complete from Onegin’s point of view. It is a virtual image of what his life might have been like. The modelling power of this metonymical relationship can become syntactically prominent and iconically significant, as in the poetic context of the following line, taken from ‘19 октября’ (‘19th October’): 41

Now he sees forgotten enemies, / Slanderers, and malicious cowards, / And a swarm of young traitoresses; / Now – a country house, and by the window/ She is sitting – always she! (translation Clayton 1985, 112) 42 See, for example, Clayton 1985, 112: Tania is not only or not simply the source of the change in Onegin – she is his fatum, the tangible expression of the weight of his conscience, his nemesis.


Троих из вас, друзей моей души, Здесь обнял я. Поэта дом опальный, О Пущин мой, ты первый посетил;43

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(my italics)

Here the immediate proximity (the very contiguity which Jakobson stressed as characteristic of the metonymic figure of speech) of the ‘I’ (embracing his friends) and ‘the poet’s house’ (which they have come to visit) becomes syntagmatically significant. The structure of the verse line reinforces the identification of the ‘I’ with the ‘House’, even though, formally, two sentences are involved. The line’s prosodic features are superimposed on the syntactic ones, which creates a unique poetic significance. Moreover, the constituents of the two sentences involved in creating this poetic semantic configuration (poet–house– visiting friends) are distributed among the three verse lines in such a way as to mirror one another, iconically centred around the microcosm of the lyric poetic ‘I/House’.44 And, of course, the phrase ‘the poet’s disgraced house’ (‘поэта дом опальный’) is itself also an example, with its transfer of the disgrace from the poet to his house. Archetypes in literature are subjected to semantic and symbolic transformations, thereby generating the poets’ individual psychopoetics. In this process the literary or poetic sujet combines archetypal images with concrete and specific features of a particular poetic world. In Pushkin’s oeuvre we find two characteristic types of such projections on the house: the Poet’s House, a utopian House projection which typically takes the shape of the ancestral rural estate (usad’ba) or Parental House, and the ambiguous image of the Domik or Little House.

43

Three of you, friends of my soul, / I could embrace here. You, oh my dear Pushchin, / Were the first to visit the poet’s disgraced house; 44 The relevant metonymically equivalent positions being: я - поэта дом (I - the poet’s house), symmetrically enclosed by: троих из вас (three of you) / ты (первый посетил) (you (the first to visit), and: друзей моей души / О Пущин мой (friends of my soul / Oh, my Pushchin). Such phenomena of poetic syntactico-semantic and prosodic symmetry usually point to the significance of the thematics involved. In the case of Pushkin this seems to apply in particular; in this connection, see especially E. Ėtkind’s fascinating analyses (1988).

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The Estate as a Domus In Russian literature of the nineteenth century, reflecting the dominant contemporary world model, the thematics and ideological significance of the House characteristically take shape in the rural estate (usad’ba). However, concrete literary instances of this estate world can also be projections of national identity and self-awareness. For example, in Pushkin’s poem ‘Зима. Что делать нам в деревне?’ (‘It’s winter. What should we do in the countryside?’; 2 November 1829, Pushkin 1979, Vol. 3, 123-4; see above), we find an image of the traditional Russian patriarchal way of life on the estate as, essentially, an autarchic Domus, including the spatial context of the country as well as the cultural and ideological perception of its climate as part of Russian cultural identity; see Boele 1994, particularly on the cultural significance of the winter in nineteenth-century Russian Romanticism. Nevertheless, the synthetic image of the Russian way of life in the countryside also comprises motifs of a personal, individual nature. Thus, in Pushkin’s case the estate is connected both with the concepts of ancestry and ‘Russianness’, and with his own inspiration and exile. Identification of the estate world as a special place, or locus, can be both positive and negative at the same time. An example of this ambivalence can be found in Pushkin’s poem ‘Деревня’ (‘The Village’, 1819, Vol. 1, 318; written in Mikhailovskoe), which opens with the lines: Приветствую тебя, пустынный уголок, Приют спокойствия, трудов и вдохновенья,45

The almost abstract qualification ‘lonely corner’, an instance of the Poet’s House, is followed by a panegyric of the estate’s beauties and amenities, but in the second half of the poem there is a complete change of attitude: Но мысль ужасная здесь душу омрачает: Среди цветущих нив и гор Друг человечества печально замечает Везде Невежества убийственный Позор /…/ 45

I greet you, lonely corner, / Refuge of tranquillity, of work and inspiration.


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Здесь Барство дикое, без чувства, без Закона Присвoило себе насильственной лозой И труд, и собственность, и время земледельца.46

Thus, the same estate Domus and its world – with its ‘flowering meadows and hills’ (Среди цветущих нив и гор) but also with its ‘savage gentry’ (Барство дикое) – metonymically becomes a means of expressing Pushkin’s complex attitudes, nationalistic and democratic, towards Russia as a whole. As I have already remarked, in Pushkin’s case the connection between the motifs of exile and ancestry is essential. In the late poеm ‘Вновь я посетил’(‘Again I visited’, 1835, Vol. 3, 313-4), for example, the poet revisits his ancestral Mikhailovskoe, ‘that corner of the world’ (тот уголок земли) where he spent two years in exile, living with his niania in his again ‘disgraced little house’ (опальный домик), and reflects not only on his own past experiences but also on the future, when a grandson will have taken his place and will walk, as he now does, under the trees that guard the estate. As he looks around, the lyric persona relives memories evoked by the familiar rural landscape and ruminates upon his past life, thereby defining what the estate means to him. The poem’s relatively free form (three unequal stanzas of unrhymed, sometimes broken iambic pentameters) underlines its intimate atmosphere, the private nature of the feelings it expresses and the freedom of the speaker who expresses them.47 The suggestion of an associative visual tour-d’horizon is particularly emphasised by the iconic effect of incomplete, shifting lines, often with emphatic deictic appeal expressly relating the house and estate to the poet himself: И, кажется, вечор еще бродил Я в этих рощах. Вот опальный домик, Где жил я с бедной нянею моей.

46

But here a terrible thought darkens the heart: / Among the flowering meadows and hills / The friend of mankind notices with grief / Everywhere the murderous Disgrace of Ignorance. / … / Here savage Gentry, without feeling, without Law / Appropriated by force of cane / The peasant’s labour, property, and time. 47 The individual, private freedom that was equally important in the poetic epistles and in the poem ‘Городок’ (‘The Small Town’), discussed above.

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Вот холм лесистый, над которым часто Я сиживал недвижим – и глядел48

(my italics)

Domik, the Little House: a Double-Faced Image This particular type is, as I have already suggested, crucial to Pushkin’s psychopoetics of the House. It occurs in two modally opposed variants: the domik in the countryside and the domik in the city. The axiological opposition between idyllic rural, and urban houses has been noted by Baevskii (1990, 101). The rural domiki, based on Mikhailovskoe and Boldino, is essentially a positive image despite the biographical connection with the theme of exile expressed, as we have seen, in the phrase ‘disgraced little house’. It is also the predominant one in Pushkin’s lyric poetry. It combines all the qualities of an estate-Domus – archetypal, idyllic and utopian, representing comfortable homeliness – with a stability which supports family life, poetic creativity and hospitality. In short, it is the ‘Poet’s House’.49 The urban domik, by contrast, is a much more ambiguous, if not outright negative, gestalt. We find it in four specific cases: 1. the little house about which Evgenii dreams in The Bronze Horseman (1833); 2. the little house where Parasha and her mother live (idem); 3. the little house at the beginning of Titov’s story ‘The Lonely Little House on Vasiliev Island’ (‘Уединенный домик на Васильевском’; 1829); 4. the little house in Kolomna in the poem of that name (‘Домик в Коломне’; 1830). in the latter three of which the house is inhabited by a humble widow and her daughter. The urban domik embodies clearly contradictory features. On the one hand it has positive, truly domestic qualities that 48

And it seems only yesterday evening that I strolled among these groves. / Here is the disgraced little house, / Where I lived together with my poor nanny. / Here is the wooded hill, on which I often / Sat motionless – and stared. 49 We shall see these very qualities again in the utopian House for the Master and Margarita in Bulgakov’s novel; see Chapter II.35.


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represent the bourgeois ideal of a stable life.50 On the other, the domiki in Pushkin’s work are all ‘haunted houses’, or psychologically threatening structures.51 Those in the second, third and forth cases might be described as ‘double-sided’. Their intense emotional charge places them among the earliest examples in Russian literature of psychopoetic and symbolic House–Personality transformations. They become vacant and are annihilated. The way that they simply disappear is almost stunning; see Harkins 1976, 202. The third is burnt down; the second is swept away by the flood: [...]. Наводненье Туда, играя, занесло Домишко ветхий. [...]52

(The Bronze Horseman, Vol. 4, 287)

and a new three-storey house occupies the site of the fourth, which the narrator intensely dislikes and would like to see burnt down: Мне стало грустно: на высoкий дом Глядел я косо. Если в эту пору Пожар бы охватил его кругом, То моему озлобленному взору Приятно было пламя.53

(Vol. 4, 236)

The sudden destruction or loss of a house is an archetypal disaster, a catastrophe in the literal, etymological sense. It represents basic, existential anxiety, contradicts our conception of the house as the essence of what is lasting, durable and ordered in life, and is an enforced break with the past. In part 1 of The Bronze Horsemen (Vol. 4), Pushkin brings together house, flood and death in an astonishing, even cata50

See also the autobiographical fragment ‘Участь моя решена. Я женюсь…’, (‘My Fate is Sealed. I Am Going to Marry….’) discussed above under the section ‘House and Hearth’. 51 The demonic character of these domiki can obviously be connected with the idea of the so-called Petersburg myth, referring to the unique and doubtful nature of that city in Russian cultural and literary perception since its foundation; see, for example, Lotman 1984, and Toporov 2003. 52 [...]. The flood / Playful, had carried there / The decrepit wretched little house. 53 I grew sad: at the high house / I scowled. If at that moment / The house had been enveloped in fire, / Then my angry gaze / Would have been pleased by the flames.

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chrestic image of Saint-Petersburg: и дома тонущий народ (‘and the people drowning at home’ – 280), having approached it metonymically, earlier in the same stanza: [...] всё гибнет: кров и пища (‘all is perishing: roof and food’ – 279; see Van Baak 1994, 31). The annihilation of these little houses is the result of the intrusion of elementary satanic or supernatural forces into natural life (Khodasevich 1937). In Pushkin’s case we should probably interpret this in a psychopoetic rather than metaphysical sense; that is, as a manifestation of Pushkin’s creative thinking about the profound, ‘shapeless’ human terror of annihilation. Pushkin uses well-known devices and topoi from the ‘Gothic horror’ tradition (as in the third of our cases, Titov’s story of ‘The Lonely Little House on Vasiliev Island’), but the introduction of the locus of the urban little house can also be seen as an innovative step towards Realism, a thematic parallel to the writer’s own transition to prose. Pushkin switched to prose in an endeavor to depict actual, contemporary society. Our fourth case, the mysterious narrative poem ‘Домик в Коломне’ (‘The Little House in Kolomna’, 1830) testifies to this fundamental transition, which seems to have affected not only his professional profile as a poet but also his own sense of identity. Apart from the metapoetic considerations at the beginning, the poem contains elements of travesty, masking and autobiographical mystification; see Semionow 1960, 82-4. In other words, the text combines comments on poetry by a poet who is switching over to prose, a disappearing little house and the theme of masking the personality by adopting an enigmatic identity. This complex gestalt of the demonic or uncanny urban Little House encompasses one half of the central twin-image that, in Pushkin’s oevre, represents the psychopoetics of the house in relation to the individual. The other half, then, is the one we can identify as the private utopia of the Little House in the countryside. To illustrate this I shall discuss cases that complement each other. First, the poetic phrases, or formulas ‘the poet’s disgraced little house’ (‘поэта дом опальный’ from the poem ’19 октября’ (‘19th October’); see above) and: ‘This is the disgraced little house’ (‘Вот опальный домик’ from the poem ‘…..Вновь я посетил’ (‘….Again I visited’); see above) represent a synthetic psy-


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chopoetic image in which the content of the archetypal House Myth54 fuses with the individual poetic expression of autobiographical motifs (the ‘disgrace’). As I have already pointed out, this synthetic image also features a psychopoetic transformation of the House–Personality type. Second, and no less characteristic, is the seventh stanza of the very early poem ‘Мечтатель’ (‘The Dreamer’, 1815. Vol. 1, 108110), in which the poet evokes his ‘peaceful roof at the back of beyond’ and addresses his muse. We find here a remarkable combination of loci: Нашел в глуши я мирный кров И дни веду смиренно: Дана мне лира от богов, Поэту дар бесценный; И муза верная со мной: Хвала тебе, богиня! Тобою красен домик мой И дикая пустыня.55

This stanza, and especially the last two lines, give expression to an ideal world model by creating a mythical locus where the poet, the house (‘my little house’, (домик мой)) and the outside world (the ‘wild wilderness’ (дикая пустыня)) are not in conflict with one another, as was the case with the urban domik, but in a state of harmony brought about through the agency of his muse.56 This model, then, is triangular: first, there is the combination of the lyric persona and the little house, together representing the poetic image of his personality; second, there is the ‘wild wilderness’, the harsh face of nature that can also be interpreted both as the outside world in general and, as we have seen, the space of restraint and lack of freedom, disgrace and 54

See, for example, the survey of fabular motifs, the ‘building blocks’, of the House Myth given at the end of Chapter I.4. 55 At the back of beyond I found a peaceful roof / And I spend my days humbly; / I was given a lyre by the gods, / The priceless gift for the poet; / And a true muse is with me: / Praise to thee, my goddess! / Through you my little house is beautiful, / As is the wild wilderness. 56 This reminds us of the utopian house-and-garden topos which Pushkin had created in his equally early epistle ‘Городок’ (‘The Small Town’), also written in 1815; see above.

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hostility, and between them there is the ‘Muse-goddess’. His muse – art – creates harmony between the poet and the world, reconciles him to it or protects him from it. Then the protective significance of the image of the House as sanctuary becomes prominent, as in the metaphor at the end of the final stanza in the rough draft of ‘Вновь я посетил’ (‘Again I visited’; 1835): Mikhailovskoe (здесь (‘here’)) is the place where he experiences the ‘secret shield of holy providence’,57 and is ‘saved by poetry’: Но здесь меня таинственным щитом Святое провиденье осенило, Поэзия, как ангел утешитель, Спасла меня, и я воскрес душою.58

(Vol. 3, 429; my italics)

Domik, the Little House: the House of Anxiety, or a Failed Biedermeier?59 There is one more aspect of Pushkin’s Little House, and particularly the urban variant, that warrants our attention. It concerns some of the literary and cultural characteristics of the early nineteenth century, in Russia as well as in other European countries, and Pushkin’s position in relation to them. As we have seen, the Little House, on account of its very ambiguity as a gestalt, was for Pushkin a particularly valuable symbol, not only of safety but also of vulnerability and existential anxiety. We find these polar values in the two-stanza poem ‘Новоселье’ (‘Your New House’, 1831), probably addressed to M. P. Pogodin, which explicitly realises the paradigm of the House Myth through the motif of Moving into a New House; see Chapter I.4. The anxiety just mentioned is brought out in the imagery of the second stanza, which again concerns a little house (‘свой домик малый’): 57

See also the comparable imagery of the symbolic House of Friendhip, with the muses providing a protective canopy (‘под сенью дружных муз’), in ‘19th October’. 58 ‘But here with a secret shield / Holy providence protected me, / Poetry, like a comforting angel, / Saved me, and my soul revived.’ It is worth noting that, in the rough draft version of this stanza, the hostility of the world, and the poet’s misunderstandings and disillusions in connection with it during his past life, are very prominent topics. 59 An earlier version of this subchapter was published in Van Baak 1998.


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Благословляю новоселье, Куда домашний свой кумир Ты перенес – а с ним веселье, Свободный труд и сладкий мир. Ты счастлив: ты свой домик малый, Обычай мудрости храня, От злых забот и лени вялой Застраховал, как от огня.60

(Vol. III, 163)

The attitude expressed in this poem, as in others that have already been discussed, betrays a form of existential anxiety that can be considered characteristic of late Romanticism. This phenomenon is an important issue in V. Nemoianu’s comparative study, The Taming of Romanticism. European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (1988). It makes sense to study Nemoianu’s insights and evaluate Pushkin’s poetics of the House against the background of his theses. Like others, Nemoianu distinguishes two phases in Romanticism and Romantic culture. To the first phase belongs the ‘high’ or ‘absolute’ Romanticism of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) in Germany and Wordsworth’s metaphysics and idealism in England. With the second phase, ‘tamed Romanticism’, he identifies a complex variety of literary and socio-historical phenomena to which he applies the term ‘Biedermeier’. The literatures of Europe differ from one another according to the moment in history when they adopted the Romantic world-view. The phase of high Romanticism was restricted to Germany and England. Because Russian literature, like the other literatures of Central and Eastern Europe, came under the influence of the Enlightenment later (mainly through the mediation of the French and German examples), it adopted the Romantic cultural code only in its second phase. The term ‘Biedermeier’ is used generically in this context to indicate aspects of a mentality that developed throughout Europe between the French Revolution and the eighteen forties, and was witness to the restoration of the anciens régimes and the tendency to return to 60

I bless your new house, / To which you moved your / Domestic idol – and with it merriment, / Creative freedom and sweet peace. // You are lucky: you safeguarded your little house, / Preserving wise custom, / Against evil troubles and sluggish laziness / As against fire.

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pre-Revolutionary values.61 These social and political processes were accompanied by an increasing diffusion of the Romantic world-view through the layers of society, but at the same time the Romantic worldview itself underwent changes, became a democratic, bourgeois property and was thus ‘tamed’. This taming of European Romanticism consisted in the abandonment of high Romanticism’s absolutist claims. Its main philosophical ideas were retained, but they were relativised, or expressed ironically. The literature of the Biedermeier type characteristically features demonic or grotesque characters and situations (Nemoianu 1984, 5-6),62 and is centred on a so-called ‘problematic character’. His essential mood is one of anxiety or fear, uncertainty about the safety and stability of his way of life or even of the worldorder. He is haunted by feelings of confusion and disarray. Confusion and disarray (its Russian equivalent is ‘smiatenie’) lie behind the sociopsychological condition of Pushkin’s underdog hero Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman: И с той поры, когда случалось Идти той площадью ему, В его лице изображалось Смятенье. (……..)63 (The Bronze Horseman (the end of part 2; Vol. IV, 289))

but the outlook and behaviour of German in The Queen of Spades is dominated by a similar fundamental anxiety. The fact that Evgenii’s ‘disarray’ is evoked by the statue of Peter the Great only confirms the profound significance of the emotion, both for the hero as a ‘problematic character’ and in the thematic context of the poem as a whole. Such anxiety is the direct source of the most characteristic Biedermeier attitudes (See Nemoianu 1984, e.g. 6, 30, 33): the craving for 61

As a name and socio-cultural concept, the term ‘Biedermeier’ first appeared in 1855 in the Munich journal Fliegende Blätter, but this does not detract from its effectiveness as a prototype of the preceding period. Gottlieb Biedermeier was a satirical figure created by Adolf Kussmaul and Ludwig Eichrodt. He was a south German bourgeois, characterised by humbleness and complaissance. 62 He refers here to authors such as Hermann Pongs, Wilhelm Bietak, Günther Weydt and Friedrich Sengle. 63 And ever since that time, when he happened / To walk over that square, / His face showed / Disarray.


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homeliness and close family ties; the ‘flight’ to the safe warmth and comfort of the domestic hearth and the idyllic garden; a modest utopism, as when Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman dreams of ‘приют смиренный и простой’ (a simple, humble shelter), and the pursuit of harmonious relations in everyday life. But the psychological need to find stability and combat anxiety also resulted in the paradoxical combination of idyll and demonism in literature. According to Nemoianu (idem, 36), Pushkin’s work shares with Western European literatures the characteristics of the Biedermeier culture as the destruction and disintegration of the Romantic paradigm once it had ceased to be the centre of cultural orientation.64 In the case of Pushkin, this is obvious in the sceptical irony of Evgenii Onegin, in which Romanticism suffers a defeat and the dandy becomes a homeloving philistine. A comparable attitude to Romantic ideas can be found in the novella Капитанская дочка (The Captain’s Daughter), and Nemoianu sees Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman as a symbol of ‘the Biedermeier crushed’, a victim of the conflict between ‘modern man’ and ‘absolute ideals’ (idem, 144). Against the background of these observations, the ambiguous, even paradoxical characteristics of Pushkin’s little Petersburg houses make sense as symbols and images of the world that Pushkin evokes and gives shape to in the problems of the emerging new individual. It is the world of contemporary Petersburg, its dynamics, anxieties and social settings, for which Pushkin had tried to develop the society tale; see especially the prose fragments discussed above. It is also the world of the ‘дворянин в мещанстве’ or ‘bourgeois-nobleman’ (Vacuro 1969, 1689) as represented by Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman, and of course it is the petty bourgeois setting of his story ‘Гробовщик’ (‘The Coffinmaker’; 1830). As an example of Pushkin’s treatment of the house theme in the urban context, the story of the coffinmaker is a special case. The symbolism and psychopoetics of the House embrace the entire semantic and poetic structure of the story: the theme of a Russian bourgeois moving into a new little house (Moving into a New House) and the meaning of the House as a Coffin; see the detailed analysis in Schmid 64

It is exactly this process, in his view, that unites such otherwise different authors as Heine, Hugo, Musset, Scott, Vigny and, indeed, Pushkin.

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1991, 295-320. This story is also interesting with regard to the Biedermeier issue because it gives a Russian image of German bourgeois artisans. One of them, also living in a domik, is called Gottlieb Schulz. By a remarkable coincidence, the prototypical Biedermeier hero created twenty-five years later by Adolf Kussmaul and Ludwig Eichrodt would also be called Gottlieb, a name which implies that piety was among his qualities. The depiction of the private sphere of Pushkin’s prose heroes goes hand in hand with the development of small, enclosed, domestic settings such as Onegin’s study or library (whose intimate character is stressed by the very fact that Tat’iana enters it surreptitiously) and Zinaida’s room in the wooden domik of the fragment entitled ‘На углу маленькой площади…’ (‘On the Corner of a Small Square…’; Vol. 6, 382-4) which is ‘furnished with taste and luxuriance’ (‘убранной со вкусом и роскошью’). In a more general sense, a crucial role was also played by the social and moral condition of post-Decembrist Russia – the reign of Nicholas I with its dead-end repressiveness and triviality, famously dismissed by Gogol’ as poshlost’, or ‘banality’. Crushed hopes of political change, the curtailment of the socio-political and bureaucratic spirit and a sense of moral and social decline among the nobility as a class – the latter keenly felt by Pushkin himself – are all factors that seemed to encourage individual centripetality and intimacy, rather than the expansiveness and heroism of high Romanticism, as a strategy for combating anxiety. In literature, this found symbolic and psychopoetic expression, not only in the small-scale urban settings of Pushkin’s demonic Petersburg but in the characteristic homelessness – practical as well as existential – of his heroes. The preference for a closed, personal, intimate living environment thus reflects both anxiety and the idea of personal integrity and uniqueness – the latter in its original etymological sense of indivisibility. The recurrent feature of Homelessness resulting from Loss of the House is an equally characteristic and striking element in Pushkin’s world-picture. Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman becomes homeless in all respects. He loses his ideal, Dreamed House:


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Он кое-как себе устроит Уют смиренный и простой И в нем Парашу успокоит.65

and also his real one, becoming a vagabond: К себе домой не возвращался. Его пустынный уголок Отдал внаймы, как вышел срок, Хозяин бедному поэту. Евгений за своим добром Не приходил…66

At the end of the poem, he is found dead on the threshold of the decrepit shack (домишко ветхий) where his beloved Parasha and her mother used to live, the hut having been washed away by the flood to a small uninhabited island: …. Был он пуст И весь разрушен. У порога Нашли безумца моего,67

Thus, hero, house and death are directly connected, which creates a concrete sense of poetic equivalence – a symbolic convergence of the House–Personality type – between the dead Evgenii and the ruined hut, while a symbolic parallel can also be drawn between the hut’s being washed away to an uninhabited island (like a drowned person) and Evgenii’s being an outcast and drifter. Before drawing some conclusions regarding the significance of the house and the House Myth in Pushkin’s work, I shall briefly mention one more text that fits the classifications and analytical scope of this chapter, the fragment known as Mar’ia Shoning’ (‘Марья Шонинг’, probably 1834 or 1835). This is part of an unfinished story 65

He will somehow arrange for himself / An humble and simple shelter / And set Parasha at rest in it. 66 He did not come back home. / His deserted corner, / When his term was up, / His landlord let to a poor poet. / Evgenii did not come for his belongings… 67 … It was empty / And completely destroyed. By the threshold / My madman was found,

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based on factual material from a Nurnberg lawsuit that must have inspired Pushkin – a case of infanticide in 1787. The ruin of the eponymous heroine begins when, after her father’s death, she is evicted by tax officers from the little house they have shared. Our first conclusion, then, is that individual identity is related to the question of having, or not having, a House or Home. Second, though Pushkin is certainly a ‘poet of the House’ (see also the opening of this chapter), the utopian ideal behind this archetype is often illusory and unreliable, which makes the House in his work a symbol of human life par excellence even as it gives shape to the anguish and anxiety of his contemporaries. Third, we are confronted with the condition of emerging modern man in Russia as ‘failed biedermeier’. Moreover, this failure in itself almost invites interpretation as a case of Russian distrust of the Western concept of personal, attainable happiness, shaped essentially as a configuration of domestic space and values. Each of these aspects can also be recognised in the context of Pushkin’s own life during the eighteen-thirties. Clayton (1985, 191) sums up Pushkin’s situation by reference to the relationship between Onegin and Tat’iana: ‘the predicament of the demon in love with the angel. No outcome is possible. The demon is petrified into immobility. Similarly, the Pushkin of the 1830s was an individual petrified by the contradictions of his social and existential circumstances, contradictions that proved unresolvable by any other outcome than death.’ Pushkin’s work marks the beginning of the specific development of Houselessness and Homelessness, whether literal or sociopsychological, as part of the overall House theme in Russian literary tradition. Examples include the homeless (and ultimately houseless) Evgenii (The Bronze Horseman; 1833), the socio-psychologically homeless Germann (The Queen of Spades; 1834), Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich Bashmachkin in ‘The Overcoat’ (1842) and Chichikov in Dead Souls (1842; see Chapter II.9). Moreoever, the numerous ‘superfluous heroes’ inhabiting the novels of Russian Realism, though not houseless, are certainly homeless;68 they include the hero of Turgenev’s novel Rudin (1856), the nihilist Volokhov in Goncharov’s The Precipice (1869; see Chapter II.13) and Dostoevskii’s Raskol’nikov in Crime

68

A strong argument for principally distinguishing between House and Home.


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and Punishment (1866).69 The psychopoetics of the House of Anxiety, together with transformations of the House–Personality type and the Loss of the House that we saw emerging in Pushkin’s oeuvre, will surface again with unprecedented force in the literature of the later phases of Russian Modernism (or Postsymbolism) and its aftermath.

69

The topos of Siberian exile, linked with Punishment, evidently involves a specifically Russian form of the Loss of Home and House; see Chapter II 17 on Dostoevskii.

8. Lermontov’s Cosmic Homelessness At the beginning of the previous chapter, I cited Fazil Iskander’s statement that Pushkin was the leader of Russian ‘literature of the house’ and that ‘next to him stands Lermontov, the initiator of the literature of homelessness’ (Iskander 1996, 6-7). Houselessness and Homelessness are indeed prominent in Lermontov’s literary world. The poetic world of Lermontov shows an individual mythopoetic and psychopoetic variant of the House Myth in which the metaphoric categories of the House-Personality and the House-Cosmos play a central role, as does the theme of the Father’s House (or House of Childhood). The motifs of loneliness and homelessness are also characteristic, which is not surprising when we consider that Lermontov’s literary world is largely made up of Romantic heroes. A good example is the figure of the eponymous demon in the poem that occupies a central position in Lermontov’s work. He is a spirit whose loneliness and homelessness are absolute on a cosmic scale. In Lermontov’s poetry, the semiotic potential of the House Myth relies on metaphorical connections between two areas of signification: that of the individual and that of the external world. They are set in confrontation, fused or identified with one another in changing and ambiguous relations such as ‘the world in the self’ and ‘the self in the world’, and there is often a connection with the desire for freedom and wandering, which are Lermontovian Romantic leitmotifs. This type of psychopoetics can be found in a broad range of Lermontov’s poetic work, including the idyll of childhood recollections. We see it, for example, in ‘Mtsyri’ (1839), probably one of the last true Romantic epic poems of Russian Romanticism. The hero is a freedom loving Caucasian mountaineer who is pining away, far from his homeland, in a Georgian monastery. As a six year old boy he was

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taken prisoner by a Russian General and left in the monastery to the care of the monks. Initially he was homesick (Смотрел, вздыхая, на восток (Looked eastward heaving a sigh), Lermontov 1984, 2, 75) and shied away from the monks, but once he became used to this life of captivity (for which the word plen is used) he learned the language and even planned to take vows himself in due time. However, one autumn night he disappears without trace. After three days of searching in the wild neighbourhood, the monks find him, totally exhausted and close to dying. The old monk – who originally received him from the General – comes to hear his confession, and he tells the old man about his experiences. He explains that he wanted to know real life, the freedom and open space of that other ‘marvelous world of anxiety and battle’ (тот чудный мир тревог и битв; idem, 77), and ultimately to find back his homeland. As an orphaned boy living in the secluded, stuffy and unhomely place of his adoption, he tried to think of what it was like to live a normal life in one’s own country, in a house, having parents and a family: [...]. Я видел у других Отчизну, дом, друзей, родных, А у себя не находил Не только милых душ – могил!1

(4th stanza, idem, 77)

Once he found himself in the wide expanses of majestic Caucasian nature, his memory suddenly became clear and he recalled his life as a boy in his father’s house. This part of his story takes up the seventh stanza of the poem. Its beginning and end are marked by the Remembered House, with its archaic, universal quality of being the centre of the world, oriented around the hearth, guaranteeing peace and harmony, and connecting members of the family with one another and across the generations (through remembering and telling stories); see the beginning and end, respectivily: И вспомнил я отцовский дом, Ущелье наше, и кругом В тени рассыпанный аул; 1

[...]. I saw that others had / A fatherland, a house, friends, family, / And I did not even have the graves of souls (whether loved or not).

Lermontov’s Cosmic Homelessness

[...] И вспомнил я нaш мирный дом И пред вечерним очагом Рассказы долгие о том, Как жили люди прежних дней, Когда был мир еще пышней.2

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(79)

There is an iconic relationship between the concentric structure of the stanza and the conceptual essence of its topic. The world-picture of this Romantic ballad, a highly conventional and stylised genre, is expressed in the connection between traditional elements of the inventory of Romantic motifs and settings – freedom and the equally utopian House Myth, the Caucasian world and nature – that in combination bring us close to a consummate image of Paradise. In the poem ‘Как часто, пестрою толпою окружен’ (‘As often, in a motley crowd’, 1840), the Father’s House (that is, the House of one’s own Childhood) is the focus of the speaker’s favourite recollections, to which he turns for solace from the noise and superficiality of deceitful society: И если как-нибудь на миг удастся мне Забыться, - памятью к недавней старине Лечу я вольной, вольной птицей; И вижу я себя ребенком, и кругом, Родные всё места: высокий барский дом И сад с распущенной теплицей;3 (Lermontov 1983, Vol. 1, 48, third stanza)

In some cases the poetic subject is identified with an empty building, as in the following two examples:

2

And I remembered my father’s house, / The canyon where we lived, and / In the shade the village scattered around it; [...] And I remembered our peaceful house / And at the fireplace in the evening / The long stories about / How people used to live in earlier days, / When the world was still more splendid. 3 And if I somehow succeed / In sinking into a reverie – like a free, free bird / I fly in my memories to a past not long ago; / And I see myself as a child, and around me, / All my native places: the high manor house / And the garden with the neglected greenhouse;

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И, все мечты отвергнув, снова Остался я один – Как замка мрачного, пустого Ничтожный властелин.4 (‘Как в ночь звезды падучей пламень’ (‘Like the flame of a falling star in the night’), 1832, idem, 251) Я тем живу, что смерть другим: Живу – как неба властелин – В прекрасном мире – но один.5 \ (‘Пусть я кого-нибудь люблю’ (‘Let me love somebody’), 1831, idem, 236)

The programmatic poem ‘Мой дом’ (‘My House/Home’; 1830, idem, 185) is a pure example of cosmic meditation. Its philosophical stance is one of harmony between man and the cosmos, justifying the translation of dom as both ‘house’ and ‘home’. Its central thesis is developed in the first line: ‘My house (home) is wherever there is the vault of heaven’ (Мой дом везде, где есть небесный свод). He thus expresses a world-view that in essence goes back to the ancient conceptualisations of heaven and earth in terms of domestic architecture; see Chapter I.1. The critic Arinshtein (in Manuilov 1981, 283) considers this poem untypical of Lermontov because of its emphasis on harmony and its light tone in general, and points to European and Russian Enlightenment philosophy (particularly Rousseau and Lomonosov) as its more immediate source of inspiration: Мой дом Мой дом везде, где есть небесный свод, Где только слышны звуки песен, Всё, в чем есть искра жизни, в нем живет, Но для поэта он не тесен. До самых звезд он кровлей досягает, И от одной стены к другой Далекий путь, который измеряет Жилец не взором, но душой. 4

And, having abandoned all dreams, again / Alone I remained – / The paltry ruler of a castle bleak and empty. 5 What makes me live, is death to others: / I live - like heaven’s ruler – / In a beautiful world – but alone.


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Есть чувство правды в сердце человека, Святое вечности зерно: Пространство без границ, теченье века Объемлет в краткий миг оно. И всемогущим мой прекрасный дом Для чувства этого построен, И осужден страдать я долго в нем И в нем лишь буду я спокоен.6

In this poem the Cosmic House paradoxically encompasses everything, including the poet and his boundless imagination. This House image combines a traditional finite universe – the ‘roof of the stars’ (До самых звезд [...] кровлей) ‘from one wall to the other’ (от одной стены к другой) – with ‘boundless space’ (пространство без границ), though not so boundless that the human heart is unable to grasp it in a second. This is the ‘sacred grain of eternity’ (святое вечности зерно), the truth about this beautiful House, that was ‘built for this feeling’ (Для чувства этого построен). Since this Cosmic House encompasses everything, it includes the poet’s long suffering as well as the peace he hopes ultimately to find there (в нем лишь буду я спокоен). This level of thematic abstraction also draws in what is probably Lermontov’s most famous poem and clearest image of the Lermontovian poetic persona, ‘Выхожу один я на дорогу’ (‘I step out on to the road alone’; 1841, idem, 85): Выхожу один я на дорогу; Сквозь туман кремнистый путь блестит; Ночь тиха. Пустыня внемлет богу, И звезда с звездою говорит.

6

My house is wherever there is the vault of heaven, / Where only the sounds of songs are heard, / Everything containing the spark of life lives in it, / But for the poet it is not cramped. // It reaches the very stars with its roof, / And from one wall to the other / Is a long journey, which the inhabitant measures / Not with his eye, but with his soul. // There is a sense of truth in the human heart, / A holy grain of eternity: / Space without boundaries, the flow of time it grasps in an instant. // And my beautiful house is all powerful, / Built for this feeling, / And I am condemned to suffer in it for a long time, / And only in it will I be quiet.

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В небесах торжественно и чудно! Спит земля в сияньи голубом... Что же мне так больно и так трудно? Жду ль чего? жалею ли о чём? Уж не жду от жизни ничего я, И не жаль мне прошлого ничуть; Я ищу свободы и покоя! Я б хотел забыться и заснуть! Но не тем холодным сном могилы... Я б желал навеки так заснуть, Чтоб в груди дремали жизни силы, Чтоб дыша вздымалась тихо грудь; Чтоб всю ночь, весь день мой слух лелея, Про любовь мне сладкий голос пел, Надо мной чтоб вечно зеленея Тeмный дуб склонялся и шумел.7

The ‘stepping out on to the road’ evokes the Romantic and Lermontovian leitmotiv of wandering and drifting, and thus implicitly of leaving one’s home and being or becoming homeless. On the level of verbal morphology, this is located in the prefix vy- in vykhozhu (‘step out’; that is, out of the house). In this poem, the lyric subject ultimately dreams about homecoming and finding shelter in cosmic nature, which takes the form of finding eternal rest under the canopy of an always-green, rustling oak, an analogy of the cosmic vault.8 7

All alone I step out on to the road, / Through the haze the stone road glistens. / The night is silent. The wilderness listens to God, / And the stars are talking with each other. // In the heavens there is solemnity and wonder! / The earth is asleep in blue radiance… / What causes my pain and suffering? / Do I hope for something? Do I regret something? // I no longer expect anything from life, / And I have no regrets at all about my past; / I search for freedom and rest! / I want to forget myself and go to sleep! // But not the cold sleep of the grave…. / I would want to go to sleep forever so / That life’s forces remained slumbering in my breast, / That my breast would heave slowly breathing, // That night and day, cherishing my ear, / A sweet voice would sing to me about love, / That above me a dark oak, / For ever green, would bend over me and rustle. 8 Tiutchev’s poetic world model, as in his poem ‘Святая ночь на небосклон взошла’ (‘The sacred night had ascended the sky’), is close to this manifestation of the House


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Homelessness or houselessness is also a recurrent feature of Lermontov’s prose. Both Vadim, the hero of the unfinished novel of that name (Vadim, 1832-33), and Pechorin in A Hero of our Time (Герой нашего времени; 1840) are typically Romantic ‘heroes of the road’. In Vadim we can distinguish a particularly interesting locus from the point of view of plot and psychology. Vadim is introduced as an orphan. He has also lost his father’s house in the course of the Pugachev uprising (1773-4).9 He is a hero seeking revenge and the restoration of his honour, but he is also a hero in search of his identity and his father. In the course of the somewhat-overburdened plot, he and his father accidentally meet in a cave, recognise and become reconciled to one another. The archaic House-Cave, closely linked to the House-Womb (see Chapter I.1, 3 and 4), functions here both as the setting and as a psychological, perhaps even Oedipal motivation of a parallel, secret plot, an ‘underworld’ or ‘counterworld’ where unexpected things happen, though we can never know the novel’s ultimate outcome since it was, as I have said, left unfinished. In another unfinished story, ‘Штосс’ (‘Shtoss’, also known as ‘У граф. В... был музыкальный вечер’; 1841), the plot is constructed as a mystery surrounding a house. The house – it is certainly not a home – has a distinctly threatening aspect. Lermontov’s descriptions of the gloomy outskirts of Saint-Petersburg are examples of the urban physiology of the Natural School and, of course, Gogol’, but the image of the house that provides this story’s central setting is introduced and developed in a manner reminiscent of the earlier Romantic, horror Myth as metaphysical, existential Homelessness. In this poetic contemplation, the night is said to have ‘woven a golden veil’ and ‘cast it over the chasm’ (Как золотой покров она свила, / Покров, накинутый над бездной). Confronted by the dark cosmic abyss, the poet concludes that man is ‘like a homeless orphan’ (сирота бездомный): И человек, как сирота бездомный, / Стоит теперь, и немощен и гол, / Лицом к лицу пред пропастию темной. (And man, like a homeless orphan, / Now stands, feeble and naked, / Face to face with the dark abyss). (1845-50; Tiutchev 1984, t. 1, 131) 9 It is noteworthy that the story of the Cossack insurgent leader Pugachev, who also claimed to be Peter III, the deceased husband of Catherine the Great, should so strongly appeal both to Pushkin (The Captain’s Daughter) and to Lermontov. Apart from the evident romantic potential of the story (involving individual heroism, freedom and demonic leadership), Pugachev himself also embodies the House-related motifs of true identity, dynasticity (descent and lineage) and legitimacy.

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story tradition with its characteristic haunted house. According to the contemporary commentator E. Naidich (see Lermontov 1984, Vol. 4, 482), Lermontov’s intention was to depict ironically the destruction of an artist who drifted away from reality into a Romantic-demonic fantasy world. The protagonist, Lugin, is a painter who suffers from spleen and is ‘haunted’ by a voice that continually repeats the same message from morning till night: ‘В Столярном переулке, у Кокушкина моста, дом титулярного советника Штосса, квартира номер двадцать семь’ (‘In Stoliarnyi Lane, near the Kokushkin Bridge, the house of titular counsellor Shtoss, apartment number twenty seven’, idem, 337). He is advised to try to find the apartment in question as a means of ridding himself of this aural hallucination. He does so and, finding it furnished but uninhabited, decides to move in, making the necessary arrangements with the janitor. Once settled in the apartment, he discovers that there is a strange door that opens by itself and leads into a dark, cold room. In that room there appear two spectres, an old man and an enigmatic female of unearthly beauty. The old man entices Lugin into playing cards; Lugin accepts the invitation, and loses. The old man returns every evening. The story breaks off here, but it is evident that these fateful events will lead to Lugin’s ruin. The spectres have no existence outside the haunted house. They and the house belong together and together realise a metonymic textual image of the House–Personality type. They represent the fantastic universe which almost certainly begins and ends in Lugin’s mind. In this respect Lermontov’s psychopoetics also reminds us of Pushkin’s variant of the House Myth in that both develop the HousePersonality with its thematics of the riddle, or mystery, of identity. The characteristic elements of the House Myth that can thus be distinguished in Lermontov’s work are the Father’s House, the HouseCosmos and the connection between House-Personality and HouseRiddle. These elements take the shape of poetic transformations of the I–House–World chain, which we will find again in the work of Andrei Belyi (in his novel Petersburg, for example), and among the Futurists.

9. Gogol’. The Bachelor, and the House as a Box Gogol’s urban works are dominated by the theme of the little man that had been introduced into Russian literature by Pushkin. It was adopted not only by Gogol’ but, after him, by the young Dostoevskii and others. In the Petersburg world of Gogol’s little men, the qualities of homeliness and domesticity (comfort and family life) are either absent or unmarked, as in ‘Шинель’ (‘The Overcoat’, 1842). Otherwise, the House concept in the urban setting is represented negatively. In Gogol’s work, the develish Anti-House is developed in the form of the public house or office and with the theme of Homelessness (Lotman 1992a, 442; see also Chapter II.35 on Bulgakov). We find markedly non-domestic or anti-domestic settings and situations in ‘Невский проспект’ (‘Nevskii Prospect’; 1835), where at a certain point one of the two heroes, Piskarev, finds himself in a brothel. The other hero, the apparently straightforward Lieutenant Pirogov, forces his attentions upon a woman and ultimately gains admittance to her house, where, unable to keep his hands to himself, he is beaten up and thrown out by her husband. Gogol’ created worlds where nothing is what it seems. Otherworldly painter Piskarev unwittingly follows a prostitute who lures him to a brothel. Imagining the beautiful woman to be a lady and wishing to see where she lives, he gradually learns about the real nature of the house she has taken him to. He follows her into a room where three other women, already occupied, pay no attention to him. The atmosphere strikes him as unpleasant and chaotic, and he is shocked by what he sees: Какой-то неприятный беспорядок, который можно встретить только в беспечной комнате холостяка, царствовал во всем. Мебели довольно хорошие были были покрыты пылью; паук застилал своею паутиною лепной карниз; сквозь непритворенную

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дверь другой комнаты блестел сапог со шпорой и краснела выпушка мундира; громкий мужской голос и женский смех раздавались без всякого принуждения. Боже, куда зашел он! Сначала он не хотел верить и начал пристальнее всматриваться в предметы, наполнявшие комнату; но голые стены и окна без занавес не показывали никакого присутствия заботливой хозяйки.1 (Gogol’1984, III, 16)

Gogol’ characterises this non-domestic, even anti-domestic situation by comparing it to the unpleasant disorder one finds only in the ‘uncared-for room of a bachelor’ (в беспечной комнате холостяка). Ironic or otherwise, this qualification implies that the bachelor state is equally non-domestic or anti-domestic, and we are reminded that Piskarev is himself a bachelor. Once he realises that he has entered a brothel, its anti-domestic nature is summarised in the splendidly paradoxical phrase ‘that loathsome shelter’ (тот отвратительный приют). In a later episode, Piskarev wakes up from a dream in which he has seen the same prostitute and created an idealised image of her. When he opens his eyes and finds himself in his own room, he is confronted with ‘repulsive reality (отвратительнa действительность): his own room – a bachelor’s room – the ‘grey, turbid disorder’ (’в таком сером, таком мутном беспорядке’) of which pushes him into a depression:

1

There reigned over everything a kind of pleasant disorder which one usually meets only in the uncared-for room of a bachelor. The furniture, which was rather good, was covered in dust; a spider had overspread the sculptured cornice with its web; through an unlatched door into another room shone a boot with a spur and the braid of a red uniform; a loud male voice and a woman’s laughter rang out quite unrestrainedly. Heavens, where had he come! At first he refused to believe what he saw and began to gaze more steadily at the objects which filled the room; but the bare walls and the uncurtained windows showed no trace of the presence of a careful housewife. (Transl. Beatrice Scott, Gogol 1945, 62)

Gogol’. The Bachelor, and the House as a Box

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Так это он спал! Боже, какой сон! И зачем было просыпаться? [...] Досадный свет неприятным своим тусклым сиянием глядел в его окна. Комната в таком сером, таком мутном беспорядке…О, как отвратительнa действительность!2 (Gogol’ 1984, III, 22)

He becomes obsessed with her image as she appeared in his dream, and he desires to do nothing but sleep in the hope of recovering it. This is the beginning of a plot development that will culminate in his suicide, alone in his room, undiscovered for a week. He starts taking opium in the hope of evoking her image in his dreams, and the experiment is successful to begin with: under the influence of the drug he has a remarkable vision of the idealised woman, sitting ‘at the window of a light little country house’: О, как хорошо сидит она у окна деревенского светлого домика.3 (idem, p, 23)

This image works as an icon of the Ideal House, suggesting its archetypal psychological significance of happiness and harmony, and reminding us also of the symbolic functions of the domik in Pushkin’s work. In Gogol’s case, it represents the exact opposite of the AntiHouse of Piskarev’s dismal, urban bachelor’s lodging, the locked-up room where he will be found with his throat slit. Reading Gogol’s ‘Записки сумасшедшего’ (‘Notes of a Madman’, 1835), we follow the growth of paranoia and megalomania in a civil servant, Aksentii Ivanovich Poprishchin to the point at which he is consigned to a madhouse. Poprishchin’s story is one of the earliest examples in Russian literature of the topic of madness in the context of this clear expression of the Anti-House; see also Garshin’s ‘Красный цветок’ (‘The Red Flower’, 1883), and Chekhov’s ‘Палата №

2

So he had been asleep! God, what a wonderful dream! Why had he been woken up? [...] A disappointing dawn looked in at his window with its unpleasant dim light. His room was in such a grey, dull disorder… Oh, how repulsive reality was! (Transl. idem, 70) 3 How beautifully she sat in the window of a bright country cottage! (Transl. idem, 71)

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6’, (‘Ward No. 6’, 1892).4 Madness is, of course, a universal topic in literature and a typical characteristic of the Romantic tradition. From the perspective of this study, it will be interesting to establish the specific connections between the madness of the heroes and the psychopoetic functions of the House Myth that are so often involved in its expression. Poprishchin is titular counsellor (титулярный советник, ninth grade in the Table of Ranks), and quite proud of it. From the diary entries that make up the story, we learn little about his domestic situation apart from the fact that he is a bachelor and has a housekeeper named Mavra. He speaks with disdain about the treasurer of his department, taking pains to point out that at home his own cook slaps his face and everybody knows this (А на квартире собственная кухарка бьет его по щекам. Это всему свету известно. Idem.154). However, he is also envious of him because of the dacha he can afford to rent (а посмотри ты, какую дачу он нанимает; ibidem). He is secretly in love with the daughter of his superior and dreams of entering his luxurious apartment and his daughter’s boudoir (159). At the very end of his diary, in the heartrending last entry, we read that his sufferings at the hands of the madhouse personnel have become unbearable. He can no longer keep up his claim to be King of Spain with the madhouse as his royal court in Madrid. At this point he collapses completely; he begs to be saved; he wants a troika to take him ‘out of this world’ (несите меня с этого мира) and bring him home to Russia and his mother; that is, to the House of his Childhood: [...]; вон и русские избы виднеют. Дом ли то мой синеет вдали? Мать ли моя сидит перед окном? Матушка, спаси твоего бедного сына!5 (idem, 172)

It is striking that Gogol’ here uses the same strong House image – the same special House icon – that we found in ‘Nevskii Prospect’: О, как хорошо сидит она у окна деревенского светлого домика.6 4

Pushkin’s Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman, published two years earlier, in 1833, also loses his mind, and his house; see above. 5 [...] and now the Russian huts appear. Is that my house that grows blue upon the distance? Mother, save your wretched son! (Transl. idem, 49)


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Thus, the common shape of the image might well be formulated as ‘a (small) house (in the country) with a beloved woman/mother in the window’. In each case the image accompanies and psychopoetically marks the heroes’ most intense emotional moments. In both cases the houses are ideal projections, or archetypal icons, and in both cases the houses are presented in a rural setting – explicitly in ‘Nevskii Prospect’, contextually in ‘Notes of a Madman’.7 Moreover, these archetypal rural House images appear in such contexts as practically to merge with the concept of Mother Russia and evoke the image of Russia as a House. They are thus in strong contrast to the otherwisedominant negative urban House characteristics that are no doubt connected with the demonic nature of Gogol’s evocations of Petersburg. Furthermore, it is significant that these heroes are all poor bachelors, like their creator. They could probably not afford to marry and settle down in a domik (which, as we have seen, is also the very ideal of Pushkin’s Evgenii in The Bronze Horseman) even if they wanted or dared to; see below on the physiologists and the Natural School. They live in rented rooms in apartment buildings and over-crowded barracks such as the one described by Poprishchin: [...] остановились перед большим домом. “Этот дом я знаю, сказал я сам себе. – Это дом Зверкова”. Эка машина! Какого в нем народа не живет: сколько кухарок, сколько приезжих! А нашей братьи чиновников – как собак, один на другом сидит.8 (idem, 156)

This urban world stands in stark contrast to the harmonious, Romantically-stylised rural world of some of Gogol’s Ukrainian stories; see also Casari 1997, 68. Moreover, he has produced hyperbolic, even grotesque representations of life in a provincial town – ‘Повесть о тoм, как поссорился Иван Иванович с Иваном Никифоровичем’ 6

How beautifully she sat in the window of a bright country cottage. (Transl. idem, 71) It is tempting to interpret this common feature biographically and psychologically against the background of Gogol’s childhood, in other words to treat the House Myth as a personal myth on the level of the individual psychology of the author. 8 [...] and stopped before a very large house. “I know this house,” I said to myself; “this is Zverkov’s house.” What an infernal pile! Every kind of person seems to live here: what a crowd of cooks, of town-visitors! And those of my brotherhood the clerks live like dogs, one on top of the other. (Transl. idem, 27) 7

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(‘Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich’) – and on a traditional country estate, as in ‘Старосветские помещики’ (‘Old-fashioned Landowners’) both in the collection Mirgorod, 1842. The latter presents a rural House image that is both hyperbolic and ambiguous, where an endearing old-fashioned couple, Afanasii Ivanovich and his wife Pul’kheriia Ivanovna, are living a traditional, undisturbed, rural life without haste. The narrator draws the following picture from memory: Я отсюда вижу низенький домик с галереею из маленьких почернелых деревянных столбиков, идущего вокруг всего дома, чтобы можно было во время грома и града затворить ставни окон, не замочась дождем.9 (Gogol’ 1984, Vol. 2, 7)

Food and eating constitute the most important occupation and topic of discussion in this ‘base bucolic life’ (низменную буколическую жизнь; idem, 8). The extremely hospitable landowners are compared by the narrator to Philemon and Baucis, who in Greek mythology represent the epitome of hospitality, one of the great virtues connected with the House Myth. The homely qualities of this household sometimes take on nearly grotesque proportions, as in the description of the conservation of fruit and other produce of the vegetable garden and storeroom. Pul’kheriia Ivanovna’s house is compared to ‘a chemical laboratory’ (Ее дом был совершенно похож на химическую лабораторию; 12). The rooms, in each of which a huge stove occupies almost a third of the space, are emphatically overheated. Pul’kheriia, who hardly ever leaves the house and garden, is an obsessive collector of things, regardless of their purpose, in this respect reminding us of the landowner Korobochka in Dead Souls; see below. Consequently, her room is completely filled with trunks and boxes of all sizes (Комната Пульхерии Ивановны была вся уставлена сундуками, ящиками, ящичками и сундучочками; 11), and every corner of the house is filled with balls of wool and old rags stored in and between boxes (Множество клубков с разноцветною шерстью, лоскутков старинных платьев, шитых 9

From here I see the lowly cottage with its gallery of small blackened wooden columns encircling the entire house, so that during thunder and hail one could close the shutters on the windows without getting wet from the rain.


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за полстолетие, были укладены по углам в сундучках и между сундучками; ibidem). Gogol’s narration marks and emphasises the concentricity and centripetality of the small world of these landowners, with the House as the centre of their microcosm, surrounded concentrically by, first, the gallery of columns running around the entire house, next the vegetable garden, and finally the boundary with its typical wattle fence (плетень) and palisade (частокол), but it is also embedded in the frame narrative; see Lotman 1992a, 426. Such a House, in principle, is a concrete shape of safety and protection, but at the same time it is an enclosing space, a container that in itself resembles one of Pul’kheriia’s innumerable boxes. However, as I have already observed, there is an ambiguity about this world; its order and peace are threatened, as, eventually, is life itself. On a fairly innocuous level, Afanasii likes to tease his wife by raising the possibility that the house might burn down, including the kitchen and even the storeroom. Even though Pul’kheriia Ivanovna knows he is joking, the mere thought of fire destroying their house disturbs her, and the fact that he mentions it so regularly clearly conceals a deep fear of his own. It is the one of the most deeply felt fears attached to the House Myth, also exploited by Pushkin: the fear of Losing one’s House by fire. The outside world is dangerous, and all threats to this peaceful little universe necessarily come from there, which only emphasises its closedness. Guests are urged at least to stay for the night because of the danger of robbers on the roads (неравно всякого случая: нападут разбойники или другой недобрый человек. [...] И гость непременно должен был остаться; 17). Afanasii, an army veteran, teasing his wife once more, pretends that he is thinking of going to war again, underlining the hostility of the outside world, beyond the palisade, beyond the village. In a notable episode, we learn that there is a stretch of neglected woodland behind the house that is inhabited by wild cats. These are lean, mean creatures that reputedly dig tunnels into storerooms to steal lard, and unexpectedly jump through open windows into kitchens whenever the cooks have left. Grotesque as it is, this is evidently a projection of basic fears and a concretisation of the threat from outside, combined with the overpowering motif of food, which thus gains the significance of allaying existential anxiety – eating as

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an unconscious strategy in the fight against the fear of death. Moreover, the anxiety itself is expressed here through the semiotic strategy of the implicit identification House–Body, allowing the interpretation that an invading force enters the House–Body through a tunnel or open window and raids the storeroom – the psychological equivalent of the stomach as the source and centre of life. At a certain moment, Pul’kheriia’s housecat disappears; she has been lured into the woods by the wild cats, tellingly compared to a detachment of soldiers who lie in wait to take advantage of a silly peasant girl: как отряд солдат подманивает глупую крестьянку; 21). After some time, the housecat returns, hungry and wild. Pul’kheriia entices her into the house and feeds her, but when she attempts to stroke her the animal jumps out through the window and disappears again before she can be caught. So this domestic cat returns to nature and joins the wild cats. In doing so, however, she does not simply become symbolic of the threats posed by the external world; she is also a mythical harbinger of death – from the underworld, so to speak. Pul’kheriia senses this immediately, and once the thought has crossed her mind that the return of her cat portends her death, she does indeed fall ill and die (Задумалась старушка:”Это смерть моя приходила за мной!” – сказала она сама в себе, и ничто не могло ее рассеять. 21). At her own request, she is buried near the church fence. It seems to me that Gogol’s text allows us to draw a remarkable analogy on the level of anthropological theory. In Chapter I.1, I discussed the ideas of the archaeologist Hodder concerning the process of domestication. Hodder (1990, Chapter 3) begins by arguing that domestication is about bringing ‘the wild’ under the control of what he calls the Domus. This Domus, it will be remembered, ‘provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial’ (idem, 39). In the context of Gogol’s story, Hodder’s statement that ‘despite all the variability and difficulty of definition of ‘domestication’, it seems clear that the origins of agriculture take place within a complex symbolic web that centres on the house and on death’ (idem, 36) can be seen in a new light. The story tells of the cat’s return to the wood, and its reversion to ‘the wild’. Read in terms of myth and anthropology, this implies the reversion of the Myth of Civilisation (and thereby of


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the House Myth), and if we take our interpretation just one step further, it shows that domestication itself – the emancipation of mankind from the constraints of nature – is less certain than it may appear. On the level of psychology, this finds a parallel in the conclusion that the apparent homeliness of the old couple is deceptive, concealing fundamental existential anxiety, and that their house, though an image of the House, or Domus, is in fact an insufficient protection from the forces of chaos. The narrator returns to the the old estate five years later and finds it in a sorry state of neglect: Дом мне показался вдвое старее, крестьянские избы совсем легли набок – без сомнения, так же, как и владельцы их; частокол и плетень в дворе были совсем разрушены, [...].10 (25)

Inside the house, the narrator is confronted by the disordered household of the widower. The caring hand of Pul’kheriia is clearly wanting. Afanasii has aged a great deal and become untidy, still unable to bear the loss of his wife (26). One day, in the garden, he hears someone calling his name. Seeing no-one, he concludes that it was Pul’kheriia who called him, dies and, at his own request, is buried next to her. Now the house is empty. The inheritor has completely ruined the estate together with the deserted peasants’ huts. The peasants themselves are either drunk or on the run. Thus, the story ends with the Death of the House. In Gogol’s major work Мертвые души (Dead Souls, 1842), the provincial world where Chichikov pursues his shady scheme contains perverted or distorted forms of domesticity that reveal the modal ambiguity and psychological symbolism of those spaces. The characteristics of the houses and households of the landowners whom Chichikov visits symbolically represent the characters of their owners. However, this is not simply a case of houses reflecting the temperaments of their owners; as Casari has observed, they seem to enclose them like ‘House–Boxes’ (‘casa-astuccio’; Casari 1997, 66), a metaphorical qualification that also could be extended to the old-fashioned land10

The house seemed to me twice as old, the peasant huts completely subsided on one side – just like their owners no doubt; the palisade and the wattle fence in the yard were totally ruined, [...].

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owners’ house we have just been discussing. In Casari’s analysis, the estates in Dead Souls are restricted spaces of a negative type, marked by imperfection and death;11 they enclose, envelop (she uses the term ‘casa-involucro’ (‘House–Envelope’); idem, 96) and suffocate, ultimately becoming ‘House–Coffins’ (‘casa-bara’; idem, 69). Among these estates, the case of Pliushkin is certainly special because it expands on the life story of its owner. Pliushkin had once led a settled domestic life with a hospitable wife and children. He was wealthy, and had the reputation of being rational and thrifty. After the death of his wife everything changed for the worse. His children left him; his wealth melted away, and he lost all contact with the outside world. By the time of Chichikov’s visit to him, he has degenerated into the proverbial miser who only lives to accumulate. His house is completely derelict, depressing and chaotic, as dark and cold as a cellar and full of rubbish that Pliushkin himself has brought in. The garden, though wild, stands in stark contrast to the house. Its lush and picturesque neglect is described with relish, stressing the opposition between the vitality of nature and the death of this erstwhile Domus. It is worth noting that Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel about the fall of the family Golovliov (Pavlova 1999; see Chapter II 15) was strongly influenced by this story of the fall of Pliushkin and his House. Chichikov himself is the prototypical ‘hero of the road’. He therefore has no house, but his coach and his remarkable travelling case fulfil a comparable role. The compartments of this case can be compared to rooms, and the coach and the case both function as temporary ‘House–Boxes’ of sorts. The motive behind all of Chichikov’s machinations is his goal of acquiring the financial independence that will enable him to buy an estate and found a real, durable Domus of his own (the first of the House Myth fabular motifs), and thus to escape the not-quite-real existence of a Gogolian hero. The rogue Khlestakov in Ревизор (The Inspector General; 1836) is also a hero of the road, the homeless product of deception and false appearance. Ultimately, Gogol’s oeuvre refers to or invokes the House Myth as an ideal projection but, through the sujet texts, only realises its hy11

See Singleton 1997, 54 on the function of the narrator’s homelessness as providing a dominant moral (axiological) point of view: From this superior vantage point of homelessness the narrator purports to expose the moral degeneration that lies at the root of domesticity in Dead Souls.


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perbolic exaggeration, failure or even antithesis. Gogol’s ambiguous attitude toward the domestic sphere has been noted before. The moral structure of space, particularly of the endless Road to moral perfection, is central to his imagery and symbolism (Lotman 1992a, esp. 446). This is particularly obvious in his poetics of the endlessness and boundlessness of Russia that is exemplified in Dead Souls and particularly in the well-known apostrophe to Russia at the end. In terms of domesticity, this is expressed in the idea of Houselessness/Homelessness as an essentially moral position of the author and of his heroes. Gogol’, the author of Dead Souls as the planned but failed trilogy delineating Russia’s spiritual destination, can be seen as aspiring to a spiritual homecoming in which a purified (and essentially Slavophile) Russia is the Home. As Singleton makes clear (Singleton 1997, 3, 65 in particular), he saw this symbolic process of home-coming as the primary task of Russian writers in general.

10. The House Myth Between the Natural School and Realism. From the City to the Countryside Russian nineteenth-century prose, from its Romantic origins to Realism via the Natural School, witnesses a clear development in its literary world-models. The Romantic model was characterised by its bias towards the individual and unique. The Natural School, with its physiological (and deterministic) approach, antithetically, and rigorously, stressed the typical and processual, avoiding the individual and idiosyncratic. Realism aimed at a synthesis (or causal relationship) between the generic or typical and the individual, thereby allowing multiple perspectives. In parallel with these features of Russian prose in the first half of the nineteenth century, a broad tendency can be discerned that relates to our topic – a shift away from urbanism and towards ruralism; see the Slavophile debate above. Prose, particularly of the Natural School, developed on the basis of urban settings and thematics. That changed with the novels of such authors as S. T. Aksakov, Turgenev, Goncharov and Saltykov-Shchedrin. In most of their works, it is the rural estate world that occupies the central position. The most representative label for this type of House – ‘Nest of the Gentry’ – was provided by the title of Turgenev’s novel Дворянское гнездо (A Nest of the Landed Gentry). Its importance in Russian cultural and literary history can hardly be exaggerated. In Chapter I.4, I provided a basic classification of fabular motifs connected with the narrative expansion of the House Myth that we might briefly summarise here as building, moving to, leaving, returning to and losing Houses. These motifs are all represented in the literature of this period.

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The foundation of a Domus is a topic of the autobiographical A Family Chronicle (Семейная хроника), published between 1846 and 1856 by S. T. Aksakov, the father of the two Slavophile brothers. This work, as well as its sequel The Childhood of the Bagrov Grandson (Детские годы Багрова внука), is a charming and affectionate story of the old, patriarchal way of life and is unique for that reason. It clearly did not follow the fashion of the day as advocated by Belinskii. As a Realist story teller, Aksakov, who made his authorial debut in 1834, met with great success among fellow writers, including Pushkin, Gogol’, Turgenev, and Tolstoi. The family chronicle opens with the story of his grandfather’s decision to move east, buy land in the still sparsely inhabited Bashkir steppe and set up a new estate together with his serfs. The founding of a new estate there involved the opening up and development of new ground and the new establishment of the traditional, sedentary Russian culture of the landed gentry. This process is described vividly and with great gusto by the narratorgrandson in the ‘First Fragment’ (‘Первый отрывок’; Aksakov 1982) of the chronicle, subtitled ‘Stepan Mikhailovich Bagrov. The Move’ (‘Степан Михайлович Багров. Переселение’). This aptly and iconically combines the opening of the narrative, the introduction of the grandfather as a progenitor of the dynasty and the founding phase of the House Myth. It also confirms the genuine task of the chronicle as a narrative genre: telling how ‘things came to be’ – with the Primary Chronicle (Повесть временных лет) as its prototype of course. In the first sentence we learn that Grandfather Stepan Mikhailovich’s reason for moving was his feeling that life in the Simbirsk province had become ‘tight’ (Тесно стало моему дедушке жить в Симбирской губернии; 22), the ownership of the land having been divided as a result of recent marriages (отчина, [...] сделалась разнопоместной). So Stepan Mikhailovich, a whimsical and wilful nobleman, left the ancestral patrimony that had been granted to his forefathers by the Tsars of Muscovy. Aksakov stresses the dynastic element of long-standing and respectable continuity by using the old term rodovaia otchina (or votchina), which in Muscovite Russia meant ‘inherited estate, lands’, ‘allodium’, ‘patrimony’, as opposed to pomest’e, which would indicate that the land had been given personally for services rendered to the Tsar. This is followed by a portrait of his grandfather, the circumstances in which he acquired his new es-

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tate, the tillage of the land, the settlement of the peasants, the first crops, the good and generous relations with neighbours and other newcomers, the damming of the river and construction of the new mill as a common enterprise and so on. It is remarkable that, in this phase of the story, no mention is made of the construction or layout of the new manor house, the gospodskii dom, though the fact that the peasants built new huts is mentioned. It may be that the house was not very different from the peasants’ huts, as we are led to suppose later on when the barin’s life is sketched in its full, pioneering simplicity. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that the choice of topics in this part of the story betrays a house concept not far removed from the one discussed earlier in connection with the Slavophiles’ ‘Nest’; that is, the House, or Domus, as a social and ethical concept whose material aspect is only secondary; see Shchukin 1994. Another interesting passage shows old Bagrov’s preoccupation with the dynastic aspect of his House. Setting out on his own to look for a new estate, Bagrov blesses his family but especially his only son because, as he says, ‘What’s the use of daughters? They don’t look into the house, but out of the house. Today they are Bagrovs, but tomorrow Shlygins, Malygins, Popovs, or Kolpakovs. My only hope is Aleksei’ (‘Что в них проку! Ведь глядят они не в дом, а из дому. Сегодня Багровы, а завтра Шлыгины, Малыгины, Поповы, Колпаковы. Одна моя надежда – Алексей’; Aksakov 1982, 24). The concrete image of daughters ‘looking out of the house’ – leaving the parental Home and moving to another House by marriage; see the fabular inventory of the House Myth in Chapter I.4 – has the expressive and idiomatic ring of folklore about it. It is also as succinct a definition of exogamy as one could hope for. Aksakov’s chronicle concerns the founding of a New House – a new Nest of the Gentry. It occupies an interesting position in nineteenth-century Russian literature precisely because, even though the house it deals with is an old house in the sense of family or dynasty, it shows a beginning on new ground, whereas the novels of the estate world are usually set in old, central Russia and demonstrate, at least implicitly, the continuity and cyclicity of the House Myth. As I remarked in Chapter I.4, the cyclic routine and order, and the succession of generations that make up the House Myth, can be disrupted by catastrophic or fatal plot developments, especially where a family dis-

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integrates or dies out, bringing their house to an end – the Death of the House. The most impressive example is probably Saltykov Shchedrin’s novel The Golovliov Family (Господа Головлевы, 1875-1880). Bunin’s work, though of a much later date, is also special from this perspective in that he describes estates in their ‘moribund’ phase, and sometimes even after their physical death when they have become ruins. I shall be dealing with the work of these authors later; for the moment it suffices to say that these examples are literary realisations of the basic fabular motifs of the House Myth: building, moving to, leaving, returning to and losing the House.

11. The Russian Estate. The Domus Myth and the ‘Nests of the Gentry’ The Russian usad’ba, the nineteenth-century estate world and its culture, provided Russian authors with a concrete setting and thematics that inspired them to create an exceptionally rich body of classical literature, beginning, as we have seen, with Pushkin.1 There can be no doubt that its inspiring power also has a great deal to do with the veritable Domus archetype that underlies it. For its reflection in literature, the work of Vasilii Shchukin, especially his cultural and historical monograph Mif dvorianskogo gnezda: Geokul’turologicheskoe issledovanie po russkoi klassicheskoi literature (The Myth of the Nest of the Gentry: A Geoculturological Study of Classical Russian Literature; Shchukin 1997) is of central importance. Another rich, comprehensive study of the role and reception of the ‘Estate Myth’ in cultural, literary and theatrical history was written by Ekaterina Dmitrieva and Olga Kuptsova under the title Жизнь усадебного мифа: утраченный и обретенный рай (The Life of the Estate Myth: a Paradise Lost and Regained; Dmitrieva and Kuptsova 2003). In the next five chapters, I shall analyse a number of representative works from this tradition in terms of the House Myth. In the period of Realism, the usad’ba, or rural estate, was the characteristic literary type of House. It is the dominant spatial and diachronic dynastic setting in works by authors such as Turgenev, Gon1

Dmitrieva and Kuptsova observe that the estate as such was already present in eighteenth-century Russian literature in connection with the topos of estate love (усадебная любовь), presented either in highly stylised, innocent, bucolic forms or as family or conjugal love enjoyed in blissful rural harmony, as in Derzhavin’s famous ‘Евгению. Жизнь званская’ (To Evgenii. Life at Zvansk); see Dmitrieva and Kuptsova 2003, 121.

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charov, Saltykov-Shchedrin and even Tolstoi. Bunin will also be analysed and discussed, in particular for his treatment of the vanishing old estate world. His work clearly marks the end of the tradition of its literary depiction – the Death of the Domus – although the decline and death of estates can also be found in work of his predecessors, albeit from different, less-definitive historical perspectives. The birth of the estate as a Domus is one of the basic fabular motifs in the House Myth. Remarkably, however, it is less well represented in the estate novel of the Realist period. In fact the most prominent example that we have is almost certainly Aksakov’s autobiographical Семейная хроника (A Family Chronicle, 1846-1856), whose central concern is the foundation of new estate and Domus tradition; see the detailed discussion of this work in Chapter II.10. It is significant that this literature is not only about the life of the Domus; the decline of houses is also an important and recurring topos in Russian rural literature. In the dynastic sense, we find this in Господа Головлевы (The Golovliov Family) by Saltykov-Shchedrin (see Chapter II.14), Turgenev’s ‘Чертопханов и Недопюскин’ (‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopiuskin’) and its sequel ‘Конец Чертопханова’ (‘The End of Chertopkhanov’), which will be discussed further in Chapter II.12, and Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, where the estate is sold to be demolished and replaced by dachas. However, the estate as a literary image and as an emotional and moral ‘frame’ (see Chapters I.4, II.11 and II.13) has proven itself to be more vital than the socio-historical reality that generated it. In later chapters, I shall discuss the remarkable ‘afterlife’ of the literary estate and its underlying Domus concept; see the chapters on Chekhov, Pil’niak and Sorokin, below. The literary world-picture behind the genre of the classical estate novel is founded on the all encompassing form of House Myth, to which we have also applied the term Domus. This means that the House concept as a whole, through its topological, temporal, orientational and axiological (evaluative and moral) characteristics, determines the world-picture of this genre. The settings and conflicts of the estate novel are defined by their internal normative orientation towards the world; that is, by the implicit axiological system that is inherent in the Domus concept. (In Chapter I.4, I used the phrase ‘spatio-evaluative orientation’ to signify the same function; see also I.1.)

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In his book on Goncharov and his work, Milton Ehre charаcterises the estate of Malinovka, in the novel Обрыв (The Precipice), as ‘the novel’s moral frame of reference’, and the estates of Oblomovka and Grachi in his two other novels as ‘a repository of traditional values and an idyllic community – the explicit ‘Eden’ of his novel’ (Ehre 1973, 242). In the latter two cases, Ehre’s mention of the the idyllic, or utopian, nature of these literary House images is highly appropriate. It indicates their psychological and emotional quality as a gestalt, which complies with the psychopoetic potential of the House as described particularly in Chapter II.3. The estate topos of Russian Realism draws out a profound and intricate connection between the thematic levels of narration and the world-picture. Its world-picture is ultimately the construction of an all-encompassing metonymy of a way of life. The estate setting, with its internal orientation, is the overall organising principle of the narrative world, its material and its conflicts. Here lies a typological difference between rural and urban Realist narrative worlds: in the latter, no clear-cut, dominant orientation is incorporated in the world-picture. In the last chapter, on the Natural School, the urban–rural opposition was discussed as a crucial aspect of the literary development towards Realism. It implied more than just a shift of setting: it was accompanied by the change of world-picture we have just sketched. Indeed, rurality became the dominant orientation in Realism, and it is striking how often the conflict between countryside and city becomes topical in the works of Goncharov, for example, succinctly characterised in this regard by Milton Ehre: ‘A Common Story told of Alexander Aduev’s journey to make his way in the great city of Petersburg; Oblomov recounted its hero’s failure to adjust to urban life; The Precipice picks up the story with Boris Raiskii’s flight home from the city to his ancestral estate, Malinovka’ (Ehre 1973, 233). The estate world in Russian literature is based upon a Domus concept that, in accordance with the House Myth, carries implications of life itself. As such it can be an ideal, the image of a world-picture and order of things, and the point of departure for plots.2 As far as plots 2

It could be argued that any novelistic world (at least in Realism) implicitly departs from such a basis, but in my opinion the specific coherence between the world-picture and the internal normative orientation of the estate novel as described here sets it apart as a genre.

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are concerned, it is rarely more than a point of departure, though it is sometimes also the point of return – ‘after the plot’, so to speak – when order is reinstated, a new, comparable order is established or an estate owner re-enters his estate world, for example after a military career. The latter is a very typical plot; see Van Baak 1983b. If there is no such return, then we either witness or infer the Death of the House, with or without the death of the hero, for whom this may simply be a reorientation, a relocation or a change of course. Even then, the estate world can be presented as something continuous or timeless, as in the strange, symbolic image of the Malinovka estate at the end of Goncharov’s novel Обрыв (The Precipice); see Chapter II.13. The position of the serf, whether as peasant or houseservant, was a special one – a specifically Russian aspect of these novelistic worlds. They were almost literally part of the property, dependent, unable to leave of their own free will and inseparable from the world of the estate and the house. Owing to the inertia of patriarchal relations, very little seems to have changed in their situation even after the abolition of serfdom. Their position and role in the space of the estate world was a natural and inherent part of that world, the only exceptions being where ‘souls’ (as in Gogol’s Dead Souls) or run-away serfs and related conflicts were thematised in literature. Turgenev’s prose debut, the Записки охотника (Notes of a Hunter), achieved this by elevating peasants beyond their metonymic position as mere elements of the estate setting and granting them the status of protagonists and individual characters. One particular illustration of the serf’s situation is provided by a text in which serfdom is already a thing of the past and the estate world breathing its last: in Chekhov’s comedy The Cherry Orchard, the old manservant Firs, a former serf, has refused to accept his freedom and therefore become part of the furniture of the estate that is put up for auction: an interesting case of realised metonymy. The estate novel was also an important forum of debate between the Slavophiles and Zapadniki, or ‘Westernisers’. The background to this debate, and indeed to the estate novels in their entirety, was formed by the factual diversity of social reality. There were estates that continued according to conservative patriarchical rules and practices, and there were landowners who tried to modernise, rationalise their management and adapt their way of life to the demands of new innovations. Shchukin distinguishes between these two opposed ways


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of life as ‘evropeiskii’ (European) versus ‘pochvennyi’ (of the soil). He draws examples from two novels by Goncharov to illustrate this opposition: the Slavophile estates of Grachi (in: Обыкновенная история, A Common Story) and Oblomovka (in Oblomov), and the ‘European’ houses of Petr Aduev and Stolz in the same novels respectively; see Shchukin 1996b, 1997, and Chapter I.2. The authors engaged in these debates were born and raised on estates, but their experiences were often very different and not always positive. As I pointed out in the chapter on the Slavophiles (II.6), the Domus concept as a utopian ideal was central to Slavophile philosophy as formulated by its major theoreticians K. S. and I. S. Aksakov, I. V. and P. V. Kireevskii, and A. S. Khomiakov. Slavophiles such as the Aksakovs (father and sons) and the Kireevskii brothers meticulously documented their lives on the estates of their childhood. Not all of these estates were equally pleasant and warm, and Westernisers such as Herzen, Granovskii, and Bakunin did not retain such sweet memories of the ‘nests’ they were born in. The Slavophile ideologues even took their rural way of life to Moscow with them and saw it as something natural, ‘organic’and ‘simple’ (a high estimation in Russian terms). But change, however gradual, was the dominant tendency, and as early as the eighteen forties Slavophile households were being seen as odd and anachronistic (idem, 115-6). In this literature, the protagonists would be non-peasants whose outlook and orientation would, by birth and upbringing, be interior to the domestic world of the estate.3 This means that the estate provides the internal normative world orientation for those who belong to its milieu, or marry into another, typologically equivalent Domus setting. In such novels, the conflict is typically triggered by the arrival of an outsider, who may be the cause of a breach in the heroes’ or heroines’ attitudes towards this internal normative orientation towards the world, as is Insarov in relation to Elena in Turgenev’s На кануне (On the Eve).

3

The world-picture of the peasants would be inseparably linked with that of the estate world but not ‘interior’ in the same sense. It would be incommensurable with its orientation and distinctions. It is not voiced in this body of literature other than when mediated through authors such as Turgenev, who confessed that he did not understand the Russian muzhik at all; see Chapter II.12.

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There is another category of heroes whose relationship with the estate world is often problematic. They are neither peasants nor servants but occupy unique peripheral positions in that world. Among them are the numerous unsuccessful guests who somehow fail to establish themselves in society and thus remain outcasts from the estate world, though sometimes accepting, or abusing, its charity. For their various reasons, they are unable to acquire, or have lost, the abovementioned internal normative world orientation. In this broad group, we can place a variety of types, some belonging to that famous Russian socio-literary category of ‘superfluous men’. They often have dubious, unclear motives for aspiring to better their station in life, as does Chichikov in Gogol’s Мертвые души (Dead Souls) and the impostor Khlestakov in his play Ревизор (The Inspector General). They can be complete scroungers or parasites such as Kuzovkin in Turgenev’s play Нахлебник (The Scrounger) and Foma Fomich in Dostoevskii’s Село Степанчиково и его обитатели (The Village Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants). They also include raznochinets and nihilists such as the prototypical Bazarov in Turgenev’s Отцы и дети (Fathers and Sons) and Mark Volokhov in Goncharov’s Обрыв (The Precipice), who is described as ‘homeless’, ‘without a ‘nest’, a hearth, property,’ and finally ‘outside of life’. (Ehre 1973, 243).4 The heroine Vera, in the same novel, is an especially illustrative case. For some time, she rebels against the traditional way of life and morals of her class, yielding to Volokhov’s seduction. She has her own room in an abandoned house on the estate; that is, she is peripheral to the life of the great Domus. By the end of the novel, however, she will have returned to the centre of it; see Chapter II.13 below. Other examples include humble dependants such as teachers, who are often also foreigners; like Lemm, the German music teacher in Turgenev’s A Nest of the Landed Gentry, they are typically pitiful figures. The eponymous hero of his novel Rudin also becomes a member of this category: initially an outsider, he fails as a lover and thereby fails to acquire an internal normative orientation towards the estate world, and so he flees.

4

Goncharov’s spatial phrase ‘outside of life’ is particularly interesting in view of our concept of ‘internal normative orientation towards the world’; it ideologises the authorial view point.


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Despite their enormous variety in character, education, and social origin, what they have in common is the fact that, temporarily or otherwise, they are outsiders in relation to the estate worlds of their respective novels. This is an abstract but significant characteristic which arises from plot structure and sujet in general: there is no plot that does not involve the crossing of a border – whether spatial, moral or both – by at least one of its protagonists. In the case of the estate novel, with its dominant world-picture, this will often be realised in the arrival of a visitor from outside. Thus, the Russian country estate, as the embodiment of the Domus concept and the House Myth, was to become the central icon of nineteenth-century Russian culture in literature for generations of readers, providing a comprehensive image of a way of life that had fundamentally positive connotations. It became and remained a topos of national identification that could be seen in concrete, stereotypical spatial representations. The Russian reader has always had a perfectly clear idea of what the ‘real family nest’ (настоящее родовое гнездо) looked like, as the definition of the ‘archetypal’ usad’ba in the Moscow area provided by the memoirist and critic P.P. Percov in 1924 makes clear: Она не роскошная, а ‘скромная’, приближающаяся к общему типу русских усадеб; построена в стиле позднего классицизма (ампира); окружена симметрично расположенными по обеим сторонам флигелями и далее – липовым парком (‘настоящая тургеневская роща’).5 (Quoted from Shchukin 1997, 121)

5

It was not luxurious, but ‘modest’, an ordinary Russian country estate more-or-less; built in late-classical style (empire); with symmetrically arranged wings and, beyond, a lime tree park (‘a genuine Turgenevan grove’).

12. Turgenev and the Domus This chapter is devoted to Turgenev’s depiction of the estate world and the psychopoetics of his House imagery. In my discussion of these topics I shall deal primarily with the story ‘Raspberry Water’ (‘Малиновая вода’) and some other stories from his prose debut Notes of a Hunter (Записки охотника, 1852), and secondarily with his second novel A Nest of the Landed Gentry (Дворянское гнездо, 1859). Between the stories and the novel there are considerable differences with regard to the stylistics and mythopoetics of the House and the Domus. In the stories from Notes of a Hunter, as the analysis will show, Turgenev’s style is very pronounced when he treats the topos of the estate world and its Domus meanings, whereas in the novel this same setting and milieu is stylistically far less marked. I think this arises from difference in narrative perspective and between the social positions of the protagonists: in Notes of a Hunter, the narrator is a fascinated observer of serfs and their world; in the novel he is dealing less objectively with his own class and way of life. Turgenev’s poetics of the House in Notes of a Hunter give cause for some far reaching cultural considerations. ‘Raspberry Water’ (‘Малиновая вода’) is a combination of framed stories in which the narrator describes his meetings with two serfs and one former serf. These meetings motivate him to portray them against the background of their world. The title ‘Малиновая вода’ (‘Raspberry Water’) refers to the place where a spring issues from a gully in a river bank and its fresh water flows into the river Ista. This is the place where the narrator meets the main characters, who are fishing. They are two old men whom he recognises as the eccentric Stiopushka, and Mikhailo Savelyev, nicknamed Tuman. As we learn during the course of the story, each of them occupies a specific,

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untypical position in their world. Tuman is an emancipated house-serf, now living under the roof of an innkeeper, while a gardener allows Stiopushka to live in his kitchen-garden under conditions more suited to an animal than a human being. He is ignored by everybody and afforded even less respect than a serf. A third character, Vlas, who epitomises the utter misery and hardship of serfdom, is introduced later in the story, but not until the portraits of Stiopushka and Tuman have been fully developed. The development of their characters comprises most of the text, so that the introduction of Vlas is rendered part of the framing structure of the story. Their life stories are mostly set in the past and evoke the memory of the old estate world back to preNapoleonic times, which has determined their lives and of which they are almost the only representatives left. Significantly, the narrator begins Stiopushka’s portrait by spatially reconstructing the usad’ba world of the one-time estate of Shumikhino, near the present village of that name: Напротив этой церкви некогда красовались обширные господские хоромы, окруженные разными пристройками, службами, мастерскими, конюшнями, грунтовыми и каретными сараями, банями и временными кухнями, флигелями для гостей и для управляющих, цветочными оранжереями, качелями для народа и другими, более или менее полезными, зданиями. В этих хоромах жили богатые помещики, и всё у них шло своим порядком, как вдруг, в одно прекрасное утро, вся эта благодать сгорела дотла. Господа перебрались в другое гнездо; усадьба запустела.1 (Turgenev 1975, 31)

This paragraph briefly depicts the original Russian usad’ba world in some of its essential cultural features and manifestations in time, as a living historical presence that was subject to the changes of history and the alterations, to houses and their inhabitants alike, of successive 1

Opposite this church there once stood an impressive, spacious manor, surrounded by various annexes, outbuildings, workshops, stables, coach-houses, bathhouses and temporary kitchens, wings for guests and stewards, hothouses, swings for the people and other, more or less useful buildings. In this mansion lived rich landowners, and things took their regular course until, suddenly one fine morning, all this abundance was burnt to the ground. The masters moved to another nest; the estate fell into neglect.

Turgenev and the Domus

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generations. It is indeed presented as a living organism, for it can die, but it can also be reborn, as is implied by the end of the extract. The possibility of rebirth in turn indicates the characteristic cyclicity of myth. An interesting parallel can be found in the opening of another story from Notes of a Hunter, ‘My Neighbour Radilov’ (‘Мой сосед Радилов’). Here, the remnants of old estates are evaluated, first from the point of view of the hunter: ...Осенью вальдшнепы часто держатся в старинных липовых садах. Таких садов у нас в Орловской губернии довольно много. Прадеды наши, при выборе места для жительства, непременно отбивали десятины две хорошей земли под фруктовый сад с липовыми аллеями. Лет через пятьдесят, много семьдесят, эти усадьбы, ‘дворянские гнезда’, понемногу исчезали с лица земли, дома сгнивали или продавались на своз, каменные службы превращались в груды развалин, яблони вымирали и шли на дрова, заборы и плетни истреблялись. Одни липы по-прежнему росли себе на славу и теперь, окруженные распаханными полями, гласят нашему ветреному племени о ‘прежде почивших отцах и братиях’.2 (48)

It is striking and seemingly paradoxical that in this example, even more than in the passage from ‘Raspberry Water’, the ephemeral nature of the nests of the gentry should be stressed so emphatically.3 This can be interpreted against the background of Turgenev’s poetics of nature and culture, as well as in the wider context of his philosophy 2

… In autumn the woodcocks often stay in ancient lime tree gardens. Such gardens are fairly common in our Orlov province. Our great-grandfathers, when they chose a place to live, would unfailingly have marked out approximately two desiatins [tithes] of good land for fruit trees and lime tree alleys. After fifty years or so, seventy at most, these country estates, these ‘nests of the gentry’, would gradually vanish from the face of the earth. The houses would rot away or be sold for demolition, the brick outbuildings would be reduced to heaps of debris, the apple trees would die or be cut down for firewood, fences and hurdles would be destroyed. Only the lime trees would grow on wonderfully well as before, and now, surrounded by ploughed fields, they speak to us, the empty-headed tribe, about the ‘fathers and brethren who passed away before us’. 3 Dmitrieva and Kuptsova 2003, 181-4 discuss the phenomenon of ‘old’ estate houses actually not being very old in connection with, among others, Turgenev’s story ‘Параша’ (‘Parasha’).

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of life. A clue might be found in the continuation of the same paragraph: Прекрасное дерево — такая старая липа... Ее щадит даже безжалостный топор русского мужика. Лист на ней мелкий, могучие сучья широко раскинулись во все стороны, вечная тень под ними.4 (‘My Neighbour Radilov’, 48)

Apart from the image and role of the Russian peasant, the lime tree is evidently the central topic here. It metonymically represents the cultural tradition of the estates and at the same time symbolises the permanence of nature, for example in the contrast between its ‘eternal shade’ and the preceding ironic reference to ‘us, the empty-headed tribe’ and the ‘fathers and brethren that passed away before’. Moreover, there is another old element here that is closely related to the House Myth – the garden. Like the concept of the house, the garden also lies at the foundation of human culture; see Tsiv’ian 1983. It is the shape and space of domesticated nature, and thus connects the domestic and the wild in human existence.5 An archaic related image is that of Paradise, a ‘garden word and concept with very old IndoEuropean and cultural roots’.6 The most relevant of these connotations, in this context, is the idea of the enduring harmony between nature and man, implying the absence of any opposition between culture and nature. The concept of a garden implies a man-made space and order. This is also reflected in the etymology of the Russian words for ‘garden’ and ‘estate’ – sad and usad’ba – both derived from roots referring to a complex of meanings including ‘tree’, ‘plant’, ‘grove’, ‘garden’, ‘planting’ and ‘sowing’, ‘to sit down’, ‘to settle down’, ‘to set up house’ (Russian ‘сесть/садиться’ (‘to sit down’), as well as ‘село’ 4

Such an old lime tree is a beautiful tree… It is even spared by the merciless axe of the Russian muzhik. Its leaves are fine; its mighty boughs spread out wide in all directions, and under those boughs there is eternal shade. 5 The same impliciation is inherent in the metaphor of the ‘nest’; see Shchukin 1997. See also Chapter I.1 on Hodder 1989, concerning the origin of the house – or rather of domestication – as bringing nature under the control of culture. 6 See Wikipedia: The word ‘paradise’ is derived from the Avestan word pairidaeza (a walled enclosure), which is a compound of pairi- (around), a cognate of the Greek peri-, and -diz (to create, make), a cognate of the English dough. An associated word is the Sanskrit word paradesha, which literally means supreme country.


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(‘village’), ‘селение’ (‘settlement’), ‘(по)селить(ся)’ (‘to settle down’); see also Chapter I.1). As we have seen, the narrator of ‘Raspberry Water’ prepared the ground for Stiopushka’s portrait by providing a short history of the old estate. After the fire, the owners had moved to another ‘nest’, the old estate was abandoned, but the site of the burnt down house7 was turned into a vegetable garden. From whatever building materials were left after the fire, a simple hut (an izbionka, not an izba) was built, and a peasant, Mitrofan was housed there with his wife Aksinia and their seven children. Mitrofan had to grow vegetables, and Aksinia had to look after a cow and a duck: Обширное пепелище превратилось в огород, кое-где загроможденный грудами кирпичей, остатками прежних фундаментов. Из уцелевших бревен на скорую руку сколотили избенку, покрыли ее барочным тесом, купленным лет за десять для построения павильона на готический манер, и поселили в ней садовника Митрофана с женой Аксиньей и семью детьми. Митрофану приказали поставлять на господский стол, за полтораста верст, зелень и овощи; Аксинье поручили надзор за тирольской коровой, купленной в Москве за большие деньги, но, к сожалению, лишенной всякой способности воспроизведения и потому со времени приобретения не дававшей молока; ей же на руки отдали хохлатого дымчатого селезня, единственную ‘господскую’ птицу; детям, по причине малолетства, не определили никаких должностей, что, впрочем, нисколько не помешало им совершенно облениться. У этого садовника мне случилось раза два переночевать; мимоходом забирал я у него огурцы, которые, бог ведает почему, даже летом отличались величиной, дрянным водянистым вкусом и толстой желтой кожей. У негото увидал я впервые Степушку.8 (31) 7

The Russian word used here, pepelishche, means both ‘site of fire’, and ‘hearth and home’ – an interesting lexical ironic twist of the House Myth and its thematics; see below. 8 The huge site of the fire was converted into a vegetable garden, in places encumbered with heaps of brick – the remnants of the former foundations. From beams that had escaped the fire a miserable hut was hastily thrown together. They roofed it with boards from an old barge that had been bought some ten years earlier for the construction of a pavilion in the Gothic fashion, and they housed Mitrofan in it, together with his wife Aksinia and their seven children. Mitrofan was ordered to supply vegetables

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This is not a normal garden, let alone a reflection of Paradise. It is a mockery of the pastorale. It is against the background of this grotesque setting that the portrait of Stiopushka is presented. It is a sketch of his life on the old Shumikhino estate before and after the fire. In this type of literary world, we expect to find metonymic relations throughout the texts between the characters of the heroes and their environment, and in tune with the demands of Realism, and the Natural School for that matter, the narrator does indeed proceed with a sociological consideration of man’s relationship with his surroundings, though only to conclude that Stiopushka’s position was different from the norm on all accounts. He is a man without a past, without a social or economic position and without family ties, though in the latter respect it is alleged that his mother was Turkish. He is ignored by everybody, and he in turn avoids all forms of communication with those around him. Although living on the estate, or rather on its periphery, he is in fact homeless. He sleeps in sheds or haystacks and occupies his waking hours in the search for food, like a wild animal. In short, his very existence is the total denial of all that makes up the social life of the human individual. This is even more striking because, far from taking place in the anonymous urban setting often associated with the popular genre of the so-called ‘poor-clerk-tale’ of the eighteen-forties, it occurs in the traditional, patriarchal world of the rural estate, where the social fabric of interdependence was held to be the strong and prominent feature, so much so that it also played a central role in contemporary Slavophile doctrine. But the metonymic relations are also developed in the context of the kitchen garden that took the place of the burnt down estate. In the passage just quoted, the garden topos is given strong ironic and grotesque accents. For the creation of the garden, remnants of the old esand fruit for the manorial table, 150 verst away; Aksinia was entrusted with the care of a Tyrolean cow that had been bought in Moscow for a lot of money but, regrettably, lacked all ability for reproduction and hence never gave any milk from the day she was purchased; Aksinia was also in charge of a tufted, smoke-coloured drake, the only surviving ‘manorial’ bird; the children, because they were so young, were assigned no tasks, which, however, did not prevent their becoming complete layabouts. I happened to spend the night at this gardener’s hut a couple of times; in passing I used to pick some of his cucumbers, which, God knows why, were exceptionally big even in summer but had a worthless watery taste and a thick yellow skin. It was there that I first saw Stiopushka.


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tate are recycled in a comically inappropriate fashion. The pastoral world of Mitrofan’s wife Aksinia is an absurd caricature, and Mitrofan’s gardening is no better if his cucumbers are anything to go by. On top of that, he is expected to deliver his produce to his master’s new house, 150 verst away, which is approximately a hundred miles! This is about the same level of absurdity that we find in the story ‘Льгов’ (‘Lgov’, also from the Notes of a Hunter) in which a serf nicknamed Suchok, having served unsuccessfully in a great number of functions in his master’s household, is eventually given the responsibility of ‘manorial fisher’, responsible for a river and pond without any fish in them. What these situations have in common is the fact that they deny a quality that is fundamental to the ideal concept of the Domus: a sensible order of inherently justified cultural purposes and routines that are beyond doubt. This very idea of ‘order-of-life, order-of-things’ is made prominent in the narrator’s short introduction to Stiopushka’s portrait: В этих хоромах жили богатые помещики, и всё у них шло своим порядком, как вдруг, в одно прекрасное утро, вся эта благодать сгорела дотла (In this mansion lived rich landowners, and things took their regular course until, suddenly one fine morning, all this abundance was burnt to the ground). In the life stories of these serfs, such an order-of-things is fundamentally undermined, made a mockery of, by the ‘bricolaged’ disorder which forms the world of Stiopushka, Mitrofan, and Aksinia. I shall return to the concept of bricolage a little later in this chapter. What we see here is the idea of the original estate as a reflection of the House Myth present, as it were, in its negation. The vegetable garden of Mitrofan and Aksinia can also be interpreted as an ironically and grotesquely deconstructed metaphor for the Russian estate world and its mythical contours. This ‘shade of the House’ also becomes manifest, though in a different way, in the second life story – that of the former house serf (dvorovyi) Tuman – as it is told by himself to the narrator. The estate house itself, as a building where he used to live, is a shade – or perhaps rather a corpse – of the past. All that is left of it is a gloomy ruin with boarded-up windows and the roof caved in: Проезжающие по большой орловской дороге [...] люди [...] до сих пор могут заметить в недальнем расстоянии от большого

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села Троицкого огромный деревянный дом в два этажа, совершенно заброшенный, с провалившейся крышей и наглухо забитыми окнами, выдвинутый на самую дорогу. В полдень, в ясную, солнечную погоду, ничего нельзя вообразить печальнее этой развалины.9 (33; the words are those of the narrator)

Tuman’s late master, Count Petr Ilyich ***, described by the narrator as a ‘famously rich and hospitable grandee of the old days’ (Петр Ильич, известный хлебосол, богатый вельможа старого века), had lived here until he had squandered all his riches and then left for Moscow, where he died in a hotel room. The idea of the House is also warped, as it were, in Tuman’s colloquial narrative. It is both idealised and caricaturised in retrospect. The very aspect of ‘order-of-things, order-of-life’ is stressed in Tuman’s account of life on the old estate, but represented in an ironic and stylised manner through the limitations of his own awareness and his colloquial manner of speaking. For example, the subject of keeping dogs and hunting gives him occasion to tell about the way in which the nobility used to live. In the following extract, expressions indicating order, rule, the proper way of doing things, decorum and etiquette are most prominent: Туман улыбнулся и покачал головой. - Оно точно: иной до собак охотник, а иному их даром не нужно. Я так думаю, по простому моему разуму: собак больше для важности, так сказать, держать следует... И чтобы всё уж и было в порядке: и лошади чтоб были в порядке, и псари как следует, в порядке, и всё. Покойный граф — царство ему небесное! — охотником отродясь, признаться, не бывал, а собак держал и раза два в год выезжать изволил. [...] Стремянный-то за графом поедет, а сам на шелковой сворке двух любимых барских собачек держит и этак наблюдает, знаете.[...] Ну, и гости, разумеется, при этом случае бывают. И забава, и почет соблюден...10 (35) 9

People traveling on the road to Oriol [...] can observe to this day, not far from the big village of Troitskoe, a huge two-storeyed house, completely deserted, with the roof caved-in and windows boarded up tightly, facing directly on to the road. On a clear, sunny midday one cannot imagine anything sadder than these ruins. 10 Tuman smiled and nodded. – That’s true: some love dogs; others couldn’t care less. I simply think this: one should keep dogs more for distinction, so to say… And everything should be in perfect order: and the horses should be all right, and the huntsmen with their dogs as they should be, in order, and everything. The late Count – God rest


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In the same vein and tone, Tuman tells of the luxurious, festive life of the nobility, and of their capriciousness, of which serfs were the main victims – for example when male serfs were recruited into the army in punishment for minor offences. Tuman views all of this as part of the same natural order of things, life as it had been at the estate house, and would still be but for the mistresses who had eventually ruined his master and thus put an end to this manorial order. In Tuman’s opinion, this order-of- things should not have ended. In spite of the hardships the serf endured under the old patriarchal order, he still looks back proudly and lovingly on what was, after all, his life. At the same time, however, he seems to realise the incongruities in his story and begins to feel uncomfortable about it. A few paragraphs earlier, I made use of the term bricolage. In his book The Savage Mind, 1966 (the English translation of La pensée sauvage, 1962), Lévi-Strauss develops the interesting concept of bricolage in order to determine and describe the specific type of cognition, classification and cultural pragmatics that precedes – and runs parallel to – the scientific approach and attitude in dealing with the world (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 16 ff.). The word bricolage, from the French verb bricoler, refers to a range of meanings that involves ‘straying off’, ‘improvisation’ and ‘haphazardness’, not working according to an abstract plan or project but rather deciding along the way and depending upon the actual material and technical situation. The activity of the bricoleur (for which there is no precise English equivalent; see the translator’s note; idem, 17) – or the process of bricolage – involves what we might designate as the recycling or reshuffling of previously existing materials and objects, and assigning to them new functions and relations. The common, constant idea behind bricolage is that of improvisation, thinking and reasoning intuitively in accordance with the most ancient – literally archaic – patterns of pragmatic dealing with the world, the type of cognition that is com-

his soul! – was never a hunter in his born days to be honest, but he kept dogs and twice a year or so it pleased him to ride out. [...] The groom would ride off behind the Count, and he would keep on a silk leash his master’s two favourite dogs and keep them well in check, you know. [...] Well, and there would be guests, of course, on such an occasion. And it would be fun, and honour would be observed… (italics added)

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mon to ritual and magical practice, and to mythical and mythopoetical thinking. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss points out that: Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’ – which explains the relation which can be perceived between the two. Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane. Conversely, attention has often been drawn to the mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’ on the plane of so-called ‘raw’ or ‘naïve’ art, in architectural follies like the villa of Cheval the postman or the stage sets of Georges Melies, or, again, in the case immortalised by Dickens in Great Expectations but no doubt originally inspired by observation, of Mr Wemmick’s suburban ‘castle’ with its miniature drawbridge, its cannon firing at nine o’clock, its bed of salad and cucumbers, thanks to which its occupants could withstand a siege if necessary […] (17)

Lévi-Strauss’s use of literary examples of architectural bricolage to illustrate the phenomenon of bricolage provides an interesting parallel. In the literary world of these Notes of a Hunter stories, Mitrofan’s hut in the vegetable garden (which also, coincidentally, includes beds of cucumbers) is a perfect example of bricolage. Made from recycled beams and planks from other structures with different purposes and functions, Mitrofan’s hut can be seen as a symbol of old ‘unreflecting’ Russia. This culture (and its cultural text, in the sense used by the Moscow-Tartu School of Cultural Semiotics) can be seen as the process of ‘bricolaging’ heterogeneous materials from the various and often incongruous sources that are involved in the Russian cultural process. This forms the background as well as the material source of the literary worlds constructed by Turgenev in Notes of a Hunter: the Slavic tradition of the old Russian peasants that includes both Christian and pagan elements; the Western European influences that provided the building blocks in the ongoing process of adoption and integration of Western culture that Peter the Great had initiated, and the Eastern or Eurasian elements, including the Tatar yoke and its effects. The last of these is not explicit in this story, but it can be recognised in the characteristic attribute stepnoi – ‘of the steppe’ – used to describe several small landowners in Notes of a Hunter, indicating that they are culturally distant from the urban sophistication of Moscow and, espe-


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cially, Saint-Petersburg (Shchukin 1997, 120). Shchukin, in this connection, distinguishes two opposed types of acculturation in Russian cultural history – ‘para-european’ and ‘para-asian’ – and stresses the long term cultural significance of this opposition in the ‘painful Russian social transformation since the middle of the nineteenth century, even until today.’11 We can also detect bricolage in the literary semiotics of other topics and motifs in these stories, one example being the case of house serfs who are assigned a wide range of tasks, as in the story ‘L’gov’(‘Льгов’) about the serf nicknamed Suchok, where formal, even ritual functions are singled out in relation to the old estate culture. This has already been alluded to briefly. During his discussion with the narrator, Suchok summarises these odd functions, one after the other, revealing their lack of any apparent logic or connection to his capacities or preparedness for performing them.12 His motley career has, of course, been determined according to the whims and abuses of his successive owners, which only confirms that they too have played their part in the process of cultural bricolage that makes up Turgenev’s rendition of nineteenth-century estate life. Under his former owners, Suchok had been coachman, cook, ‘kofishenk’ (a function that, significantly, neither the narrator nor he understands, and which he was required to perform under the name of Anton rather than his real name, Kuz’ma), ‘akhtër’ (actor in his mistress’s ‘keatr’, playing a number of different roles),13 cook again, page boy, ‘faleter’ (a corruption of foreiter, ‘postilion’), gardener and whipper-in; he was even sent away to Moscow and bound apprentice to a shoemaker in punishment for injuring one of his master’s horses. And yet he is glad to have been ‘promoted’ to the rank of fisherman (on an estate whose 11

Idem, 120: Проблема противостояния двух укладов русской жизни – параевропейской и параазиатской – стала особенно актуальной в середине XIX века, накануне начавшегося в 1861 году и длящегося до наших дней периода болезненной социальной трансформации России. 12 See Lévi-Strauss’s striking remark in this context: The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project (1962, 17). 13 The alienating and literally absurd theatre passage is particularly interesting from a semiotic point of view. Suchok ‘acts’ on command, dressed up, not knowing what he is doing or why, his finest role having been that of a blind man.

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waters contain no fish) because he could equally well have been sent to work in the papermill, like his old friend Pupyr’. Applying Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage to these cases, we can conclude that these Russian masters assigned roles to their house serfs that had more to do with ritual formality than functional productivity. There is obviously a strong irony at work here, but that does not diminish the fact that the masters are presented by Turgenev as bricoleurs. In assigning these tasks, they operate with signs (ritual tasks, effectively mocked in the the theatre passage) rather than concepts (clear, functionally defined tasks), a tendency that Lévi-Strauss stressed in his theoretical exposition. The tasks themselves are part of a household repertoire and practice, an order-of-life at the manor house that was, at least in part and quite intentionally, derived from the Petrine European cultural model. The cultural programme of the country estate aspired to the incorporation of that model into the rural Russian Domus tradition; that is, the integration of a corpus alienum into the existing system. In some of the other stories from Notes of a Hunter, we find portraits of landowners that are strikingly parallel to those of serfs and in line with this view of them. This should not surprise us since the culture of rural Russia was, to a considerable extent, a shared culture of peasants and owners alike.14 In many cases, the standard of living of the landowner was hardly higher than that of many serfs. The example par excellence is the grotesquely quixotic, fascinating hero Chertopkhanov in the stories ‘Чертопханов и Недопюскин’ (‘Chertopkhanov and Nedopiuskin’) and ‘Конец Чертопханова’ (‘Chertopkhanov’s End’). This small landowner is presented ironically as a sort of champion of Russianness. He represents the common type of small landowner (мелкопоместный помещик), symbolising the general economical and social decline of the rural nobility in the nineteenth century. In all his outrageous nobleman’s eccentricity, excess and pathetic pride, he is portrayed against the backround of his derelict and

14

On the other hand, though, Turgenev did not portray all peasants in the same style. Khor’ and Kalinych, or the boys of ‘Bezhin lug’ (‘Bezhin Meadow’), for example, are characters in their own right and sociologically-cast types, with none of the ironies discussed here. It is the originality and vividness of these characters that is largely responsible for the success and renown of Notes of a Hunter.


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run down house, a mockery, like ‘Raspberry Water’, of the one time grandeur of the great eighteenth-century estates. Chertopkhanov’s ancestors were once rich, living the sumptuous, extravagant life of provincial noblemen; in other words, they lived ‘po-stepnomu’, ‘the steppe life’ (see above), entertaining people until they had no money left and had to live on their home produce for several months. This is indeed а recognisable Domus routine, one that would have been very familiar to the bricoleurs Tuman and Suchok, whom we have just discussed: Деды его жили пышно, по-степному, то есть принимали званых и незваных, кормили их на убой, отпускали по четверти овса чужим кучерам на тройку, держали музыкантов, песельников, гаеров и собак, в торжественные дни поили народ вином и брагой, по зимам ездили в Москву на своих, в тяжелых колымагах, а иногда по целым месяцам сидели без гроша и питались домашней живностью.15

Chertopkhanov’s present estate is in fact presented as an ‘anti-estate’; that is, a form of Anti-House. Everything in it is disharmonious. It comprises his little house (домик) instead of a manor house and four decrepit wooden structures of uneven size: a wing (of which there should be two), a stable, a barn and a bathhouse. It is a disorderly and incoherent group of buildings, alone and exposed on all sides without a fence or gate. This latter detail indicates an inconceivable lack of principal spatial demarcation, not only for a Russian country estate but even for a peasant’s hut. By this emphatic lack of demarcation, it negates the basic semiotic act in the creation of a House as such: symbolically and materially staking out a piece of land, thereby establishing order and privacy, shutting out chaos and nature; see especially Chapter I.1. Chertopkhanov’s ‘estate’ is compared, not to a ‘nest’ in the canonical domestic sense, but to a goshawk’s eyrie, effectively symbolising the master’s simultaneous aggressive pride and poverty. 15

His ancestors used to live splendidly, as noblemen of the steppe, which means that they entertained everybody, invited or not, stuffing them with food; they issued a quarter of oats per troika to other coachmen; they kept musicians, singers, buffoons and dogs; on festival days, the people were treated to wine and home-brewed beer; in winter they drove to Moscow in heavy wagons with their own horses, and sometimes they were without a penny for months, feeding on home-grown fowl.

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On his land, chaos reigns, and the house itself (the word zhilishche (abode) is used) inspires the narrator to a very negative gendered comparison: Издали виднелся небольшой домик; он торчал на голом месте, в полуверсте от деревни, как говорится, ‘на юру’, словно ястреб на пашне. Вся усадьба Чертопханова состояла из четырех ветхих срубов разной величины, а именно: из флигеля, конюшни, сарая и бани. Каждый сидел сам по себе: ни забора кругом, ни ворот не замечалось. [...] Жилище господина Чертопханова являло вид весьма печальный: бревна почернели и высунулись вперед ‘брюxом’, труба обвалилась, углы подопрели и покачнулись, небольшие тускло-сизые окошечки невыразимо кисло поглядывали из-под косматой, нахлобученной крыши: у иных старух-потаскушек бывают такие глаза.16 (280-1)

Like his father before him, Pantelei Eremeich Chertopkhanov inherited what was left of the former estate together with the mortgaged little village of Bessonovo and its thirty-five male and seventy-six female souls, and fourteen-and-a-quarter desiatin of land (i.e. 38.47 acres or 15.53 hectares) at an inconvenient distance, for which the legal titles were missing. The narrator also gives a short portrait of his equally colourful father Eremei Lukich, a bricoleur if ever there was one. He had gone bankrupt as a result of what is ironically called his ‘house management’ (хозяйственный расчет). Not wanting, as a gentleman, to be dependent on merchants and townsfolk, he set up all sorts of trades and workshops on his own estate. He persisted in this ruinous scheme to the end, and enjoyed it. This can be illustrated by a small catalogue of his conspicuous quirks. He once designed and constructed a family coach of such huge dimensions that it could only be drawn using all the horses in the village together with their owners. 16

From a distance one could see his little house; it stuck out on a bare site, a half verst away from the village, ‘up high’, as they say, like a goshawk over a field. Chertopkhanov’s entire estate consisted of four decrepit wooden structures of different sizes: a wing, a stable, a barn and a bathhouse. Each of these stood by itself: there was no fence around them, or a gate to be seen. [...] Mister Chertopkhanov’s abode made a very doleful spectacle: beams, turned black, stuck out forward “like a belly”; the smoke-stack had collapsed; the corners had rotted away and tottered; the small dullgrey windows looked inexpressibly sour from under the shaggy, pulled-down roof: old trollops sometimes have such eyes.


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On the first steep hill it collapsed and fell to pieces. Instead of feeling embarrassed by his failure as a constructor, he ordered a monument to be erected on the hill (273). He also took it into his head to build his own church without the help of an architect. He used up a whole forest of wood in burning bricks, laid out foundations large enough for a cathedral and began to erect the cupola, which collapsed three times in succession. Accusing the old women of the village of witchcraft, he had them flogged, but the cupola was never erected (ibid.). In what amounts to a mockery of Petrine reforms – that is, of the rationalist constructor’s planning modus operandi – Eremei Lukich began a literal perestroika of his village: among other reforms, all the huts were placed in triangles, three at a time (suggesting that he had read Hegel?), as always inspired by the idea of ‘house management’. His serfs had to wear numbers on their collars, which they were required to call out loudly upon meeting their owner. We might well ask how the multiple use of bricolage in these texts by Turgenev can be explained. I have already suggested, in connection with the example of Mitrofan’s hut, that it might be interpreted as symbolic of the old, ‘unreflecting’ Russia, a culture that can be seen in its development and routines as the ‘bricolaging’ of heterogeneous materials from the various and often incongruous sources that make up the Russian cultural process. The same holds true for the cases I have just discussed, and it is reasonable to suppose that this phenomenon can also be seen functioning in the works of other authors, including non-Russians.17 As I have indicated, the constant idea behind bricolage is that of improvisation, thinking and reasoning intuitively, the type of cognition that is common to ritual and magical practice and to mythical and mythopoetical thinking. In the words of Lévi-Strauss, ‘Like ‘bricolage’ on the technical plane, mythical reflection can reach brilliant unforeseen results on the intellectual plane.’ It 17

Other candidates in Russian literature, each with an evident penchant for the application of bricolage stylistics to Russians and their culture, are Gogol’ (including ‘Старосветские помещики’ (‘Old World Landowners’), ‘Повесть о том, как поссорилсся Иван Иванович с Иваном Никифоровичем’ (‘A Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich’), Leskov (‘Левша’, and especially his stories about ‘праведники’, or ‘righteous men’), Platonov (especially Чевенгур (Chevengur) alias Происхождение мастера, (The Origin of the Master)), and Venedikt Erofeev (Москва–Петушки (Moscow-Petushki)).

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is this parallel between mythical – or mythopoetical – thinking and the technical aspect of human cognition that can provide us with a clue here. If, for Lévi-Strauss’s ‘technical plane’, we substituted the original, etymological interpretation of the Greek poièsis – poetic creation, verbal art – as a fundamentally cognitive and textual praxis, this would then account for the effectiveness (see Lévi-Strauss’s ‘brilliant unforeseen results’) of linguistic, semiotic and textual bricolage as a major, probably universal, literary strategy.18 Apart from this, we can also look for arguments in the literary tradition. In the case of Turgenev, the influence of Gogol’ will no doubt have been significant. Or we can try to find its motive from within the context of Turgenev’s own literary and philosophical profile – bricolage, as a stylistic principle reflecting a Russian world-picture, subjected in Notes of a Hunter to the ironies and hyperbolisations of this author. On the stylistic level, bricolage can be seen in the literary technique involved in representing this world, the selection and combination of details in order to characterise the estates, the people, their way of life and their culture. Though abundant and sometimes absurdly detailed, much of the information concerning estates and people is not at all systematic or coherent. The information is not only selective in a most unmotivated or unexpected way; it is also often disproportionate. As a conscious literary strategy, which we have every reason to assume in a story by Turgenev, this stylistic bricolage seems geared to evoking a sense of estrangement, fascination, humour, smiles or laughter when faced with strong cases of russkost’ (‘Russianness’). Where the author might have provided the causal, logical or explicative detail of a physiological sketch, what he gives us instead is a mockery of the Natural School. There are, of course, other positions from which to assess this stylistic phenomenon. One of them could be that of the narrator of Notes of a Hunter as a whole, whose very identity is strange and problematic. Bricolage would then take its place among the distancing devices that he uses in his role of fasci18

Lévi-Strauss typologically juxtaposes, as complementary modes, the practice and cognition of the mythmaking bricoleur and those of the scientifically-planning, ‘logical’ ‘architect’. In the realm of verbal praxis, a striking functional analogy presents itself in the famous Aristotelian pair muthos–logos, respectively. This could provide a new angle from which to interpret literature (verbal art), and perhaps also the foundations of genre and stylistics, in terms of an encompassing anthropology.


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nated observer of a theatrical stage, expressively exemplified in ‘Контора’ (‘The Office’), or as voyeur and eaves-dropper, as in ‘Бежин луг’ (‘Bezhin Meadow’) and ‘Свидание’ ‘The Tryst’. It is equally plausible to relate it to Turgenev’s part in the debate with the Slavophiles, particularly with S.T. Aksakov in, for example, his 1852 review of the latter’s Notes of a Rifle Hunter. In reaction to Aksakov’s idea of nature as ‘the realm of harmony and instinctual cooperation’ (Ripp 1980, 51), Turgenev posits his vision of the world of culture as fundamentally conflictory, ‘an aggregate of differences’ (idem). This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the peasants in Notes of a Hunter are not seen as homogeneous. At the same time the peasantry was, and remained, a mystery to Turgenev, as he admitted in a letter of May 1853 in which he stated that he saw them as a ‘foreign force’.19 Also, as Yarmolinskii stresses in his biography of Turgenev, the author “wisely limits his observation to house serfs or, generally speaking, peasants who have slipped out of the routine ways. The average tiller of the soil in normal circumstances – of whom he had, after all, very slight knowledge – is not in the picture” (Yarmolinskii 1959, 110). The remarkable literary effectiveness of Turgenev’s stylistic strategy in Notes of a Hunter relies on the unpredictability and apparent randomness of the ‘bricolaged’ details, as well as their symbolic potential. On the level of psychological characterisation or stylisation, it typically brings about a strong sense of the individuality and authenticity of the inhabitants of the estate world; see Ripp’s ‘aggregate of differences’. An opposition between culture and nature is at the heart of Turgenev’s poetics. Nature is represented as whole, eternal and selfsufficient, whereas culture is conflictory and paradoxical, or ‘double’.20 In its manifestations of the estate life, culture is marked as 19

The peasants have completely overwhelmed us in literature. That in itself would be nothing; but I am beginning to suspect that we, no matter how much we fuss with them, still don’t understand anything about them. (Quoted from Ripp 1980, ibid.) 20 See Markovich 1982, 204, Petrova 1997, 125, Kurliandskaia 1997, 118, Nedzvedskii 1998, 12 and Oudshoorn 2006, for example, on Turgenev’s poetics and philosophy of the ‘double perspective’ or ‘double vision’ with regard to the temporal versus the eternal, nature versus culture, and the absurd, chaotic, discordant characteristics of society versus the cosmic order underlying the world.

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ephemeral, chaotic, and ‘bricolaged’, but this is set against the background of an implicit ideal of durability and harmony: the House Myth as an anthropological constant. Thus the literary realisations of the House image in the estate topos of these stories reflect Turgenev’s vision of the ambiguous nature of mankind’s condition. A notable exception to this rule is the small estate of Tat’ana Borisovna in the story ‘Татьяна Борисова и ее племянник’ (‘Tat’iana Borisovna and her Nephew’). Her charming house is the epitome of order, warmth and conviviality. It is a little domestic universe, independent and self-governing: a House indeed, and the very opposite of Chertopkhanov’s ‘abode’. ‘In her house’, the narrator remarks, ‘it is always beautiful weather’ (у ней всегда в доме прекрасная погода, если так можно выразиться; 183). Of course there are ironies here too, but Turgenev thus creates in these stories a markedly-gendered opposition between ‘male’ and ‘female’ estates as cultural icons, confirming a vision of timeless domestic values and vitality as the realm of women. It is interesting to note that Bunin does the same in his evocation of the moribund Russian estate world in, for example, ‘Антоновские яблоки’ (‘Antonov Apples’) and Жизнь Арсеньева (Life of Arsenyev); see Chapter II.16. Moreover, there is the admittedly controversial possibility of reading the grotesque and caricatured depictions of this estate world in the light of Turgenev’s critique of serfdom and Russia’s backwardness in general. Such readings are supported by the remarkable stylistic consistency of Notes of a Hunter: the ironies of bricolage are very often applied to the sphere of culture, especially that of the estates, but never to the representation of nature. The title of Turgenev’s novel Dvorianskoe gnezdo is often seen as the original source of the term ‘Nest of the Gentry’ that became such an icon of the period. However, as Shchukin (1997, 121) explains, the expression was originally used by the inhabitants of the Oriol province with reference to a particular area where the richest manor houses were concentrated. Moreover, Turgenev himself indicated in a letter that the title was the choice of his publisher; he himself would have preferred Liza, the name of the heroine. It is certainly true that the title Nest of the Gentry does not seem particularly relevant to the novel’s plot and that a number of Turgenevan plots have settings that could be so described, but it is nevertheless true that, as I shall now try to dem-


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onstrate, the topic indicated by the title is realised in significant ways in the structure and psychopoetics of the novel. A Russian nobleman, Fiodor Lavretskii, returns home after travelling through Europe and becomes a regular visitor of his neighbours and distant relatives, the Kalitins. He and Liza Kalitina fall in love, but their love is doomed from the beginning because Lavretskii is already married. His marriage is a failure and he has left his wife in Paris. When he learns from a newspaper that she has died, happiness at last seems to be within reach, but the newspaper announcement proves false. Lavretskii’s wife returns and tries to achieve reconciliation with her husband, who, devastated by this unexpected turn of events, will have nothing to do with her. She moves into one of his estates; he leaves for Moscow, and Liza enters a Convent. In time, Lavretskii learns to accept his loss and, disillusioned but not broken, manages to builds up a new life as a caring and responsible landowner who works his land together with the peasants. It is important to consider Lavretskii’s background in some detail because it is highly elaborate by comparison with Turgenev’s other novels and serves to explain his character, especially his attitudes towards his milieu and position as a Russian nobleman. In Chapters VIII-XII, we are given an account of his pedigree as a nobleman, going back to the fifteenth century. In Chapter VIII, there are colourful and exotic portraits of his ancestors and their manorial ways, written in an ironic register reminiscent of the one we discussed in connection with Notes of a Huntsman. Lavretskii’s grandfather is another ‘simple gentleman’ or stepnoi, ‘of the steppe’ (это был простой степной барин; 152), an impulsive and whimsical man of beaux gestes who ran his estate very much in the manner of Chertopkhanov senior. Here too, in his portraits of the gentry, Turgenev highlights fundamental cultural discrepancies between the country world and the city, between traditional life on the country estate with its pronounced Russianness, and the effects of Western cultural influence exerted through the ‘Petrine programme’ and Enlightenment education. These two cultural complexes are not only set in confrontation with one another but presented as irreconcilable, leading to emotional alienation and unhappiness. An important stylistic difference between Nest of the Gentry and Notes of a Hunter is the fact that, beyond these retrospective passages, the focus is not determined by an ironical, distantial ob-

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server interpreting an exotic world. Central to this novel are the hero’s fate and feelings, and the causal relations between these and his milieu. Lavretskii’s own childhood, his having grown up on two different estates, is strongly affected by this background. His father Ivan Petrovich, born the son of a simple stepnoi gentleman, had been educated by a rich, unmarried aunt and made heir to her fortune, then sent to a French gouverneur, a pupil of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopedists. The old aunt had then been persuaded to marry a Mr. Courtin de Vaucelles, who subsequently absconded with her money to France, so that when the aunt died soon afterwards Lavretskii’s father, after trying in vain to begin a career in Saint-Petersburg, at the age of twenty and with his prospects as an heir shattered, had had nowhere to go but home. It was as a cultural alien that he had returned to his father’s simple estate, to his ‘own nest’, which he now found unbearably filthy, poor and dull. His father, in turn, detested his metropolitan manners and clothing, and his French education: Грязно, бедно, дрянно показалось ему его родимое гнездо; глушь и копоть степного житья-бытья на каждом шагу его оскорбляли; скука его грызла; зато и на него все в доме, кроме матери, недружелюбно глядели. Отцу не нравились его столичные привычки, его фраки, жабо, книги, его флейта, его опрятность, в которой недаром чуялась ему гадливость; он то и дело жаловался и ворчал на сына. “Всё здесь не по нем, - говаривал он -, за столом привередничает, не ест, людского запаха, духоты переносить не может, вид пьяных его расстраивает, драться при нем тоже не смей, служить не хочет: слаб, вишь, здоровьем; фу ты, неженка эдакой! А всё оттого, что Вóльтер в голове сидит”.21 (153-4) 21

Filthy, poor and worthless his own nest appeared to him; the backwoods and soot of the steppe way of life offended him at every turn; he was bored to death; but then, everybody in the house, except his mother, looked at him in an unfriendly manner. His father detested his metropolitan manners, his tail-coats, his jabots, his books, his flute and his tidiness, behind which, and not without reason, he sensed disgust; every now and then he complained and grumbled about his son. “Nothing here is as he likes,” he used to say. “At dinner he is squeamish, doesn’t eat; he cannot stand the smell of people, of closeness; the sight of drunken people upsets him; don’t you dare to put up a fight either when he’s around; he doesn’t want to serve in the army: poor health, just look; my goodness, what a mollycoddle! And all because he has Vólter sitting in his head.”


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For this uneducated Russian landowner Voltaire, garbled into ‘Vólter’, in the ‘head’ of his son embodied the essential evil of foreign culture. Later on, however, Turgenev stresses that Voltaire and all the encyclopedists had settled only in his head, that this knowledge “had not penetrated his soul, nor led to a firm conviction” but had remained an alien presence in the young man. In his unhappiness, he had become attracted to one of the female house serfs, Malania. Scandal, and crisis was inevitable when young Ivan Petrovich announced that he would marry her. The couple had eloped and married secretly, and Ivan Petrovich had returned to Saint-Petersburg, leaving behind his young wife to the care of some distant relatives. This time he had been more successful in the capital, and was soon appointed one of the members of a mission to London. After three months news had reached him of the birth of a son, Fiodor, on the 20th of August 1807. This son is the hero of the novel. Ivan Petrovich had stayed abroad for many years, only returning for the war against Napoleon, and in the meantime both his wife and his father had died. He finally returned to Russia on his retirement, to run the estate and educate his twelve-year-old son. Fiodor had been brought up by his father’s sister Glafira, who had carefully and systematically kept him away from his mother. Ivan Petrovich, in the meantime, had become a complete Anglophile and champion of Britishness. He considered himself a patriot but did not know Russia well. He wanted to change the way his estate was run, subjecting it to a very strict new ‘system’ that was alien and hostile to Russian customs, but in practice most things stayed the same. The only real victim of his excessive Anglophilia and Spartan principles was his son, Fiodor. When the father died, the son had felt deeply relieved to be free of his despotic ways, hypocrisy and egoism, but he still feared his aunt Glafira, who had ‘taken the house into her hands’ (Глафира опять завладела всем в доме; 165). Under her, life on the estate returned to the Russian routine, but Fiodor Lavretskii was now the master. Leaving the estate in the hands of his aunt, he had gone to study in Moscow. It was there that he had met Varvara Pavlovna, a general’s daughter and worldly woman who had greatly impressed the provincial Lavretskii. As a rich landowner, both in her eyes and in the eyes of her parents, he was a very eligible husband. They had married but, as we have already seen, the marriage was a failure.

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The story of Lavretskii is not only about his doomed love for Liza; it has a great deal to do with his coming to terms with his traumatic childhood and youth, the development of his own Slavophile ideas and attitudes, his search for a life in harmony with Russia and his regaining of his sense of Russianness and thereby escaping ‘superfluity’; see Oudshoorn 2006, 45-6. This aspect of his experiences occupies a significant part of the novel and is also reflected in the psychopoetic treatment of his houses. A victim of his father’s tyrannic Anglophilia, Lavretskii feels that his education is defective and warped, not only intellectually but in far more essential ways – emotionally and socially, ‘as a Russian’. He does not ‘feel free’ and does not know how to behave in society. His decision to go to Moscow to amend this is presented almost as a subconscious one – he is ‘drawn’ to Moscow, by a ‘dark, but forceful feeling’ – and although he studies very diligently in the faculty of Physics and Mathematics, we learn as an odd but significant detail that he travels to the university in a broad country sled drawn by two horses (аккуратно приезжавшем на лекции в широких деревенских санях парой; Chapter XII, 167). This indicates that he is partly a muzhik himself by origin; see Batiuto in Turgenev 1976, 320. It also implicitly confirms his vision of Moscow, as opposed to SaintPetersburg, as the properly-Russian city, the place to make good what he had missed in his upbringing so that he might one day feel at home and be able to fulfil his responsibilities as a Russian landowner, which is the social theme of the novel. Lavretskii’s desire to be a ‘real Russian’ in this sense places him in stark contrast to Varvara Pavlovna, who hates the rural life and would prefer to live in Saint-Petersburg or Paris. After their marriage, they first settle on the larger, more sophisticated of his two estates, Lavriki, but she immediately takes a dislike to the house and household, including aunt Glafira. For her, living there can only be temporary. It is like ‘living in a tent’, but she keeps silent for a while: Приехавши в Лаврики в самый разгар лета, она нашла дом грязным и темным, прислугу смешною и устарелою, но не почла за нужное даже намекнуть о том мужу. Еслибы она располагала основаться в Лавриках, она бы всё в них переделала, начиная, разумеется, с дома; но мысль остаться в этом степном захолустье


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ни на миг не приходила ей в голову; она жила в нем, как в палатке, кротко перенося все неудобства и забавно подтрунивая над ними.22 (Chapter XV, 172)

In spite of this, she and her father succeed in taking over the management of the estate from Lavretskii’s aunt Glafira, who feels superfluous and retires to the other, smaller family estate, Vasil’evskoe. Varvara Pavlovna soon persuades Lavretskii to move with her to the Westernised Saint-Petersburg, leaving the estate in the hands of her father, so that she can enjoy fashionable city-life while living in a luxurious apartment: В сентябре месяце Варвара Павловна увезла своего мужа в Петербург. Две зимы она провела в Петербурге (на лето они переселялись в Царское Село) в прекрасной, светлой, изящно меблированной квартире; много завели они знакомств. [...] Варвара Павловна привлекала гостей, как огонь бабочек.23 (ibid.)

In Petersburg, Lavretskii seeks the isolation of his study. A son is born but quickly dies, and the couple, following medical advice, travel abroad. In Paris, Varvara feels perfectly at home, and, just as she had done in Petersburg, soon ‘made a little nest’. Discovering that Varvara has been unfaithful to him, Lavretskii leaves her. After some peregrinations, he returns to Russia, first renting a room in the city where the Kalitins live, then moving to the old Vasil’evskoe estate, uninhabited, apart from a pair of old house serfs, since the death of his aunt Glafira. Lavretskii has spent his childhood and youth on the two family estates – the splendid and well kept ancestral Lavriki, where his grandparents are buried but of which his only memories are painful ones, 22

Coming to Lavriki in the very heat of summer, she found the house dirty and dark, and the servants ludicrous and antiquated, but she did not think it necessary even to hint at this to her husband. If she had considered settling down at Lavriki she would have changed everything in it, beginning with the house itself of course; but the idea of staying in this provincial backwater did not enter her head for a minute. She lived in it as in a tent, patiently bearing all the inconveniences and teasingly making fun of them. 23 In September, Varvara Pavlovna took her husband to Petersburg. Two winters she spent in Petersburg (for the summer they moved to Tsarskoe Selo) in a beautiful, light and elegantly furnished apartment; they made a lot of acquaintances. [...] Varvara Petrovna attracted guests as fire attracts moths.

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and the small, poor, derelict Vasil’evskoe, not far from the city where the Kalitins live, which is full of good memories for him. It is here that he settles after his return from Europe. The contrastive characteristics of the two houses reflect crucial moments in the hero’s life and development. This accords with the well-known metonymic modelling strategy of connecting setting and character, adopted particularly by Realists and Naturalists. In Turgenev’s novelistic world-picture, the estate setting is usually a ‘given’. His descriptive technique serves the purpose of identifying the actual as the typical, the normative background for plot developments, the estate being a chronotope or, as I prefer to call it, the novel’s conflict space. This means that he can largely rely on the implicitness and obviousness of that world and its articulations in the development of his narrative. However, there are situations that require the foregrounding, or topicalisation, of the setting and its elements, and in A Nest of the Landed Gentry there are episodes in which we see such topicalisation, stressing the materiality and concreteness of the domestic setting rather than its functional subordination to the sujet. This is especially the case in Chapters XVIIIXX and the first half XXI, which describe Lavretskii’s return to Vasil’evskoe. The psychological, moral and emotional importance of this estate is evident from the beginning. As he enters the boarded-up little house, he stresses the fact that it feels like ‘coming home again’, even though his stay there on this occasion will be only temporary: “Вот я и дома, вот я и вернулся”, - подумал Лаврецкий, входя в крошечную переднюю, между тем, как ставни со стуком и визгом отворялись один за другим и дневной свет проникал в опустелые покои.24 (Chapter XVIII, final paragraph)

From the point of view of plot typology, this is a classic example of what we might refer to as the ‘revisited’ sujet. It occurs at a moment of intense emotional and moral crisis, and the hero returns to his native estate in the hope that it will have healing properties. Lavretskii tries to make a clean break with the emotional disaster of his Anglophile upbringing and the trauma of his marriage. He is in search of the 24

“So now I am home; so now I have returned,” Lavretskii thought, entering the tiny entrance hall while the window shutters were being opened noisily one after the other and the daylight penetrated the empty rooms.


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‘true values’ of life as a Russian nobleman. Although he does not yet dare to acknowledge it consciously, he is also falling in love with Liza Kalitina. By returning to Vasil’evskoe, which for him represents the natural life of Russia, the motherland, he wishes to restore what he has lost and to repair his shattered emotions. The Vasil’evskoe to which he returns is a weed-grown, neglected estate where time seems to have halted, which in itself is in stark contrast to the preceding chapters; see Oudshoorn 2006, 56. Since the death of his aunt, two years earlier, the house has been boarded up, though Anton and Apraksia, the two elderly servants, are still living there. Lavretskii spends a couple of weeks restoring order and life to the house and garden. The material aspects of the lifeless domestic setting are described in great detail – the furniture, the bed linen, the bedroom where his aunt had died, the icon and carpet in the little room where she used to pray, the portrait of his great-grandfather, the garden. After his first meal, prepared and served by Anton, he drinks tea from an old cup which he remembers from his childhood as one from which only guests were allowed to drink; thus, he is behaving as though he were a guest (Chapter XIX). The prospect of spending his first night in Vasil’evskoe after so many years is strangely disturbing to him: Погасив свечку, он долго глядел вокруг себя и думал невеселую думу; он испытывал чувство, знакомое каждому человеку, которому приходится в первый раз ночевать в давно необитаемом месте; ему казалось, что обступившая его со всех сторон темнота не могла привыкнуть к новому жильцу, что самые стены дома недоумевают.25 (Chapter XIX, 178)

This passage obviously fits the cognitive framework of Realism. It is an explicit description of a state of mind in the form of a projection of human perception on to inanimate phenomena: Turgenev uses the psychopoetic equation of the House–Personality type to express the 25

After he had put out the candle, he gazed about himself for a long time and experienced a joyless feeling that must be familiar to anybody who has spent their first night in a place that has been uninhabited for a long time: he had the impression that the darkness that surrounded him from all sides could not get used to the new inhabitant, that the very walls of the house were put out by his being there.

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intensity of Lavretskii’s contradictory feelings towards his House of Childhood as he undergoes the process of Home Coming and identification with a place. He immerses himself in the rural timelessness, peace and nature of his new environment, hoping to change his life fundamentally for the better by forgetting the urban hurry: И какая сила кругом, какое здоровье в этой бездейственной тиши! Вот тут, под окном, коренастый лопух лезет из густой травы; [...] На женскую любовь ушли мои лучшие года, - продолжает думать Лаврецкий, - пусть же вытрезвит меня здесь скука, пусть успокоит меня, подготовит к тому, чтробы и я умел не спеша делать что-нибудь.26 (188)

At the end of Chapter XX, the development of Lavretskii’s feelings and consciousness are rendered metaphorically as a natural process, and it is interesting to note how the process of psychic orientation and identification described here is implicitly modelled concentrically around the personality whose experience is being related: personality– house–homeland; see Chapter I.3:27 В то же самое время в других местах на земле кипела, торопилась, грохотала жизнь; здесь та же жизнь текла неслышно, как вода по болотным травам; и до самого вечера Лаврецкий не мог оторваться от созерцания этой уходящей, утекающей жизни; скорбь о прошедшем таяла в его душе, как весенний снег, и – странное дело! – никогда не было в нем так глубоко и сильно чувство родины.28 (idem.)

26

And what strength surrounds one here! What health there is in this inactive stillness! Here, under this window, a burdock with its strong roots rises out of the thick grass; [...] My best years were spent on the love of a woman, Lavretskii went on thinking. Let boredom sober me here; let it calm me down, prepare me, so that I too can do something without hurrying. 27 This will also be the foundation of Bunin’s psychopoetics as a memoirist (Chapter II.16). 28 At the same time, in other places on the land, life was in full swing, in a hurry, roaring; here that same life was flowing noiselessly, like water through marsh grass, and not until it grew dark could Lavretskii tear himself away from observing this life as it faded and passed by. Grief about the past melted away in his soul like spring snow, and – strangely! – he had never felt so strongly a sense of homeland.


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Another case in which the psychopoetics of the house are emphasised occurs in Chapter XXXIV, another crucial moment for Lavretskii in which he declares his love for Liza. After leaving the house of the Kalitins one evening, he does not wish to go straight home and so walks into the fields. He discovers and follows a narrow path that leads him to a long fence with a little gate. Unknowingly, he has strayed back through the fields to the house of the Kalitins, and he enters their garden. He suddenly sees the house with its two lighted windows, one of them being Liza’s, and we are told that ‘There, at the bend in the walk, the whole house suddenly looked at him with its dark face’ (Вот на повороте аллеи, весь дом вдруг взглянул на него своим темным лицом; 229). Here, at this crucial turning point in his life, the personification of the house serves to emphasise the hero’s mental and emotional state: his sense of amazement tempered by the awareness of tresspassing and a premonition of their meeting, ‘preordained’ by fate (‘это недаром’ – подумал он). He sits on a little bench and looks at Liza’s window, then notices that the entrance to the terrace is open. Liza comes down, and he calls to her. She joins him in the garden, and he declares his love for her. The same House image, connected with this crucial episode in his life, recurs in the epilogue where, after eight years, Lavretskii revisits the Kalitins’ house and garden and, looking back on his life, feels lonely and homeless: Лаврецкий вышел из дома в сад, сел на знакомой ему скамейке – и на том дорогом месте, перед лицом того дома, где он в последний раз напрасно простирал свои руки к заветному кубку, в котором кипит и играет золотое вино наслажденья, он, одинокий, бездомный странник, [...] оглянулся на свою жизнь.29 (282)

The designation ‘homeless’ can be interpreted against the background of the House Images discussed here and their significance for the hero 29

Lavretskii left the house and entered the garden, sat down on the bench he knew so well – and on that dear spot, in front of that house, where for the last time he had stretched out his hands in vain to the cherished goblet in which the golden wine of enjoyment sparkles and plays – he looked back upon his life, alone, a homeless wanderer [...].

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as he looks back on his life. Only thus can we appreciate the integrating role of literary House images as they fulfil their psychopoetic function of providing what I would call emotional and moral ‘frames’ within the narrative structure. The idea of Lavretskii’s becoming homeless was dramatically raised in Chapter XV by his aunt Glafira when she felt she was being ‘driven off her ancestral nest’ by Lavretskii’s wife. Before leaving for Vasil’evskoe, she predicted – and there is a curse in the prediction – that Lavretskii would ‘never make a nest anywhere’ but would ‘have to wander forever’: “Знаю, кто меня отсюда гонит, с родового моего гнезда. Только ты помяни мое слово, племянник, не свить тебе гнезда нигде, скитаться тебе век. Вот тебе мой завет.”30 (172)

On the surface, given that he owns two estates, Lavretskii’s being described as homeless seems ironic, but this is homelessness in an emotional and moral sense. He has not found love, and his dream of a ‘nest’ shared with Liza has proved illusory, but he has not lost his House in either the dynastic (as intended by Glafira in her curse) or material sense, and the epilogue assures us that he will be a responsible and capable Russian landowner, ploughing the soil and keeping the interest of his peasants uppermost in his mind. In other words, Lavretskii ultimately succeeds in realising those fundamental aspects of the Domus and avoiding the fate of the ‘superfluous man’. The psychopoetic images used by Turgenev in connection with Lavretskii’s estates and houses reflect his contradictions and his moral struggle, but they do indicate his failure to maintain the eponymous ‘nest of the gentry’ as such. His story has far more to do with the acceptance of his fate; see Oudshoorn 2006, 58. We should conclude that Home Coming is the theme of Lavretskii’s life story, but his is a psychological, emotional and moral Home Coming – his coming to terms with his world, his background, his Russianness and nature, and resigning himself to his fate. It is tempting to draw a parallel with Turgenev’s own life story. 30

“I know who is driving me away from my ancestral nest. Only remember my words, nephew: you will never make a nest anywhere; you will wander forever. That is my will for you.”

13. Goncharov. Homelessness Between Arcadian Dreams and Precipices I. A. Goncharov is the author of three novels in which the rural setting of the estate world is central and set in confrontation with the urban sphere. Two of them will be discussed in this chapter: Oblomov (1859), and Обрыв (The Precipice; 1869). In Oblomov, the opposition is between the hero’s bachelor apartment in Saint-Petersburg and the estate of Oblomovka ‘in one of the distant provinces, almost in Asia’ (Chapter V), the rural world of his childhood upon which he is economically dependent for his life as an urban gentleman. This was the central topic of the original story, integrated into the novel as the famous ninth chapter of part one – ‘The Dream of Oblomov’ (‘Сон Обломова’) – but first published as a separate text in 1849. What makes this story so special is that Oblomovka, probably more than any other literary House image in Russian literature, represents an archetypal locus, a genuinely mythical House of Childhood and Oblomov’s Paradise Lost. In Il’ia Il’ich Oblomov, Goncharov has created a charming and fascinating character whose Russianness and individual malaise, named ‘Oblomovism’ in the critical debate and broader reception, has assumed mythical proportions over the course of time. From the point of view of this study, one could say that he represents a certain paradox: he is presented as homeless when in fact he is extremely homebound.1 He hates to leave his apartment, but he never entertains people at home. The few people who have any influence over him are con1

The first of the four parts of the novel – about 150 pages – is almost entirely set in Oblomov’s room (Tengbergen 1991, 97). In Chapter V we are told that he had been living in Petersburg for twelve years without ever going anywhere (безвыездно живет двенадцатый год в Петербурге).

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stantly trying to persuade him to do something, to become active, to go out into the world, to cross his apartment’s threshold. Thus his actantial (and ultimately psychological) defectiveness – his superfluity, in the terminology of the critical debate – is inevitably reflected in the shape and routines of his domestic situation, and will also be manifest in the way he relates to houses and domesticity during the course of the novel. He can be designated homeless, not only because his shabby apartment, taken care of by his lazy manservant Zakhar, bears all the marks of an urban bachelor’s abode, but also because his landlord has given him notice to quit, facing him with insuperable problems. It is as this is happening that his old friend Stolz pays him a visit after a long absence abroad. Stolz, whose own nature is energetic and active, finds his friend more apathetic than ever and decides to stay with him. Against his will, he takes him to the theatre, to restaurants and to meet other people. On one of these occasions, Oblomov meets Olga, who makes a great impression on him. He has the feeling that she could change his life, and she does indeed challenge him: she forces him to read books and to accompany her to the theatre, and, briefly, they fall in love. When Olga and her aunt rent a dacha for the summer, Oblomov moves to a dacha in the same vicinity, which allows him to see her regularly, but their courtship is blighted by uncertainties and doubts. He begins to dream about life with Olga on the Oblomovka estate, and at a certain point he even asks her to marry him, but she accepts his proposal only on condition that he promise to make certain practical arrangments, including finding a new apartment in town and having the house at Oblomovka repaired. In the meantime, Oblomov’s belongings have been transferred from his old apartment to the house of an acquaintance, the widow Agafia Matveevna Pshenitsyna, far away in the Vyborg district, an area of unpainted fences and cabbage patches. Oblomov wishes to find a more central apartment for Olga and himself, but the widow’s brother has talked him into an unfavourable lease that he cannot cancel unless he finds another tenant, and finding an appropriate apartment in the centre of town proves more difficult than he expected. Oblomov gradually reverts to his old habits. The widow, a simple, uneducated woman, spoils him in every way, and he finds her motherly care irresistable, whereas the prospect of life with Olga worries him because it will be

Goncharov. Homelessness Between Arcadian Dreams and Precipices

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demanding and full of social and other responsibilities. After the summer, Olga and her aunt move back to town, but meetings with Olga put an unbearable strain on him because of the distance from Vyborg, and so he stops visiting her. Worried, she finally goes to visit him and tries to rekindle his energies. What she finds is the latest in a series of letters reporting the poor condition of Oblomovka. Seeing that Oblomov still does not stir, Olga finally has to acknowledge that she has failed to change him, and there is nothing left for her to do but break off the engagement.2 His love for Olga initially succeeded in drawing him out of his lethargic passivity, but his was an idealised, Romantic vision of love, and Olga expected him to accept responsibilities as a grown man. Unable to accept the consequences of an enduring relationship, he sank back into his lethargic, vegetative existence. Oblomov’s problem stemmed from the discrepancies between his dream world and reality. He was incapable of coping with the real world and its demands for sustained action and planning. His ideal was motionless rest without external disturbance. He was essentially a romantic, but in the social context created by Goncharov this meant that he was doomed to remain outside contemporary life as embodied by his energetic friends Stolz and Olga. We can conclude that, however charming and intelligent he was, his character was inadequate to the needs of normal life and adult relationships. He eventually marries the widow and even fathers a child by her, but she continues to take care of him lovingly without demanding anything from him. For him this is emotional regression, but in her role of mother she brings his life as close as possible to the Oblomovka idyll.3 Before coming under the widow’s care, Oblomov had found an apartment for himself and shared it with his servant Zakhar, and he had subsequently moved to a dacha. Now, in his state of infantile regression, he went out into the world even less than before. Increasingly, his world was restricted to the widow’s house and garden, his daily rhythm determined solely by the succession of meals and day

2

For parts of this resumé I am indebted to Tengbergen 1991, 82-99. Very tellingly, Stolz remarks to Oblomov that the house and yard of the widow remind him of Oblomovka, only much uglier. 3

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and night. He had proved incapable of finding a proper apartment for himself and Olga, or of repairing his ancestral house. It is a sad conclusion, but his inability to cope with the practical world means that he is unable to make a House of his own for himself and his wife and children – the primary motif of the fabular inventory of the House Myth (Chapter I.4) – unlike Stolz and Olga, who will marry one another and have children. They will not forget their friend Oblomov: Stolz will set things straight at Oblomovka, and after Oblomov’s death they will take care of the education of his son Andriusha, or Andrei, named after Stolz. This implies that the dynastic motif is realised: the House of Oblomov, and Oblomovka, will be continued. Judging by reports, the house and estate of Oblomovka was neglected and in poor condition. The unreliable steward had been sending Oblomov increasingly smaller sums of money, blaming drought, crop failure and the peasants’ running away. Oblomov continually planned to travel to Oblomovka, but never actually did so. For years he had been planning to improve the management of Oblomovka and renovate the house, but of course none of this ever materialised. The Oblomovka world of his dream is usually presented as an archetypal, ideal place in an imagined, personal Arcadia, but although it certainly has such traits, the total picture is more complex and ambiguous. Chapter IX, ‘The Dream of Oblomov’, is a dream about the way of life on the Oblomovka of Oblomov’s childhood. Oblomovka is always on Oblomov’s mind as his emotional frame of reference. The image of Oblomovka that is developed there is a strong case of the House and world function that I have defined as ‘emotional and moral frame’; see Chapters I.4, II.11 and II.12. At the beginning of the chapter Oblomovka is defined as a ‘peaceful little corner’ (мирный уголок), entirely different from either the sea, with its restless waves and noises, or the mountains, which inspire awe and fear. The sky is low, embracing the earth firmly and lovingly like a safe parental roof: Небо там, кажется, напротив, ближе жмется к земле, [...] а разве только, чтобы обнять ее покрепче, с любовью: оно распростерлось так невысоко над головой, как родительская надежная


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кровля, чтоб уберечь, кажется, избранный уголок от всяких невзгод.4 (Goncharov 1963, 121)

This ‘elect little corner’ is set apart from other possible worlds in the strongest, categorical oppositions: to set it away from the sea and the mountains is to set it in opposition to worlds on the scale that usually forms the beginning of creation myths such as Genesis. What we have in their place is an instance of the archaic cosmogonic imagery that identified the sky with the roof of a house (see Chapter I.1), emphasising the protection of the Parental House. The surrounding landscape is of an Arcadian or pastoral beauty, a locus amoenus with picturesque qualities, like a painting by an old master. However, it is a distinctly Russian landscape, including a ravine (obryv) with its ambiguous connotations. Nevertheless, it is a landscape that we should wish to enter, promising an unknown happiness, a long life and a death resembling sleep, incidentally confirming the inevitablity of death as in the canonical et in Arcadia ego. The seasons succeed one another regularly: winter is really winter but never exceeds its bounds, and summer is, of course, especially ravishing. There are neither disasters nor pests in the four sleepy villages that make up this peaceful corner. We are also given some very strange, sometimes chilling details of this world that are incompatible with the Arcadian cliché and seem to be motivated by the illogicality of the dream world. It may be possible to explain them psychoanalytically as symbols of unconscious fears and conflicts. They are all connected with the peasants. For example, one peasant’s hut is hanging over the precipice of the ravine, supported only by three beams, but people have been living in it quietly for generations: Kak одна изба попала на обрыв оврага, так и висит там с незапамятных времен (One hut happened to be over the precipice of the ravine, and it has been hanging there from time immemorial; 125), and there is further reference to folkloric topics such as the hut of Baba Iaga. Another hut sticks to a hillock like a swallow’s nest, and two others are located in the very bottom of the ravine. A sleepy silence reigns around these huts, and though their doors are wide open (Тихо и сонно все в деревне: безмолвные избы 4

On the contrary, the sky there seems to press itself closer to the earth, [...] only to embrace her firmly and lovingly: like a safe parental roof, it seems to spread itself so low over your head to protect this chosen corner from all kinds of adversity.

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oтворены настеж; idem) it is only rarely that a sickly old woman will answer your call. There is an obvious alienation in these ‘mute’ ‘AntiHuts’ whose wide open doors are not at all inviting and all of which are almost absorbed by the wild nature of the ravine. This episode forms a stark contrast to the safe-haven image of the estate house that follows it. This contrast reinforces the archetypal opposition between hostile nature and culture, taking shape in the concrete motifs of Oblomov’s Russian rural nobleman’s unconscious. From this perspective, it is not strange that the world of the peasants’ huts is almost indistinguishable from ‘the wild’; see Hodder’s Domus concept in Chapter I.1. Silence reigns everywhere, and the people know neither crime nor strong emotions, neither excitement nor bravery. This is partly because nobody takes any interest in the frightening world beyond their corner – the world of Moscow and Petersburg, and beyond those the French and the Germans. A short description of villages that comprise the Oblomovka estate and the habits of the villagers rounds off the ‘geography of this corner’. Oblomov’s dream now focuses on how seven year old Il’ia Oblomov spends his day in and around the house: awakening in his little bed, surrounded by the loving care of his nanny and his mother; everybody in the house being nice to him, hugging him and kissing him, and his mother allowing his nanny to take him for a walk but strictly forbidding them to go anywhere near the ravine (ovrag), which of course hides robbers, wolves and all kind of monsters, and regularly has carrion thrown into it. The ravine is the most frightening place in the neighbourhood. The dreamed parental house itself is old, charmingly crooked and moss-covered, its garden in a state of neglect. The little boy Oblomov plays in and around the house, but is fascinated by and drawn towards the ravine. He observes, experiences, and memorises all that is happening around him in great detail. All action in the Oblomov household is geared to the preparation of food, and everyone is consulted about dinner. In the afternoon, after dinner, everybody falls asleep – in the house, in the stables, in the garden and in the haystack – the only interruption to the silence being the sound of snoring in every direction. The communal activity (of sleep-


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ing) that is stressed in this projection of the Domus and its routines is no doubt a typological Slavophile trait. Even the nanny in charge of Oblomov succumbs to this urge to sleep in the afternoon, and the urge itself is likened to a contagious illness. Oblomov has been waiting impatiently for this to happen so that he can explore the world on his own. He climbs into the dovecot, goes to the farthest extremes of the garden, listens to insects making noises in the grass, catches a dragonfly and tears off its wings to see what will happen, watches as a spider sucks its prey empty before killing them both, jumps into a ditch to dig up roots before cleaning and eating them, and then goes beyond the gates of the house and garden, to the birch grove and the ravine. Having reached the edge of the precipice, he remembers the stories about wood spirits, robbers and wild animals, loses his nerve and hurries back to wake up his old nanny, shivering with fear. Towards the end of the afternoon, the house begins to come to life again in preparation for teatime, and after tea, when the sun starts going down, the kitchen is given over to the making of supper. When the day is over, people tell themselves what a good day it has been, hoping and praying that tomorrow will be just the same. Young Oblomov dreams of the gripping stories that his nanny has told him so colourfully during the long winter nights – stories of another, wonderful world where there is no difference between day and night, where nobody has to work and there are rivers of milk and honey – and stories of the old Russian heroes, ghosts and talking bears. All these stories will stay with Oblomov for the rest of his life. At this point, therе is an anthropological digression concerning these old folkloric bylina and their heroes, and what they meant for the people of the distant past who lived lives of fear and uncertainty in a natural world that was dangerous and hostile. It is a short treatise about the thoughts and perceptions of primitive man with his projections of primordial fears and his superstitions concerning omens, wild animals, robbers and Tatars that made it hazardous to go outside one’s house – superstitions, the narrator tells us, that Russians have difficulty in renouncing even now. This imagery again reminds us of the Hodder typology concerning culture and the wild, culture being equated with the House, beyond which lies chaos, death, nothing:

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Страшна и неверна была жизнь тогдашнего человека; опасно было ему выйти за пoрог дома: его того гляди запорет зверь, зарежет разбойник, отнимет у него все злой татарин, или пропадет человек без вести, без всяких следов.5 (139)

Such stories have a hold over everybody in Oblomovka. They all believe in wood spirits, werewolves and the living dead. Then Oblomov sees himself in his dream as a fourteen year old, with his friend Andrei Stolz who lives in a nearby village that once belonged to Oblomovka. He is the son of a practical, efficient, serious German whose outlook is very different from that of the Oblomovka people (‘oblomovtsy’, 143). At Oblomovka, questions of life and its purpose are never asked. For the oblomovtsy, life’s ideal purpose is rest and inactivity, interrupted occasionally by inevitable unpleasant disturbances such as illness, loss, quarrelling – and work. This attitude has been transmitted from generation to generation over a great many years. A considerable part of the chapter is devoted to description of the Domus routines at Oblomovka, which are taken very seriously. The sense of time and the cycle of life are determined by the seasons, the feasts that belong to them and the various attendant rituals, all of which are observed by the oblomovtsy as strictly and faultlessly as ‘the fire of Hesta’. The latter, incidentally, is an explicit reference to one of the central motifs of the House Myth in its Roman variant, Vesta being the Roman goddess of the Hearth and House; see Chapter I.1. Equally in line with this is the prominence of the rituals connected with the three ‘major acts of life’ (три главные акта жизни, 145): birth, marriage and death – which are also major motifs of the House Myth. Maintaining the house in the material sense is more of a problem. To take just one example, there is a wooden gallery running the length of the house that has been seriously neglected and in need of fundamental repair for a very long time, to the point where it is positively dangerous. However, Oblomov the elder is – like his son – a great procrastinator and has not been able to bring himself to take the neces5

The life of mankind in those days was terrifying and uncertain. It was dangerous for him to go beyond the threshold of his house: before he knew it a wild animal would kill him, or a robber would murder him, or an evil Tatar would steal all his things, or a man would go missing without trace.


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sary initiatives; it is too much like work, even though it is servants who would actually be required to perform the task. When the structure eventually collapses, the removal off the debris is delayed until the following spring. Economically, Oblomovka is as archaic and autarchic as possible. The idea of spending money, even on necessities such as candles in preparation for the winter, is unthinkable for the oblomovtsy. Capital should be kept in a trunk – an attitude strongly reminiscent of Turgenev’s small landowners – while the house, its furniture and the clothing of its people should all be used and worn to the point where they fall apart. The oblomovtsy would gladly kill their best turkey or a dozen chickens for a guest, but it would be unthinkable for a guest to pour himself a glass of wine because that is expensive and not part of their own produce. Otherwise, hospitality is very important to them, and they love to talk about receiving visitors, what they like to eat and the games they most enjoy playing. Their way of life is monotonous, but the oblomovtsy would not wish for another: they resent the idea of change. Oblomovka is represented to us as a self-sufficient, self-oriented microcosm of traditional nineteenth-century Russian life. Its Slavophile tendencies, though significant, are downplayed by Goncharov’s sober-minded irony. Oblomovka and its way of life, reliant as that is upon timeless routines, presents a Domus image very like that of Gogol’s ‘Old-fashioned Landowners’. Oblomov’s character and outlook have been entirely determined by this image. When Stolz visits his friend at the widow’s house for the last time and learns that they have married and have a son, he concludes that Oblomov has completely returned to his lethargic state and that there is no hope for him. Significantly, he expresses this – emotionally forced and heartrending as it is – in terms of Oblomovka, which he has rescued from its timeless provincial stagnation, completely reformed and set on a course of development and modernity: – Погиб ты, Илья: нечего тебе говорить, что твоя Обломовка не в глуши больше, что до нее дошла очередь, что на нее пали лучи солнца! Не скажу тебе, что года через три она будет станцией дороги [...] – Прощай, старая Обломовка! – сказал он, огля-

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нувшись в последний раз на окна маленького домика – Ты отжила свой век!6 (Part 4, IX, 516-7)

So Oblomov and his fate are identified metonymically with those of the House where he was born and grew up. Goncharov’s third and last novel Обрыв (The Precipice; 1869) has often been counted among the many antinihilist novels that appeared in the eighteen sixties and seventies. It is generally seen as inferior to Oblomov on account of Goncharov’s inability to handle the dramatic developments that make up the plot, but for D. S. Mirsky it has a saving grace that precisely concerns the features that interest us here: ‘It may be said that all is unsatisfactory in The Precipice except the picture, based on his reminiscences of childhood, of the patriarchal, despotic, and kindly grandmamma, and of her life, at once spacious and economical, in her vast, almost rural estate in the city overhanging ‘the precipice’ above the Volga’ (Mirsky 1958,190-1). Indeed The Precipice offers one of the richest descriptions of the estate Domus in Russian literature. As a setting and foil for the plot, it evokes nineteenth-century central Russia in its quintessential morphology, geologically and geographically – the estate is on the precipice near the Volga river – as well as sociologically. Boris Pavlovich Raiskii, an artist, is disappointed in both his painting and his Petersburg life, and having difficulties in deciding what course of life he should choose. He decides to move to his estate on the Volga, which he has not visited for a very long time. Living on the estate are his unmarried aunt Tat’iana Markovna Berezhkova, the reigning matriarch of Malinovka who is lovingly addressed as ‘grandmother’ (babushka), and two orphaned cousins who are in her care – the simple-hearted Marfa and her mysterious, rebellious, complicated older sister Vera. The plot centres around three men who are competing for Vera’s love: Boris Raiskii (who will not win her heart in the end but will be reconciled with the outcome), Mark Volokhov (a wildly provocative nihilist who temporarily manages to tempt her 6

You are lost, Il’ia: it makes no sense to tell you that your Oblomovka is no longer at the back of beyond, that her time has come, that the sun’s rays have fallen on her! I will not tell you that in three years or so she will be a railway station [...] – Good-bye, old Oblomovka! – he said, looking back for the last time at the windows of the little house – you have had your day!


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into secret meetings in the ravine, below the precipice) and Ivan Ivanovich Tushin (a stable, trustworthy, truly-Russian7 landowner who, according to Ehre (1973, 244), was Goncharov’s answer to nihilism); it is he who will marry Vera. The estate and the life that supports it are presented by Goncharov as providing the continuity and internal normative orientation (see Chapter II. 11) to which the heroes return after the plot has run its course and Marfa and Vera are both married. The Malinovka estate is, as usual, topologically situated between nature and culture, very close to a provincial town but bordering on the precipice above the River Volga. As I have already indicated, this precipice is where the central transgression, Vera’s seduction by the nihilist Mark Volokhov, takes place. Goncharov has thus used the well known topoi of the precipice and ravine in their canonical function as the space of illegality and immorality, or the space of the outcast. There are legends concerning murders and suicides committed long ago at the bottom of this precipice and, as in the case of the ravine in Oblomovka, it is forbidden territory; see Ehre, ibidem. Malinovka actually comprises two houses, one old and one new, each with an atmosphere of its own. The new house is where the estate life takes place in its fulness, and where grandmother and Marfa are living. The old house, by contrast, is gloomy and derelict, with an aura of death, devoid of the energetic Domus life of the new house. Vera has her room here, and Raiskii also settles here when he comes to Malinovka. In their own separate ways they have, in the words of Dmitrieva and Kuptsova, ‘a ruinous effect on the Arcadian space of the estate’ (герои, как раз разрушающие аркадийное пространство усадьбы, Dmitrieva and Kuptsova 2003, 181). Goncharov’s depressing description of the old house includes the image of the House as Grave:8 За залой шли мрачные, закоптевшие гостиные, в одной были закутанные в чехлы две статуи, как два привидения, и старые, 7

Vera even compares him to a bear, though to Mark Volokhov he is more like a wolf (Part 4, Chapter VIII, 537). 8 Dmitrieva and Kuptsova, also quoting this passage, state that the House-as-Grave metaphor is not uncommon in connection with old estate houses (idem, p. 185); see the inventory of images of the House Myth as drawn up in Chapter II.4.

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тоже закрытые, люстры. [...] громадная кровать в спальне стояла, как пышный гроб, покрытый глазетом. Райский с трудом представлял себе, как спали на этих катакфалках: казалось ему, не уснуть живому человеку тут.9 (Goncharov 1966, 69)

The contrast between the two houses is expressively exploited by Goncharov to characterise the respective heroes and the initial state of affairs. Vera in particular is associated with the old house for most of the novel, but her finally moving into the new house signifies the restoration of order and things changing for the better. Most of the disruptive action is associated either with the precipice and ravine or with the town, whereas the restoration of orderly life brings the main protagonists back into grandmother’s sphere, which is the sphere of the internal normative orientation towards the estate world. Ehre’s perspicacious analysis is most relevant here in relating the novel’s plot structure to the ‘moral topology’ of Malinovka. Interestingly, a spiritual and spatial centripetal movement and reorientation is observable. In the final synthesis of the novel, there is a ‘movement from the surrounding localities to the central community, the family of the gentry’ (Ehre 1973, 245); the heroine Vera, having confessed her ‘fall’ and been forgiven by grandmother Tat’iana Markovna, leaves the old house and ‘rejoins the domestic nest’. She repents of having been rebellious; it was as though she ‘had been asleep’ and ‘seen all of you in a dream, you [Raiskii], grandmother, my sister, the entire house – I have been vicious, cold and forgetful!’ (Я будто спала: всех вас, тебя, бабушку, сестру, весь дом — видела как во сне, была зла, суха забылась! Goncharov 1966, Part 5, III, 596). Tushin leaves the forest where he has been living and comes to Malinovka to marry Vera and take over the management of the estate.10 Marfa and her fiancé Vikentyev also come back to Malinovka to be married, after9

Beyond the hall came sombre drawing-rooms covered with soot, in one of which there were two statues wrapped in covers like ghosts, and old chandeliers, also covered. [...] a huge bed stood in the bedroom like a luxuriant coffin covered with brocade. Raiskii could hardly imagine how people had slept on these catafalques: a living person could never fall asleep here, it seemed to him. 10 So it is Tushin who comes into the New House through Marriage (one of the canonical House Myth motifs), not his wife Vera, who thus symbolically prolongs the matriarchy of the grandmother in running the estate. Both bridegrooms, Tushin and Marfa’s fiancé Vikentyev, come from the other side of the Volga.


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wards settling on Vikentyev’s estate on the other side of the Volga. A number of other characters also find a place at Malinovka, including Tit Nikonych, grandmother’s secret lover of long ago. The restoration of Domus values and order is affirmed by the exclusion from this new community of potentially disruptive influences such as the nihilist Volokhov (ibidem). Volokhov is a homeless character ‘without a ‘nest’, a hearth, property’, who ultimately proves to be ‘outside of life’ (Ehre 1973, 243). Raiskii has always occupied a special position with its own unique perspective, and his ideological position is similarly unique. He is conservative, but neither nihilist nor reactionary, neither ‘a new man’ nor ‘backward’ (Ehre 1973, 247). He is drawn towards his estate11 and its inhabitants, and so shares its internal normative orientation. He is restless, as is shown in his travelling abroad to devote himself to art, but he retains his internal normative orientation and attitude, and carries it with him on his travels. This is expressed in the novel’s famous finale: И везде, среди этой горячей артистической жизни, он не изменял своей семье, своей группе, не врастал в чужую почву, всё чувствовал себя гостем и пришельцем там. Часто [...] его тянуло назад, домой. Ему хотелось бы набраться этой вечной красоты природы и искусства, [...] и унести всё с собой туда, в свою Малиновку. а ним всё стояли и горячо звали к себе – его три фигуры: его Вера, его Марфинька, бабушка. А за ними стояла и сильнее их влекла его к себе – еще другая, исполинская фигура, другая 12 великая “бабушка” – Россия.

11

On the occasion of Marfa’s marriage, Raiskii assigns the estate house, together with its land and village, to the two sisters. 12 And everywhere, amidst this feverish artist’s life, he did not betray his family, his group; he did not grow roots in a foreign soil but always felt himself a guest and stranger. Often ... he felt drawn back home. He wanted to absorb the eternal beauty of nature and art … and bring it back there, to his Malinovka. Three figures always stood behind him and fervently called to him – his Vera, his Marfenka, and the grandmother. And behind them always stood yet another gigantic figure, another great "grandmother" who beckoned him even more intensely – Russia. (translation M. Ehre 1973, 246).

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The Malinovka estate, together with the three – or rather four – female figures, strongly defines Raiskii’s Russianness in spatial and symbolic terms, not concentrically from within the estate space (as was the case with Lavretskii and the Vasil’evskoe estate in Chapter II.12) but from the outside. This shift serves to illustrate all the more forcefully the concept of internal normative orientation that was introduced above to characterise the literary usad’ba and its moral topology as a microcosm of nineteenth-century Russian rural life. Raiskii’s life, we must conclude, is determined by repeated Home Coming. It is difficult to provide a summary of the Domus life at Malinovka that will do justice to its colourful and often exotic peculiarities, but I shall try to capture something of it with the aid of a few illustrations. Chapter VII of part one is devoted to a first impression of the estate, its buildings, gardens and alleys. For young Raiskii this was the ‘Eden’ (Эдем,13 53) of his early childhood and of his summer holidays from school: В доме какая радость и мир жили! Чего там не было! Комнатки маленькие, но уютные, с старинной, взятой из большого дома мебелью дедов, дядей, и с улыбавшимися портретами отца и матери Райского, и также родителей двух оставшихся на руках у Бережковой девочек-малюток. Полы были выкрашены, натерты воском и устланы клеенками; печи обложены пестрыми, старинными, тоже взятыми из дома изразцами. Шкапы битком набиты старой, дрожавшей от шагов посудой и звеневшим серебром. На виду красовались старинные саксонские чашки, пастушки, маркизы, китайские уродцы, бочкообразные чайники, сахарницы, тяжелые ложки. Стульчики и кругленькие, с медными ободочкаи и с деревянной мозаикой, столики жались по уютным уголкам.14 (ibidem) 13

‘Eden’ is part of Raiskii’s name, derived from ‘rai’ – ‘Paradise’; Oblomov’s dreamed Oblomovka is not far away. 14 In the house there reigned such joy and peace! And there was so much to see! Small but comfortable rooms containing the old furniture of grandfathers and uncles taken from the big house, and smiling portraits of Raiskii’s father and mother, as well as of the parents of the two little girls who had been left in grandmother Berezhkova’s care. The floors were painted, polished with wax and covered with oil-cloth; the stoves were covered with motley old tiles, also taken from the old house. The cupboards were filled to the brim with old crockery that quavered at every step, and jingling silverware. Ancient Saxon porcelain cups stood out vividly, together with little sheperd-


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Tat’iana Markovna rules over the property and the household as if it were a small kingdom: Она управляла им, как маленьким царством, мудро, экономно, кропотливо, но деспотически и на феодальных началах.15 (53)

She is respected and feared by her servants, and her appearance on the scene, announced in advance by the jangling of her keys, is sufficient to inspire the necessary discipline: На поясе и в карманах висело и лежало множество ключей, так что бабушку, как гремучую змею, можно было слышать издали, когда она идет по двору или по саду. Кучера при этом звуке быстро прятали трубки в сапоги, потому что она больше всего на свете боялась пожара, и куренье табаку относила - по этой причине - к большим порокам. Повара и кухарки, тоже заслышав звон ключей, принимались - за нож, за уполовник или за метлу [...], прежде нежели бабушка появилась.16 (56)

Life is so ordered and framed by routines that hardly any instruction or explanation is necessary: Они говорили между собой односложными словами. Бабушке почти не нужно было отдавать приказаний Василисе: она сама знала всё, что надо делать. А если надобилось что-нибудь экстренное, бабушка не требовала, а как будто советовала сделать то или другое. Просить бабушка не могла своих подчиненных: это было не в ее феодальной натуре. Человек, лакей, слуга, дев-

esses, marchionesses, Chinese monsters, barrel-shaped teapots, sugar-basins and heavy spoons. Small chairs and tables with tiny brass rims and wooden mosaics huddled together in cozy corners. 15 She ran it like a small kingdom, wisely, thriftily and painstakingly, but despotically and according to feudal principles. 16 On her belt and in her pocket, grandmother carried a multitude of keys with her, so that she could be heard like a rattlesnake at a distance when she walked across the court or through the garden. At this sound, coachmen would hastily tuck away their pipes into their boots because she feared a fire more than anything else in the world and therefore considered smoking one of the greater vices. The cooks too, when they heard the chinking of her keys, would pick up their knives, ladles or brooms [...] before grandmother appeared.

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ка — всё это навсегда, несмотря ни на что, оставалось для нее 17 человеком, лакеем, слугой и девкой. (57)

For all grandmother’s manorial concern and sense of responsibility – even sending servants to hospital if necessary – the fundamental distance between masters and servants remains inviolable, and order is to be maintained at all costs (57): Различия между “людьми” и господами никогда и ничто не могло истребить. Она была в меру строга, в меру снисходительна, человеколюбива, но всё в размерах барских понятий. Даже когда являлся у Ирины, Матрены или другой дворовой девки непривилегированный ребенок, она выслушает донесение об этом молча, с видом оскорбленного достоинства; потом велит Василисе дать чего там нужно, с презрением, глядя в сторону, и только скажет: “Чтоб я ее не видала, негодяйку!” Матрена и Ирина, оправившись, с месяц прятались от барыни, а потом опять ничего, а ребенок отправлялся “на село”.18

Against the background of this domestic order and stable routine, some of the dramatic plot moments particularly stand out. In part 5, Chapter VII, the emotional crisis between Vera and grandmother is at its deepest. Grandmother, feeling that she has failed to keep Vera in the fold of her estate world and its order of life, is full of selfreproach. She feels totally and utterly demoralised, and this shapes and colours her view of her world. She has a distorted, infernal vision 17

They used to speak in monosyllables. Grandmother hardly ever needed to give orders to Vasilisa: she herself knew all that had to be done. If something extra was needed grandmother did not demand it, but gave ostensible advice to do this or that. To ask subordinates to do something was unthinkable for grandmother: it was against her feudal nature. A servant, a footman, a maidservant, when all was said and done, remained for her a servant, a footman, a maidservant. 18 Nothing could ever remove the difference between “the people” and the masters. Grandmother was fairly strict, fairly indulgent, philanthropic, but only within the limits of her manorial notions. Even when Irina, Matriona or any of the other of the house-maids had an illegitimate child, she would listen to the account of it in silence with an air of affronted dignity. Then she would order Vasilisa to give the girl whatever was necessary, full of indignation, looking sideways and only saying: “Get that bitch out of my sight!” Matriona or Irina, after recovering, would hide from the mistress for a month or so, and then it would be as though nothing had happened, and the child would be sent “to the village”.


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of the estate and house – which mean everything to her, for which she feels responsible and which it is her duty to protect – running out of control and collapsing into chaos.19 It is an impressive concrete rendering of what depression can do to one’s perception of the world, and of the psychic significance of the House image: Ей наяву снилось, как царство ее рушилось и как на месте его легла мерзость запустения в близком будущем. После, от нее самой, он узнал страшный сон, ей снившийся. Озираясь на деревню, она видела — не цветущий, благоустроенный порядок домов, а лишенный надзора и попечения ряд полусгнивших изб — притон пьяниц, нищих, бродяг и воров. Поля лежат пустые, поросшие полынью, лопухом и крапивой. Она с ужасом отворотилась от деревни и вошла в сад, остановилась, озираясь вокруг, не узнавая домов, двора. Сад, цветник, огороды — смешались в одну сплошную кучу, спутались и поросли былием. Туда не заходит человек: только коршун, утащив живую добычу, терзает ее там на просторе. Новый дом покривился и врос в землю; людские развалились: на развалинах ползает и жалобно мяучит одичалая кошка, да беглый колодник прячется под осевшей кровлей. Старуха вздрогнула и оглянулась на старый дом. Он перестоял всё — когда всё живое с ужасом ушло от этих мест — он стоит мрачный, облупившийся, с своими темно-бурыми кирпичными боками. Стекол нет в окнах, сгнили рамы, и в обвалившихся покоях ходит ветер, срывая последние следы жизни. В камине свил гнездо филин, не слышно живых шагов, только тень ее... кого уж нет, кто умрет тогда, ее Веры — скользит по тусклым, треснувшим паркетам, мешая свой стон с воем ветра, [...].20 (628-9) 19

The intensity of grandmother’s suffering is connected with the fact that, in her conflict with Vera, she is faced by a repressed conflict with her own past, with her own ‘fall’. 20 She was dreaming, though awake, of how her kingdom was collapsing and how in its place the vileness of neglect in the near future descended. Later he [Raiskii] heard from her about the terrible dream she had had. Looking around her at the village, she did not see a flourishing, well-equipped order of houses, but a row of half rotten huts, deprived of supervision and care – a den of drunkards, beggars, tramps and thieves. The fields were lying barren, overgrown with wormwood, burdock and nettles. She turned away from the village in disgust and went into the garden, stopped and looked

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In this terrifying projection of guilt, and fear of chaos, disorder and death, the huts and houses figure anthropomorphically as personalities or identities but in the negative sense – through the absence of that meaning – or, as in the case of the old house, with decay and old age as the basis of comparison. There is an inverse movement compared to Hodder’s Domus concept: nature is not drawn into the order of culture; instead culture loses its domain to nature, with the eagle owl making its nest in the house – taking over an abandoned nest (which is normal in nature) of the landed gentry – and the wind roaming freely in it. However, the previous order will be restored (Всё пришло в прежний порядок; XIII, 632). At the beginning of their reconciliation, Vera wants grandmother to take her out of the old house and into the new house – the living estate. Thus, after initially Fleeing the House, Vera concludes the novel with a final Home Coming, which is both the beginning of a new life for her and the promise of continuity for the life of the Domus.

around, not recognising the houses or the yard. The flowerbeds, the vegetable garden and the rest had all become mingled into one single heap, entangled and forgotten. No man would go in there, only a kite that, after dragging in its living prey, would unrestrainedly tear it to pieces there. The new house had become crooked and grown into the ground; the servants’ halls had collapsed; among the ruins a wild cat crawled and mewed dolefully, and a fugitive convict was hiding under what remained of the roof. The old woman flinched and looked at the old house. It had stood there far too long – while all life had left this place in horror – and it was still standing there gloomily with its paint peeling off and its dark brown brick flanks. There were no windowpanes in the windows; the sashes were rotten, and the wind freely entered the rooms that had caved in, tearing away the last traces of life. An eagle owl had made its nest in the fireplace. No living footsteps were heard, only the ghost of her – she who was no more, she who would die, her Vera – gliding over the dim, cracked parquet, blending her moaning with the howling wind, [...].

14. Saltykov-Shchedrin. Houses of Death N. Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fame as a novelist rests on his only novel, Господа Головлевы (The Golovliov Family; 1872-6). He was also a feared and famous satirist. The crisis of the family as an institution is a recurrent topic in his oeuvre (for a detailed analysis see Pavlova 1999), and in addition to the novel he wrote stories in which the decline and desintegration of Russian noble families is chronicled in a manner very similar way to that of The Golovliov Family; see particularly Пошехонская старина (Old Days in Poshekhonie (1887-89)). Saltykov’s utterly negative assessment of the life of the landed gentry and serfdom found a means of expression in the form of satire, and his literary treatment of this obsessive theme was strongly influenced by Gogol’s ‘Старосветские помещики’ (‘Old-fashioned Landowners’ and the story of the landowner Pliushkin in Мертвые души (Dead Souls) (Pavlova 1999, 42). Much of his work, including the creation of some central characters, has an autobiographical basis, but it is nonetheless a judgement on Russian society and history as a whole. For Saltykov, the idea of the family was identical to the concept of the House: Семья – это ”дом”, это центр жизнедеятельности человека, это последнее убежище, в которое он обязательно возвращается, куда бы ни призывали его профессия и долг. Далее этого убежища ему некуда идти.1 (Quoted from Pavlova 1999, 38)

1

The family is “the house”; it is the centre of a man’s life and activities; it is his last refuge, to which he returns without fail, wherever his profession and duty might call him. There is nowhere further for him to go than this refuge.

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We must assume that this statement expresses the author’s own worldview, reflected in the essential values attributed to the House. The House is the foundation of the individual’s life; it is also his refuge – even his last resort. The House’s protective quality is paramount, which renders all the more remarkable the fact that, in Saltykov’s literary work, it is exactly this aspect of the House archetype that is so breathtakingly undermined, betraying a deep anxiety on the part of the author. As D.S. Mirsky rightly argues, placing The Golovliov Family firmly among a succession of works in which Russian estate life is represented without illusion, it is the darkest and gloomiest novel in Russian literature: The book is certainly the gloomiest in all Russian literature – all the more gloomy because the effect is attained by the simplest means without any theatrical, melodramatic, or athmospheric effects. Together with Goncharov’s Oblomov before, and Bunin’s Sukhodol after it, it is the greatest monumentum odiosum erected to the memory of the Russian provincial gentry. [...] It is one of the most terrible visions of ultimately dehumanised humanity ever conceived by an imaginative writer (Mirsky 1958, 294)

This is indeed a strong statement about a novel with a radical message. Mirsky goes on to describe it as a social novel – the natural history of a family of provincial squires, intended to show up the poverty and bestiality of the civilisation of the serf-owning class. The reign of brute matter over human lives has never been portrayed with greater force. Spiteful, greedy, selfish, without even any family feeling for each other, without even any satisfaction or any possibility of happiness in their dull and dark souls, the Golovliovs are an unrelieved wilderness of animal humanity. (ibidem)

The Golovliov Family is a family novel in which a number of the House Myth images and motifs are strongly represented, but all of them with an aura of doom and death. They are the images of the Unhappy House of the family which is not a family, the House–Prison and the House of Death, including the concrete image of the House–

Saltykov-Shchedrin. Houses of Death

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Grave (Coffin). From the inventory of the fabular motifs of the House Myth, the most prominent are: Leaving the House (home) both as a phase in life and as a flight or escape from it (as a result of conflict); Returning to the House (homecoming, with reference to the parable of the prodigal son); the Loss of a House, and the Death of the House in the dynastic sense. The Golovliovs are a family of total failures and empty, shallow, heartless egotists, but they are also presented by their creator as victims. They are doomed by ‘an ill-starred fate’ (злополучный фатум). In the final chapter, entitled ‘Reckoning’ (‘Расчет’), the narrator elaborates the reasons for this, ultimately singling out three basic causes or ‘characteristic features’ that have determined their decline: idleness, unfitness for any business whatsoever, and addiction to hard drinking (праздность, непригодность к какому бы то ни было делу и запой): Вдруг, словно вша, нападает на семью не то невзгода, не то порок и начинает со всех сторон есть. Расползается по всему организму, прокрадывается в самую сердцевину и точит поколение за поколением. Появляются коллекции слабосильных людишек, пьяниц, мелких развратников, бессмысленных празднолюбцев и вообще неудачников. И чем дальше, тем мельче вырабатываются людишки, пока наконец на сцену не выходят худосочные зауморыши [...], которые при первом же натиске жизни не выдерживают и гибнут. Именно такого рода злополучный фатум тяготел над головлевской семьей. В течение нескольких поколений три характеристические черты проходили через историю этого семейства: праздность, непригодность к какому бы то ни было делу и запой. Первые две приводили за собой пустословие, пустомыслие и пустоутробие, последний - являлся как бы обязательным заключением общей жизненной неурядицы.2 (Shchedrin 1968, 458) 2

Suddenly, as by a louse, the family is attacked by either adversity or vice, and it begins to attack them from all sides. It crawls its way through the entire organism, sneaks upon the very heart and gnaws away generation after generation, hoards of feeble, miserable people, drunkards, petty debauchees, foolish idlers and failures of all kinds. And the further it spreads, the shallower the petty people become, until finally sickly weaklings enter the stage [...], who break down and perish at the first of life’s vicissitudes. Precisely such an ill-starred fate was hanging over the Golovliov family. In the course of a couple of generations, three characteristic features ran through the history of this family: idleness, unfitness for whatever business, and addiction to hard drinking. From the first two ensued idleness of talk, of thought and of the womb, and

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The world-view presented in this expressive digression summarises the family’s life by the use of a theatrical metaphor and deterministic terms of biology and natural selection – a combination of narrative attitudes which even makes room for a modicum of compassion towards the Golovliovs and families like theirs. The ‘extensive fundamental derangement’ implies and determines moral degeneration. A family that is not a family and has not been one for generations is also in fundamental disarray as a House. The novel’s time space begins around the middle of the nineteenth century, with serfdom as an institution coming to an end. The Golovliovs are small landowners. Arina Petrovna, a strong, cruel, niggardly woman, is successfully running the Golovliov property that comprises three estates, the central one bearing the family name, Golovliovo. The other two, smaller and poorer, are named Dubrovino and Pogorelka. Arina Petrovna’s husband, Vladimir Mikhailovich, is a goodfor-nothing, licentious degenerate who drinks, loves to write obscene verses and can imitate the song of the starling. He calls her ‘witch’ and ‘devil’; she calls him ‘windmill’ or ‘balalaika without strings’, but in spite of all this name-calling and mutual insult they have four children: three sons, Stepan, Porfirii, and Pavel, and a daughter Anna. This daughter fails to live up to her mother’s expectations, but Arina Petrovna positively detests and scorns her sons. Stepan, the eldest, also known as ‘Степка-балбес’ (‘Stiopka-booby’) takes mostly after his father; Pavel, the youngest, is a sullen, apathetic character who lives in a world of his own imagination, but it is the middle son, Porfirii, who is the central character of the novel. He is both exceptional and exceptionable. From his early childhood the family nicknames him ‘Юдушка’ (‘Little Judas’) and ‘Кровопивушка’ (‘Little bloodsucker’). He is a pathological hypocrite, a chatterbox and a plotter, masterfully hiding his intentions behind a façade of pious bigotry and platitudes. Even his mother, whom he calls his ‘dear friend mama’, is afraid and suspicious of his ingratiating manners, and he is easily capable of outmanoeuvring the entire family. The house of the Golovliovs is truly a House of Death. In each of the chapters a member of the family dies. When the children grow up the last was the inevitable conclusion, so to speak, of extensive fundamental derangement.


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they leave, or rather flee, the house, each provided with a portion (кусок), after which they are expected to look after themselves. Anna elopes with a junior cavalry officer and marries against her mother’s wish. She gives birth to twin daughters, is left by her husband and dies soon afterwards. Arina Petrovna reluctantly takes the daughters into her care and raises them in a rigorous and unloving manner. Stepan, after a series of failures, returns home penniless having squandered his portion, a house in Moscow. Porfirii succeeds in persuading his mother not to give Stepan another portion but instead to allow him to live on the Golovliovo estate, disinheriting him in the process. Stepan (Stiopka) is put away in an outbuilding, where he is locked in at night. Drinking heavily, he pines away and dies. Then the father dies, and Little Judas (Iudushka) persuades his mother to divide the family property among the two remaining sons. Little Judas receives the biggest estate, Golovliovo. His mother stays there with him at first, to help him with the management. She invests her money in the acquisition of new land and becomes financially dependent on shrewd Iudushka, who now demands financial accounting from her down to the last copeck. She leaves in disgust, moving to the small estate of her son Pavel. He takes no interest in his estate, retiring more and more to his study, where he drinks himself to death. Arina Petrovna moves, with her two granddaughters, to the little estate of Pogorelka, which her daughter Anna had once received as her portion. When the two granddaughters leave her to become provincial actresses, there is nothing left for her but to return to Golovliovo and endure the pranks and intrigues of Iudushka, who in turn is willing to suffer her presence for fear that she might curse him, which he really fears. Iudushka has had two sons of his own. After becoming a widower, he began a relationship with his servant Evpraksiia, after which one of his sons, living in bitter poverty, committed suicide. The second son, Petenka, suddenly arrives, begging his father for help. He has incurred serious gambling debts and, without his father’s help, will be sent to Siberia. When Iudushka refuses, his son accuses him of causing the death of his brother, and it is now that Arina Petrovna curses Iudushka. Petenka dies on his way to Siberia, and Arina Petrovna herself dies shortly afterwards. Iudushka thus becomes the owner of the entire family property, but he is also beginning to feel his lonely isolation. When Evpraksiia bears him a child, he ignores it and has it sent away

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to an orphanage. She now revolts, ignoring her master’s commands, interrupting him, insulting him, telling him home truths and engaging openly in licentious affairs with other house serfs, all of which Iudushka is powerless to prevent. His only, occasional, visitor is his cousin Anninka. He begins to neglect the estate and locks himself up in his study, drinking and withdrawing into an imaginary world. When Anninka next visits him she is herself feeling demoralised and ill. Her sister having recently committed suicide, she wishes to die ‘at home’, and they sit together, drinking heavily and and remembering the family members who have died. It is at this point that Iudushka’s conscience begins to trouble him. One winter’s night, he walks out of the house in frenzy, intending to visit the grave of his mother, twenty-five verst away, and to ask her forgiveness. His body is found on the road the following day, frozen to death. In the meantime, Anninka is lying in her bed at Golovliovo with a heavy fever, and a distant niece on a neighbouring estate is attentively watching the events there, waiting impatiently for her own opportunity to take over. The estates of the family Golovliovo were gloomy households, where people led cheerless and joyless lives. Throughout the novel we find references to gloom and repression, an atmosphere that breaths emptiness, and deathly silence. When Anninka visits her uncle Porfirii for the first time, he tries to force her to settle down at Golovliovo and keep him company. She is overwhelmed by a sense of the horror of the place and – even though she is heir to it – shivers at the very thought of actually living there: [...]: она решилась как можно скорее уехать из Головлева, и ежели дядя будет приставать, то оградить себя от этих приставаний необходимостью явиться в назначенный срок. Проснувшись на другой день утром, она прошлась по всем комнатам громадного головлевского дома. Везде было пустынно, неприютно, пахло отчуждением, выморочностью. Мысль поселиться в этом доме без срока окончательно испугала ее. “Ни за что! - твердила она в каком-то безотчетном волнении, - ни за что!”3 ( 356) 3

[...]: she decided to leave Golovliovo as soon as possible, and if her uncle pestered her she would defend herself against his obtrusiveness by telling him that she had to attend some urgent appointment. After waking up the next morning she walked up and down in all the rooms of the huge Golovliov house. Everywhere it was deserted and inhospitable; there was a smell of alienation and escheat. The idea of settling in


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She will eventually join him there, of course, but only after her own demoralisation has reached rock bottom. Arina Petrovna had been the force that kept the house together, economically and socially, and as long as she had the strength to exert her energetic rule the Golovliovs gave the impression of being a family – an ‘unassailable fortress’ and a ‘family stronghold’. In those days, Arina Petrovna spoke continually of ‘the family’, but once she had grown old and become totally dependent, she realised with a shock that they had never been one. As the narrator stresses, the family had been based on ‘artificial ties’, and with the imminent death of her son Pavel at Dubrovino the illusion had become untenable and the end of the dynasty inescapable: Прошло не больше десяти лет с тех пор, [...], а положения действующих лиц до того изменились, что не осталось и следа тех искусственных связей, благодаря которым головлевская семья представлялась чем-то вроде неприступной крепости. Семейная твердыня, воздвигнутая неутомимыми руками Арины Петровны, рухнула, но рухнула до того незаметно, что она, сама не понимая, как это случилось, сделалась соучастницею и даже явным двигателем этого разрушения, настоящею душою которого был, разумеется, Порфишка-кровопивец.4 (249)

Under the manorial rule of Arina Petrovna, domestic life was completely dominated by her excessive economy of scraping together and hoarding produce. Even if the storerooms were overflowing with old stock that had gone bad, it was still fit for the servants. This is how the Golovliovo estate prepared itself for the winter:

this house indefinitely frightened her definitively. “Not for the world! – she repeated with unaccountable agitation – not for the world!” 4 Not more than ten years had passed, [...] but the positions of the dramatis personae had changed so much that not a trace was left of those artificial ties thanks to which the Golovliov family had resembled something like an unassailable fortress. The family stronghold, erected by the tireless hands of Arina Petrovna, had collapsed, but it had collapsed so imperceptibly that she, not understanding what was happening, had become the accomplice and outwardly even the driving force of this destruction, of which the real soul was, of course, Porfishka-the-bloodsucker.

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[...]; отовсюду стекались запасы на зиму, из всех вотчин возами привозилась бабья натуральная повинность: сушеные грибы, ягоды, яйца, овощи и проч. Все это мерялось, принималось и присовокуплялось к запасам прежних годов. Недаром у головлевской барыни была выстроена целая линия погребов, кладовых и амбаров; все они были полным-полнехоньки, и немало было в них порченого материала, к которому приступить нельзя было, ради гнилого запаха. Весь этот материал сортировался к концу лета, и та часть его, которая оказывалась ненадежною, сдавалась в застольную. - Огурчики-то еще хороши, только сверху немножко словно поослизли, припахивают, ну да уж пусть дворовые полакомятся, - говорила Арина Петровна, приказывая оставить то ту, то другую кадку.5 (Shchedrin 1968, 235)

Such preparations for the winter are, after all, the routines of the Domus, and in most other estate literature they would be treated as seasonal highlights, uniting masters and peasants in the traditions of rural life. Here they only highlight manorial distance. The novel stresses the fact that landowners live at the cost of serf labour, and for families like the Golovliovs the abolition of serfdom is a spectre signalling the end of their way of life. This spectre is clearly seen both by Vladimir Mikhailovich on his deathbed and by Arina Petrovna, who perceives it as the Death of the Domus: Последние слова его (В. М.) были: - Благодарю моего бога, что не допустил меня наряду с холопами предстать перед лицо свое! Слова эти глубоко запечатлелись в восприимчивой душе Арины Петровны, и смерть мужа, вместе с фантасмагориями будущего, наложили какой-то безнадежный колорит на весь голов5

[...]; from everywhere supplies for the winter were coming in. From all quarters, cartloads of natural produce that had been prepared by the peasant women were delivered at the estate: dried mushrooms, berries, eggs, vegetables, etc. All this was measured, taken in and added to the stocks of previous years. It was not without reason that the mistress of Golovliovo had built a whole line of cellars, larders and barns; all were chock-full, and there was a lot of stuff in them that was off and could not even be approached because of the terrible smell. All this stuff was sorted towards the end of the summer, and what turned out to be untrustworthy was sent to the servants’ hall. “These cucumbers are still good, but at the top they’ve become sort of slimy, and they stink a bit, well, let the servants treat themselves to them”, Arina Petrovna would say, ordering this or that tub to be taken out.


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левский обиход. Как будто и старый головлевский дом, и все живущее в нем - все разом собралось умереть.6 (251)

As Iudushka’s conflict with Evpraksiia showed, this feudal household was indeed in total disarray and approaching its final disintegration. However, these masters too were rooted in the Russian rural tradition and lived a life that was similar in many respects to that of their serfs, as in the case of Turgenev’s small landowner Chertopkhanov; see Chapter II.12. The harsh mistress Arina Petrovna had spent almost all her life in the Russian countryside and only knew estate life. The endless fields and almost featureless nature of the Russian countryside had shaped her personality and world-picture. It was the ‘landscape of her soul’, just as it must have been for her serfs, and a direct metonymical relationship between her character and the landscape around the old estate house of Pogorelka is clearly indicated: Погорелка была печальная усадьба. Она стояла, как говорится, на тычке, без сада, без тени, без всяких признаков какого бы то ни было комфорта. Даже палисадника впереди не было. Дом был одноэтажный, словно придавленный, и весь почерневший от времени и непогод; сзади расположены были немногочисленные службы, тоже приходившие в ветхость; а кругом стлались поля, поля без конца; даже лесу на горизонте не было видно. Но так как Арина Петровна с детства почти безвыездно жила в деревне, то эта бедная природа не только не казалась ей унылою, но даже говорила ее сердцу и пробуждала остатки чувств, которые в ней теплились. Лучшая часть ее существа жила в этих нагих и бесконечных полях, и взоры инстинктивно искали их во всякое время. Она вглядывалась в полевую даль, вглядывалась в эти измокшие деревни, которые в виде черных точек пестрели там и сям на горизонте; вглядывалась в белые церкви сельских погостов, вглядывалась в пестрые пятна, которые бродячие в лучах солнца облака рисовали на равнине полей, вглядывалась в этого неизвестного мужика, который шел 6

[Vladimir Mikhailovich’s] final words were: I thank my God that he did not allow me to appear before His face as the equal of villeins! These words imprinted themselves deeply in Arina Petrovna’s receptive soul, and her husband’s death, together with the phantasmagorias of the future, laid a certain hopeless colouring over the entire Golovliovian daily routine. It was as though the old Golovliov house, with all that lived in it, was suddenly going to die.

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между полевых борозд, а ей казалось, что он словно застыл на одном месте.7 (290-1)

With regard to the estate house itself, the parallels with Chertopkhanov’s case are really striking. He too is a small landowner who represents the most conservative end of the spectrum. His derelict house also stands on a poor, exposed spot without so much as a garden or fence, and the concrete domestic situations of his establishment are similarly rendered with images and indexes of general disharmony and fundamental economic and moral disarray, announcing the death of the house. The motifs and shapes of the House Myth are there, but they are nearly always accompanied by negative prefixes such as ‘un’, ‘dis-’ and ‘mal-’. Neither can we detect here what I defined earlier as positive internal normative orientation, as in the case of The Precipice; see Chapter II.13. The Golovliovs are defensive and mistrustful in their permanently disharmonious life and relations with the outside world. Their narrow-mindedness finds spatial reflection in the way they increasingly isolate themselves from the world, closing their houses and withdrawing in self-imposed isolation. Such frames of mind are clearly expressed in House images such as the House–Prison or the House–Grave (see Chapter I.4), which are strongly represented in this novel. The epithets just discussed – ‘unassailable fortress’ and ‘family stronghold’ – are realised concretely at various moments during of the downfall of the Golovliovs, illustrating their basic attitude of mistrust 7

Pogorelka was a doleful estate. It stood in an unpleasant, exposed spot, without a garden, without shade, without signs of any comfort whatsoever. There was not even a front garden. The house, which had only one storey, appeared weighed down; it was blackened all over from time and bad weather. Behind the house there were a few outbuildings, also dilapidated; and all around, the fields stretched out, fields without end, not even a wood to be seen on the horizon. But because, since her childhood, Arina Petrovna had lived almost without a break in the country, this poor environment, far from appearing cheerless to her, spoke to her heart and awakened the remnants of joyful feelings which glimmered in her. The best of her lived in these bare and endless fields, and her eyes instinctively looked for them at all times. She would be absorbed in the perspective of the fields, in the rain-soaked villages that struck the eye as black dots here, there and everywhere on the horizon, in the white village churches and churchyards, in the multi-coloured spots which clouds painted on the slopes of the fields as they wandered in the sun’s rays, in this unknown peasant who walked between the furrows, giving her the impression that he had frozen on the spot.


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and fear towards the world as those who remain become progressively isolated. One concrete illustration of the spatial modelling of such fear can be seen when the two granddaughters leave the Pogorelovka estate (to try their luck as actresses). Arina Petrovna experiences a new sense of ‘limitless freedom’, which frightens her because it forces her to confront the emptiness of her life. She tries to combat this in concrete terms by narrowing down her own life space and shutting out the girls: she gives orders for the rooms where the girls had lived to be boarded up: С отъездом сирот погорелковский дом окунулся в какую-то безнадежную тишину [...]. Проводивши внучек, она, может быть, в первый раз почувствовала, что от ее существа что-то оторвалось и что она разом получила какую-то безграничную свободу, до того безграничную, что она уже ничего не видела перед собой, кроме пустого пространства. Чтоб как-нибудь скрыть в собственных глазах эту пустоту, она распорядилась немедленно заколотить парадные комнаты и мезонин, в котором жили сироты ("кстати, и дров меньше выходить будет", думала она при этом), а для себя отделила всего две комнаты, [...].8 ( 289)

When Stepan returns home, having squandered his allowance, it is not to be a joyous Homecoming. He is desperate and terrified; he knows he will not be received like the biblical prodigal son. His perception of the paternal grounds and house is coloured by hauntingly negative memories and bad feelings about himself. Seeing the stone that marks the boundary of the estate makes him recall his wretched life up to that point, which he sees as having been deformed by his upbringing on the estate. Going further, beyond the boundary stone, marks his fatal decision to return home. The description of his miserable home-

8

With the departure of the orphans the Pogorelovka house was plunged into a hopeless silence [...]. Having seen off her granddaughters she felt, maybe for the first time, that something had been torn off from her essence and that at one go she had obtained a limitless freedom, so limitless that she did not see anything before her but empty space. In order somehow to hide this emptiness from her own eyes, she gave orders to board up immediately the ceremonial rooms and the mezzanine where the orphans had lived (“Apropos, we will also use less firewood,” she thought on the occasion), and detached only two rooms for herself, [...].

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coming provides examples of expressive psychopoetic House imagery: Было около десяти часов утра, когда из-за леса показалась белая головлевская колокoльня. ицо Степана Владимирыча побледнело, руки затряслись: он снял картуз и перекрестился. Вспомнилась ему евангельская притча о блудном сыне, возвращающемся домой, но он тотчас же понял, что, в применении к нему, подобные воспоминания составляют только одно обольщение. Наконец он отыскал глазами поставленный близ дороги межевой столб и очутился на головлевской земле, на той постылой земле, которая родила его постылым, вскормила постылым, выпустила постылым на все четыре стороны и теперь, постылого же, вновь принимает его в свое лоно. Солнце стояло уже высоко и беспощадно палило бесконечные головлевские поля. Но он бледнел все больше и больше и чувствовал, что его начинает знобить. аконец он дошел до погоста, и тут бодрость окончательно оставила его. Барская усадьба смотрела из-за деревьев так мирно, словно в ней не происходило ничего особенного; но на него ее вид произвел действие медузиной головы. Там чудился ему гроб. Гроб! гроб! гроб! - повторял он бессознательно про себя. И не решился-таки идти прямо в усадьбу, а зашел прежде к священнику и послал его известить о своем приходе и узнать, примет ли его маменька.9 ( 220) 9

It was about ten o’clock in the morning when the belltower of Golovliovo appeared from behind the wood. Stepan Vladimirych’s face grew pale, and his hands started to tremble: he took his cap off his head and crossed himself. He remembered the parable of the prodigal son returning home, but immediately understood that such memories, applied to himself, would only be a delusion. At last he found with his eyes the stone that marked the boundary, and he found himself on Golovliov land, on that loathsome land which had borne him loathsome, raised him loathsome, released him loathsome into the wide world and now accepted him back, just as loathsome, into its bosom. The sun already stood high, and relentlessly scorched the endless Golovliov fields. But he grew paler and paler, and began to feel shivery. Finally he reached the church and the churchyard, and there what courage he still had abandoned him completely. The estate looked at him from behind the trees so peacefully as to suggest that nothing special was happening inside it; but on him its aspect made the impression of a Medusa head. It seemed like a coffin to him. A coffin! a coffin! a coffin! he repeated to himself involuntarily. And he could not bring himself to go to the house straight away, so he first went to the priest and sent him to announce his arrival and to find out whether his mother would receive him.


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His expressive projection of fear takes the form of complex personification of the house using metonymic symbolism that connects, and partly equates and includes in one another, the following elements respectively: ‘mother-earth’ (the estate land), ‘house’, ‘mother’ and ‘lap’ (‘bosom’) (…той постылой земле, которая родила его, Барская усадьба, лоно). All of these elements are given negative qualifications or transformations (metaphorisations): the mother-earth that bore him is ‘loathsome’, as he is himself; the house in which his biological mother lives takes on the frightful aspect of Medusa,10 and the metaphorical string ‘house–mother–lap’ is drawn into the perspective of death through his repeated comparison of the house with a coffin. His darkest fears – and the metaphors in which they are phrased – will be realised. Upon entering the house he is greeted by his mad father who gleefully warns him that his mother, the ‘witch’, ‘will eat him’: – Что, голубчик! попался к ведьме в лапы! - крикнул он, покуда Степан Владимирыч целовал его руку. Потом крикнул петухом, опять захохотал и несколько раз сряду повторил: – съест! съест! съест! – Съест! – словно эхо, откликнулось и в его душе. Предвидения его оправдались. Его поместили в особой комнате того флигеля, в котором помещалась и контора. Туда принесли ему белье из домашнего холста и старый папенькин халат, в который он и облачился немедленно. Двери склепа растворились, пропустили его, и – захлопнулись.11 (221)

10

According to Greek mythology Medusa was originally a woman with exceptionally beautiful hair. As a punishment for offending her, Athene changed her hair into a nest of wriggling snakes and decreed that everybody who looked at her would be turned to stone. By analogy, the terrified Stepan perceives his own ‘nest’ as a ‘nest of wriggling snakes’ – in itself a very apt metaphor for the morals and habits at Golovliovo – and is indeed ‘petrified’ when he looks at the face of his Mother–House. 11 – Well, my dear! You fell into the witch’s clutches! he shouted, while Stepan Vladimyrich kissed his hand. Then he crowed like a cock, again laughed out loudly and repeated a number of times: – She will eat you! Eat you! Eat you! / – Eat you! his soul responded, as if echoing. His foresights proved true. He was placed in a special room in the same wing as the office. There they brought him home-made linen and an old dressing-gown of his father’s, which he put on immediately. The doors of the burial vault opened slightly, let him in, and closed with a bang.

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The House of his childhood has turned into a prison, the room he is confined to into a burial vault; later, he will die in it. Symbolically, the mother does eat her own child here, an unimaginable evil of mythical stature. In this inverted world-order, giving birth is undone by the mother ‘eating’ her child as he goes back into the house, back into her, to die. But the next generation of Golovliov children – the two daughters of Anna, and the two sons of Porfirii – are also doomed, and they die without issue. Two of them commit suicide (in one case caused by the father Porfirii) while the remaining two also die young. Although they all leave the house, they are unable to ‘break free from the vicious circle’ of the ‘cursed nest’ of the Golovliovs (Pavlova 1999, 127). What is represented here is an unconnected, dying estate world that has lost its moral foundation and thus lost also the internal normative orientation towards the world which, in one way or another, characterised the estate worlds of Goncharov’s Precipice, Tolstoi’s War and Peace and even Aksakov’s uncomplicated A Family Chronicle; see Chapter II.10.

15. Tolstoi and Family Life The concept of the family is central to Tolstoi as a novelist. Both War and Peace (Война и мир; 1864-1869) and Anna Karenina (1873-76) are family novels. The epic War and Peace creates a picture of national life on the scale of Russia as a whole as well as on the scale of the intimate lives of families and individuals. In this process, the function of domestic details and topics related to Domus routines is to provide a concrete historical background against which family life can unfold in its full pictorial vividness. Life, both on the estate and in the urban manor house, is presented with the material saturation required by Tolstoi’s Realism, but its primary function is the motivation of characters and their interactions. Here, the House, its spaces and its way of life are not in themselves problematised or questioned, as is also true of the basically harmonious, justified House world of Tolstoi’s debut novella Детство (Childhood, 1852), in which, for the first time in Russian literature, the world is shown through through the perception of a child. Peace, at the beginning of the novel, lies in the grand pattern of traditional, pre-Napoleonic Russian life, painted by Tolstoi as what is undoubtedly the grandest and brightest great Domus cycle in all of Russian literature: aristocratic family life in all its seasonal variety – summer in the countryside, winter in the city, guests, celebrations and other recurrent social patterns epitomised by the life of the Rostov family, with the isolated estate of the Bolkonskiis as a contrast. Peace is found again in the first epilogue, in the domestic happiness of Pierre and Natasha, and Nikolai and Mar’ia, regrouped after the vicissitudes of the war and representing the next generation in the cyclical succession of the Russian gentry. War, which involves the most drastic crossings of boundaries conceivable, can be identified against this

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background as the great plot generator, the French invasion and the catastrophies attending it amounting to a gross infringement of this way of life. The lives of Tolstoi’s exemplary families in War and Peace can be seen as full realisations of the cyclical House Myth or Domus. Family life in peacetime is characterised by its clear internal normative orientation towards the world, manifest from the level of the individual family to that of the nation as a whole. War severely disrupts the routines that support this world-order, bringing tragic losses and suffering to individuals and their families as much as to the nation, but it passes by and does not undermine the foundations of internal normative orientation. Indeed, it does the opposite: the common effort to overcome the French invasion results in a strengthening of patriotic feelings and a new awareness of Russianness among the gentry, which is the leitmotif of Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance, 2003. Pierre Bezukhov’s vacillation and spiritual searching are part of his character; they do not place him outside the re-established order and its normative orientation. In Russian literature (as in most other literatures), disruptions of Domus worlds (in variants of the ‘Loss of the House’) are obviously the rule rather than the exception if only because the nature of narrative plot structure basically requires the disruption of some initial order, which may then be revived – as in War and Peace – or not – as in Saltykov’s The Family Golovliov. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoi’s other major urban family novel, the author presents both the disruption and founding of family worlds. Here, the main plot line – the portrait of Anna’s character and temperament, the consequences of her choices and the reactions of her milieu – is devoted to presenting the moral and existential problems of family life and marriage. The fatal course of the plot causes Anna to leave and lose her family and her house. This in turn leads to her increasing social isolation in the urban milieu,1 and her social death is soon followed by her physical death by 1

This invites comparison with the image of Vol’skaia in the high society milieu of Pushkin’s prose fragment ‘The Guests Gatherered at the Dacha…’; here we see, in nuce, an attempt at creating a modern society novel, a ‘physiology’ of the early nineteenth-century Russian aristocratic culture, in which the house, with its drawing room rituals, receptions and balls, is as much a programme as a building; see also Van Baak 1990b. Tolstoi professed great admiration for Pushkin’s fragment, which served him as a model for Anna Sherer’s drawing-room setting in War and Peace.

Tolstoi and Family Life

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suicide. However, there is another, contrasting plot development along the positive ‘rural line’ of Levin and Kitti, who marry and found a New House, a new nest of the landed gentry. Internal normative orientation is both lost and reestablished in this novel. It is completely lost in the course of Anna’s tragic urban plot, but Levin can be seen struggling for it, and he ultimately finds it in his marriage with Kitty. Interestingly, here again,2 the absence (loss) and presence (recovery) of internal normative orientation are respectively linked with urban and rural settings. This seems to run in parallel with Tolstoi’s increasingly moralistic, doctrinal view of rural life as morally superior to urban life. In general we can conclude that the domestic theme in Tolstoi’s novels is not prominent as a focus of mythopoetic expression but rather implied in the psychological and moral sphere of family life. He shares this dominant thematic range with Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoevskii; see Pavlova 1999, and Chapters II.14 and II.17, respectively.

2

See Pushkin, Goncharov and Turgenev.

16. Bunin. Remembering the House. The Body in the World Although he is much younger than the estate authors discussed so far, it makes sense to examine the work of Ivan Bunin (1870-1953) here because the part of his oeuvre that is devoted to the Russian estate world can be seen as the swan song of that literary world and genre as a period phenomenon. He is probably the last great Russian writer (apart from Nabokov) to write about it from personal experience. A significant number of his most important works deal with a vanishing rural Russia and the death of the aristocratic usad’ba culture that for him is inextricably linked with it – particularly in the image of the House of Childhood – through the intense process of remembering and associative reminiscing. These aspects of Bunin’s thematics, in combination with his stylistic characteristics, make him a major author of the House Myth and domestic psychopoetics.1 As an autobiographical author Bunin had set himself the task of recalling and recreating, as fully and as immediately (that is, unmediatedly) as possible, the vanished world of his childhood in all its essential aspects and details through the ‘prism’ of the human senses. Fundamental to this aspiration was his desire, as a philosopher, to gain a deeper understanding of his life and of the world. For the literary author Bunin, the justification of his art depended upon his ability to convey his impressions and experiences in verbal form, and thereby, in his own words, ‘to express and prolong myself on earth’ (выразить и продлить себя на земле; quoting from Saakiants in Bunin 1986, Vol. V, 571). For Bunin the core of his childhood and youth was taken up with the vanishing world of the estates, the traditions of his ancient family and 1

The following analysis is based on Van Baak 2004b.

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the mystery of nature, the central themes of his fictionalised autobiography The Life of Arsen’ev (Жизнь Арсеньева; 1927-33). The idea of literary genre as a set of semiotic encoding strategies necessarily implies the concept of a model and image of the world. In this context, world-models, which may be mythological, religious, philosophical or literary, can be understood as human conceptions of the world, and of mankind and his place in the world. As we saw in Part I, the House concept can occupy an important position in such models. In the world model of autobiographical writing, the narrative position necessarily coincides with the perceptive and evaluative centre, which also implies that it has spatial characteristics that can be exploited aesthetically and cognitively. In other words, the fact that the autobiographical ‘I’ occupies embodied space within the narrated world and entertains significant relations with it through the senses can be emphasised and thematicised. The perception and expression of these relations typically takes the subject beyond his or her corporal confines. This involves a cognitive process of concentric and metonymic self-definition of the individual in relation to his environment – which may be represented by the House, the village or town, the region, the country and even the cosmos – that is quite compatible with Bunin’s philosophical convictions. It is a cognitive and semiotic strategy that we might call expansive metonymy in that the sense of belonging or possession is built up concentrically, beginning with the ‘Self’ and successively taking in broader metonymic elements of the surrounding world. This expansive metonymy appears to be a universal strategy for the expression of the fundamental relationship between the Self and the world. In the metonymic or contiguous relationship with the House, an inverse cognitive process can be observed – that of anthropomorphic (anatomical) metaphorisation (by analogy and projection) of the House and its elements; see Chapter II.3. From a topological point of view, the relation of the subject to its world is one of inclusion. Thus we can describe identification, or self-definition within the world, as the process of including the subject in a milieu. This can also be considered the masterplot of biographical and autobiographical writing, and in that guise it is also part of the fabula of the House Myth; see Chapter I.4. On the basis of the model of inclusion topology, we can identify the following symbolic equivalents of this mythical fabula:

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‘to be born’ – ‘to come into a body’ – ‘to come into a house/family/milieu/world,’; ‘to live/be’ – ‘to have, or be in, one’s body’ – ‘to live in a house/family/milieu/world’; ‘to die’ – ‘to leave one’s body’ – ‘to leave one’s house/family/milieu/world’. We can also try to visualise the equivalent positions and elements of this inclusion topology in a simple concentric form: WORLD

HOUSE

BODY

I

BODY

HOUSE WORLD

family

(boundary

‘self’

(boundary

family

milieu

of body)

‘psyche’

of body)

milieu

‘heart’

This scheme models the topological inclusion underlying mankind’s self-consciousness and orientation towards the world in the natural phenomenological manner that is also present in the phenomenology of language and its symbolic transformations between the elements involved. We can see it, for example, if we compare the anatomical position of the ‘heart’ with its evaluative sense in expressions such as ‘the heart of the matter’ and ‘at heart’; it is also present in the idea of the body, its boundaries and the senses as ‘interfaces’ with the world, and, of course, in equivalences of the I–Bod y–House type. It has already been pointed out that variants of this conceptual and psychopoetic strategy are characteristic of the construction of meaning in literature. A good example is the following passage from Bunin’s The Life of Arsen’ev: Я мечтал о далеких путешествиях, о необыкновенной женской красоте, о дружбе с какими-то воображаемыми чудесными юношами, сверстниками и товарищами по стремлениям, по сердечному пылу и вкусам... А разве я не сознавал порой, что еще никогда не ступала моя нога дальше нашего уездного города, что весь мир еще замкнут для меня давно привычными полями и косогорами, что вижу я только мужиков и баб, что весь круг наших знакомств ограничивается двумя-тремя мелкопоместными усадьбами да Васильевским, а приют всех моих мечтаний – моей старой уг-

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ловой комнатой с гниющими подъемными рамами и цветными верхними стеклами двух окон в сад?2 (book 3, Chapter 5; Bunin 1988, Vol. V, 102)

This expressive passage consistently and concentrically focuses attention on the topological and autobiographical centre of the the narrator’s childhood world, narrowing down inclusively from the outside world to the house, to his room, to the mental space of his subjectivity, but finally reorienting itself from the interior to the garden. The process of inclusion is attended by anthropomorphic identification of the type just described: house–room–subject, windows–eyes. Such metonymical relations between House and subject can remain more or less implicit; they need not be expressed on the textual surface, or they can be only partially so, but they are inherent as a cognitive and perceptive model, and they have a vast potential for symbolic and psychopoetic development. It is evident that this semiotic strategy is fundamental to the structure of literary worlds such as those we have found in the nineteenth-century estate novel, in which character and setting are so strongly connected. As we shall see, the psychopoetic impact and expressiveness of the literary estate world was in fact so strong as to outlive its historical basis and inspire authors of later periods; see the chapters on Pil’niak and Sorokin. In Bunin’s narrator, we are struck by the enormous intensity of his sensory perception of the remembered world – especially through his poetics of smells, for which he is famous – and by his emotional involvement in and engagement with the world that is thus expressed: Выйдя на балкон, я каждый раз снова и снова, до недоумения, даже до некоторой муки, дивился на красоту ночи: что же это такое и что с этим делать! 2

I dreamed about long journeys, about exceptional female beauty, about friendship with wonderful young men of my own age, sharing my strivings, my passions and tastes… But now again it was borne in upon me that I had never set foot anywhere further than our provincial town, that the whole world was still enclosed for me by the long-accustomed fields and slopes, that I saw only peasants and peasant women, that the entire circle of our acquaintances was restricted to two or three small estates and Vasil’evskoe, the refuge of all my reveries to my old corner room with its rotten sashes and the coloured upper glass panes of its two windows looking out on to the garden.


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Я и теперь испытываю нечто подобное в такие ночи. Что же было тогда, когда все это было внове, когда было такое обоняние, что отличался запах росистого лопуха от запаха сырой травы!3 (idem, 6, 103)

Like other works of Bunin, The Life of Arsen’ev consists largely of scenes and episodes that are motivated by the narrator’s aspirations to give form to this intense engagement as a memoirist. The subject is intensely aware of his position in the world. It is as though these scenes were motivated by one grand existential and artistic question: ‘What does this world mean to me?’ A better formulation may even be, ‘Why is this world so important to me?’ However we phrase it, Bunin’s poetics of perception are the answer to this question, and the narrator himself explicitly raises it: В те дни я часто как бы останавливался и с резким удивлением молодости спрашивал себя: все-таки что же такое моя жизнь в этом непонятном, вечном и огромном мире, окружающем меня, в беспредельности прошлого и будущего и вместе с тем в каком-то Батурине, в ограниченности лично мне данного пространства и времени?4 (Book 4, 5, 131)

The first chapter opens with a simple definition of the spatial and dynastic origin of young Arsen’ev-Bunin. This fragment is also modelled according to the concentric scheme of basic human orientation and consciousness as presented above:

3

When I went out on to the balcony, each time, again and again, I marveled at the beauty of the night so much that I was perplexed and felt actual pain: what is this and what should I do with it? Even now I experience something similar during such nights. How much stronger it must have been then, when all this was still new, when I had such a sense of smell that I could distinguish the smell of dewy burdock from that of damp grass! 4 In those days I often used to stop, as it were, and ask myself, with the abrupt amazement of youth: all the same, what does my life mean in this incomprehensible, eternal and enormous world that surrounds me, in the boundless past and future but at the same time in a place like Baturino, in the limitedness of the time and space that is given to me?

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Я родился полвека тому назад, в средней России, в деревне, в отцовской усадьбе.5 (idem, 7)

This strong sense of concentricity as identity is repeated somewhat later in a repeated statement of his origin that, paradoxically, stresses the boundlessness of Russia as its essential, and culturally identifying feature and thereby only reinforces the effect: Я родился и вырос, повторяю, совсем в чистом поле, которого дaже представить себе не может европейский человек. Великий простор, без всяких преград и границ, окружал меня: где в самом деле кончалась наша усадьба и начиналось это беспредельное поле, с которым сливалась она? Но все таки только поле и небо видел я.6 (idem, 16, 36)

Concentric topology is also repeated iconically in the overall composition of the novel. It attributes a global thematic significance to the autobiographical narrative genre form through the temporal analogy of succession from birth to death, as we see in the novel’s penultimate chapter: Какая могила ждет меня там, в Батурине! Старость отца и матери, увядание моей несчастной сестры, нищая усадьба, нищий дом, голый, низкий сад.7 (Book 5, 30, 244-245)

The fact that ‘grave’ has a figurative, emotional meaning here does not affect our argument; neither does the fact that two ancestral estates are involved in the novel – Kamenka, his paternal estate, and Baturino, the estate he inherited from his grandmother. Together, they constitute the coherent, individual universe of Arsen’ev’s childhood and youth. The image of the grave here should be read as an emotional departure, mark5

I was born half a century ago, in central Russia, in a village, on my fathers’s estate. I was born and grew up, I repeat, in the absolutely open field, which a European cannot even imagine. A great space surrounded me, without any barriers or boundaries: where indeed did our estate end, and that boundless field with which it merged begin? Anyhow, all I saw was the field and the sky. 7 What kind of grave awaits me there, in Baturino! The old age of my father and mother, the withering away of my unhappy sister, the destitute estate, the destitute house, the low garden. 6


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ing an impending new life phase. It coincides with the narrator’s awareness that that world is coming to an end, or ‘going down’, as is emphasised by the semiotics of downward verticality – старость, увядание, нищий, низкий (old age, withering, destitute, low) – with regard to the estate, the house and the people who are part of it. The space of the house, the estate world in general and the reminiscing subject with his emotions are indissoluble: they appear together in the same contexts, usually accompanied by temporal or circumstantial adjuncts and expressions of emotion. The space of the estate world always and everywhere surrounds the receptive narrator, who selects the moments and details that he finds pertinent to his story. He cultivates his sensitivity, which is his most precious talent as an autobiographer, and thus the impression is created of a total interrelatedness of all things and the subject’s intense involvement in that world. This is conveyed by a textual structure in which the syntagmatic relations are easily dominated by paradigmatic relations of equivalence. At the same time a thoroughly spatial conception of the personality is developed. In the following passage, a traditional architectural metaphor is used to represent the world in which the soul exists as an ‘abode’. The estate – that is, the house and its milieu – remains the centre of the very young hero’s world, but this gradually expands and accumulates details that arouse his interest: Детская душа моя начинает привыкать к своей новой обители, находить в ней много прелести уже радостной, видеть красоту природы уже без боли, замечать людей и испытывать к ним разные, более или менее сознательные чувства. Мир для меня все еще ограничивается усадьбой, домом и самыми близкими.8 (Book 1, 4, 12)

Metonymic and symbolic identification between personality and house, setting and milieu can also be realised by the exploitation of gender features, which are projected on to both the house and its inhabitant or owner. In some of Bunin’s autobiographical stories, a dis8

My child’s soul begins to grow accustomed to its new abode, already to find great, joyful fascination, already to see the beauty of nature without pain, to notice people and experience different, more or less conscious feelings towards them. The world for me is still restricted to the estate, the house and the people most close to me.

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tinction is made between ‘female’ and ‘male’ estates. Examples can be found in his story ‘Антоновские яблоки’ (‘The Antonov Apples’, 1900) as well as in The Life of Arsen’ev (for example, in his description of his grandmother’s estate in Book 1, Chapter 13, Vol. 5, 30-1). In Chapters 2 and 3 of ‘The Antonov Apples’, the estates of his aunt Anna Gerasimovna and his uncle Arsenii Semionych are set in opposition to one another partly on this basis. In the ‘female’ estate of Anna Gerasimovna, the spirit of the old days of serfdom still reigns. This is a typical nest of the landed gentry, and the narrator himself recalls its literary prototype, Gogol’s ‘Old-fashioned Landowners’; see Chapter II.9.9 The garden is neglected, but the fairly modest house is clean and comfortable. It has a high roof, but, apart from that, emphasis is placed upon its rounded shape, reserved seclusion and intimate warmth. Only after the little house has been presented as a warm nest, using expressive personifying and affective imagery, is the mistress of the house introduced, resembling her house in the narrator’s loving memory of his autumn visits: Сад у тетки славился своею запущенностью, соловьями, горлинками и яблоками, а дом – крышей. Стоял он во главе двора, у самого сада, – ветки лип обнимали его, – был невелик и приземист, но казалось, что ему и веку не будет, – так основательно глядел он из-под своей необыкновенно высокой и толстой соломенной крыши, почерневшей и затвердевшей от времени. Мне его передний фасад представлялся всегда живым: точно старое лицо глядит из-под огромной шапки впадинами глаз, – окнами с перламутровыми от дождя и солнца стеклами. А по бокам этих глаз были крыльца, – два старых больших крыльца с колоннами. На фронтоне их всегда сидели сытые голуби, между тем, как тысячи воробьев дождем пересыпались с крыши на крышу... И уютно чувствовал себя гость в этом гнезде под бирюзовым осенним небом! Войдешь в дом и прежде всего услышишь запах яблок, а потом и другие: старой мебели красного дерева, сушеного липового 9

It is evident that Bunin saw himself in the tradition of great authors and their contributions to the creation of the literary estate world. The sentence ‘Помню, как сладко спала вая усадьба в долгое послеобеденное время’ (I remember how the entire estate was sleeping delightfully during the long after-dinner time; idem, 22) clearly echoes Goncharov’s Oblomovka; see Chapter II.13.


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цвета, который с июня лежит на окнах... Во всех комнатах – в лакейской, в зале, в гостиной – прохладно и сумрачно: это оттого, что дом окружен садом, а верхние стекла окон цветные: синие и лиловые. Всюду тишина и чистота, хотя, кажется, кресла, столы с инкрустациями и зеркала в узеньких и витых золотых рамах никогда не трогались с места. И вот слышится покашливанье: выходит тетка. Она небольшая, но тоже, как и все кругом, прочная.10 (Vol. 2, 163)

The ‘male’ estate of Arsenii Semionych looks totally different; it is distinguished from it in every respect and, interestingly, is not given a personifying metaphor; instead, it is the male narrator’s presence in this house that is emphasised: И вот я вижу себя в усадьбе Арсения Семеныча, в большом доме, в зале, полной солнца и дыма от трубок и папирос. Народу много – все люди загорелые, с обветренными лицами, в поддевках и длинных сапогах. Только что очень сытно пообедали, раскраснелись и возбуждены шумными разговорами о предстоящей охоте, но не забывают допивать водку и после обеда. А на дворе трубит рог и завывают на разные голоса собаки. Черный борзой, любимец Арсения Семеныча, взлезает на стол и начинает пожирать с блюда остатки зайца под соусом. Но вдруг он испускает страш10

My aunt’s garden was famous for its neglect, its nightingales, its turtle-doves and its apples, and her house for its roof. The house stood in the front of the courtyard, so close to the garden that the branches of the lime trees embraced it. It was rather small and squat, but it did not look its hundred years – so solidly did it watch from underneath its exceptionally high, thick thatched roof, blackened and hardened by time. To me its façade always seemed alive, as though an old face was watching from underneath a huge cap with its hollow eye-sockets – windows with their glass panes turned the colour of mother-of-pearl by rain and sun. On its pediment, fat pigeons were always sitting, while thousands of sparrows flew like a shower from one roof to another… And I was comfortable as a guest in this nest under the turquoise autmnal sky! Upon entering the house you would first experience the smell of apples, to which would be added other smells: of old mahogany furniture and dried lime tree flowers, which had been lying on the windowsill since June… In all the rooms – the footman’s room, the hall, the drawing-room – it was cold and murky: this was because the house was surrounded by the garden and the upper parts of the windows had coloured glass panes: dark blue and violet. Silence and cleanliness reigned everywhere, although the arm-chairs and the inlaid desks and mirrors in their narrow, winding guilded frames never seemed to have been moved from their places. And then you would hear a slight cough: there was aunt. She was small, but also firm, like everything around.

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ный визг и, опрокидывая тарелки и рюмки, срывается со стола: Арсений Семеныч, вышедший из кабинета с арапником и револьвером, внезапно оглушает залу выстрелом. Зала еще более наполняется дымом, а Арсений Семеныч стоит и смеется. – Жалко, что промахнулся! – говорит он, играя глазами.11 (idem, 165)

The opposition is based on contrastive features of the houses which reflect and code the gender characteristics of their owners and inhabitants. The differences between the two settings depend upon their gendered as well as their concomitant actantial characteristics. In the image of the ‘male’ estate, the aspects of domesticity and comfort that are stressed are different from those in the ‘female’ setting. The difference lies in the ‘energy’ and scale of behaviour – the crowd and the noise, the eating and drinking of the male hunting party standing in stark contrast to the quiet warmth and seclusion of the old woman’s house – as well as in the type and orientation of the spaces themselves that reflect the gendered differences in temperament – the ‘female’ one self-centred (‘centripetal’), surrounded by the garden, which is itself an enclosed space; the ‘male’ one, expansive (‘centrifugal’), oriented outwards towards the hunting fields and woods. Bunin’s text is a remarkable illustration of the potential of gendered oppositions which is inherent in the House Myth; see also Chapter I.3. Bunin’s story ‘Sukhodol’ (1911), which Bunin himself called a novel, is a fictionalised family chronicle based on the lore and traditions of his own noble family as he had learned them from old family members and servants. In this story, Bunin evokes the world of the estates that had already almost ceased to exist in his youth. The disap11

And here I see myself on the estate of Arsenii Semionych, in the big house, in the hall, full of sun and smoke from pipes and cigarettes. There are a lot of people – all of them sunburnt, with faces that have been exposed to the wind, in tight coats and tall boots. They have just had a copious dinner, their faces ruddy and excited by noisy conversations about the coming hunt, but they do not forget to finish their after dinner vodka. In the court, a bugle is blown, and dogs start to howl in different voices. A black borzoi, Arsenii Semionych’s favourite, jumps on to the table and begins to eat from a plate the remnants of hare in sauce. Suddenly it utters a terrible squeal and, knocking over plates and cups, darts from the table: Arsenii Semionych, coming out of his study holding a whip and a revolver, makes the hall resound with a shot. The hall is filled with even more smoke, but Arsenii Semionych just stands there smiling. – What a pity I missed! – he says, flashing his eyes.


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pearance of a way of life is accompanied by the inevitable dissolution of the spaces that supported it. Empty or derelict houses are ‘read’ by the reminiscing narrator as metonymic material images of the former inhabitants, often his direct ancestors, and the ways in which they lived. Bunin’s often detailed and intensely qualitative descriptions of the old estate world can be seen as an artistic attempt to reconstruct that world in all its essential significant elements, from people and buildings to gardens and fields. This results in a modelling strategy of the literary world that differs from that of Turgenev, for example. In Turgenev’s work (see Chapter II.12) the world of the estates as such was taken for granted, which generally gave the estates that formed the settings for his plots a certain ‘transparency’. Bunin’s attention is focused, first and foremost, on the tangible materiality of a world that was vanishing or had already vanished, purely for its own sake. The structure and significance of that world are often more important than the narrative development, and in such cases plot lines, typically recorded in flash back, tend to serve as illustrations, subordinate to Bunin’s overall reconstructive purpose. He shows us an estate world that would quickly vanish, not only as a way of life and as a space, or Domus, but also in its material remnants that were similarly ephemeral – easily, literally ploughed over. In this he is reminiscent of Turgenev’s narrator in the opening of the story ‘My Neighbour Radilov’ from Notes of a Hunter, who also stresses that the nests of the gentry, as buildings, are relatively short-lived; see Chapter II.12. In the final chapter the narrator elaborates on this aspect, first comparing the disappearance of the old estates to the ploughing over of hamsters’ burrows in the fields and then relating how they actually underwent that fate. What he saw was a mere shadow of the estate world from which he had originated, and, as he realises, over time his emotional ties with this piece of land have become weaker. Once the last inhabitants are gone, what is left of the house is taken over by nature: Дом ветшал оседал все более. Все те долгие годы, что прошли над ним со времени последних событий, здесь расказанных, были для него годами медленного умирания... И все легендарнее становилось его прошлое. [...] И как под сохой, идущей по полю, один за другим бесследно исчезают холмили над подземными ходами и норами хомя-

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ков, также бесследно и быстро исчезали на наших глазах и гнезда суходольские. И обитатели их гибли, разбегались, те же, что кое-как уцелели, кое-как и коротали остаток дней своих. И мы застали уже не быт, не жизнь, а лишь воспоминания о них, полудикую простоту существования. Все реже навещали мы с годами наш степной край. И все более чужим становился он для нас, все слабее чувствовали мы связь с этим бытом и сословием, из коего вышли. [...] То место, где стояла луневская усадьба, было уже давно распахано и засеяно, как распахана, засеяна была земля на местах многиц других усадьб. Суходол еще коекак держался. Но, вырубив последние березы в саду, по частям сбыв почти всю пахотную землю, покинул даже сам хозяин ее, [...]. Летом те места, где прежде широко раскидывалась усадьба, тонули в мужицках ржах: далеко стал виден дом, окруженный ими. Кустарник, остаток сада, так одичал, что перепела кричали у самого балкона.12 (Vol.3, 160-1)

Thus, in the memoirist’s imagination, for all its archetypal durability, the House has become the very symbol of transience and the inexorable passage of time.

12

The house was becoming decrepit. All the long years that had gone by it since the last events that were told here were the years of its slow death… Its past was becoming ever more legendary. [...] And just as, one by one, the little hills over the hamsters’ underground burrows disappear without trace under the plough that traverses the field, just so, without leaving a trace and just as quickly, the nests of the Sukhodol gentry disappeared before our eyes. Their inhabitants perished or were scattered, and those who somehow remained, somehow whiled away the rest of their days. What we found was no longer the way of life, the living life, but only the memory of it, a halfwild simplicity of existence. As the years passed, our visits to our steppe land grew rarer and rarer. The stranger it became to us, the more weakly did we feel our tie to this way of life and the social setting from which we originated. [...] The place where the Lunevo estate stood had long been ploughed over and sown, just as the areas where many other estates stood had been ploughed over and sown. Sukhudol, somehow, was still there, but after cutting down the last birches in the garden and selling piecemeal almost all the arable land, the owner himself had left, [...]. In the summer, those areas where the estate used to spread out widely were hidden amongst the peasants’ rye, which could be seen from far away, surrounding the house. The shrubbery, a remnant of the garden, had grown so wild that quails were calling from close to the balcony.

17. Dostoevskii. The Underground Man and the Accidental Family From the perspective of this book, Dostoevskii stands out as a visionary author of crisis and transgression. His mythopoetic and psychopoetic treatment of the House theme is strongly reliant on House imagery from a diversity of areas which were labeled in Chapter I.4 as archaic, including the Underground House (the Personified House of the unconscious), the House of Death and the Unhappy House (of the family which is not a family). He also exploited the contemporary urban housing situation in Saint-Petersburg as a foil for the dramatic presentation of human suffering – in Crime and Punishment (Преступление и наказание, 1866), the cases of the Marmeladovs and Raskol’nikov’s attic (which is compared to a coffin) are obvious examples – and for the creation of suspense, especially the famous staircase in the murder episode in the same novel. Dostoevskii is almost exclusively an urban author. If he writes about a rural setting, he is a humourist or parodist, as in The Village Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants (Село Степанчиково и его обитатели, 1859). As was pointed out in Chapters II.4 and II.5, the demonic character of the modern, impersonal city as a general cultural phenomenon appears in nineteenth-century Russian literature, its typical heroes being those who are the victims such forces. This also typifies Dostoevskii’s debut – Poor Folk (Бедные люди, 1846) – and other early work, still influenced by Gogol’ and the European Romantics. It is parallelled in a dramatic fashion by the House imagery. Living in the modern city mostly meant living in grey, anonymous poverty in ghastly tenementhouses. As we have seen, the problems of family life were central topics for Saltykov-Shchedrin (Chapter II.14) and Tolstoi (Chapter II.15). In

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Dostoevskii’s work, with the exception of the unusual novella The Village Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants, we do not find families and Houses in the context of the Domus or estate world as we do in the work of the other two authors, but however different they may be from one another in other respects these three authors do have in common their focus on the family as the crucial nexus in which Russian morals, society and future come together. In its nineteenthcentury Russian context, the House Myth and its masterplot, rooted originally in the gentry milieu of the estate Domus, can become somewhat detached from its material and provincial setting when focused on the family (as a moral concept (see Chapter I.1), based on mutual love and responsibility) and its relation to society at large. This is certainly different from Pushkin’s conception and treatment of the House, which was still very much about the poet’s individual identity and honour in the chain of descent.1 The first Dostoevskian literary family that comes to mind is, of course, that of the extraordinary Karamazov family. The fate of the traditional family in the changing, post-reform Russian society intensely occupied Dostoevskii. As Pavlova noticed in her book on Saltykov and the family theme (Pavlova 1999, 119), during the eighteen-seventies Dostoevskii and Tolstoi both turned to the phenomenon of the dissolution of the family, which they saw as a signal of social disaster. According to Pavlova, they explicitly voiced their concern in literary form, Dostoevskii in the epilogue of his novel Подросток (The Raw Youth) and Tolstoi in part VIII of Anna Karenina. They sensed ‘chaos stirring underneath a surface of fine-looking and stable forms’ (ibidem). In A Writer’s Diary for the year 1877 (Дневник писателя, Poln. Sobr. Soch. t. XXV, 173), Dostoevskii characterised the situation with the qualification ‘accidental family’ (случайное семейство), resulting from a fatal rift and conflict between ‘the fathers’ and ‘the sons’: Да и никогда семейство русское не было более расшатано, разложено, нерассортирано и неофoрмлено, как теперь. Где вы найдете теперь такие “Детства и отрочества”, которые могли быть воссозданы в таком стройном и отчетливом изложении, в 1

We also can distinguish here different period features: the predominance of the essentially Romantic individual lyric position, as against Realist multiperspectivism.

Dostoevskii. The Underground Man and the Accidental Family

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каком представил, например, нам свою эпоху и свое семейство граф Толстой, или как в “Войне и мире” его же? [...] Современное русское семейство становится всё более случайным семейством. Именно случайное семейтво – вот определение современной русской семьи. [...] Иные и столь серьезные даже люди говорят прямо, что русского семейства теперь “вовсе нет”. Разумеется: всё это говорится лишь о русском интеллигентном семействе, то есть высших сословий, не народном, но, однако, народное-то семейство – разве теперь оно не вопрос тоже?2 (Quoted from Pavlova 1999, 120-1; Dostoevskii’s italics)

For Dostoevskii, the idea of the family is not only the guarantee of emotional and moral coherence among close relatives and between fathers and sons; for him it is even synonymous with faith in life itself: Случайность современного русского семeйства, по-моему, состоит в утрате современными отцами всякой общей идеи для всех отцов, в отношении к своим семействам, общей для всех отцов, связующей их самих между собою, в которую бы они сами верили и научили бы так верить детей своих, передали бы им эту веру в жизнь.3 (Poln. Sobr. Soch. t. XXV, 178)

The absence of the mother figure is notable here, as it is, of course, in Dostoevskii’s great family novel, The Brothers Karamazov. What is clear is that, in his dynastically-based, perhaps even biblically-based 2

And never was the Russian family more shattered, broken down, disorganised and non-legalised as it is now. Where can one find today “Childhoods and youths” that could be reconstructed in such harmonious and clear exposition as that in which Count Tolstoi, for example, presented his own epoch and family to us, or as in his “War and Peace”? [...] Our contemporary Russian family is more and more becoming an accidental family. Accidental family is exactly what defines the contemporary Russian family. [...] There are even some very serious people who simply state that the Russian family nowadays “does not exist”. Of course, all this is said only with regard to the Russian intelligentsia, the upper classes, not the common folk, but the common family – isn’t that something of a problem too these days? 3 The accidental character of the contemporary Russian family, I believe, consists in the loss by contemporary fathers of any idea common to all fathers in relation to their families, of any idea common to all fathers which would connect them among themselves, in which they would believe and in which they would likewise teach their children to believe, passing on to them this faith in life.

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hope of a better future for Russian family life, it behoves the fathers to maintain and pass on the notion of family – of House. This is rendered all the more striking by the fact that, in the Realist novels discussed above, the preservation and continuation of the Families/Houses typically depended upon strong women. There seems to be a fundamental discrepancy between the traditional notion of the male, paternal role in the founding and continuation of dynasties and the domestic continuity and traditions in the nineteenth-century Russian novelistic worlds, which hinged more upon the strength of mothers. In Dostoevskii’s work we do not find stable family homes, but he certainly employs a pronounced domestic symbolism. Negative House images, Anti-Houses and Homelessness are characteristic of the literary worlds in which many of his stories and novels are set; see Chapter II.4 on the tradition of homelessness in Russian literature. Prominent examples are the ‘House of the Dead’ or prison of Notes from the House of the Dead (Записки из мертвого дома, 1861-2; a literal translation of the Russian phrase would be ‘dead house’) and, of course, Notes from the Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864). It is generally agreed that these two works, particularly the second, reflect turning points in Dostoevskii’s mental, philosophical and religious development. Notes from House of the Dead is based on Dostoevskii’s experiences during his four years as a convict in Omsk, Siberia, under the Tsarist penal system. It takes the form of a fictional memoir, found after the death of one Aleksandr Petrovich who, after murdering his wife, had been sent to a prison where he was forced to work in the mines. The position of the hero-narrator is characterised by his loneliness in a hostile, criminal environment and his unremitting sense of being locked in. From the beginning, however, he points out that lessons can be learned from such an experience that are of general validity for the whole of life. The narrator is a nobleman who has come into contact with common people for the first time, among them remorseless murderers and unrepentant criminals. He describes the severity of the prison, the debasing hard labour, the fights, fetters and punishment floggings, but he also includes the lighter moments and the good contacts. Dostoevskii’s fictionalised rendering of the AntiHouse of prison and hard labour is the first of its kind in Russian lit-


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erature. It is a prototypical forerunner of Solzhenitsyn’s writings about the harsh Stalinist labour camps of the Gulag; see Chapter II. 36. The House image here is both concrete and symbolic. This prison and labour camp setting is obviously an Anti-House, bringing social death and confrontation with hardened criminals. It lacks the essential protection and freedoms of a House; human relations within it are abnormal, and, for obvious reasons, the House Myth’s basic perspective of family life, successive generations and dynasties is missing. In Dostoevskii’s own experience and perception, it represents the ‘lowest depth’ of human experience, but it is a depth that made possible the development of new religious and spiritual insights and convictions – the beginning of his new vision of man, or what we might call his new anthropology. Notes from the Underground is unique for its psychological and philosophical burden, particularly its relentless moral self-analysis. Together with his philosophy of life, the ‘Underground Man’ (as he has become known) constitutes a universal modern character of existential isolation and homelessness. George Steiner, for example, has said that ‘Dostoevskii’s Underground Man is l’étranger, l’homme revolté, der unbehauste Mensch, the outsider, the outcast’ (Steiner 1976), and there can be little question that he has a prototypical significance for the crucial heroes of Dostoevskii’s later novels. The Underground Man feels humiliated by the world and has turned away from it. In his ultra-individualism and ultra-rationality, there is no place for family or love of one’s neighbour; indeed, his position amounts to the ultimate denial of all social and moral connectedness and thus of all responsibility for one’s neighbour, the ultimate consequence being death. The Underground Man is an icon of this new vision of man and the search for his subconscious motivation. As such, he represents the symbolic psychopoetic equivalence between the basement of the house and the recesses of the psyche or personality; see Chapter I.3. This equivalence operates on the concrete, metonymic level of the setting of the text – the underground man plunged deep into his own, solipsistic thoughts in his underground room – as well as on the abstract level of theme and the higher level of general psychological (and anthropological) symbolic significance, as is also supported by the title of the story. There is, of course, another important aspect to Dostoevskii’s House symbolism in these Notes. The under-

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ground image was also a polemical statement intended to challenge the simplistic utopianism of Chernyshevskii, particularly his novel Что делать? (What Must Be Done? 1863), in which London’s Crystal Palace is the symbolic Anti-House of an ultra-rationalist utopia. Like Leskov (see Chapter II.2), Dostoevskii uses the image of the merchants’ milieu both to indicate a certain mentality and as a device to enhance suspense. In the tradition of naturalism represented by the Natural School, he connects the characterisation of the house with the character of its inhabitants, but he also exploits the symbolic features of these houses in a more Romantic-Symbolist fashion to enhance the dramatic and enigmatic qualities of his plots; see Casari 1988, 89-90. The old merchant house of Rogozhin in The Idiot (Идиот, 1868-9) is closed, inhospitable, and gloomy; the interior is dark and austere, lacking the warmth of family life. Ippolit compares it with a cemetery. In The Brothers Karamazov, the merchant house is characteristic of the provincial town setting, especially that of Samsonov. In her publications on the meaning of the merchant house in the work of Dostoevskii and Leskov, Casari (1988, 91; 1997, 37-49) concludes that this type of house, isolated from the outside world by its thick walls and big garden enclosed by high fences, is a canonical setting for the tragic plots of nineteenth-century Russian literature, and she draws an interesting functional parallel between this topos and the Gothic horror castles of earlier European literature. The crime of parricide, which forms the core of The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы, 1880), is one of the most fundamental and ancient disruptions of the world-order underlying the House Myth. It has well known precursors in classical Greek mythology, on the cosmogonic scale of Zeus’s bringing down his father Cronos,4 and in the Oedipus story that later became the famous cornerstone of the Freudian repertoire of the human male psychodrama. Pavlova calls this novel a ‘family tragedy’ (Pavlova 1999, 147) in which the future of Russia is the central question, dependent as that is upon Russia’s capability of repentance, and moral and religious renewal. The novel opens with a chapter significantly entitled ‘The history of a little family’ (‘История одной семeйки’). It is a novel of enormous complexity and interpretative range; here, I can only point 4

Motivated by the equally mythical crime of Cronos who devoured his own children.


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out the general and most prominent characteristics of Dostoevskii’s psychopoetic treatment of the House Myth in this work. The Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы, 1880) is set in the provincial, non-metropolitan town of Skotoprigonevsk, a literary rendition of the historical Staraia Russa; see Piretto 1986. Old Karamazov’s house is a large domestic complex with wings, attractive in itself but far too big for him. It is full of nooks and crannies, and infested with rats, which he likes because he would otherwise find the house too silent at night when he habitually sends the servants to one wing before locking himself up in the main central section (Vol. 14, 87). It is here that he leads his life, full of secrecy, which earns him a licentious and libertine reputation, and this is also the place where he will be murdered. Dostoevskii’s suspense technique relies on the threatening atmosphere of the self-contained world of these old houses with their big gardens and hidden passages. As in the case of the underground world, there is an inescapable air of secrecy, illicit behaviour and scandal. In The Brothers Karamazov, these fenced-in, weedgrown, deserted gardens with their lopsided summerhouses are very important. Their psychopoetic potential is certainly analogous to that of the spatial symbolism of the Underground Man’s world, but here they express Dmitrii’s ‘dark’, instinctive and impulsive nature. They are the setting, for example, of the strange meeting of the brothers Aliosha and Dmitrii (Mitia) in Book 3, Chapter III: Вследствие всех этих соображений он и решился сократить путь, пройдя задами, а все эти ходы он знал в городке как пять пальцев. Задами было почти без дорог, вдоль пустынных заборов, перелезая иногда через чужие плетни, минуя чужие дворы, где, впрочем, всякий-то его знал и все с ним здоровались. [...] и … наткнулся на самую неожиданную встречу. За плетнем в соседском саду, взмостясь на что-то, стоял, высунувшись по грудь, брат его Дмитрий Федорович и изо всех сил делал ему руками знаки, звал его и манил, видимо боясь не только крикнуть, но даже сказать вслух слово, чтобы не услышали. Алеша тотчас подбежал к плетню. [...] Алеша и сам был рад и недоумевал, как перелезть через плетень.5 (Dostoevskii 1976, Vol. 14, 94-5) 5

As a result of these considerations, he decided to shorten his way by taking the backyards. He knew all these passages through the town like the back of his hand. By the backyards meant almost avoiding roads, moving along deserted alleys, sometimes

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Piretto points out that, for Mitia, ‘the key moments of his presence in the novel’ are related to the fences around his father’s house. It is also interesting to note that none of the brothers has a house or home of his own (Piretto 1986, 85). This world of gardens, hedges and fences is clearly the domain of the unconscious and instinctive, the chaotic, and ‘the wild’. It is also the world in which the retarded iurodivaia Lizaveta Smerdiashchaia leads her subhuman, peripheral existence. Hers is a houseless and homeless story throughout, and it is possible to see her as one more victim of the family crisis in this novel. Her father was a ruined petty bourgeois, without a house but living with some rich citizens. Her mother died when she was very young. Her father beat her whenever she came home, and so she did so only rarely, living outdoors, always barefoot, entering people’s houses without being chased away. Only in winter did she seek shelter for the night in a hall or cowshed. Otherwise, her domain was the secluded gardens of the town. She was indeed a mockery of the ‘child of nature’, outside the frame of civilisation but not immune to its evil influence. She now lives innocently in a mockery of Paradise, a weedgrown corner in a vegetable garden, reminding us of Turgenev’s eccentric serf Stiopushka in his story ‘Raspberry Water’; see Chapter II.12. Lizaveta Smerdiashchaia (meaning the ‘stinking one’) is always treated with contempt. When she becomes pregnant by an unknown man, rumour points to various solid citizens and family fathers of the town, which is in itself an indictment of the town’s hypocrisy and double life. She dies giving birth, but it is her illegitimate son Smerdiakov, adopted and raised by old Karamazov but scorned and humiliated by everyone, who, in spite of the brothers’ own parricidal motives, actually kills their father. His mother had, supposedly, been raped by old Karamazov, who had cynically insinuated as much. climbing over other people’s wattle fencing but avoiding their yards in parts where everybody knew him and greeted him. [...] and he stumbled into a most unexpected meeting. Behind the wattled fence of the neighbouring garden, his brother Dmitrii Fiodorovich stood perched upon something, the fence coming up to his breast, making beckoning signs with all his might and evidently fearing not only to shout but even to speak lest he should be heard. Aliosha immediately ran towards the fence. [...] Aliosha himself was also pleased and tried to ascertain how he could climb over the fence.


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Smerdiakov is an utterly miserable character, filled with hate and having every reason to bear grudges. He has some claim to be a son of Fiodor Karamazov and is quite possibly a relative of some kind, but he is never a member of the family.

18. The End of Realism. The Onset of Modernism. New Anxieties Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Russian culture reveals a growing tension between the Realist aesthetics that had been dominant up to that point and the beginnings of the fundamentally different views of life that were taking shape artistically in the evolution of preSymbolism, Symbolism and the ‘Silver Age’. This was the onset of Russian Modernism. Realism had outlived its evocative power and was no longer felt to be artistically convincing. Тhe large-scale Realist novel, with the exception of Tolstoi’s Resurrection (Воскресение), was on the wane. This can arguably be ascribed to its ‘canonical’ and dominant characteristics as a genre, a tendency towards the basic positivist assumptions of a knowable and coherent world, implicitly of universal, normative validity with the subjective and the aberrant causally embedded in it. There is a reliable narrator whose omniscience can usually be taken for granted. The development of Modernism can be seen as a complex rejection of these characteristics and the world-view that went with them. There was a revival of poetry, and in prose we can observe diverse developments favouring shorter, less plot-oriented forms such as the sketch (ocherk) and the short story or tale (rasskaz or povest’). One of the directions taken by prose at the turn of the century in the work of authors such as Korolenko and Kuprin is now generally referred to as neo-Realism, which suggests a degree of continuation and is in fact a form of Naturalism. Other prose distances itself from the Realist canon and is more open to the changing aesthetics and attitudes of Modernism, including not only preSymbolism and Symbolism but also such observable tendencies as ‘neo-Romanticism’, ‘Impressionism’ and ‘Fin de Siècle’. A new, characteristic feature of this period is a certain emotional disposition that

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begins to manifest itself in literature as apathy, a sense of uneasiness and bewilderment or positive anxiety about life and culture. In time, this sentiment grew stronger, taking the form, particularly among the Symbolists, of catastrophic or apocalyptic expectations. It also affected the literary treatment of the House Image and its symbolic and psychopoetic characteristics in a striking way. Among the earliest authors to be discussed in this context are Vsevolod Garshin and Anton Chekhov.

19. Garshin’s World as Prison Vsevolod Garshin is an interesting author of the transitional period. Two of his major works are also important from the point of view of House symbolism and its psychopoetic significance for him. ‘Attalea Princeps’ is a symbolic story or allegory about a palm growing with other tropical plants in a glass-house. As it does not stop growing, it eventually breaks through the glass roof that has curtailed its freedom hitherto. This has fatal consequences for the palm because the glass roof also provided indispensable protection against the hostile world outside. This being allegory, the ambivalence of the glass-House image is presented at a certain distance. It suggests a moral that underlines the futility and fatality of human aspirations and striving for freedom, but it also conveys the message of existential anxiety concerning the fragility and uncertainty of the human condition in the world, symbolised by the tree in the glass-house. As such it can be interpreted as an instance of the House as Cosmos and as an imago mundi; see Chapter I.1. Existential anxiety, though in a more direct and threatening manner, is also a basic emotion in his most famous story, ‘The Red Flower’ (‘Красный цветок’), which is intensely connected with Garshin’s personality and the tragic course of his life. On various occasions, he confirmed that, apart from the ending, the story was a detailed reflection of his own experiences; see Latynina 1986, 156. It provides a strange and haunting picture of a lunatic asylum or madhouse with its degrading, depersonalising and frightening procedures, perceived through the eyes of the patient as a prison rather than a medical institution. Gogol’s ‘Notes of a Madman’ is, of course, comparable, though the mood and narrative attitude there are very different. As Latynina points out, in the distorted, warped perception of Garshin’s hero, all objects have a different, more intense or expressive significance. There is a large room with a sticky stone floor under

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dark-red vaults, two oval holes filled with water as baths, a copper oven with a cylindrical kettle and a whole system of copper pipes. The patient associates this space with the torture-chambers of the inquisition and, indeed, with hell itself (Latynina 1986, 158). In this ‘AntiHouse’, the patient comes to see his task as the sacrifice of his own life in a life-and-death struggle with the evil forces of the world, embodied in three red flowers growing in the court of the asylum. He dies clutching poppies in his fist. In the narrowing perception of the hero, the madhouse becomes the world. It is interesting to compare an episode from Garshin’s life that he told to F. F. Fiedler, his German translator: Когда мне было 18 и 25 лет, я страдал расстройством нервной системы, но меня оба раза вылечили… Однажды разыгралась страшная гроза. Мне казалось, что буря снесет весь дом, в котором я тогда жил. И вот, чтобы этому воспрепятствовать, я открыл окно, - моя комната находилась на верхнем этаже, - взял палку и приложил один конец к крыше, а другой – к своей груди, чтобы мое тело образовало громоотвод и, таким образом, спасло все здание со всеми его жителями от гибели.1 (Latynina 1986, 157-8)

This is a clear example of the psychopoetics of the House–Personality, or House–Body type. At the same time, this House–World image can be interpreted as a metaphor for existential imprisonment, with a psychopoetic function comparable to that of the glasshouse in the previous story. In Garshin’s literary and psychopoetic treatment of these thematics, a cultural and moral anxiety becomes manifest that is characteristic of his work and world-view as a whole. We can also interpret this in the broader framework of the period and its tendencies, as characterised above; see also Henry 1983, especially 258-9.

1

At the ages of 18 and 25, I suffered nervous breakdowns, but I recovered in both instances… Once, a terrible thunderstorm broke loose. I felt as if the storm would destroy the entire house I was living in at the time. In order to prevent this, I opened a window – my room was on the top floor – took a stick and buttressed one end of it against the roof and the other against my chest, so that my body would act as a lightning rod. In that way, I saved the entire building and its inhabitants from ruin.

20. Chekhov. Ambiguous Dachas and Mansions Chekhov’s temperament as an author is quite different from that of Garshin, but he is no less an exponent of the period when he portrays the anxieties of the beginnings of modernity. In his case, too, this is reflected expressively in his psychopoetic and symbolic treatment of House images and motifs. An extreme example is the psychiatric ward in the story ‘Ward No. 6’ (‘Палата № 6’, 1892), a provincial madhouse which is again a Prison-House, or Anti-House, where the patients are isolated and regularly beaten as part of a standard ‘treatment’, as though they were criminals, and where medical conditions are generally appalling. Chekhov was interested in reports on the state of Russian psychiatric hospitals, but in writing this story he was also influenced by impressions gained on his journey to Sakhalin (A. Rosikin; see Chekhov 1977, Vol. 8, 449). At the same time, the ward is the place where the doctor and one of his patients have their philosophical arguments on the values of a stoicist’s attitude to life. The commentary to this story (ibidem) defines as its central conflict their argument over the question of whether there is a difference between the doctor’s warm and comfortable study and this ward, and whether a man should resist and fight ‘pain, meanness, vileness’ (боль, подлость, мерзость). In the end the doctor acknowledges that his opponent is right in saying that one should, but then he is locked up in his own ward. The story evoked intense emotional reactions among its contemporary readership. For many years, this was Chekhov’s most famous work. Leskov greatly admired the story, equating the ward with Russia and thus interpreting this Anti-House on the scale of the country as a whole, which was not Chekhov’s intention. It is, indeed, a devastating criticism of the condition of Russia:

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В ‘Палате № 6’ в миниатюре изображены общие наши порядки и характеры. Всюду – палата № 6. Это – Россия… Чехов сам не думал того, что написал (он мне говорил это), а между тем это так. Палата его – это Русь!1 (idem, 458)

This interpretation invites comparison with the function of the house metaphor in the old Muscovite world-view (the Domostroi, Zabelin 1990), which we have defined typologically as the Closed House; see Chapter II.2. In Chekhov’s stories a typical milieu is that of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, who tend to be relatively affluent. His heroes long for a better life, or at least a life offering greater significance or excitement. The concept of the dacha, with all its connotations, seems to characterise well the sociology of many of Chekhov’s heroes. I use the term dacha in this context as a general, typological concept, the type of house and milieu where ‘real life’ is somehow kept at a distance, where dreams and illusions can be cherished, at least for a while, without the interference of threatening reality.2 This means that country estates and country houses can also fulfil this function. They can be places of retreat from the dreary routines and tensions of modern urban life; they can also provide settings for the sort of artistic escapism or flight from reality that is staged in The Seagull (Чайка, 1896).3 1

In ‘Ward No. 6’ our common customs and characters are portrayed on a miniature scale. Everywhere there is Ward 6. This is Russia…. Chekhov did not think about this when he wrote it (he told me so), but still it is true. His ward is Rus! 2 See, for example, the imagery used by Ivan Ivanovich in the story ‘The Gooseberries’ (‘Крыжовник’): Надо, чтобы за дверью каждого счастливого человека стоял кто-нибудь с молоточком и постоянно напоминал бы стуком, что как бы он ни был счастлив, жизнь рано или поздно покажет ему свои когти, стрясется беда – болезнь, бедность, потери, и его никто не увидит и не услышит, как теперь он и не видит и не слышит других. (Behind the door of every happy man, there should be someone standing with a little hammer, who would constantly remind him with a blow that, however happy he might be, life sooner or later will show him its claws, disaster will befall him – illness, poverty, loss, and that nobody will see or hear him, just as he does not see nor hear others; Chekhov 1977, Vol. 10, 62). 3 Other stories featuring this thematic complex in one way or another are ‘Черный монах’ (‘The Black Monk’), ‘Верочка’ (‘Verochka’), ’Володя’ (‘Volodia’), ‘Именины’ (‘The Name-Day’), ‘Соседи’ (‘Neighbours’), ‘Невеста’ (‘The Fiancée’), ‘Огни’ (‘Fires’), ‘Чужая беда’ (‘’Some Else’s Misfortune’), ‘О любви’ (‘About Love’), ‘Рассказ госпожи NN’ (‘The Story of Mrs. NN’).

Chekhov. Ambiguous Dachas and Mansions

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Chekhov’s fondness for estates and estate houses obviously has biographical roots, as do the gardens and landscapes that are part of this characteristically Russian world. When Chekhov was growing up, the way of life of the original nests of the gentry was already in serious decline as a result of Russia’s changing economy and social situation following the great reforms, and it was by no means a way of life that he was born into. By the eighteen-eighties, for economic reasons, family estates were regularly rented out to summer guests – the socalled dachniki – and Chekhov discovered the charms of that world early in life as he and his relatives, together with friends such as the painter Levitan, spent their summers on former estates, rented as dachas. As a consequence, Chekhov developed a desire to become a landowner and ‘establish himself forever on an estate’ (Shchukin 1997, 230), and in 1892 he acquired an estate of his own, Melikhovo. Thus, the dacha and the culture that developed around it are a specific symptom of democratic developments in post-reform Russia. The dacha and usad’ba topos of this period, with its social, cultural and emotional significance, are inextricably linked with emerging Russian urbanism and Modernism towards the end of the nineteenth century. For this reason, I shall now discuss, in varying degrees of detail, a number of works by Chekhov: ‘Новая дача’ (‘The New dacha’; 1899), Вишневый сад (The Cherry Orchard; 1903), ‘Дом с мезанином’ (‘The House with the Mezzanine’; 1896), and ‘Крыжовник’ (‘Gooseberries’; 1898), ‘Человек в футляре’ (‘The Man in a Shell’; 1898), ‘Черный монах’ (‘The Black Monk’; 1894), ‘Верочка’(‘Verochka’; 1887).4 In the story ‘The New dacha’ (‘Новая дача’), an engineer builds a dacha near a village where he has already supervised the building of a new bridge across the river. The life of leisure and harmony that he hopes to find there with his wife and daughter proves illusory. He and his family try hard to set up good relations with and give help to the poor villagers, but are cheated and robbed for their pains. The villagers harbour hostile feelings towards the engineer because they did not want the bridge in the first place. All their feelings of distrust towards the world at large are projected on to him and his family, all of whose 4

The following analyses are mostly based on Van Baak 2004c. Other dacha stories by Chekhov are: ‘Дачники’ (‘Dacha-dwellers’), ‘Дачница’ (‘The Dacha-dweller’), ‘Дачные правила’ (‘Dacha Rules’), ‘Дачное удовольствие’ (‘Dacha Pleasures’) and ‘На даче’ (‘At the Dacha’).

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efforts to live in peace with the village are frustrated at every turn. The gap between the two world-views and mentalities proves unbridgeable, and the family eventually give in and leave the new dacha. The new owner is a pedantic civil servant who only spends weekends there. Ironically, there is now no conflict between estate owner and villagers, but neither is there any contact. He does not even deign to respond when they bow to greet him, and the dacha is thus a locus of self-imposed isolation, a corpus alienum in the surrounding world. The estate that is going to be sold in The Cherry Orchard (Вишневый сад) is, of course, an obvious instance of a literary House image. Though the old house functions as the material setting of the play, it also works on a symbolic level. With its Domus way of life, it has been a specimen of the old nests of the landed gentry, of which the servant Firs is the sole survivor – a grotesque social fossil from before the abolition of serfdom, reminding us of the way things were. At the end of the play, when everyone else has left, he remains alone in the empty house, to die with it. The estate is doomed because times have changed and it has outlived its era. After the last inhabitants have left, the cherry orchard, symbol of the old world, is cut down; the land is to be divided into building plots for dachas to accommodate the growing new urban population. As it is a (tragi)comedy, its house setting and thematics are presented in such a way as to set off the clash between different social attitudes – those of the old, impoverished landowners (and the spongers taking advantage of them), and those of the new entrepreneurs catering to the needs of the modern bourgeoisie. From the catalogue of fabular motifs of the House Myth provided in Chapter I.4, we can conclude that this play realises the Death of the House. For Chekhov, as for so many Russians, the world of the Russian estate held an irresistible charm in spite of the fact that it was already vanishing or changing fundamentally during his lifetime, and was so out of step with modern Russian life. This may explain why, notwithstanding his inevitable irony and scepticism, he developed the usad’ba-topos with so much love and skill. He was, of course, well aware of its archetypal topical qualities. A telling illustration of this combination is a paragraph from the story ‘On Official Duty’ (‘По делам службы’, 1899), and the second sentence of the following fragment gives a condensed idealised characteristic of the estate world, the very essence of its timeless positive Domus qualities:


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Пока внизу в передней снимали шубы и валенки, наверху играли на рояле “Un petit verre de Cliquot...”, и было слышно, как дети топали ногами. На приезжих сразу пахнуло теплом, запахом старых барских покоев, где, какая бы ни была погода снаружи, живется так, тепло, чисто, удобно.5 (Chekhov 1977, Vol.10, 96)

In ‘The House with the Mezzanine (An Artist’s Story)’ (‘Дом с мезанином (pассказ художника)’), we are presented with two country estates that are in stark contrast to one another, representing two sides of the House Myth. The plot, set in the countryside, is a love story that is doomed to failure. It would probably require a booklength study to give the specific function of the usad’ba-dacha as a love topos its due attention; it is very conspicuous in Russian literature. In addition to Turgenev (specifically ‘Первая любовь’ (‘First Love’ 1860)) and Chekhov (‘The House with the Mezzanine’; ‘Volodia’), Bunin is particularly prominent in this respect for works such as ‘Митина любовь’ (‘Mitia’s Love’, 1924). In ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, the narrator, a landscape painter, lives for a short period in the country-house of the landowner Belokurov. This house is old, inhospitable and cheerless. The narrator occupies a huge pillared hall with no furniture apart from a divan and a table. It is bleak, filled with strange noises and particularly disturbing during thunderstorms – an ironic hint of Gothic horror. Belokurov lives in a wing in the garden. Halfway through the story, we learn that he has a mistress living there with him, an intimidating presence, ten years his senior, who bullies him. The narrator leads a dull and lethargic existence, but occasionally takes long walks in the neighbourhood. On one such walk, he comes across an unknown estate, an enchanting house with a mezzanine, surrounded by a beautiful park, woods and fields, with a village on the opposite side of a pond. It is inhabited by a widow and her two daughters, the Volchaninovs. The narrator and Belokurov begin to visit them regularly, and the narrator relates the development of their acquaintance. 5

While downstairs in the entrance hall people were taking off their fur coats and felt boots, upstairs somebody was playing “Un petit verre de Cliquot…” on a grand piano, and one could hear how the children stamped their feet. The newcomers were embraced by warmth, by the smell of old manor rooms, where, whatever the weather outside, life is always like that, warm, clean, and comfortable.

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In the early days, these meetings are interesting and entertaining, but gradually the narrator’s relationship with the daughters changes. They have entirely different characters from one another. Lida, the elder, is very serious, involved in local zemstvo-politics and absorbed by the idea of setting up schools and hospitals for the poor. Her younger sister, Zhenia, nicknamed Misius’, is more of a dreamer. As summer progresses, relations between the narrator and Lida grow more and more tense as they find themselves in constant disagreement over the responsibilities of the intelligentsia and what should be done for the people. The mansion setting provides the traditional foil for these debates, which echo the equally traditional debates among the intelligentsia about Russia, its people, its true destiny and their own responsibilities towards it. At the same time, the narrator falls in love with Zhenia. The conflict comes to a head one evening when he declares his love for Zhenia, who reports it to her mother and sister. When he returns to the estate the following morning, he finds only Lida, who is occupied in teaching a peasant girl. Zhenia has gone with her mother to an aunt, prior to travelling abroad for the winter. The narrator returns to Petersburg shortly afterwards, and his fond memories of Zhenia and the house with the mezzanine gradually fade. The narrative functions of the eponymous house in this story deserve attention. They are in some respects more traditional than in other works by Chekhov. The theme and setting, as well as certain psychopoetic effects involving the House image, are particularly reminiscent of Turgenev’s estate world; see especially A Nest of the Landed Gentry (Chapter II.12). On the other hand, the narrative development of the world of this house is marked and isolated according to a certain symmetry. The development of the House image parallels the development of the narrator’s feelings towards it and its inhabitants. His first impression of the estate places it in complete contrast to Belokurov’s mansion. It is wonderful, picturesque and enchanting, and it strikes him as something dear and familiar, even as a vision from a happy dream. Only one essential element is missing: the father. Without a father, the three women can never represent the ideal of a


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complete family.6 Despite this, there can be no doubt that in this phase of the story we are being presented with an image of the archetypal Russian estate, a Russian Domus.7 Its access is heavily marked by rows of enormous dark trees that guard it as though it were an alluring but forbidden place in a fairy tale: Два ряда старых, тесно посаженных, очень высоких елей стояли, как две сплошные стены, образуя мрачную, красивую аллею. Я легко перелез через изгордь, и пошел по этой аллее. [...] Потом я повернул на длинную липовую аллею. [...] Но вот и липы кончились; я прошел мимо белого дома с террасой и с мезонином, и передо мною неожиданно развернулся вид на барский двор и на широкий пруд с купальней, с толпой зеленых ив, с деревней на том берегу, с высокой узкой колокольней, на которой горел крест, отражая в себе заходившее солнце. На миг на меня повеяло очарованием чего-то родного, очень знакомого, будто я уже видел эту самую панораму когда-то в детстве. [...] И я вернулся домой с таким чувством, как будто видел (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 9, 174-5) хороший сон.8

6

There is something of a pattern toChekhov’s representation of incomplete families. We find it repeated in The CherryOrchard, ‘The Black Monk’ and ‘Verochka’, to name just three examples related to our topic. 7 The image provided by Chekhov suggests a past world of harmony and happiness, a memorialised utopian vision of the usad’ba and its culture that renders it a mythical locus and set of values; see also Piretto 1989. This idealised image of the country estate, like that in The Cherry Orchard, displays aesthetic period qualities of the ‘belle époque’ that, in Silvia Burini’s analysis, justify a comparison with the idealised and stylised renderings of estates by the contemporary symbolist painter Borisov-Musatov (Burini 1996). The archetypal significance of the image is enhanced by the explicit suggestion of a childhood memory, even though the narrator cannot possibly have seen this estate in his childhood. Moreover, the dream motif in this context evokes one of the most famous literary examples of the estate archetype, that of Oblomov’s dream; see Chapter II.13. 8 Two rows of old, densely planted, very high fir trees stood like two massive walls, forming a sombre beautiful alley. [...] I easily climbed over a hedge and continued along this alley. [...] Then I turned into an alley of lime trees. [...] But there the lime trees ended; I passed alongside a white house with a terrace and a mezzanine, and in front of me a view suddenly unfolded of a manorial courtyard and of a broad pond with a dressing shed, a throng of green willows and a village on the other bank with a tall, narrow bell-tower on which a cross shone, reflecting in itself the setting sun. For a moment I felt the charm of something intimate, something very familiar, as though I

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The pleasant atmosphere of friendship, leisure and courtesy that grows stronger with the repeated visits is intensified by recurrent descriptions of the beauties and amenities of the estate, including croquet, lawn-tennis and long dinners. This development begins in Chapter I with a general image of the house that is aesthetically and emotionally positive. A prominent feature is a mezzanine, of which the Russian equivalent, mezonin, is an attic storey. So far, this architectural detail might be interpreted as a historical and poetic indicator, metonymically characterising a particular type of house9 and way of life. Gradually the house becomes ‘personalised’: it is the house of the Volchaninovs, particularly of Lida and Zhenia (Chapter II). In this phase, the mezzanine is mentioned as part of the Domus routine which has become so dear to the narrator. The same episode characterises Lida as she is busy about the house: В это время Лида вернулась откуда-то [...] Торопясь и громко разговаривая, она приняла двух-трех больных, потом с деловым, озабоченным видом ходила по комнатам, отворяя то один шкап, то другой, уходила в мезонин; ее долго искали и звали обедать, и пришла она, когда мы уже съели суп. Все эти мелкие детали я почему-то помню и люблю, и весь этот день живо помню, хотя и не произошло ничего особенного.10 (180-1)

Chapter III is mainly devoted to the debates and growing tensions between the narrator and Lida. Although it is the setting, the house is absent from the surface structure of the narrative text. Chapter IV is set had already seen this very panorama at some time during my childhood. [...] And I returned home feeling as though I had had a good dream. 9 In the commentary on this story (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 9, 490), there is a discussion concerning historical estates that Chekhov knew from personal experience and might have used as prototypes for this story. Among them are estates in the Kaluga district. According to S. I. Samoilov, author of a local excursion guide (1930), houses with mezzanines, or attic storeys, were numerous in that region. 10 At that moment Lida came back from somewhere [...] In a hurry and talking loudly, she received two sick people. Next, she paced the rooms with a businesslike and preoccupied look, opening now one cupboard, now another, and then went away to the mezzanine. They looked for her for some time and called her for dinner, and she came when we had already finished the soup. All these small details I remember and cherish for some reason; in fact I vividly remember that entire day, although nothing in particular happened.


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in the garden at night, when the narrator is on his way back to the Belokurov estate. Here the dénouement of the love theme begins; the narrator and Zhenia declare their love for each other, and she goes back to the house. The narrator remains in the garden for a long time, intensely watching the house with the mezzanine. It now transpires that the mezzanine is where the two girls have their rooms, and so it becomes the centre, or ‘heart’, of the house. The House image, its features and elements, and the narrator’s disparate feelings about the girls, all merge into a complex image that relies on devices of psychopoetic equivalence and identification of the House–Personality type. This topos is indeed very reminiscent of the crucial nocturnal garden scene in which Lavretskii and Liza declare their love in Turgenev’s A Nest of the Landed Gentry.11 As he watches the house, the narrator forms the impression that the personified house looks back. He refers to ‘the lovely, naïve, old house’, the first two attributes obviously associated metonymically with the girl who lives inside and with whom he has fallen in love. He sees how the lamp in Zhenia’s (Misius’s) room briefly flashes up brightly before being dimmed and, a little later, extinguished – an icon of this short-lived love-story: Я постоял немного в раздумье и тихо поплелся назад, чтобы еще взглянуть на дом, в котором она жила, милый, наивный, старый дом, который, казалось, окнами своего мезонина глядел на меня, как глазами, и понимал всё. Я прошел мимо террасы, сел на скамье [...], и отсюда смотрел на дом. В окнах мезонина, в котором жила Мисюсь, блеснул яркий свет, потом покойный зеленый – это лампу накрыли абажуром. Задвигались тени… Я был полон нежности, тишины и довольства, что сумел увлечься и полюбить, и в тоже время я чувствовал неудобство от мысли, что в то же время, в нескольких шагах от меня, в одной из комнат этого дома живет Лида, которая не любит, быть может, ненавидит меня. Я сидел и всё ждал, не выйдет ли Женя, прислушивался, и мне казалось, будто в мезонинe говорят. Прошло около часа. Зеленый свет погас, и не стало видно теней.12 (189) 11

Contemporary critics such as A.A. Andreeva and A. M. Skabichevskii have commented on the affinities of this story with Turgenev’s work (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 9, pp. 493 and 495). 12 I stood for a while in thought and dragged myself back quietly in order to look once more at the house in which she was living, the lovely, naïve, old house that seemed to

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When he returns the next day, he finds the terrace door open, enters the house and searches in vain for Zhenia. This entering of the house is psychologically relevant, particularly since it was not explicitly described in the context of his earlier visits. He finds only Lida and learns from her about Zhenia’s departure, for which she is responsible. His leaving of the estate on this occasion is final; that is, it is no longer part of a recurrent activity. It is marked specifically as a narrative conclusion, symmetrically mirroring the narrator’s first arrival in Chapter I and at the same time marking the house and grounds as a world of its own, essentially different from the ordinary world: И я ушел из усадьбы тою же дорогой, какой пришел сюда в первый раз, только в обратном порядке: сначала со двора в сад, мимо дома, потом по липовой аллее…[...] Потом темная еловая аллея, обвалившаяся изгородь…13 (190)

The story concludes with the author looking back on this experience after many years. He is beginning to forget about the house with the mezzanine, but sometimes, while painting or reading, he remembers watching ‘the green lamp in the window’ while waiting for Misius’. Here again, his memory works metonymically, substituting the house for his beloved who is within; see also Burini 1996, 72-3. ‘Gooseberries’(‘Крыжовник’) is a framed narrative about one Nikolai Ivanych, a civil servant who for decades had been hoarding

be looking at me, with the windows of its mezzanine like eyes, understanding everything. I passed by the terrace, sat down on a bench [...], and from there looked at the house. In the windows of the mezzanine in which Misius’ lived, a bright light flashed, then a quiet green one – the the lamp had been covered with a lampshade. Shadows started to move around… I was full of tenderness, stillness and contentment at the fact that I had been capable of being carried away, of falling in love, and at the same time I felt uneasy at the thought that at that very moment, a few steps away from me, in one of the rooms of this house, Lida was living, who did not love and possibly hated me. I sat and waited for Zhenia to come out, listening, and it seemed to me as if they were talking in the mezzanine. About an hour passed. The green light was extinguished, and the shadows were no more visible. 13 And I left the estate by the same road I had taken when I came here for the first time, only now in reverse order: first from the court into the garden, past the house, then through the lime tree alley… [...] Next came the dark fir tree alley, the broken hedge…


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money and living like a miser in order to buy an estate. His brother, Ivan Ivanych, tells his life story to an audience of friends. As young boys they had enjoyed their childhood in the country together on their father’s small estate, which had to be sold after his death in order to pay his debts. In adult life their ways had parted. Ivan Ivanych describes how his brother became obsessed by the idea of going back to the countryside and thus realising his life’s dream as the owner of a small estate with: a) a gentleman’s house, b) a servants’ hall, c) a vegetable garden, d) gooseberry bushes ((a) барский дом, b) людская, c) огород, d) крыжовник; Chekhov 1977, Vol. 10, 59). For him, the gooseberries symbolise the purpose and promise of his life. After some decades, he eventually buys a small estate, and the narrator describes his visit there. The estate, and all that comes with it, is depicted as a sad, embarrassing failure, a mockery of a gentleman’s country house. All its features are described negatively. It is situated on a river, but neighbouring factories pollute the water; the grounds are criss-crossed with ditches, fences, hedges and fir trees planted in rows. As a visitor, one does not even know how to get into the courtyard, or where to leave one’s horse. Both the dog and the cook are fat and lazy, and look like pigs. He finds his brother in bed, looking old and flabby, ‘taking a rest after dinner’ according to the cook. The new landowner has adopted all the airs and narrow-minded, reactionary opinions of a typical landowner, forgetting his humble origin and his previous position as a humble civil servant. As it happens, this is the very day when the first gooseberries are to be tasted. They are hard and sour, but Nikolai Ivanovich finds them delicious and cannot stop eating them. All his life has been spent in anticipation of this moment. As an Ideal House, or Domus, the estate is illusory. It is also a negative House image because it has constricted Nikolai Ivanovich’s view of life. It provides isolation, but without any splendour. Through his overpowering dream of the house with the gooseberries, he has drawn boundaries within which he can see nothing but himself; see Maxwell 1977, 43. As the narrator Ivan Ivanych tells his brother’s story to friends, he relives his despair over that wasted life and loss of youth, and in a famous monologue he pronounces his despair over the state of Russia in general, over social injustice and poverty, the deafness of the rich and the inef-

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fectiveness and escapism of the intelligentsia. In doing so, he uses some striking and expressive House imagery: Вы взгляните на эту жизнь: наглость и праздность сильных, невежество и скотоподобие слабых, кругом бедность невозможная, теснота, вырождение, пьянство, лицемерие, вранье… Между тем во всех домах и на улицах тишина, спокойствие; из пятидесяти тысяч живущих в городе ни одного, который бы вскрикнул, громко возмутился. [...] Это общий гипноз. Надо, чтобы за дверью каждого довольного, счастливого человека стоял кто-нибудь с молоточком и постоянно напоминал бы стуком, что есть несчастные, [...] Но человека с молоточком нет, счастливый живет себе, [...].14 (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 10, 62)

Quite apart from its rhetoric of moral appeal to the reader or listener, this speech is reminiscent of a passage from Chaadaev’s first philosophical letter, originally written in French; see Gershenzon in Chaadaev 1978: Look around you. Don't you think we are all very restless? We all resemble travellers. There is no definite sphere of existence for anyone, no good habits, no rule for anything at all; not even a home; nothing which attracts or awakens our sympathy or affection, nothing lasting, nothing enduring; everything departs, everything flows away, leaving no traces either without or within ourselves. In our houses we seem to be camping; in our families we look like strangers; in our cities we look like nomads, even more than the nomads who let their herds graze on our steppes, for they are more attached to their deserts than we to our cities. (transl. McNally and Tempest 1991, 20; see also Chapter II.4)

14

Look at this life: at the insolence and idleness of the powerful, the ignorance and bestiality of the powerless, the impossible poverty all around, the overcrowdedness, the degeneration, the drunkenness, hypocrisy and lies… In the meantime, in all houses and streets, silence and quiet reign; among the fifty thousand inhabitants of the city there is not one who would cry out against it. [...] There is a general hypnosis. Before the door of every contented, happy man there should be standing someone with a little hammer who would constantly remind him with a blow that there are unhappy people, [...] But the man with the little hammer is not there. He is happily leading his own life.


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Even though Chaadaev’s is a caustic philosophical polemic that sets Russia itself in opposition to the European nations, both texts exploit the House image as a meta-metaphor, a model of the Domus with mythical qualities. In both texts the reader is emphatically confronted with the dismal state of Russian society, its heartlessness and lack of morality and civilisation, by strong negations of the very qualities of the House archetype. Towards the end of the gooseberry story, the narrator paradoxically uses a canonical image of family life to express his feelings of despair and guilt about the stagnation of Russian bourgeois society and his own inability to do anything about it: Я уехал тогда от брата рано утром, и с тех пор для меня стало невыносимо бывать в городе. Меня угнетают тишина и спокойствие, я боюсь смотреть на окна, так как для меня теперь нет более тяжелого зрелища, как счастливое семейство, сидящее вокруг стола и пьющее чай.15 (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 10, 64)

And again, at the very end of the story, it is a perception of domesticity and sociability that so strikingly colours the narrator’s view of life. Chekhov conveys the reaction of Ivan Ivanovich’s audience in a negative tone: they feel disappointed and very uneasy in response to his ‘tedious’ story about ‘a poor devil of a civil servant eating gooseberries’. Instead, ‘somehow’, they would rather hear stories about ‘elegant people’. Not only the people who are present, but everything in the room, including the portraits, the furniture and the carpet, is drawn into this evocation of domesticity, urbanness and the comforting safety of the concrete here and now, as though instinctively to combat and undo the unbearable anxiety and loneliness that the unhappy Ivan Ivanovich imposed upon them by telling his ‘unhomely’ tale (idem, 65): [...] слушать рассказ про беднягу-чиновника, который ел крыжовник, было скучно. Хотелось почему-то говорить и слушать 15

I left my brother’s house early the following morning, and since then it has become unbearable for me to be in the city. I am depressed by the silence and quiet, and I am afraid to look in at windows because there is no more frightening spectacle for me now than that of a happy family, sitting around a table and drinking tea.

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про изящных людей; про женщин. И то, что они сидели в гостиной, где всё – и люстра в чехле, и кресла, и ковры под ногами говорили, что здесь когда-то ходили, сидели, пили чай вот эти самые люди, которые глядели теперь из рам, и то, что здесь теперь бесшумно ходила красивая Пелагея, - это было лучше всяких рассказов.16

The motifs of self-imposed constriction, isolation and escapism in the gooseberry story form an interesting link with the image of the futliar, the shell or case in the story ‘Человек в футляре’ (‘The Man in a Shell’, 1898), where the motif is also repeated in the covered chandelier.17 It tells the story of a man who closes himself in in any way he can, narrowing down his perspective and evading confrontations with life. In both stories, we see heroes whose views of life are distorted by ‘futliarnost’’; see Maxwell 1977, 43. The image of the House with the gooseberry bushes is not one of basic shelter and protection but of a place where an individual can escape the world and avoid responsibility. The narrator comments that his brother’s wish to withdraw from the world was nothing more than egoism, laziness and ‘a monkishness without heroic self-denial’ (quoted from Bruford 1948, 85). In this context, Chekhov’s narrator uses spatial imagery setting closedness and contraction in opposition to expansion as the dimension of freedom, and comparing the ‘escape-estates’, to which the intelligentsia feel attracted, to the space of the grave: Он был добрый, кроткий человек, я любил его, но этому желанию запереть себя на всю жизнь, я никогда не сочувствовал. Принято говорить, что человеку нужно только три аршина земли. 16

[...] it was tedious to listen to a story about a poor devil of a civil servant who ate gooseberries. Somehow one would rather speak and hear about elegant people; about women. And the fact that they were sitting in the drawing-room where everything – the chandelier in its cover, the arm chairs and the carpets under their feet – told them that here once used to walk, sit and drink tea those very same people who were now looking down from their picture frames, and the fact that here and now pretty Pelageia was walking around – all this was much better than any story. 17 These two stories, together with ‘About Love (‘О любви’), were written in the summer of 1898 and form what is commonly referred to as the ‘Little Trilogy’, mainly because all three of them are framed narratives with common narrators in either the frame or core stories, though there are also other clear points of agreement; see Maxwell 1977, 35.


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Но ведь три аршина земли нужны трупу, а не человеку. И говорят также теперь, что если наша интеллигенция имеет тяготение к земле и стремится в усадьбы, то это хорошо. Но ведь эти усадьбы те же три аршина земли. Уходить из города, от борьбы, от житейского шума, уходить и прятаться у себя в усадьбе – это не жизнь, это эгоизм, лень, это своего рода монашество, но монашество без подвига. Человеку нужно не три аршина земли, не усадьба, а весь земной шар, вся природа, где на просторе он мог бы проявить все свойства и особенности своего свободного духа.18 (Chekhov 1977, Vol. 10, 58)

Symbolically, the country house of Nikolai Ivanovich is like the futliar, functioning as a kind of mental straitjacket. It can be considered as a highly characteristic element of Chekhov’s psychopoetic inventory. The common literary functions of the futliar and this house are determined by the fact that they are basically constrictive spatial images bearing negative connotations and symbolising existential anxiety, a word whose etymology (L. angere, ‘to choke, distress’; angustus, ‘angst’) is semiotically relevant here. These images make concrete the Chekhovian problem of individual freedom and what a decent man should do in life. Another interesting feature of the passage just quoted is the spatial climax in the final sentence, from the famous ‘three arshins’,19 via the country estate to the whole world and all of nature. In this rhetorical build-up, we can recognise the mythopoetical equation of the House– Cosmos type that, through its vital, liberating and expansive movement, marks exactly the the reverse of the constrictive world-view of Nikolai Ivanovich in his depressing anti-usad’ba. On a more abstract 18 He was a kind, mild man. I loved him, but I could never sympathise with this wish to lock himself up for life. It is customary to say that a man needs only three arshins [3x71cm.] of land. But then, three arshins is all a corpse needs, not a man. And they also say today that, if our intelligentsia has a taste for the countryside and estates, this is a good thing. But these very estates are the same three arshins of land. Going away from the city, from struggle, from the noise of life – that is not life, that is egoism, laziness, that is some sort of monkishness, but a monkishness without self-denial. Man does not need three arshins of land, not an estate, but the entire earth globe, all of nature, where he can give free play to all the qualities and peculiarities of his free spirit in freedom. 19 Famous because it implied a polemical stance against Tolstoy’s famous aphorism that man only needs three arshins of land for his coffin.

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level we could also compare these complex images to the Closed House type, as in the story ‘Ward No. 6’. In ‘Черный монах’ (‘The Black Monk’, 1894), the estate topos is the setting of a love story with an unhappy ending. Again, as in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, an incomplete family and a male hero provide the main narrative focus. This time, the incomplete family comprises the widowed father Egor Semionych Pesotskii, a famous horticulturist and grower of fruits and vegetables, and his daughter Tania. They live on the Borisovka estate. The male hero, Andrei Vasil’evich Kovrin, was adopted as an orphan by Egor Semionych and raised by him together with Tania. The story begins as Andrei returns to Borisovka after a long absence. Three parallel and intertwining plots now develop, each showing the specific characters of the three protagonists and thus together preparing for the unhappy dénouement. The first is the Domus text involving the father and his obsessive gardening; the second is the unhappy love story involving Tania and Andrei, and the third is the case history of Andrei himself, who begins to suffer serious attacks of megalomania after encountering a hallucinatory black monk during lonely walks on the estate. At this early stage in the story, a distinct sense of doom is already present. The Borisovka estate is shown at the beginning as a gardeners’ Paradise: there are beautiful orchards with an endless variety of fruit trees, and enormous vegetables tended by a host of workmen. Pesotskii, however, is an unbearable perfectionist, and everybody on the estate, including his daughter, suffers from his horticultural fanaticism. Thus, he is not like a genuine pater familias presiding over a proper Domus. In matters regarding the garden, he trusts only his daughter, whom he envisages married to Andrei and providing a male heir to continue the garden. So far, this reflects the dynastic motif inherent in the House Myth, but in its realisation it is fraught with anxiety and failure. It also serves as an indication of the essentially narrow, closed world-view of the father, reflected in the markedly concentric layout of the Borisovka estate; see also Shchukin 1997, 249. Pesotskii lives in constant fear of losing control. Tania is neither strong nor healthy, but has an impulsive nature. She is very unhappy on her father’s estate. Her long cherished dream has been to marry Andrei and thus escape the oppressive house of her


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father, but once the decision is made she veers between exultation at the prospect of marriage and fear of leaving the ‘nest’. Leaving the House of the Father through marriage is one of the canonical motifs of the House Myth that is realised in this story. After the marriage has failed, however, Tania returns to the estate alone to look after her old father, the garden having by this time been taken over by others. Andrei, then, is the one least related to the estate world. He returns to the place of his adoptive childhood but only after a long absence during which he has built a successful and promising scholarly career. The world of the estate, with its beautiful gardens and amenities, does not serve for him as a family nest. Its primary function in his life is to be the dramatic setting of the first symptoms of his mental illness, on to which he projects his egotistical fantasies. The aesthetic shapes and spaces of the estate are brought into focus each time he encounters the black monk or roams the estate hoping for the next encounter – the river bank where he has his first experience, the park, the gardens, the alleys and the house itself. In the course of his hallucinatory discussions with the monk, Andrei comes to believe himself a genius. When the situation becomes untenable, he agrees to undergo medical treatment and leaves the estate for that purpose. After his therapy, he returns to the estate and has no further encounters with the black monk. However, he can no longer bear these surroundings. He quarrels with Tania and her father, blaming them for his present unhappiness. He complains that his treatment has robbed him of his originality and talent, leaves the estate and his wife to resume his academic career, only to die shortly afterwards. The Borisovka estate was the scene and setting of the cherished illness that allowed him to see the black monk and indulge his delusions of grandeur. In ‘The Black Monk’, the mythical contours of the Domus ideal are in fact housing its opposite, aptly designated an Anti-House. The Edenic shapes of the usad’ba world have been concealing disharmony and intense suffering without any prospect of relief. In the story of ‘Верочка’(‘Verochka’, 1887), the usad’ba topos is also developed as the foil and setting of an unhappy love plot, but its repertoire of Domus motifs is less prominent and less elaborate than those of the stories discussed above. This story itself is thematically and structurally simpler, but it warrants discussion here because of the

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narrative function of the estate house in rounding off or aborting the unhappy love plot in a manner comparable to that which occurs in ‘The House with the Mezzanine’. The stiff statistician Ivan Alekseevich Ognev remembers how he bade a final farewell to his host Gavriil Petrovich Kuznetsov and his daughter Vera. He had stayed many times at their estate while gathering data for his statistical research, in the process becoming a family friend – and somewhat more. Most of the story is devoted to Vera’s accompanying him to the end of the estate while struggling with her feelings, and his attendant embarrassment. At last she tells him how she has loved him since his first arrival at their house. Her feelings are left unrequited, and their parting could not be more painful or awkward. This story of unsuccessful love ends with a poignant scene in which the hero hesitates and stands for a while at the window behind which he imagines Vera to be, before leaving the estate for the last time: Помнит Огнев свои осторожные шаги, темные окна, густой запах гелиотропа и резеды. Знакомый Каро, дружелюбно помахивая хвостом, подошел к нему и понюхал его руку... Это было единственное живое существо, видевшее, как он раза два прошелся вокруг дома, постоял у темного окна Веры и, махнув рукой, с глубоким вздохом пошел из сада.20 (Chekhov 1976, Vol. 6, 81)

Another striking feature of Chekhov’s treatment of the usad’baDomus topos that presents itself in the love plots discussed here is that in each case the central hero, on whom the narrative is focused, is a male outsider in relation to the estate space to which the prospective female lover or partner belongs. There is, of course, an archetypal plot model involving a pattern of male mobility in relation to the female expectation to be wooed and the spatial typology of interiority that comes with it. Nevertheless, such a conclusion also calls for a comparison with the case of Turgenev, the ‘founding father’ of this genre. In his earliest novels, the situation is far less unequivocal: only Rudin 20

Ognev remembers his careful steps, the dark windows, the intense smell of heliotrope and mignonette. The familiar dog Caro, wagging his tail in a friendly manner, approached him and sniffed his hand… This was the only living creature that had seen how he walked around the house a few times, stood for a while at Vera’s dark window and, after giving up on it, walked away from the garden with a deep sigh.


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fits the model properly, while Lavretskii, in The Nest of Landed Gentry, is himself an estate dweller; Insarov, as the outsider conquering Elena in On the Eve, comes close, but it is she who is both the heroine on whom the novel is focused and the one who is in authority. Fathers and Sons, in spite of its estate settings, has an entirely different dominant theme and is therefore beyond the scope of this discussion.21 Thus, we have seen House images in Chekhov’s literary worlds as vehicles of archetypal qualities that are both positive and negative. The image of the Russian estate as the archetypal Domus is positive, not as a reality in itself but as an ideal that remains an inalienable part of the Russian experience and world-picture, and as an ideal topos for the aspirations of free creativity, as epitomised by the author’s own estate of Melikhovo. Its image as the concrete and metaphorical space or model of the existential anxiety characteristic of early Russian Modernism is, by contrast, a profoundly negative one: the ultimate image of Home confronts the heroes with their existential homelessness, whether as members of incomplete families or as outsiders such as Chekhov’s characteristic narrators.

21 It is also tempting to interpret this psychoanalytically in connection with the different biographies of the two authors in question, seeing Turgenev, the barin or landowner, as one who has internalised the estate world and its modalities both naturally and by birthright, and Chekhov, the grandson of a former serf, as by definition an outsider to this estate topology.

21. Symbolism. Demonic Urbanism and Catastrophic Expectations A general, dominant characteristic of the literature of this period – the first phase of Russian Modernism – is expectation of catastrophe. This is certainly true of Symbolism. Before investigating the Symbolist treatment of the House Myth, I propose to look into the literary semiotics that characterises this movement and its world-picture. According to the typology developed by Likhachev and, especially, Smirnov (see Smirnov 1977), the Symbolist literary world-model, at least in the sense of a systemic dominant in the continuity of historical and cultural developments, can be qualified as a secondary artistic style. Artistic systems of the secondary type are characterised by a tendency to ‘semiotise reality’ (‘семиотизация действительности’, idem, 24), implying a conception of the empirical, factual world according to which every thing is a sign – a unit of expression, or signification. The thing has become a signifier (the exterior of a sign), whereas its content has fused with some ideal, essentialist or abstract, ‘pure’ concept (idem). This means that the denotative function of the linguistic sign is reduced, and that the significance of the material world results from the fact that it is projected upon an ‘ideal setting’ (‘идеальная среда’, idem, 25). This is also the basis for another characteristic of Symbolism as a secondary artistic style: the structure of a dual, or two-world, model (dvumirie), typologically and dialectically setting it off against Realism. This also affects the realisations of the House Myth in the context of the new aesthetics of the Symbolists. However heterogeneous and ambivalent Symbolism may be as a historically developing complex of artistic phenomena and transformations (also stressed by Smirnov; idem, 26 for example), a striking characteristic of Symbolist literature on the thematic level is its atten-

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tion to the modern urban setting. The urban world characteristically symbolises the intellectual and contemplative sphere of human culture as opposed to the negatively indexed world of nature, for example in the early work of Briusov. We see it in the following opposition, involving houses and streets as symbols or possible ‘keys’ to the other, ‘more real’ (‘realiora’) world as postulated by Briusov’s Symbolist poetic doctrine: Я люблю большие дома И узкие улицы города.1

versus Есть что-то позорное в мощи природы.2 (See also Smirnov 1977, 30)

1 2

I love big houses / And the narrow streets of the city. There is something ignominious in the power of nature.

22. Briusov and Blok We see the development of abstract symbolic topoi of a demonic city and an ‘urban landscape’, as Hansen-Löve calls it, which cannot easily be identified or connected with a particular geographical reality – though the urban poetry of Briusov and Blok in particular is connected with the so called Petersburg myth (Hansen-Löve 1989, 341) – but which models a world in accordance with the well-known analogy of the House–City–World/Cosmos type. According to D. Maksimov (as quoted by Hansen-Löve, ibidem), the ‘city’ in Briusov’s work is not only ‘urbs’ but also ‘orbis’; that is, the concept of the world or universe in its archaic, discoid or spherical, centred form; see Lewis & Short 1969. Briusov even has a collection of poems entitled Urbi et orbi. The urban poetic landscape often acquires demonic or diabolic traits, especially in connection with the thematics of eschatology, doom and the vision of Petersburg as a necropolis. The diabolic Symbolist urban world is part of a world of appearance and pretence. Hansen-Löve draws a parallel between the diabolic city image of neoromanticism and the world-picture of early Symbolism (Hansen-Löve 1998, 341); see Merezhkovskii’s lines from 1889: Дома и призраки людей – / Все в дымку ровную сливалось (Houses and ghosts of people – / Everything blended equally into a puff of smoke). While moments of social criticism are discernable in Symbolist poetry, its urban landscapes typically form a generic gestalt that omits the more-or-less detailed inventories and specifications that would identify a particular urban milieu or endow it with causality and historicity. Clearly the basic semiotic strategy of Symbolism favours working with paradigms rather than syntagmatism; see also Smirnov 1977, 1518, referring to M. V. Panov. Symbolic equations of the House–City– World/Cosmos type are manifestations of this, as in the following examples from Briusov’s long poem ‘Замкнутые (сатирическая по-

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эма)’ (‘The Confined (A Satirical Poem’)), in which the decrepit City–House of the present and the vision of a future phantom House– City–World are juxtaposed: И (город) весь казался обветшалым зданием,

and И, как кошмарный сон, виденьем беспощадным, [...] С стеклянным черепом, покрывшим шар земной, Грядущий Город-дом являлся предо мной. 1 (Briusov 1973, Vol. 1, 259 and 265)

Streets, houses, walls, doors and windows remain representative and often interchangeable ingredients of an abstract world, an ‘ideal setting’ focusing on symbolic and organic relations, axiological oppositions, relations of analogy or homology between man, house or city on the one hand and nature on the other, as illustrated in the following example from Briusov’s poetic address to the city (from the poem ‘Городу (дифирамб)’ (‘To the City (Dithyramb)’): Царя властительно над долом, Огни вонзая в небосклон, [...]Стальной, кирпичный и стеклянный, [...]Ты – чарователь неустанный, [...]А по твоим железным жилам Струится газ, бежит вода. Твоя безмерная утроба Веков добычей не сыта,В ней неумолчно ропщет Злоба, В ней грозно стонет Нищета.2 (Briusov 1973, Vol. I, 514)

In the urban Symbolist poetry of Briusov and Blok, we find basic House images serving as indices within a system of symbolic signification and interpretation in which the ‘essence’ of the 1

And (the city) seemed like a decrepit building. / [...] And, like a nightmare, like a merciless vision, / [...] With a glass skull, covering the globe, / The future city–house appeared before me. 2 Ruling sovereignly over the vale, / Thrusting fires into the sky, / [...] Made of steel, brick and glass, / [...] You are a tireless enchanter. / [...] And through your iron veins / Gas flows, water runs. / Your immense womb / Is not satisfied with the loot of ages, – / In her Anger grumbles incessantly, / In her Poverty moans menacingly.

285

Briusov and Blok

city, house or room as a closed or enclosing space is directly linked to the ‘essence’ of, for example, a predatory animal, a womb or a coffin, as in Briusov’s Здания – хищные звери С сотней несытых утроб! Страшны закрытые двери Каждая комната гроб3

(Hansen-Löve 1989, 333)

or identified as a ‘place of sorrow’ or a prison, as in Sologub’s Узкие мглистые дали. Камни везде, и дома. Как мне уйти от печали? Город мне – точно тюрьма4

(ibid. 334)

or as an analogy of hell, as in Bal’mont’s Дома, я чувствую, горят, Но люди скованы забвением5

(ibid. 314)

in which people and houses become interchangeable, as in Minskii’s И под покровом тьмы кромешной, Как люди, мрачные, тянулися дома, Как тени, люди шли поспешно.6

(ibid. 335)

or Blok’s

3

Buildings are beasts of prey / With hundred unfulfilled wombs. / Closed doors are frightening: / Every room is a coffin (332) 4 Narrow hazy vistas. / Stones everywhere, and houses. / How can I get away from sorrow? / The city for me is just like a prison (334) 5 The houses, I feel, are ablaze, / But the people are chained by oblivion (314) 6 And under the veil of of pitch darkness, / Like people, so sad, the houses dragged on, / Like ghosts, the people hurried by.

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Уж вечер. Мелкий дождь зашлепал грязью Прохожих, и дома, и прочный вздор…7 (Blok 1971, Vol. 3, 23)

The absence or insignificance of homeliness and social domesticity in general characterises Symbolist poetic world-pictures.8 This can be attributed to the demonic or eschatological aspect of the urban world and the anti-bourgeois attitudes of the poets, but it is probably also connected with the nature of the Symbolist lyric persona and his or her self-oriented, solipsistic attitude to the outer world. Even where there is a positive image of homely values, it is still the lyric persona’s solipsism and longing for sublime, creative solitude that is emphasised, rather than anything else: Когда опускается штора И ласковый ламповый свет [...] Мне не нужно яркого блеска, Красоты и величья небес. Опустись, опустись, занавеска! Весь мир отошел и исчез. Со мной любимые книги, [...] – Да! Я знаю, как сладки вериги В глубине безысходных пещер.9 (В стенах (Within Walls), Briusov 1973, Vol.1, 172)

In this poem, we see the development of a House image characterised by modest, positive domestic intimacy (see the closing of the curtains) and isolation from the outer world – even the universe – into the absolute seclusion of a hermit’s cave (‘In the depths of endless caves’), implying the poet’s ascetic heroism (‘sweet fetters’). However, the same attitude can also be expressed in an unambiguously negative 7

Evening has come. A muddy drizzle started to smack / The passers-by, and the houses, and all the rest of that nonsense. 8 Compare the anti-domesticity of the house used for prostitution in Blok’s ’Последний день’ (‘The Last Day’) in Город (The City) (Blok 1971, Vol. 2, 132); and see below. 9 When the blind is lowered / And the gentle glow of the lamp / [...] I don’t need bright light, / Nor the beauty and the grandeur of the sky. / Go down! Go down, curtain! / The entire world has receded and disappeared. / My favourite books are my company, / [...] – Yes! I know how sweet fetters are / In the depths of endless caves.

Briusov and Blok

287

sense through the equation of personality, house and cosmos along the interiority–exteriority axis, as in Весь мир – замкнутый дом, и на замке печать (The whole world is a closed house, and the lock is sealed); see Hansen-Löve 1989, 104.10 Although, as we have seen, we can find in Briusov’s work a ‘programmatic’ preference for the urban world and the interiority of the house, this still comes with a strong ambivalence towards these types of space.11 In fact it might be more accurate to speak of his fascination rather than his preference: he is fascinated by the two-faced nature of an archetypal structure that, as a result of the ‘essentialist’ poetics of Symbolism discussed above, surfaces in his poetry, as well as in that of others, in such ‘undiluted’, ambivalent and contradictory forms. Symbolist semantics are deliberately suggestive and ambiguous. The relationship between the world and the position of the Symbolist poet confronted with it – that is, between the material world and its significance sub specie aeternitatis – typically results in semiotic inconclusiveness and ambiguity. It is the negative ambiguities that are most important because they are more numerous and more representative of the Symbolists’ eschatologic expectations than the positive. We can discern specific patterns in them, the simultaneous identity and non-identity of urban life and death, and their poetic transformations. The city is populated by ‘living dead’ (A); hence, the simultaneous identity and non-identity of the city and cemetery as a necropolis (B) and of the house as both a protective structure and a ‘House of the Dead’, a prison, a grave or a coffin (C). Ultimately, this also lies at the root of the ambiguous identity of the (poetic) personality. This is expressed through transformations of the House–Soul/Personality type; inversely, houses can acquire human features (D). All four can occur together in particular contexts. As image types of the House, they can be interpreted as icons, symbolic ‘anchors’ of the personality or soul 10

Hansen-Löve (ibidem) points out that the symbolic function of the door changes during the development of symbolism. In early Symbolism it is associated with apocalyptic or eschatological ‘disclosure’ and ‘revelation’, whereas in the later, so-called ‘diabolical’ phase the door remains closed, symbolising the world as a prison or the inaccessability of the ‘other world’. 11 There is also a development in Briusov’s attitude through time. He is more overtly positive in his earlier work of the eighteen-nineties, the collection В стенах (Within Walls) for example; see Hansen-Löve 1989, 333.

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in the world. Their function is based on the establishment of analogies or homologies between the gestalts of the ‘Self’ and the House, which implies psychopoetic ambiguities between their personification and reification.12 Let us look at some examples:13 (A). Blok: Были как видения неживой столицы - / Случайно, нечаянно вступающие в луч. (Blok 1971, Vol. 2, 145); Как тяжко мертвецу среди людей/ Живым и страстным притворяться! [...] Живые спят. Мертвец встает из гроба, [...] В зал многолюдный и многоколонный / Спешит мертвец. [...] Лишь у колонны встретится очами / С подругою – она, как он мертва (Страшный мир (Terrible World), ’Пляски смерти, 1’ (‘Dance of Death, 1’), idem, Vol. 3, 22);14 Briusov: Люди – как призраки странные (Briusov 1973, I, 176); И женщин белые тени, / Как трупы, ложатся в гробницы (idem, 265); Там люди-трупы спят, / Вдвоем и одиноко (idem, 329); 15 (B) Briusov: Я провижу [...] / Застывшие громады домов; / Жизнь [...] среди неподвижных зданий, / В теснине мертвых домов (Briusov 1973, I, 173);16 (C) Briusov: Улицы мертво-бесстрастны, / В ущельи безжизненных зданий / Мы дышим неземной тишиной (‘В доме’ (‘In the House’), Briusov 1973, I, 182); Недвижные дома – как тысячи могил. (idem, 329); Ты очнулась одна / В этой спальне, на могилу похожей. (idem, 365).17 12

The step that logically follows this – the explicit ‘materialising’ transformation of the House–Body type – is not typical of Symbolism but is typical of Futurism, as we shall see. 13 For this selection of examples, I have made use of an unpublished research paper by Ellen Rutten (1998). 14 They were like visions of a lifeless city – / That, by accident, without intention, was stepping into a shaft of light. 15 People are like strange apparitions / And the white ghosts of women, / Like corpses, lie down in tombs [...] Human corpses are asleep there, / Together and alone. 16 I foresee [...] Frozen masses of houses; / Life [...] among motionless buildings, / In a gorge lined with dead houses. 17 The streets are impassive like death, / In the ravine between lifeless buildings / We breathe an unearthly silence; Motionless houses are like thousands of graves. [...] you awoke alone / In this grave-like bedroom.

Briusov and Blok

289

Blok: Все испуганно пьяной толпой / Покидают могилы домов (Blok 1971, Vol. 2, 139); Скучала за стеной и перла, / Как птица пленная, жена (There are numerous cases of houses that function as prisons in the work of both Briusov and Blok).18 (D) Briusov: Словно нездешние тени, / Стены меня обступили: / Думы былых поколений! / В городе я – как в могиле (Briusov 1973, I, 177); Камни, камни! [...] Люди, из вас воздвигали мы храмы, / Из вас мы слагали дворцы и жилища, / Вами мы крыли могильные ямы, / Вы с нами – и в жизни и на кладбище! [...] Жизненный трепет пройдет по встревоженным грудам, / Камней восторженный гимн, как сиянье, встанет над миром (idem, I, 345-6); Но не было жизни и не было люда, / Закрытые окна слагались в ряды, / И только картины глядели оттуда…(‘Город женщин’ (‘The City of Women’) I, 357).19 The poetic transformations that we indicated using the House–Soul or House–Personality combination, and its inversion, are very important as archetypal house manifestations. They can be powerful sources of mythopoetic imagery, not only for the Symbolists but for other poets also. In the work of Blok, the symbolic and expressive value of this combination occurs, explicitly and implicitly, in various forms. We find the house in its fundamental guise of protective, enclosed space of intimacy and encompassing the poet’s person and ego, house and poet being analogous in their concentric relation of interiority towards the outside world. The collection of poems Страшный мир (Terrible World) expounds its theme in terms of House symbolism: Повеселясь на буйном пире, Вернулся поздно я домой; 18

All frightened in a drunken crowd / They abandon the graves of their houses; / Behind the walls, pining and trying to break loose, / Like a captive bird, was the wife. 19 Like otherworldly ghosts, / Walls surrounded me: / Thoughts of past generations! In the city I am as though in the grave; Stones, stones! [...] / People, out of you we erected temples, / Out of you we put together palaces and dwellings, / With you we covered burial pits, / You are with us – in life and in the cemetery! [...] / A lifelike trembling seizes the anxious mounds, / The stones’ rapturous hymn, like a radiance rises above the earth; But there was no life and there were no people, / Closed windows formed rows, / And only paintings looked from there…

290


Ночь тихо бродит по квартире, Храня уютный угол мой. Слились все лица, все обиды В одно лицо, в одно пятно; И ветр ночной поет в окно Напевы сонной панихиды… Лишь соблазнитель мой не спит; Он льстиво шепчет: “Вот твой скит. Забудь о временном, о пошлом И в песнях свято лги о прошлом”.20

(Blok 1971, Vol. 3, 22)

The modelling functions of this House image rely on the phenomenology of interiority mentioned above, but also on other forms of analogy: house–face (facing the world) and window–eye. The poet’s house is also a hermit’s cell (‘skit’), where he can be alone with the only other archetypes that inhabit the house of his soul: the night, and his ‘seducer’ (‘soblaznitel’) or muse. We find an example of the inverse transformation of this image in В моей душе, как келья, душной Все эти песни родились.21

(Blok 1971, Vol. 3, 259)

where the poet’s soul, as the source or birthplace of poetry, is explicitly compared to a monk’s cell. In the optimistic poem from the Verses on the Beautiful Lady, in which the lyric persona opens his window on a misty morning, the house and the lyric persona coincide. His desired mystical meeting with her will occur as the sun and the wind together enter the poet’s house, which is his ‘body and soul’: [...] Ты ли, подруга желанная, 20 After a merry and wild feast, / I retuned home late; / The night quietly roams about my flat, / Guarding my snug little corner. // All faces, all grievances / Merged into one face, into one blot; / And the night wind whistles into the window / Tunes of a sleepy requiem… // Only my seducer does not sleep; / He flatteringly whispers: “This is your monk’s cell. / Forget about things temporal and trite / And piously sing lies about the past. 21 In my soul, as stifling as a monk’s cell / All these songs were born.

291

Briusov and Blok

Всходишь ко мне на крыльцо? [...] Настежь ворота тяжелые! Ветром пахнуло в окно! [...] Солнце и ветер в лицо! С ними подруга желанная Всходит ко мне на крыльцо!22

(Blok 1971, Vol. 1, 110)

The next step in the poetic semiotisation of this relationship is the attribution of human psychic faculties and emotions with analogous transformations to the house gestalt, or parts of it, as in Гашу огни моих надежд. Со вздохом закрываю окна.23

(Blok 1971, Vol. 1, 409)

and, in the context of a bird knocking on the window of his prison (‘temnitsa’) as a call for him to free himself, in Я сам не знаю, О чем томится Мое жилье?24

(idem, Vol. 2, 284)

and, with a variation of transformations corresponding to the spatial and ideological orientation of the lyric subject,25 in Сквозь цветы, и листы, и колючие ветки, я знаю, Старый дом глянет в сердце мое, Глянет небо опять, розовея от краю до краю, В окошко твое.26 (idem, Vol.3, 168)

with the house – presumably of a former beloved – having a psyche directed towards the lyric persona (‘the house will cast a glance into 22

[...] Is it you, my longed for friend, / Who comes to me across the porch? / [...] Open wide the heavy gates! / A gust of wind came into the window! / [...] Sun and wind in my face! / And with them my longed for friend / Comes to me across the porch! 23 I extinguish the fires of my hopes. / With a sigh I close the windows 24 I don’t know myself, / What my house is pining for? 25 In the sense of B. A. Uspenskii 1973. 26 Through the flowers, and the leaves, and the thorny branches, I know, / The old house will cast a glance into my heart, / The sky, turning pink from side to side, will cast a glance / Into your little window.

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my heart’) and the same house containing the beloved – the object of desire – as seen from the outside. Now the one who experiences the desire is personified nature, taking the place of the excited voyeur and watching her small window (‘the sky, turning pink, will cast a glance into your little window’). The house is the symbolic transformation of the poet’s desire and expectations connected with the enigmatic nature of the Beautiful Lady in another poem of that cycle. Its particular poetic effect is based on the mysterious and erotic intimations that the context imparts to this House image in the poem that opens with the verse ‘Там - в улице стоял какой-то дом,’ (‘There in the street stood a house’; Blok 1971, Vol. 1, 144). This poem as a whole develops House symbolism of the House–Riddle type in relation to the identity of the enigmatic Lady. The five stanzas symmetrically and iconically construct the interiority of the house as seen from the outside. In stanza 1, there is a steep staircase leading up to the dark house (И лестница крутая в тьму водила); a door opens and closes, leaving some light outside; then the dark closes in again ([...], – и снова тьма бродила). In stanza 5, the staircase is featured again, and a shadow passes by; the door opens and closes, and then it is dark again (По лестнице [...] Мелькала тень [...], и снова тьма бродила). Thus, the poem forms a cycle, from darkness to darkness, without revealing the identity – or even the existence – of the Lady. In between, stanzas 2 and 4, which are equally symmetrical and concentric in relation to the framing stanzas 1 and 5, provide some external details of the house (stanza 2) and its surroundings (stanza 4); in stanza 2, footsteps are heard near the door of the flower shop, ascending the staircase in the twilight, and in stanza 4, light and the sound of music and singing are coming from the house. The central stanza is the thematic and compositional centre of the poem, and the iconic centre of the enigma: Там наверху окно смотрело вниз, Завешанное неподвижной шторой, И, словно лоб наморщенный, карниз Гримасу придавал стене – и взоры.27

27

High above there was a window looking down, / Hung with a motionless curtain, / And, like a frowning brow, the ledge / Imparted a grimace to the wall – and looks.

Briusov and Blok

293

The house looks down upon the lyric persona through a window, hung with blinds, and a cornice becomes a frowning and grimacing eyebrow, but for all its expressive detail, its numinous and personifying imagery, it only enhances the riddle of identity. Neither the lyric persona nor the reader is any wiser than before as the frame of darkness closes once more around the house and its mystery (и снова тьма бродила). Blok projected catastrophic and eschatological expectations on to the urban milieu, especially in his collection of verse named Город (The City), which was written, he said, under the impression of Briusov’s apocalyptic urban fantasy ‘Конь Бледъ’ (‘The Pale Horse’); see Blok 1971, Vol. 2, 325. He stresses the social dimension of the modern city and its illusions and disillusions. The opening poem in the collection, ‘Последний день’ (‘The Last Day’), sets the tone by connecting the themes of deception (‘obman’) and prostitution – even though spring, in the second half of the poem, symbolises hope. Here, the interiority of the house is a place of false intimacy and delusive feelings. The contrast between day and night exposes the unhomely character of this anti-house with its depressing disorder and appalling furniture. The red chest of drawers (‘krasnyi komod’) in particular, a symbol of bourgeois domesticity, epitomises the utter banality and despair from which the woman will try to escape when she goes out on to the street in the second half of the poem: [...] Пробудились в комнате мужчина и блудница, Медленно очнулись среди угарной тьмы. [...] За холодным окном дрожали женские плечи, Мужчина перед зеркалом расчесывал пробор в волосах. [...] Еще вечером у фонаря ее лицо блеснуло, В этой самой комнате была влюблена. [...] На всем был серый постылый налет. Углами торчала мебель, валялись окурки, бумажки, Всех ужасней в комнате был красный комод.28 (idem, Vol. 2, 132)

28 [...] A man and a prostitute awoke in the room; / Slowly they found themselves in the darkness of exstacy. / At the cold window the woman’s shoulders shivered; / The man in front of the mirror parted his hair. / Only last night near the streetlamp her face had shone; / In this very room she had been in love. / [...] Everything there was grey and repellent to the touch. / The corners of the furniture were sticking out; cigarette

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The house also occurs in his work as a moral image and as the essential symbol of social life, but only in the context of Russia’s historic catastrophe, the tragic portent of which Blok felt particularly strongly. We see it in the unfinished autobiographical epic poem Возмездие (Retribution), where his old house – the ‘hospitable old house’ – is the symbolic centre of a threatening and catastrophic world: И зашаталось всё кругом, И ветром новое врывалось В гостеприимный старый дом: [...] В гостеприимном старом доме Найдется комната для них. [...] У дома состарилась душа.29 (idem, Vol. 3, 203, 206, and 215, respectively)

as well as in ‘Унижение’ (‘Humiliation’): Разве дом этот – дом в самом деле? Разве так суждено меж людьми?30

(Blok 1971, Vol. 3, 20)

and we shall encounter more houses that perform this function in twentieth-century literature. In his scathing poem ‘Друзьям’ (‘To My Friends’, 1908), Blok adopts a prophetic attitude, condemning his own generation and the catastrophe that they will call down upon themselves and Russia. In doing so, he uses impressive, utterly destructive Anti-House imagery: the ‘poisoning’ and ruining of the house, resulting in the loss of the house, which means no longer having anywhere to lay one’s head: Чтò делать! Ведь каждый старался Свой собственный дом отравить, Все стены пропитаны ядом, И негде главы приклонить! stubs were lying about, scraps of paper. / The most horrific thing in the room was the red chest of drawers. 29 And everything around started to rock, / And with the wind something new broke / Into the hospitable old house: [...] / In the hospitable old house / There will be a room for them. [...] / The house’s soul had grown old. 30 Is this house really a house? / Should it really be like this among people?

295

Briusov and Blok

[...] И, пьяные, с улицы смотрим, Как рушатся наши дома!31

31

(idem, Vol. 3, 82)

What should be done! For everyone has tried / To contaminate his own house, / All the walls are saturated with poison, / And there is no place to lay one’s head! [...] / And we, drunk, watch from the street, / How our houses collapse!

23. Belyi’s Cosmic House. The Big Bang and the Temple of the Body Andrei Belyi plays a particularly important role in the literary history of the house theme. He is the author of the genuinely millenarian, satirical urban novel of Modernism Петербург (Petersburg in the 1916 edition). This novel stands in the tradition of the Petersburg myth and engages in intertextual discussion with earlier literature connected with Petersburg – Pushkin’s demonic, urban Медный всадник (The Bronze Horseman) in particular – as well as satirising contemporary political and literary affairs. It plays on ambiguities concerning people’s identities, blurring the boundaries between appearance and reality. Its exceptional impact on the further development of experimental Russian prose arose out of its stylistic innovations, characterised by fragmentariness, feverish syntactical and compositional rhythms, acoustic and euphonic effects, and an innovative paragraph layout. Eschatological and apocalyptical themes and imagery had been prominent in Symbolist poetry, but Belyi took the language phenomena of verse and manipulated them to serve prose composition, which reflected and supported the catastrophic nature of the novel’s theme and world-picture in an altogether new, iconic way. The plot’s buildup of tension is based upon the central idea of a conspiracy to blow up Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, in which the Senator’s own son, Nikolai, becomes the instrument of the revolutionaries, while intricate parallel plots and digressions of the most diverse nature distract and mislead the reader in a manner not unlike that of a detective story. Nevertheless, the novel’s material and arrangement as a whole are subordinated to the overarching theme in which the bomb itself symbolises the apprehension of an impending catastrophic explosion that will hurl mankind into an abyss – a favourite theme in Be-

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lyi’s work in general; see Dolgopolov 1975, 47. At the plot’s conclusion, the bomb, a ticking sardine tin, does explode in the study of the Senator and, though it fails to kill him, succeeds in ‘blowing up’ the domestic and familial relations of his house. In the prologue to the novel, Petersburg is presented concentrically as the heart of the Russian empire, as a European capital unlike any other Russian city, including Moscow (the recognised, ancient capital), Kiev (the ‘mother of Russian cities’) and Konstantinopol’, which, like Petersburg, is part of the empire.1 The Nevskii Prospekt is then declared to be the public centre of Petersburg, an observation that had already been made by Gogol’. It is interesting to note that Petersburg is also characterised by setting its urban and domestic architecture in opposition to that of other, really Russian cities. As a European prospect, the Nevskii’s essential features are its linearity, its nocturnal illumination and the fact, added by the narrator with ironic hesitation, that ‘the houses that form its lateral limits are – hmmm … yes: … for the public’ (образующие его боковые границы домà суть – гм … да: … для публики; Belyi 1967, 2). Other Russian cities, by contrast, ‘are a heap of wooden hovels’ (деревянную кучу домишек; ibidem), a reference to Peter’s insistance that Saint-Petersburg be built of stone and brick – which in practice was often fulfilled in the early days by painting wood to look like stone; see Belyi 1978, 297. Thus, we find the cultural and ideological opposition between Russia and the West – the theme of Peter’s heritage – conveyed through the contrast between the urban façades of houses in drawing table Petersburg and the wooden hovels (‘domishki’) of concentric, organic Moscow. This ideological opposition will form a general background for the novel as a whole, and it is possible to interpret the passage as an ironic combination of the ambiguous image of the ‘small house’, which we have already encountered in Pushkin’s work as ‘domik’, and the urban gestalt of the Symbolist city that, as we have just seen, could merge the images of house and city and give houses a dubious status as places to live in – hence the ironic hesitation before confirming that 1

The narrator emphasises that he will not elaborate on this detail; nevertheless, its being mentioned in this prologue is strikingly reminiscent of the ‘purple-wearing imperial widow’ theme addressed by Pushkin in connection with the status of Petersburg within the empire, in the introduction to The Bronze Horseman; see the beginning of this chapter.

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the houses are ‘public’. This suggestion is reinforced by the allusion to Petersburg as having an illusory, phantasmagorical or at least sometimes dubious ontological status, which can be found in the Petersburg images of Pushkin and Gogol’ as well as in those of Dostoevskii and the Symbolists. As in the case of the earlier Symbolists’ projections, Belyi’s Petersburg is an imaginary, symbolic city composed of disparate locations and spaces that have no geographical coherence. The Senator’s house, however detailed its descriptions, is not to be identified with any particular house in the historical Petersburg; see Dolgopolov 1975, 46, 50. Here the narrator defines Petersburg’s existence as conditioned by its bureaucratic function: ‘If Petersburg is not the capital, then Petersburg does not exist’ (Если же Петребург не столица, то – нет Петербурга). But Belyi’s Petersburg is also the ‘mathematical and temporal point’ at which present and past intersect and come together; hence, for example, the ride of the Bronze horseman through this novel’s Petersburg, connecting Pushkin’s and Belyi’s time-spaces. The boundaries between the material and the ‘other’ – phantasmagorical, ex-temporal or cosmic – world are unstable and relative. Dolgopolov points out that the door of the apartment belonging to the revolutionary Aleksandr Dudkin opens immediately on to the street – into ‘space’ – without anything resembling an entrance hall, just as is the case with Raskol’nikov’s room. Whatever partitions there are, are uncertain and vacillating.2 There are no firm transitions or mediating structures between the private spheres of these heroes and the outer, urban world. The walls of their ‘abodes’3 are thin, relative boundaries. Both Raskolnikov and Dudkin are heroes of the city, of the street; see Dolgopolov 1975, 49. In Belyi’s individual twoworld conception, man is paradoxically a ‘prisoner’, not only of his room, the streets and the city, but also ‘prisoner of the world’, ‘citizen of the universe’ (узник мира, гражданин вселенной).

2 Compare the existential anxiety and distrust of the protective qualities of the house in Bely’s remark that “the walls do not protect us against the arrival of the unknown” (стены не защищают нас от прихода неведомого; Arabeski, 1911); see also Jensen 1977, 121. 3 Dolgopolov makes a qualitative distinction, suggesting that ‘zhil’ë’ does, and ‘zhilishche’does not, feature real domestic values, the latter being the case of Raskol’nikov and Dudkin.

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The Senator’s house is large, full of hollow rooms and odd objects. It has a cold, formal beauty; there are no carpets, and the shining parquet floors are embarrassing. It is a house where emotions are suppressed, and conflicts come to a head in silence; it is ‘lacquered’ (лакированный; Chapter 1, ‘Северовосток’ (‘North-East’)). It is a selfcontained universe, a symbol of the Senator’s personality and social position. It is a closed space, arranged to protect its inhabitants from the dangers of the outside world. It is forced open by the explosion, which has a catastrophic and traumatic effect on both the building and its inhabitants, leaving Apollon Apollonovich in a fit of hysterics in front of the abyss that is the street, the city and reality: the wall of his study has been blown away, and people down in the street are gathering and looking up. In the epilogue we learn that the son leaves for Egypt but later returns to Russia. So there is a ‘homecoming’, and perhaps the suggestion of something new, but for now he is a Slavophile: he lives in the countryside, dresses like a Russian peasant and reads, not Kant, but the Ukrainian antirationalist mystic Grigorii Skovoroda. Belyi’s Modernist psychopoetics of the house exploits the House– I/Personality analogy throughout the novel in a series of realised metaphors and unprecedented, staggering transformations. The architectural, spatial essence of the house is interpreted in terms of, or identified with, the Senator’s brain and personality; see also Alexandrov 1985, 115. Thoughts become interpersonal phenomena, perceptible to the senses, occupying space and moving freely and autonomously, materialising and dissolving and vice versa. Reality and imagination can become equally real or illusory. The world of things, places and occurrences, ideas of that world, and the brain or skull as the home of consciousness, imagination and identity, all become part of one spatio-temporal continuum. The Senator’s thought – in his mind, within his house – of a suspect stranger (raznochinets) whom he has met in his house becomes identical with the stranger himself in the street, and in turn thoughts of the stranger ‘running back’ can enter the brain of the Senator, imparting a sense of apprehension and fear of a plot. In the sub-chapter entitled ‘Strange Characteristics’ (Странные свойства, Chapter 1, 30), Apollon Apollonovich is ironically identified with Zeus, mythologically his ‘next of kin’, out of whose head Pallas


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Athene came forth. In the Senator’s case thoughts run out of, and into, his head in the manner just described: Аполлон Аполлонович был в известном смысле, как Зевс: из его головы вытекали боги, богини и гении. Мы уже видели: один такой гений (незнакомец с черными усиками), возникая, как образ, з а б ы т и й с т в о в а л далее прямо уже в желтоватых невских пространствах, утверждая, что вышел он – из них именно: не из сенаторской головы; праздные мысли оказались и у этого незнакомца; и те праздные мысли обладали все теми же свойствами. Убегали и упрочнялись. И одна такая бежавшая мысль неснакомца была мыслью о том, что он, незнакомец, существует действительно; эта мысль с Невского забежала обратно в сенаторский мозг, и там упрочила сознание, будто самое бытие незнакомца в голове этой – иллюзорное бытие.4

Reverting to the Zeus and Pallas myth, the Senator’s thoughts are called ‘Pallases’. His next thought is a thought about ‘the Pallas of the Senatorial house’. But then, leaving the Senator’s brain, this thought of the house materialises and becomes the house, and, totally unexpectedly opens its door to a new virtual space in the novel, namely that of the narrator and the reader: [...] едва из его головы родилась [...] Незнакомец – Паллада, как полезла оттуда другая, такая же точно Паллада. Палладою этою был сенаторский дом. Каменная громада убежала из мозга; и вот дом открывает гостеприимную дверь – нам .................. 4 Apollon Apollonovich was like Zeus: out of his head flowed goddesses and genii (the stranger with the small black moustache), arising as an image that had already begun to live [...] in the yellowish spaces. And he maintained that he had emerged from there, not from the Senatorial head. This stranger turned out to have idle thoughts too. And they also possessed the same qualities. They would escape and take on substance. And one fugitive thought was the thought that the stranger really existed. The thought fled back [from the Nevskii] back into the Senatorial brain [and there consolidated consciousness, as if the very existence of the stranger in this head was an illusory existence] (Quoted from Belyi 1978, 20-1; textual differences (between square brackets) are due to variant editions of the original).

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Лакей поднимался по лестнице;[...] прекрасная лестница! На не же ступени: мягкие, как мозговые извилины[...] лестницу, по которой не раз поднимались министры.5 (idem, 30)

These transformations are continued as the narrator follows the lead of the lackey and takes the reader with him through the various rooms of the house – or of the brain of the Senator – all of which is, as the narrator stresses, a chimera, an ‘irritation of the cerebral membrane’.6 In the end, however, the house, built of stone, is the Senator’s head: Строилась иллюзия комнаты; и потом разлеталась бесследно, [...] За захлопнутой дверью не оказалось гостиной: оказались… мозговые пространства: извилины, серое и белое вещество, [...] Дом – каменная громада – не домом был; каменная громада была Сенаторской Головой: Аполлон Аполлонович сидел за столом, над делами, удрученный мигренью, [...].7 (idem, 32-3)

Another variant of this process of transforming the Senator’s space is found in the sub-chapter called ‘The Senator’s Second Space’ (‘Второе пространство сенатора’) at the end of Chapter 3. Apollon Apollonovich, in his bedroom, prepares for what the narrator calls ‘the voyage of sleep’. Soon, the Senator ‘from his bed hung suspended over a timeless void’ (из кровати повис над безвременной пустотой; idem, 151). We are told that he always sees two spaces. One is material – the walls of his room, the walls of his carriage – while the other, also material, is more difficult to define. It is a mysterious, chaotic, hallucinatory space above the Senator’s eyes that is 5

Scarcely had the Stranger-Pallas been born out of his head when another Pallas, exactly like it, came crawling out from there. This Pallas was the Senator’s house. [The stone mass ran out of the brain; and here the house opens its hospitable door – for us]….The lackey was climbing the staircase. Oh, most beautiful staircase! And the steps: soft like the convolutions of the brain, over which cabinet ministers had stepped more than once. (idem) 6 The nervous state of Apollon Apollonovich is also given a realistic medical motivation: he suffers from haemorrhoidal rushes, and migraine. 7 An illusion of a room would be constructed, and it would then fly apart, leaving no trace [...] There proved to be no drawing room behind the slammed door, but rather, cerebral spaces: convolutions, gray and white matter, [...] The house – the stone mass – was not a house, the stone mass was the Senatorial Head: Apollon Apollonovich was sitting at the table, busy with dossiers, depressed by migraine [...]. (idem).


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constantly in flux; it contains a variety of spots and colours, darkness and light, and strange objects; it is a space within space. This is his ‘universe of strange phenomena’ (вселенная странностей), which he always sees just before he drifts away into sleep. As he does so, the perspective changes, and he begins to experience it as though ‘something’, which is not he, were sitting in the middle of his brain, watching from there. He is conscious that, if his temporal bone should open, this something would be able to run down a corridor and hurl itself into an abyss. His consciousness now leaves his body and looks down on a ‘yellow old man’ who is sitting on his bed, and then, suddenly, his consciousness is the yellow old man himself. Apollon Apollonovich understands that this travel through his house – along the corridor, through the hall and finally through his own head – is dream, but as soon as this thought occurs to him he awakens, not sitting on his bed but lying in it with his head under the blanket. It has been a double dream (idem, 154). We have seen metaphoric realisations and mutual transformations of a series of spaces and dimensions that constitutes a chain: Cosmos/Russia/Petersburg–House–I/Personality/Head. Of these, the house expressively functions as a world modelling image that mediates between the first, cosmic level and the third complex of individual space – the self. The internal structure of this series, especially the scope of mutual transformability of the elements involved, reflects the specific character of Belyi’s catastrophic world-picture. In Belyi’s novel, the dimensions of the chain are organised by the concepts of interiority and concentricity, and the movements along their axis determine the production of the peculiar verbal metaphysics of what he called – using the same spatial semantics – ‘праздная мозговая игра’ (‘empty cerebral play’). The house of the Senator is created by his cerebral play, and thus it is a clear example of the House image as a model of the psyche, or consciousness, as discussed in Chapter I.3.8 Belyi’s artistic vision and psychopoetics of the house are consistent. This becomes evident when we look at another of his novels 8

See also Bachelard 1964, 18, 24: ‘avec l’image de la maison nous tenons un véritable principe de l’intégration psychologique’ [...] ‘la topographie de notre être intime’. Another interesting case is Zamiatin’s story ‘X’, in which correspondences are developed between the disoriented post-revolution consciousness of a deacon, and the room he lives in; see Chapter II.31.

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from the same period, Kotik Letaev, which was conceived as the third part of a trilogy to be called Восток или Запад (East or West), the first two parts being Серебряный голубь (The Silver Dove) and Petersburg. Alexandrov observes numerous parallels between Kotik’s experiences of the worlds of matter and spirit, and those of the narrator and characters in Petersburg, discussing in detail the underlying philosophical tenets (Alexandrov 1985, 161 ff.). Written in 1915 and 1916, Kotik Letaev is an autobiographical and philosophical novel in which Belyi interprets his experiences of early childhood in the light of various philosophical systems, particularly Anthroposophy, which was very influential upon Belyi’s thinking; see also Tschizhewskii in Belyi 1964, VIII, IX. Throughout the novel, the image of the room (komnata) is repeated. This by itself should not surprise us, the room being the dominant space of the child’s earliest experiences. However, when describing the origin of his own infant consciousness, Belyi develops the image as one element in a metaphorical and mythical chain, exploiting the semantics of expansion, explosion and pulsation around the centre of the emerging ego in a manner very reminiscent of the one we saw in Petersburg. For example, the first chapter begins: Первый сознательный миг мой есть – точка; проницает бессмыслицу он; и – расширяся, он становится шаром, а шар – разлетается: бессмыслица, проницая его, разрывает его…[...] Ничто, что-то, и опять ничто; снова что-то; все – во мне, я во всем… Таковы мои первые миги…9 (Belyi 1964, 25-7)

After this comes ‘light’ – ‘luminaries’ (светочи) – followed by a metamorphosis of space and time which, developing with the illogical equivalences of a genuine creation myth, includes the following elements, among which the thematic words are in small capitals: ‘darkness’ (мрак) ‘SKIN’, as of a snake (кожа змееныша) ‘VAULT: (that’s how we feel space)’ (свод: таково нам пространство) ‘(my first image of space is a) CORRIDOR’ (мое первое представление о нем, что оно – коридор…) ‘(next our corridor 9

The first moment I am conscious of is a point; this moment penetrates the senselessness; and – expanding, it becomes a bubble, and the bubble bursts: the senselessness, penetrating it, tears it to pieces… [...] Nothing, something, and again nothing; again something; everything is in me, I am in everything… Such are my first moments…


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is like my first recollection of time, when the corridor felt like a skin)’; ‘corridor (of time), corridors, PASSAGES, NARROW STREETS, [...] known to me: ‘I’’ (наш коридор представляется воспоминанием о времени, когда он был мне кожей; переходки, коридоры, переулки [...] ведомы мне: а вот - ‘я’; а вот - ‘я’) ‘ROOMS are BODY PARTS (discarded by me)’ (комнаты - части тела; они сброшены мною) ‘(that I fall to pieces and become blackborn) EARTH’ (распасться [...] и стать чернородом земли) ‘(I am) BUILDING (millennia inside my body, and I throw them out of my body: my strange) BUILDINGS’ (тысячелетия строю я внутри тела; и бросаю из тела: мои странные здания) ‘(in my) HEAD (I compose a) TEMPLE (of thought)’(в голове слагаю храм мысли) ‘(hardening it into) a SKULL’ (его уплотняя, как череп) ‘(I take off my skull; it will be for me) the DOME OF THE TEMPLE’ (сниму с себя череп; он будет мне – купола храма) ‘I will start to walk through the GIGANTIC TEMPLE (of the self, of expanding consciousness)’ (будет время: пойду по огромному храму) ‘I will leave the TEMPLE, just LIKE A ROOM’ (и я выйду из храма: с той же легкости мы выходим из комнаты) [...].

This chain of metamorphoses is now summarised: ‘This is my way of entering life: corridor, vault and darkness; vermin are pursuing me…’ (Вот мой образ вхождения в жизнь: коридор, свод и мрак; за мной гонятся гады…).10 This is a uniquely-elaborated Modernist example of cosmogonic mythopoetic modelling, based on equivalences established between the religious and domestic architecture of cosmos, earth, house and rooms, and the human skull; see also Chapter I.3. These are brought together by the old idea of the body as temple, and the spatial features of concentricity and interiority as the essence of the concepts of self and consciousness.11 If Modernism is understood to be a phase in our culture during which ‘the self’, as a central theme, supercedes all other

10 It is interesting that here, as in Peterburg, an alienated state of mind is also given a rational medical explanation: in the next paragraph we are told that young Kotik has a high fever and was reputedly sick all the time. 11 There is a link with anthroposophy here. Alexandrov observes that the skull-temple evokes the cranial shape of Rudolf Steiner’s Goetheanum (Alexandrov 1985, 161).

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topics of human interest,12 it may well be precisely here that Modernism begins. Archaic myth explains the origin and purpose of the world and mankind, but archaic thinking stops short at the problem of the individual psyche. This passage affords yet another interesting phenomenology – an ‘archaic’ intuition – if we compare the combination skin–house to the parallel etymological Germanic connection between these concepts: in Dutch, huid–huis, and in German, Haut–Haus; see Chapter I.1. Moreover, the image of the snake shedding its skin also adds to the archaic mythical impression of Belyi’s fantasy. A parallel with the process of being born – the birth canal – is also a valid interpretation here, of course, and this will be born out by further developments of the metaphor chain; this activates Womb–House and House–Womb associations; see Chapter I.3. In the same chapter of Belyi’s novel, we find yet more archaic house/room– skull equivalents: Cave–House/Skull (в пещерные излучины черепа) and images of the labyrinth and catacombs (33).13 Although the novel is clearly based on concrete autobiographical data, with details of Moscow and their house on the Arbat, this cosmogonic type of House Myth is continually repeated and varied as a pattern of transformations. Its traces can be recognised throughout the novel, sometimes with almost obsessive repetition, as in ‘all rooms, rooms, rooms!’ (Все комнаты, комнаты, комнаты!) on pages 29, 37 and 290. Because of the novel’s philosophical perspective, the narrator is not creating his symbolic, mythopoetic language merely to tell his story – the original, Aristotelian idea of mythos; see Wellek and Warren 1973, 190 – but uses it also as a special metalanguage for his philosophical discourse. When story-telling and discourse occur simultaneously, as they often do, the writing approaches mysticism. I shall not even attempt to address the very complex problem of Belyi’s phi12

The emergence of modern psychology and psychoanalysis, with its interest in the unconscious, is evidence of this, but there was also a widespread fascination among artists of the period with the questions of modern physics: relativity, and time. 13 Hansen-Löve, in an article on the world–skull metaphor in the mythopoetics of Khlebnikov, suggests that Belyi’s ‘animistic equation of world and (part of the) body’ in Kotik Letaev was motivated by the archaic–primitive consciousness of the childlike perspective (Hansen-Löve 1986, 168).


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losophical views, but from the point of view of this study his comments on the emergence of consciousness contain some very interesting, often brilliant formulations and illustrations of his ideas concerning the continuum of time and space, and the universe, house, body and soul/I as ‘prototypes’ or ‘prefigurations’, as in the following passages, which occur under the heading ‘And I Think…’ (И я думаю ...): -Переходы, комнаты, коридоры напоминают нам наше тело, прообразуют нам наше тело; показуют нам наше тело; это - органы тела… вселенной, которой труп – нами видимый мир; мы с себя его сбросили: и вне нас он застыл; это кости – прежних форм жизни, по которым мы ходим; [...] так входим в ворота рождения; переходы, комнаты, коридоры напоминают нам наше прошлое; прообразуют нам наше прошлое; это органы… прошлой жизни… - переходы, комнаты, коридоры, мне встающие в первых мигах сознания, переселяют меня в древнюю эру жизни; в пещерный период; [...] Созерцание черепа странно: и он – память о памяти великолепного скелетного храма, выдолбленного нашим ‘Я’ в скалах черного мрака; в храме тела – лежат планы храмов; и восстанет, я верую,14 из храмовых обломков: храм тела. Так гласит нам писание…15 (Belyi 1964, 32, 33, 37)

14

The central importance of this clustering of motifs (body/skeleton–temple) becomes clear when we consider the end of the novel, where he expresses his belief in resurrection. 15 Passages, rooms and corridors remind us of our body. They prefigure our body; show us our body; these are the organs of the body… Of the universe, the body of which is the corpse of the world which is visible to us; we threw it off; [...] outside of us it hardened; these are the bones of previous life forms, about which we walk; [...] thus we enter the gates of birth; passages, rooms, and corridors remind us of our past; prefigure our past; these are the organs of a past life… – passages, rooms, and corridors, emerging before me in the first moments of my consciousness, transport me to the era of primitive life; to the era of the cave-dwellers. [...] Contemplation of the skull is strange; it too, is a memory of a gorgeous skeleton temple, hewn out by our “I” in the rocks of black darkness; in the temple of the body there are blueprints of temples; and, so I believe, out of the temple’s débris will arise: the temple of the body. Thus says holy scripture…

24. From Symbolism to Futurism Futurism can be viewed as the second phase of Modernism in Russian culture. Both are predominantly poetry-oriented movements dealing with the impending catastrophic changes and tendencies of the early twentieth century, and in both, urban thematics play a decisive role. At the same time, however, there are of course fundamental ideological, semiotic and stylistic differences between them, and these have equally far-reaching consequences for their specific poetics and psychopoetics of the House Myth. To begin with, Futurism lacks both the two-world model of Symbolism and its aspiration to achieve ‘pure concepts’. It has a monistic world-view; see Smirnov 1977, 103. For Futurism, unlike Symbolism, sociophysical reality lost its character of a text, and cultural texts acquired the features of natural facts. Futurism imparted to concepts the character of things; it materialised the semantics of the artistic sign, and it equated the ideological and empirical levels (ibidem). If semantic transformations took place in Symbolism on the level of the ‘language of relations’, it was the ‘language of things’ that dominated Futurism; see Hansen-Löve 1989, 40. We see this in such diverse authors as Elena Guro (as early as 1909), Khlebnikov and Maiakovskii. The semiotic attitude of ‘veshchizm’ (‘thingness’) characterises Futurist strategies regarding the use of imagery, and indeed language itself, as a tool. The catastrophic expectations of Symbolism were replaced by a revolutionising perspective in Futurism. Revolutionising the foundations of language went hand in hand with a parallel revolutionising of looking at the world – hence the inextricable association between the poetry and painting of the period. It is prominent in Maiakovskii’s early, ‘cubistic’ poetry, for example, in the immediacy and concreteness of his visual perception of the dy-

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namic, modern urban world. In Khlebnikov’s work, the urban world as a poetic universe is far less important, if not virtually absent. Guro presents an interesting case because she occupies an intermediate position between Symbolism and the beginnings of Futurism, and her style can also be qualified as Impressionism (Markov 1968, Jensen 1977). She has written urban as well as non-urban prose and poetry, but there is no conflict in her work between city and nature (Jensen 1977, 82). In much of the work of Guro and Khlebnikov, things and words are subjected to transformations between the realms of matter and organic nature, in which the inanimate becomes animated; see also Markov 1968. Their animistic and mythopoetic approach to reality suggests the immediacy of a child’s prerational, prelogical observation and perception without the hierarchies and causalities imposed on the world and its elements by conventional, adult vision. This also means that features of traditional Russian folklore can effectively be reactivated in this type of poetry.

25. Guro. A New House and a New Life. The Magic of a Child’s Vision In Elena Guro’s earliest prose (1909), urbanism is of an impressionistic nature, and the subjective prism of the person whose experience is being recorded is the dominant organising principle of the city text; see Jensen 1977, 114. This city image is still close to that of the Symbolists (idem, 121); for example, in her early prose text ‘Перед весной’ (‘Before Spring’; Guro 1996, 11-14), it is not the image of the modern, crowded, noisy, technological city, but that of a mysterious place. ‘Песни города’ (‘Songs of the City’; Guro 1996, 15-24) aims to unify city life and art (Jensen 1977, 96). The city and its elements become animated, undergo metamorphoses. The walls and windows of the city look down with sympathy upon the artist (И на него умные городские стены смотрят с сочувствием), or a girl who is ‘on her way to art’ (that is, to a music lesson), along ‘marvellous transformed streets’ (по дивным преображенным улицам). At the end, the spell of imagination is broken; now the houses are empty, lifeless and motionless, ‘just like a Monday’ (И дома неподвижны – точно понедельник). As time passes, Guro’s image of the city becomes increasingly negative, and in her last urban work, the poem ’Город’ (‘The City’, 1910), it is a downright ugly, violent, loveless place. This means that Guro had already stopped writing about the city before Futurism really started (Jensen 1977, 117). The rest of her oeuvre is devoted specifically to the world of the dacha surrounded by Nordic (Finnish) nature as she reconstructs the world of childlike experience. ‘Приезд в деревню’(‘Arrival in the Countryside’) is a subtle, realistic-impressionistic autobiographical prose piece. Told from an adult narrative perspective, it describes a child’s changing moods and uncertain expectations of an impending family trip to the

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new dacha, the journey itself, and the thrill of arrival and taking possession. The space of both the city house and the dacha – and even of the railway station – is used to give relief, in a very literal sense, to the nuances and shifts of her moods, and her intense sensory perceptions. First, there is the tedium of waiting and expectation in the nursery, where the promise of excitement comes from outside: От времени до времени в темной и узкой детской, между бесконечными понедельниками, вторниками, цвета обыкновенной скуки, открывались приятно тревожные окошечки, откуда мог прийти праздник. Тогда начинали жить радостным нетерпением.[...] Тогда шторки по утрам бывали светлые и дразнили вскочить с постели.[...] В комнатах становилось ново, светло, пусто и гулко. Появлялись сундуки, пахло новыми веревками и сеном. И во всех этих запахах и звуках жило будущее, и мечта о нем.1 (Guro 1996, 62)

During the trip the road, the landscape and atmospheric details are important, but spatial aspects of the city house and the railway station also mark further phases in the child’s experience (idem, 64): В воспоминаниях отошли, побледнели и куда-то нырнули: город, игрушки, надоевшие обои детской. И, пока шли через дороги, через станционный двор, становилось сразу как-то необычайно.2

1 From time to time in the dark and narrow nursery, between endless Mondays and Tuesdays with the colour of the usual tedium, pleasantly alarming little windows would open, through which the holiday could come in. Then one began to live in joyful impatience. [...] Then the little blinds in the mornings would be bright, and they would incite one to jump out of bed. [...] The room began to feel new, bright, hollow and resonant. Trunks would appear; there would be a smell of new string and hay. And in all of these smells and sounds the future was alive, and dreams about the future. 2 In one’s memory, the city, the toys, the dull wallpaper of the nursery were all gone to some other place, grown pale, and vanished. And while we were crossing the railway tracks and the station forecourt, everything immediately became somehow very special.

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In the dacha, everything is new and bright, and smells fresh; the children hear unfamiliar words that are also new and fresh for them, not yet worn out by usage. The dacha, the wood and the meadow with its flowers constitute a new world, and ‘reality began to look like a dream’ (действительность совсем стала похожа на сон); both the dacha and nature itself seem to approve of the general ‘delirium’ of joyful impressions: Пахло новым дощатым полом, а в окно махали черно-зеленые ветви и синели апрельские сумерки.[...] И новизна, и подъем от новых, свежих, не сношенных обиходом слов и названий – грубовато-твердых, передавались нам. А в окна кивали ели.[...] С завтрашнего дня начнется новая жизнь. Все слилось в приятный пестрый бред. В комнату громадной еловой темнотой (idem, 66-7) глядели окна.3

Throughout this prose piece, there is a strong sense of intimacy and the novelty of experience, conveyed particularly through changes in the house, its attributes and properties. The city house and the dacha in its immediate natural environment are the microcosmic centres of the child’s world – one very familiar, the other incomprehensible but exciting. This is an example of what could be defined as House–Cosmos and House–Soul with a positive character, a veritable ‘topographie de notre être intime’ (Bachelard, Chapter I) and a child’s view of the world as essentially one great promise. An interesting counterpart to this ‘vital’ text is a very small prose piece entitled ‘Дача с призраками’ (‘The Dacha with the Ghosts’; 345), a melancholy, slightly disturbing evocation of a derelict, weed-grown dacha and the memories that occur to the narrator as she walks away. An impressive, anthropomorphic, gothic image of dark feelings is associated with the ‘wild’ granite on which the house stands: Чьи-то сжатые губы чудились нам, когда вспоминался дикий гранит внизу дома (When we re3

There was a smell of fresh wooden flooring, and at the window the dark-green branches were waving, and the April dusk was shining blue. [...] And the newness, the thrill of the new, the fresh words and names which had not yet been worn out by practice communicated themselves to us. And in the wind the fir trees nodded. [...] As of tomorrow a new life would begin. Everything had merged into a delightful manycoloured delirium. Into the room the windows looked with massive fir tree darkness.

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called the wild granite under the house, we had a vision of somebody’s lips pressed together). It is because of this associative range that the House image is such a universal semiotic model for structuring both the child’s perception of the world and the adult narrator’s recollections of the ‘House of Childhood’ and the ‘House of the Father’. In other words, texts like these show the literary potential of the House concept and image functioning as a thematic or paradigmatic crystallisation point for the paradigms of the human psychic faculties. The fairytale-like ‘Домашние’ (‘House-mates’; idem, 78-9) illustrates the role of animistic vision and motifs from folklore. It is another instance of a House–Microcosm with a childlike or fairytale world-view, in this case one in which trees can speak. House spirits step out of the walls and cupboards, and come together, in an apparently empty house, to perpetrate their magic. Among them is ‘wall muzhik Terentii’ (стенной мужик Терентий), ‘the size of a cat’s paw’ (ростом с кошачью лапку), who lives behind the wallpaper. This figure clearly combines a child’s fears of the unseen and unknown as projected on to the house, where the spirits deliberate about what kinds of dreams they will send to the nursery, with the figure of the domovoi or house-sprite of traditional Russian folklore, to which the name ‘house-mates’ (domashnie) also alludes. In this case, however, the non-folkloric connotation of domesticity renders it ironic and harmless.

26. Khlebnikov. The House of Language. A Body to Live in Velimir Khlebnikov represents a very special case because, in his work, we find thoroughly mythopoetic, or ‘neo-archaic’, thinking in combination with a revolutionising of language to its very foundations. Even more than the young Maiakovskii, and certainly more systematically, when creating his poetic universe he takes literally the meaning of the realised metaphor as a material transformation or organic metamorphosis. In Khlebnikov’s universe, the central transformations of the House Myth take place along the archaic World–House–I series, which should not surprise us. Khlebnikov’s metaphors realise the materialisation, or personification and animation, of his language in a consistent and literal way. On the basis of the domestic thematic material in his work, this gives rise to what we might simultaneously call the House–Utopia and the House of Language. The latter concept is grounded in a basic feature of Khlebnikov’s poetics and philosophy of language, and can be attested throughout his work. Through his ‘organic constructivism’ (Stobbe 1986, 381), Khlebnikov’s work is related to Lisitskii’s and Malevich’s suprematism. In this artistic milieu, the concepts of time and space were revolutionised with an unprecedented radicalism in both pictorial and verbal art. In a text of 1919, Khlebnikov attempts to tackle the problem of the time-space continuum with the help of a fascinating metaphor, synthesising the architectonic–domestic image and numerical mathematics, his other favorite field of creative speculation:

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Как-то радостно думалось, что по существу нет ни времени ни пространства, а есть два разных счета, два ската одной крыши, два пути по одному зданию чисел.1 (Quoted from Stobbe 1986, 382)

In his introduction to Zangezi, his last and major work, Khlebnikov refers to the architecture of literature and its genres. This is Khlebnikov’s metapoetic statement concerning genres, made against the background of the well-known ‘crisis of the genres’ of that period, though his concepts remain unclear and enigmatic in many respects. He makes recourse to architectural metaphors in order to describe his synthetic and constructivist intentions in Zangezi. The genre status of this text, as of many others of his works, has been the subject of a longstanding scholarly discussion. In any case, by virtue of its structural complexity and comprehensiveness, it can be considered as a Gesamtkunstwerk (Grübel 1986), a construction ‘emulating’ the building of the universe. Words are the constructive units of the building of the narrative (Повесть строится из слов как строительной единицы здания, Chlebnikov 1989, 473). This is the narrative of the ‘first order’; such narratives are in turn the building blocks of a higher synthesis, the ‘supernarrative’ or ‘supersaga’ (Schmidt 1985, 191). In Khlebnikov’s own words, ‘Narrative is architecture composed of words. Architecture composed of narratives is a ‘supersaga’’ (Рассказ есть зодчество из слов. Зодчество из ‘рассказов’ есть сверхповесть.) (Khlebnikov 1989, 473). Khlebnikov, as we have already observed, is essentially a nonurban poet,2 and the House functions in his work as a focus of utopian metaphorical projections of an organic, often vegetative nature. Otherwise, city images are negative and often related to death, especially skull symbolism; see Hansen-Löve 1986, 178-180. A most telling example is the prose text Мы и дома. Мы и улицетворцы. Кричаль (We and Our Buildings. We and the Creators of Streetsteads, Khleb-

1

It was somehow a joyful thought that in essence there was neither time nor space, but there were two different numbers, two slopes of one roof, two ways over one building of numbers. 2 A notable exception being the famous ‘Журавль’ (‘The Crane’).

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nikov 1989, 595-602.3 It is an unusual kind of treatise cum narrative, a utopian project for future, or Futurist, urban development. Before sketching his ideas on the subject, Khlebnikov refers to existing cities that are like a ‘fisherman’s net stretched out on the beach, cities of glass, shiny as inkwells’, which ‘compete among themselves for sunshine and a scrap of sky, as if they were part of the vegetable kingdom’ (как невод на морском берегу, стеклянные, как чернильница, ведут междоусобную борьбу за солнце и кусок неба, будто они мир растений). Then, in the name of the Futurists (budetliane), he addresses the present city planners, whom he calls ‘streetcreators’ (ulitsetvortsy), and urges them to leave their ‘rats’ nests’ (krysiatniki, a pejorative neologism coined from kuriatnik: ‘henhouse, or chicken-coop’). The Revolution will be the victory of the vertical dimension: ‘Indeed, the hand of time will turn the axis of vision upwards’ [...] (В самом деле, рука времени повернет вверх ось зрения); and the new principle is: ‘The roof will become the main thing, the axis of the standing structure’ (Крыша станет главное, ось стоячей). The present city is looked at ‘from the side’ (на город смотрят сбоку), whereas the new city will be lookеd upon from ‘the bird’s eye’s view’ (будут - сверху). People will learn to fly, and ‘with swarms of flyers and the face of the street above it, the city will begin to be concerned with its roofs, not its walls’ (Потоки летунов и лицо улицы над собой город станет ревновать своими крышами, а не стенами). Thus, as in our examples from Symbolist poetry, what we see here, besides animation and personification, is a poetic equivalence between city and house. Moreover, in the anatomy of the house–city, the walls and roofs become its organs of perception. The vertical axis then becomes even more marked as the utopian urban dimension by elaborating the contrast between the roof high above and the dirty street below: ‘Consider the roof as a thing in itself’. It ‘basks in the blue, far away from dirty clouds of dust’ (Крыша, как таковая, нежится в синеве, она далека от грязных туч пыли). People are called upon to ‘dress up’ their roofs (прихорашивайте ваши крыши), to ‘think of them as hairdos’ and ‘add some pretty pins’ (уснашайте эти 3 For most of the texts below I make use of the English translation by Paul Schmidt, though occasionally my analysis requires a more detailed literal translation.

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прически узкими булавками). People will no longer ‘gather in the vicious streets, whose dirty desire reduces human beings to a thing, [...] but instead they will throng upon rooftops, upon beautiful and young rooftops’. (Не на порочных улицах с их грязным желанием иметь человека, как вещь, [...] а на прекрасной и юной крыше будет толпиться народ). Much of this text is taken up by typically Khlebnikovian, highly idiosyncratic verbal operations with a basically urban, architectural and industrial thematics, successively discussing the city from various perspectives. Elements from the urban and domestic spheres are subjected to organic metaphorisation and synthesised or reconstituted on the level of poetic etymology and poetic neologism. At the same time, an archaic association with the tower of Babel is possible. The contemporary tenement apartment house (доходный дом) is criticised because life in it is no better than solitary confinement. Part two of the text gives the ‘Remedies of the Yet-to-be City of the Futurians’ (Лекарства Города Будрых).4 As an alternative to the ugliness and alienation of contemporary ‘rats’ nests’, an organic and democratic urban ideal is developed. In the past tense, Khlebnikov refers to movable containers of molded glass and the decision that ‘the primary building unit would no longer be an incidental material like brick, but rather these modular units inhabited by individuals’ (с помощью населенной человеком клетки). Then there is the construction of ‘framework-buildings’ – or house-frames (дома-остовы) – ‘whose open spaces were filled in by the inhabitants themselves with their moveable class cubicles’. Khlebnikov gives a list of such Futurian frame-buildings, comprising the following types: Bridge-buildings, Poplar-tree-buildings, Underwater palaces, Steamship-buildings, Filament-buildings, Checkerboard-buildings, Swing-buildings, Strand-of-hair-buildings, Goblet-buildings, Tube-buildings, Openbook-buildings, Field-buildings, Houses on wheels and Flowerbuildings (Дома-мосты, Дом-тополь, Подводные дворцы, Домапароходы, Дом-пленка, Дом-шахматы, Дом-качели, Дом-волос, Дом-чаша, Дом-трубка, Порядок равернутой книги, Дом-поле, 4

The neologism ‘budryi’ can be interpreted as genuinely utopian: bud- (‘future’) + ryi (analogous to and hence alluding to mudryi (‘wise’)). In other words, its meaning is something like: ‘(of the) will-be-wise’, or ‘wise-to-be’, though it could not have been combined like this in Schmidt’s translation.


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Дом на колесах, Дом-цветок). What is remarkable in this list of utopian houses is their frequent lack of constructive solidity due to their organic, vegetative nature and the mobility of the glass cubicles and ‘Houses on wheels’, which render Khlebnikov’s Futurian house concepts revolutionary: they defy the limitations of practical time-space. Furthermore, the use of glass gives transparancy significance as a utopian value.5 This feature is also prominent in Zamiatin’s We, but in that dystopian novel it has a negative connotation because it minimises privacy and thus depersonalises the inhabitants of the glass houses. Mobile housing is associated with the nomadic existence of the gypsy (‘living quarters, a secular travelstead for 20th-century gypsies’; гостиная, светская ульская для цыган 20-ого века), but it no less symbolises the dynamism and technological innovation of urban utopianism. In Platonov’s novel Chevengur (see below), we also find dynamisation of life in all its aspects as a symptom of genuine revolutionary change: in legendary Chevengur, where real Socialism is already established, houses and gardens are literally being moved, by hand, about the city. In Khlebnikov’s ‘We and the houses’, we saw the vegetative image of the House–Tree (the Poplar-tree-building, Дом-тополь) as a utopian projection of a new world. In other works, his organicist mythopoetics creates outright cosmogonic imagery, as in Chapter 16 of the longer poem ‘Tyrant without a T. A Meeting’ (‘Тиран без ТЭ. Встреча’), originally known as ‘The Trumpet of the Flower Priest’ (‘Труба Гуль-муллы’; see Khlebnikov 1986, 686). There he describes a fig tree in a valley in Iran. He connects images with strongly archaic, cosmogonic associative potential, including the concept of the WorldTree6 connecting heaven and earth, the Water of Heaven impregnating Mother-Earth, the tree as a mother (womb) and а House–Tree, or Paradisiacal Tree–House. The fig tree’s branches hang down to the 5

Cf. Stobbe 1986, 379: Transparancy, verticality and levitation are the underlying principles in Khlebnikov’s utopian environment and reflect his aversion to space and its physical laws. 6 Compare the World–Tree Iggdrasill in Scandinavian mythology, a gigantic ash forming the basic structure of the world, the tree of life, and fate; it connects heaven, earth and the underworld. The cosmogonic parallel to the image of the vault of heaven is obvious; see Chapter I.1. Khlebnikov elaborated the tree image in a number of poems of the same year, 1921, in a highly idiosyncratic manner (Holthusen 1981).

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ground and are densely interwoven both in themselves and with the roots, separating the inside from the outside as though to form a wall (and a microcosm) to protect the poet who sleeps on the roots. There is also a possible association with the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.7 The relevant lines are: Клубятся, пузырятся в борьбе за дорогу Корни смоковицы (Я на них спал) И в землю уходят, Тоской матерей тянутся к детям, [...] Брюхом широким ствол (шире коня поперек) [...]Подымал над собой тучу зеленую листьев и веток, Зеленую шапку, Градом ветвей стекая к корням, С ними сливаясь в узлы Ячеями сети огромной. [...] Сливаясь с корнями, дерево капало вниз И текло древесною влагой, [...] Ствол пучится брюхом, где спрячутся трое, Долине дает второе зеленое небо, – [...] Здесь я спал, изнемогший.8 (Khlebnikov 1986, 356-7) 7 The Paradise motif is a strong coding element in this poem: the word ‘paradise’, via Greek and Latin, is of Persian origin: ‘pairi-daêza’, ‘fence’, ‘fenced-in area’, ‘garden’ (De Vries 1971). Khlebnikov prepared himself thoroughly before he went to Iran. He underwent the voyage as an intensely pristine, ‘Adamic’ experience. In Chapter 11, which opens with the entire poem’s title: ‘Tyrant without a T’ (‘Тиран без ТЭ'), he sings the praise of that country, giving special significance to Persian phonetics and etymologies, as we see in the following lines: ‘The country where all people are Adams, / Let out the roots of the heavenly Paradise! (Страна, где все люди Адамы, / Корни наружу небесного рая!; Xlebnikov 1971, 354). This is also a beautiful example of Khlebnikov’s metalinguistic, etymological poetics, exploiting the full polysemy of ‘roots’ (‘корни’). Thus, a well-motivated association with Adam’s bower from the biblical Paradise story is also possible. 8 The roots of the mulberry / Swirl and bubble, struggling for space / (I slept on them) / And they disappear into the ground, / Reach out to their children with motherly anguish, / [...] With its broad belly the trunk (wider than a horse across) / [...] raised above itself a cloud of green leaves and branches, / A green cap, / In a hail shower of branches running down to the roots, / Blending with them in knots / Like the cells of a huge net. / [...] Blending with the roots, the tree dripped downward / And oozed wood moisture, / [...] The trunk swells like a belly in which three can hide, / Lends the valley a second green sky, – / [...] Here I slept, exhausted.


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Against the background of Khlebnikov’s texts discussed above, his poem ‘I and Russia’ (‘Я и Россия’) also warrants attention here. In this famous poem, a utopian series is developed of the type World– City–House–I/Body. At the beginning of the poem, the lyric persona equates Russia, which gave liberty to the masses, with himself as a City–House. This may well be purest example of the House–Body equation thus far. Standing on the beach, he takes off his shirt to sunbathe, and in doing so he imparts freedom, sunlight, and happiness – ‘The dungeon of my shirt fell!’ (Пала темница рубашки!) – to the inhabitants/citizens of his Body–House (the skyscraper of my hair, небоскреб моего волоса) / Body–City (the city of my body, город тела) / Body–State (of the I – state, Меня – государствa; the peoples of Me, народы Меня). The characteristic Khlebnikovian metamorphoses between macrocosms and microcosms connect the individual integrity of the lyric persona’s body with the collectivity of the ‘Ol’gas and Igors’ whom his body houses. His own anatomy realises the Strand-of-hair-buildings we have already come across in the utopian house project in We and Our Buildings (Мы и дома): И я снял рубаху, И каждый зеркальный небоскреб моего волоса Каждая скважина Города тела Вывесила ковры и кумачовые ткани. Гражданки и граждане Меня – государства Тысячеоконных кудрей толпились у окон. Ольги и Игори, [...] Радуясь солнцу, смотрели сквозь кожу. [...]9 (Khlebnikov 1986, 149-150)

The poem is utopian in the sense that relations between the individual and the collective are modelled and harmonised in a special, ordered way. The structural parallels in the titles of the two texts are striking: 9 But what I did was take off my shirt / And all those shiny skyscrapers the strands of my hair / Every pore / In the city of my body / Broke out their banners and flags. / All the citizens, all the men and women / Of the State of Me, / Rushed to the windows of my thousand-windowed hair, / All those Igors and Olgas, / [...] They were ecstatic at the sunshine / And peeked through my skin. [...] (Transl. Schmidt 1985, 35-6)

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We and our Buildings–I and Russia. This makes them all the more programmatic from the point of view of this study. They are also realisations of the metaphor of the ‘body politic’ and therefore, on a more abstract level, invite comparison with the two master-metaphors of the Russian House Myth that were described at the beginning of Part II: the Domostroi and the ‘Window on Europe’.

27. Maiakovskii. Realising the Metaphor. The Self as a House In Maiakovskii’s early work, the poetics of reifying (‘veshchizm’) led to an abundant exploitation of the technique of realised metaphor involving materialising, anatomising and personifying transformations of the city and the street; see his so called ‘cubist’ poems such as ‘From Street to Street’ (‘Из улицы в улицу’), and ‘And still’ (’А всетаки’). In the poem ‘The Hell-City’ (‘Адище города’), the ‘big hell’ of modern urbanism is individualised and fragmented by the windows: Адище города окна разбили / на крохотные, сосущие светами адки (The hell of the city is broken up by windows / Into tiny little hells, that suck with their lights) and: В дырах небоскребов (In the holes of the skyscrapers. Maiakovskii 1973, 1, 29). The city and its buildings become a sphere of emotional identification and overt erotic fantasy, as in Слезают слезы с крыши в трубы, / к руке реки чертя полоски (Tears run down from the roof into the drainpipe, / drawing ripples towards the hand of the river) and а в неба свисшиеся губы / воткнули каменные соски (and into the dangling /drooping lips of the sky / the stone teats were stuck), both examples being from the poem ‘Кое-что о Петербурге’ (‘Something about Petersburg’; idem, 30). A further step is taken when the lyric persona is explicitly and materially identified with the ‘body’ of the city – the pavement of its streets – as in the poem ‘I’ (‘Я’; idem, 36): По мостовой / моей души изъезженной / шаги помешанных / вьют жестких фраз пяты (On the pavement / of my trampled soul / the steps of madmen / weave the prints of rude crude words; transl. Mayakovsky 1975, 53). Realised, reifying metaphor extends this identification to include love in terms of banal, modern urbanness: и вот я – озноенный июльский тротуар, / а женщина поцелуи бросает – окурки! (and there I am –

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a pavement burnt by the heat of July, / and a woman flings her kisses – cigarette butts!), from the poem ‘Любовь’ (‘Love’) (Maiakovskii 1973, 32). In the introduction to his major work, Облако в штанах (A Cloud in Trousers), the poem being introduced is declared to be a deliberate provocation of the reader’s sensibilities: Вашу мысль [...] буду дразнить об окровавленный сердца лоскут,/ досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий (Your thought, / [...] I’ll taunt with a bloody morsel of heart; transl. Mayakovsky 1975, 61). The four parts or ‘panels’ of this tetraptych can indeed be read as so many exercises in the expression and transformation of intense emotions and strong attitudes: frustrated love, self-sacrifice for the sake of the masses, the plight of being a poet and the rejection of God and religion. Moreover, in the evocations of the urban world all the devices described above are found again in this work. In the first panel, the lyric persona is waiting in the evening for his beloved to come to his hotel. The first half of this panel is devoted to the growth of his impatience and frustration, while the second half shows his anger and outrage after she has arrived and told him that she is going to marry someone else. In the elaboration of each of these complex motifs, we find strong imagery in which the house, or hotel, plays an important role. The imagery of the emotions in this work as a whole is characterised, by absolutism of scale and intensity, as ‘Titanic’. Thus, his agonies of doubt about his love are such as to make the window glass melt with the heat of his forehead: И вот, Громадный, Горблюсь в окне, Плавлю лбом стекло окошечное. Будет любовь или нет?1

(Maiakovskii 1973, 63)

When the clock strikes twelve, he suffers a nervous break-down. This image releases a series of realised metaphors which causes ‘a nerve’ to ‘leap / like a sick man / from his bed’ (тихо, / как больной с кровати, / спрыгнул нерв). This one is followed by others. Their wild dance makes the plaster on the ground floor crash, until the nerves’ ‘legs 1 And thus, / enormous, / I stood hunched by the window, / and my brow melted the glass. / What will it be: love or no-love? (transl. Mayakovsky 1975, 65).

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give away’ (у нервов подкашиваются ноги). The equation of the house and lyric persona as nervous systems, or sentient centres, is almost complete when the slamming of the hotel doors announces the arrival of Mariia: Двери вдруг заляскали, Будто у гостиницы Не попадает зуб нá зуб.2

(idem, 64)

In the second half of this panel, the parallel series House– Body/Anatomy, and House–Psyche/I/Heart is exploited even more expressively in what are probably Maiakovskii’s most quoted and discussed lines. He has lost his Mariia, and we find the combined images of the Burnt House, the Public House and the metamorphoses just mentioned. First, in his initial despondency, he compares himself to homeless tramps who ‘often find shelter in a burnt-out house’ (И в доме, который выгорел, / иногда живут бездомные бродяги). The effect of this image can be attributed to the oxymoronic coincidence of incompatible features: the basic idea of shelter and of homelessness. Implicitly the House image here embodies emotional stability, and, even though burnt, it is the only refuge for the soul or self as it tries to reconstitute its integrity. It has nowhere else to turn, an implication that is also essential to the next development. The fire motif is developed further in order to express ultimate degrees of catastrophe, emotional and moral devastation, despair, panic and fear of dying through fire in a house, in the burning and sinking Lusitania or in Pompeii as it was devastated by the eruption of the Vesuvius. On the other hand, it also represents the Titanic or superhuman scope of his emotional effort when he decides to stand up to his fate – only to be confronted by inevitable failure. Now the ‘I’ is presented as containing, or housing, the soul, or personality. It thereby forms the metaphorical basis for the ego’s attempt to achieve the impossible – the escape from the self in the literal, spatial sense. An incongruity, or paradox, of personal identity is constructed here on the 2 The doors suddenly banged ta-ra-bang, / as though the hotel’s teeth / chattered. (idem, 96).

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basis of a ‘container’ and a ‘contained’ being both the same and different at one and the same time: И чувствую – “Я” для меня малó. Кто-то из меня вырывается упрямо.3

(idem, 65)

In utter despair, he addresses his mother and sisters. His speaking about himself in the third person mirrors the ‘personological incongruity’; he stresses that he has nowhere left to go, or to hide. In furtherance of the fire motif, a mixed image evolves as his heart – the traditional seat of the poet’s self, personality and emotions – becomes a burning house: Мама! У него пожар сердца. Скажите сестрам, Люде и Оле, Ему уже некуда деться.4

The image of the heart on fire is then further developed in a famous series of realised metaphors from the Body–House domain. The Futurist poet’s mouth is already scorched by the fire, and his scandalous word ‘throws itself out of it like a naked prostitute’ who ‘jumps from a burning brothel’ (выбрасывается, как голая проститутка / из горящего публичного дома); and a variant of this image appears towards the end of the first panel where ‘the scorched figurines of words and numbers scurry from the skull like children from a flaming building’ (Обгорелые фигурки слов и чисел / из черепа, / как дети из горящего здания; transl. Mayakovsky 1975, 72). In the meantime, firemen are sent in to fight the fire. They are warned not to climb a burning heart in jackboots. Instead, he himself will quench the fire using barrels of tears from his eyes, and he wants to brace himself against his ribs (дайте о ребра опереться) in his effort to leap out of

3

And I feel – / my “I” is too small for me. / Someone is stubbornly breaking free from me. 4 Mamma! / His heart is on fire. / Tell his sisters, Liuda and Olia, / he has nowhere left to go.

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himself (Выскочу!). But his ribs give way, and the conclusion is: ‘you can’t leap out of your heart!’ (не выскочишь из сердца!). In the introduction to the tetraptych, the reader had been warned that he would be confronted with extremes of human experience: досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий (I’ll insatiate my insolent, caustic contempt).5 And indeed the poem is an exploration of the limits of human possibilities, psychically and physically. In the first panel this is achieved through correspondences and equivalences between the two domains, expressed with the help of the metaphor complex House–Man.

5

This interpretation does justice to the iconic significance of the intensifying reduplication of the prefix in iz”izdevaius’.

28. Zabolotskii. Modernist. Archaist It would be possible to describe the poet Nikolai Zabolotskii (19031958) as a Modernist archaist, as a Romantic and as one who was tragically out of his time.1 In some respects, regardless of the differences between them, his poetry shows a fundamental affinity with the oeuvre of Khlebnikov, of whom he was certainly a great admirer. Both are mythopoetic thinkers for whom past and present, nature and culture somehow form a conceptual and poetic continuum. Like Khlebnikov, Zabolotskii professes a serious and consistent naiveté in his poetic worlds, even though he can also be thoroughly Modernist in his ironies. In his early work especially, he exploits seemingly irreconcilable cognitive registers: that of archaic cosmology and mythical discourse in conjunction with that of enlightenment and rationalist argumentation, but he is not a systematic philosopher, and the link here seems to be an ironic sort of didacticism. However, this is quite consistent with his great interest in Goethe’s Naturphilosophie and Hesiod’s didactic poetry. He also wrote longer poems that are reminiscent of the ancient genre of the didactic poem (poèma). These incluse ‘Торжество земледелия’ (‘Celebration of Agriculture’, 1929-30), which covers a very wide range of topics from nature to Russian folk epic and peasant life, tractors and Soviet agronomics, and ‘Деревья’ (‘The Trees’, 1933), in praise of what was almost certainly his favourite life form in nature. The central question in Zabolotskii’s work is that of the relationship between mankind (culture) and nature (see Rostovtseva 2000). This appears to be contradictory relationship as represented in his poetry, which endeavours to erase the boundaries between culture and nature, viewing them as one continuum. Zabolotskii was a convinced 1

Some of the analyses in this chapter are based on Van Baak 2003.

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materialist and monist, asserting that all spiritual and corporal properties are immortal because nothing in nature disappears but merely changes its form; see Rostovtseva 1976, 67. Zabolotskii often represents nature as the greater, all-encompassing concept that includes culture. This also means that the two realms can interpenetrate in his animistic and totemistic poetic view, and his poetry is devoted to exploring the consequences of such a vision. This can yield grand images of an animated, even moral nature, as in the poem ‘Я не ищу гармонии в природе’ (‘I do not look for harmony in nature’, 1947): И в этот час печальная природа Лежит вокруг, вздыхая тяжело, И не мила ей дикая свобода, Где от добра неотделимо зло.2

(sixth stanza, 137)

However, in the same poem he may have to acknowledge ‘an enormous world of contradictions’ (огромный мир противоречий), accepting that nature is ambiguous and his holistic search for harmony in a projected nature-as-culture unfounded.3 There are also extremely endearing, down-to-earth-moments of disillusionment where nature does not seem to ‘speak’ to the Romantic poet, as in this extract from the humorously didactic, amphibrachic poem ‘Читайте, деревья, стихи Гезиода!’ (‘Read, You Trees, Hesiod’s Verses’, 1946): Опять ты, природа, меня обманула, Опять провела меня за нос, как сводня! Во имя чего среди ливня и гула Опять, как безумный, брожу я сегодня?4

(174-5)

As a poet-cosmologist, Zabolotskii tells, in a didactic tone, of a world in which culture and nature are not, or should not be, divided in the 2 And in this hour sad nature / Lies around, breathing heavily, / And her wild freedom is not dear to her, / In which evil is inseparable from good. 3 It can be even worse: Вся природа улыбнулась, / Как высокая тюрьма. (All of nature smiled, / Like a tall prison.) From ‘Прогулка’ (‘A Walk’, 1929, 50). 4 Again you, nature, deceived me, / Again you have pulled my leg, like a procuress! / In the name of what amidst downpour and roar / Am I roaming again, like a madman, today?

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Zabolotskii. Modernist. Archaist

usual sense. He consistently takes his self-imposed task seriously, as in the opening of ‘В жилищах наших’ (‘In our Abodes’, 1926), an ode to trees and becoming a tree, where he confronts us with our wrong, urban attitude towards nature: В жилищах наших Мы тут живем умно и некрасиво. Справляя жизнь, рождаясь от людей, Мы забываем о деревьях.5

(48)

As we have seen, however, he can just as easily urge the trees to read Hesiod and Ossian in the poem ‘Читайте, деревья, стихи Гезиода!’ (‘Read, you trees, Hesiod’s verses’) 174-5. In such a frame of mythopoetical thinking, it should come as no surprise that the House concept is an integral part of the cosmic order, particularly in the relationship between culture and nature. In its simplest form, it is a projection of human domestic values on to natural space, as in a run-of-the-mill children’s story or poem6 such as ‘Осень’ (’Autumn’, 1932; 138-9), where nature’s woods provide her animals with very good housing to protect them against the coming winter: Осенних рощ большие помещения Стоят на воздухе, как чистые дома. В них ястребы живут, вороны в них ночуют, [...] Жук домик между листьев приоткрыл.7

Zabolotskii has nature imitating ancient architecture – rather than the other way round as the canonical history of architecture teaches – in,

5

In our abodes / We are living cleverly without seeing. / Celebrating life, born from people, / We forget about the trees. 6 The fact that this projection is so common in children’s literature probably indicates its fundamental anthropological significance in showing how mankind and the foundations of human culture are rooted in nature. 7 The large rooms of the autumnal forests / Stand free, like fresh, tidy houses. / In them hawks live; crows spend the night in them, / [...] / A beetle set the door of his little house ajar between the leaves.

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for example, the opening lines of the poem ‘Искусство’ (‘Art’, 1930; 57): Дерево растет, напоминая Естественную деревянную колонну.8

He also projects the archaic cosmological concept of the ‘Vault of Heaven’ (or firmamentum; see Chapter I.1) on to a wood, which he calls an ‘evergreen house’, in the opening lines from the poèma ‘Безумный волк’ (‘The mad wolf‘, 1931; 111) in which a bear addresses a wolf: Еще не ломаются своды Вечнозеленого дома.9

The materialist-monist thinker Zabolotskii uses the House as an integrating poetic concept, but he also uses it as a poetic and philosophical meta-concept, establishing an equivalence between the House concept, poetry and the poet, as in the poem ‘Предостережение’ (‘Caution’, 1932), in which, didactic as ever, he warns poets against looking for poetry in the wrong places10 and advises them as to where it might be found: Соединив безумие с умом, Среди пустынных смыслов мы построим дом — Училище миров, неведомых доселе. Поэзия есть мысль, устроенная в теле.11 (second stanza, 73)

This is a complex synthesis of theories about the origin of poetry (joining madness and mind) and its creative power to ‘build’ new 8

The tree grows, reminding us / Of a natural wooden column. Still the vaults are not breaking / Of our evergreen house. 10 This poem contains a curious warning in the first stanza and repeats it at the end: poet, stay away from ‘music’ with your ‘sensitive ear’, or ‘your house will come down’ (Коль музыки коснешься чутким слухом, / Разрушится твой дом [...]; last stanza, p. 74). Is this the rationalist and logocentrist Zabolotskii settling scores with Symbolist aesthetic theory by pitting ‘architecture’ (structure) against ‘music’? 11 Having joined together madness and mind, / Amidst deserted meanings we will build a house – / A school for worlds, hitherto unknown. / Poetry is thought, arranged in a body. 9


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meaning like a house; about language in terms of an archaic cosmological House model as discussed chapter I.1; about the idea of a material identity of the poet and his emerging work and, by implication, the mythopoetical House–Body analogy. This most clearly shows his poetic affinity with Khlebnikov’s ‘House of Language’; see Chapter II. 26: ‘Khlebnikov. The House of Language. A Body to Live in’. What Modernist mythmakers12 such as Belyi (in his autobiographical prose), Khlebnikov, Guro and Zabolotskii have in common is a fundamental delight in – or fascination with – the world experienced as new in the immediate perception of a child. This child’s perception is the key to Zabolotskii’s poem ‘Детство’ (‘Childhood’, 1957, 253). I shall discuss it here in some detail because it gives the House and its context, as a synoptic and archetypal image of the world as a whole, a real imago mundi (Eliade, Bollnow; see Chapter I.1). It is a late poem, written in a rather different style from his previous work but still a most expressive example of Zabolotskii’s finding mythopoetic inspiration in the House–Cosmos archetype and the thrill of a very first experience, the prerogative of our early childhood: Детство Огромные глаза, как у нарядной куклы, Раскрыты широко. Под стрелами ресниц, Доверчиво-ясны и правильно округлы, Мерцают ободки младенческих зениц. На что она глядит? И чем необычаен И сельский этот дом, и сад и огород, Где, наклонясь к кустам, хлопочет их хозяин, И что-то вяжет там, и режет и поет? Два тощих петуха дерутся на заборе, Шершавый хмель ползет по столбику крыльца. А девочка глядит. И в этом чистом взоре Отображен весь мир до самого конца. Он, этот дивный мир, поистине впервые Очаровал ее, как чудо из чудес, И в глубь души ее, как спутники живые, Вошли и этот дом, и этот сад, и лес. И много минет дней. И боль сердечной смуты, И счастье к ней придет. Но и жена и мать, 12

Also including contemporary painters such as Filonov.

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Она блаженный смысл короткой той минуты Вплоть до седых волос все будет вспоминать.13

The opening is all about visuality (lines 1-5). It prepares us for an idyllic view of a country house – almost certainly a dacha – as seen by a little girl. This is provided in the next five lines and brings us to the halfway point in the poem. The second half describes what this momentary image means to the girl, and what it will mean for the rest of her life. The image comprises a country house, a garden in which a man is working, a fence and, by extension, a wood. The house is mentioned twice without much detail apart from its porch, but it is mentioned first and is therefore the principal element in the child’s view of the world. This image represents at once a microcosm – on the immediate perceptive level of the girl – and a macrocosm – on the level of its lasting psychological and philosophical impact. Her momentary vision of the House in its surroundings gives the girl an enchanting first experience of a sensible, coherent world that will accompany her throughout her life. Her ‘seeing’ it for the first time coincides with the awakening of her consciousness; see also Van Baak 2004. For all we know she may well have laid eyes on the same set of objects before, but only now did the world draw itself to her attention in this way, as miracle, and entrench itself forever in her memory. In this visual confrontation, the world ‘took shape’ for the girl; it was the shape of a ‘House in the World’; it was a world of which the House and its implicit values and qualities were, and would remain, the centre. To this may be added the idyllic, pastoral quality of the country garden, with its fence separating it from the outside world that can be recognised 13 Childhood. Big eyes, like those of a smart doll, / Wide open. Under the arrows of eyelashes, / Trustful-clear and perfectly rounded, / The thin rims of her young pupils twinkle. / What are they looking at? And what makes it so exceptional: / This country house, the garden, and the kitchen-garden, / Where, bent over shrubs, their master is bustling about, / Ties up, or cuts something there, singing a song? / Two skinny cocks are fighting on the fence, / Rough hop creeps up along a pole on the porch. / And the girl watches. And in this clear look / All the world is reflected to the very end. / This marvellous world, for the very first time indeed / Enchanted her, as a miracle of miracles, / And into the depth of her soul, as living travelling companions, / Went this house, this garden, and the wood. / And many days will pass. And the pain of sorrow, / And happiness will come her way. But, as wife and mother, / The blissful sense of that short moment / She will continue to remember until her hair turns gray.


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concretely in the wood. This invites association with the idea of Paradise as a garden.14 Together, these elements and their associative potential form a psychologically valuable whole, a ‘landscape of the soul’ as its basic orientation towards the world.

14

The word ‘paradise’ deriving from Avestian ‘paradaeza’, meaning ‘enclosed, fenced off space’.

29. The Catastrophe. The Loss of the Centre Modernism, as we have seen, developed the House theme in connection with the theme of impending catastrophe, either as a metaphysical or eschatological expectation, as in the case of the Symbolists, or in the sense of a radical break with traditional perception and vision, as in the case of Futurism in general. In Russian society during its celebrated ‘Silver Age’, far-reaching changes were in fact becoming visible; see Kelly and Shepherd 1998 for a synopsis of these developments. However, both phases of Modernism were, in their separate ways, anticipating and apprehending catastrophe rather than reacting to actual disaster, a state of affairs that continued until disaster began to take shape in a chain of wars and revolutions, and the lasting destruction of society that attended them. During and after the occurrence of that catastrophe, the House as the locus of projection for cultural and mental values can be seen to undergo change. The idea of the Loss or Destruction of the House is no longer a mere potentiality; it has become an all-encompassing reality. In ‘post-catastrophic’ literature, especially the Avant-garde of the nineteen-twenties, the ambiguities of the House gestalt are increasingly perceived in a definite historical, even ideological context. Thus, in addition to the canonical criteria of literary periodisation, starting with this period it is possible to characterise the texts of Russian literature as ‘after the catastrophe’; see also Van Baak 1990a and Shchukin 1997, 211ff. Disorientation becomes a characteristic feature of the literary world-view. Interestingly, this world-view is not necessarily related explicitly to war and revolution. In much of the poetry of this period, fate is characteristically presented as the agent of catastrophe, particularly in the image of a snowstorm. However, the catastrophic world-view that was prepared in the preceding phases of Modern-

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ism is now inevitably linked, if only by implication, to historical phenomena. In terms of the dominant features of its literary world-picture, the period of Symbolism may appear as a more or less coherent phenomenon when compared with the manifest heterogeneity of postSymbolism. At the same time, authors as diverse as Blok and Pil’niak use the image of the Scythian as a literary and cultural identification, either as a dynamic, disruptive, revolutionary force, as in Blok, or as a primordial, instinctive, unreflecting ancestor, as in Pil’niak; see Browning 1985. It is a striking symptom of the loss of orientation in those generations, and of the prevailing sense of fundamental cultural crisis and catastrophe. The image of the dynamic, violent Scythian, like that of the snowstorm, has the ambiguity of a destructive but liberating energy. In Blok’s work, the motif of catastrophic disorientation is expressed in relation to the outbreak of the First World War, for example in the poem that opens with the lines Рожденные в года глухие/ Пути не помнят своего (Those born in mute years / Do not remember their way), dated 8 September 1914, and the theme of the Scythians is treated in its full ambiguity in his poem of that name, ‘Скифы’ (‘Scythians’), dated 30 January 1918. The image of the mythological nomadic warrior-Scythian is a compelling index of cultural conflict and disruption from the perspective of urban, bourgeois anxiety: Да, Скифы – мы! Да, Азиаты мы, / С раскосыми и жадными очами! (Yes, Scythians we are! Yes, Asians we are, / With slanting and mean eyes!). The storm of revolution that rages over the expanses of Russia’s forests and steppes, together with the Scythian and Asian hordes, is set in opposition to ‘comely Europe’ (пригожая Европа), to the bourgeoisie and philistinism.1 Oppositions such as these fundamentally undermine the archetypal condition of living in a house. It is important to realise the difference between the idea of ‘conflict’, without which there can be no literary plot, for example, and that of ‘catastrophe’, which affects the structure of the world down to its foundations. The real nature of the 1

A perceptive contemporary critic of Blok’s work, Ivanov-Razumnik, sets in typological opposition the ‘Russian’ and ‘Scythian’ (русский, ’скиф’) on the one hand, and the ‘European, the ‘bourgeois’ (европеец, ’мещанин’), ‘new Russia’ and ‘old Europe’ on the other, on the grounds that ‘scythianism’ (скифство) equals ‘spiritual maximalism’ (духовный максимализм) equals revolution (Ivanov-Razumnik 1920, 37, 39).

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catastrophe becomes manifest in the structure of the literary worldpicture. According to the logic of a non-catastrophic world, that which is understood and self-evident is perceived largely as implicit cohesion and therefore remains semiotically unmarked. Catastrophe means that the implicit logic and motivation of the world model are disrupted on all levels of its structure, resulting in disorientation both in time and space and on the perceptive and evaluative levels. It also entails the loss of normal relationships, which means that any element of the literary world, including the house, can become semiotically marked or marked in a new way. This is particularly obvious in the work of Avant-guard authors such as Belyi, Pil’niak, Zamiatin and Babel’ as well as in Futurist poetry. In the literature and art of this period, we find a characteristic combination of catastrophic, ‘de-automatised’ perception of the world (in the sense of contemporary Russian Formalism), forms of primitivism on the plane of expression, and mythopoetic, or ‘neomythological’, thinking; see Meletinskii 1976, Schmid 1987, Van Baak 1985a and b, 1987. With catastrophe becoming manifest in literature, the House and domestic values and relations no longer constitute a stable centre in the world but, paradoxically, can become symbols of vulnerability and instability. It is also important to notice that the legendary Scythian is not homeless for want of a house: for him nomadic houselessness (as distinct from homelessness) is a chosen, self-imposed way of life. In this respect Scythians are not unlike Gogol’s Cossacks of the nineteenth century, who feared the domestic interior as a threat to manhood; see Chapter II.9. It is also these very aspects of aggressive nomadic mobility and homelessness that form the basis of Babel’s Конармия (Red Cavalry). For Pil’niak, the image of the Scythian is emblematic of his view of human nature and behaviour as dominated by instinct, impulsiveness and nature rather than by ratio, and as embodying the essence of pre-Petrine Russian culture; see Browning 1985, who dubs Pil’niak a ‘Scythian at a typewriter’. In post-Symbolism – in which the beginnings of ‘post-catastrophe’ literature are clearly emerging – we are confronted with a heterogeneous and dynamic range of stylistic formations and, more than ever before, individual styles, encompassing what is usally referred to as the historical Avant-garde, including authors such as Pil’niak, Zamiatin, Ivanov, Babel’, Platonov and Bulgakov.

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At the beginning of this period, we find interpretations of the House Myth given utopian or anti-utopian characteristics, sometimes in one and the same text – for example, Pil’niak’s stories ‘Старый дом’ (‘The Old House’), ‘Имение Белоконское’ (‘The Belokonskoe Estate’) and ‘Смерть коммуны’ (‘The Death of the Commune’) and his novel Голый год (The Naked Year), and Zamiatin’s stories ‘Пещера’ (‘The Cave’) and ‘Mamai’, and his prototypical antiutopian novel Мы (We).

30. Pil’niak. Life and Death of the House In Pil’niak’s work, we find realisations of the House Myth related to the loss of houses, but he also uses the theme of the house as a locus of memory to convey his ideas of time and history in relation to the human condition. On the one hand, there is the theme of what we might call the ‘Death of the Domus’; on the other, he depicts the ruin of a utopian projection of the House Myth in the ‘Death of the Commune’, as happens in the story of that name (‘Смерть коммуны’). Examples of the first aspect are present in his famous novel Голый год (The Naked Year, 1922) and the story ‘Имение Белоконское’(‘The Belokonskoe Estate’), which, like ‘The Death of the Commune’, was also incorporated into the novel. In Голый год (The Naked Year), the fall of the house of the Ordynins (дом Ордыниныx), which is also the title of the second chapter, represents the destruction of the old Russian world by the Revolution, which P. A. Jensen refers to in this connection as ‘the decline of the nests of gentlefolks’ (Jensen, P. A., 1997). This experimental novel as a whole is permeated by an intense sense of history, historic continuity and the disruption of this continuity by the catastrophe of the Revolution. In this text, as in the others to be discussed here, Pil’niak exploits the thematic and psychopoetic possibilities of the House Myth, clearly showing in the process his awareness of the archaic roots and original cosmogonic significance of the myth. For example, in the following passage from the beginning of Chapter 2, he combines Modernist devices of anthropomorphisation with unusual mythological and biblical imagery that suggests the old, deep Russian roots of the house of the Ordynins. However, the house is also presented as fatally doomed, both as a dynasty and as a building:

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За те два года, что не было Глеба, дом верно полетел в пропасть, - он, большой дом, собиравшийся столетием, ставший трехсаженным фундаментом, как на трех китах, в один год полысел, посыпался, повалился. Впрочем, каинова печать припечатана уже давно.1 (Pil’niak 1966b, 80)

This novel serves as another illustration of the phenomenon that in Modernism the idea of the House can become a paradoxical symbol of vulnerability and instability. Domestic values are certainly among the first to disappear under the adverse, catastrophic conditions that prevailed so inescapably during the historic reality of that period. It is interesting to look more deeply into the novel’s world-picture and attendant attitudes regarding the traditional, stable values of domesticity and homeliness. With just one exception, it is impossible to find House images in this novel that are simply positive, and the passage just quoted is typical. The old world, embodied in the thousand-year-old provincial town of Ordynin and the house of the Ordynins within it, is decrepit, dead or dying, as we are told in only the second sentence of the first chapter: Древний город мертв. Городу тысяча лет (The ancient city is dead. The city is a thousand years old). The new and vital can only be expected from the elementary energy set free by the Revolution. Even the commune, a social experiment of anarchists who take over the Ordynin country house and estate, is doomed because the people lack the will to ‘act energetically’. During the course of the novel, a marked inversion of traditional values takes place in relation to the spatial and axiological interior–exterior opposition. The interior traditionally represents what is closed, known, safe and positive, and the exterior what is open, uncertain, potentially dangerous and therefore, at the very least, ambiguous, but here the interior sphere of the house is the closed realm of the past, of stagnation, anxiety, darkness, winter and death, whereas the exterior, the sphere of ruthless nature and revolution, is evaluated positively because it stands for vitality, lightheartedness, youth, spring, movement and new growth. Two 1 In the course of the two years when Gleb was away, the house irredeemably went down into the abyss – this big house, which had been a century in the making and become a firm foundation as though built on three whales, had, within a year, become bald and covered with dust, and toppled over. Anyway, the mark of Cain had already been on it for a long time.

Pil’niak. Life and Death of the House

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wonderful illustrations of this spatio-modal inversion can be found, in close proximity to each other in oxymoronic images that respectively depict the Ordynin interior and a cosmic view of the Revolution in the boundless exterior world: За домом идет июнь, и в доме залегла зима. Над землею величайшее очищение прошло - революция. Ты не знаешь, какая красота…2 (II, 84, 85)

This same attitude is maintained, and it sets the tone at the beginning of Chapter 3. ‘О свободах. Глазами Андрея’ (‘About Freedoms. In the Eyes of Andrei’; Andrei Volkovich, related to the Ordynins’): Радость безмерная, свобода! Свобода! Дом, старые дни, старая жизнь, - навсегда позади, - смерть!3 (III, 113)

The house is dead; the Ordynins have left their estate in the province, but in spring a group of anarchists occupy the house and the land belonging to it. The anarchists set up a commune; Andrei and Natal’ia Ordynin become part of it, and what follows is a short-lived idyll in the commune on the former Ordynin estate. Thus, the catastrophe at large, as evoked by Pil’niak, is also realised in the loss of the old houses and their domestic routines. At the end of the novel, however, Pil’niak strikes a different note, combining optimism about the future with the very thematics of domesticity and homeliness that were missing earlier on. The last subchapter of Chapter 4, ‘Часть третья триптиха’ (‘The Third Part of the Triptych’), is qualified as ‘самая светлая’ (‘the lightest’). It opens with an evocation of the old, ruined Kremlin overlooking the Volga, and of the old houses with their ancient gloomy 2

Behind the house it is June, and inside the house winter has settled down. / Above the earth the greatest of purifications has passed by – the revolution. You don’t know how beautiful.... 3 Boundless joy, freedom! Freedom! The house, the old days, the old life – they’re all behind us forever, they’re dead! See also, in this context, the Communard Iuzik’s ideological statement that sets the cosmos and the earth where mankind is living in opposition to one another: земля – это миговая тюгма (the earth is the world’s prison) (III, 121)

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grandeur (хмуры и величавы своим старобытием) that were built there by Nicolas I. Everything is either old and worn out by time or damaged by the Civil War. It is autumn, and the iron roofing of the houses is being shaken by the wind so as to make a noise. Attention then shifts to the apartment of Natal’ia, who runs a hospital there. This interior is a positive space: it is simple but furnished, clean and light, and a stove is burning; outside is the darkness of twilight. Arkhip Ivanovich Arkhipov, a hardened revolutionary and one of the famous ‘leather jackets’ (кожаные куртки), has come to propose marriage to Natal’ia in the hope that they might have children and work together. Natal’ia initially has her doubts, protesting that, because she does not love him, “it will all be cold, comfortless” (Это все холодно будет, неуютно; 209). Arkhipov, who only knows work and revolution, answers in amazement: “What do you mean, comfortless? I don’t understand that word” (– Как? Неуютно? – не понимаю я этого слова). Domestic comfort (uiut) is clearly not a revolutionary value – and in Russian literature it has never been a strongly developed concept, tending rather to be contested on ideological grounds as something allegedly Western and intrinsically alien to Russian culture; see earlier in this chapter. This point is further stressed to the point of ridicule as Pil’niak has Arkhipov look the word up in his little dictionary of ‘foreign vocabulary in the Russian language’ only to find that the word uiut is not even listed. Natal’ia conquers her reservations and declares her love for him. She recognises a possible synthesis of love, comfort, children and work to make a better future (Ах, и будет уют, и будут дети, и – труд, труд! [...] Милый, единственный, мой! Не будет лжи и боли). She speaks these words to herself as she stands at the window of her apartment, which, we are explicitly told, has been heated that day for the first time. The concluding paragraphs of this chapter present a wonderful, ironic contrast based on domestic differences: on the one hand there is Natal’ia in her neat apartment that exudes essential uiut with its shiny linoleum, burning stove and philodendrons, thinking of the man she loves; on the other there is her revolutionary suitor Arkhip in his room in the old Ordynin house, now a communal lodging (общежитие), looking in vain for the word uiut in the wrong dictionary. The information conveyed by these contrasted domestic scenes is diverse and complex. They suggest a great deal about the persons in-


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volved and the ways in which they relate to their living spaces, their backgrounds, their expectations in life and their possible future relationship as man and wife. They could therefore be interpreted as constituting a gendered opposition involving elements of the House Myth. However, there is another significant aspect to this catastrophic treatment of domestic thematics and the general image of the house that also warrants attention. In Pil’niak’s novel, as in other works of the period, we can observe what I propose to call domestic impropriety; see Van Baak 1983a, for example 221ff., and passim.4 This phenomenon occurs whenever there is disparity or mutual incompatibility between the ‘canonical’ programme of domestic thematics (ultimately the fabula of the House Myth; see Chapter I.4) and the actual development of the plot – the sujet of the Russian Formalists. The story ‘Старый дом’ (‘The Old House’, 1924) presents a special case. Here the house is not only a conflict space in the usual sense; it is also the vehicle of a complex house symbolism, and it functions in the story as a hero: it has its own life story that includes its ruin, anticipated in the very first paragraph5 but not actually described in the story. The story is largely autobiographical. Its literary meaning is constructed on the basis of an anthropomorphic vision of the house as the analogue of the human beings living in it, having a life story, registering the passage of time and suffering from it. This means that metaphoric and metonymic semantic processes are simultaneously active in the development. The central invariant structural element, apart from the omniscient narrative voice, is an old house on the bank of the river Volga, the history of which is chronicled for a succession of generations, beginning in 1861 and ending in the postRevolutionary present of 1924. Legendary stories in connection with the house and its history are occasionally related or hinted at. These draw a link with Pugachev’s eighteenth-century insurrection, thus suggesting a historic parallellism between periods of historic turmoil 4

There, I discussed the idea of impropriety in the context of I. Babel’s Конармия (Red Cavalry), where different cultural models (Jews, peasants and itinerant Cossacks at war) and narrative positions clash with regard to the structure of the world and behavioural models. Actual impropriety arises when two or more conflicting cultural models interact on the same motif level; Van Baak 1983a, 168. 5 раньше, когда дом не был еще разрушен (earlier, when the house had not yet been ruined) (Pil’niak 1966a, 192)

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and revolution in Russia almost two centuries apart, as if to relativise the historic uniqueness and catastrophic scope of the present (1924). In accordance with the canonic rules of historical novels or literary chronicles of this type, the course of events on the national, historical level either runs parallel to, or is contrasted with, the vicissitudes of individual heroes. The old house is the conflict space where joyful childhood experiences and expectations alternate with stories of doom and failure, where the course of history casts its shadows on individual biographies and creates a sense of fatality – including the looming threat of an incestuous relationship, an attempt at poisoning and rumours of cannibalism. Nevertheless, in compliance with Pil’niak’s philosophy of life, the ultimate, dominant mood is the acceptance of life, however hard, and trust in the vitality and vigour of youth as the essence of nature, which is stronger than history. The parallel just mentioned between Pugachev’s insurrection and the October Revolution arises from the same relativising perspective.6 The figure of the grandmother supports a strong sense of dynastic (Domus) continuity against the background of historic upheaval and catastrophic events. As long as she is alive, the younger generations have a reason to return occasionally and come together as a family. Once she has died, this chain is broken, and a new generation takes over the battered house in the person of Nonna, the last of the family. She is strong and has been formed by catastrophe, war and revolution, and it is she who has to cope with the demands of the new era: Дом я возьму в свои руки (I take the house in my own hands). The plot function of the grandmother underlines the story’s identity as a chronicle and evokes 6

Compare a passage from the story’s ending in which the narrator, seeing the new generation (in the person of Nonna) taking over the house, speaks about his own feelings: Вошла Нонна и села на барьер, скрестила руки. И тогда тот, [...], вдруг почуял, что к нему пришла та правда, [...], облегчающая правда: он понял, что жива жизнь жизнью, землей, тем, что каждую весну цветет земля и не может не цвести, пока есть жизнь - [...], пусть идет новая жизнь!… И тогда стало на минуту, в этой бодрой, отреченческой радости, - больно, потому что все проходит, все протекает. (Nonna came in and sat down with crossed arms. And then he [...] suddenly understood that truth had come upon him, [...] that relieving truth: he understood that life is vitality, the earth, the fact that each spring earth blossoms and cannot be prevented from blossoming as long as there is life – [...], let the new life have its way! ... And then there was a short stab of pain in this bright and renouncing joy – because everything passes, elapses.) (Pil’niak 1966a, 214)


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the nineteenth-century Russian literary chronicle tradition of writers such as Aksakov and Goncharov, even though Modernist stylistic devices are also prominent. The use of these devices by Pil’niak demonstrates his fascination with both the passage and the fatality of time, which is so characteristic of his oeuvre in general.7 The house in this story is an example of a Domus. It simultaneously fulfils a number of narrative and symbolic functions that are based on its being a material structure. This should be noted since, as we saw in the introductory chapters, the original, archaic functions of the Domus concept appear to be primarily grounded in its social rather than in its material and architectural aspects. Its material prominence in this story is connected to its functioning as a character, or personage; the material house is indeed the hero of the story, though that is not its only function. On the level of the narrative structure, three functions of the house can be identified: -

-

7

the house as conflict space and theatre: as the central and constant setting of a family and its individual members. It also serves as the literary topos of revisiting; that is, of returning to one’s birthplace, seeking confrontation with memorable places and their associative and mnemonic capacities, and reviving memories; see Chapter I.4 on the fabular inventory of the House Myth. the house as text and material chronicle, literally registering the passage of time because successive generations of children, at corresponding intervals (1861-1908-1924), have left pencil marks

See Ivanov 1974 on the thematics of time as a period characteristic of Modernism. Titles such as ‘Тысяча лет’ (‘Thousand Years’); ‘Расплеснутое время’ (‘Spilled Time’); Голый год ( The Naked Year); ‘Наследники’ (‘The Inheritors’); ‘Год их жизни’ (‘A year of their Life’); ‘Отрывки из дневника’ (‘Fragments from a Diary’); ‘Отрывки из “повести в письмах”’ (‘Fragments from a “Tale in Letters”’); ‘С последним народом’ (‘With the Last People’); ‘Смертельное манит’ (‘Enticing Death’); ‘Старый дом’ (‘The Old House’); ‘Старый сыр’ (‘Old Cheese’); ‘Варяжские времена’ (‘Varangian Times’), and ‘Ветер перед мартом’ (‘Wind before March’) are symptomatic of Pil’niak’s preoccupation with the theme of fatal time. However, we are simultaneously confronted with Pil’niak's characteristic plotless narration, or at least the marked absence of suspense devices or manipulations of fabular time. In Pil’niak’s literary world, time seems to equal past time, especially in such titles as ‘Расплеснутое время’ (‘Spilled Time’) and the intriguing ‘Повесть непогашенной луны’ (‘Tale of the Unextinguished Moon’); see Van Baak 1990a, 11, 13-4.

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and dates on the post of the terrace door indicating their recent growth – which is also an allusion to the impossible spatial and material fixation of time. the house as personage and hero; that is, as the subject of plotrelated predicates. Thus the house is not only subject to, suffering from and registering the external forces of history and time in general; it is also presented as capable of responding and behaving as an animate,8 anthropomorphic actant. In terms of the typology we have been using, it exemplifies the House–Body and House– Personality.

It is particularly in this last function – the metaphor of the house as an animate being or personage – that Pil’niak’s stylistic idiosyncrasies are at their most expressive and prominent. In a series of oxymoronic and paradoxical images, what is essentially immovable, the house, is seen as moving and remaining immobile at one and the same time. We could interpret this personified house as, simultaneously, a realised metaphor – the ultimate consequence of treating the house as a plotbearing hero – and the canonical symbol of duration and stability through time, as in: К двадцать третьему году обвалился лабаз, и было похоже, что дом прыгал в Волгу и разбил себе рожу – охренный дом – до крови красных кирпичей, да так и замер в своем скачке на ды-

8 [...] а потом стало ясно, что пепел отошедших лет посыпал и его: не было вокруг него ни одного забора, двор где стояли тысячи пятериков, уступами шедший к Волге, полег залишаевшей собакой, серый, в белене, в полыни. (… and then it became clear that the ashes of bygone years had also settled on it: there was not a single fence left around it; the yard, where logs had been stacked up by thousands, and which reached towards the Volga, had lain down like a shabby dog, grey, and smothered in henbane and wormwood.) Another expressive example of the same effect can be found in the story ‘Мать-мачеха’ (‘Mother-stepmother’), also known as ‘Третьая столица’ (‘The Third Capital’): дом раскорячился, лопнул, обалдел, посыпался щебнем, охра – и та помутнела, окна и дверим все деревянное в доме было сожжено для отопления, ворота ошерились, [...], - дом долгое время таращился, как запаленная кляча. (the house spread its legs, burst open, became dulled and covered with pebbles; the ochre plaster also lost its brightness, and all wooden parts were burnt for heating; the gates became rough like fur [...] – the house stood there for a long time, wide-eyed, like a jade).


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бах, сдвинувшись, вжавшись в землю для прыжка. Но дом был каменен, громоздок, глух, приданое Катерины Ивановной.9

In the narrator’s memory, the house, time and again, takes on the shape of a synthetic image in a seemingly timeless, cyclical past, as is emphasised by the use of the imperfect tense in the quotation below. It is an emotionally and morally charged ‘icon’ of his family’s house in the context of the Russian landscape, symbolically embodying his own identification as a member of it: И вспомнилось: - … Каждую весну, когда слетались все в дом к бабушке, пометы на двери росли на четверть вверх, и росла под террасой сирень (Pil’niak 1966a, 211) и буйничала Волга за забойкой.10

Thus, Pil’niak’s house can be seen as a locus where past and present confront one another, or clash, in terms of personal biographies and in a broader cultural context. An impressive example of the simultaneous treatment of these perspectives is the story ‘Имение Белоконское’ (‘The Belokonskoe Estate’, 1918; Pil’niak 1922, 74-82), part of which was also incorporated in The Naked Year. Just as in the case of ‘The Old House’, the title here defines and names a domestic, Domus-like setting as the topic of a story that is largely preoccupied with the relentless passage of time. It tells of two men’s partly parallel, partly divergent courses of life before and after the Revolution. The story comprises two chapters and develops two points of view in compositional parallelism. Two milieus are juxtaposed, that of the Belokonskoe estate and that of a peasant hut, though the estate is the central conflict space. Prince Prozorovskii and Ivan Koloturov grew up together, the former on the Belokonskoe estate and the latter in a peas9

In about 1923, the barn collapsed, and it seemed as though the house was jumping into the Volga, and as though the house, an ochreous house, had cut its face to the very blood of its red bricks and frozen in the middle of a leap, crouched, with its hind legs dug into the earth. But the house was stony, clumsy and mute, Katerina Ivanovna’s dowry. 10 And he remembered: … Every spring, when all were flocking together in grandmother’s house, the marks on the door were growing upwards by the quarter, the lilac was growing under the terrace and the Volga was running restlessly behind the sheetpiling.

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ant hut belonging to it. When they were children they played together, but their different social backgrounds have determined their different courses of life. With the Revolution, the situation is reversed, and this is where the story begins. The Prince has received a written order to leave the estate and house where he has lived all his life. The house, the estate, the land and all that belongs to it is confiscated by the ‘Belokonskii Komitet Bednoty’; that is, the ‘Belokonskii Committee of the Poor’, of which Ivan Koloturov happens to be the chairman. The house is now described from the Prince’s point of view as he walks away for good. He bids farewell to the estate and its lands with great affection and aristocratic resignation, and disappears in the distance. The context builds up strong poetic equivalences of the House– Personality type within the broader setting of the landscape, very much like the synthetic, aesthetically and emotionally charged image (or ‘icon’) of the narrator’s house in ‘The Old House’: Утром встал с синим рассветом, - князь Прозоровский, - и ушел в поле, бродил весь день, пил последнее осеннее вино, слушал вороньи свадьбы: [...] была грусть осеннего Белоконского, всегда жил здесь осенями. Шел пустыми полями без дорог, в лощинах багряно сгорали осины, сзади на холме стоял белый дом, в лиловых купах редеющего парка. Безмерно далеки были дали, синие, хрустальные. Виски уже лысы и седеют, - не остановишь, не вернешь.11 (Pil’niak 1922, 74-5)

The equivalences, especially in the second part of this passage, are based on the fact that the house, which the Prince leaves behind in both time and space as he walks away (сзади на холме стоял белый дом), as well as the park, the landscape and the Prince himself as the experiencing subject, are cast in expressive and contrasting colours, as

11

In the morning he rose with the dark blue daybreak – Prince Prozorovskii – and went away into the fields, roamed all day, drank in the last wine of autumn, listened to the swarming crows: [...] there was the melancholy of autumnal Belokonskoe; he always used to live here in autumn. He walked through empty fields without roads; in the hollows aspens were burning with a purple glow; behind him on the hill stood the white house, among the violet clumps of the thinning park. He could see very far into the distance, which was blue and crystal clear. His temples were already thin and grey – you can’t stop it, can’t bring it back.


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if in a dream-like vision.12 Of these colours, the white and grey spectrum is symbolic of the passage of time and age to which everything is subject: белый дом (the white house) – виски уже [...] седеют (his temples are already grey). In combination with the parallel between the thinning trees in the park and the Prince’s bald temples, this reinforces the effect of synthetic imagery and the identification of house with man. The Prince irrevocably recedes into the past, together with the estate and the world around it, because they are things of the past: не остановишь, не вернешь (you can’t stop it, can’t bring it back). On his long walk, the Prince is allowed to stay for the night in the hut of one of the peasants of the estate. This meeting provides, among other things, a psychologically interesting, ambivalent confrontation between the former barin (master) and a peasant, showing the now homeless Prince in the context of the peasant’s hut. Within the composition of the story as a whole, this scene presents a wonderfully balanced analogy with and contrast to the situation of the former peasant Koloturov, now Revolutionary committee chairman, staying at the Prince’s house. Neither of them is in his proper place. The Prince will disappear from the story by taking a train to Moscow, but there are further dealings with Ivan Koloturov as he vainly tries to come to terms with his contradictory and awkward position on the ‘Sovetskoe Imenie Belokonskoe’ (‘Soviet Estate of Belokonskoe’), the grotesque and telling misnomer that he used in his typed order to the Prince. Under Koloturov’s rule, the proletariat takes over the old manor house, resulting in destruction, disarray and anarchy. Koloturov himself is very unhappy: his wife despises him for going to the manor instead of remaining in their peasant izba, and he would in any case prefer to relinquish his new responsibilities in a house where he feels his presence is improper and out of place. Communes are prominent in Pil’niak’s oeuvre. He was interested in the history of the Revolution in the Russian province, and he wrote several times on the theme of the commune in old houses or on former estates. Examples include Chapter III of his novel Голый год (The Naked 12

This is reminiscent of the idealised image of the country estate in Chekhov’s ‘House with the Mezzanine’, which was given comparable aesthetic qualities from the ‘belle époque’ and which Silvia Burini compares with the idealised and stylised renderings of estates by the contemporary symbolist painter Borisov-Musatov (Burini 1996); see above.

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Year): ‘О свободах. Глазами Андрея’ (‘About Freedoms. In the Eyes of Andrei’), the text of which is identical to the fragment ‘Полынь’ (‘Wormwood’); Chapter V: ‘Смерть коммуны’ (‘The Death of the Commune’); ‘Наследники’ (‘The Inheritors’), and his last novel Соляной амбар (The Salt Barn).13 ‘Наследники’ (‘The Inheritors’) shows strong parallels with ‘The Old House’. It is another harrowing short story about an old house in a city on the Volga – the story is dated ‘Saratov, January 1919’ – where a noble family used to live but which, together with its last inhabitant, has been dying for twenty years, set on the eve of the Revolution. In other words, the house is a moribund Domus: Последние двадцать лет в доме, вместе с домом, умирала старая хозяйка его, Ксения Давыдовна, старая дева.14 (Pil’niak 1994, I, 415)

The old woman had died without issue in October 1917, and the house itself had died with her, as Pil’niak stresses. Now, the cold, humid, derelict, looted old house is inhabited by ‘the inheritors’, who had been scattered all over Russia and even Europe. They, the members of the Rastorovskii family and their relatives, huddle together ‘in their nest’ (в свое гнездо), trying to hide from revolution, hunger and the raging snowstorms of winter – the elementary forces of the typically Pil’niakian vision. These are not the kinds of people one would expect to engage in social experiments such as living in communes, but, forced by circumstances, that is what they try to do at the beginning. It does not work, of course, because ‘Communism is too imperfect’ (Но, верно, коммунизм слишком несовершенен).15 They ‘split up’ (разгородились) and ‘entrenched themselves, everyone in his own room, 13

The title refers to an old barn, the equivalent of a commune. Pil’niak’s last novel was written in 1937 but not published then owing to his having been arrested. He was executed on 21 April 1938. The novel occupies a special position in Pil’niak’s oeuvre, reflecting a reassessment of the Revolution, its roots and causes under the ideological pressure of the Stalinist era. I will not discuss it here. 14 In the house, for the last twenty years, its old mistress, Kseniia Davydovna, had been dying along with it. 15 In the light of such a straightforward remark, even in 1919, it appears obvious where Pil’niak’s later problems with the authorities originated. Nevertheless, the story was published several times, and as late as 1935; see Pil’niak 1994, I, 493.


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with his own pot and samovar’ (окопались каждый в своей комнате, каждый со своим горшком и самоваром). Interestingly, the original title was ‘Окопная жизнь’ (‘Life in the Trenches’),16 referring to this strikingly non-domestic way of life in a house. Again we see a relationship of impropriety between the background of a Domus setting, with its implicit way of life, and the actual behaviour of its occupants (as distinct from ‘inhabitants’), signaling the historic catastrophe of human relations in the context of the House (Domus). After the splitting up, they occupy the house in anger, only looking back and, as Pil’niak significantly stresses, ‘cut off from life, outside of life’ as life should be lived in a house under normal circumstances: Живут в доме злобно, скучно, мелочно, ненужно, проклиная революцию и жизнь, живут оторванные от жизни, вне жизни, обернувшись к старому и ожидая это старое.17 (Pil’niak 1994, I, 416)

The familiar shape of world and society has collapsed in the general catastrophe. People suffer and fight over chores, space, and possessions. The commune does not work, and there seems to be no other conceivable or bearable alternative to living together in a house, even as a family. Worse still, the conflicts and psychology described in this very short story essentially anticipate the dead-end hopelessness of the Soviet kommunalka world where the House easily became an AntiHouse, as we shall see especially in Chapters II.33 and 34. The final chapter (V) subsumes the utter despair and banality to which the old house and its inhabitants have been reduced. The inheritors of the house and its Domus history cannot cope with their role and the responsibility that it imparts. The house, as was was made clear at the beginning, is dead, and there is nothing left to inherit or maintain, let alone pass on as in the canonical cycle of the Domus. It is bitterly cold; nobody feels at home, and the water pipes (for lack of proper measures to prevent it) freeze and burst. In their misery, two young 16

In the journal Рабочий мир, (Workers’ World) 1919, Nos. 7-9 (Pil’niak 1994, 493). Their life in the house is full of anger and tedium. Shallow and superfluous, they curse the Revolution and life, living cut off from life, outside of life, turned towards the old and waiting for it. 17

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women who occupy the mezzanine mourn their wasted youth18 – a wry reference to, and a clear acknowledgment of, the lasting force of this Chekhovian estate icon: Над степью, над Волгой, над городом идет ночь, идет мороз. В мезонине тоскуют Ксения и Елена. Генерал не может уснуть. Константин приходит поздно, бесшумно пробирается к Леонтьевне. В окна дома идут синие лунные пласты света. Водопровод (Pil’niak 1994, I, 423) за ночь промерз и лопнул.19

Chapter V of The Naked Year, ‘The Death of the Commune’, describes the end, or death, of the small-scale social experiment of the anarchistic idealists and dreamers that began in Chapter III. Even in this chapter, the narrator harbours certain nostalgic feelings about the commune, but there is also irony and scepticism towards the naïveté of the Communards’ utopian vision of life and man’s nature that cannot fail to clash with the real world outside, where there are real war and real Bolsheviks. The leading commune members are reckless anarchists or romantic dreamers of world revolution. Were it not for the catastrophic outcome of the episode – the deaths of the commune members at the hands of the local soviet – the commune could be seen as play, or at least as a carnivalesque flush in the atmosphere of anarchy attending the Revolution. In the following passage, the commune enjoys itself in the former princely country house, seemingly impervious to the bad weather outside that also symbolises the encroaching external danger. It is a caricature of the elegant domestic life of the former noble society: В коммуне, в старом княжеском доме, веселились бесшабашно, задорно и молодо. За окнами стал черный мрак, хлестал дождь, шумел ветер. В гостиной зажгли кенкеты, последний раз зажи18

Interestingly, Natal’ia Ordynina, the last member of the Ordynin family in The Naked Year, has joined the commune on the estate and also lives in the mezzanine (Pil’niak 1966b, 128). 19 Over the steppe, the Volga, the city night and the frost reign. In the mezzanine, Kseniia and Elena are being miserable. The General cannot fall asleep. Konstantin comes back late and steals noiselessly towards Leont’evna’s room. Through the windows, blue sheets of moonlight enter the house. During the night, the water pipes freeze and burst.


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гавшиеся верно, при князьях, танцовали, пели, играли в наборы, метелили метелицу. Павленко и Наталья таинственно принесли окорок, бутылки с коньяком и водками и корзину яблок. [...], и от того, что за стенами были чужие, от того, что над землей шли осенние, уже холодные облака, - было в зале особенно уютно и весело.20 (Pil’niak 1966b, 169-170)

There is a sense of togetherness about the commune in the old country house – an essential difference from the situation in ‘The Inheritors’ – and the safety implicit in its walls is emphasised. After midnight, however, the commune members take turns to guard the house, nightly expecting an attack from outside. Тhere is irony in the fact that the experimental commune, a ‘New House’ for the ‘New Men’, is set up on an old estate that has been a form of Domus. The commune too aspires to be the seat of ideal, harmonious human relations. It is equally ironic that the ephemeral experiment of the commune can be seen as a mockery of the ‘organic’ Domus myth that had existed as a cultural and social type since time immemorial. The Russian estate world, representing the hierarchical, family-based, dynastic concept of the Domus, has finally disappeared after a long history, but the commune – a Romantic but rationalistic experiment, with egalitarian and utopian pretensions, not family-based and undynastic – is nonviable from the start, if only because it entertains untenable normative expectations regarding human nature and capacity to maintain such relations. Its Edenic aspiration of autarchic existence is doomed to failure. The idyll proves to be no more than an unrealistic, romantic escape, a vulnerable isolation from the rest of the world, which will interfere. A parallel typological disparity can be distinguished on a more abstract level of the House Myth. A symbolic cosmological significance 20

In the commune, in the old princely house, they were amusing themselves recklessly, ardently and youthfully. Outside the windows stood black darkness; rain was lashing down, and the wind was howling. In the drawing-room they had lighted the chandeliers on the walls that had last been lit, no doubt, when the Princes had been living here, dancing, singing and playing. Pavlenko and Natal’ia had mysteriously brought ham, bottles of cognac, various vodkas and a basket of apples. [...], and because beyond the walls there were strangers, and because autumnal clouds were already drifting over the land, it was particularly comfortable and joyful in the drawingroom.

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and order is implicitly present in the concept of the Domus, but it is enclosed in itself and held together by what we have called its internal normative orientation; see Chapters II.11-13 in particular. Communes, by contrast, are utopian, and although they have a closed shape they are, by principle, oriented outwards in their ideological pretention to be exemplary scale models for a better society at large.

31. Zamiatin. The Cave Myth Revisited Zamiatin’s story ‘The Cave’ (‘Пещера’, 1920) is arguably one of the most multifaceted symbolic elaborations of the House Myth in Russian Modernism; for a detailed structural analysis, see Van Baak 1981. In this story, two incompatible worlds confront one another in the consciousness of the hero. The setting is Petrograd during the Civil War – the winter of 1919 – but a narrative time reversal has taken place such that the Petersburg world is in a distant past while the present – in which the plot takes place – is the Ice-Age. Thus, the hero’s apartment is also a mammoth-hunter’s cave, situated among other cave dwellings and surrounded by relentless, icy nature. In the hero’s apartment, where his wife is ill, the only food is a few potatoes, and there is no firewood to heat the stove. The hero, Martin Martinych, is forced to go out into the cold to steal firewood from his neighbour. The central theme of the story is an insoluble moral dilemma for the hero, torn between the simultaneous but incompatible demands of two worlds. On the one hand there is the civilised Petersburg world of the past, a culture and civilisation whose moral code forbids theft, the code rendered all the stronger by the knowledge that his neighbour’s life also depends upon that firewood. On the other, there is the IceAge world model in which alternative options and moral reflection have no place, all behaviour being guided by the logical necessity of sheer survival. According to that model, the overriding importance of firewood as a source of warmth and life is what determines the hero’s behaviour and consciousness. This is translated in different terms, depending upon which consciousness of the hero is dominant, that of the civilised Petersburger, or that of the Ice-Age hunter: И на черте, отмеченной чуть приметным пунктирным дыханием, схватились на смерть два Мартина Мартиныча: тот, давний,

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со Скрябиным, какой знал: нельзя, - и новый, пещерный, какой знал: нужно.1 (Zamiatin 1969, 141)

The cast-iron stove in the Petrograd apartment is a self-evident and understood product of domestic culture in a non-catastrophic – here, pre-catastrophic – world. In the Ice-Age cave vision, it is a relentless fire-god, demanding constant sacrifices and religious worship, in return for which the god gives warmth, thus enabling the cave dwellers to create their Edenic myth of the Petersburg past when spring, music and love prevailed under the protection of domestic order. Contrasting these two worlds in the context of the House–Cave reveals the vulnerability and fragility of domestic, humane, civilised culture under adverse conditions.2 A recognisable element of the canonical House Myth is the hearth as the centre of the house and socially-regulated life – that is, the House–Hearth – but one could also argue that the story is a neomyth or remythologisation – a Modernist, fragmentary reconstruction of the classical Prometheus myth about the origins of mankind as a fire-user and house-dweller; see Chapter I.1. In modern types of culture such as the ideal Petersburg world, the archaic, troglodytic fire god-stove (пещерный бог-печка) appears depersonalised, reduced to a mere commodity or instrument: печка (stove). The mythical tale of Prometheus’s heroic theft of fire from the gods, with all its religious significance for mankind, has been reduced to an instrumental routine. What remains after the loss of the original mythical content is the syntax of the verbs involved that, together with other ‘verbs of habitation’, represent the thematic programme of domestic behaviour. The loss of the original mythical content is clear, but we can still recognise its vestiges in modern language and literature,3 and in the way people’s reactions still betray the relationship be1 And on the faint dotted line traced out by his breath, two Martin Martinych’s locked in mortal combat: the old one, who had loved Skriabin and knew he must not, and the new one, the cave-dweller, who knew – that he must. (Zamiatin 1975, 143-4) 2 This story will also be discussed in Chapter II.34, in the section dealing with communal dwelling. 3 Lotman exactly formulated the very phenomenon we are confronted with here: “the archaic structures of thought have lost their content in modern consciousness. [...] that which in language has already lost its independent semantic meaning may undergo secondary semanticisation and vice versa. Connected with this is the secondary revival of mythological narrative processes which cease to be mere formal organisers of

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tween the old fire-god and fire-worshippers (Van Baak 1981, 417-8). In the apartment-as-cave, the fire ritual is performed and the fire god placated: Бог могуче гудел. В темной пещере – великое огненное чудо. Люди – Мартин Мартиныч и Маша – благоговейно и молча, благодарно простирали к нему руки.4 (Zamiatin 1969, 138)

We could say that this is remythologisation of what is manifest whenever people stretch their hands out towards a stove or hearth and expressing feelings of comfort and affection. They too are manifestations of the House Myth programme. The plot is technically unresolved at the end of the story, but the only plausible inference is a tragic ending. Martyn Martinych has left the cave/apartment to disappear into the cold ‘outside’. As if to underline its mythical qualities, the story ends with a distinctly cosmogonic image of the universe itself as a cave, an example of the archaic House–Cosmos, including the concept of the vault of the sky, or firmamentum (see Chapter I.1), as an eternal macrocosm repeated in the microcosm of the cave-dwellers: Низкие, темные глухие облака – своды и все – одна огромная, тихая пещера. Узкие, бесконечные проходы между стен; и похожие на дома темные, обледенелые скалы; и в скалах – глубокие, багрово-освещенные дыры: там, в дырах, возле огня – на корточках люди.5 (Zamiatin 1969, 146-7)

The story ‘Mamai’ (also 1920) shows parallels to the cave story. It is ironic where ‘The Cave’ is essentially tragic. The title is the name of both the fourteenth-century Tatar conqueror of Russia and of the textual coherence and accumulate new senses which often take us back, either consciously or unwillingly, to myth.” (Lotman 1979, 172) 4 The god hummed mightily. A great fiery miracle in the dark cave. The people – Martin Martinych and Masha – worshipfully, silently, gratefully stretched out their hands towards it (Zamiatin 1975, 140). 5 Low, dark, thick clouds like a vaulted ceiling, and everything – one vast, silent cave. Endless narrow passages between the walls; and houselike, dark, icy cliffs; and in the cliffs – deep, red-lit hollows. There, in those hollows, people were squatting by fires. (Zamiatin 1975, 149)

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story’s insignificant urban protagonist. The setting is again Revolutionary Petersburg/Petrograd in 1917. The protagonist is a ‘forty year old boy’, a clerk in an insurance company, and a henpecked husband whose only interest in life is old books. His name, ‘Mamai’, is thus not only anachronistic but also oddly inappropriate. The Mamai of 1917 is a timid ‘little man’ who ‘conquers books’: Мамaй 1917 года – завоевывал книги (Zamiatin 1969, 149). His enemy is a mouse that has eaten the paper money he had hidden beneath a doorway and with which he had planned to buy a precious old volume. The Revolution threatens his small world in the shape of demands from the newlyinstalled Revolutionary House Committee. Here the mother-metaphor6 determining the structure and meaning of the hero’s urban world is not the Cave–House (or House–Cave), but the Ship–House. The imaginative force of this image certainly involves the inherent paradox between the immobility of the house and the dynamics of a seagoing ship. In accordance with Zamiatin’s poetics of this period, the Ship– House is the dominant symbol motivating an intricate, baffling but intrinsically logical system of derivative images, such as we find in разбунтовавшийся каменный океан улиц (the rioting stone ocean of the streets). It functions as a metaphor of time against the background of revolution. The water of the sea and the stone of the city are simultaneously present in the catastrophic imagery of this story, the notional incompatibility functioning much like that of the two-world simultaneity of ‘The Cave’. ‘Mamai’ opens with the image of huge, sixstorey apartment houses sailing through the night like ships, individually and autonomously, like so many independent states. 7 The people in their apartments are passengers sharing the same ship, which we might think of as the ship of time, or historic contingency: По вечерам и по ночам – домов в Петербурге больше нет: есть шестиэтажные каменные корабли. Одиноким шестиэтажным миром несется корабль по каменным волнам среди других одиноких шестиэтажных миров; огнями бесчисленных кают сверкает корабль в разбунтовавшийся каменный океан улиц. И, ко6

Zamiatin’s own technical term. This detail strangely unites the idea of modern urban disconnectedness and individuality with the old concept of the ‘Ship of State’. It also harbours a utopian connotation. 7

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нечно, в каютах не жильцы: там пассажиры. По-корабельному просто все незнакомо-знакомы друг с другом, все – граждане осажденной ночным океаном шестиэтажной республики.8 (idem, 148)

The ship metaphor, with its derivative associations of siege and loneliness, conveys the sense of uncertainty and anxiety inherent in life at sea, and this in turn reinforces the sense of security associated with domestic interiority. The late story ‘The Flood’ (‘Наводнение’, 1929) is a masterly psychodrama about a marriage that remains childless. This gripping, almost thriller-like plot develops motifs of unconquerable subconscious desires that culminate in murder motivated by jealousy. The plot development, which is also the development of the heroine’s psychology, the emotional process that motivates her into killing her rival and her subsequent unexpected pregnancy, is built up by Zamiatin using a complex, subtle system of metaphors. A significant role in this system is played by an old, deserted house (that is, an Empty Old House) that can be interpreted as an icon of the heroine’s process of individuation and thus as an instance of the House–Psyche image. The symbolic Gestalt function of this House is realised more implicitly, but no less forcefully, than in his early, experimental prose. The essential analogy is the emptiness of the House, a metaphor for the heroine’s barrenness as well as her emotional desolation. I shall not deal in detail with Zamiatin’s most famous work, the novel We (Мы, 1920), even though its psychopoetics and symbolism of the house certainly merit detailed analysis; for analyses in connection with House thematics, see Singleton 1997 and Maksimova 1994. What I shall do is provide a general indication of the symbolic functions of houses in the novel. The dystopian, totalitarian qualities of the world in We are partly revealed in the transparency of the houses, which are made of glass. Everything and everybody is visible, and the 8 In the evenings and at night there are no longer any houses in Peterburg: there are six-storey apartment houses. Like a lonely six-storey world, a ship floats over the stone waves among other lonely six-storey worlds; with the lights of its innumerable cabins the ship gleams into the rioting stone ocean of the streets. And, of course, in the cabins there are no inhabitants: there are only passengers. In shiplike fashion, none of them know one another: all are citizens of a six-storey republic besieged by a nocturnal ocean.

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only privacy is granted during the regulated time devoted to sex, when blinds are drawn with ironic prudery. It is striking that, in Zamiatin’s grim fantasy, the transparency of the houses effects depersonalisation and maximal control over the individual,9 whereas in Khlebnikov’s utopian fantasies the ideal future form of housing was based on transparant, individual glass cubicles. In both cases, however, the feature of transparency can be seen as symbolically related to the ‘neo-myths’ of rationalism, enlightenment and progress; that is, they are either positive or negative (or at least critical) assessments of their ultimate consequences. There is an implicit renewal of Dostoevskii’s criticism of Chernyshevskii’s ultra-rationalist utopia as embodied in the image of the ‘Crystal Palace’ (see Chapter II.17), and it comes as no surprise that Zamiatin greatly admired Dostoevskii. The ultra-rationalist world in which the diarist D-503 lives is fundamentally transparant and unfree. It is encapsulated in a huge glass wall and ceiling that keep out the dangerous, forbidden old world of nature, intuition, chance, irrationality and individualism. There is, however, an escape route via an Old House. It involves passing through the basement, the Dostoevskian prototype image of the human subconscious, symbolising the pristine, irrational nature that cannnot be suppressed – the Old Adam, or Old Eve for that matter, as in ‘The Flood’. Thus the Old House is an instance of the House as a metaphor of the indispensable need for room for individual emotions; that is, for the realm of the Self, not only on the level of the individual, but for mankind in general; see also Chapters II.33 and 34.

9 Elena Maksimova interprets these glass cells (kletki) symbolically as so many graves, the occupants of which are already dead, having had their fantasy removed through a brain operation (Maksimova 1994, 72). She also describes in some detail the psychopoetic aspects of the house in this work (the anatomical analogy type) and elements of a folkloric substratum for the Anti-House (Anti-dom).

32. Platonov’s Paradoxes and Pseudologics. Negative Spaces and Houses on the Move Platonov’s work is enigmatic and ambiguous. It is often impossible to decide whether to read his stylised worlds as utopian, or as antiutopian, ironic or naïvely serious and idealistic. In a manner that is both individual and absurd, he blends the pathos of revolutionary rhetoric with the grim pictures of its destructive results or equally fatal ineffectiveness. His narrative voice unreservedly sympathises with his heroes in their, mostly unreflecting, revolutionary enthusiasm and drive, but at the same time the world he evokes is relentlessly sober and revealing about such matters as collectivisation. He is, without doubt, among the most fascinating Russian authors of purist revolutionary enthusiasm and essentialism, and of the catastrophe that inevitably and harshly came with its spell (see Chapter II. 29), disguising what he has to say by paradoxes and pseudological reasoning (Van Baak 2001). This is particularly prominent in his main works, the novels Чевенгур (Chevengur, 1929, first complete publication 1988) and Котлован (The Foundation Pit, 1930, first complete edition 1987).1 In Platonov’s literary worlds, the House topic plays a major role. He occupies a unique philosophical and stylistic position in Russian literature, but he also stands apart on account of his visionary mythopoetical treatment of the idea of the House and its conflicts in the con1

The problematic publication history of Platonov's work reflects the ambiguities of his independent ideological stance. Although Maksim Gor’kii acknowledged his exceptional talent, as well his humanitarian collectivism, he criticised his novel Chevengur for its anarchistic tone and peculiar rendering of the revolutionary proletariat (letter of September 18, 1929). Neither of his novels was published during his lifetime; see V. A. Chalmaeva, Platonov 1989, 642-4.

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text of Communist utopian thinking and its practical consequences. What he had to say about it in the context of the emerging Soviet state will also be the subject matter of the following chapters. I shall begin with The Foundation Pit because it concerns one of the most impressive negative House symbols connected with the era of Socialist construction, though, as I have intimated, ‘Socialist construction’ itself will be a central topic in the next chapter. Its theme is the building of a ‘Common Proletarian House’ (Общепролетарское жилище) that will house the future proletariat in peace and harmony,2 to a grandiosely symbolic design celebrating the collectivisation of agriculture. As a result of incompetence and megalomanic mismanagement, however, all the builders actually do is dig an enormous hole that becomes bigger and bigger. Where the foundation of the Common House was supposed to be, there will only be a grave, and the collectivisation will prove to be a cruel absurdity. Platonov’s utopian House image thus combines the archaic and the revolutionary. It evokes and integrates the image of the biblical ‘House of the Father’, its revolutionary transformation into the egalitarian symbol of the ideal communality (the ideology of the Common Proletarian House) and the idea of the grave or tomb as the House of the Dead; see Chapter II.17 on Dostoevskii; also I.1 and I.3. Another biblical parallel that has been drawn (Hans Günther in Dmitrovskaia 1995) is with the Tower of Babel, an equally doomed construction. Platonov, however, shows an inverse utopia in which no actual building takes place but in which, as Günther formulates it (idem, 14), the workers exhaust themselves in ‘anti-building’ (в антистройке) or ‘building-destroying’ (в акте строения-разрушения). They are absolutely consistent, even stubborn, in their purpose – as are all of Platonov’s heroes – because the more grandiose the plan for the Common House becomes, the bigger the pit must grow. The following passage from the end of the novel, as new volunteers wish to join the collective farm, is a good illustration of this ‘anti-building’, a sadly and embarrassingly heroic struggle that can only have inverse utopian results: 2

Heli Kostova has remarked that, before his novel Счатливая Москва (Happy Moscow 1932-6), the idea of the House was less important to Platonov than that of the Road (in connection with his truth-seekers and wanderers), the House finding its sole justification as a collective abode for the future (Kostova 1998, 245).

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- Мужики в пролетариат хотят зачисляться, - ответил Вощев. - Пускай зачисляются, - произнес Чиклин с земли. – Теперь надо еще шире и лубже рыть котлован. Пускай в наш дом влезет всякий человек из барака и глиняной избы. [...] Чиклин взял лом и новую лопату и медленно ушел в дальний край котлована. Там он снова стал разверзать неподвижную землю, [...] и рыл, не в силах устать, до ночи и всю ночь, пока он не услышал, как трескаются кости в его трясущемся туловище. Тогда он остановился и глянул кругом. Колхоз шел вслед за ним и не переставая рыл землю; все бедные и средние мужики работали с таким усердием жизни, будто хотели спастись навеки в пропасти котлована. 3 (473-4)

It should be noted that, to the simple-minded Chiklin, the foundation pit is already the House. He invites the others not just to ‘enter’ the house but to ‘climb’ into it (Пускай в наш дом влезет всякий человек) – the verb vlezt’ indicates ‘climbing’ – instead of using the normal ‘voiti v dom’: ‘to enter’, ‘to go into’ a house. Apparently, for people like Chiklin, the digging itself is not only part of the fulfilment of the promise of the Common House of the Proletariat; it is already the fulfilment in itself. These people throw theselves into it with maximum fervour (as if anticipating the Stakhanovite movement) and religious devotion ‘as if they wished to save themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit’. This catachrestic metaphor of infinity is highly characteristic of Platonov’s paradoxical stylistics and worldpicture. It indicates the extraordinary metaphysical dimension of the project in the eyes of the diggers. In that perspective they are involved – unconsciously – in one of the most archaic and mythical House concepts, that of the House as an analogue to the cosmos in creation myths; see Chapter I.1. But the building enterprise here is part of the 3

– These muzhiks want to join the proletariat, – answered Voshchev. / – Let them join, – said Chiklin. – Now the foundation pit needs to be dug still wider and deeper. Let any man, from his barracks or clay hut, climb into our house. [...] Chiklin took a crow-bar and a new spade and slowly went away to the far end of the pit. There he began again to open up the immovable earth, [...] and dug, because he did not have the strength to get tired, until the night fell and throughout the night, until he heard how his bones cracked in his shaking body. Then he stopped and looked around. The kolkhoz were following him and incessantly digging the earth; they were all poor and average muzhiks, working with such vital zeal, as if they wished to save themselves forever in the abyss of the foundation pit.

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inverted utopian world of this novel, in which the intention to build unites infinity, the promise of salvation and death in the negative vertical dimension of the abyss. At the beginning of the novel, the main protagonist, Voshchev, has just lost his job in a small mechanical factory ‘as a result of the growth in him of feebleness and pensiveness amidst the general pace of labour’ (вследствие роста слабосильности в нем и задумчивости среди общего темпа труда, 367), which characterises him as a typical Platonovian dreamer-philosopher. He packs his belongings and leaves his apartment, in order better to ‘understand his future in the open air’ (чтобы на воздухе лучше понять свое будущее, idem). After some aimless peregrinations through the town where he lived and worked, he finds himself one night on a vacant plot, and lies down to sleep in a ‘warm hole’. He is discovered by a man with a scythe who is mowing the weeds there. He tells Voshchev that this is the place where a foundation pit is planned and that he should go to the nearby barracks to sleep. He joins the collective that is living in the barracks, and finds kindred sprits among them in their devotion to truth and to building the House of the Future. From here, the novel’s sujet develops, in which he will play a central role. As we have seen, the project does not develop as planned. All kinds of obstacles, material, psychological and ideological, combine to prevent it. Only the digging goes on, and in spite of all their efforts, the project is doomed to be and remain, an ‘anti-building’, increasingly associated with death and culminating in the death of the little girl Nastia, who is buried at the bottom of the foundation pit. Structures such as necropolises and the Pharaonic pyramids were intended to house the dead. What we have here is not even a house; it is simply the beginning of a House-to-be. Before reaching the level of the foundation, it has become a grave. Thus, it is emphatically about the death of an idea. The little girl, the only one among these workers, symbolises their hope of the coming world of justice, of Communism, with the kolkhoz living in solidarity in one House. The use of a young girl as a symbol here is obvious and may even seem a cliché, but in the context of Platonov’s work and philosophy youth is particularly important. In other works, such as Chevengur, children can be wiser and ‘older’ than their parents and other adults. Here, the workers are deeply aware of her symbolic sig-


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nificance, and they are devastated by her death. The philosopher Voshchev, watching Nastia die, feels that hope, and even the sense of life, have died with her: Вощев стал в недоумении над этим утихшим ребенком, он уже не знал, где теперь будет коммунизм на свете, если его нет сначала в детском чувстве и в убежденном впечатлении? Зачем ему теперь нужен смысл жизни и истина всемирного происхождения, если нет маленького, верного человека, в котором истина стала бы ра(Platonov 1989, 473) достью и движеньем?4

Their hopes were embodied in her, as they were in the House, reflecting the poetics of literal interpretation that are so characteristic of all Platonov’s work. Here the digging, whose purpose is to prepare for building, leads to burying. Negative verticality has doomed this building project to failure and death. This negative verticality was symbolically announced, or at least hinted at, at the beginning, when Voshchev lay down to sleep in the warm hole that was the beginning of the foundation pit, and was addressed by the man with the scythe.5 The novel ends in the barracks where the men live together and where Voshchev joined the the foundation pit collective at the beginning. The cyclicity of this structure only serves to emphasise the tragic ineffectiveness of their idealistic House project. Chevengur is a literary text that suggests a universal scope. It has been described as a novel, a tragedy, a work of visionary social fiction, a chronicle and a self-critical confession. The world it evokes comprises the space of Russia, at the same time exceeding this space in a metaphysical sense (Chalmaeva in Platonov 1989, 645). Its intentions have been formulated as ‘the trial and ruin of an idea’ (Чевенгур – это испытание и гибель идеи; idem, 640), the idea being nothing 4

Voshchev stood in bewilderment over this still child. Already he did not know where on earth Communism could now be if it were not, first of all, in the feeling and convinced impression of a child. For what purpose did he now need the sense of life and the truth of the universal origin, if this small, true human being, in whom the truth would have become joy and movement, was no more? 5 It is also tempting to interpret Voshchev’s lying down to go ‘to sleep in a warm hole’ as a symbolic and cyclical return to the womb of Mother Earth. Nastia will be buried in the same hole.

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less than that of the universal brotherhood of all mankind, including past and future generations, as inspired primarily by N. F. Fiodorov’s ‘Философия общего дела’ (‘Philosophy of the Common Cause’) (Platonov 1989, 647). It would also be possible to describe Platonov as an anthropologist. According to Elena Tolstaia-Segal, the conflict in the novel is between ‘comradeship’ and blood ties, Communism and the family, spiritual searching and sex – between the ‘horror’ of natural existence and what mankind wishes to be (Segal 1981, 253). This is a puzzling amalgam of topics and oppositions, but it does seem an adequate description of Platonov’s literary and philosophical thematics in general. Moreover, it highlights concepts that are central to our analysis of his work and, for that matter, Russian literature in general. As we shall see in the next chapter, the conceptual grouping of the Family and the House will prove highly problematic for the Soviet vision of human nature and its requisite malleability to ideological purposes. In the utopian city of Chevengur, far away in the Steppes of Russia, Communism has already been achieved, as a logical result of which labour has been abolished because the sun will now work for all (Platonov 1989, 190). Another surprising result of this local revolutionary logic is that houses and gardens are constantly being moved around, which is in itself utterly paradoxical, in contradiction to anything related to the concept of the House. This is all the more surprising when we realise that the Chevengurians are not nomads. They just keep moving their houses within the space of their town – which resembles a freshly ploughed up field – for the purpose of maintaining the revolutionary spirit and fighting the threat of stagnation. In its absurdity, this is a prime example of the literal interpretation of ideological concepts that so inspired Platonov. The city of Chevengur acquires fame for having allegedly achieved Communism, attracting revolutionary enthusiasts from all over Russia including the novel’s protagonists; but the city will be destroyed, first by the very Communards who created this utopia, and ultimately by war, so that in the end Chevengur will lie empty. In the opening lines of the novel, the reader is informed of a type of man still living in Russia, close to a state of nature:


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Есть ветхие опушки у старых провициальных городов. Туда люди приходят жить прямо из природы. Появляется такой человек – с зорким и до грусти изможденным лицом, который все может починить и оборудовать , но сам прожил жизнь необорудованно.6 (Platonov 1989, 5)

For the winter he finds shelter at the house of a sexton (in exchange for ringing the church bell at night). He can repair everything, but lives his own life without equipment of any kind. He does odd jobs during the summer, and these pay for his winter shelter. Zakhar Pavlovich, as he is called, makes wooden utensils, but mostly he and people like him do nothing that resembles ‘work’, certainly not ‘labour’. In other words, these people, living on the periphery of traditional Russian culture, are at least as close to nature as they are to culture. This is a striking opening to a novel that is not about timeless, pristine Russian life forms. It is about a dream of universal utopian social order and justice, a historical break from the unconscious, vegetating life that Russian culture represents. In the opening lines, Platonov allows the man to ‘come out of the woods’, not on the time scale of paleoanthropology but, with the liberty of a great writer, as a contemporary of the modern age – or of all times, since the old, pre-Revolutionary Russian province is the setting here. This suggests a typological view of man’s nature in which his prehistory and his history are coexistent in his cognitive and moral profile.7 I believe this to be the same opposition that Elena Tolstaia-Segal identifies as between the ‘horror’ of natural existence and what mankind wishes to be (Tolstaia-Segal 1981, 253). The people sketched in these pages are fascinating, eccentric loners and wanderers, often visionary in their own ways and so reminiscent of Leskov’s colourful eccentrics8 and the uniquely Russian iurodvye, or ‘holy fools’. In other words, they are the very epitome of Russianness as it has been stylised and sanctioned by Russian literary 6 Near old provincial towns there are ancient fringes of the woods. People come to live there, straight out of nature. There appears such a man – sharp-sighted, his face worn out with sadness, who can repair or fit anything but has lived his own life without equipment. 7 Zamiatin’s implicit anthropology in his story ‘The Cave’ provides a striking parallel here. 8 The so called ‘pravedniki’, or ‘righteous ones’; see Odnodum, and the like.

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tradition. At the same time, however, they are the illiterate or semiliterate homespun philosophers and prophets of the revolutionary message in Platonov’s literary universe. In the opening chapters, we see how Zakhar Pavlovich, having left ‘the wood’ for ever, comes into contact with all kinds of unfamiliar modern tools and contraptions. Because of his natural practical skills, he is given all kinds of tasks to perform, including piano tuning – even though he has never seen a piano before. He explores and masters new things as though they were a matter of magic, but once they are mastered by him – and even improved, at least in his own judgement – he loses interest in them and moves on. All this certainly reflects what we might call Platonov’s anthropology, but underlying his novel is more than anthropology: he is relating an anthropological myth, first about the emancipation of man from nature, acquiring culture, technology and so forth – condensed in the opening images just analysed – and second about his ardent but difficult moral quest for ultimate universal justice and the end of history. When viewed in this light, Platonov’s novel can also be interpreted as projecting central elements of the archaic Prometheus myth, as discussed in Chapter I.1. The Prometheus myth was about man’s emancipation from nature and his acquisition, under the symbol of the light, of culture and its institutions, systematic knowledge and science and technology, including the building of houses. The parallels are striking, even in detail. We are told at the beginning that Zakhar Pavlovich ‘never made anything for himself – neither a family nor a dwelling’ (Себе же он никогда ничего не сделал – ни семьи ни жилища, 5). This exact combination of ‘family’ and ‘house’ is, of course, highly significant in terms of the House Myth. Having neither house nor family means having no history or future; there is no memory that transcends the individual. These are the characteristics of the orphan. Being orphaned and finding a new family is another major motif in Platonov’s work, not only on the level of individual children losing their parents, but also on the symbolic level of the orphaned class of the poor, the bednota. Zakhar Pavlovich leaves the woods and begins to live with a joiner, desperately searching for work to fulfil his life. Now that he has fully ‘adopted’ culture, he has also acquired a working attitude.


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Interestingly, the first thing he does in this situation is to repair the joiner’s house: Через неделю Захар Павлович так заскорбел от безделья, что начал без спроса чинить дом столяра.9 (14)

Then he discovers the railway station and concludes that trains are his real calling in life. He later adopts a young orphaned boy who has been turned out by his stepfather – who has seven children of his own – to beg in the streets. The boy decides that, once he has collected enough bread by begging, he will go to his father’s grave, make himself a dug-out next to it, and live there, because he does not have a house (вырыть себе землянку рядом с могилкой отца и жить там, раз у него нету дома, 23). What he really wants is to join his father in death. This exceptional homeless orphan boy is Aleksandr (Sasha) Dvanov. He is driven by an unquenchable desire to understand mankind and penetrate the world and its meaning. Thus, in the Promethean sense, he is a real son to Zakhar Pavlovich. Dvanov will become the major protagonist of the novel once the Revolution and the Civil War have begun. He will meet Kopionkin, Gopner, and Chepurnyi; they will become his friends and soulmates, and together they will start their revolutionary quest for Chevengur, the whole truth, absolute solidarity and Communism. In between, the reader is presented with descriptions of Russia’s rural population, suffering from revolution and civil war, and living in a ‘pre-Promethean’ state. The reader’s sense of paradox and estrangement is caused by the fact that their living conditions are not represented as completely negative, even though their poverty, hunger and meagre housing are stressed. It is as though their collectivity is the paramount aspect and a precondition for real Communism, reminiscent of the Russian saying ‘в тесноте, да не в обиде’ (‘the more the merrier’; see also Chapter II.6, concerning Slavophile domestic attitudes, and II.34 on the kommunalka). Moreover, they are presented collectively and almost as as though they were a part of nature; that is, the ‘nature’ that Zakhar Pavlovich emerged from in order to join ‘his9 After a week, Zakhar Pavlovich fell into such deep grief because of his idleness that he began to repair the joiner’s house without asking.

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tory’. These people are ‘down to earth’, merged with the Russian landscape and almost submerged in the soil. In the following passage, Dvanov’s friend Kopionkin is riding across the steppe on his horse named ‘Пролетарская Сила’ (‘Proletarian Strength’) when he passes some starving villages: По сторонам, из дальних лощин, поднимался сырой холодный пар, и оттуда же восходил тихими столбами печной дым проголодавшихся деревень. Копенкину нравились и пар, и дым, и неизвестные выспавшиеся люди. - Отрада жизни! – говорил он себе, а холод лез ему за шею раздражающими хлебными крошками.10 (Platonov 1989, 171)

So these people live deep down in hidden ‘distant hollows’, suffering from famine but, at he same time, able ‘to have a good sleep’ (выспавшиеся люди). Somewhat later, Chepurnyi, who comes from Chevengur and will tell Dvanov and Kopionkin about that city, is waking up from a dream of his childhood: Человек и сам постепенно просыпался, наспех завершая увлекательные сны, в которых ему снились овраги близ места его родины, и в тех оврагах ютились люди в счастливой тесноте – знакомые люди спящего, умершие в бедности труда.11 (idem, 173)

The people in this dream image are also said to have lived in ovragi – ravines, or gullies – not merely crowded or cooped up but ‘huddling together in happy narrowness’ (ютились люди в счастливой тесноте) before dying in the poverty of labour. They have lived and died without the consciousness of historic momentum that is so prominent in Dvanov’s (and Platonov’s) thinking. These images 10

On both sides, from distant hollows, damp, cold steam rose, and likewise, in silent columns, smoke rose from the ovens of hungering villages. Kopionkin was pleased by the steam and the smoke, and by the unknown people having a good sleep. – The joy of life! – he said to him self as the cold ran down his spine like irritating bread crumbs. 11 The man [Chepurnyi] gradually woke up, hastily concluding absorbing dreams about the ravines near his birth place, and in those ravines people huddled together in happy narrowness – people whom the sleeping man had known, and who had died in the poverty of their labour.


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evoke people who, as I have suggested, are still in a ‘pre-Promethean’ state. In terms of the domestic myth, we could say – perhaps a little strongly – that they have hardly ‘left the cave’, in a sense reminding one of Prometheus in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound (see above Chapter I.1) in his answer to the chorus: ‘Knowledge they had neither of [...] houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun, [...] but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves’ (Aeschylus 1973 Vol. I, 255). Moreover, the natural phenomenon of the ovrag in Russian cultural perception is opposed to culture and human society. It is often a negative natural space, associated with evil spirits, robbers or outlaws; here, against this background, it here also invites association with the underworld, the realm of the dead; see Van Baak 1997 and 2001. Central to Chevengur is the revolutionary idea of the universal and thorough dynamisation of life. The Communards of that city are imbued with the necessity of realising this idea, and they take up this task with complete consistency, interpreting literally its ideological imagery: Не зная букв и книг, Луй убедился, что коммунизм должен быть непрерывным движением людей в даль земли. Он сколько раз говорил Чепурному, чтобы тот объявил коммунизм странствием и снял Чевенгур с оседлости.12 (192)

Upon reaching Chevengur, Chepurnyi looks down on his city and its surroundings from a neighbouring hill. It is a sunny summer morning, and the inhabitants are exerting themselves in their revolutionary effort to realise Communism, defying or inverting traditional cultural routines, especially domestic routines, because they are symptomatic of bourgeois stagnation. In accordance with their local revolutionary logic, the Chevengurians are striving for a new spatial and economic order by moving houses and gardens about instead of working in the fields: Старый город, несмотря на ранний час, уже находился в беспокойстве. Там виднелись люди, бродившие вокруг города по по12

Knowing neither the alphabet nor books, Lui became convinced that Communism should be an uninterrupted movement of people into distant parts of the earth. Time and again he told Chepurnyi that he should declare Chevengur a wandering city and take it away from its settled way of life.

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лянам и кустарникам, иные вдвоем, иные одиноко, но все без узлов и имущества. Из десяти колоколен Чевенгура ни одна не звонила, лишь слышалось волнение населения под тихим солнцем пахотных равнин; одновременно с тем в городе шевелились дома – их, наверное, волокли куда-то невидимые отсюда люди. Небольшой сад на глазах Алексея Алексеевича наклонился и стройно пошел вдаль - его тоже с корнем переселяли в лучшее место.13 (176-7)

In the course of these constant dynamics, the streets of the city have disappeared. Nevertheless there is some – forced – suggestion of paradoxical revolutionary normality. This is expressed in lexical collocations that, from the point of view of domestic routine, seem out of place: Около одного скошенного заблудившегося амбара лежали под одним тулупом юноша и девушка – [...] Где-то, в гуще домов, протяжно засвистел человек. [...] в ущельях смешанного города.14 (194)

Nobody in the city works anymore, for ideological reasons. The moving about of the houses and gardens is not considered regular work. It is something different. As Chepurnyi explains to his friend Kopionkin, this is a subbotnik, a Saturday of voluntary collective work for Communism: - Почему это нынче в городе дома передвигают и сады на руках носят? – разглядывал Копенкин.

13

The old city, in spite of the early hour, was already full of agitation. You could see there people roaming the fields and bushes around the city, alone or in pairs, but without bundles or belongings. Of the ten bell-towers of Chevengur, not one was ringing; all you could hear was the excitement of the population under the quiet sun of the arable plains, and at the same time houses were moving in the city – they were probably being dragged by people who were invisible from here. Before Aleksandr Aleksandrovich’s very eyes, a small garden stopped and then moved on in an orderly fashion – that too was being transferred to a better place, roots and all. 14 Near a warped barn that had lost its way, a boy and a girl were lying under a sheepskin coat [...] Somewhere, in the thick of the houses, a man uttered a long drawn-out whistle. [...] in the ravines of the mixed up city.


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- А сегодня субботник, - объяснил Чепурный.- Люди в Чевенгур прибыли пешим ходом и усердствуют, чтобы жить в товарищеской тесноте.15 (182)

This obviously cannot last. The moving about of houses and gardens is not only impractical and fruitless but in direct contradiction with nature. As Tolstaia-Segal concluded, Platonov’s heroes tried to organise life within the limits of their own wits, rooting out the old, bad world but ultimately destroying life itself (Tolstaia-Segal, 257). It is a fatal misinterpretation of the goals and means of the Revolution, and it leads to grotesque absurdities.16 Such uncritical revolutionary devotion is ultimately the bearer of death. The pathetic maximalism of the revolutionary programme of the Chevengurians culminated in the paradoxical catastrophic destruction of an archetype of culture: the stability and continuity of the House as the foundation of life, society and history. A striking common feature of the two texts analysed in this chapter is the important role played by holes of one kind or another: the ‘ravines’ and ‘precipices’ (obryv, loshcina, ushchel’e) in Chevengur and the eponymous Foundation Pit, also expressively represented as an ‘abyss’ (propast’). In both cases they are ‘anti-spaces’ of human habitation. They share what I have called negative verticality as an index of the underworld, the realm or House of the dead. Instead of shaping ‘presence’ (construction, house, life, hope), these spaces are negations, the shapes of ‘absence’ (chaos, death), and they are also more closely related to nature than to culture. The mythopoetics and psychopoetics of the House that Platonov developed in his work are characterised by their synthesis of the ‘modern’ and ‘archaic’ to create the timeless, and in this respect he shows a natural affinity with Khlebnikov. 15

– Why are the people moving their houses and carrying their gardens today? – Kopionkin asked, looking around. / – Today is a subbotnik, – Chepurnyi explained. People have come to Chevengur on foot and are determined to live together in comradely narrowness. 16 The maxim of the chairman of a commune that Dvanov and Kopenkin visit on their wanderings could well be considered a motto for the novel as a whole: “Великое дело – коммуна! Усложнение жизни” (“The commune is a great thing! The complication of life”).

33. The House and Socialism. Trifonov, Chukovskaia and Akhmatova In this chapter and those that follow, the literary reflection of the House concept will be explored in the Soviet context. It should not surprise us that the idea of building was central to Socialist (Communist) ideology and propaganda. Beginning in the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties, the building ideology materialised in two ways: gigantic industrialisation projects such as the hydroelectric plant Dneproges, and grand housing projects. The Marxist world-view guiding Soviet policy was based on historical materialism, according to which man’s material and economic surroundings determine his life and mind as well as the development of society. Marxist theory was supposed to formulate scientific predictions concerning the inevitable development of human society, which inspired the political programmes of the Bolsheviks to set Russia on the road to the future by ‘building’, first, Socialism and, ultimately, Communism. It is clear that such a programme implies fundamental and far reaching anthropological claims regarding human nature and the possibility of changing mankind, as individuals and as a species. It is interesting to to relate this, on an abstract level, to the idea of the House Myth, and in particular to some issues from Chapter I.1. There I discussed the archaeologist Hodder, who developed the Domus concept and wrote that it ‘provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial’, further stating that the emergence of human society was linked to the building of houses (Hodder 1990, 39). In the same chapter, I also discussed the semantics of the two Indo-European roots which realised the relationship between human culture, society and house building in the semantic distinction between

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the ‘spatial/constructive’ and the ‘social’ respectively: *dem (‘to build’) and *dom (‘to tame, domesticate’, from the Latin domare); see Benveniste 1969 and Sergent 1995, 293. It was to be expected that Soviet Marxism, in its utopian projections, would take this relationship into account in one way or another, and in Soviet ideological discourse the construction metaphor did indeed play a central role, becoming a master metaphor for the entire Socialist project as such; see Clark 2000, 119-20. ‘Socialist construction’ covered both material building and progress in moral, ideological and political respects, in accordance with Socialist (Communist) utopian thinking about the ‘New Man’ and the ‘New World’ as a consequence of enlightenment positivism. In this context, the historical task of the architect was to give material shape to the ideology, and thus it is only logical that the metaphor should have been applied to Joseph Stalin himself as the supreme architect of Communism, as its zodchii – an archaism in which ‘building’ and ‘creating’ in the cosmogonic, religious sense are united.1 A striking example of this unity is the title of K. I. Finogenov’s portrait of Stalin: Гениальный зодчий коммунизма И. В. Сталин в кремлевском кабинете за разработкой планов великих строек коммунизма2 that also, incidentally, renders seeing the painting itself entirely unnecessary. Stalin’s own 1932 dictum that writers were ‘engineers of human souls’ (Günther 2000, 44) clearly fits the same master metaphor. The previous chapter has dealt in detail with the particular case of Platonov, but it remains to be seen, more generally, to what extent the original Utopian projections about the New Man in the New World were realised during the Soviet period, what aspects of the House Myth were dominant in this process and how this was reflected in literature? Maiakovskii’s poem ‘Идиллия’ (‘Idyll’, 1929) opens almost programmatically: Революция окончилась. Житье чини (The Revolution is over. Repair your life/residence). It is significant that the Russian zit’e here means both ‘(way of) life’ and ‘residence’. As the title suggests, it is an ironic poem about the building of the new life of the 1

See Chapter I.1: Slavic (Russ.) здание < зъдати, and related forms, meaning ‘to create’, ‘to found’, ‘to erect (in stone)’. 2 “The brilliant architect of Communism I. V. Stalin in his Kremlin study working out the great construction plans of Communism.” (Quoted from Papernyi 1996, 231).

The House and Socialism. Trifonov, Chukovskaia and Akhmatova

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Soviet citizen, beset by the cramped housing conditions of the New Economic Policy period: Пахнет липким, пахнет кислым от пеленок и супов. Тесно править варку, стирку, третее дитё родив. Вот Ужо Сулил квартирку В центре кооператив.3

as well as by the still-unconquered bourgeois reflexes and attitudes. The domestic idyll still lies in the fulfilment of the basic human need for shelter, rest, food and warmth, with the archaic hearth as the centre of family life as well as of the House: Обеспечен сном и кормом, вьет очаг семейный дым... И доволен сам домкомом, и домком доволен им.4 3 It smells of something sticky, / something sour, / of nappies and soup. // It is too cramped to manage the cooking, / the washing of the clothes, / when you have just had your third child. // But the cooperative society / has already / promised a small apartment in the centre. 4 Provided / with sleep / and food, / the hearth / sends curling up / family smoke …// And is himself / pleased / with the house committee, / and the house committee / is pleased with him.

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But the domestic, cosy idyll is threatened from outside. The proletarian Revolution proves not to be over yet, but this time it is presumably against the philistine remnants – the господа мещане (petty bourgeois ladies and gentlemen): Революция не кончилась. Домaшнее мычанье покрывает приближающейся битвы гул ... В трубы в самоварные господа мещане встречу выдувают прущему врагу.5 (Maiakovskii 1973, Vol. 4, 161-163)

Most of the maximalist urban building dreams of the nineteen-thirties (to which the term perestroika, later adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev, was already being applied) did not materialise, either because of the enormous costs involved (Klark 2000, 123) or because they had never been more than megalomanic ideological projections that were incapable of realisation (Papernyi 2000, 132-3). The builders of the New World were the new industrial proletariat that emerged as part of the joint collectivisation and industrialisation project. This proletariat had to be housed in barracks, and in the cities communal housing was inevitable – a process characterised by the economist Bayer as ‘a form of bastard urbanisation’.6 Building houses for the workers was now the 5

The revolution is not over yet. // The domestic mumbling / is drowned / by the rumble of the battle drawing near… // Through the pipes / of their samovars / the petty bourgeois ladies and gentlemen // will blow / a welcome / to the enemy breaking loose. 6 See Aleksei Bayer, ‘A Poor Development Model’, in The Moscow Times of 3 August 2007, internet version: ‘During the Soviet period, the country was subject to extremely rapid forced industrialisation. Enormous resources, financial as well as human, were pumped into building factories, power plants, infrastructure and new cities without regard for human, social or environmental costs. An agrarian nation underwent a form of bastard urbanisation, its people swept en masse into barrack-like temporary housing.’ Most Soviet-era residential construction, the prefabricated neighborhoods that abound in every city and town, comprises buildings such as these.


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architects’ most urgent task. Their designs had to comply simultaneously with ideological views on proletarian housing and a shortage economy. The idea, according to the constructivist architect Moisei Ginsburg in 1926, was to ‘adjust a maximum economy of means to the demands of the greatest number of workers’ (Schahadat 2004, 158). The designs developed during the nineteen-twenties were called dom-kommuna, or ‘commune-house’, and they were intended as the material expression of the ideological debate on how to transform post-Revolutionary daily life: such communal housing should form ‘the starting point of Communist culture’ (idem, 159). As Svetlana Boym has expressed it, ‘A new revolutionary (u)topography was going to alter radically the commonplaces of culture and the public and private spaces’, with palaces of culture and workers’clubs, for example, taking the place of cafés and pubs (Boym 1994, 126). A 1940 article in the journal Архитектура СССР (Architecture of the USSR) states that, by the end of the nineteen twenties, some sixty percent of the population lived in communal housing (defined by Vladimir Papernyi 2000, 137 as accommodating one family per room). Such housing, the kommunalki, still exists in Russia today; see Chapter II. 34. A few more typological remarks might not be out of place here concerning some of the major tendencies in Soviet culture that have a bearing on our topic. To begin with, it would be a serious mistake to consider the history of Soviet society and culture as a homogeneous process. In Kul’tura Dva (Culture Two, 1996), his extensive typological analysis of Soviet society under Stalin, Papernyi identifies two types of Russian culture that not only alternate but compete and clash with one another. It is a fascinating exploration, especially where it deals with Stalinist architecture, but I will focus here on its basic theses. ‘Culture One’ dominates the early phase of the Soviet period (until the early nineteen-thirties). It is characterised by revolutionary utopianism (radically breaking with the past in every respect) and egalitarian collectivism (suppressing individuality, as well as gendered differences). It is ‘horizontal’, analytical, rationalist, internationalist, abstractionist, pragmatic and constructivist in its art and architecture. ‘Culture Two’ is represented by the transformations that increasingly came to characterise Soviet culture under Stalin. It is virtually the opposite of Culture One, tending towards the socially conservative or re-

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constructive. The nuclear family is restored to its place as the ‘cornerstone’ of society, and there is a renewed emphasis on the differentiation of gender roles. ‘Vertical’, ‘organic’ and hierarchical in its collectivism, it is also historically-, nationally- and even romanticallyoriented, favouring mythical thinking and promoting hero worship. Examples of the latter include the phenomenon of Stakhanovism (where the hardest workers were treated as heroes), and the setting up of Pavlik Morozov (who denounced his own parents to the secret police, and was later killed), and the heroes of aviation and arctic exploration, as role models.7 Moreover, it is thoroughly symbolic, not only in its attitude to life, but also in its representational art and in its monumental architecture, which combines classical idioms with elements and ornaments from all possible stylistic areas and traditions, including folkore, medieval Russia, the Orient, the Gothic and the Renaissance.8 During the nineteen-twenties (that is, under the dominance of Culture One), the new architecture was oriented towards the communal ideal. A number of communes and communal houses were built with the support of the government. This radical architecture was at odds with traditional family life, which was seen as only a temporary withdrawal from collective existence, ‘reducing it to the level of cohabitation’ (на редукцию семьи до уровня сожительства. Papernyi 1996, 147). Marriage ceased to be recognised as a necessary social institution for the intimacy of family life and procreation, with the result that marriage and divorce, as well as abortion, became exceedingly simple to arrange. One of the more extreme schools of thought recommended the wholesale destruction of the family by the proletariat on the grounds that it was ‘an organ of repression and exploitation’ (Papernyi 1996, 146). Although it never succeeded in solving the practical housing problem, Culture Two would endeavour to reverse all this after 1930, shifting ideological attention away from the radical collectivism of Culture One and encouraging individualism in, for example, clothing, and indeed housing (Papernyi 1996, 152).9 For the domestic situa7

See also Clark 1976 on the master plots of Soviet literature of this period. See Papernyi 1969 and 2000 for penetrating analyses and interpretations of these peculiar aspect of Socialist Realist architecture. 9 Papernyi discusses, as a symptom of this surprising tendency, the contest organised in 1946 for ‘the best individual dwelling houses.’ The post-war five-year plan explic8


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tion of the overwhelming majority of Soviet citizens, however, this was theory only, without any practical consequences, and would remain so for a very long time. The policy that succeeded the ‘New Economic Policy’ after 1929 introduced the command economy of five-year plans, industrialisation and collectivisation. It was these measures that really transformed the social fabric of Russian society into the Soviet society that emerged during the nineteen-thirties (see Dunham 1976), that unique combination of sociological phenomena and individual attitudes that is instantly recognisable in the label homo Sovieticus. According to Papernyj, a new Culture One phase began in the nineteen-sixties, coinciding with and expressing the ideology of ‘destalinisation’. Under Khrushchev, new housing-blocks were built in great numbers, though there were never enough to put an end to the kommunalki. These apartments, which, like the kommunalki, can still be seen, were cheap to build, and very small. They were intended to be provisional, to be replaced later by better ones once Communism had been achieved. Housing in this phase does indeed reflect the Culture One typology: strictly pragmatic, without the triumphant and symbolic motifs and decorations of the elite buildings of Stalinism. It is clear that, during the course of Soviet history, the concept of the House reflected ideological views ranging from radical collectivism to the defence of individualism. Though architecture was seen to be extremely important for the material expression of Socialist and Communist doctrine, the results were such that the basic domestic needs of the people in general, especially in terms of privacy and convenience, were never given a high priority. No doubt this had to do with the actual building policy, but it was also related to the ideological status of the individual in Soviet thinking, irrespective of the prevalent Culture-type. The House, as an anthropological concept, implies a set of basic values that include privacy, personal security and individual freedom, and it is my belief that the doctrinal dogmas that directed Soviet society led to the deliberate repression, or at least to the systematic and planned neglect, of these values. A number of Soviet practices that have come to be regarded as typical were utterly itly stated that provision was needed to ‘help the people, in every way, to build individual dwelling houses’.

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hostile to domesticity in both their intentions and consequences, among them the pressure under which people were encouraged to denounce their neighbours, and indeed members of their own families. The ambiguity of Soviet housing arises from the incompatibility of the state’s desire to exert total control with the individual citizen’s need for private space, freedom and security. Soviet living conditions, and the policy of maintaining them, implied denial of the very nature of human beings in their fundamental relations as individuals towards their families, friends, neighbours and social environment. In the darkest days of Stalinism, even one’s home was not necessarily a safe place.10 The ideological myth that prevailed during this phase of Soviet culture was what Katerina Clark (1981, Chapter 5) has called ‘the Stalinist myth of the Great Family’, according to which the ‘Family’ was the state itself. The populace were ‘brothers and sisters’ whose primary responsibility was to that family, of which Stalin himself was, of course, the symbolic Father. Understood literally and put into social practice, this was a huge anthropological lie, irreconcilable with the needs of real people and their real family ties.11 I have the impression that in Socialist Realist literature – the ‘official’ literature or ‘offitsioz’ – and perhaps more generally in Soviet mainstream literature, topics related to the House Myth are less prominent than we might expect. This means that houses have no special or marked semiotic modelling function. I have already drawn the conclusion that, in the work of a number of avantgarde authors, a catastrophic world-view was responsible for the fact that the implicit logic and motivation of the world was disrupted. This also entailed the loss of normal, ‘canonical’ relations, meaning that any element of the literary world, including the house, could become semiotically marked or highlighted in a new way. In the literature of the ‘officioz’ in particular, nothing like a catastrophe in that sense is present, with the ob10

This may also explain the extraordinary significance of the dacha as a special sphere which would typically provide (a measure of) privacy, safety and ‘sense-ofself ‘. 11 See I. P. Smirnov on ‘negative anthropology’ in connection with Soviet totalitarianism in Smirnov 2000, 24; see also Chapter II.32 for the discussion of Platonov’s thematics in Tolstaia-Segal’s analysis; that is, the novel’s conflict being partly between ‘comradeship’ and blood ties, Communism and the family.


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vious exception of literature about the war. It may be possible to explain this by the fact that, in these texts, the house and domesticity are not prominent as a locus or image of either conflict – let alone catastrophe – or ideal or symbolic projection. This may seem paradoxical given that construction, as we have seen, was such a central ideologeme in the Soviet world, but the ideological pressure of collectivity over individuality, the public over the private, was no doubt of decisive influence here. Also, real housing conditions gave no cause for pride, let alone Socialist Realist glorification. In this connection, Igor Golomstock, in his book on totalitarian art, makes a striking parallel observation regarding Soviet painting of the nineteen thirties and forties, and offers an enlightening explanation: [...] in Soviet genre painting of the thirties and forties we find almost no depictions of interior family scenes. If one were to judge by art alone, one might well come to the conclusion that Soviet man never lived at home or spent time with his family, but instead passed his entire existence in factories, on the fields of collective farms, at party meetings, or surrounded by the marble of the Moscow metro.

The explanation lies in the reality of Soviet life. The old way of life had been destroyed, and the new way had become a nightmarish existence in crowded communal flats or tumbledown village huts left over from Tsarist days. It was impossible, for all the flexibility of the concept of ‘faithfulness in the reflection of reality’, to include any of this in the joyful picture of the new life being propagated by Socialist Realism. It was only at the very end of the Stalin period that genre paintings like Laktenov’s ‘The New Flat’ appeared: the gulf between the image and the reality, however, was so vast that even Soviet criticism coined the phrase ‘the lacquering of reality’. (It is possible, though, that the critical attacks on Laktenov’s painting were occasioned not so much by the implausibility of the scene as by its hidden elements of truth: the expressions of blissful extasy on the faces of the figures betray just how extraordinary it was for an ordinary Soviet family to obtain a flat to themselves.) (Golomstock 1990, 260) In Chapter I.4, while outlining the basic imagery and fabular inventory of the House Myth, I stressed that the normal, basic, uninterrupted and self-contained routines of the domestic sphere (the pro-

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gramme of the House Myth) do not generate a plot development in the formal sense, but of course they can occur in plotless literary texts, especially reminiscences and lyrics. In the face of the negative domestic extremes indicated above, we should ask ourselves whether there was any domestic normality. Obviously there must have been such situations and perceptions for people growing up in the Soviet Union, if only in their early childhood consciousnesses because they would have had no alternative experiences and conceptions at that age. However, few such notions of domestic, familial and social reality would have survived the long-term confrontations of adult life in communal living conditions, and they would certainly not have made it into published literature. On the other hand, we must allow for the considerable capacity of people to accept the inevitabilities in life, including communal density, preferring to focus on small compensatory advantages.12 Moreover, an author may use or construct a mode of normality in order to evoke and stress the contrary by implication, with or without irony. Authors are free to present everyday life in its routine aspects, whatever the setting, and Solzhenitsyn’s Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; 1962) owes its own confrontational impact to this device, presenting one day in a Stalinist labour camp as part of a cyclical routine of uneventful normality and even – almost – as a happy day, apart from the catch at the end: Прошел день, ничем не омраченный, почти счастливый. * Таких дней в его сроке от звонка до звонка было три тысячи шестьсот пятьдесят три. Из-за высoкосных годов – три дня лишних добавлялось...13 (Solzhenitsyn 1962, 135)

12

There is a Russian expression ‘v tesnote, da ne v obide’ (something like ‘the more the merrier’, or, more literally, ‘cooped up, but nobody takes offence’), in which some see a reflection of the Russian mentality and particularly of the Russians’ extraordinary capacity to cope with such hardship. See also Chapter II.6 on Slavophile domestic attitudes, especially Khomiakov. 13 A day had gone by, not clouded by anything, almost happy. * During his time in the camp there were three thousand six hundred and fifty three such days, from one wake up call to the next. The three extra days were added because of the leap years …


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Another example from the same period of Soviet literature, but now dealing with the usual, bleak Soviet domestic normality, is a 1964 poem by V. Lugovoi, entitled ‘Окраины’ (‘Outskirts’) published in Molodaia gvardiia, No. 4, 96. It is described by Vera Dunham as ‘poignantly typical of the post-Stalinist mood’ (Dunham 1976, 248-9). The poem itself, as well as the fact that it was allowed to be published in the leading journal for the Komsomol youth, apparently reflects the spirit of Khrushchev’s relatively liberal rule. As Dunham explains, ‘This kind of poetic, slightly devious muttering enjoyed in the sixties its own rather special audience, also tolerated because there was no reason not to’. I quote her English translation: Neither overpraised Nor maligned, I am simply a rank-and-file Hardworking man, Drawn to the vacant lots On the city’s outskirts, To their inconspicuous grass. For good reason I dream more and more Of the courtyards Of my lost childhood While light blue laundry Still hangs on the line, Forgotten for a while. Outskirts! At early dawn I stand by the window. Women in aprons, I recognise the music Of your wrangles, I hear the clatter of your plates And pots, I hear the shuffle of old slippers. Gas burners in these kitchens Are holy to me. They mean shelter. Housepainters, Metalworkers, Tailors, Sales clerks,

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Teachers – So earthy, one and all, That Earth does not remember them – Chauffeurs and waiters. For good reason I feel akin To their inconspicuous talents, Their simple kindness. I am serene, At ease, The judges whom I accept must Not intrude from the outside. They are the destinies alone Of the people right here, The destinies whose reflection I carry.

Dunham characterises this poetic fragment as ‘the sottovoce of a quiet liberal with populist overtones’. She also sees it as one more ‘indicator of the final embourgeoisement of Soviet society’ (the topic of her book), and states that it is ‘hard to say whether the scene he paints is praised for being proletarian or middle class’. She also stresses the difference between this and the earlier revolutionary pathos of the nineteen twenties, using the canary as the metonymic symbol of the revival of bourgeois domesticity in post-Stalinist Soviet life: […] in which the canary overpowered the militant collective myth a long, long time ago. Unlike Maiakovskii, the oracle of the twenties who had inveighed against meshchanstvo of any kind, the poet of the sixties murmurs a quietist Hosannah to domesticity, no matter how unprepossessing, to the canary no matter how archaic, to the private worlds of the small citizens (250).14

14

I leave out her detailed considerations about the complex sociology of the period, especially the question of social mobility, which is obviously also related to housing; see Dunham (p. 250): ‘If the liberal poet does not now readily extoll public myths of large purpose – neither the worn-out official ones nor the emerging dissident ones – he does take a stand. In this instance, he pledges loyalty to his modest social provenance, and shows reluctance, at least poetically, to leave his tenement. Obviously, in a society as complex as Soviet society today, the massive


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With or without irony, the poet sings the praise of his childhood world of courtyards and communal housing (I dream more and more / Of the courtyards, / Of my lost childhood), and even of the quarrels that are part of it. The noises of the communal kitchen – usually a zone of communal conflicts par excellence (see the second text analysis below) – to him represent the very epitome of domestic shelter; that is, of the House as such: ‘Gas burners in these kitchens / Are holy to me. They mean shelter.’ It is tempting to interpret these holy (!) gas burners in terms of that most archaic of analogies: the hearth as the social and sacred centre of the House, and hence as the human centre of the universe. There is a remarkable parallel here with Zamiatin’s ‘The Cave’; see Chapter II.31. Rather than look into Socialist Realist literature confirming the master metaphor of the Great Family (which is analised in detail by Katerina Clark in her book), I have chosen to look at literary texts in which the Soviet world-view and practice (implicitly Papernyi’s Culture Two) is revealed and ‘deconstructed’. I shall discuss works by three authors who deal with the grim nineteen thirties and especially 1937: Iurii Trifonov, Lidiia Chukovskaia and Anna Akhmatova. I begin with Trifonov’s case because he expounds the topic on a broad, almost sociological scale. Chukovskaia’s and Akhmatova’s harrowing texts, by contrast, focus on the private perception of Stalinist terror, with the House principally related to the notion of personal integrity and safety. Iurii Trifonov’s novel, Дом на набережной (The House on the Embankment), was first published in 1976 in the monthly periodical Дружба народов (Friendship of the Peoples). The house of the title is a huge complex of apartment buildings and services on the embankment of the Moscow River, designed and constructed between 1928 and 1931 by Boris Mikhailovich Iofan (1891-1976), one of the most celebrated architects of the Stalin era. It is a highly impressive building that houses an enormous number of people and, by virtue of its size and its constructive and stylistic characteristics, inevitably became an architectural symbol of the most triumphant phase of Soviet culture. The apartments, which are very spacious and have high ceildrive of urban middle class youth to rise into the establishment is accentuated by the reluctance of some of them to do so.’

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ings, were also provided with such modern amenities and services as central heating, attendant-operated lifts, security systems and a firstclass restaurant. From the beginning it housed the families of the highest ranking revolutionaries and politicians, the most reliable members of the Soviet military, and the cultural and intellectual elite.15 Iofan’s guiding architectural principle was indeed the expression of that period’s defiant self-confidence: ‘the idea of power and of having achieved universal happiness.’16 In other words, in the intended symbolism of Soviet culture, this building can be ‘read’ as a material sign of the utopian project of Socialism – a realisation of the House of the Future. For the Russian readership of today, the building inevitably evokes an entire cultural world-picture in its tragic historical context, and it is this that forms the background to the individual fates of the novel’s characters, some of whom really existed. Not surprisingly, their lives are quite different from what the utopian message would have had us believe. The house on the embankment, then, was not a house in the normal sense. As an apartment building it brought together a multitude of families and individuals whose sociological background was far from average or normal. Thus it represented something like ‘a state within a state’.17 It is no coincidence that it was built opposite the Kremlin, a most appropriate icon of centralist ideology. The inhabitants’ privileges and general station in life caused envy, underlining as they did the paradoxical, if logically inevitable, fundamental inequality of Soviet citizens. Such negative feelings occasionally afflict the novel’s protagonist, living in poverty in the immediate neighbourhood, when he visits classmates who live in ‘the big house’. 15 Its official name is дом ВЦИК и СНК СССР (‘The House of the All-Unionist Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR’). It was also called Дом Правительства (‘The Government’s House’), for obvious reasons. 16 Творческая концепция Иофана с наибольшей полнотой выразила основные идеи 30—40-х годов — идею власти и идею достигнутого всеобщего счастья. Созданные им образы-доминанты, образы-символы (Дом СНК и ВЦИК, проект Дворца Советов, павильоны парижской и нью-йоркской выставок) — в сущности, концентрированное выражение новой социокультурной ситуации. (http://artclassic.edu.ru/catalog.asp?cat_ob_no=17669&ob_no=17670). 17 Величественное здание не вмещалось в понятие “дом”. Скорее, это была страна в стране (www.school.edu.ru::Iofan).


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Its inhabitants are all, in some way, close to the centre of Stalinist power. As a consequence they are extremely vulnerable to Stalin’s reign of terror, and among the first to experience it. As early as 1932, just one year after the first inhabitants moved into it, they were subjected to that wave of Stalinist repression that reached its climax in 1937. More than seven hundred victims have been identified among the occupants of the house. More than three hundred were shot, while the others were consigned to prisons or camps from which they never returned. The most reliable ‘servants of the people’ could become the same people’s ‘worst enemies’ overnight. The treatment meted out to their families varied: sometimes only the study of the arrested person was sealed, the family being allowed to continue living in the rest of the apartment, but for the relatives of those designated ‘enemies of the people’ this was soon found to be an inadmissible luxury. Under a new system introduced by the Commandant’s office, relatives of convicted people were to be housed communally in shared apartments (the kommunalka) – one room per family. Later, they were simply evicted from the house, often without the right to alternative housing of any kind.18 Trifonov himself lived in the house from 1931 until 1939, and he experienced all of this. His father, Valentin Trifonov, was purged by Stalin, after which his family moved from the house on the embankment into a sordid kommunalka. Trifonov incorporates that episode in his literary text: И еще помню, как уезжали из того дома на набережной. Дождливый октябрь, запах нафталина и пыли, коридор завален связками книг, узлами, чемоданами, мешками, свертками. Надо сносить всю эту “хурду-мурду” с пятого этажа вниз. Ребята пришли помогать. Какой-то человек спрашивает у лифтера: “Это чья такая ‘хурда-мурда’?” Лифтер отвечает: “Да это с пятого”. Он не называет фамилии, не кивает на меня, хотя я стою рядом, он знает меня прекрасно, просто так: “С пятого”.- “А куда их?” – “Да кто знает. Вроде, говорят, куда-то к заставе”. И опять мог бы спросить у меня, я бы ему ответил, но не спрашивает. Я для него уже как бы не существую. Те, кто уезжает из этого дома, перестают существовать. Меня гнетет стыд. Мне 18

Lev Iashkin, Дом на набережной — Серафимовича, д. 2., http://artclassic.edu.ru/catalog.asp?ob_no=17673.

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кажется, стыдно выворачивать перед всеми, на улице, жалкие внутренности нашей жизни! Мебель в громадной квартире казенная, она вся остается.19 (Trifonov 1986, Vol.2, 449)

This passage is built up in a most chilling way. The phrase in the opening sentence, – ‘how we moved out of the house on the embankment’ – seems neutral, but its recapitulation towards the end – ‘Those who move out of this house cease to exist’ – has the ring of an existential judicial sentence, which is precisely what it is. Between these phrases, in the conversation between the lift-operator and the third party, Trifonov gives a practical demonstration of how social ostracism functioned. It is very telling that he so directly connects his feeling of shame with his family’s belongings, placed outside and visible to everybody. For him, the intimacy of his home and family has become exposed and vulnerable. He uses a powerful image to convey this sense of existential threat: an anatomic analogy in which the house is the self and its contents, one’s possessions, are the entrails. The Body/House has been turned inside out, but, ironically, only partially so: the passage ends with the surprising information that the apartment’s actual furniture is not theirs! This striking detail of early Soviet life provides a concrete illustration of how the extremes of doctrinal collectivism literally, as well as metaphorically, reduced the domestic sphere of the individual. Thus, this house was not only the material symbol of the state’s defiant ideology; it also became a symbol of the Soviet ideology’s worst derailments, a mockery of the archetypal security, intimacy and self-possession that comes with the image of a House. Being evicted 19

I still remember how we moved out of the house on the embankment. A rainy October, the smell of naphtaline and dust, the corridor blocked up with bunches of books, bundles, suitcases, sacks and parcels. This whole “caboodle” has to be taken down from the fifth floor. The boys have come to help. Somebody asks the lift operator: “Whose caboodle is this?” The lift operator answers: “Oh, this is from the fifth.” He does not mention my name, does not nod in my direction, although I am standing nearby, he knows perfectly well who I am, he just says: “From the fifth.” – “And where are they going?” – “Who knows? Seems like somewhere in the outskirts, so they say.” And again he could have asked me, I would have answered, but he does not ask. It is as if I already do not exist for him anymore. Those who move out of this house cease to exist. I am oppressed by shame. It seems shameful to me to turn inside out in front of everyone, on the street, the wretched entrails of our life! The furniture in the huge apartment is state property, all of it remains there.


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from one’s house is one of the basic fabular motifs of the House Myth, as identified in Chapter I.4. Where the eviction also represents expulsion from society and may even lead to homelessness, the power of the motif is intensified. Individual responses varied, of course, as Trifonov’s novel demonstrates. As a Socialist Realist author, Trifonov is generally seen as untypical, particularly in his later work (including The House on the Embankment), and the fact that this novel passed censorship and was allowed to be published surprised many people at the time. Even when he is evoking past periods of Socialist construction, Trifonov’s characters, and the society of which they are shown to form a part, are a far cry from the ideals of conventional Socialist Realism. His subject is the Soviet past: he is dealing with the nineteen thirties and forties, the horrors of the Stalinist terror (of 1937 in particular) and the harsh period of so-called ‘High Stalinism’ immediately after the war; but even in the nineteen seventies, long after the official destalinisation campaigns of the Khrushchev era, it was not permitted to write about these matters openly and critically. Trifonov does write about them, but in an indirect, implicit or veiled way, using Aesopian formulations that his readers would not have found difficult to decode. The protagonists are neither ‘larger-than-life’ positive heroes, nor stereotypical one-dimensional ‘enemies of the people’. On the contrary, they are often portrayed as antiheroic characters whose attitudes and behaviour are at best ambivalent and at worst completely negative. Trifonov’s style and outlook have been described as existentialist because of the importance he gives to banal detail (byt) and because he typically makes philosophical narrative interventions expounding his own antiheroic, sober-minded view of life. This is not an author who believes that values, morality or human nature have anything to do with class struggle or historical necessity (Hosking 1992, 574); his judgment is low-key, and he tends to be pessimistic as to the possibility of moral improvement (Terras 1985, 483). All these features are, of course, entirely out-of-tune with the official Socialist Realist code and its ‘cult of optimism’ (Vickery 1963), but they also make for strong, convincing images of Soviet life, with all its conflicting moral and emotional pressures. Trifonov’s style is characterised by changing perspectives, frequent shifts of narrative focus and a discontinuous chronology that

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moves between historical layers and episodes. Among the latter, Timmer (1978, 200) has identified 1937-1940 (the childhood of the main protagonists), 1941-1945 (the war years, particularly 1941), 1946-1953 (the student years of the main protagonists, particularly 1947), 1957-1958 (the period of destalinisation) and 1972-1974 (the present from which the narrative views the past). The narrator shifts the viewpoint between that of Dmitrii Glebov, the protagonist, and the other characters, sometimes himself becoming a participant in the story as he remembers and comments upon past events. The novel opens with a family setting in 1972, by which time Glebov is a fairly settled and accomplished academic. He has a dacha, but is soon to move into a new cooperative house (кооперативный дом, a specific form of ownership representing an improvement in housing conditions). Wishing to purchase a table, he goes to a furniture store and recognises one of the people working there as his childhood friend Levka Shulepnikov, who at first ignores him. They have not met for a very long time, and he is shocked by the extent of his old friend’s degradation. This meeting triggers Glebov’s story. It is complicated, ambivalent and, to him, embarrassing to the extent that he would prefer to allow parts of it to remain a suppressed memory: Опять внезапно: совсем раннее, нищее и глупое, дом на набережной, снежные дворы, электрические фонари на проволоках, драки в сугробах у кирпичной стены. Шулепа состоял из слоев, распадался пластами, и каждый пласт был непохож на другой, но вот то-в снегу, в сугробах у кирпичной стены, когда дрались до кровянки, до хрипа "сдаюсь", потом в теплом громадном доме пили, блаженствуя, чай из тоненьких чашечек, - тогда, наверно, было настоящее. Хотя кто его знает. В разные времена настоящее выглядит по-разному. Если честно, Глебов ненавидел те времена, потому что они были его детством.20 (365) 20

‘Again unexpected: a very early memory, destitute and stupid, the house on the embankment, the snowy courtyards, the electric lanterns hanging down from wires, fights in snowdrifts near the brick wall. Shulepa consisted of different layers, broken up into sheets, and every sheet was unlike any other, but what had happened there – in the snow, in the snowdrifts near the brick wall, when the fighting would go on till it bled, till someone would wheeze, “I surrender,” and afterwards, in the huge warm house, in a state of bliss, drinking tea from dainty little cups – all that was probably


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It is a tale of childhood and coming of age in the Soviet Union. Its historical setting includes some of the most eventful and tragic episodes of Soviet history, though as I have already indicated these – and they include the death of Stalin in 1953 – tend to be dealt with by hints and implications rather than direct reference. Coming of age in this case meant not only coming to terms with the usual thrills, fears and challenges that childhood and youth entail, but also coping with the social and political consequences of the Soviet system, including life in communal housing and blatant social inequality. As we have just seen, for Dmitrii Glebov this story is as much about remembering as wanting to forget the painful but irremediable past. The narrator is exploring complicated memories that are at once dear (because they are about the unique and uniquely-valuable experiences of childhood and youth) and painful (because they entail renewed confrontations with difficult moral issues and choices). In this particular case the coming of age may be tainted by the fact that it takes place in the Stalinist Soviet Union, which means that some of the moral issues that people faced, irrespective of their age, were uniquely false and often insoluble. They were false because they originated, not from life, but from an abstract, powerful, revengeful and unscrupulous authority, and they were intended to elicit reactions inspired by existential fear. We follow Dmitrii Glebov in his development from school age to adulthood, during which friendships play an important role but there are also the tensions and hardships of an unusually cruel and aggressive world. It is a world in which even the very young must be circumspect in forming alliances, and aware of the dangers that surround them. From the beginning of Glebov’s retrospective story, we sense that his life is overshadowed by anxiety and uncertainty, though their causes are not always easy to identify. We see this clearly in the long and ambivalent struggle between him and his friend, Levka Shulepnikov. It is a struggle for power that begins as soon as Levka comes into Glebov’s class at school. Levka’s social identity is unclear and generally shrouded in a sense of mystery, of which he is himself the creator. He jealously guards and strives to enhance his mysteriousness real, then. Although, who knows? At different times the present looks different. To be honest, Glebov hated those days, because they had been his childhood.’

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and unpredictability in order to maintain his power over his classmates, a characteristic that continues into his student years. He likes to arouse envy in others, as happens when he and Glebov are reacquainted as students in 1947 and he shows off a rare and expensive American Air Force leather jacket. Levka’s elite status is indicated by the fact that he lives in the big house, together with his mother and two successive stepfathers, both of whom seem often to be enigmatically absent, but the feelings of apprehension and unhappiness that he excites in Glebov are also connected with the fear that all Soviet citizens felt in those times, acquired as a second nature, and indispensable to public survival. The root of Glebov’s particular unhappiness is his sense of social and economic inferiority to a number of his classmates (but particularly Levka Shulepnikov), all of whom live in the big house on the embankment. This social inequality is reflected in expressive spatial terms by the juxtaposition of this house with the poor communal housing on the courtyards of Deriuginskii Lane (Дерюгинский переулок; from deriuga, ‘sackcloth’), where Glebov has always lived with his parents and grandmother: Серая громада висла над переулочком, по утрам застила солнце, а вечерами сверху летели голоса радио, музыка патефона. Там, в поднебесных этажах, шла, казалось, совсем иная жизнь, чем внизу, в мелкоте, крашенной по столетней традиции желтой краской. Вот и ‘несоответствие’! Те не замечали, другие плевать хотели, третьи полагали правильным и законным, а у Глебова с малолетства жженье в душе: то ли зависть, то ли еще что. Отец работал на старой конфетной фабрике мастером-химиком, а мать - и то, и это, а в общем-то ничего. Образования не было.21 (373) 21

The gray mass hung over the small lane in the morning, standing in the sunlight, and in the evening, from above, radio voices and music from gramophones came down. Up there, in the lofty [literally ‘under-the-sky’] apartments, it seemed that life was completely different from that below, in its meanness, painted yellow according to century old tradition. That was the ’disparity’! Some people did not notice it; other people did not give a damn about it; still others thought it was right and legitimate, but Glebov, since his early childhood, had felt a burning in his soul: whether it was envy, or something else still, was not clear. His father worked as a master chemical worker in an old sweets factory; his mother did all sorts of jobs, but in general, nothing much. No education.


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Visiting his class-mates inevitably means being confronted by their privileged lives in their spacious and luxurious apartments, but the barriers that he faces are physical as well as psychological: they are the barriers of security and control that characterise this bastion of the Soviet elite: Глебов не очень-то охотно ходил в гости к ребятам, жившим в большом доме, не то что неохотно, шел-то с охотой, но и с опаской, потому что лифтеры в подъездах всегда смотрели подозрительно и спрашивали: “Ты к кому?” Надо было называть фамилию, номер квартиры, иногда лифтер звонил в квартиру и выяснял, действительно ли там ждут в гости такого-то.22 (379)

At the same time, Glebov is fascinated by this unfamiliar social atmosphere – its sense of superiority and its decadence. His attitude towards it is complex and ambivalent, and will remain so, but in the course of time he manages to come to terms with social inequality, so that his friendships do not suffer from it. Given what it means to live in the squalor and poverty of communal housing, this is no mean feat. Trifonov makes much of this aspect of Soviet life: Глебов привык и к своей квартире, когда возвращался в нее после посещений большого дома. Первое время бывало как-то тоскливо, когда он видел вдруг, будто со стороны, свой кривоватый домишко с бурой штукатуркой; когда поднимался по темной лестнице, по которой следовало идти осторожно, потому что ступени были местами выбиты; когда подходил к двери, обсаженной, как старое одеяло заплатами, множеством табличек, надписей и звонков; когда погружался в многослойный керосиночный запах квартиры, где всегда что-нибудь кипятилось в баке и всегда кто-нибудь варил капусту; когда мыл руки в бывшей ванной комнате, тесной от досок, закрывавших саму ванну, в которой никто не мылся и не стирал белье, а на досках стояли принадлежавшие разным жильцам тазы, корыта; когда многое дру22

Glebov went, rather reluctantly, to visit the boys who lived in the big house – or rather not reluctantly: he did indeed go willingly, but also with a certain caution, because the lift operators at the entrance always looked with suspicion and asked: ‘Who is it you want to visit?’ He was required to give the family name and the number of the apartment. Sometimes the lift operator would make a telephone call to the apartment, to find out whether they were really expecting a visitor.

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гое видел, ощущал, замечал, возвращаясь от Левки Шулепникова или от кого-нибудь из большого дома, но понемногу все сглаживалось, мягчало и переставало задевать.23 (382)

At home, Glebov often feels uncomfortable or embarrassed. His father tries to dissuade him from establishing close ties with the boys in the big house. He covertly warns him, hinting that those people have a different way of life (384). He sees danger even in friendships among boys, and he advises his son in general terms – though they gain a particular relevance when seen as a strategy for survival in the Soviet context – to follow the rule of the streetcar ‘not to lean out of the window’ (не высовываться: Trifonov, 383) or ‘stick [his] neck out’. Only his grandmother, baba Nila, understands him. She is the one on whom their house depends. Her role is ‘to carry the house from morning till evening’ (она тащила дом, с утра до поздноты на ногах; 395). After the death of Glebov’s mother, the house had become desolate, and his father had taken to drink. Since then Baba Nila had supported the weight of the household: ‘the whole house was on her’ (весь дом был на ней). However fragile her person, and however subordinate her role in the story, only she represents the continuity and stability of the House archetype, even in communal housing. In fulfilling this responsibility and never giving up, she also confirms the archetypical female role, which seems to elude political contingencies. Her death (478) marks Glebov’s leaving of the house – his coming of age as a Soviet citizen – because it coincides with the crucial episode 23

Glebov also became less discontented with his own apartment when coming back to it after visiting the big house. At the beginning he felt somehow miserable when he suddenly saw, with a new objectivity, his own crooked hovel with its brown plastering; when he went up the dark staircase, on which one had to walk carefully because the steps were knocked out in some places; when he approached the door that was clad, like an old patched blanket, in a multitude of name-plates, inscriptions and doorbells; when he plunged into the layered kerosine stench of the apartment where there was always something boiling in a kettle and where someone was always cooking cabbage; when he washed his hands in what used to be a bathroom, cramped because of the shelves that shut off the bathtub itself in which nobody washed either themselves or laundry, but where various basins and tubs belonging to different inhabitants were kept on the shelves; when he saw, felt, and noticed a lot of other things coming back from Levka Shulepnikov’s or from somebody else’s in the big house, but little by little it all abated, softened, and stopped offending.


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in his life when he publicly betrays a friend to safeguard his own career, as we shall see. As the earlier quotation from page 365 made clear, the social and cultural differences between the big house and Deriuginskii Lane are marked vertically; that is, along the dimension of hierarchy and power. ‘On the ground’ there is the dismal world of kommunalki, where antisocial families terrorise their neighbours, where gangs are formed and criminal violence frequently breaks out, the inevitable consequences of forcing people to live together in cramped housing conditions. The vertical difference between this world and that of the house on the embankment is both emphasised and symbolised by the physical height of the latter. Its lofty apartments (‘поднебесные этажи’) provide a panoramic view of the city by courtesy of its serviced elevators. It is down below, in the ‘social jungle’ of Deriuginskii Lane, that these worlds meet and clash in the fights that break out among their respective young male occupants. It should not surprise us that, in such a setting, young Glebov, who partakes of both worlds, quickly comes to realise the ambivalence and uncertainty of his position. During the war, many of his friends from the house are killed, or disappear. His student years (the late nineteen forties) are marked by a continuation of his contacts with those few who have survived. At first it seems as though, after the war, the big house has disappeared from his life, as though that chapter in his life has ended, along with his childhood, and the house has lost all its former ambiguous and paradoxical appeal for him. But not quite. It is the house that has always exerted its emotional and moral force upon him, and there is still one person there to whom he can be drawn: Большой дом, так много значивший в прежней жизни Глебова тяготил, восхищал, мучил и каким-то тайным магнитом тянул неодолимо,-теперь, после конца войны, отпал в тень. Не к кому стало туда ходить. Кроме Сони Ганчук.24 (403)

24

The big house that had meant so much in Glebov’s previous life – oppressing him, enrapturing him, tormenting him, and like some secret magnet attracting him irresistibly – now, after the war, fell away into the shade. There was nobody left there to go to. Except Sonia Ganchuk.

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Now, as a student, he becomes a frequent caller at the apartment of this former school friend, Sonia Ganchuk. Her father is a famous and respected academic, a Professor at the Literature Institute where both he and Sonia study. He has also been a revolutionary. Glebov is himself beginning to be attracted by the prospect of an academic career, and the big house begins to enchant him again – in a new way. He has changed, and life in the house has also changed. In the author’s words, he ‘creeps back’ into the ‘aura of the big house’ (вползал в ауру большого дома). There is understandable reluctance here: the ‘aura’ of the house has inevitably been affected by the post-war restoration of Stalinism – the picking up of grim routines that the disaster of the war only temporarily interrupted: Постепенно и заново Глебов вползал в ауру “большого дома”. Лифтеров в подъездах теперь не было. И жильцы как будто не те, что прежде: вид попроще и разговор не тот. Но в лифтах, однако, по-прежнему настаивались необычные запахи: шашлыков, чего-то рыбного, томатного, иногда дорогих папирос или собак.25 (405)

In the course of time he becomes infatuated with Sonia and declares his love for her during a new year’s party for students at her parents’ dacha. Looking out of the window, Glebov is suddenly struck by the idea that ‘all this could become his house’; he ‘knows that all of this belongs to him’, just as he feels that Sonia now ‘belongs to him’: [...] и вдруг - приливом всей крови, до головокружения почувствовал, что все это может стать его домом. И, может быть, уже теперь - еще никто не догадывается, а он знает - все эти пожелтевшие доски [...], фотографии, скрипящая рама окна, крыша, заваленная снегом, ‘принадлежат ему’! Была такая сладкая, полумертвая от усталости, от хмеля, от всего истома ... [...] Он обнимал худое, покорное, мягкое, худые плечи, худую спину, в этом теле не было 25

Gradually Glebov crept back again into the aura of ‘the big house’. There were no more lift operators at the entrance. And the occupants, it seemed, were different from the earlier ones: they looked simpler, and their conversation was different. But as before, unusual smells hung in the lifts: of shashlyk, something fishy, or tomatoes, or of expensive cigarettes, or of dogs.


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никакой тяжести, но оно принадлежало ему – вот что он чувствовал, - принадлежало ему вместе со всем-со старым домом, елями, снегом; 26 (421)

His strong urge for possession may be motivated by a desire to escape from his kommunalka background, to repair what he feels lacking in his self-esteem, social standing and background. However, it is important to bear in mind that this sudden urgent feeling is projected on to the dacha; that is, on to the house and demesnes that he identifies with his beloved and all that she stands for. It is noteworthy that the possessive imagery in this passage is developed on the basis of what we might call ‘expansive metonymy’: the sense of possession is built up concentrically, beginning with himself and then taking in important metonymic elements of the dacha: its shelves, its pictures, and its roof covered with snow. In the second part of the passage it is Sonia’s body that forms the starting point of the metonymic expansion, now encompassing the house and its surroundings. This structure of expansive metonymy appears to be a universal semiotic strategy for the expression of such fundamental relations between the self and the world. His dream of marrying her, and thus of acquiring her and her house (and not only the dacha, of course), is a prime example of the dynastic principle of the House Myth, set in motion in this case by the fabular motif of ‘coming into a new house through marriage’. The principle of ancestral cyclicity inherent in the mythical structure as an abstract pattern is not present here, which is logical: ‘entering a new house’ for an individual is a unique moment of fulfilment of one’s life plot, of one’s here-and-now becoming part of the mythical structure, but it has the potential to lead to the equivalent of the next fabular step of the House Myth: ‘founding a new house’. The suddenness and physical impact of these feelings evidently take him by surprise. This is an indication of their primordial and ar26

… and suddenly – through a rush of all his blood that made him dizzy – he felt that this could become his house. And, maybe, already now – nobody else suspected it yet, but he already knew – all these yellowed bookshelves …, the photographs, the creaking window-frame, the roof buried under the snow, ‘belonged to him’! He felt such a sweet languor, from complete exhaustion, such a glow of pleasure, from everything … He embraced this thin, submissive, soft body, these thin shoulders, this thin back. There was no weight at all in this body, but it belonged to him – this was what he felt – it belonged to him, together with the old house, the spruces, the snow …

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chetypal nature, their momentous emotional announcement of a turning point in life. The fact that his relationship with Sonia will end without marriage, though crucial for the story’s plot, is irrelevant to the psychological and functional significance of the mythical text here. By a gradual process, Glebov becomes Professor Ganchuk’s most trusted graduate student, and in spite of his and Sonia’s attempts to keep their relationship secret the Professor begins to treat him as a future son-in-law. When Professor Ganchuk is made the victim of an unjust ideological attack, levelled at him in the treacherous, anonymous way that Stalinism perfected, Glebov is inescapably drawn in as a pawn in the game. Trifonov’s representation of the way this process worked is masterly. To begin with, Glebov hopes that Levka, through his influential connections, will be able to help him, but it is a forlorn hope, coinciding with the beginning of Levka’s own gradual fall from grace. Once Levka’s second step-father loses his political influence, the narrator tells us, stressing once more the dynastic motif, their ‘house fell’ (дом рухнул). In the interests of his own academic career, Glebov agrees to testify against Professor Ganchuk (who is consequently disgraced), and ends his relationship with Sonia after a night spent in the big house. It is the climactic moment of the story: Утром, завтракая на кухне и глядя на серую бетонную излуку моста, на человечков, автомобильчики, на серо-желтый, с шапкою снега дворец на противоположной стороне реки, он сказал, что позвонит после занятий и придет вечером. Он больше не пришел в тот дом никогда.27 (489-90)

This abrupt, laconic winding up of Glebov’s relationship, not just with Sonia but with the house – the central relationship of the entire novel – is prepared for and offset by a reference to the great panoramic view from the apartment (which could almost have been his), over the embankment, over the bridge and towards the palace on the opposite side

27

In the morning, taking breakfast in the kitchen and looking at the gray concrete curve of the bridge, at the small figures, at the small cars and at the gray-yellow palace capped with snow on the other side of the river, he said that he would call after classes and come in the evening. He never came to that house again.


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of the Moscow River – a mocking and ironic House image in this context. Inwardly, Glebov is saying goodbye to all this. This central story, or the sequence of events that make up this story, is what Glebov remembered in 1972, the night after meeting Levka again in the furniture shop. The narrative now moves forward to 1974. Glebov has made a success of his scholarly career and even earned the right to travel abroad to attend a conference in Paris, where, by coincidence, he meets former occupants of the big house. In the final pages, the narrator himself pays a visit to old Professor Ganchuk. Sonia having died several years earlier, they walk together to the cemetery to visit her grave. When they arrive, the cemetery is about to close, and the gatekeeper refuses to let them in. During the ensuing quarrel it transpires that the gatekeeper is Levka. He grants them admission, but when they return after visiting the grave, he has disappeared. The novel ends with a brief glimpse of the house on the embankment from the point of view of Levka, who observes it from the trolleybus on his way home that evening. His view is quite different from any of the earlier ones we have seen: Спустя несколько минут он проезжал мостом через реку, смотрел на приземистый, бесформенно длинный дом на набережной, горящий тысячью окон, находил по привычке окно старой квартиры, где промелькнула счастливейшая пора, и грезил: а вдруг чудо, еще одна перемена в его жизни?...28 (494)

Now the house, which we are used to thinking of as high, is described as ‘squat’, and even ‘shapeless’. This is the perception of a former inhabitant of the house who, after a privileged, golden childhood, has been expelled from Paradise, so to speak. This rather reinforces the narrator’s comment upon Glebov’s sceptical attitude towards his own past and what really happened then: В разные времена настоящее выглядит по-разному (At different times the present looks different; 28 Some moments later he drove across the bridge over the river, looked at the squat, shapeless long house on the embankment, shining with thousands of windows, sought, as usual, the window of the old apartment where his happiest moments had raced by, and day-dreamed: what if, by a sudden miracle, his life were about to undergo another change?...

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365). Levka picks out the window of the apartment ‘where his happiest moments had raced by’. This is, essentially, a condensed image of the lost House of Happy Childhood, the projection of his yearning, which he hopes to regain through some unimaginable miracle. The House on the Embankment was a remarkable literary success, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece for historical as well as literary reasons. At the same time it demonstrates the impact of the House image and the extent of its capacity to generate a wide variety of cultural elements and to integrate them into a complex cultural sign. This house reflects an image of Soviet life in some of its crucial phases that has an enduring significance for later generations. It can be seen as a symbol of the Soviet era, in all its aspects. Since the publication of Trifonov’s novel in 1976, the house has been commonly referred to by the title he gave it, and in 1989 the Museum of the House on the Embankment (Muzei ‘dom na naberežnoi’) was founded by public initiative.29 My second case here is Lidiia Chukovskaia’s ‘Софья Петровна’ (‘Sof’ia Petrovna’), also known as ‘Опустелый дом’ (‘The Empty House’). This tale (povest’) was written during the winter of 1939-40 and first published in France in 1965. It is a gripping story about Stalinist repression, particularly the way in which its unimagineable ruthlessness was perceived by its victims. Its original title was ‘Sof’ia Petrovna’, but the French publisher’s choice of ‘The Deserted House’ (’Опустелый дом’) can be explained thematically. Oddly, the heroine’s name was also changed – to Ol’ga Petrovna – but I shall be using her original name. Quotations are taken from internet sources. It is the story of Soviet citizens who become victims of what was formulated during the famous 22nd Congress of the Communist Party as: “грубейшие нарушения социалистической законности, злоупотребление властью, необоснованные репрессии.”30 Its author, Lidiia Chukovskaia, left Leningrad just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The manuscript survived the war and the blockade, and was miraculously returned to her, but for obvious reasons there was no pos29

The authorities were opposed to the idea; see: http://museumdom.narod.ru ‘The most flagrant violation of Socialist legality, abuse of power and unfounded repression.’ The Russian quotation is from the publisher’s introduction to Chukovskaia 1965, 6.

30


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sibility of its being published in the Soviet Union. Its publication in Paris in 1965 was without her knowledge. The heroine, Sof’ia Petrovna, becomes a typist after her husband dies. She lives in a one-room apartment in a communal building, together with her son Kolia. As a young widow, she has to provide for herself and her son, who successfully passes the entrance examinations for the technology institute. She finds employment at a publishing-house and is very diligent and successful, as are her son Kolia and his inseparable friend Alik. The boys are enthusiastic students and members of the Komsomol, a Communist organisation for young people aged sixteen and over. They are the enthusiasts on whose devotion and drive the early Soviet endeavour depended. The designation ‘enthusiast’ was an official prestigious epithet, applied not simply in recognition of individual temperament but as an indicator of ideological achievement, particularly by the Komsomol, in the Socialist education of the masses.31 Kolia proves to be a very talented young engineer, and on one occasion his portrait even appears on the front page of the Pravda, with the caption: “Энтузиаст производства, комсомолец Николай Липатов” (“Production Enthusiast, Komsomol member Nikolai Lipatov”). These youngsters are sincere patriots, naïvely but understandably trusting the newspapers and their clever rhetoric that extolls one incredible success after another under the infallible leadership of the party, and especially Stalin. Sof’ia Petrovna and her friends and colleagues also have no reason not to believe the worrying and increasingly paranoid newspaper stories of the secretly-plotting ‘enemies of the people’, ‘vrediteli’ (saboteurs) and spies. It is 1937, and there is growing sense of anxiety that nobody is to be trusted beyond the small circle of one’s closest friends, but even people whom she has always thought of as exemplary citizens are being arrested. She is astonished to learn that the director of the publishing-house where she works has been ‘unmasked’ as a saboteur and enemy of the people. Naïvely, she expresses this astonishment in a letter to her son Kolia, who now lives in Sverdlovsk and works at the Uralmash factory, enjoining him, as an honest Komsomol member, ‘to be vigilant’ 31

‘Трудовой энтузиазм’ (‘labour enthusiasm’) was the traditional ideological collocation. There was a sovkhoz ‘Èntuziast’, and in a number of cities, including Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Pskov, there are still boulevards named ‘Prospekt Èntuziastov’ after the people so designated; see Mokienko & Nikitina 1998.

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(‘byt’ bditel’nym’), a phrase often heard in those paranoid days. Following the director’s arrest, other workers at the publishing-house are dismissed for their earlier loyalty to him, and subsequently slandered and maligned at a meeting on account of their social background. Among them is the firm’s best typist, Sof’ia Petrovna’s good friend Natal’ia. For speaking up in defence of her friend during the meeting, Sof’ia Petrovna will herself fall victim to the malignant madness of the ‘increased vigilance’ campaign, and be forced to leave her job. Against the background of ever-increasing intimidation, repression, arrests, sudden nocturnal raids and disappeаrances without trace, Sof’ia’s own son Kolia is arrested and disappears. Sof’ia, like so many others, now goes through the dark night of Stalinism. Unable to believe the unbelievable, she at first decides that there must have been an error – that Stalin cannot possibly know what is happening – and writes naïve letters to the Leader in person, imploring him to rectify the mistake. She does not yet understand that this is both useless and dangerous, rendering her son, and herself, more vulnerable. She expects him home soon, confident that his arrest is simply a case of mistaken identity – another Lipatov, accused of Trotskyism. In order to find out whether Kolia is in prison in Leningrad, awaiting trial, Sof’ia decides to go to the office of the public prosecutor, but she finds herself at the infamous political prison at Shpalernaia Street. Looking at the anonymous building, she asks herself: ‘Can it really be that Kolia is here, in this house, behind these bars?’ (Неужели это может быть, что Коля здесь, в этом доме, за этими решетками?). Then she notices a long queue, mostly of women, lined up in front of another house, ‘a normal house, without any signs’ (дом обыкнoвенный, на нем никаких вывесок). It is number 28, a down-at-heel, dirty private residence in which there is a fireplace, a broken mirror and a marble Cupid without wings. On the majestic staircase, a woman issues Sof’ia Petrovna with a number: Дом № 28 оказался облупленным особняком почти у самого моста. Софья Петровна вошла в парадную — роскошную, но грязную, с камином, с огромным разбитым трюмо и мраморным купидоном без одного крыла. На первой ступеньке


величественной лестницы, [...], лежала женщина. – Записываться? – спросила она, подняв голову.

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(Ch. 9)32

This former private residence is now an Anti-House of bureaucracy,33 an evil space that represents a vicious circle. The wives, mothers or sisters of ‘saboteurs, terrorists, and spies’ line up and are issued with numbers. On the sudden opening of a small door there is an instantaneous rush to a single window at the top of a seemingly-endless staircase inside the building, a window that can be opened and closed at will. They come here in the hope of finding out what has happened to their arrested relatives, or to pass on money for them. The waiting seems interminable. During the next five hours, Sof’ia is sent from one room to another five times, only to find herself back in the room where she began, with fifty-nine people between her and the window. It is a vicious circle indeed. When at last it is her turn, she asks where her son is who was arrested by mistake; the man behind the window looks through a card-index, confirms that he is there but adds that no information is to be given about him. Next please! She will stand in line for the ‘Big House’, as it is also called, for more than a year, supported by her friend and former colleague Natal’ia (who lost her job on the spurious grounds of having made an ideological typing error and will eventually poison herself), and Kolia’s friend Alik (who has been excluded from the Komsomol for not betraying Kolia, cannot now find a job and will eventually be arrested himself). She will learn to find her way in house number 28 and its routines; she will learn to read the other women’s fates from their faces. All she will hear of Kolia is that he has confessed to an act of terrorism, and has been sentenced to ten years in a camp. She will never be told where. She will continue to hope for a sign, a letter from Kolia, news about his case, the restoration of justice. She will wait in vain.

32

House number 28 revealed itself to be a shabby private residence almost next to the bridge. Sof'ia Petrovna went through the main entrance hall, luxurious but dirty, with a fireplace, a huge broken cheval-glass and a marble Cupid without wings. On the first step of the majestic staircase [...] a woman was lying down. – Do you want to register? – she asked, raising her head. 33 As we have just seen, it also represents the ‘prison-house’, a tradional variant of Anti-House.

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In the meantime, she becomes the victim of insinuations and is no longer allowed to work at the publishing house. She will never be able to find regular work again because of her son’s having been arrested (‘repressirovannyi’), because having relatives arrested or imprisoned made one suspect and led to social isolation. Under this succession of blows, Sof’ia Petrovna suffers a mental breakdown. Just over a year after Kolia’s arrest and disappearance, word is spread that people have been released from prison. She first hopes, then suspects, imagines and finally believes that Kolia will now come home. Having learned to avoid contact with others, let alone tell them about her son’s arrest, she now begins to tell of his release, developing a painfully and tragically disturbed fantasy of his imminent return. One morning, under the influence of her delusion, she tells the people in the communal kitchen that she has received a letter from Kolia, making up its wildly optimistic content. She decides to curl her hair and clean her room. At this point, she notices an envelope in the mailbox. It is a real letter from Kolia, delivered by a kind person at considerable personal risk, telling her that he has been wrongly convicted of being part of a terrorist organisation; he has also been badly beaten and expresses the hope that she will write letters in his defence. Sof’ia Petrovna hurries with the letter to a trusted fiend, whom she finds sitting on a trunk in her apartment, which is completely empty apart from the telephone, waiting to be deported the following morning. Her husband, a famous medical practitioner, has already been sent into exile for fifteen years. The friend reads the letter, and takes Sof’ia Petrovna to the bathroom because the telephone is bugged. There she warns her not to file any protests, explaining that the punishment for sending such a letter as Kolia has sent is very severe and adding that another application from Sof’ia Petrovna would only remind the authorities to deport her… She returns home and burns the letter. The process of moral and social isolation that Sof’ia Petrovna has been through is also dramatically reflected in her communal living conditions (the so-called obshchezhitie). In Chapter 3, she recognises that it is both natural and important for her to have started work, but very much regrets the loss of her former apartment because, with young Kolia growing up, she would have liked him to have a room of his own. During the Revolution, however, the number of occupants even there had been increased, reducing the amount of space per per-


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son, the very revolutionary process that had led to communal housing, succinctly expressed in the Russian noun ‘uplotnenie’, from the verb uplotnit’ (‘to concentrate’, ‘to pack’): Их уплотнили еще во время голода, в самом начале революции. В бывшем кабинете Федора Ивановича поселили семью милиционера Дегтяренко, в столовой семью бухгалтера, а Софье Петровне с Колей оставили Колину бывшую детскую.34

Kolia, however, who has already imbibed the collective spirit, finds it only fair and explains to her the ‘revolutionary sense’ of ‘packing’ bourgeois apartments (революционный смысл уплотнения буржуазных квартир). Why should the Degtiarenko family live in a basement while he and his mother occupy a spacious flat? She has to agree with him, of course, but still clings to some of her bourgeois values. If only Degtiarenko’s wife were not such a mucky pup! Even in the corridor you can smell the sour cabbage odour from her room, and she never opens a window! Besides, her twin boys are already sixteen years old and they still cannot spell properly! Sof’ia Petrovna finds some compensation for the loss of her apartment, however, in being chosen unanimously as apartment plenipotentiary. It is as though she were now managing her own apartment, and she acquits herself very diligently in this capacity. In general, apartment number 46 is a quiet and orderly apartment, unlike number 52 above it where there is fighting almost every weekend. Sof’ia Petrovna grows accustomed to living in one room with her son, although for some time she dreams of finding a more spacious apartment – a dream that loses its edge somewhat once Kolia and Alik are sent to the machine factory in the Urals. She carefully keeps her room clean, has it painted and has the door repaired. She tends to spend less time at home, preferring to earn extra money through overtime at the office, but her friend Natal’ia often spends evenings with her. In this way, even one room can represent the basic values of one’s own space, quiet, privacy and even pride, and perhaps it does so all the more in34

They had already been ‘packed’ during the famine at the very beginning of the Revolution. In Fedor Ivanovich’s former study, the policeman Degtiarenko was housed with his family; in the dining room lived a bookkeeper’s family, and Sof’ia Petrovna and Kolia were allotted the former nursery.

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tensely in a communal apartment because the other domestic functions are shared. Under the surface of communal living, however, there are hidden tensions. These can be based on social differences and differences of temperament, but the most dramatic developments are related to the Stalinist terror campaign, which brings out and rewards the worst in people by its psychological mechanisms of slander, providing anonymous information against others and implicating them in wrongdoing. Sof’ia Petrovna’s domestic life changes following her son’s arrest. Once she begins to queue in front of the Big House, she spends hardly any time at home, the queue becoming ‘a kind of a new world’ for her:35 Дни и ночи ее проходили теперь не дома и не на службе, а в каком-то новом мире — в очереди. Она стояла на набережной Невы, или на Чайковской — там скамейки, можно присесть, или в огромном зале Большого Дома, или на лестнице в прокуратуре. Уходила домой поесть или поспать она только тогда, когда Наташа или Алик сменяли ее.36 (Chapter 10)

However, the terror does not stay outdoors. Although Sof’ia Petrovna tries to hide the fact that her son has been arrested, it inevitably becomes known among the other inhabitants of apartment number 46. One evening, she is taking a bath and thinks over the frightening occurrences at her office – Natal’ia’s dismissal in particular – and Alik’s exclusion from the Komsomol. As she does so, she hears in the kitchen a discussion among some of the other occupants, the policeman’s wife, Valia, and the nurse. It warrants extensive quotation be35

Queuing, of course, has always been a characteristic of Soviet life, a Soviet chronotope if ever there was one, inspiring, for example, Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Ochered’ (The Queue, 1983, Paris 1985), in which people actually ‘live’ in a queue. The phenomenon of queuing beset the Soviet citizen even indoors as an inevitable part of the daily routine of the kommunalka: queuing for the lavatory, queuing to take a bath, queuing for the telephone and so on; see Evans 2005, 454. 36 Days and nights went by now, not at home or at the office but in a kind of new world – in the queue. She stood on the Neva embankment, or in Chaikovskii street – where there were benches on which one could sit for a while – or in the huge hall of the Big House, or on the staircase to the prosecutor’s office. She would go home to eat or sleep only when Natasha or Alik took her place in the queue.


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cause it exemplifies the general perception of what is happening, especially the spirit of insinuation and implication embodied in the nurse and Valia. It is here that Sof’ia Petrovna is confronted for the first time with the threatening force of the terror intruding into her house: На кухне кто-то потушил примус, и сразу стали слышны голоса и грохот посуды. Медицинская сестра, по обыкновению, произносила какие-то колкости. — Я пока еще не сумасшедшая и не без глаз,— медленно говорила она. Керосину я третьего дня самолично приобрела 3 литра. А теперь тут капля на донышке, псу под хвост. С некоторых пор ничего невозможно на кухне оставить. — Кто у вас керосин брать будет? басом отозвалась жена Дегтяренко. (….) У всех своего керосина хватает. Я, что ли? - Я не о вас говорю. В квартире, кроме вас, люди живут. Если уж один член семьи в тюрьме - то от остальных всего можно ожидать. За хорошее в тюрьму не посадят. Софья Петронна замерла. Что ж, что сын в тюрьме, сказала жена Дегтяренко.- Посидит, да и выпустят. Он не карманник какой-нибудь, не вор. Образованный молодой человек. Мало ли теперь кого сажают. Муж говорит, многих теперь берут порядочных. А про него и в газете писали. Знаменитый ударник был. - Ударник, подумаешь! Маскировался, вот и все, сказал Валин голос. - Овечка какая невинная нашлась, - снова заговорила медицинская сестра. Нет уж, извините, пожалуйста, зря у нас не сажают. Уж это вы бросьте. Меня же вот не посадят? А почему? Потому что я женщина честная, вполне советская. Софье Петровне сделалось холодно в ванне. Вся дрожа, она вытерлась, накинула халат и на цыпочках прошла в свою комнату. Она улеглась под одеяло и сверху, на ноги, положила подушку. Но дрожь не унималась. Она лежала, дрожа, и смотрела прямо перед собой в темноту. Ночью, часа в два, когда все уже спали, она встала, накинула на рубашку пальто и пробралась в кухню. Она взяла свою керосинку, свой примус, свои кастрюли и все перенесла к себе в комнату.37 (Chapter 11) 37

In the kitchen somebody put out a primus stove, and immediately voices could be heard and the crash of plates and dishes. The nurse, as usual, made some of her caustic remarks. – I am not out of my mind or blind, – she said slowly. – The other day I personally bought three litres of kerosene. And now it is gone to the dogs. We haven’t been able to leave anything in the kitchen in the kitchen lately. / – Who would take your kero-

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This is only the beginning. At the publishing-house, her reputation has been slanderously and openly blackened since she stood up for her friend Natal’ia during the meeting, and she realises that people now look at her differently. It is a threatening world, and her safety-zone has narrowed down to her room, even to her pillow, her last resort: Вернувшись домой, она прильнула к подушке – к своему последнему прибежищу.38 (Chapter 13)

Now she is afraid of everybody. She is no longer representative of the apartment. She does not dare to walk past the publishing-house where she used to work. Her search for a job is in vain, and when she comes home she is afraid of finding a notice from the police in her own room: Возвращаясь домой после бесплодных попыток найти себе службу, она боялась взглянуть на стол в своей комнате: быть может, там уже лежит повестка из милиции? Ее уже вызывают в милицию, чтобы отнять паспорт и отправить в ссылку? Она

sene? – the policeman’s wife said with her bass voice. [...] Everybody has enough kerosene of their own. Do you think I did it, or what? / – I’m not talking about you. There are other people still living in this apartment. If one family member is in prison, you can expect anything from the others. They don’t put people in prison for good behaviour. / Sof’ia Petrovna froze. / – Well, so she has a son in prison – the policeman’s wife answered – he’ll be there for a while, and they will let him go. He is not some pickpocket, not a thief. He is an educated young man. Anybody can be jailed. My husband says they arrest a lot of decent people these days. But they wrote about him in the paper. He was a famous shock-worker. / – Shock-worker, I say! He disguised his intentions, that’s all – said Valia’s voice. / – Now there’s an innocent lamb – the nurse went on. – I am sorry, but in our country they don’t put people in prison for no reason. Nonsense! They didn’t put me in prison, did they? And you know why? Because I am an honest women, quite a Soviet woman… / Sof’ia Petrovna, in the bath, began to shiver nervously. Shaking as if she had a fever, she dried herself, put on her dressing-gown and went to her room on tiptoe. She lay down under the blanket and put the pillow on top of her feet, but the shivering did not stop. She lay trembling all over, staring into the dark. / Around two a clock in the morning, when everybody was asleep, she rose from her bed, put on her coat and went to the kitchen. She took her own kerosene stove, her own primus stove, her pans – and carried it all to her room. She fell asleep only towards dawn. 38 Back home she pressed her face into her pillow – her last resort.


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боялась каждого звонка: не с конфискацией ли имущества пришли к ней?39 (Chapter 16)

She begins to neglect herself and her room. Her fears are becoming obsessive, almost paranoid, but the spectre of intrusion into her room becomes real on one occasion when the door of her room is suddenly opened from the outside – without knocking – and the nurse enters in the company of the house-manager. Without greeting her, the nurse immediately goes on to the offensive: she has ruined the room with her cooking; she has disdained to cook in the kitchen with the others since they established her guilt of ‘systematically stealing kerosene’; her son is in jail, exposed as an enemy of the people; she is herself without regular employment, and, in general, she is a ‘suspect element’. Then the house manager commands her immediately to return ‘the equipment’ (the, not her equipment) to the kitchen, threatening to call the police if she refuses. Afterwards, the wife of the policeman comes to comfort her: their behaviour was unlawful and she has the right to stay; they hoped to drive her out of her room because they each wanted it for themselves, she for a daughter about to be married, he for setting up a mistress, and they will eventually fall out over it. She also imparts the comforting news that, according to her husband, people are beginning to be released from prison. In this story, some of the fundamental, archetypal qualities of the House are undermined and destroyed – those of safety, privacy and personal integrity. Communal housing meant a severe reduction in privacy, but as the terror campaign unrolls violations of domestic privacy become regular practice, as witnessed by the stories of arrests and evictions; and, as Sof’ia Petrovna experiences for herself, it is not violated only by the police: her own co-occupants have broken into her room as self-appointed judges and agents of Soviet morality. The real primary agent of these trespasses, violations and intimidations is, of course the Soviet state, which is Stalin himself, whose icons are omnipresent, who is revered as a god and to whom people 39

Coming home after her fruitless efforts to find a job, she was a fraid to look at the table in her own room: perhaps a notice from the police already lay there, summoning her to the police station in order to take away her passport and send her into deportation. She was afraid each time the doorbell rang: were they coming after her, to confiscate her belongings?

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even try to write personal letters applying for help – and not only in this story. I have already referred to Katerina Clark’s ‘Stalinist myth of the Great Family’ (Clark 1981) as the master metaphor of official Soviet literature, according to which all people were ‘brothers and sisters’ with a primary responsibility to that Family of which Stalin was the symbolic Father. In this case, we could conclude, using the terms of that myth, that through his agents (Ezhov in particular, the then head of the secret police) the symbolic Father commits a ruthless breach of trust, betraying his children – the people. It is only gradually that the innocent ‘children’ come to realise how deeply this betrayal is already entrenched in their lives and homes, as the detection of the bugged telephone shows – certainly still a novelty at that time. In the context of Soviet culture, the telephone is an ambiguous piece of domestic technology. It allows the choice of making a connection between one’s privacy and the world, but once bugged without the user’s knowledge it makes that privacy completely vulnerable. Stalin had a particular interest in the possiblities offered by the telephone, and communication technology in general, in helping him to satisfy his obsessive wish for complete control of society down to the private sphere of the individual. His ill-fated colleague Bukharin memorably dubbed him ‘Ghengis Khan with a telephone’ (Чингиз-хан с телефоном).40 The image of the Empty House of the story’s alternative title is primarily connected, on the personal level, with the disappearance of Sof’ia Petrovna’s son who will never return, leaving the mother in a state of total uncertainty. Her life from now onwards will be one of hopeless waiting, at least until she reaches the point of accepting the fact that he will never return. It is an image that repeats itself in a great many other houses, as is so impressively emphasised in the last chap40

This expression delighted Trotskii, who quoted it in part one of his book on Stalin; see http://www.vodaspb.ru/files/analitics/2005/20050825-evraziistvo.html#_ftn21. The development of speech recognition is one of the technology projects on which the engineers in Solzhenitsyn’s novel В круге первом (In the First Circle) are working in their special camp. Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s memoirs are also interesting in this respect. Apparently Stalin had the habit of making surprise telephone calls, preferably late at night, and sometimes he would arrange for telephones to be installed in the houses of certain people and then announce that he would call them, knowing that they would now be sitting at home, trembling and waiting for the telephone to ring.


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ter where Sof’ia Petrovna finds the doctor’s wife in her empty apartment, sitting on her trunk and awaiting her own deportation. Lidiia Chukovskaia’s terse and very condensed story about one of the darkest and most tragic periods of Soviet history finds an echo in Anna Akhmatova’s poetic sequence ‘Requiem’, written between 1935 and 1940. Her husband had been executed, and she also experienced the disappearance of her son, though in her case he returned. She had stood in the same queue. The poems of this cycle evoke the emotions of those who went through this experience. In her evocations of the fear, isolation, despair and sense of unbearable loss, Akhmatova also uses images based on the cruel disruption of domestic order as something subsumed in the disruption of world-order. In the final couplet of the second poem – ‘Тихо льется тихий Дон’ (‘Quietly flows the quiet Don’) – moonlight shines into the house of a lonely woman: Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме, Помолитесь обо мне.41

The fifth poem opens with: Семнадцать месяцев кричу, Зову тебя домой.42

In the second part of the ‘Epilogue’, she remembers the women with whom she stood in the queue, among them one who said that coming there was ‘as though she were coming home’ (Сюда прижожу, как домой). Тhe seventh poem, ‘The Verdict’ (‘Приговор’), written in the summer of 1939, evokes the sense of utter and unbearable bereavement and loneliness, condensing it all in the final oxymoronic image of a bright day and the empty house, which must have motivated the title of the French edition of Lidiia Chukovskaia’s story of the same period:43

41

My husband lies in his grave, my son is in prison, / Pray for me. For seventeen months I have been screaming, / Calling you back home. 43 They were close friends. Chukovskaia later published a memoir of Axmatova (Записки об Анне Ахматовой. Paris 1976). 42

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Приговор И упало каменное слово На мою еще живую грудь. Ничего, ведь я была готова, Справлюсь с этим как-нибудь. У меня сегодня много дела: Надо память до конца убить, Надо, чтоб душа окаменела, Надо снова научиться жить. А не то... Горячий шелест лета, Словно праздник за моим окном. Я давно предчувствовала этот Светлый день и опустелый дом.44

Thus, the sudden and often traceless disappearance of people from their houses was a common phenomenon in those days. This is obviously a catastrophic experience of the highest order for everybody involved, and on account of this it is related to the basic fabular inventory of the House Myth, in the category of the Loss of the House. As we have seen, however, in the nineteen thirties this was, and long continued to be, a trauma that could not be spoken of, read about or published. A unique exception is a poem written in 1937 by Daniil Kharms entitled ‘Из дома вышел человек’ (‘A Man Went out of His House’). Disguised as a simple children’s song (‘песенка’), it refers undeniably to the actuality of disappearing people. Kharms found himself in trouble after its publication in the Children’s journal Чиж (The Siskin) and was not published for a year (Kharms 1991, 525). The poem opens with a man leaving his house (Из дома вышел человек) and going on a long trip on foot, without eating, drinking or slееping. Suddenly he comes to a dark forest, into which he disap44

The Verdict: And the word fell like a stone / On my still living breast. / Don’t worry, I was prepared, after all, / I will cope with it somehow. // I have a lot to do today: / I must kill my memory completely, / My soul must become of stone, / I have to learn to live all over again. // And if I don’t… The hot rustling of summer, / Is almost like a holiday under my window. / Long ago I had a premonition of this / Bright day and empty house.


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pears. The final stanza, certainly partly owing to its refrain structure, is probably the most chilling if interpreted against the background of Chukovskaia and Akhmatova: Но если как-нибудь его Случится встретить вам, Тогда скорей, Тогда скорей, Скорей скажите нам.45

In conclusion, Socialist and Stalinist ideology may have had pretensions to the construction of what in our terminology we might call a ‘new Domus’; that is, a domestic grouping fitted to the life and needs of the New Man in Russia, but all it succeeded in bringing about was the denial and destruction of the old Domus values and conditions, supplanting them by the pseudo-myth about living together and belonging together that Clark identified as ‘the Great Family’. As we have seen, there are many reasons – practical and conceptual, anthropological and social – why this pseudo-myth could never have taken the place of, or even come close to, the Domus concept, which is in itself an idealised concept, as was the ideal of the Slavophile sobornost’, or communality; see Chapter II.6. Where the domostroi (see Chapter II.2) and the Slavophile Domus projections at least foresaw a place in the House for every member of the patriarchal household (apart from criminals of course), Soviet Socialism originally proposed its own Modernist, non-bourgeois alternative of a collectivism based, not on concrete and individual kinship relations, but on a fictive, abstract kinship through class and a vindictive pressure to accept it. In its ultimate consequences, this replacement of the traditional Family-asa-House concept by the new pseudo-myth of the Great Family led to various distortions and even catastrophic mockeries of the real family. The instance most frequently exploited for purposes of propaganda is almost certainly the story of Pavlik Morozov. Even though the historical facts may be different from the canonised Soviet myth, this only

45 But if it somehow / Should happen that you met him, / Then hurry up, / Then hurry up, / Hurry up and tell us.

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goes to prove its mythological impact and significance for the manipulation of the Soviet populace.46

46

Wikipedia: Pavel Trofimovich Morozov ( November 14, 1918 – September 3, 1932), better known by the diminutive Pavlik, was a Soviet youth glorified by the Soviet Union propaganda as a martyr. His story, dated to 1932, is that of a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family. It was a Soviet morality tale: opposing the state was selfish and reactionary, and state was a higher virtue than family love. His story was a subject of compulsory children’s readings, songs, plays, a symphonic poem, a full-length opera and six biographies. There is very little original evidence related to the story, much of it hearsay, provided by second-hand witnesses. According to modern research, the story (denunciation, trial) is most likely a fictional tale, although there is little doubt that Pavlik was a real child who was murdered in some domestic quarrel.

34. Anti-Houses. Under the Doom of the Kommunalka. Deformations of the Utopian House Of all domestic situations in Russian cultural history, the communal dwelling of the twentieth century, or kommunalka (from Russian: ‘kommunal’naia kvartira’), presents probably the most characteristic and poignant image of urban life but at the same time seems to be the most elusive as a literary setting. Although the vast majority of Russians lived – and many still live1 – in that way, the phenomenon is underrepresented in Russian literature because of its unambiguously negative nature – a consequence of the well-known discrepancy between fiction and fact in the officially endorsed versions of Soviet life. Its origins and persistence as a setting, way of life and determinant of the Soviet citizen’s outlook certainly merit our attention. Historical reasons for its emergence are easily identified, among them being the catastrophic destruction of living space through wars and revolution, the explosive growth of the urban population during collectivisation and industrialisation, and the long-term building priorities of an ideology favouring heavy industry over the domestic needs of the majority of the population, to say nothing of the individual. However, part of the explanation of the kommunalka also lies in its being the typical microcosm of Soviet life. The kommunalka is a paradoxical phenomenon in the sense that, although it had been a persistent ‘communal’ phenomenon of Soviet life, it was not always the type of housing that Soviet domestic and urban development policy aimed to produce. At least from the begin-

1

According to Utekhin (2001, 12), the notorious narrowness and tightness of the kommunalka have eased somewhat during the past decade, the people living in communal apartments generally having more space at their disposal than in the past.

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ning of the nineteen thirties, providing the families of workers with good housing had been a promise of Socialist construction. The luxurious and spacious apartment buildings that were erected under Stalin from the late nineteen thirties, especially during the short period between the end of the Second World War and the early nineteen fifties, were highly desirable abodes by any standards. With its stylistic mixtures of neoclassicism, neorenaissance and that unique national Russian and Soviet pathos, this architecture stands as a proud symbol of the workers’ Paradise to come, part of the grand design that Stalin hoped would symbolise and celebrate the new Soviet Union as the victorious postwar superpower it now was. In principle, these apartments were intended for the workers and the happy few party nomenklatura. Relatively few of these outrageously-expensive projects were realised, and in later years, under the pressure of explosive urban growth, many were converted into kommunalki themselves.2 Khrushchëv was under pressure to provide cheap, small living spaces in great numbers. What was built under his rule was the very opposite of the Stalinist apartments. He promised that these were only temporary constructions that would be replaced by proper housing once Communism had been been established, after an estimated twenty years. As we now know, this did not happen, and after more than forty years most of these apartment buildings still stand in one way or another and are inhabited in one way or another. They are known as ‘khrushchovki’, or ‘khrushchëby’, a contraction of Khrushchëv’s name and the word trushchoba (‘slum’).3 Thus, just like the persistent phenomenon of queuing, the enduring shortage of housing space accompanied urban life in the Soviet Union throughout the Soviet period, and its effects are still being felt. It is plausible to interpret this phenomenon as a consequence of ineffective planning and management – a well known weakness of the system – but it also seems to reflect a lack of enthusiasm on the part of 2

They are much sought-after again in the new Russia, now as objects of postCommunist gentrification. The same has been happening to the old bourgeois houses in the city centres. Often, the original communal inhabitants have been forced to leave and settle in the new high rise buildings on the outskirts. 3 Other meanings and connotations of this word are ‘overgrown place in a forest’, ‘hole’, ‘out-of-the-way place’ and, colloquially, ‘thieves’den’ (The Oxford Russian Dictionary 1997).

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the authorities to deal with the problem effectively. The common element in these aspects of Soviet society is the negative side of collectivity and communality, reflecting the low ideological status of the individual and his interests by contrast with the virtue of all things collective, and the low costs per item characteristic of communal measures. As in queuing and the related symptoms of structural deficit, where there is persistent housing shortage there is a strong psychological tendency for anonymous power to assert itself, with the concomitant experience of powerlessness on the part of the affected citizens. This power constantly imposed itself on the Soviet citizen, consciously as well as unconsciously but always inescapably, in the restricted spaces and limited geography of the kommunalka world. Quite apart from outright hostility and mutual suspicion, such a shape and modality of basic social space is likely to induce attidudes of resignation and fatality rather than initiative and personal responsibility. What do the shapes and physiology of the kommunalka world look like? The space immediately connected with that of the kommunalka is the dvor, or courtyard. In fact it forms one system with the kommunalka, providing basic opportunities for escape and uncontrolled meeting, especially for the young. According to the description given by Utekhin (2001, 186), the dvor is the area of active social life – the place where the subcultures of children, adolescents and even potential criminals are shaped, among rubbish dumps, crates and barrels, scrap-iron and, originally, toilets. One can hardly think of a more devastating literary reflection of this condition than the sardonic mockepic ‘Сортиры’ (‘The Loos’), written in 1991 by Timur Kibirov (Kibirov 1994, 343-378). In this impressive narrative poem of 106 eight-line stanzas, Kibirov sets out to tell the story of his ‘coming of age’ among the dismal dvory (courtyards) and sortiry (toilets, loos) of postwar Russia. The poem is full of literary allusions, Oneginesque digressions and baroque, grandiloquent metaphors that stress the very anti-aesthetics of the poem’s topic. Invoking his muse in the manner of a classical poet, but with scathing and unrelenting irony, he ‘sings’ his anti-epic about this banal, embarrassing and debased aspect of Soviet domestic reality.4 A comparable inspiration can be found in Alek4 The poem’s tone may be illustrated inoffensively by quoting the opening lines of stanza 4: О, дай Бог памяти, о, дай мне, Каллиопа,/ блаженной точности, чтоб

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sandr Zinov’ev’s grotesque satire or allegory Зияющие высоты (Yawning Heights), in which the sortir is presented as a central issue and problem of urban planning in fictional Ibansk (Zinov’ev 1976, 201). The fantastic or grotesque treatment of the Soviet Anti-House really deserves a study of its own, covering the work of Zoshchenko, Krzhizhanovskii, Terts and a great many authors besides, but for the purposes of this study I shall limit myself to a few outstanding examples. What concept of living space, outside the Gulag world, could be further removed from the Domus idea than that of the kommunalka? The socio-historical reality of communal dwelling in Soviet Russian life has been so influential in terms of mentality and outlook that we should closely examine the worlds they represent. As I have said, it was the increasing density of population during the collectivisation and industrialisation process that lay behind the emergence of the kommunalka as the basic setting of urban Soviet life. The phenomenology and semiotics of its sociology show the unique aspects of this condition. The demands for space suitable for the private lives of individuals or families are constantly at odds with the need to maintain common spaces and trajectories. In other words, life in the kommunalka means constantly dealing with the restrictions that the shared space imposes upon the private sphere.5 Both the idea and the name of the kommunalka suggest communal life, which has positive overtones. However, this is forced communality, forced intimacy, not a state of living together by choice as in a описать сей двор! (O, may God give me the memory, O, Calliope, grant me the blissful precision to describe this courtyard! 5 Its psychic impact on the collective subconscious of the Russians is still strong, as is demonstrated by the following extract from an article by Yulia Latynina in The Moscow Times of 7-11-2007 entitled ‘Don't Spit in Your Neighbor's Soup’: ‘What is most striking about the Kremlin's attitude toward Georgia is the pettiness of the whole matter. A superpower should not respond in this way. Russia’s behaviour is more akin to a communal apartment dweller who spits in his cohabitant’soup out of spite and malice. The second most striking feature is the senselessness of the Kremlin policy. Russia’s ostensible goal is to strengthen its authority in the Caucasus, but it certainly can’t achieve this by making a porno film about Georgia’president. Russia can’t conduct its foreign policy as if it is living in a communal apartment. In these situations, you can befriend a neighbor and earn his respect. Or you can strike fear in his heart by roughing him up a bit. But you will never be able to strengthen your authority by spitting in his soup.’


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family. In her sociological and cultural analysis of the kommunalka in relation to the concept of intimacy, Sandra Evans draws interesting conclusions as to its effects on the inhabitants (Evans 2005, 455-6). Though it first emerged as a temporary, inevitable housing measure, the communal housing principle subsequently became a cornerstone of Soviet social ideology, intended to boost the Soviet citizen’s sense of collectivity. However, the enforced closeness of communal living did nothing to strengthen the mutual solidarity of the inhabitants. Instead, it reinforced the social mechanisms of individualisation, screening off and withdrawal. For the general mental profile of the Soviet citizen, this implied not only psychological ambivalence but the development of a split consciousness. Evans distinguishes three levels of consciousness that are parallel to the three principal degrees of intimacy: with the state, with the community (the kommunalka) and with the individual (idem). In his essentially phenomenological analysis of Soviet communal life, Utekhin holds long term communal housing responsible for some psychotic disorders among elderly people, referring to the psychiatrist A. V. Medvedev’s use of the term ‘параноиды жилья’ (‘paranoid disorders related to habitation’) (Utekhin 2001).6 The phenomenon of the kommunalka is different from the communes and other shortlived, idealistic or utopian experiments in communal living that took place in the early phase of post-Revolutionary Russia. As a topic and setting, the commune found expression in avantgarde literature such as Pil’niak’s Голый год (The Naked Year) and ‘The Belokonskoe Estate’ (‘Имение Белоконское’), and Platonov’s Котлован (The Construction Pit) and Chevengur. Pil’niak’s novel contains a chapter entitled ‘Смерть коммуны’ (‘Death of the commune’), describing how a short-lived commune of dreaming, muddle-headed anarchists is eradicated ‘by Moscow’; that is, by the Bolsheviks. In Chapter II.30, we also discussed Pil’niak’s ‘Наследни6

Chapter 9 is entitled ‘Параноиды жилья’: замечания о культурных детерминантах психопатологии’ (‘‘Paranoid disorders related to the habitation’: remarks on cultural determinants of psychopathology’). Characteristic of the syndrome is a systematic suspicion of being robbed, offended and slandered by other inhabitants, who also change locks and so forth. Medvedev thinks that sharing a room probably induces the paranoid variants, whereas isolated living stimulates hallucinations. Interestingly, the motifs of infringement and suspicion were already prominent in Martyn Martinych’s neighbour in Zamiatin’s ‘Cave’, where the neighbours were only sharing the water tap; see also below, and Chapter II.31.

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ки’ (‘The Inheritors’), in which the members of the Rastorovskii family try to hide and survive revolution, hunger and winter. Forced by circumstances, they try to begin what is essentially a communal life in the house they have inherited, but instead of sharing the burdens and responsibilities they ‘entrench’ themselves, each in his own room, cursing the Revolution and life itself in their anger. As the narrator stresses at the beginning of the story, when these ‘inheritors’ arrived, the house and its last inhabitant had died; that is, it was no longer a Domus. They are described as huddling together ‘in their nest’ (в свое гнездо), an obvious reference to the nineteenth-century Domus variant of the Nest of the Gentry, but there is no ‘nest’ anymore, and their commune, born as it is out of necessity, cannot replace it. It does not work, and there seems to be no bearable alternative manner of living together in a house, not even as a family.7 The conflicts and psychological effects described in this very short story anticipate some of the essential challenges of life in the kommunalka world. Zamiatin’s ‘Пещера’ (‘The Cave’) 1920, already analysed in Chapter II.31, is a striking example of a ‘double-text’. It exploits the functional as well as the moral or axiological discrepancies between pre-Revolutionary bourgeois life in a Petersburg apartment, with its ‘civilities’ and modern amenities, and life in the same space after the disruptive forces of war, revolution and winter have struck. In the latter state, the apartment space is no more than a cave, its life reduced to the instinct for personal survival. This apartment/cave is not yet a kommunalka, but the catastrophic private and civil loss symbolically prefigures what will later become the normal condition of Soviet kommunalka life. The central hero, Martin Martinych, is forced by necessity to go to his neighbour for water. His neighbour lets him in, but remains suspicious – justifiably so since he steals from his neighbour’s stock of firewood while he is there. This is a confrontation that both sides experience as essentially an infringement of privacy by necessity. It seems to me that infringement of pricavy, and the inevitability of it, is a fundamental motif of kommunalka life and its tensions. 7

Here too, nomen est omen. The family name of Rastorovskii clearly suggests etymological affinity with names such as Raskol’nikov. It predestines the break up and disintegration of the clan.


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This analysis can lead us to view the kommunalka as both a result and an icon of Russia’s catastrophe in the twentieth century in general.8 It has also led to a view of the kommunalka culture as a mirror of Soviet society at large, as in Solzhenitsyn’s 1991 pamphlet ‘Rebuilding Russia?’ (‘Как нам обустроить Россию?’). Referring to nationality problems within the Soviet Union, he writes, ‘Many of us know only too well, alas, that sharing a communal apartment can at times make life itself seem intolerable. And that is exactly how inflamed things have become in our national interrelationships’ (Solzhenitsyn 1991, 7); see also Chapter II.3. One common characteristic of literary texts dealing with the kommunalka seems to be what I have called domestic impropriety. This occurs where there is a conflict or discordance between the ‘canonic’ programme of domestic thematics (see Chapter I.4 on the fabula of the House Myth) and actual behaviour. Another, occurring in combination with domestic impropriety in the sense just described, is linked with its socio-historical context. The kommunalka is very often set in a building that dates back to pre-Revolutionary times. It bears the marks of former ‘bourgeois’ family occupation, as in Lidiia Chukovskaia’s ‘Sof’ia Petrovna’, analysed in the previous chapter. It is most clearly seen in the process of uplotnenie (‘packing’), already mentioned, where formerly large rooms would often be divided into two by adding a new wall. The kommunalka dweller in this situation is confronted with a double ‘code’ or ‘text’: on the one hand, there is the material text of the old bourgeois culture in which spaces and domestic functions (according to the original architectonic intentions) are well-matched; on the other, there is the newly-imposed, communal behavioural text in which spatio-functional discrepancies and conflicts become manifest. The pre-Revolutionary material vestiges, sometimes suggesting something very close to a Domus past, underlie the new text and code of communal living, but there are significant discrepan-

8

Or the catastrophe of any other culture in comparable conditions. With regard to Zamiatin, only such a broad anthropological scope of interpretation can do justice either to him as an author or to his tragical/sceptical view of the human condition.

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cies, or ‘mismatches’, between the original spaces and distinctions and the new ways of living in them.9 These features are tellingly illustrated in Utekhin’s detailed analysis (Utekhin 2001). In his first chapter, entitled ‘Map and Territory’ (‘Карта и территория’), he characterises the kommunalka as a living space having what he calls ‘transparence’ (прозрачность, 13). This refers to the permeability to smells as well as to the visual and acoustic penetrability (проницаемость) of the public (especially kitchens and corridors) and private spaces. Such paradoxical, often unbearable but always unalterable conditions can only be approached with irony and satire, and if this was at all possible in Soviet literature, it was only within the strictest of limits.

9

See the analogous discordant double code in Zamiatin’s ‘Cave’, realised symbolically in the functional clash of naming the apartment’s inventory according to either the ‘Petersburg’ or the ‘Ice Age’ text.

35. Bulgakov. The House as a Metaphysical Home Bulgakov’s novel Мастер и Маргарита (The Master and Margarita, 1928-40) is not only one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century; it also presents an important literary conceptualisation of the House theme. First published in 1966-7, and then only in a censored edition, it is a multi-layered fantasy of immense scope and complexity, intertwining plots concerning Soviet Russia in the nineteen twenties with the story of Pilate and Christ, and including Faustian personages, grotesque supernatural occurrences and theological and philosophical questions. The primary subtext is a scathing satire of the bourgeois hypocrisy, corruption and banal materialism of Soviet life during the period of the New Economic Policy. In this satirical setting, the Devil, in the guise of one Professor Voland and accompanied by a carnivalesque, Faustian retinue of demons, wreaks four days of havoc in Moscow, manipulating the greed and other weaknesses of the inhabitants, instigating scandals and even killing people. The House theme as a philosophical and moral topic is directly connected with the eponymous heroes: the man named the Master and his lover, Margarita. More than in most works discussed here, its treatment of domestic thematics explicitly focuses on the qualities of the House as Home, embodying the essence of culture, morals and human warmth and interaction for the individual. In Bulgakov’s view, Soviet ideology, culture and social practices meant a fatal breach with the most valuable in Russian cultural tradition. They were fundamentally incompatible with the creative freedom without which the individual artist cannot exist. For him the concept of Home conveyed the ideal coming together of individual and traditional cultural values that Soviet reality directly threatened.

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Most of the passages that deal with the House as a physical entity are related to the all-pervading ‘квартирный вопрос’; that is, the structural shortage of living space that could drive people to desperate acts. This layer of the novel’s meaning essentially reflects the predicament of the Soviet citizen sketched in Chapters II.33 and 34. In Professor Voland’s analysis, this is the crucial problem besetting the Soviet citizen, who, as he remarks, is pretty much his same, good old self, only the housing question has had a pernicious influence on him: Обыкновенные люди... в общем напоминают прежних... квартирный вопрос только испортил их (Ordinary people … in general they remind one of the former ones … but the housing question just ruined them; Bulgakov 1973, part 1, Chapter 12, 541). This is a scathing and profound statement of the inhuman and corrupting conditions in which communal housing forced people to live, and the Devil should know of course. Bulgakov’s satire here, as in many of his other works, is aimed at the Bolshevik pseudo-myth of the ‘The New Man’ and the absurdities of Soviet reality. In one of his most devastating satirical stories, ‘Собачье сердце’ (‘Heart of a Dog’; 1924), Bulgakov has a Professor Preobrazhenskii defending pre-Revolutionary domestic culture and values against the intrusive Soviet practice of uplotnenie (‘packing’); that is, the reduction of the individual’s living space by redistribution of room functions. In his conflict with the chairman of the Housing Committee, Preobrazhenskii insists on continuing to use the rooms of his spacious house in accordance with their original functions: dining in the dining room and not in his bedroom, operating in the the operating theatre and not in the servants’ room. This type of conflict has already been discussed and defined as domestic impropriety, occurring when there is a conflict or discordance between the canonical programme of domestic routines and actual behaviour; see also Chapters II.30 (Pil’nak), II.34 (on the kommunalka), and I.4 on the fabular inventory of the House Myth’; see also Singleton 1997, 121-3. At the beginning of the novel, the proletarian poet Ivan Nikolaevich, whose pseudonym is Bezdomnyi (the ‘Houseless’, or ‘Homeless’), is having a conversation with Berlioz, the journal editor and director of the Writers’ House. They are discussing Jesus Christ, a surprising topic for officially-atheist Soviet authors. Voland interferes in their conversation, claiming to have been present at Jesus’s trial and

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crucifixion and telling them what really happened between Jesus and Pilate. They listen to him in amazement. He baffles them even more with some tricks of clairvoyance. Among these, he predicts that Berlioz will be beheaded by a female komsomol member, and this is almost immediately fulfilled when he falls over in the street and is beheaded by a tram, the driver of which is indeed a female komsomol member. Bezdomnyi is convinced that Voland deliberately arranged this murder and sets off in pursuit of him, but in vain: nobody believes his story; he is declared mentally insane and incarcerated in a madhouse. It is there that he meets the man named the Master, the only one who believes his story of the Devil-Voland and the supernatural occurrences. The Master’s own story is tragic. He has had himself admitted to the mental hospital of his own free will some time before. He used to work in a museum as an historian until winning a lottery enabled him to leave both his job and his small, shabby apartment and devote himself entirely to the writing of his novel, which is about Pilate and his relationship with Jesus and indeed forms the ‘inner story’ that is told in The Master and Margarita. In writing this novel, he was inspired by his beloved Margarita, whom he had met in a street and with whom there had been an immediate, entirely mutual understanding. Because she was already married, their love had to be kept a secret, but Margarita would come every day to the basement apartment that the Master had rented since winning the lottery. This apartment had all the qualities of a real home. It was an emotional safe haven that also played its part in inspiring him to literary creativity. It was comfortable and cozy, full of objects that were dear to him, furniture and books. It served as a closed, self-sufficient microcosm, shutting out the world as though it were an eternal present (see Singleton 1997, 131), impervious to time, weather or change of season outside.1 After finishing the novel, he had presented it to a literary journal, but it had been refused on ideological grounds, and a damaging campaign had been directed against him in the press. After a mental breakdown, he 1 According to Singleton (136), Bulgakov is recalling Dostoevskii’s ‘underground man’ in the isolation of his basement apartment. The comparison certainly makes for an intriguing contrast: Dostoevskii’s hero is the extreme champion of rationalism, whereas the Master and his art cannot live with the consequences of Soviet rationalism in the outside world.

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had burned his manuscript and committed himself to the asylum. Nobody knew where he was, not even Margarita. We now follow the story of Pilate and Jesus (or Ieshua, as he is called here), which is actually part of the Master’s novel, and then comes an account of Voland’s escapades in Moscow, where he had come to hold his annual ‘Devil’s Full Moon Spring Ball’ that, by tradition, had always to be hosted by a woman named Margarita. Now the Master’s beloved Margarita concludes a pact with Voland: hoping that he will reunite her with the Master, she agrees to be the hostess of the Ball, and in return she is indeed reunited with the Master. The omnipotent Devil restores the past, including the burnt manuscript, and the Master and Margarita return to the basement apartment. Just before Voland and his retinue leave Moscow, he is standing on a roof and looking down on the city when a disciple of Ieshua appears before him with a request from Ieshua that he should take the Master and Maragarita with him, the tormented Master having deserved eternal rest. Their bodies remain on earth, but they themselves are taken by Voland to a realm beyond space and time where they settle in an Eternal House – the eternal refuge (вечный приют) – of peace and quiet, where the Master finishes his novel. The Master is the protagonist with whom the House is connected as a timeless ideal of homeliness, happiness, culture, human warmth and justice, in fact of life itself. J. M. Lotman has analysed the House and its functions in The Master and Margarita in a short article (Lotman 1992, 457-463), one of two sharing the common title of ‘Заметки о художественном пространстве’ (‘Remarks on Artistic Space’), also available in English (Lotman 1990). The starting point of Lotman’s analysis is the opposition in Russian folklore between the universal concept of the House as the epitome of culture and safety protected by the gods, and that of the Anti-House (антидом) or ‘Forest House’ (лесной дом) as the space of the Devil, alien, unsafe, and connected with the world beyond the grave. In Russian literature the House concept becomes, in Lotman’s words, the ‘ideological focus’ (идейным фокусом) of human cultural tradition, humanitarianism and the ‘independence of man’ (‘самостоянье человека’), particularly in the work of Pushkin; see also Chapter II.7. In Gogol’s work, the devilish Anti-House develops in the form of the public house and the office, and the theme of homelessness (see also Chapter II.9), and


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in Dostoevskii’s work Lotman identifies it in the Underground House, the Grave-House and the House of the Dead; see also Chapter II.17. According to Lotman, this tradition is essential in all of Bulgakov’s work. In The Master and Margarita, Houselessness (or Homelessness) is developed in both plots: the poet with the pseudonym Bezdomnyi (‘the Houseless’) finds a parallel in the inner story (the Master’s novel) in Ieshua, whom the public prosecutor Pilate concludes to be ‘a tramp’. The discussion in the novel of his having or not having a permanent residence is a veiled reference to the all-important propiska, or residence permit, without which people living under Soviet rule were deprived of all rights and forbidden to live in a city. The madhouse in which Ivan Bezdomnyi meets the Master is, significantly, another ‘canonical’ form of Anti-House. A variant of the Anti-House that Lotman distinguishes is that of the False House (ложный дом), which is realised primarily in the kommunalka; see also Chapter II.34. Lotman points out ( p. 458) that, for Bulgakov, the concepts of the House and the communal kitchen are absolutely incompatible. Margarita does not know the horrors of living in communal housing; she feels that one cannot live there – only die. Under the influence of the Devil’s actions, such apartments are associated with death, if only because, when it comes to housing problems, the death of a family member means a moment to be taken advantage of at all costs. These housing conditions also drive people to slander and denunciation. This is the essence of the all-pervading, structural shortage of living space. In the novel, such apartments are not houses where people live; they are merely shelters, and very often places from which to flee or disappear, particularly when Professor Voland and his retinue force themselves upon tenants and take over their apartments by supernatural means (Lotman, 459). With the arrival of Voland, not only do houses tend to turn into Anti-Houses, but Moscow itself acquires an infernal aspect (Lotman, 460). These houses take on a symbolic significance and are treated appropriately: they are destroyed by fire, or ‘punished’ in other ways. The Griboedov, or Writers’ House is the centre of intrigue, lies and materialistic opportunism in which utilitarian literature, as distinct from talent and creative integrity, is the key to success and material privilege; see also Singleton 1997, 126. It is burnt down by the demons Korov’ev and Behemoth as Voland and his band are leaving Moscow. Margarita, in

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her guise as a witch on her broom en route to the Devil’s Spring Ball, takes time to ravage some writers’ apartments, including that of the literary critic Latunskii who censured the Master’s novel, which she floods. Domestic metaphysics extend to grotesque enterprises in the hunt for square meters, including the extension of a three-room apartment into a four-room one. There is also a structure made of planks, a ‘hellish place for a living man’, in which Margarita sees the Master in a dream: бревенчатое зданьице, не то оно – отдельная кухня, не то баня, не то черт знает что, [...] адское место для живого человека (a construction made of planks, and one could not make out what it was – a separate kitchen, or a bathhouse, or the Devil knows what else, [...] a hellish place for a living man; Part 2, Chapter 19, 643). It is her dream image of the prison camp where the Master has been incarcerated earlier in his life. It has a clear symbolic significance as a literary dream vision, and it is the absolute antithesis – also in terms of its poetic detail; see Singleton, 139 – of the domestic ideal of the ‘eternal refuge’ to which he will be taken in the end. Opposed to these Anti-Houses is the House of the Living, or simply the House. Lotman observes that these two types of House are contrasted on the basis of a number of features of the cherished cultural tradition as set against the deformed analogues of Soviet culture; see also Singleton 1997, 119-120. For example, in the Anti-Houses there is the noise of the radio and gramophones, whereas in a House piano music is heard. Apartment 50, into which Voland and his retinue have moved, has a double nature that is confirmed by the fact that the gramophone and the piano alternate. The homely House of the Living is a centre of spirituality, cultural continuity, creativity and love. Bulgakov establishes a hierarchy of spirituality: on the lowest level spirituality needs living space; at its highest it does not. Ieshua, with his absolute spirituality, does not need a House, and in his earthly life he is always on the road (Lotman, 461). The Master, by contrast, is in search of a House. His own plot is marked by his passage through pseudo-domestic spaces. After winning the lottery, he bought books, abandoned his single room on Miasnitskaia Street and rented the two-room apartment in the basement. Here he could enjoy privacy with Margarita; here he found the space for his books and the peace to work on his novel. It was only a small


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apartment (квартирка), but his work on his novel made it into a House of Poetry – in stark contrast to the Griboedov House. No sooner did he give up working on the novel than the protective Homely qualities of the apartment became doubtful and it reverted to being a miserable basement (Lotman, 462). At the end, in the other world after their flight, he would find peace in a metaphysical, ideal Homely Home, full of culture, love and friends, all of which his earthly life had denied him.2 In the final chapter before the epilogue, entitled ‘Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge’ (‘Прощение и вечный приют’), Margarita describes the Utopian House to the Master. It is a timeless image of cultural tradition: Вот твой дом, вот твой вечный дом. Я знаю, что вечером к тебе придут те, кого ты любишь, кем ты интересуешься и кто тебя не встревожит. Они будут тебе играть, они будут петь тебе, ты увидишь, какой свет в комнате, когда горят свечи. Ты будешь засыпать, надевши свой засаленный и вечный колпак, ты будешь засыпать с улыбкой на губах. Сон укрепит тебя, ты станешь рассуждать мудро. А прогнать меня ты уже не сумеешь. Беречь твой сон буду я. Так говорила Маргарита, идя с мастером по направлению к вечному их дому, [...].3 (Part 2, Chapter 32, 799)

2 As Singleton points out, this Edenic final situation holds little promise for further creativity. So there is a paradox here: the virtue of homelessness and the attendant craving for a home are the artist’s purest impulse to creativity, but finding a home inevitably holds the threat of stasis (Singleton 1997, 117-8). The ‘eternal refuge’ of domesticity to which the Master is brought is ambiguous in Bulgakov’s rendering: it lies somewhere ‘between Ieshua’s pure idealism, which the Master cannot attain, and the rationalism of Soviet life, which the Master does not desire’ (idem, p. 135). In other words, it also has traits of the prison or the asylum, if only because Voland has told the Master that he will never leave it. 3 Look, there is your house, your eternal house. I know that in the evenings those you love, those who interest you and who do not worry you, will come to visit you. They will play for you; they will sing for you, and you will see the light in the room when the candles are lit. You will fall asleep having put on your greasy and eternal nightcap; you will fall asleep with a smile on your lips. Sleep will strengthen you; you will pass wise judgements. And you will not be able to chase me away any more. And I will guard your sleep. Thus spoke Margarita, as she walked together with the Master in the direction of their eternal home [...].

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Lotman sees the House as a distinct leitmotif in Bulgakov’s work. His first novel Белая гвардия (The White Guard; 1924), about the fate of intellectuals and officers in the turmoil of the Revolution and Civil War, reflects the good memories of his own family home and youth in Kiev (the House of Childhood). At the same time it is about a House and Family falling apart (the Death of the House). It opens with a description of its nest-like qualities, the death of the mother and a fateful prediction that its ‘walls will fall down’. His Театральный роман (Theatrical Novel; 1937) reflects his troublesome relations with the theatrical world in which he repeatedly tried to find a career. The hero, a poor lonely writer, is living in a small room that, like the Master’s, changes when he is at work. In this case, it becomes a flying ship. In the novel he is writing, the House that was lost in The White Guard (and in the play Дни Турбиных (The Days of the Turbins (1926)) on the same theme) is restored. Here inspiration and creativity make the House emerge from the flat white paper as a three-dimensional reality, like a box, gradually coming alive and acquiring colours and sounds. Singleton stresses the connection in Bulgakov’s oeuvre between true domesticity (the quality of Home), on the one hand, and cultural tradition, literature and creativity on the other. This is the principal notion of her analysis of Bulgakov’s oeuvre. For example, in The White Guard the demise of the genuine home of the Turbin family (as a result of the Civil War) is indicated by the fact that they are forced to burn the works of Tolstoi and Pushkin, including War and Peace and The Captain’s Daughter, which also deal with the loss of houses through war; see Singleton 1997, 119, quoting Lotman. As in Zamiatin’s ‘The Cave’ (see Chapter II.31), ‘the chaos of war deprives the home of its cultural symbolism and transforms it into living space that only provides shelter’ (Singleton, 120). Singleton also observes the literary role of the stove here. As long as the apartment in the basement was the perfect Home, the stove was indeed the traditional symbolic centre of this House; see Chapter I.2 on the meaning of the hearth. Once the Master’s novel had been declined, however, the stove no longer provided the couple with warmth and happiness, instead becoming the ‘focus of their despair’ (idem, 134); they simply stared into the flames. Moreover, the stove be-


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comes a primary instrument of destruction when the Master burns the manuscript of his novel in it.4

4

Singleton here also refers to a comparable negative function of the stove (a raging flame, not a symbol of domestic warmth) in Goncharov’s Oblomov and Zamiatin’s We. See also Chapter II.31 on the ambiguous significance of the stove in Zamiatin’s ‘The Cave’.

36. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag World. ‘Matriona’s House’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was mentioned in Chapter II.3 for his use of negative house images in relation to the Soviet Union and the condition of post-Communist Russia. In Chapter II. 34, on the kommunalka, I quoted from his novella Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) about ‘normal’ life on a regular day in one of Stalin’s labour camps. It is an inescapable conclusion that the kommunalka and the labour camps are the most characteristic negative phenomena of Soviet social history. The labour camps were the nearest thing to home for millions of people, sometimes for more than a decade of their lives, and yet the barracks in which they were housed were never ‘home’ to them, nor even a ‘house’, merely the barest housing in the most basic sense. However, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out in Архипелаг ГУЛАГ (The Gulag Arkhipelago), the world of these camps existed on such a scale, and for such a long time, that we should in fact think of them as comprising a parallel society (of which Ivan Denisovich was described for the first time as a typical citizen), a different world,1 linked only secretly in an absurd and literally unspeakable manner to the society that lived outside the barbed wire; see Chudakova 1990, 245. People who did not die in the Gulag world but returned to that other society were outcasts, never to be spoken about, non-existent family members. Marriages were often annulled when one of the partners went to the Gulag world. From the perspective of the House Myth, it seems difficult to find a fitting image category for this phenomenon, and we should bear in mind that the Gulag itself was a specific, concrete historic reality, not a variant of a mythical concept. Only the category of the Anti-House seems adequate, conferring as it does the general idea of a prison. It is an Anti-House, partly 1

Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma stories should also be mentioned here.

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because it lacks the essential freedoms that belong to the House but also because it lacks the Myth’s basic perspective of family life and successive generations. The protypical forerunner in Russian literature is, of course, Dostoevskii’s Записки из мертвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead; 1862), reflecting his experiences during his four years of hard labour in Omsk; see Chapter II.17. The Solzhenitsyn texts mentioned above are witnesses of the great theme that has been the motor behind all his work, whether as novelist, documentary-publicist or pamphleteer. In all these activities, he has manifested himself as one of the fiercest Russian critics of the Soviet regime and system as being founded on lies. He is the author of the monumental Архипелаг ГУЛАГ (The Gulag Arkhipelago), written in the nineteen sixties, published in the west in 1973 and in the USSR in 1989, probably the single most influential document in exposing the repressive regime and the repressed reality on which it was based. In 1974, he published a pamphlet appealing to his fellow Soviet citizens, under the title ‘Жить не по лжи’ (‘Live not by lies’). The date on its manuscript was 12 February, the day before he was exiled from the Soviet Union. From the beginning of his literary career, Solzhenitsyn has consistently voiced his protests against the regime and his concern for tradional Russian culture and values. The same basic attitude can, of course, be detected in his literary works. One of his earliest stories, published in the relatively liberal days of Khrushchev, is ‘Матренин двор’ (‘Matriona’s House’), written in 1959 and first published in 1963, one year after Ivan Denisovich. In it, Solzhenitsyn paints a grim picture of the miserable and hopeless life in the Soviet province. For the people living here, the Soviet system had done nothing to improve their situation, neither before nor after the Second World War. It describes the fate of an old, widowed peasant woman and her house. She becomes the victim of her egotistical and ruthless family who fight over her house, and in the end she is killed. The first-person narrator returns to central Russia from time served in the Gulag in the extreme east of the Soviet Union. Wishing to seek refuge in the Russian province, he finds employment as a mathematics teacher in a place called Torf Produkt (Peat Products). He becomes a lodger in the house of the story’s heroine, Matriona, in the little village of Talnovo. She is a cheerful, honest, generous char-

Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag World.‘Matriona’s House’

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acter, optimistic in spite of her frequent illnesses and the hardships she has endured during her life. She lives in a spacious old peasants’ hut (izba) with a Russian stove. It was originally built of good materials but is now decaying and rather untidy. He pays her for his lodgings and discovers that the collective farm where she used to work has never bothered to pay her pension; neither is she ackowledged as an invalid although she clearly is one. A large number of similar administrative and bureaucratic injustices have befallen her since the death of husband, twelve years ago. She milks a goat and grows her own potatoes, and that is all that the narrator is given for breakfast and for dinner, but he is easily reconciled to this, and they become good friends. The story goes into detail about the hard life of Matriona and the stories she tells the narrator. Most of the peat that is won in the neighbourhood is not for the local people, and there is never enough fuel for them to get through the winter, which means that they have to steal peat, carrying it on their backs, often over very long distances. She also has to work hard to gather fodder for her goat. She would not be able to have a cow, even if she wanted one, because the authorities would not allow her to mow grass on the embankment which belongs to the railway, or in the wood because that belongs to the forest service, and neither would the kolkhoz allow her to mow grass on their land. However, the kolkhoz still presses her into helping them with chores of every kind, as do her relatives and neighbours. Matriona, generous soul that she is, simply cannot refuse and will help the neighbours’ to dig up their excellent potatoes without envying them or accepting money for it, though in fairness they sometimes force it upon her. In between she suffers from attacks of her illness which can immobilise her for days on end. At such times, her best friend Masha comes to help her, but the idea of sending for a doctor from the medical centre is unheard of in the village. She was married before the Revolution and had six children, all of whom died very young. Her husband, Efim, failed to return from the last war. She married into the house and has been living in it ever since. Before her marriage, she had in fact been betrothed to her husband’s older brother, Faddei, but he was drafted when the Great War began. He disappeared during the fighting, and when nothing had been heard of him for two years, she married his younger brother, and it

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was he who had brought her to the house. Faddei eventually returned, having been held captive in Austria. He was angry that she was married, and swore that if Efim had not been his brother he would have killed them both. He refused to marry until he found another girl who was also called Matriona. When he did so, he habitually beat her, but they had six children together, and all of them survived. When Efim failed to return from the Second World War, having in fact abandoned her, the first Matriona lived alone for a time in the old, decaying house, but then she arranged with the other Matriona that she would take care of her youngest daughter, Kira, and for ten years Kira had been like a daughter to her. She had recently left Matriona’s house to be married. Matriona had promised to leave the the gornitsa – a wooden building frame attached to the main house that, because it was separate from the part warmed by the smoking central stove, had originally formed the clean area of the izba – to Kira in her will. The will did not say anything about the rest of the izba, and three of Matriona’s sisters wanted that for themselves. While the narrator is living there, he witnesses the ensuing family tragedy. Kira and her new husband appear, supported by her father Faddei, and they demand that she give them the gornitsa immediately, allegedly so thet they can build a house on another piece of land, there being no other wood to build from. Matriona feels very intimidated by this. Because Faddei and his father originally built the gornitsa for the use of himself and his bride, he being the eldest son, he comes with his sons and sons-in-law to dismantle it and all that appertains to it, leaving Matriona’s izba with a thin, patched wall, full of holes, effectively destroying it. To make matters worse, Matriona’s sisters also appear, blaming her for having given away the gornitsa. Meanwhile, its wood is loaded on to a number of sledges, to be pulled by a single tractor. When the party is leaving, Matriona generously goes outside to see the sledges off, while the narrator remains in the hut, waiting for her to return. Instead of Matriona, two railroad officials arrive, wanting to know whether the transport began from here and whether the company had been drinking. It transpires that, after crossing the railway, the tractor had tried to pull the sledges up a steep slope; the rope had broken, and one of the sledges had stuck on the railway track and begun to break up. Matriona had gone on to the rails to help two others in clearing the wreckage, and all three had been crushed by a


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train that, because it was moving backwards, had come from the unexpected direction. With Matriona still exposed in her coffin during the mourning period before her funeral, her sisters have already taken possession of the izba and everything in it. The narrator is struck by the insincerity of their ostentatious wailing and crying, each of them assuring the deceased that she loved her more than the others while at the same time blaming her for her own death, which would not have happened if she had only listened to them and refused to give away the gornitsa. By the same token, they blame her husband’s family, who should not think that they will give up the izba to them so easily. The mourning of that family is equally insincere: they assure the dead Matriona of their innocence of her death, but they also claim their right to the izba. Meanwhile, there is further irony in the fact that the railway workers, who spend three days repairing the damage to the track, keep themselves warm by burning some of the splintered remains of the gornitsa. While supposedly mourning the woman he once loved – and threatened to kill – Faddei is preoccupied by thoughts of saving what remains of the gornitsa and thwarting Matriona’s sisters in their plans regarding the izba. He ultimately succeeds in obtaining official permission to retrieve the remaining wood from the gornitsa, but the izba is divided among them by agreement since they realise that, if they contested the case in court, both parties would lose the house, which would be given over to the village Soviet. The narrator moves in with one of the sisters-in-law, who talks disparagingly of Matriona even when supposedly praising her warmth and simplicity. It was only then, the narrator concludes, that he understood the exceptional character and meaning of Matriona: Не гналась она за обзаводом... Не выбивалась, чтобы купить вещи и потом беречь их болше своей жизни. Не гналась за нарядами. За одеждой, приукрашивающей уродов и злодеев. Не понятая и брошенная мужем своим, схоронившая шесть детей, но не нрав свой общительный, чужая сестрам, золoвкам, смешная, по-глупому работающая на других бесплатно, - она не скопила имущества к смерти. Грязно-белая коза, колченогая кошка, фикусы...

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Все мы жили рядом с ней и не поняли, что есть она тот самый праведник, без которого, по пословице, не стоит село. Ни город. Ни вся земля наша.2 (Solzhenitsyn 2001, 137)

Thus we have a narrator who is homeless as a result of the Soviet system but finds a temporary home in the old izba of a mildly-eccentric old woman whose ‘sins were less than those of her lame cat – that throttled mice’ (163). He witnesses what is nothing less than a condensed Russian family chronicle of the first half of the twentieth century. Connected with this House story there is the dynastic aspect, a conflict over its possession which divided families, and a resultant tragedy. A further traditional element that can be discerned in this dynastic story of greed and revenge is the suggestion of a fatal curse connected with the House and its inhabitants. Faddei is moved by a ruthless drive for revenge and compensation for his old humiliation. He has to have the gornitsa but, from the moment he resolves to take it, it is accursed: Из-за горницы, на которую легло прoклятие стех пор, как руки Фаддея ухватились ее ломать.3 (183)

As we have seen, the same sense of the gornitsa’s having been to blame for the tragedy resounds in the mourning lamentations of the women. Matriona, the innocent, righteous woman who, in spite of poverty, illness and misery, lives by humanitarian standards, is the main victim of this tragedy. However, we can also conclude that a metonymic 2 She never wanted to acquire things for herself… Never would trouble herself to buy things and find them more important than her own life. She would never attempt to acquire luxury clothes such as adorn monsters and evil-doers. Misunderstood and abandoned by her husband, having buried his six children but not her sociable nature, a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, a laughingstock because she would work for others without payment – she did not try to accumulate property when death was approaching. All she owned were a dirty-white goat, a crippled cat and rubber plants… We all lived alongside her, and we never understood that she was that righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, no village stands. Nor any city. Nor our whole land. 3 Because of the gornitsa, on which there was a curse from the moment Faddei’s hands laid hold of it in order to break it.


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analogy is created between the integrity of the individual – her right of inviolability – and that of the house, which is also morally inseparable from its inhabitant and owner. Matriona’s real significance, as the conclusion shows, is defined as a moral message about the values of the human community, as formulated by a traditional Russian proverb. Solzhenitsyn has taken the implicit structure of this proverb and ‘grafted’ his own story’s title and topic on to it. At the end of the story, Matriona and her house are effectively placed in the centre of a concentric image of a morally sensible Russian world (house–village– land), a mythopoetic strategy that has already been discussed in Chapters I.1 and I.3 in connection with creation myths and analogous archaic cosmological representations.

37. Erofeev. Venichka’s Homelessness in the Soviet Universe Venedikt Erofeev’s Moskva–Petushki (M-P)1 is an acknowledged classical underground text of the stagnant Brezhnev era2 as well as of twentieth-century Russian literature as a whole. Since its first publication in Russia,3 there have been numerous critical and analytical articles, close readings and detailed commentaries interpreting and tracing the wealth of quotations, allusions, parodies, ironies and doubleironies that are so characteristic of Erofeev’s poèma and its first person hero Venichka. Russian literary critics and historians have hailed it as one of the first and most important Postmodernist works in Russian literature.4 My intention is to discuss the foundations of the hero’s world by focusing on what I think are crucial spatial topics in M-P: the train, the pod”ezd (porch or entrance hall, including the staircase and landings), and the house, or rather its absence. Erofeev introduced the narrative text of M-P to his readers as a poèma. This designation inevitably echoes Gogol’s poèma Dead Souls and the distinctive, paradoxical sense of genre that came with it, conveying Gogol’s special view of Russia and his own responsibility as a writer. Although irony, parody and pastiche are the stylistic core of Erofeev’s work, this generic designation implies a certain grand-scale, 1

This chapter is based on an earlier, more extensive analysis of this text; see Van Baak 2003. 2 According to Skoropanova (1999, 145), the work was written in 1969 or at the beginning of 1970. 3 A shortened version in 1988, in the journal Трезвость и культура, and the complete text in 1990 (Saint-Petersburg); see Skoropanova 1999, 146. 4 In addition to Skoropanova’s synoptic review of the Russian reception of M-P, see Iu. Levin 1992ab, 1996, M. Lipovetskii 1992, I. A. Paperno & B. M. Gasparov 1981 and E. A. Smirnova 1990.

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epic intention behind the text, which should be understood as a ‘message for Russia’. As I have already indicated, its recent reception in Russia predominantly reflects the Postmodernist stance of the literary critics of the nineteen-eighties and nineties; see Skoropanova in particular. There is certainly much in the polyvalent aesthetics of M-P that justifies such a classification when some of the canonical criteria of Postmodernist judgement are applied to it: a general loss of hierarchy on the stylistic and sociolinguistic levels, the use of hybrid genres, genre forms and discourses, free quotation, parody, pastiche, travesty and the debunking of authoritative or classical images. All these are conspicuous aspects of M-P, which is also clearly a long way removed from the stylistic and ethical canon of Soviet literary discourse, illegally and irreverently undermining the authoritarian, monolithic Soviet world, its ideology, its leaders and other icons. However, there are equally important structural features of M-P that suggest more traditional, modernistic, romantic and even archaic approaches. Throughout the work, the narrator-hero, unreliable and ironic though he may be, is still intensely involved in his world, clinging to an ideal and feeling responsibility. In M-P the author/narrator does indeed have a story to tell, and although Venichka’s world is not presented as a coherent one, there is a consistent, coherent voice – that of the social or ideological ‘non-conformist’ – and a continuous effort to occupy a moral position – that of the victimised individual in the face of the immoral, repressive and anonymous Soviet power.5 It is possible to conclude that the narrator-hero, his standpoint and his behaviour are characterised by an ultimately tragic attitude, and it is exactly this position that is not typical of the canonical Postmodernist condition. The basic plot structure of the poèma M-P as a genre is already indicated by the title: it is a train journey with a destination. It is therefore reminiscent of traditional epic forms such as the travelogue or quest, in which the idea of journeying is dominant. In addition to the association with Gogol’s Мертвые души (Dead Souls), critics have 5

M. Lipovetskii (1992, 217), for example, discusses the Postmodernist features of MP, but also emphasises the ‘integrity of the perception of the world of author and hero’ (целостность мировосприятия автора и героя).

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established a link with Radishchev’s eighteenth-century Sentimentalist travelogue Путешествие из Петербурга в Москву (A Journey from Saint-Petersburg to Moscow). This is valid on more than simply formal grounds: despite the essential differences between the two texts they are recognisably part of the same literary tradition. In both texts, a journey and its articulations provide the basic plot motivation for successive confrontations with people and circumstances that induce a variety of critical and revelatory contemplations of Russia and the state it is in. The intended trajectory of Venichka’s plot is a journey from Kursk Station, in Moscow, to the suburb of Petushki. Venichka never arrives in Petushki (whereas Radishchev does reach Moscow), his quest for that ideal destination, which harbours the woman he loves and their son, bringing him straight back to the ‘unknown porch’ in the centre of Moscow from which he began his journey – and in which he will be killed. It is obvious that Venichka’s view of the world is determined by his relationship with alcohol, but the alcoholic theme in M-P does not simply represent a social scourge and a desperate escape from moral and social misery; it is also a protest against a state and ideology that drives its subjects to drink. The alcoholic discourse is a central element of the lives and world-views of non-conformist heroes such as Venichka, and hence of the poèma’s overall meaning, but Venichka’s obsession with alcohol verges on religious veneration and inspires him to exuberant metaphorical language. This discourse is in fact a major expression of his consistently mocking, disruptive and antiauthoritarian attitude, a heroic and futile effort to gain freedom where there is none to be gained. With its inversion of values and anarchic drive, it is a clear and dispiriting example of Bakhtinian carnivalisation. As the plot of M-P advances, the theme of alcoholic consumption is steadily developed, and Venichka’s material world becomes less and less distinct from the world of his fantasies, fears and delirious projections. We might indeed consider the possibility that everything the poèma describes takes place only in the mind of the narrator-hero as an interior monologue (see Skoropanova 1999, 171) or nightmare. However, although his world becomes increasingly blurred and disoriented, there is a paradoxical sense in which he remains sober to the end; otherwise he would not be able to tell his story.

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The shapes and spaces of Venichka’s world are, of course, influenced by the type of perception just described. The setting – greater Moscow – is presented mainly as the route followed by Venichka’s trip on a suburban train (èlektrichka). His world is rendered as a series of spatial articulations, breaking up the travel plot, beginning and ending with specific parts of the city of Moscow. In the overall structure of the poèma the train is also part of the thematic conflict between linearity and cyclicity. Cyclicity is usually seen as a typological characteristic of archaic or mythical world models as opposed to linear models that ackowledge time and event as historically unique and successive. However, as Lotman has indicated, in modern literary texts (understanding ‘modern’ in the broadest sense), the plot is typically the resultant of their interaction (Lotman 1997). For the delivery of its symbolic, even metaphysical, message, Erofeev’s text obviously relies strongly on the semiotics of cyclic narrative modelling.6 The linearity of the train plot is interrupted and becomes cyclic after the station (and chapter) ‘Orekhovo-Zuevo’ because it is here that Venichka, in the process of changing trains, boards the wrong train and begins his journey back to Moscow under the mistaken impression that he is still on his way to Petushki. Venichka’s story of a whole day thus comes full circle, beginning and ending in an ‘unknown porch’. As a mobile setting and conflict space, the train can generate certain traditional mobile plot features that it shares with other forms of transport, but it is without doubt a modern literary setting, both technically and from the perspective of literary history. A rail passenger is completely subject to the autonomous movement of the train. The fact that he or she has no control over the route or duration of the trip, or even over its destination, can be exploited symbolically in the construction of the plot. In M-P, this feature is expressed in the fact that his trip does not bring Venichka to Petushki, as intended, but back to Moscow. His being the cause of his own downfall by stepping on to the wrong train at Orekhovo-Zuevo does not alter this fatal role of the 6

This is manifest in compositional phenomena such as the partial iconic repetition and contrastive mirroring of various parts and concepts in the text. For example, in the structure of Moscow, cyclicity is inherent in the motif of the Sadovoe kol’tso (the Garden Ring). See Van Baak 2003.


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train.7 During the course of the poèma, the expected destination of the train – Petushki – is increasingly represented by Venichka as a different world where everything is better. It is in fact a utopia, or Paradise, where the jasmine is never without flower; birds sing day and night the whole year round, and even original sin seems harmless: Петушки - это место, где не умолкают птицы, ни днем, ни ночью, где ни зимой, ни летом не отцветает жасмин. Первородный грех - может, он и был - там никого не тяготит.8 (‘Reutovo-Nikol’skoe’, Erofeev 2001, 38)

Trains and stations can function as improper houses, partial and defective substitutes for the domestic qualities of the house in the proper sense. This function of the train is often connected with the disruptions and peregrinations that come with war, as in Babel’s Konarmiia (Red Cavalry) or Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago. The train as a space with walls, windows and places to sit, providing a form of shelter somewhat reminiscent of a house, is nevertheless a mockerey of domestic space and the stability that is essential to a house. In M-P, Venichka and his fellow alcoholics lead a semi-nomadic existence on suburban trains, finding shelter in railway stations. It is a unique way of life, a subculture of non-conformists with a particular view of life. Their life is bound up with the train, which is itself a metaphor for life, fate and especially ‘progress’ – one of the central mythemes, or pseudo-myths, of Soviet ideology. The irony here lies in the cyclical composition of the poèma, which suggests that the metaphorical train of Soviet society, rather than moving forward in accordance with the historic linearity of progress and carrying its passengers towards the promised radiant future, is running in circles; see also Skoropanova 1999, 170. It is a vicious circle, a fatal cycle in which a negative cause keeps returning with increasing force, as in addiction and the insurmountable stagnation of the Brezhnev era. Metaphysically, Venichka is subject to an endless

7 The station Orekhovo-Zuevo is about 95 km from Moscow; the distance from Moscow to Petushki is 125 km. 8 Petushki is a place where the birds always sing, night and day, where the jasmine always flowers, summer and winter. Original sin – perhaps it was there – but it does not burden anybody.

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repetition – or, in the words of Lipovetskii, an ‘evil eternity, overpowering the linearity of human life’.9 The illusory, ‘vicious’ or haunted movement of the train is related to another fundamental aspect of Venichka’s existence and relationship with his world, that of disorientation, which itself implies the impossibility of linearity. His disorientation can be motivated by his consumption of alcohol, of course, but it can also be observed on several other structural and thematic levels, temporal and spatial as well as moral. It determines his entire universe, its logic and its causality. In the first chapter – ‘Москва. На пути к Курскому вокзалу’ (‘On the Way to Kursk Station’) – this is already a leitmotiv: Venichka complains about the fact that, when searching for the Kremlin, he invariably ends up at Kursk station – even when he is relatively sober – but now that he intended to go to Kursk station he was unable to find it and ended up sleeping on ‘somebody’s unknown porch’ (проснулся утром в чьем-то неведомом подъезде; 18). He is a failed epic ‘hero of the road’, doomed to follow the wrong tracks, incapable of linearity or effective purposeful action. But this is not only an essential aspect of his own actantial make-up; it is inherent in the structure of his world and his conflict. According to Lipovetskii, commenting on similarities between Venichka and the traditional iurodivyi (holy fool), his conflict is overtly metaphysical – a conflict with the very structure of the world (это конфликт с мироустройством; Lipovetskii 1999, 222). Forms of disorientation are present throughout the text and extend beyond Venichka’s literal direction of travel. Disorientation is part of his attitude towards life. In a crucial passage in the first chapter, he expresses his view of life in a characteristic maxim. Realising that he does not know the porch where he finds himself on the morning of his trip to Petushki (spatial and cognitive disorientation), he accepts and even welcomes the fact as an unavoidable, necessary part of life’s course:10 9 Так дурная бесконечность кольца одолевает линию человеческой жизни (Lipovetskii 1992, 223). 10 Levin (1996, 31) connects this with a passage from Dostoevskii’s address at the Pushkin jubilee (Дневник писателя за 1880 г.): Смирись, гордый человек, и прежде всего сломи свою гордость, which reaches back to Pushkin’s Цыганы: Оставь


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Что это за подъезд, я до сих пор понятия не имею; но так и надо. Все так. Все на свете должно происходить медленно и неправильно, чтобы не сумел загордиться человек, чтобы человек был грустен и растерян.11 (18)

Following his own logic, Venichka concludes that it makes no difference whether he goes left, right or straight on; the choice is irrelevant. When he does choose a direction, therefore, his doing so is simultaneously logical, absurd and futile, as he is well aware. Speaking in the voice of Ecclesiastes, he laments the fate of his country at the end of Chapter 1: Поэтому иди направо, чтобы уж наверняка туда попасть. О, тщета! О, эфемерность! О, самое бессильное и позорное время в жизни моего народа – время от рассвета до открытия магазинов! Сколько лишних седин оно вплело во всех нас, в без(19) домных и тоскующих шатенов! Иди, Веничка, иди.12

This is the hardest hour, the time before the liquor shops open, when Venichka most painfully realises that he, and the likes of him, are homeless. As the title of this chapter suggests, it is not clear where Venichka lives, but he appears to lead a semi-nomadic existence. He is a hero of the road, declared homeless. At the beginning of the poèma, we learn that he has been on the move since yesterday, searching for the elusive Kremlin. He is obviously not very attached to domestic values: what really concerns him in the opening chapter is not the fact that he has woken up to find himself, with his little suitcase, on ‘somebody’s unknown porch’, but that he has lost track of his drinking pattern. Towards the end however, in the chapters ‘Петушки. Вокзальная плонас, гордый человек. In my opinion Venichka’s paradoxical and ironic tone of resignation here also shows strong affinity with that of Platonov’s narrators. 11 What sort of porch this is I still have no idea; but it has to be like that. Everything is in order. Everything on earth must happen slowly and wrongly, lest man become proud, so that instead he be melancholy and confused. 12 Therefore turn right, so that you may get there for certain. Oh, vanity! Oh, ephemeralness! Oh, most powerless and shameful time in the life of my people – the time between sunrise and the opening of the shops! How much unwanted gray has it plaited into the auburn hair of the homeless and melancholy! Go, Venichka, go.

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щадь’ (‘Petushki. Station Square’) and ‘Петушки. Садовое кольцо’ (‘Petushki. Garden Ring’), his delirious disorientation, despair and loneliness reach rock bottom as he realises that he has not come to Petushki at all but returned to Moscow, whose excessively broad streets and huge houses terrify him. We are presented with the pitiful image of Venichka shivering with cold, vainly knocking on front doors, unable to understand why people will not open their doors to a poor man and let him warm himself for a couple of minutes (114). The porch has a special significance for the entire story. As I have already indicated, Venichka meets his death in the final chapter in an unknown porch that, if not the one where he awoke at the beginning, might just as well be. The anonymity of the porch, in itself the most anonymous and inhospitable area of the domestic space, is of course symbolic of Venichka’s social position and status in the Soviet urban space. We might think of it as a topological no man’s land, not really a part of the domestic space, neither house nor street. In the porch and staircase where Venichka took shelter for the night, Erofeev emphatically introduces verticality, the dimension of spirituality and religious thematics, which is set in contrast to the horizontality of the epic text of the poèma. Venichka explicitly states that the place where he sat down to go to sleep was forty steps up, counting from below.13 The literary modelling capacity of this opposition in M-P is further enhanced by the framing position of the porch in relation to Venichka’s plot world. It is both the beginning and the end. In the two penultimate chapters,14 the build-up of suspense begins with Venichka’s meeting the four men who will kill him and his decision to run for his life (116). This coincides with his final realisation that he is not in Petushki and the sudden, totally unexpected view of the Kremlin. Together, these coincidences dramatically signal the end of his epic, ‘horizontal’, and his spiritual, ‘vertical’ journey, marking the special significance of the final chapter in which Venichka is going to die. The title of the final chapter – ‘Москва – Петушки. Неизвестный подъезд’ (‘Moscow – Petushki. Unknown Porch’) – indicates 13

The religious and cultural significance of the number 40 in relation to death and the journey of the soul has been noted by various critics. 14 ‘Petushki. Sadovoe kol’co’ (Garden Ring), and ‘Petushki. Kreml’ (Kremlin). Pamiatnik Mininu i Pozharskomu’ (Monument to Minin and Pozharskii).


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that the story has made a full circle, taking us back both to the title of the entire poèma and to the unknown porch. In this chapter, the porch and the landing at the top of the staircase also signify verticality, particularly the verticality of staircases, as the canonical dimension of suspense in a dangerous space.15 Venichka flees upstairs to the highest landing, finds himself trapped there and listens to his killers climbing the stairs and closing in upon him. He is fully aware of his impending death. As I have already suggested, it is the anonymity of the porch and staircase that plays such an important role in Venichka’s story. In that respect, they are comparable to the stations and railway carriages where Venichka lives for much of the time. The conclusion is that he has no place of his own – the simplest adequate minimal definition of the essence of a house. Homelessness may be a universal theme of literature, but there are always culturally and historically specific aspects to consider when we are faced with it in a text. Venichka’s situation should therefore be viewed in its specific Soviet Russian context. As we have repeatedly observed during Part II, the lack or loss of houses, as well as ‘defective’ houses, has played a significant role in Russian literature since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century it was a thematic constant. The theme and situation of homelessness can provide very powerful images of loneliness. It can be seen, against the background of the principally positive House Myth, as a fundamental human defect or deprivation. However, as we have also seen in earlier chapters, we can observe in Russian cultural and literary history a characteristic distrust of the values of domesticity in the Western sense, an uneasy idea that a ‘homely home’, with its comfort and commodities, is somehow undeserved, a symptom of materialistic laziness and egotism, undesirable in the face of persisting social inequality and immorality.16 15

Critics, for example Levin 1996, 92, have drawn an analogy between this and the staircase in Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment. 16 This seems ironically to echo Aksakov’s Slavophile emphasis on the ideas of sobornost’ as a community ideal, and the gnezdo (‘nest’), both patriarchal concepts that stress the spiritual community at the expense of individuality and material comfort; see also Chapter II.6. However, as we have seen in the work of Pushkin for example (see Chapter II.7), the House as a symbol of durability and security can be unreliable in Russian literature.

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In the context of twentieth-century Russian literary and cultural history, we can also observe a deep conflict between what appears to be a universal human need for domesticity (shelter, warmth, privacy, space for oneself and one’s family) and the perceived need to transcend the barriers of the individual ego in order to develop the true collective spirit of the ‘New Man’. Prime examples of ideological and moral tensions concerning the House and its values during the Soviet period can be found in Andrei Platonov’s Котлован (The Foundation Pit) and Chevengur as well as in the phenomenon of communal housing; see Chapters II.32 and 33. Most of what Venichka himself has to say about this is implicit. In the chapters ‘Karacharovo-Chukhlinka’ and ‘Chukhlinka-Kuskovo’ (29-32), he tells of having settled down ten years earlier at the station of Orekhovo-Zuevo, moving into an apartment where four other men, colleagues at the cableworks, were already living. At the beginning they live in harmony, but after some time he invokes their anger by drinking beer but apparently not needing to use the lavatory. This gives them the impression that he feels superior to them: мы грязные животные, а ты как лилея! (‘We are dirty animals, and you are like a lily!’). He pleads an innate delicacy and excessive sense of shame, even referring to the days of Ivan Turgenev to justify himself, but his comrades refuse to accept this. To them, his prudery (tselomudrie) is a sign of his lacking something fundamental in his upbringing. It is obvious that we should interpret this story, with its grotesque inversion of values, as a scathing irony on life in the kommunalka with its structural denial of privacy; see Chapter II.34. One of the men remarks significantly that ‘with such scandalous opinions’ he ‘will be for ever lonely and unhappy’ (С такими взглядами ты будешь вечно одиноким и несчастливым; 31). In the chapter ‘Kuskovo-Novogireevo’ (33), Venichka continues to tell how he lived together in harmony with his comrades at the cableworks: ‘Having cast aside shame and further worries, we lived an exclusively spiritual life’ (Отбросив стыд и дальние заботы, мы жили исключительно духовной жизнью). We can observe here a thematic connection with Blok’s poem ‘Солoвьиный сад’ (‘Nightingale Garden’, 1915), which Venichka gives his comrades to read in order to broaden their horizons as much as possible, stressing that it is a ‘timely book’ that they ‘will read to their great benefit’ (33). In this poem,


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Blok’s lyric hero undergoes an existential crisis. Confronted by utter loneliness, he realises that he has been under the spell of an unattainable and undeserved personal happiness, symbolised by the image of a woman in an enchanted garden from which he is exluded. One commentary on this poem states that it is a polemical rejection of the ‘particularly hateful idea of ‘personal comfort’’ (особенно ненавистный ему ‘личный уют’) and the individual’s right to ‘personal happiness’ (личное счастье); see Blok 1970, t. 3, 345. Blok himself claimed that the themes of duty, compassion towards the weak and the poor, the fact that everybody must go their own, chosen way and the necessity to fight for a new, better world were predominant (see Blok 1997, 886); yet the interpretation that Venichka’s gives is curious and difficult to connect with Blok’s text; it is ironic in its familiar, irreverent, bantering tone and includes a mockingly didactic twist. He sheds an unorthodox light on an authoritative Symbolist text and presents an autobiographically engaged view of the predicament of Blok’s lyric hero. He bluntly states that at the centre of the poem is a lyric hero who has lost his job for ‘drunkenness, whoring and absenteeism’ (уволенный с работы за пьянки, блядки и прогулы), thereby implicitly projecting on to the poem his own homelessness and vagrancy. Venichka, too, repeatedly says that every man cannot but go his own way.17 A plausible conclusion would be that it is at least the tragic heroism of the themes of loneliness and unattainable happiness that appealed to Venichka and made him bring this poem to his comrades’ attention, but in Blok’s poem there is also the utopian association with the Garden of Eden, echoing Venichka’s own vision of Petushki, the home of his beloved and their son, as a Paradise. In the entire text of M-P, there are no normal domestic indoor settings. In the chapter ‘Chernoe-Kupavna’ 48), Venichka tells how, on his twentieth and thirtieth birthdays, friends came to visit him, bringing bottles of vodka and zakuski as presents, but these visits only made him unbearably lonely and sad. Staying indoors is as impossible for Venichka as giving up drinking, even though his reason tells him to do both. 17 This could be associated with the final linеs of Blok’s poem: А с тропинки, протоптанной мною, / Там, где хижина прежде была, / Стал спускаться рабочий с киркою, / Погоняя чужого осла. (And down the path, made by me, / There, where the hut used to be, / A workman descended with a pickaxe, / Urging on someone else’s donkey.)

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In the chapters ‘Novogireevo-Reutovo’ and ‘Reutovo-Nikol’skoe’, he describes his heart’s struggle with his reason and sense of duty over the question of whether to drink or stop drinking (37). Reason, of course, tries to convince Venichka (and his heart) that he should refrain from drinking, linking this, interestingly, with going out; that is, leaving the house. Venichka’s reason says, Ты не встанешь, Ерофеев, ты никуда не пойдешь и ни капля не выпьешь (‘You will not get up, Erofeev; you will go nowhere and drink not a single drop’). The heart pleads in favour of some leniency, and reason gives in to a compromise: Ну, хорошо, Веня – сказал – хорошо, выпей сто пятьдесят, только никуда не ходи, сиди дом (‘Well, all right, Venia – it said – drink 150 grams, but don’t go out; stay at home’). Then Venichka begins to drink 500 grams per day in order to keep his place that is, stay at home, but he fails of course (37). After six days of heavy drinking, when ‘the boundary between reason and heart had disappeared’, these two sanctioned his leaving for Petushki to find his joy and be saved. For the restless Venichka, the idea of the House and happiness together is at best an ideal, spiritual but elusive and ultimately immaterial destination, not unlike that of the eternal Jerusalem, merging in his imagination into the unattainable paradisal locus of Petushki. This Petushki seems to be located outside normal, oriented space and time; as we noticed earlier, Venichka is caught up in an evil cycle of disorientation, and he admits that he does not know the whereabouts of the house of his beloved in Petushki; see the chapter ‘Усад – 105-й километр’ (‘Usad-105th kilometer’; 98). On another, equally figurative level, Venichka’s factual houselessness is also symbolic of the houselessness of his roaming spirit within the Soviet world. Here again, the House as an archetope is ambivalent, as archetypes always are. The absence of a house is not always necessarily a deficiency; it can be a condition of freedom.18 Ven18

Therefore, as a matter of principle, the concept of the House should not be identified with the idea of ‘home’, even though a motif such as ‘homecoming’ (just like its opposite, the ‘loss of home’) should be considered as an integral part of the House Myth; see also Chapter I.1. We could say that the thematic inventory of the House Myth includes – and so is larger than – the set of motives defining ‘home’. The ‘home’ function is never a stable, given one but is related to individual plots, whereas the House concept is hierarchically more general; that is, it has the status of invariant in relation to the level of particular plots and their axiological, evaluative differentiations.


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ichka, consciously or intuitively, flees the threat of stagnation that comes with the sedentary life.19 He lives on the streets by his own choice, which is the only freedom he has as a powerless non-conformist. It allows him the least possible involvement in the Soviet world and system. Topologically, his position is consistently on the periphery of society, the typical zone of existence for non-conformists. The House as a topos in the sense of the House Myth is certainly not a peripheral structure; on the contrary, it is a centred concept par excellence.20 It is tempting to interpret in this light the fact that at the very beginning of the poèma Venichka stresses his inability to approach the Kremlin; the real centre of Moscow. Reaching the ideal, peripheral Petushki could be seen as the only possible real homecoming for Venichka, but it is not to happen.21 So here too, we see a case of the ‘loss of the centre’ that was discussed in Chapter II.29. Venichka lived in an evil, chaotic universe without definitive orientations. The House, both as a reality and as an ideal, was not capable of providing its archetypal values and orientations for him in such a universe. The only House he could think of as a Home remained a wild dream that he continued to cherish, a paradisal House in Petushki where he would live together with the woman he loved and their son. Thus his dream House contained all the canonical elements of the House Myth, but the House, for Venichka, could never be anything more.

19

Which on its own already makes him a typological Romantic hero. His position is very reminiscent of the topological behaviour of, for example, the ‘house-fleeing’ Cossacks of Gogol’ (see Lotman 1968) and Babel’; see Van Baak 1983. 20 For the cosmogonic capacity of the House to be the centre of the universe, see, among others, Bollnow 1963. 21 Moscow, as we come to see it through Venichka’s eyes, is an increasingly chaotic, treacherous and demonic place. This urban demonism has been noticed by many critics in connection with the intertextual references and literary associations with the Saint-Petersburg of Dostoevskii, particularly in his novel Crime and Punishment ; see, among others, Levin. Venichka cannot find the Kremlin – the centre and seat of his enemy, the Soviet state. He only sees it when he is close to his death.

38. Sorokin’s Roman. A Postmodernist Attempts the Destruction of the Domus In Chapter I.4, the last of the fabular categories of the House Myth covered Loss of the House by various causes, including what was called the ‘Death of the House (Domus)’. In Part II we have dealt with plots representing the Death of the House (Domus) in Russian literature, particularly among the great realists of the nineteenth century. Sorokin’s novel Роман (Roman; that is, Novel), published in 1994 but written between 1985 and 1989, presents the almost-certainly unique case of what boils down to an attempt at killing the Domus and all that belongs to it, both as a plot element and as a world-founding, mythical concept of the literary world. This attempt is part of, or at least implied by, Sorokin’s greater deconstructive and destructive strategy with regard to the novelistic universe and the genre itself,1 as we shall see. Sorokin, particularly in his early works, proves an astonishingly virtuosic and provocative manipulator of different stylistic ranges, or ‘blocks’ (стилевые блоки) as he called them in a February 1995 interview (Roll 1996, 125). His position in Russian literature has its roots in Moscow conceptualism and SotsArt. In that phase of his literary career, he was seen as a Postmodernist author parodying and deconstructing the language of totalitarian art (idem, 17).2 In the Russian

1 As Sorokin himself stated in the journal Nezavisimaia gazeta (14-4-2005; www.srkn.ru/criticism/sorokin1.shtml): Так же, как роман „Роман“ уничтожал жанр, обозначенный в названии этого произведения. 2 ... and undermining the authority of literature as such. In an earlier interview (Sorokin 1992, 121), he says: ‘all my books are only relationships with text, with different speech layers …When asked about the ethical dimension of my work … then I don’t understand … aren’t these just letters on a piece of paper?’

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context, this implies a specifically complex and often confusing position. On the one hand, it means doing away with the ‘totalitarian’ authority of the great Russian writers – their traditional social status as prophets or teachers, the authority of their literary vehicles, their styles, genres, world-views and motivations – in the most provocative and confrontational way imaginable: sublime, hyperbolic imitation and emulation. The primary ingredient is irreverent play – the undermining of seriousness and authority, and the joy of pulling the reader’s leg, or the leg of literary criticism, or even the legs of the extra-literary authorities: Sorokin has been prosecuted because of his writings. In his case, the play and deconstruction are aimed at the canons of Realism and Socialist Realism. On the other hand, there is a deep fascination with the power of those stylistic ‘blocks’ and the gifted writers of Russian literary history whose works are epitomised in them. Every Russian author naturally has a private ambition to be part of the canon of Russian literature, and Sorokin, as he admits in the interview just mentioned, is no exception. Speaking of his intentions as a novelist, and about his novel Roman in particular, he says: Я никогда не воспринимал соцреализм как пародию, наоборот, он меня привлекал и привлекает. Но я пользуюсь разными стилями. Мои романы – это часто работа не с соцреализмом, а с русской литературой вообще. Роман под названием “Роман” это попытка выделить такой средний русский роман, отчасти провинциальный. В этом романе действие происходит не во времени, а в пространстве русского романа. Время действия – XIX-ый век, хотя я сам и старался давать никаких временных координат. Легче всего было бы обойтись чеховскими персонажами – околоточными и почтмейстером, - но я как раз хотел избежать этого. Хотя он вышел только сейчас, я работал над ним четыре года, с 1985 по 1989, и я думаю, что это довольно филигранный текст.3 (idem, 126) 3 I never perceived Socialist Realism as a parody; on the contrary, it has always attracted me and still does. But I use diverse styles. My novels are often the result of working, not with Socialist Realism, but with Russian literature in general. The novel with the title Roman is an attempt to single out such an average Russian novel, partly provincial. In this novel the action takes place, not in time but in the space of the Rus-

Sorokin’s Roman. A Postmodernist Attempts the Destruction of the Domus 461

For our purpose it is interesting that he sees his novel as taking place ‘not in time, but in the space of the Russian novel’. It is not intended as a historical novel, or even as historical fiction. The text is created without reference to any actual historical framework. It is intended as play with generic conventions and readers’ expectations, and this will almost certainly extend to the mythological structures that are inherent in the textual tradition of this type of novel. Another important characteristic of Sorokin the novelist is his seemingly-obsessive fascination with violence, both as a literary theme and as a phenomenon connected with the totalitarian position of the author and his насильственный дискурс (‘violent discourse’; idem, 17). As its plot development will show, this novel is no exception. What, then, is this novel entitled Roman? Just a novel, or a pastiche of the great nineteenth-century Russian novel? Or is it a grotesque but superbly controlled and self-serving ironic form of epigonism – long after the disappearance of the literary formations themselves – for which literary theory still lacks a proper name? However we approach this problem, it is evident that we are dealing with something more important than pastiche. We can infer from the interview above that, in the last resort, Sorokin lays claim to an original work. On the basis of the text itself, he is, of course, entitled to do so, though on grounds which are different from the usual criteria of literary reception and canonisation. The novel is given a metafictional title, referring to the genre of the great nineteenth-century novel and its estate setting, but also to this novel’s protagonist, whose name is Roman. This stresses the text’s literariness, its artistic character and the conventionality of its world-picture, characters, plot and composition. For most of the text, these generic expectations are fulfilled in so far as the chosen plot options fit the conventions, logic and world-picture of the genre. Although indications of a certain doom are hidden at various points in the plot, the novel’s catastrophic finale as it is is not only unexpected sian novel. The time of action is the nineteenth century, although I tried not to give any temporal clues. The easiest would have been to make do with Chekhovian persons – police-officers or a postmaster – but I wanted to avoid exactly that. Though the novel has only just come out, I worked on it for four years, from 1985 to 1989, and I think it is a rather meticulous text.

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but absolutely unforeseeable as a possible narrative ending within the genre space of this type of novel. For the greater part of the textual space, the reader is indeed confronted with an astonishing thematic and stylistic concoction of the great masters: Turgenev, Tolstoi, Goncharov, Chekhov (notwithstanding his explicit denial) and even Bunin. To summarise the most important fabular and structural moments, a young lawyer named Roman leaves the city and goes to live in the countryside, hoping to find freedom and peace of mind. He lives on the estate of his uncle and aunt, and plays his full part in their way of life. During a mushroom hunt in the woods, he loses the way and is confronted by a wolf. A terrible fight ensues, at the end of which he manages to kill the wolf with his knife. He is found, recovers from his heavy injuries, is hailed as a hero and marries the adopted daughter of the man who found him. The marriage and its celebrations form a central episode in the novel, not only as the traditional and major turning point in the hero’s life – and a major House Myth motif – but also because, from that moment on, things begin to change radically. The night after the wedding, the newly-married pair break some of their wedding presents, among which they find an axe. They then embark upon a destructive killingspree using the axe, beginning with the relatives and guests and then going on to neighbouring houses to perpetrate the same horrific deeds, killing, defiling and destroying anyone and anything that comes into their path. All this killing is accompanied by disgusting and macabre rituals. The next decisive phase in the systematic process of alienation from the traditional novel structure comes as the narration loses its stylistic flexibility and variation, and thereby its ability to propel the plot in a plausible, continuous fictional world. It no longer induces in the reader the celebrated ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. The sheer repetitiousness of the successive murders and dismemberings acquires a rhythm of its own that, at a certain point, breaks the illusion of novelistic narration itself. The text becomes a descriptive repetition, the sentences becoming simpler and shorter until a lexical and syntactical minimum is reached. Thus the structure of the story itself, right down to the sentence level, is gradually subjected to the same totally destructive process. After killing his wife, the hero and his actions also become victims of the process. The last twenty-two pages comprise


nothing but sentences with Roman as the subject. By the end there are only sentences with the subject and one finite verb, the last one being Роман умер (Roman died). Ironically, this simplest of phrases could well be the plot ending of a conventional narrative, but as the last in such a long succession of comparable phrases it must also be interpreted at least on the metafictional level – as referring to the ultimate decomposition and death of the genre, the final sentence being understood as stating that the novel has died.4 From the beginning of the novel, we see the familiar building up of the novelistic world of the Domus and its canonical attributes and practices: life on the estate in its rural context. It is beyond the task of this chapter even to try to give a representative sample of the very rich, dense texture of detail and topic with which Sorokin achieves his objectively-convincing image of a nineteenth-century literary estate world. He is hyperbolic both in his range of clichés regarding Russian estate life and in the intensity of their application. There is continual visiting of neighbours, hunting and feasting with numerous guests; there is the rich rhythm of the seasonal rituals and manorial involvement in peasant life. The full catalogue of Domus life is systematically and increasingly magnified and exaggerated from the very beginning. To give just one illustration, there are two jocular descriptions of a party on the occasion of the fiftieth birthday of Roman’s uncle, Anton Petrovich. Strong effects are only to be expected in a scene such as this, but there is very much of everything here, and it adds up to an extreme example of Russian maximalism: Юбилей удался на славу. Антон Петрович был в ударе: облаченный в белый фрак с огромным малиновым бантом, с разметавшинися прядями, он, казалось, ни на минуту не присел к ломившемуся от яств столу; его громоподобный голос гремел, не умолкая, так что избранному на грузинский манер тамаде – столичному тенору Сергею Никаноровичу Прянишникову оставалось лишь молча улыбаться происходящемуся и пить свою любимую померанцевую. [...]

4

For the aesthetic function and motivation of Sorokin’s self-destructive discourse, see Smirnov 1999. A clear, concise characterisation of the position of Sorokin and his novel Roman in the context of Russian Postmodernism is given by Kasper 1999.

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[Later that night] Подсвеченное по краям ночное небо сверкало низкими звездами, теплая, как парное молоко, вода мягко плескалась о борта, Петр Игнатьевич, покрякивая и хваля все на свете, стягивал с себя одежду, готоваясь ухнуть в озеро своим семипудовым телом, [...].5 (Chаpter IV, 54-5)

In a similar vein, the declaration of love between Roman and Tat’iana, their betrothal, marriage and wedding party together occupy 150 pages (Part 2, Chapters VII and VIII) out of a total of 625. The House concept in its Domus variant plays a fundamental role in this novel’s world-picture, thematics and structure. This is only to be expected, given that the genre’s world-picture was founded on the nineteenth-century Realist variant of the Domus Myth, as we have seen in Chapters II.11-16. The destruction of this novelistic world and genre by Sorokin goes hand in hand with the destruction of the Domus concept itself on the level of plot and language as well as the metafictional level. The reader who follows Sorokin’s text to the end is confronted with the absolute consistency with which the author performs his inescapable and final destruction on all levels of his literary action. He achieves this first by gradually undermining some of the fundamental expectations inherent in the world-picture of the genre, thereby inducing in the reader an element of doubt. There is an increasing discrepancy between the excessively ‘up-beat’, energetic plot surface of the novel and the underlying, steadily intensifying threat to its world. On the surface – for about four-fifths of the text-space at least – the plot develops a world characterised by fulness of life, with an aura of Realist stability supporting a sensible life and not precluding the 5

The anniversary party went wonderfully well. Anton Petrovich was in great form: arrayed in white tails with a huge crimson bow and flying locks, he did not seem to sit down for a moment at the table that was near to breaking under the weight of the vials; his thunderous voice roared unremittingly, so that the elected toast-masterGeorgian-style – the Saint-Petersburg tenor Sergei Nikanorovich Prianishnikov – had no choice but to smile in silence at what was happening and drink his favourite orange-blossom vodka. […] [Later that night] The nightly sky, illuminated from its rims, sparkled with low stars; the water, warm like steamy milk, gently lapped at the sides of the rowing boat; Piotr Ignat’evich, wheezing and praising everything on earth, pulled of his clothes, preparing to plunge into the lake with his seven pud [113 kg.] body [...].


chance of a happy ending. In other words, it delivers the House Myth’s basic message of vitality. At the same time, however, a counteractive, destructive principle is encroaching upon this world, a principle that will prevail through the protagonist’s monstrous deeds, even to the extent of destroying him. Roman is the agent of the material destruction of the people, the neighbouring houses, the church and all elements of the setting that uphold the Domus world and culture. On the level of the plot, the destructive principle is, not surprisingly, the death motif. It is worked into the sujet from the very beginning. The opening of the novel is an idyllic evocation of a Russian country graveyard, formally the first occurrence of the death theme but clad in the most innocuous, conventional literary form conceivable, an elegiac image of peaceful world: Нет на свете ничего прекрасней заросшего русского кладбища на краю небольшой деревни.6

It is certainly an icon of the ‘space of the Russian novel’, but it can be more than that. It can be seen as the shape of death incorporated into culture, on the periphery of the village but still part of the cultural space. This brings us back to one of the sources of inspiration for our Domus concept, the theory of the archaeologist Hodder discussed in Chapter I.1 (Hodder 1990, Chapter 3, 36 and 39). He states that domestication is about bringing ‘the wild’ within the control of the Domus’. This Domus ‘provided a way of thinking about the control of the wild and thus for the larger oppositions between culture and nature, social and unsocial’. He concludes, moreover, that ‘domestication’, and hence the Domus, is fundamentally centred on the house and death. Not only does this novel end on the word ‘died’; the death motif can be traced throughout the plot, in various shapes, even in the aforementioned betrothal episode where almost all the speeches somehow refer to death, and Roman’s young wife seems to sense this. In Russian cultural history and folkore, two worlds are traditionally seen in opposition to one another – those of ‘the wood’ and ‘the field’ (лес–поле). This opposition is analogous to those of nature– 6 There is nothing more beautiful on earth than an overgrown churchyard on the edge of a small village.

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culture, and periphery–centre; see Chapter I.2. In line with his prototypes, Sorokin also exploits this opposition. The wood is associated with the unruly and uncontrolled, the animal and the dangerous. Its agents – apart from the infamous Baba Iaga and wood spirits – are the bear and the wolf. As early as Chapter IV (p. 55), there is a hint of the wolf as, during the rowing party already described, a little girl sings a comic French refrain about the dangers of walking in the wood: Promenons-nous dans le bois! Pendent que le loup n’y est pas! Si le loup y était! Il nous mangerait!

In this novel, that which threatens is clearly associated with the wood and comes from the wood. Here too, the wolf is in its traditional role as the agent of harm and evil, but the full range of its fatal impact is not at all clear at the moment of its appearance in the plot. Other aspects of the novel’s realistic world can now also be interpreted according to this fatal register. Tatiana’s stepfather is a forest warden, and they live in a house on the edge of the wood, named лесной дом, ‘the forest house’, where she keeps a pet bear. Another canonical literary form of this opposition is realised in the house of the village doctor, Kliugin, right on the edge of a ravine. This is, of course, a symbolic site because, as we have seen, in the mythopoetics of the Russian landscape ravines (овраг, обрыв, ущелье) are not neutral places. They are wild places on the periphery of cultivated land, to which they are also a threat because of soil erosion. They are traditionally associated with death, crime or the Devil, as we see in Goncharov’s eponymous novel Овраг, (The Precipice); see Chapter II.13; see also II.32 on Platonov. Doctor Kliugin, who lives there alone, is a strange, solitary man who has served time in Siberia as a political prisoner. Though highly respected by the peasants, he is also socially peripheral. He is a cynic and an atheist, a typical rationalist and a Faustian character with decidedly demonic traits; see the German root in his name: klug (clever). He was once married, but his wife died after seven months, together with their prematurely-born daughter. Roman knows both Kliugin and his house, which has always amazed him because ‘it threatened to fall down any moment’ into the Ravine (Романа всегда


удивляло это строение, готовящееся вот-вот свалиться вниз. 130) – a puzzling echo of ‘Oblomov’s Dream’. After a nocturnal discussion with him, Roman comes to the conclusion that, although a good doctor, Kliugin is not just a cynical joker and poseur but a convinced ‘hater of life’ (жизнененавистник; 143). So Kliugin is an evil spirit; his house is almost a part of hostile nature, and he will later prove to be a magician and an agent of death, if not the devil himself. It is he who gives, as a wedding present, the axe with which the novel world will be destroyed at the hands of Roman. The axe bears an engraved instruction: Замахнулся – руби! (‘Once you have taken a swing – chop!). All of this indicates that the conventional boundaries of Realism have been broken and the supernatural introduced, or admitted, into the Realist narrative world. The supernatural here shows a strong affinity with the thematics of werewolves and vampirism. Roman, although recovering from the physical effects of the wolf’s bites, has acquired something of the wolf’s nature. This motivates his extraordinarily destructive, bloodthirsty behaviour and is probably connected with the psychological power he has over his accomplice-wife despite her also having received the magic gift of an enchanting little bell. The destructive rampage itself seems to be triggered by the axe given to Roman by Kliugin, which is evidently bewitched. That Roman and Tat’iana, and ultimately Roman alone, are able to continue their destructive course unchecked by any outer force or reason is again a mockery of Realism’s generic logic and inherent expectations. Thus, there are fatal indications that are not only thematic but stylistic and generic (in so far as they modify the world-picture): what at first seems merely intense with a tendency towards hyperbole becomes increasingly hyperbolic with a tendency towards the disproportionate and grotesque before establishing itself as undeniably disproportionate and ending in the intensely pathological. We can conclude that, on the whole, the thematic and stylistic density of this novel indicates a general lack of balance in the conjured-up world of Roman. This might already be read as a symptom of hidden caricature, but it also indicates a trajectory which cannot fail to run out of control and end in narrative catastrophe. We can indeed confirm that Sorokin’s victim was the genre of the estate novel together with the mythical foundation of its world-picture. Sorokin has exerted his Postmodernist authorial power as a textual player, first by meticulously building up

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all the characteristics of the genre, according to the rules, and moving beyond them, and then by destroying the whole edifice.7 Ivan Bunin, who also descibes the death of the estate world (see Chapter II.16), is different because, in his work, the narrative position and the genre context with its Domus world-picture remain intact. There is another work by Sorokin, from about the same period, in which he also combines a ravine (ovrag) and a country house in a significant grouping. It is entitled Норма (The Norm, 1994). This highly experimental work – it can hardly be called a novel – comprises eight parts written in diverse stylistic registers without apparent fabular coherence. Part 3 is a prose piece that is reminiscent of the novel Roman, thus motivating the anagrammatic relationship between the titles. Here also is the suggestion of a nineteenth-century setting. It is written in an impressionistic, sensitivist style befitting a sentimental ‘revisited’ narrative. The protagonist, Anton, is returning to the House of his Childhood, which is also the House of his Father, after a very long time. He first comes to the ravine, which ‘clearly shows through the mist’ (100). He is fascinated by the sight of it. It is broad with steep overgrown slopes and filled with thick, impenetrable shrubs that surprise him because he remembers only grass there. He enters the ravine, and his heart begins to beat faster when he suddenly locates the old narrow footpath, barely discernable by now. The path leads him into the mist, ‘calling’ and ‘beckoning’ him ‘to follow’. Excited, he quickens his pace. The ravine space first creates suspense and expectation, then becomes the actual space and shape of his remembered past, modelling his tense anticipation of the renewed meeting with his old home: Прошлое – гибельно-сладкое, горьковатое, оживало с каждым шагом, вырастая из тумана, подинмаясь слева – темным еловым бором, справа – тремя густыми липами, а посередине, посередине... Антон замедлил шаг. 7

Our final impression is rather puzzling. For all its verbal richness on the surface, this novel seems to be remarkably simple, easily accessible to thematic and structural analysis, and also to analysis on the level of its symbolic networks. Does this mean that it is actually a rather shallow work, revealing only a mock complexity? And could this have anything to do with the fact that, when all is said and done, it originates from a pastiche – a form of epigonism, as I have suggested, long after the original literary formation had disappeared?


Дом. Все тотже. Их дом. Его дом. Дом детства. Дом юности. Крыша, крытая длинной щепой, две трубы – одна короче другой, темные окна. Сад непомерно расросшийся. И бор. И липы... Он остановился, медленно расстегивая плащ и отводя кашне от горла. - Боже мой... С липы снялась сорока, спланировав, полетела низом, треща и посверкивая белыми подкрыльями на темном фоне бора. Антон постоял минуту и медленно двинулся к дому. А дом – приземистый, обветшалый, кирпичный – стал плавно приближаться, разворачиваясь, поражая страшно покосившимся и чермыми глазницами окон.8 (101)

Anton enters the decayed house and what used to be the garden. The house and garden have been almost completely taken over by nature. Mushrooms grow on the floors, which have almost rotted away. The remainder of the chapter is devoted to his coming to terms with what is left of the old house and the successive memories evoked by what he finds and sees. The discovery of some old letters gives him new and thrilling information about his ancestry. Sorokin effectively projects the classical grouping of an old country house at the centre of its rural and natural setting. He builds an aesthetic, emotional image with a strong synthetic quality based on archetypal and Russian motifs. Groupings like these can have a strong aesthetic and psychological impact. The result here is an emotionally 8

The past – fatal-sweet, slightly bitter, came to life with every step, growing from the mist, arising on the left as the dark fir forest, on the right as the three dense lime trees and in the middle, in the middle … Anton slackened his pace. The house. Still the same. Their house. His house. The house of his childhood. The house of his youth. The roof, covered with long wooden planks, the two chimney-stacks, one shorter than the other, the dark windows. The garden grown excessively thick. And the firs. And the lime trees … He stopped, slowly unbuttoned his raincoat and took the muffler from his throat. – My God … A magpie flew up from one of the lime trees and, after a gliding flight, nose dived, chattering and flashing the white of its wings against the dark background of the fir forest. Anton stood still for a minute and then began to walk slowly towards the house. And the brick house – squat, decayed – began smoothly to draw near, spreading out, startling him with its terribly slanted porch and the blackened eye-sockets of its windows.

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charged world centred upon the House as a core motif of the hero’s personality. It is what we might call a ‘landscape of the soul’ in which the House forms an emotional and moral ‘frame’; see Chapters I.4 and I.11.9 Nature is aestheticised, pictorialised and almost personalised, greeting Anton with the magpie’s elegant flight and call, and the house itself comes towards him and reaches out for him like a dear relative who has grown very old. The images based on nuanced and diverse perceptions of the senses are especially striking from a stylistic point of view, particularly those arising from the sense of smell, the famous trigger of memory that, in Russian literature, was so intensely exploited by Bunin. The text is also a rich and dense purveyer of the House Myth. Its fabular inventory is represented as the House of Childhood, the Father’s House and the Dynastic House. Psychopoetically, it develops strong imagery of the House–Personality and House–Body type.

9 Its synthetic quality is comparable to that of the house–garden–wood grouping in the Zabolotskii’s poem ‘Childhood’; see Chapter II.28.

39. Makanin’s Underground. Homeless Under a Roof Makanin’s novel Андеграунд, или герой нашего времени (Underground, or a Hero of Our Time, 1998) is undoubtedly one of the greatest Russian novels of the end of the twentieth century and thereabouts. It is a gripping period portrait and broad conceptualisation of the chaos, socioeconomic decline and general moral desorientation that Russia was facing in its first post-Communist decade. At the same time the allegorical and symbolic structures that Makanin developed to evoke that Russian world are founded on the House Myth repertoire, though in a hauntingly negative way. The hero leads an uprooted life of homelessness which forces him to live in a variety of AntiHouses. Like Sorokin (see the previous chapter), Makanin carries on an intense debate with Russian literature but in an entirely different way. Sorokin’s Postmodernist text staged the death of a genre, its typical setting and its culture. In this case, a wide range of classical Russian 1 literature is involved in showing the painful and violent process whereby the hero comes to terms with the social and ideological desorientation of post-Communist Russia. The story is told in the first person from the point of view of a Muscovite who is simply named Petrovich, an author who, during the Brezhnev era, principially rejected Soviet society and chose to leave his family and live alone on its periphery – or, as the novel’s title has it, in the cultural ‘underground’ (andegraund). In this underground sphere, he and other authors and artists occupied a morally prestigious niche in Soviet society: that of intransigent guardian of ‘the Word’ – 1

According to Brintlinger, Makanin overtly or allusively recalls Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin, Anton Chekhov, Iurii Olesha, Boris Pasternak and Venedikt Erofeev, together with Dostoevskii, Lermontov and many others (Brintlinger 2004, 50).

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protector of pure literature against ideological corruption by the state. His works could never be published in the Soviet Union but only circulated illicitly as samizdat manuscripts. This image clearly connects the novel with Dostoevskii’s Underground Man (see Chapter II.17), including its aura of illicitness and the implied psychological range of its metaphor; in Makanin’s words: Андеграунд – подсознание общества (‘The underground is the subconscious of society’; Makanin 2003, 452). With the demise of Communism, however, the moral justification for the heroic position of dissident Russian author, with its traditional roles of prophet and teacher of the people, had lost its foundation in an unsettled new society. As the author of works that were previously unpublishable, he now refuses to publish them. One day, perhaps, the people will be worthy of them (Bilenkin, internetsite left.ru/pn3.html). Petrovich has to come to terms with this new world, reinvent himself in the moral and socioeconomic vacuum of the post-Soviet urban jungle against the background of his identity as a Russian author and the demands of that literary tradition. This is a shocking and derailing process during which the intelligent Petrovich actually commits two murders; the motives for these are not altogether clear, but hurt pride and feelings of moral superiority play an important role (Langeveld 2003, 159). First, he impulsively kills a Caucasian who wishes to rob him. Later, he follows a KGB agent who has provoked him and secretly taped his remarks during a discussion, and eliminates him. He finds the idea that the tapes might someday be found and give the impression that he had cooperated with his mortal enemy unbearable.2 Neither of these murders leads to his arrest, but they profoundly disturb both the course of his life and his outlook. 2

Bilenkin takes the argument still further in his interesting analysis, connecting the moral claims of the Russian literary tradition with Petrovich’s character. According to him, the battle for the future in which ‘the Word ‘ can appear presupposes the moral emancipation from the ‘Soviet man’ (ot sovka) in oneself who delivered his freedom, and thereby also his moral existence, to the state. It is not so much the state – in the shape of the executioner-psychiatrists – that Petrovich has to fight, even though he has killed two people; it is more the plots of the ‘Great Russian literature’ that ‘whisper into his ear’ that he should repent, as Raskolnikov repented in front of the obshchaga (community). The Russian writer Petrovich has to kill and not repent before the state. He must kill the ‘virus of the Great Russian literature’ in himself in order to restore the freedom of his personality (Bilenkin, op. cit., p. 9).

Makanin’s Underground. Homeless Under a Roof

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The second part of the novel’s title quotes the title of Lermontov’s novel Герой нашего времени (A Hero of Our Time; 1841), laying claim to the portrayal not simply of one isolated character but a whole generation. This is stressed by Makanin’s also repeating the motto of Lermontov’s novel: Герой... портрет, но не одного человека: это портрет, составленный из пороков всего нашего поколения, в полном их развитии (‘The hero is a portrait, but not of one man: this is a portrait drawn up from the vices of our generation in their full development’). Like Lermontov’s hero Pechorin, Petrovich is a homeless drifter, and like Dostoevskii’s Underground Man he is an individualist and outcast by choice, probing the subconscious of a society that he both rejects and does not understand (Brintlinger 2004, 44). As the novel progresses, Petrovich not only commits two murders but also undergoes the ordeal of the notorious punitive psychopharmaceutical drug treatment that was used in Soviet times to break people’s resistance and make them ‘confess’. Petrovich has a brother Venia, or Venichka, who has been an underground artist. He fell into the hands of such punitive psychiatrists during the Brezhnev era and has been reduced by their drugs to a mental cripple. In the aftermath of his second murder, Petrovich has a nervous breakdown and is admitted to the same clinic. At the beginning he is fairly content with the peace he finds there, but one of the psychiatrists begins to suspect him of a criminal act, transfers him to the closed ward for the criminally insane and subjects him to the punitive drug treatment in the hope of extorting a confession. Petrovich somehow manages to resist the pressure. During a subsequent fight with two attendants he is beaten up badly. Having lost three teeth and had two ribs and a hand broken, he has to be treated temporarily in a different clinic. In the meantime the psychiatrists lose interest in him as a patient, and he is subsequently discharged. His stay in the clinic has been a deeply-threatening ordeal. Although he succeeded in meeting his brother Venia, whom he loves and greatly admires for his moral integrity as an artist, he has paid dearly for the privilege and only barely escaped his brother’s fate. The madhouse is, of course, a literary Anti-House of long standing, and this tradition strongly resonates in Makanin’s creation of its characteristically Soviet variant. In her article ‘Hero in the Madhouse: The post-Soviet Novel Confronts the Soviet Past’ (2004), Angela Brintlinger discusses in detail the particular significance and treatment

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of this topos in works by two Postmodernist Russian authors: Viktor Pelevin in his novel Чапаев и Пустота (Chapaev and Pustota, 1996) and Vladimir Makanin in the novel under discussion. She points out that, although the Soviet Union no longer exists in their novelistic worlds, by reviving the image and attendant horrors of the madhouse both authors remind us that the past continues to cast a long shadow (44). From the perspective of Russian literary tradition, beginning with Gogol’ and continuing in the works of Garshin and Chekhov (see the chapters on these authors), the asylum or psychiatric ward is an inhuman Anti-House where patients are tortured and repressed rather than treated. Not only did these institutions typically display the same repressive features as prisons and labour camps, but the literary metaphor of Russia itself as a prison or asylum is as obvious in the traditional works as in those of Pelevin and Makanin. The fact that the Master in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (see Chapter II.35) voluntarily enters a mental hospital as a refuge where he hopes to find peace is an ironic inversion that proves the rule. In Makanin’s case, the psychiatric hospital deeply and inescapably disrupts the lives of both Petrovich and his brother. The chapter devoted to this episode is entitled ‘Палата номер раз’ (‘Ward Number One’). Ward One is the closed ward, and the chapter title is a clear reference to Chekhov’s story. In the psychiatric hospital, Petrovich reminds himself that it is ‘a piece of the state’ (психушка – кусочек государства; 294) and therefore equivalent to a police station or prison, but he changes under the harsh circumstances and discovers empathy. The hospital is also a place ‘where the line between therapy and punishment has been blurred’, as Brintlinger formulates it (57), drawing the parallel with Siberia as the ambiguous but cathartic place of punishment and moral growth for heroes such as Raskol’nikov (Crime and Punishment). In spite of the punitive psychiatric horrors of the hospital, the world outside is often hardly less bewildering and does not offer much more of a Home to Petrovich. He lives in what is called an obshchaga, slang for obshchezhitie, a large communal housing block of singleroom apartments with shared facilities on seemingly-endless corridors, but is nevertheless a homeless person or vagrant, labeled with the offical administrative acronym bomzh: Без определенного места жительства (‘of no fixed abode’) and therefore without the indispensable propiska, or resident’s permit. He makes a living by looking after the


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apartments of obshchaga residents who, for whatever reason, are away. He is thus a guardian, not only of the true literary Word but also of other people’s apartments. He has built a whole network of relationships with people in whose apartments he lives for short periods, sometimes in a state of relative luxury that he could never afford himself. Although he keeps himself mainly to himself, living on the periphery of this communal microcosm, he still manages to form and entertain a variety of business and intimate acquaintances, spread all over the labyrinth of corridors. The novel’s opening chapter is tellingly entitled ‘Коридоры’ (‘Corridors’). Corridors are not parts of the apartments, but they connect apartments inside the apartment building (the actual Dom, or House, which we also encountered, for example, in Trifonov’s House on the Embankment; Chapter II.33). They are a special form of space, somewhere between private and really public space, concretely shaping the social ambiguities of Petrovich’s particular form of Houselessness. The corridor, as we saw before, is also one of the main zones of social interaction in the kommunalki, the main stage where the private and the communal are confronted and conflicts are likely to be acted out; see also the porch in Erofeev’s Moskva–Petushki; Chapter II.37. Corridors define Petrovich’s way of life in the obshchaga, his niche in its ecological system. The obshchaga is a closed, self-sufficient community with its own rules and its own sociology. In Petrovich’s perception, it stands for the Soviet and post-Soviet-world as a whole (Brintlinger, 59), and the corridor is the axis along which contemporary Russian society is organised (Rumiantsev, www.hrono.ru/libris/lib_s/slovoo08.html). For the narrator, it is an almost perfect world that satisfies his material, sensory and emotional needs as a hyperindividualist and womaniser, as well as his curiosity and fantasy as a Postmodernist intelligent, aesthete and philosopher: Мой нынешний дар в том, чтобы слышать, как через двери пахнут (сочатся) теплые, духовитые квадратные метры жилья и как слабо, увы, припахивает на них недолговечная, лет на семьдесят, человеческая субстанция. Квартиры и повороты то за угол, то в тупик превращают эту пахучую коридорно-квартирную реальность в сон, в кино, в цепкую иллюзию, в шахматный-клеточный

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мир - в любопытную и нестрашную гиперреальность. Как оказалось, больше человеку и не нужно: мне хватило. Вполне хватило этого мира коридоров, не нужны красоты Италии или Забайкальской Сибири, рослые домики города Нью-Йорка или что там еще. Мне и Москва-то не нужна. (Хотя я ценю ее полуночное пустеющее метро. [...]).Когда-то коридоры и их латунно занумерованные квартиры, и особенно их тихие двери, казались мне чреваты притаившимися женщинами. [...]. Всюду они. За каждой тихой дверью. В коридор они вдруг выбегали, нет, они выпрыгивали: они являлись или же вдруг прятались. Их можно было внезапно увидеть, встретить. (Или же их надо было искать.) [...]. Коридоры и женщины. Мужчины при них тоже мелькали, но были лишь фоном, бытовым сопровождением и подчас необходимой квартирной деталью, вроде стола, холодильника или сверкающей (иногда ржавенькой) ванны. Участвовали, и не больше.3 (Makanin 2003, 23)

In a sense, this story is a mirror, or complement, of one he told earlier about an unhappy inhabitant of the obshchaga whose wife had left him years before. She had managed to hide in the obshchaga while on the run from him by constantly changing apartments. The poor husband, an engineer named Kurneev, spends his time after work looking for her everywhere, searching the corridors, calling her name, and listening at closed apartment doors – though not daring to knock on 3

My present talent consists in sensing through doors the warm aroma of the square metres of living space oozing out, and, alas, their slight odour of short-lived – seventy odd years, or so – human substance. Apartments beyond corners or dead-ends transform this odorous corridor-apartment reality into a dream, a cinema, a tenacious illusion, a checquered chess-board world – a curious and but not frightening hyperreality. As it turned out, a man did not need more: it was enough for me. This world of corridors was quite sufficient for me. I did not need the beauties of Italy or of Siberia beyond Lake Baikal, the tall houses of New York or what else you have there. I do not need Moscow either (although I appreciate its deserted midnight metro. [...]) There was a time when the corridors, and their apartments with their brass number signs, and particularly their noiseless doors, seemed to me to be pregnant with hiding women. [...] They were everywhere. Behind every noiseless door. They used to run out on to the corridor, no, jump out on to the corridor: they would appear, or hide suddenly. One could see and meet them unexpectedly (Or one had to look for them.) [...] Corridors and women. There would also be men glimpsed fleetingly near them, but just as a background, as an every-day accompaniment and sometimes indispensable domestic detail, like the table, the refrigerator or the shining (sometimes slightly rusty) bathtub. They took part, but no more than that.


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them. The wife has also visited Petrovich. Tellingly, the narrator stresses that it is this poor man’s fate to go on looking for her. He will never be able to leave the obshchaga world. It is as though he were running in a vicious circle (и не уйти, не выйти ему из этого корридора; 14). This means that the obshchaga is indeed a world in itself, a sort of tragicomic promiscuous microcosm from which neither the husband nor the unfaithful wife can escape. It is also a sort of allegory for the state of Russian society, of the Russian family. In a conversation with the narrator, the mistrustful husband, Kurneev, hopes as usual to obtain information from him as to the whereabouts of his wife. To the narrator, who is a confirmed sexual opportunist and anything but a family man, he provocatively raises the subject of the family and the importance of family values as the absolute foundation of society, even referring to the beginning of the Trojan war and Helen’s running away from her husband. The narrator, though he cannot help feeling genuine sympathy for the man, nevertheless chooses to ignore the hint, concluding for himself that a guardian is responsible for apartments, not for forty-five year old wives (Сторож отвечает за квартиры. А не за жен в возрасте сорока пяти лет; 17). Not all the obshchazhniki, the people living in this obshchaga world, are housed in the same communal way. Some of them are better off and relatively wealthy – New Russians with more spacious apartments, dachas, property elsewhere in Moscow and even villas in Spain. Nevertheless they are considered obshchazhniki, sharing this microcosm of corridors (Rumiantsev, op. cit.). The meaning of the obshchaga as a metaphor for Russia is reinforced by Makanin’s representation of its space and properties. It is immense but at the same time claustrophobic, the inhabitants representing the Russian people in their struggle for life – hard, cynical, ruthless, almost never sober, but also sentimental and full of stories about the absurdities of Russian life (Langeveld 2003, 158). During an ecstatic discussion with friends, Petrovich envisages their common fate and future as underground intelligenty in strongly symbolic, even metaphysical, images of the obshchaga–Russia space: Мы - подсознание России. Нас тут прописали. При любом здесь раскладе (при подлом или даже самом светлом) нас будут гнать пинками, а мы будем тыкаться из двери в дверь и восторгаться длиной коридора! Будем слоняться с нашими дешевыми пласт-

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массовыми машинками в надежде, что и нам отыщется комнатка в бесконечном коридоре гигантской российской общаги. Что до светящегося окна в самом конце коридора [...], оно не означает, кстати сказать, выхода: не означает ни выхода, ни конца туннеля, ни путеводной звезды, ни даже знака - это просто наша физическая смерть, износ тела. Просто конец нашей жизни, Миша. Слабое пятнышко света, которое дает нам отсрочку; но с ней вместе дает и своеобразное счастье жить в этом гениальном российском коридоре с десятками тысяч говенных комнат.4 (Makanin 2003, Part 3, Chapter ‘Underground’, 173-4)

The fact that Petrovich can make a living in the way he does is symptomatic of the dire social and domestic situation that has been inherited from Soviet times (see especially Chapters II.33-34) and indeed invites the ‘jungle’ metaphor for this society. The situation takes a bad turn for Petrovich when a privatisation campaign begins, allowing people to acquire legal title to their apartments. This induces the return of the inhabitants of Petrovich’s apartments in order to obtain their title, and an air of mistrust towards him arises from people with whom he has previously been on speaking terms, and more. He has become redundant as a house-guard, though only temporarily: when the privatisation wave is over, he will return to his former way of life. Before that rise in his fortunes, Petrovich’s path spirals downward dramatically. Having lost his means of subsistence, he lives on the streets, among stray dogs, prostitutes, containers and rubbish before descending to the lowliest form of communal housing, a dormitory for transient people and vagrants (bomzhi). This bomzhatnik is a threestorey wooden structure ‘with Vietnamese on the first floor and rats on the others’ (с вьетнамцами на первом этаже и с крысами на ос4 We are the subconscious of Russia. We were registered here. Whatever our apportionment here (mean or radiant) they will kick us around, and we will rush about from door to door and be in raptures about the length of the corridor! We will loiter with our cheap plastic typewriters, hoping that a little room will turn up for us in the endless corridor of the gigantic Russian obshchaga. And as for that shining window at the very end of the corridor [...] that does not signify an exit: it indicates neither exit nor the end of the tunnel, nor a guiding star. It is not even a sign. It is simply our physical death, the wear and tear of our body, Misha. A feeble little speck of light granting us delay; but at the same time it grants us the distinct happiness of living in this great Russian corridor with its tens of thousands of shitty rooms.


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тальных; 374). It is here that he suffers his nervous breakdown in the aftermath of his second murder and from here that he is taken to the psychiatric hospital. He is discharged from the hospital after five months (see 357) and returns to a more or less nomadic existence, staying with, and taking care of, a woman he knew before and visiting his editor only to find that the publishers have paid no attention to his manuscripts, until he succeeds in returning to his former obshchaga and his life as an apartment sitter. Even here, one more unpleasant surprise awaits him. One of the obshchazhniki – now a New Russian with property – persuades him to settle down in and guard one of the apartments, even giving him a fraudulent document attesting that he is the owner. The real owners appear soon enough, and Petrovich is forced out, returning to his former life as guardian of other people’s apartments. Thus, after committing two murders and having his personality severely tested in the psychiatric hospital, Petrovich finds a way to reenter the community of humankind (Brintlinger, 62). His life’s course in this novel resembles a descent into hell by degrees and a return to the relative normality of the obshchaga world, all in the face of the social upheaval that is taking place in post-Soviet Russia. Petrovich himself uses the word ‘Hell’ on one occasion in connection with his stay in the psychiatric Anti-House, but his tone is ironic and disparaging, and the effect is to defuse its Dantesque load and pathos: he prefers to call it a ‘скромненькое типовое Чистилище’ (a ‘modest standard of Purgatory’; 357). Petrovich does not blame anybody because, in his opinion, contemporary people deserve no better. There is nevertheless an implicit association with Solzhenitsyn’s analogy between Dante’s Inferno and a ‘privileged’ type of Gulag (though it is still an Anti-House; see Chapter II.36) that, as a master-metaphor, underlies his novel В круге первом (The First Circle). Association with Solzhenitsyn’s work and world-picture is further corroborated by the fact that Makanin’s final chapter, devoted to Petrovich’s brother, is entitled ‘Один день Венедикта Петровича’ (‘A Day in the Life of Venedikt Petrovich’). As noted before, Petrovich is a hyper-individualist, and he is almost constantly, perhaps even obsessively, aware of his Self in relation to the world. He is provoked into action when he feels that his ‘I’, his dignity, is threatened or undermined, and this plays a part in both

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murders. He evaluates or ‘measures’ everything that happens to him in relation to his Self, frequently objectifying his ego in the text, as in мое ‘я’; если ‘я’ выдержит; слишком ‘я’; я совмещался с ‘я’ (my ‘I’; if ‘I’ endures; far too ‘I’; I coincided with ‘I’), all of which occur on pages 274-5. This habit is connected with his character as an intelligent and author, but it certainly also finds motivation against the background of his own punitive psychiatry and the trauma of his brother’s having been deprived of his personality. All that really matters to him is the integrity and authenticity of his Self, his individuality, which is also a guarantee of his moral integrity as an underground author; see also Bilenkin, cited earlier in this chapter. He is not attached to property or worldly things. His few earthly belongings comprise one suitcase and a small plastic typewriter – the symbol of his one time authorship – but his most valuable possession is his Self (Langeveld 2003, 156).5 His position as a bomzh in the obshchaga means that he has no permanent personal spatial sphere, which is the essential difference between him and people living in their own Houses. His position is special because he is occasionally an urban nomad, but his true state could be defined as ‘homeless under a roof’. Therefore his psychotopological relationship to his housing is not of the common House– Body–Personality type that is based on concentric inclusion and also underlies the sense of Home. In Petrovich’s case, the concentric relation goes no further than the Body–Self boundary. This topology corresponds quite well with his self-centred character and its psychopoetic expression in the objectification of his ego and his strong urge to self-control. It also corresponds with his not having a Home of his

5

Petrovich’s attitude to property and his place in the world is expressed in the spatial reflection of his hypertrophic self-consciousness, as the concrete spatial ‘shape’ of the sphere for which he is inclined to accept responsibility (though sometimes he goes beyond this ‘line’ and helps other people). The philosopher Petrovich behaves and lives up to the Latin maxim Omnia me mecum porto (‘All my things I carry with me’). Langeveld says as much by quoting Platonov in the title of his analysis of Petrovich’s personality: ‘with nothing but his dressed body’ (Langeveld 2003). The quotаtion is from Platonov’s novel Счастливая Москва (Happy Moscow): и новому работнику дали место в общежитии, поскольку человек не имел ничего, кроме своего небольшого одетого тела; ‘and they gave to the new worker a place in the dormitory because he had nothing but his small dressed body’).


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own. The apartments he guards represent the House simply as an abode or shelter; see Singleton 1997, 120. All of this sets him apart from the other, normal obshchazhniki who lead normal lives in their apartments. Some of them pay him regular visits to talk or relieve their feelings, but these visits are not always enjoyable or rewarding for him. Petrovich is keenly aware of the differences between them and visualises his position in some striking qualitative spatial imagery: Они трудятся, а я нет. Они живут в квартирах, а я в коридорах. Они если не лучше, то во всяком случае куда надежнее встроены и вписаны в окружающий, как они выражаются, мир. Да и сам мир для них прост. Он именно их и окружает. Как таз. (С крепкими краями по бокам.) Подчас разговор - вялая вата, туфта, мой собеседник бывает что и глуп, косноязычен, но даже в этом (напряженном для меня) случае на душе у него в итоге заметно теплеет. [...] Теперь я не нужен. Мой гость встает уйти и у самых дверей - вдруг радостно вспоминает, что в общем я говно, неработающий, нечто социально жалкое, сторож.6 (18)

The visitor, as he leaves, pities him for ‘living within other people’s walls’: - Так и живешь в чужих стенах? - говорит он, качая головой и уходя. Этот запоздалый плевок (самоутверждения) - его неловкая плата за мою готовность выслушать его накопившиеся житейские глупости.7

6 They work, and I don’t. They live in apartments and I in corridors. Even if they are not better, then at least they are built in and inscribed a lot more reliably into the surrounding world as they express themselves. And the world itself is a lot simpler for them. It exactly surrounds them. Like a wash-basin. (With raised edges on the sides). Sometimes the conversation is like flaccid wadding, complete nonsense; my collocutor can be stupid, speaking thickly, but even in this case (strained for me) something eventually smoulders noticeably in his soul. [...] Now I am not needed anymore. My guest rises to leave and, at the very door, suddenly joyfully remembers that I am only shit, not working, an object to be pitied, a guardian. 7 So, you are living within other people’s walls, then? – he said, shaking his head and walking away. This belated spittle (of self-assertion) was his clumsy pay for my readiness to hear out his accumulated commonplace stupidities.

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There is a fine irony of mutual disdain expressed in these spatial images: the poor, homely apartment dweller, needing a firm ‘surrounding’ world the size of a wash-basin, is set against the poor guardian, living ‘within other people’s walls’. In the urban universe of Petrovich, there are some dominant forms of space (apart from the various apartments he guards) that share important pseudo-domestic features and characterise his world-view and life style; they are the corridors of the obshchaga, the psychiatric hospital (with its own corridors) and the metro. The psychiatric hospital, as we have seen, was an overt Anti-House variant. The metro is a crucial area for a bomzh, an indispensible part of his life. Besides offering mobility, it too is essentially a corridor world: it gives shelter, connects places and people and is a crucial meeting zone throughout the novel – a feature shared with many other Russian metropolitan narratives, of course. Moreover, it is also underground. As we have seen, Petrovich ‘does not need Moscow’, but he loves to ride the Moscow metro, especially at night,8 because it allows him to think and find rest as he gives himself over to its soothing circularity: В полуночном метро я удачно сел в углу вагона и, не вставая, ехал себе и ехал кольцевой линией. А метро с той поры стало местом, где мне особенно спокойно.9 (178 and 371)

As we have seen, the corridor image is the primary image of the novel, and it runs through the entire text as its world-model; see also Rumiantsev on corridors, cited above, and Makanin 173-4. Its metaphorical potential is particularly developed towards the end as the corridor–life comparison becomes increasingly manifest. When Petrovich finally realises that it no longer makes any sense for him to bring manuscripts to a publisher (against the protestations of his friends), he feels this, not as a defeat, but as liberation, as though he had seen the light. He has not complied with the rules of the new world and 8 … just like Erofeev’s bomzh hero Venichka (see Brintlinger 2004, 50, and Chapter II.37), although in his case it is a vicious circularity. 9 In the midnight metro I was lucky to find a place in the corner and, without rising, just rode and rode the Ring line. / And since then the metro had become a place where I felt particularly at ease.


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‘emerged’ from the underground, as so many of the former underground authors have. His ‘I’, as he feels it, ‘has outgrown texts’; he has taken a step further (факт, что мое ‘я’ переросло тексты. Я шагнул дальше; 374) and can live without that former recognition. He has succeeded in remaining true to himself. He expresses this revelation and its existential significance for him in the almost conventional image that identifies life, and hope, with a corridor: К каждому человеку однажды приходит понимание бессмысленности тех или иных оценок как формы признания. Мир оценок прекратил свое существование. Как просветление. Как час ликования. Душа вдруг запела. Казалось, человек все еще шел по коридору (я шел по долгому коридору жизни) – шел к свету, 10 (374) который узнал издалека.

When he returns to the obshchaga and hears that will not merely have lodging for the night but a real apartment (kvartira) to guard for at least two weeks, he can hardly believe it. Once he has an apartment to guard, people begin greeting him again, inviting him and visiting him as though nothing had happened. He is overjoyed, noticing that, once again, he ‘is slowly walking through the corridor’ without knowing where he is going: [...] я еле сдерживаю счастье, звон и боль внезапно нахлынувшего чувства – еще не верится: я вернулся. (Не просто ночлег на ночь – квартира.) Я прислонился к стене. Я даже не заметил, как Сестряева ушла. В голове кружение. Вдруг осознаю, что я вновь медленно иду по коридору – куда? – не знаю.11 (393)

10 Every man someday realises the senselessness of certain evaluations as a form of recognition. The world of evaluations had ceased to exist. Like a bright spell. Like a moment of exultation. My soul suddenly began to sing. It felt like a man who was still walking through a corridor (I was walking the long corridor of life), walking towards the light, which he recognised from afar. 11 I can hardly restrain my happiness, the peal and pang of the suddenly overwhelming feeling – I still can’t believe it: I am back (not just a lodging for the night, but an apartment). I leaned against a wall. I did not even notice that Sestriaeva had walked away. I feel giddy in my head. Suddenly I realise that I am walking again slowly through the corridor – where to? – I don’t know.

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The final chapter, ‘Один день Венедикта Петровича’ (‘A Day in the Life of Venedikt Petrovich’), has optimistic overtones. Petrovich fully enjoys his return and celebrates with fellow obshchazhniki. His brother Venichka (by whom some drawings, deemed lost, have now been traced) is permitted to pay him a visit in the obshchaga. A beautiful irony is achieved by the fact that, at that moment, Petrovich is guarding a number of apartments simultaneously, which he introduces to his brother as one single house belonging to him. To the utter amazement of Venichka, they have a party in one apartment, sleep in another and take bath in a third. However simple and humble the furniture, to Venichka it all represents incomprehensible luxury and creates a sense of Home after the hospital wards. As Petrovich, in a glow of pleasure and pride, shows his brother around his ‘corridor world’ (коридорный мир; 456), the extent of Venia’s traumatisation by hospital corridors and walls becomes clear. They are the concrete shape of his repressed existence in the psychiatric hospital: Мы в коридоре. - Сюда, - показываю я Вене путь. А Веня, выйдя, застыл посреди тянущихся стен. Коридор волнует, что-то ему напоминает (мне уже ничего, только жизнь). Вспомнился ли ему давний коридор студенческого общежития, [...], когда мы оба, 22 и 19, там приостановились? В больших коридорных окнах торчат, заострившись, верхушки деревьев. (Этаж уже четвертый.) - ... Квартира. Одна из моих, - машу я рукой в сторону квартиры Конобеевых (по ходу коридора). - Тоже моя! Да, брат. Сейчас другие времена, можно иметь много квартир!.. Я привираю не из хвастовства в этих длинных-длинных коридорах. Я привираю, потому что я - Кот в сапогах, показывающий весь коридорный мир, принадлежащий сеньору. Потому что мое - значит Венино. Квартиры, друзья, коридор и все мои окна, и в окнах мое приватизированное небо - все наше, Веня. Я готов, впрочем, днем позже раздарить весь этот мир людям, кому ни попадя, - я хотел бы раздавать и дарить. Счастлив. Душа поет. [...].12 (456; Makanin’s italics) 12 We are in the corridor. – This way. – I pointed the way to Venia. But Venia, outside the door, froze in the midst of the endlessly stretching walls. The corridor disturbed


485

A little later, Petrovich again uses the corridor as his existential metaphor. In an effort to feel his brother’s emotions more closely, he asks him whether the corridors – their lives – ‘are coming together’ (Коридоры сходятся, а, Веня?). They are walking from one apartment to another – another part of ‘my house’, as Petrovich stresses proudly – deeply enjoying the domestic freedoms and amenities, the sense of Home (– тоже мой дом...): Идем не спеша. - Какой долгий коридор, - вздыхает Веня, уже устал. Смеюсь: - Но не длинней, чем жизнь, а, Веня?! Не отвечает, а коридор повернул и, спрямляясь, опять рванул вперед, мы идем теперь в квартиру Соболевых (идем мыться), 55 и 52, мы идем вместе, и коридоры безусловно не длиннее, чем жизнь. Коридоры сходятся, а, Веня? - Веня только пожимает плечами, устал. (Интеллект не включается.) Зато ему явно нравится идти из моей квартиры опять в мою. Разбросанность жилых кв. метров по этажам он понимает как своеобразный вид моего, наконец-то, признания в мире, род богатства. Ах, красота! - охает (ахает) Венедикт Петрович - и это мы уже у Соболевых. И у них Веня прежде всего отмечает домашние добротные кресла. [...] Да, говорю - квартира, тоже мой дом... располагайся, Венедикт. В кресло и полистай книжонку. Какую захочешь (466-7) и полистай, пока я сварю поесть.13 him, reminded him of something (I could not have cared less, it was just life). Did he remember that long ago corridor of our students’ dormitory [...] when we both, aged 22 and 19, halted there for a short while? In the big corridor windows, tree tops stuck out pointedly (this was already the third floor). – … Apartment. One of mine. – I waved my hand in the direction of the apartment of the Konobeevs (as we walked through the corridor). – Also mine! Yes, dear brother. The times are different now; one can have a lot of apartments these days! – I was making believe, but my intention was not to boast of these endless corridors. I was making believe because I was Puss in Boots, showing off the entire corridor world that belonged to my señor. Because what was mine also was Venia’s. Apartments, friends, the corridor and all my windows, and the privatised sky in the windows – all of it belongs to the two of us, Venia. I was prepared, however, to give away this whole world to the people the next day, to whomsoever. – I wanted to give it away. I was happy. My soul was singing. 13 We walked without hurrying. – What a long corridor!” Venia sighed. He was already tired. / I smiled: – But not longer than life, eh, Venia?! / He didn’t answer, but around a corner in the corridor, he straightened up and accelerated again. We were now heading for the Sobolev apartment (to wash ourselves), Nrs. 55 and 52. We were

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For Venia, after his maltreatment in the hospital, space is freedom, materialising in the freedom of movement and the absence of walls. Petrovich is speaking: - Просторно здесь, а? - Очень! - восхитился Веня. В этой моей квартире настолько просторно, что можно ходить взад-вперед и не чувствовать достаточно далеко отнесенных стен, ходить, не чувствуя стен, а, Веня?...14 (468; Makanin’s italics)

Venia cannot remain in his brother’s care, but the visit has been a triumph. When he is being returned to the hospital by the attendents, he breaks out of his lethargy for the first time and demonstrates an act of will. Refusing the attendents’ support, he looks back at his brother on the hospital doorstep and says: “а вот ведь не толкайте, дойду, я сам” (“now don’t push me, I’ll get there, I’ll do it myself”; 478). This is in fact the closing sentence of the novel. The italics appear to confirm once again that this Self, and its responsibility towards the world, is Petrovich’s life theme.15 During the course of the novel, Petrovich occasionally speaks about his life before he became a homeless undergound author and house-sitter-bomzh, obsessively guarding his individual freedom. We walking together, and the corridors, of course, were not longer than life. – The corridors are coming together, right, Venia? / Venia shrugged his shoulders. He was tired (his intellect was not switched on). But he evidently enjoyed walking from my apartment to – again – my apartment. He saw in the fact that the square metres of living space were scattered over the floors a special form of worldly recognition for me, a sort of wealth. – Ah, this is beautiful, Venedikt Petrovich sighed. / Now we were already at the Sobolevs’. In their apartment, Venia was struck most of all by the homely durable chairs. [...] – Yes, I said, this apartment is also my house… Make yourself at home, Venedikt. Sit down and read a book, any book you wish, while I make us something to eat. 14 – Plenty of room here, isn’t there? / – Indeed! Venia said admiringly. / – There is so much room in this apartment of mine that one can walk to and fro without feeling the walls, which are quite far apart. Walk without feeling walls, eh, Venia?... 15 See also Brintlinger’s analysis (2004, 64): [...] Petrovich learns two lessons in the madhouse. He discovers that the isolation that comes with murder, with transgression, can be overcome through human empathy. He also sees Venia’s independence, his “ia sam,” as the words he has been waiting for, the clue to re-entering a creative state that, perhaps, gives the reader this very novel.


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learn that he once had a family of his own. It is tempting to surmise that childhood experiences played a role both in the development of this stoic individualist and undomestic solitary man, and in his closeness to his brother. A clue to this effect is provided, not surprisingly, by a discussion between Petrovich and the psychiatrist who treats his brother, long after Petrovich’s own discharge from the hospital, concerning their early childhood. According to the psychiatrist, Venia always recalls his childhood and Petrovich, even on his worst days. Petrovich explains to him that, when they were small, their parents used to go to work for the entire day, locking the two boys in the house. In summer they were sent to a grandfather in the country, and that was the only place where they were happy. They had few friends until they went to school (398). The psychiatrist’s rather odd conclusion is that they grew up together ‘naturally’ (– То есть росли естественно?). ‘Yes’, Petrovich answers, ‘like grass’ (– Да, как трава). Then Petrovich jokingly tries out the following fantasy on the psychiatrist, who does not seem to remember him as a patient. It is really a sort of psychodrama. As we have seen, when he was suspected of a criminal act during his stay in the psychiatric clinic, Petrovich had been maltreated and subjected to drug treatment, and when he resisted he was beaten up so badly that he had to be moved to another clinic. Now he asks the psychiatrist whether, if the attendents had prevailed over him that day, there would have been any chance of his being placed in the same ward as Venia? If so, it would have been as though their childhood had returned, with the doctor as their own father going to work and locking them up from the outside: Мог бы я рассчитывать, что окажусь с Веней в одной палате?.. Это ведь трогательно! Мы бы с Веней решили, что детство вернулось. А Иван Емельянович был бы как отец родной, который ушел на работу и снаружи нас запер...16 (399)

16

Could I expect to find myself in one and the same ward with Venia?... For that would be touching! Venia and I would conclude that our childhood had returned. And Ivan Emel’ianovich would be like our own father who had gone off to work and locked us up from outside…

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The writer’s psychic experiment is lost on the psychiatrist, but the significance of this bad fairytale for Petrovich himself is clear.17 It shows how, for him and his brother, the archetypal House of Childhood and the Anti-House, or Prison-House, of the psychiatric clinic are identified with one another. At the same time, however, he has a deep wish to be reunited with his brother, who is still living the same trauma, and to help him. The positive face of the domestic childhood archetype is still present, however vaguely and implicit, in the shape of the summers spent in the country with their grandfather. In this novel we found two heroes living in entirely Anti-Domestic settings and the pseudo-domestic (or ‘weakly’ domestic) setting of the obshchaga – a situation succinctly defined in the text as ‘living within other people’s walls’ – whether of their free will (Petrovich) or by necessity (Venia). Furthermore, the obshchaga setting was a symbol for Russia as a whole, a synthetic image in which the traditional socioeconomic and domestic state of Soviet times frequently, almostimperceptibly coincided with the upheaval and desorientation of postSoviet Russia in the nineteen-nineties. The obshchaga world, as an icon of Soviet and post-Soviet society and its world-model, is characterised by its seemingly autarchic way of life and its closed-in universe of corridors, apartments and communal housing. This autarchic ‘closedness’ makes it possible for a hero such as Petrovich to live there in the seeming paradox of being ‘homeless under a roof’. It also invites comparison – for all the evident differences – with Zamiatin’s closed utopian world of We, as well as his eponymous ‘Cave’ metaphor; see Chapter II.31. Zamiatin’s texts represent fantastic worlds based on closed world-images of an extreme nature in which the outside, natural world is hostile, incompatible with the inside, and has to be shut out. Both can be seen from the point of view of the House Myth as catastrophic deviations. Makanin’s world is not a fantastic one, but it too is closed against the outside world. However, the obschaga labyrinth of corridors is a pathological form 17

Petrovich creates emotional and moral compensation for this victim position by assuming the role of Puss in Boots, as we saw earlier. Puss in Boots is the protagonist in the tale of a cat who helps an impoverished master attain wealth through trickery, and playing the role with Venia as the master enables him to vindicate injury and dispense justice in his obshchaga realm, though he is unable to do so in the psychiatric hospital.


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of the denial of nature by urbanism. It is the embodiment and symbol of the failed, originally-utopian social experiment of Soviet construction; see Chapters II.33 and 34. For Petrovich, the obshchaga-corridor universe is all there is. He has grown used to its permanent instability and has even learned to appreciate it.18 Taking all of this into account, we might conclude that the novel is strangely hopeful, testifying to ineradicable vitality (a basic quality of mythical worlds) in circumstances of ‘stable homelessness’ and perhaps even suggesting a sort of Home-coming after all.

18

So pregnantly and rapturously expressed by Petrovich (see above): “Whatever our apportionment here (mean or radiant) they will kick us around, and we will rush about from door to door and be in raptures about the length of the corridor! We will loiter with our cheap plastic typewriters, hoping that a little room will turn up for us in the endless corridor of the gigantic Russian obshchaga.”

Conclusions The purpose of this study has been to confront systematically the concept and motif of the House as represented in Russian literature, using an analytical framework that was both anthropological and cultural, subsumed under the identification of ‘House Myth’. Basic narrative fabular elements, together with a set of generalised types of House image, made up the House Myth and provided the points of reference for this confrontation. In the course of this analytical procedure, recurrent patterns and features could be discerned in Russian literature’s treatment of the House and its thematics, thus reflecting characteristics of the Russian world-picture, mentality and attitudes to life. At the same time, these analyses yielded specific characteristics of literary authors, works and even periods. Recurrent features from the beginning of the nineteenth century are Houselessness or Homelessness, but as symbols of the fate and predicament of Russia or Russian culture rather than documents of the misfortunes of unhappy individuals. This is especially true of Chaadaev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol’ and, later, Platonov, Erofeev and Makanin. In Pushkin’s work, probably for the first time in its full, ambiguous potential, the House Myth became prominent as the symbol of dynastic pride and sense of identity, giving shape and space to the liberal ideal of freedom, and inspiration to the poet as creative individual, but also embodying his existential anxiety and psychological uncertainty in the potential Loss of the House. Distrust of the values of domestic civilisation was a recurrent feature of authors such as the Slavophiles, Gogol’ and Platonov, in whose works the moral justification of Russian culture, or even culture itself, plays an important role, often in opposition to the Western cultural model. The opposition between urban and rural culture was pivotal in the development of Russian literary world-pictures, and thus of the House theme. The transition from Romanticism – particularly of the so-called

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Natural School – to the Russian Realist prose of the nineteenth century was marked by a shift from urban settings to the fundamental dominance of the countryside, with the topos of the country estate and its attendant ways of life, outlook and mentality at the heart of it. Beyond all doubt, the country estate is the central domestic topos and icon of the Russian Realist world-picture. Its way of life was presented in literature as a virtually autarchic microcosm of the Russian world (or Domus, in accordance with the domestic typology developed in Part I), with an outlook defined by what we have called its internal normative orientation towards the world; see especially Chapters II. 11-16. In the same period, various Realist authors bear witness to the deep changes taking place in the socio-economic fabric of post-reform Russia, manifesting themselves in the shaking up and dissolution of the traditional, dynastic and patriarchal Russian family and its alleged Domus foundations. This was a major theme in the work of SaltykovShchedrin, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, among others. Dostoevskii set the traditional patriarchal family in opposition to what he called the ‘accidental family’, the latter being the ‘modern’ and future type that follows the loss of the internal normative orientation. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the estate world was rapidly decaying and disappearing (materially as well as metaphorically; see Bunin), and the dacha acquired a literary role both as a rural domestic topos of wishful projections of personal freedom, creativity and happiness, and as an escape from modern urbanness (with Chekhov as its most prominent author). Beginning with Dostoevskii in late nineteenth century Russian literature, urban settings, or at least urban orientations, were becoming clearly dominant, as in the marked demonic urbanism that came with Symbolism and its Modernist anxieties and psychopoetics, and no less in the experiments of the Futurists and the disoriented worlds of the Avantgarde prose of the nineteentwenties. For the post-Revolutionary twentieth-century world of Soviet Russia, the all pervading House icon and symbol is, no doubt, that of communal housing, the kommunalka, and its various manifestations as Anti-House. It shares this quality with the special Soviet world of the Gulag (though that is different in most other aspects). Playing very little part, if any at all, in officially permitted literature under the rule of

Conclusions

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Socialist Realism (with the important exception discussed in Chapter II.33), the kommunalka is all the more prominent in ‘underground’ and post-Communist literature. In these texts, we are confronted with extremely negative House images and concepts reflecting actual domestic situations and practices over a long period of time. These are shown to contradict the very foundations or the House Myth as an anthropological constant that sets the norms for humane social existence. At the same time, however, we found that the kommunalka was incapable of repressing the archetypal images and values of the House Myth. The two last works discussed in this study seem to confirm, each in its own way, the enduring mythopoetic potential of the two great domestic icons of Russian literature. They do so by ‘revisiting’ the two great poles of domestic thematics that had already orientated the cultural spaces of nineteenth century Russian literature: Sorokin, by recreating, magnifying and destroying Realism’s ambiguous estate rurality, and Makanin, by projecting a cosmos of negative urbanness as the foil for post-Communist homelessness. A general and recurrent phenomenon in the works discussed in this book is that the House images we see are not only positive ones. Time after time, the House Myth and its motifs prove to be morally, emotionally and psychologically crucial, but the thematic focus of these literary worlds and their conflicts is ambiguous. This mythopoetic and psychopoetic exploration has shown that the relationship between man and his house in literature is not always reliable and stable. On the contrary, the analyses prove that, just as often, this relationship can be troubled or uncertain, and we may assume that this is not limited to Russian literature. However, we can also conclude that the House Myth, in its multitude of psychic, anthropomorphic and symbolic embodiments in literature, represents an oustandingly strong archetypal image and ideal to which people will revert, in happiness as well as deepest adversity, because it remains the basis of human vitality and hope.

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Index abyss, 145n, 297, 300, 303,342n, 365, 366, 375 abode, 25n, 39, 46, 56, 103, 115, 116, 118, 184, 299 Akhmatova, A.A., 377, 415, 417 actant, -tial, 40, 200, 244, 348, 450 Aeneas, 38, 39, 41, 42, 72, 109n Aeneid, 25n, 37, 38, 42, 72, 105n, 109 Aeschylus, 35, 373 affective, 82, 103n, 242 agriculture, -ral, 20-22, 41n, 45, 46, 49, 155, 329, 364 Aksakov, I.S, K.S., 99, 167 Aksakov, S.T., 159, 160, 161, 164, 167, 187, 230, 347, 453n alienation, 70, 189, 204, 223n, 318, 462 allegory, allegorical, 59n, 80, 84, 85n, 114, 422, 471, 477 ambiguity, -guous, 13, 46, 60, 115, 124, 126, 130, 133, 152, 153, 157, 188, 202, 203, 474, 475, 491, 493 ambivalence, -lent, 70, 104, 115n, 124, 259, 281, 287, 351, 394, 395, 400, 422, 456 analogy, -gous, 15, 27, 30, 31, 32, 34, 42, 54, 59n, 62, 63, 67, 117, 144, 154, 186n, 229n, 236, 240, 253, 283, 284, 285, 288, 299, 290, 291, 300, 318n, 333, 345, 351, 361, 362n, 365, 389, 392, 426n, 432, 443, 453, 465, 479 anarchism, -ist, -y, 343, 351, 354, 363n, 423, 447 anatomy, -ic(al), 31n, 32, 55, 57, 62, 236, 237 ancestor, -try, 33, 35, 38n, 39, 60, 69, 74n, 81n, 105n, 123, 124, 125, 160, 165, 183, 189, 193, 198, 338, 401,

469 antechamber, 113, 114 anthropocentric, 67 anthropology, -ical, 11, 12, 13, 15, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 41, 45, 53, 56, 62, 66, 67, 87, 110, 111n, 154, 155, 186n, 188, 205, 251, 331n, 368, 369, 370, 377, 383, 384, 417, 425n, 491, 493 anthropomorphic, 26, 31, 216, 236, 238, 131, 345, 348, 493 anti-domestic, -icity, 92, 104, 147, 148, 226n, 488 Anti-House, 60,70, 93, 107, 147, 150, 183, 250, 252, 260, 261, 278, 293, 294, 354, 362, 407, 419, 422, 430432, 471, 473, 474, 479, 488, 493 anxiety, 14, 108n, 127, 130-134, 136, 137, 140, 154, 155, 218, 258, 259, 260, 273, 275, 277, 279, 299, 338, 342, 361, 395, 405, 491 apartment, 51, 88, 92, 146, 150, 151, 193, 199-201, 299, 302, 318, 344, 358, 359, 360, 361n, 366, 379n, 383, 389, 390, 391, 392, 396n, 397, 398n, 399, 400, 403, 404, 405, 408, 409, 410, 412, 415, 419n, 420, 422n, 424, 425, 426n, 429, 430, 431, 433, 434, 454, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 478, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486n, 488 Arcadia(n), 199, 202, 203, 209 archaic, -chaism, -aist, 32, 34, 37, 39, 50, 53, 55, 58, 59, 65, 67, 68, 70, 99, 105, 116, 140, 145, 174, 179, 203, 207, 247, 283, 306, 315, 318, 319, 329, 332, 333, 341, 347, 358, 359, 364, 365, 370, 375, 378, 379, 388, 389, 443, 446, 448

512


archetope, -topical, 19, 33, 456 archetype, -typal, 13, 22, 33, 43, 44, 46, 60, 65, 66, 69, 90, 101, 104, 116, 123, 126, 127, 129, 136, 149, 151, 163, 169, 199, 202, 204, 218, 246, 264, 267, 273, 279, 287, 289, 290, 333, 338, 375, 392, 398, 399, 402, 413, 456, 457, 469, 488, 493 architect, -ural, -tonic, 11, 20n, 21, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 34, 40, 51, 56, 60, 62, 79, 83, 92, 97, 116, 142, 180, 185, 186n, 241, 268, 298, 300, 305, 315, 316, 318, 332, 347, 378, 381-383, 390, 420, 425 Aristotle, 31 attic, 54, 55, 97, 98n, 248, 268 autarchic, 49, 50, 99, 124, 207, 355, 488, 492 axiology, -ical, 34, 66, 67, 126, 156, 164, 284, 342, 424, 456n axis mundi, 32 Baba Iaga, 46, 203, 466 Babel, Tower of, 318, 364 Babel’, I.È., 57, 58, 69, 339, 345n, 440, 457n bachelor, 108, 109n, 147-151, 200 Bakunin, M.A., 167 basement, 92, 97, 251, 362, 409, 429, 430, 432, 433 bath, bath house, 47, 172n, 183, 184n, 260n, 398n, 410, 412n, 432, 476n, 484 Batiushkov, K.N., 117 bed, 19, 36, 37, 180, 195, 204, 210n, 222, 271, 302, 303, 312n, 324, 412n behaviour, 19, 23, 46, 110, 244, 253, 339, 353, 357, 358, 393, 412n, 413, 422n, 425, 428, 446, 457n, 467 Belinskii, V.G., 96, 160 Belyi, A., 60n, 63, 146, 297-307, 333, 339 Biedermeier, 107, 130-134, 136 biological, 32 birth, 58, 74, 164, 167, 191, 206, 221, 230, 240, 254, 306, 307n, 372n Blok, A.A., 69, 283-295, 338, 455

body, 26, 30, 32, 53-58, 67, 74, 97, 154, 163, 167n, 222, 237, 260, 288, 291, 297, 303, 305-307, 315, 321323, 325, 326, 333, 348, 365n, 392, 401, 464n, 470, 478n, 480 bomzh, 474, 480, 48, 486 boundary, 28, 71, 90, 153, 227, 228n, 237, 456, 480 boundless, -ness, 143, 240, 343 bourgeois, -ie, 19, 44, 96, 127, 132134, 254, 273, 286, 293, 338, 373, 379, 380, 388, 409, 417, 420, 424, 425, 427, 473 brain, 31, 32, 54, 55, 300-303, 362n Brezhnev, L.I., 445, 449, 471, 473 bricolage(d), 177, 179-182 Briusov, V.Ia., 282, 283-295 Bulgakov, M.A., 14, 339, 428-435 Bulgakov, S.N., 73, 74 Bunin, I.A., 62, 164, 188, 236-246, 265, 462, 468, 470, 492 Butkov, Ia.P., 97 Byzantium, -tine, 79, 80, 85 campsite, 33 canopy, 34, 116, 56n, 70 catastrophic, -phe, 61, 69, 72, 82, 90, 91, 120, 127, 161, 232, 258, 281, 293, 294, 297, 300, 303, 309, 325, 338, 339, 342, 343, 345, 346, 353 Catherine the Great, 145n cave, 20, 21, 26, 28, 33, 35, 36, 54, 57, 59, 70, 145, 286, 306, 307n, 340, 357-360, 369n, 373, 389, 423, 424, 426n, 434, 435n, 488 Cave-House, 145, 306, 360 cell, 102, 114, 115, 290 cemetery, 252, 287, 289n Chernyshevskii, N.G., 252 Chukovskaia, L.K., 378, 389, 404417, 425 City-House, 284, 321 Chaadaev, P. Ia., 80, 89-93, 98, 272, 273, 492 chaos, -otic, 24, 32, 34, 48, 147, 153, 156, 183, 184, 187n, 188, 205, 215, 216, 248, 254, 302, 375, 434, 457, 471

Index Chekhov, A.P., 60, 149, 164, 166, 258, 261-279, 351, 354, 461n, 462, 471n, 474, 492 chronotope, -topic, 73, 194, 410n circle, -cular, 27, 33, 152, 230, 238, 405, 407, 414, 448, 449, 453, 477, 479, 482 city, 28, 33, 38, 42, 51, 81n, 83, 84, 92, 97, 100, 108n, 111, 112, 126, 127n, 160, 165, 189, 192-194, 208, 231, 247, 272n, 273n, 282n, 283285, 287, 288n, 289, 293, 298-300 civil war, 61, 344, 358, 371, 434 closedness, 34, 274, 488 cognition, -tive, 12, 22, 30, 54, 62, 65, 66, 71, 87, 179, 185, 186, 195, 236, 238, 329, 369, 450 collective, -vism, -vity, 37, 87, 321, 363, 364, 366, 367, 371, 374, 381383, 385, 388, 392, 409, 417, 421, 423, 439, 454 collectivization, 364, 380, 383, 420, 422 comfort, -table, 19, 20n, 27, 51, 70, 98, 100, 103, 115, 126, 133, 147, 179, 212n, 226n, 242, 243n, 244, 261, 265n, 273, 344, 355n, 359, 398, 413, 429, 453, 455 communal, 88, 100, 204, 344, 358n, 364, 380, 381, 382, 385, 386, 389, 391, 395, 396, 397, 398, 405, 408, 409, 410, 413, 417, 420, 421, 422, 423, 425, 425, 428, 431, 474, 475, 477, 478, 488, 492 commune, 340, 342, 343, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 373, 375n, 381, 382, 423, 424 Communism, 87, 352, 364, 366, 367n, 368, 371, 373, 374, 377, 378, 381, 383, 384n, 404, 405, 420, 438, 471, 472, 493 community, 27, 28, 32, 99, 165, 210, 211, 423, 443, 453n, 472n, 475, 479 concentric, -ity, 12, 33, 40, 57, 58, 67, 85, 141, 153, 196, 212, 236-240, 277, 289, 292, 298, 303, 305, 401, 443, 480

513 consciousness, 20n, 35, 50, 54, 56, 63, 70, 80, 154, 186, 192, 195, 196, 203, 204, 237, 239, 241n, 247, 251, 254, 300, 301n, 303-305, 306n, 307, 334, 357, 358n, 359n, 361, 362, 365, 369, 372, 386, 421, 422n, 423, 456, 472, 473, 478n, 480n Constructivism, 315 conflict, 30, 50, 54, 67n, 68, 72, 85, 107, 110, 129, 133, 164-167, 187, 203, 215n, 219, 225, 248, 261, 264, 266, 300, 310, 338, 353, 363, 368, 384n, 385, 389, 393, 424, 425, 428, 442, 448, 450, 454, 475, 493 conflict space, 70, 73, 96, 194, 345347, 349, 448 corridor, 303, 304, 307n, 392n, 409, 426, 474-477, 478n, 481n, 482, 483-485, 486n, 488, 489 cosmos, -mic, 32, 37, 59, 139, 142144, 145n, 187n, 236, 259, 276, 284, 287 cosmogony, -onic, 25, 32, 34, 37, 39, 67, 203, 252 cosmology, -gical, 34, 116 Cossack, 69, 90, 145n, 339, 345n, 457n country house, 115, 122, 149, 262, 265, 271, 275, 334, 342, 354, 355, 468, 469 countryside, 103, 104, 111-113, 114n, 115n, 124, 126, 128, 160, 165, 225, 231, 265, 271, 275n, 300, 311, 462, 492 cradle, 58, 74 creation, 24, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 58, 82, 83, 85n, 105, 176, 183, 186, 203, 217, 242n, 247, 304, 365, 443, 473 Cronos, 252 cycle, -ic(al), 49, 69, 70, 71, 74, 91, 113, 161, 173, 177, 179, 180, 206, 231, 232, 292, 349, 353, 367, 386, 401, 415, 448, 449, 456 dacha, 20n, 51, 91n, 150, 164, 200, 201, 232n, 262-265, 311-313, 334, 384, 394, 400, 401, 477, 492 Death of the House (Domus), 72, 155,

514


162, 164, 166, 219, 224, 226, 235, 264, 340, 341, 352, 354, 366, 423, 434, 460, 463, 468 disorientation, -ntedness, 303n, 338, 339, 447, 450, 452, 456, 492 Dmitriev, I.I., 116 domestic, -city, 12-14, 19, 20, 23, 26n, 43, 44-46, 48-50, 56, 63, 6971, 73, 90-92, 96, 99, 101-108, 111-113, 117, 118, 126, 131n, 133, 134, 142, 147, 148, 150, 154-157, 167, 174, 183, 188, 194, 195, 200, 210, 214, 223, 226, 231, 233, 244, 250, 253, 273, 286, 293, 298, 299n, 305, 314, 315, 318, 331, 339, 342345, 349, 353, 354, 358, 361, 371, 373, 374, 379, 380, 382-389, 392, 410, 413-415, 417, 419, 421, 425, 428, 432-434, 449, 451, 452-455, 405, 476n, 478, 482, 485, 487, 488, 491-493 domestication, 21, 22, 25, 35, 41, 48, 67, 154, 155, 378 domik (little house), 104, 107n, 120, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 149, 151, 298 Domostroi, 34, 47, 48, 49, 61, 78, 7981, 84, 88, 97, 99, 100, 114, 262, 322, 417 domovoi (house-sprite), 314 Domus, 21, 22, 24-26, 34, 38, 39, 4042, 48-50, 72, 73, 79, 80, 82, 91, 93, 99, 100, 104, 113n, 124-126, 154-156, 160, 161, 163-165, 167169, 171, 177, 182, 183, 198, 204212, 216, 224, 231, 232, 245, 248, 264, 267, 268, 271, 273, 276, 278, 279, 342, 346, 347, 349, 352, 353, 355, 356, 378, 417, 422, 424, 425, 459, 463-465, 468, 492 Domus aeterna, 34 Dostoevskii, F.M., 14, 79, 81, 92, 96, 97, 136, 137n, 147, 168, 233, 247255, 299, 362, 364, 429n, 431, 438, 450n, 453n, 457n, 471n, 472, 473, 492 dream, 36, 38n, 54-56, 58, 59, 71, 98n, 126, 129, 133, 134, 142n, 144,

148-150, 198-206, 210, 212n, 215n, 238, 262, 266-268, 271, 277, 301, 312, 314, 351, 354, 366, 369, 372, 380, 387, 389, 401, 403n, 409, 423, 432, 457, 467, 476n dwelling, 20n, 21, 35, 38, 59, 92, 96, 289n, 357, 358n, 370, 382, 383n, 419, 422 dynamic, -mism, 43, 59, 67, 70, 72, 73, 81, 90, 91, 133, 319, 338, 339, 360, 373, 374 dynasty, dynastic, 31, 34, 37-40, 50, 67, 69, 72, 73, 105, 145n, 160, 161, 163, 164, 198, 202, 219, 223, 239, 249, 250, 251, 277, 342, 346, 355, 401, 402, 442, 470, 491, 492 earth, 23, 27, 32, 100, 105, 142, 144n, 173n, 202, 203n, 229, 235, 275n, 289n, 305, 319, 330, 343n, 346n, 349n, 365, 367, 372, 373n, 388, 430, 451n 464n, 465n Eden, 165, 212, 455 ego, 55, 203, 289, 304, 454, 480 embodied , 342, 362, 367, 411 emigration, emigrant, 13 enlightenment, 131, 142, 189, 329, 362, 378 epic, 36-39, 61, 65, 91, 96, 97, 139, 232, 294, 329, 421, 446, 450, 452 equivalence, -ent , 13, 20, 25n, 27, 32, 33, 34, 72, 80n, 84, 85, 87, 90, 112, 120, 123n, 132, 135, 154, 167, 179, 236, 237, 241, 251, 268, 269, 304-306, 317, 327, 332, 350, 352n, 402, 474 Erofeev, V., 185, 445-457, 471n, 475, 482n, 491 escape, -pism, 111n, 156, 175n, 192, 219, 223, 262, 272, 274, 275, 277, 293, 301n, 325, 342, 355, 362, 401, 421, 430, 447, 464, 473, 477, 492 estate (usad’ba), 14, 30, 49-51, 60, 68, 69, 71, 73, 91, 103-105, 11n, 113-115n, 120, 123-126, 152, 155, 156, 159-169, 171-179, 181-184, 186-195, 198-200, 202, 204, 208212, 214-216, 218, 220-227, 228n,

Index 229-231, 235, 238, 240-245, 248, 262-271, 275-279, 340-343, 349351, 354, 355, 423, 461-463, 467, 468, 492, 493 ethic, -al, 11, 100, 161, 446, 459n etymology, -gical, 24, 26-28, 30, 32n, 35, 38n Europe, -ean, 14, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25n, 27n, 28-30, 32, 44-46, 49, 51, 78, 83, 84, 87, 92, 98, 100, 111n, 114, 130-133, 142, 167, 174, 180-182, 189, 194, 240n, 248, 252, 273, 298, 322, 338, 352, 377 Evolution, 20, 24, 82, 257 exile, 114, 115, 121, 124-126, 137, 408 existential, 60, 67, 90, 120, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136, 145, 154, 155, 232, 239, 251, 259, 260, 275, 279, 299n, 392, 395, 455, 483, 485, 491 exogamy, -mic, 110, 161 expanse, 34, 116, 118, 140, 338 expansion, -sive(ness), 59, 85, 134, 160, 236, 244, 274, 276, 304, 401 exterior, -ity, 34, 281, 287, 342, 343 fairy tale, 46, 68, 267, 314, 488 Family, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20n, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29n, 31, 32, 37, 38, 48, 50, 57, 61, 74, 81, 91, 92, 99, 100, 103-106, 108n, 113, 114, 122, 126, 133, 140, 148, 156, 160-162, 164, 169, 176, 184, 193, 210, 211n, 217-223, 226, 230-233, 235, 237, 244, 248-252, 254, 255, 263, 264, 273, 276-278, 312, 346, 347, 349, 352, 353, 355, 370, 379, 381, 382, 384, 385, 389, 391, 392, 394, 397n, 409, 412n, 414, 418n, 423-425, 431, 434, 438, 440-442, 454, 472, 477, 487, 492 Family, accidental , 247, 248, 249, 492 fatal(ity), fate, 68, 91, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116n, 121, 122, 127, 146, 161, 190, 197, 198, 208, 219, 227, 232, 245, 248, 259, 319n, 325, 337, 342, 346, 347, 363, 375, 390, 407,

515 414, 421, 428, 434, 438, 442, 448, 449, 451, 466, 467, 469n, 473, 477, 491 fence, 23n, 27, 28, 81n, 118, 119n, 153, 154, 155n, 173n, 183, 184n, 197, 200, 226, 252, 253, 254, 271, 320n, 334, 335, 348 fireplace, 20n, 27, 28, 33, 118, 141n, 216n, 406, 407n firmamentum , 34, 116, 332, 359 Fleeing the House, 60, 72, 216, 457n folklore, folkoric, 45-47, 61, 161, 203, 205, 310, 314, 362, 430 forest, 84, 185, 210, 331n, 338, 416, 420n, 430, 439, 466, 469 Forest House, 430, 466 foundation, founding, to found , 11, 25, 31-33, 37-40, 42, 44, 48, 57, 66, 67, 72, 79, 83, 84, 90-92, 114, 127, 160, 161, 164, 174, 175, 185, 186, 218, 230, 232, 250, 279, 331, 388, 342, 364-367, 375, 402, 446, 454, 460, 467, 472, 477, 492, 493 frame, emotional or moral, 164, 165, 198, 202, 470 framing story, 73, 91, 53, 171, 172, 271, 274n funeral, 74, 441 Futurism, 288n, 310, 311, 337 garden , 11, 28, 30, 66, 70, 85, 103n, 118, 119n, 133, 141n, 152, 153, 155, 156, 172, 173n, 174-177, 180, 181, 195, 197, 201, 204, 205, 212, 213n, 215n, 216n, 226, 238, 240n, 242, 243n, 244, 245, 246n, 252254,263, 265, 269, 270n, 271, 277, 278n, 319, 320n, 334, 335, 368, 373-375, 454, 455, 469, 470n garret, 97 gender, gendered, 44, 85, 107, 110112, 184, 188, 241, 255, 345, 381, 382 genre, 15, 47, 65, 68, 71, 96, 110, 114, 117, 141, 160, 164, 165n, 176, 186, 279, 316, 330, 385, 445, 446, 460-464, 467, 468, 472 gestalt, 59, 65, 66, 85, 122, 126, 128,

516


130, 165, 283, 288, 294, 298, 338, 361 glass-house, 259 Goethe, J.W., 305, 330 Gogol, N.V., 14, 69, 91, 92, 96, 14, 136, 145, 147-154, 160, 166, 168, 185n, 186, 207, 217, 242, 248, 259, 298, 299, 339, 430, 446, 457n, 474, 491 Goncharov, I.A., 14, 51, 68, 108, 136, 160, 165-168, 199-216, 218, 230, 233n, 242n Gorbachev, M.S., 87, 380 Gorkii, M., 364 Granovskii, T.N., 167 graveyard, 57, 465 Grebenka, E.P., 97, 422 Gulag, 251, 422, 437, 438, 479, 492 Guro, E.G., 63, 310, 310-314, 333 habitation, 20, 26, 28, 32, 33, 358, 375, 382, 423 hall, 11, 102n, 104, 113, 114, 194n, 210, 216, 224, 254, 265, 271, 299, 303, 407n, 410n, 446 hearth, 21, 27-29, 67, 92, 103-106, 127n, 133, 140, 168, 175n, 206, 211, 358, 359, 379, 389, 434 Herodotus, 46 Herzen, A.I., 167 Hesiod, 329-331 hierarchy, -chical, 28, 34, 40, 310, 355, 382, 399, 432, 446, 456n hierarchization, 67 Holy Russia, 86 Home, 14, 19, 20, 25n, 27, 29, 30, 38, 39n, 41, 42n, 43, 44, 56, 59, 68, 71, 72, 74n, 89n, 90, 102, 103, 105n, 106, 108n, 109n, 111, 112n, 121, 128, 135n, 136, 137n, 142, 145, 150, 157, 161, 165, 175n, 183, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194n, 197, 198, 200, 211, 219, 222, 254, 272, 279, 300, 353, 384, 385, 392, 398, 403, 409, 410, 414, 427, 429, 433, 434, 437, 438, 442, 455-457, 468, 474, 480, 484, 485 Homecoming, 36, 68, 72, 157, 194,

196, 198, 212, 216, 221, 227, 254, 268, 290n, 300, 406, 408, 412, 413, 415, 456n, 457, 489 homeless, -ness, 72, 73, 279, 325, 339, 351, 393, 428, 430, 431, 433n, 442, 445, 451, 453, 455, 471, 473, 474, 480, 486, 488, 489, 491, 493 homely, -ness, 70, 71, 274, 286, 293, 342, 343, 371, 430, 432, 433, 453, 482, 486n homesick, 140 Homer, 36, 37n homology, 32, 384, 288 horizontal, -lity, 33, 381, 452, horror, 128, 145, 216n, 222, 252, 265, 368, 369, 393, 431, 474 House as a Coffin, 71, 133, 210n, 219, 228, 229, 247, 276, 285, 287 House as Cosmos, 32, 27, 59, 139, 142, 146, 236, 259, 276, 283, 287, 303, 305, 313, 333, 343n, 359, 365, 493 House as Grave, 34, 57, 71, 107n, 144, 209, 219, 226, 240, 275, 287, 289n, 362n, 364, 366 House as Hell, 70, 107n, 260, 285, 323, 432, 479 household, 25n, 38, 47, 50, 80, 100, 105, 110-112, 152, 155, 177, 182, 192, 204, 213, 225, 398, 417 House image, 13, 14, 27, 48, 54, 60, 83, 84, 88, 116, 143, 150, 152, 188, 197, 199, 215, 251, 258, 261, 264, 266, 269, 271-273, 279, 284, 286, 290, 292, 294, 303, 314, 325, 342, 364, 403, 404, 437, 492, 493 houseless, -ness, 68, 136, 254, 339, 428, 431, 456, 475, 492 House Myth, House as Myth, 12, 13n, 14, 15, 37, 45-51, 65-74, 77, 87, 89-92, 96, 102, 104-110, 119-122, 129, 130, 135, 139-141, 145, 146, 150, 151n, 152, 153, 155-157, 159165, 169, 174, 175n, 177, 188, 202, 206, 209n, 210n, 218, 219, 228, 232, 236, 244, 248, 251-253, 264, 265, 277, 281, 306, 309, 315, 322, 340, 341, 345, 347, 356-359, 370,

Index 378, 384-386, 393, 401, 402, 416, 425, 428, 437, 453, 456n, 457, 459, 462, 465, 470, 472, 488, 492, 493 House of Anxiety, 14, 107n, 127, 130-134, 136, 137, 218, 277, 279, 299n, 342, 405, 492 House of Childhood, 60, 61, 63, 70, 71, 73, 104, 120, 130, 141, 150, 167, 190, 193, 197, 196, 199, 202, 208, 212, 220, 230, 235, 238, 304, 314, 333, 346, 389, 404, 434, 468, 469n, 470, 488 House of Death, 57, 71, 72, 127, 135, 156, 162, 218-230, 247, 251, 289, 431 House of Friends (Friendship), 104, 116, 130n House of Language, 315, 333 House of Memory, 62, 63, 70, 104, 120 House of Russia, 84, 87, 88 House of the Dead, 34, 57, 250, 287, 364, 375, 431, 438 House of the Father, 34, 104, 120, 146, 277, 314, 364 House of the Future, 70, 366, 390 House of the Living, 432 House of Poetry, 433 House-Body, 154, 260, 288, 321, 325, 333, 348, 470, 480 House-Cave, 145, 358, 360 House-Cosmos, 139, 143, 146, 276, 313, 333, 359 House-Consciousness, 63 House-Personality, 55, 127, 129, 135, 137, 139, 146, 195, 260 House-Prison, 218, 226 House-Psyche, 325, 361 House-Riddle, 146, 292 House-Ship, 318, 360 House-Soul , 53, 56-58, 103, 241, 288-291, 294n, 307, 313, 325 House-Tree, 39, 319 House-Womb, 32, 57, 70, 145, 284, 385, 306, 319, 369 House-World, 32, 39, 40, 45-51, 59, 104, 114, 116-119, 125, 140, 146, 153, 232, 237, 241, 260, 283, 284,

517 287, 290, 306, 316, 321, 334, 443, 477 House symbolism, 13, 251, 259, 290, 292, 345 House without Love, 71 House, Burnt, 127, 172, 175-177, 325, 431 House, Closed, 70, 79, 81, 84, 85, 87, 99, 100, 252, 262, 274, 276, 277, 285, 287, 429, 473-475, 488 House, Common European, 87 House, Common Proletarian, 364, 365 House, Cosmic, 287 House, Dreamed, 54, 134, 204, 212n House, Empty, 54, 135n, 141, 152, 155, 194n, 227n, 245, 264, 311, 314, 361, 404, 408, 414, 415, 416n House, False, 293, 431 House, Fleeing the, 60, 72, 216, 457n House, Haunted, 60, 70, 107, 127, 146 House, Little (domik), 102, 104, 107n, 108n, 117, 118, 119n, 120, 123, 125, 126-137, 183, 184n, 194, 242 House, New, 72, 84, 91, 92, 106, 107, 120, 130, 131n, 133, 161, 177, 209, 210, 216, 233, 312, 355, 401, 402 House, Old, 51, 57, 61, 70, 84, 161, 209, 210, 212n, 216, 253, 264, 269, 270n, 292n, 294, 304, 343, 345, 346, 349-353, 361, 362, 401, 469 House, Open, 87 House, Parental, 70, 106, 107, 123, 161, 202-204 House, Paternal,, 70, 107, 227, 240 House, Personified, 61, 70, 248, 269, 348 House, Poet’s, 123, 125, 129, 289 House, Public, 147, 325, 430 House, Remembered, 140, 141n, 154, 238, 468 House, the Big, 96n, 212, 244, 342, 390, 396, 397n, 398-400, 402, 403, 407, 410 House, Unhappy, 60, 71, 107, 218, 248, 273, 276, 277

518


hut (izba), 26, 32, 37, 47, 54, 59, 109, 117, 135, 175, 176n, 180, 183, 185, 203, 349, 350, 351, 365n, 439, 440, 455 Iazykov, N.M., 120 iconic, -city, 122, 123, 125, 141, 160, 240, 292, 297, 327n, 448 identification, 37, 40, 43, 46, 58, 61, 80, 121, 123, 124, 154, 169, 196, 236, 238, 241, 269, 323, 338, 349, 351, 492 identity, 14, 36, 48, 60, 69, 70, 81n, 102, 107, 124, 128, 136, 145, 186, 240, 248, 287, 292, 293, 300, 325, 333, 346, 395, 406, 472, 492 ideology, -gical, 14, 35, 49, 50, 80, 92, 86, 87, 97, 99, 100, 112, 124, 167, 168n, 211 idiosyncracy, -cratic, 104, 159 idyll, -ic, 71, 118, 126, 133, 140, 165, 201, 343, 355, 378, 379, 380 imago mundi, 32, 259, 33 impropriety (domestic), 345, 353, 425, 428 indeterminacy, 66, 236-238 inclusion, 28, 480 Indo-European, 19, 23, 24, 25n, 27n, 28, 29, 32, 46, 111n, 377 indoors, 410, 455 intelligent, -tsia, 49, 92, 109, 201, 249n, 262, 266, 272, 275, 472, 475, 477, 480 interior, -rity, 11, 34, 44n, 57, 62, 69, 103, 167, 238, 252, 279, 287, 289, 290, 292, 293, 303, 305, 339, 342344, 361, 385, 447 internal normative orientation, 164, 165n, 167, 168, 209-212, 226, 230, 232, 233, 356, 492 intimacy, 19, 74n, 114, 125, 134, 231, 242, 382, 392, 422, 423, 475 introversion, 85 inventory, 33, 70, 71, 104, 141, 161, 202, 209n, 219, 275, 347, 385, 416, 426n, 428, 456n, 470 Iskander, F.A., 101, 139 isolation, 91, 193, 221, 226, 232, 251,

264, 271, 274, 286, 355, 408, 415, 429n, 486n Ivanov, V.V., 339 Izba (hut), 175, 351, 439-442 Izmaragd, 61 Kafka, F., 60n Karamzin, N.M., 117 Kharms, D., 416 Khlebnikov, V.V., 306n, 309, 310, 316-322, 239, 333, 375 Khomiakov, A.S., 99, 100, 167, 386 Kibirov, T.Iu., 421 Kireevskii, I.V., P.V., 99, 167 kommunalka, 88, 353, 371, 391, 401, 410n, 419, 421-426, 428, 431, 437, 454, 492, 493 Korolenko, V.G., 257 Krzhizhanovskii, S.D., 422 Kuprin, A.I., 257 Kushner, A.S., 101 Kustodiev, B.M., 82 Lermontov, M.Iu., 59, 101, 139-146, 471n, 473, 491 Leskov, N.S., 49n, 261, 369 locus amoenus, 118, 203 Loss of the House, 13, 61, 91, 104, 120, 127, 134, 137, 219, 232, 294, 337, 341, 343, 408, 416, 434, 453, 456n ,459, 491 lyric, lyrical, 61, 70, 71, 73, 95, 96, 115, 117, 120, 123, 125, 126, 129, 144, 248n, 286, 290-293, 321, 324, 325, 386, 455 madhouse, 70, 107n, 149, 150, 260, 261, 429, 431, 473, 474, 486n maid’s room , 113, 114 Maiakovskii, V. V., 309, 315, 323327, 378, 380 Maistre, Xavier de, 59 Makanin, V., 471-489, 491 manor house, 141, 141n, 161, 182, 183, 188, 231, 351 marriage, 38, 42, 60, 71, 72, 92, 104n, 106n, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113n, 127, 151, 160, 161, 167, 189, 190-

Index 192, 194, 200-202, 206-210, 211n, 221, 232, 233, 277, 324, 344, 361, 382, 401, 402, 413, 429, 437, 439, 440, 462, 464, 466 master, 47, 48, 50, 55, 80, 97, 100, 109, 110, 126, 172, 177-179, 181183, 185, 191, 214, 222, 224, 225, 351, 427, 429-435, 474, 488 maximalism, 338, 375, 463 mentality, 80, 81, 85, 131, 252, 386n, 422 Merezhkovskii, D.S., 283 metamorphosis, 304, 316 metaphor, -rical, 11, 12, 15, 20, 31, 34, 54-57, 61, 63, 72, 79, 84, 87, 88n, 95, 98-100, 113, 114, 116, 130, 139, 145n, 156, 174, 177, 196, 209, 220, 229, 241, 243, 260, 262, 273, 279, 300, 303, 304, 306, 315, 316, 322-327, 345, 348, 360-362, 365, 378, 389, 392, 414, 421, 447, 449, 472, 474, 477-479, 482, 485, 488, 492 metaphor, realised, 61, 300, 315, 322324, 326, 348 metaphorisation, 229, 236, 318 metonym, -my, -mic(al), 11, 12, 26, 31, 42, 72, 73, 83, 95, 102, 103, 121-123, 125, 128, 146, 165, 166, 174, 176, 194, 208, 225, 229, 236, 238, 241, 245, 251, 268, 269, 271, 345, 388, 401, 442 metonymy, expansive, 236, 401 metonymy, realised , 166, 300, 303 metonymy, symbolic , 11, 84, 103 mezzanine, 227n, 263, 625, 266, 267n, 268, 269, 270, 276, 278, 351n, 354 microcosm, -ic, 49, 50, 118, 123, 153, 207, 212, 313, 314, 320, 321, 334, 359, 419, 429, 475, 477, 492 milieu, 24, 91, 95, 167, 171, 189, 190, 232, 236, 237, 241, 248, 252, 262, 283, 293, 315, 349 mistress of the house, 109, 111, 112, 179, 181, 214, 224, 225, 352 modern, 13,21, 48, 51, 59, 66, 70, 91, 92, 96, 100n, 133, 36, 166, 207,

519 232n, 247, 251, 261, 262, 264, 282, 293, 306n, 310, 311, 323, 358, 360n, 369, 370, 375, 390, 424, 448, 492 Modernism, 61,63, 69, 137, 247, 257, 258, 263, 279, 281, 297, 300, 305, 306, 309, 329, 333, 338, 341, 342, 347, 357, 358, 417, 445, 446 monastery, 114, 139 Monomakh, Vl., 85 moral, 12, 26, 30, 34, 40, 47, 50, 62, 71, 73, 74, 78, 79, 82, 86, 90, 96, 100, 110, 112, 117, 120, 122, 134, 156n, 157, 164, 165, 168, 169, 194, 198, 202, 209, 210, 212, 214, 220, 223, 226, 229, 230, 232, 233, 248, 249, 251, 252, 259, 260, 272, 27, 294, 325, 330, 349, 357, 369, 370, 378, 393, 395, 399, 408, 413, 418n, 424, 428, 443, 446, 447, 450, 453, 454, 470-474, 480, 488, 491, 493 Moscow-Tartu School, 12, 53, 65, 180 Mother-House, 229n Mukařovský, 66 Muscovite, -vy, 47, 49, 79, 85, 87, 99, 160, 262, 472 mythical, 32, 34, 54, 66, 70, 87, 90, 129, 154, 177, 180, 185, 186, 199, 230, 236, 252, 267n, 278, 278, 304, 306, 330, 358, 359, 365, 382, 401, 402, 438, 448, 459, 467, 489 mythology, -gical, 39, 45, 54, 152, 229n, 236, 252, 300, 319n, 338, 341, 358, 359, 461 mythopoetic(s), 32, 67, 71, 95, 99, 139, 171, 180, 185, 186, 233, 247, 276, 289, 305, 306, 310, 316, 319, 330, 331, 333, 339, 363, 375, 443, 466, 493 Nabokov, V., 62, 235 narration, 70-72, 153, 165, 347, 462 narrative, 19, 54, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 90, 107, 109, 110, 128, 153, 159, 160, 165, 171, 178, 194, 198, 220, 232, 236, 240, 245, 259, 266, 269, 270, 271, 274n, 276, 2768,

520


279, 311, 316, 317, 345, 347, 357, 358n, 363, 393, 394, 403, 421, 445, 448, 462, 463, 467, 468, 482, 491 narrator, 73, 91, 109, 127, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 171, 172, 175-178, 181, 184, 186, 188, 205, 219, 223, 238, 239, 241-243, 245, 250, 257, 265, 266, 267n, 268-271, 273, 274, 279, 298, 299, 301, 302, 304, 306, 313, 314, 346n, 349, 350, 354, 394, 395, 402-404, 424, 438-442, 446, 475, 477 national, 66, 81, 88, 101, 124, 125, 169, 231, 346, 382, 420, 425 Natural School, 95, 96, 145, 151, 159, 165, 176, 186, 252, 492 Naturalism, 252, 257 necropolis, 34, 90n, 283 287, 366 Nekrasov, N.A., 96n, 97 nest, 32, 59n, 100, 161, 167-169, 172n, 175, 183, 190, 193, 198, 203, 211, 216, 229n, 230, 242, 243n, 277, 317, 318, 352, 424, 434, 453 Nest of the Landed Gentry, 60, 73, 92, 159, 161, 163, 168, 171, 173, 188, 189, 194, 198, 210, 233, 242, 245, 246, 263, 264, 266, 269, 279, 342, 424 Nicholas I, 134 nihilist, 136, 168, 208, 209, 211 noble(man), nobility, 25n, 30n, 39n, 43n, 105, 109n, 113, 120, 133, 134, 160, 178, 179, 182, 183, 189, 195, 204, 217, 244, 250, 352, 354 nomad, -dic, 22, 23n 33, 38n, 46, 272, 319, 338, 339, 368, 449, 451, 479, 480 obshchaga, 472n, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478n, 479, 480, 482-484, 488, 489 Oedipus, -pal, 145, 252 Odyssey, 36, 68, 72 Olesha, Iu.K., 471n openness, 34, 66 organic, -ism, -icist, 88, 100, 167, 284, 298, 310, 315, 316, 318, 319, 355, 382 orphan, 61, 68, 71, 107, 114, 121n,

140, 145, 208, 222, 227n, 276, 370, 371 orientation, -tedness, 11, 31, 33, 35, 40, 67, 68, 79, 83, 85, 100, 133, 140, 164-168, 196, 207, 209-212, 226, 230, 232, 233, 237, 239, 244, 286, 291, 309, 335, 338, 339, 356, 382, 447, 450, 452, 456, 457, 471, 488, 492, 493 orientation, normative , 68, 164, 165n, 167, 168, 209-212, 226, 230, 232, 233, 492 Orthodox, orthodoxy, 13n, 47, 50, 85, 86, 88, 99 Ossian, 331 Ostrovskii, A.N., 49, 60, 79, 80, 86 Our House Russia, 88 outcast, 135, 168, 209, 251, 437, 473 outdoors, 112, 254, 410 oxymoron, -nic, 82, 325, 343, 348, 415 palace, 39-41, 252, 289, 318, 362, 381, 402n, 403 Pallas Athena, 300, 301, 302n Pasternak, B.L., 449, 471 paradise, 48, 70, 71, 118, 141, 163, 174, 176, 199, 212n, 254, 276, 30, 335, 403, 420, 449, 455 pastoral(e), 118, 176, 177, 203, 335 patriarchical, 34, 50, 71, 79, 99, 100, 118, 124, 160, 166, 176, 208, 417, 453n, 492 Pelevin, V., 474 penates, 38, 103n, 105, 106n, 117, 118n Penelope, 36 perestroika, 87, 88, 185, 380 periphery, peripheral, 87, 97, 168, 176, 254, 369, 457, 465, 466, 471, 475 Peter the Great, 19, 49, 83-85, 87, 132, 180 Petersburg (Saint), 20, 63, 83, 84, 85n, 95-97, 109-115, 128, 133, 134, 145-147, 151, 165, 181, 190193, 199, 204, 208, 247, 266, 283, 297-299, 303, 304, 323, 357, 358,

Index 360, 405n, 424, 426n, 445n, 447, 457 Petersburg Myth, 92, 127n, 283 petrine, 49, 50, 85, 87, 182, 185, 189, 339 phenomenology, -gical, 11, 14, 22, 54, 63, 237, 290, 306, 422, 423 physiology, -gical, -gist, 91, 96-99, 145, 151, 159, 186, 232n, 421 Pil’niak, B.A., 57, 61, 62, 69, 164, 238, 338-340, 342-356, 423 Plato, 35 Platonov, A.P., 60, 1854n, 319, 339, 363-375, 378, 384n, 423, 451n, 454, 466, 480n, 491 Plautus, 59, 320n poetics, 12, 14, 53, 66, 85n, 102, 109, 117, 123, 26, 128, 131, 157, 171, 173, 187n, 238, 289, 287, 309, 315, 320n, 323, 360, 367 polysemy, 66 postmodern(ism), 446, 459, 463n, 467, 471, 474, 475 post-Symbolism, 338, 339 prehistory, -toric, 20n, 23, 45, 47, 50, 369 prism, 14, 15, 235, 311 prison, -er, 29, 70, 81, 107n, 115n, 140, 218, 226, 230, 250, 251, 259261, 285, 287, 289, 291, 299, 330n, 343, 391, 406, 407n, 408, 412n, 413, 415n, 432, 433, 437, 466, 474, 488 private, -acy, 19, 51, 81, 100-102, 114, 116-119, 125, 128, 134, 183, 299, 319, 362, 381, 383-385, 388, 389, 406, 407, 410, 413, 414, 422, 424, 426, 432, 454, 460, 475, 478, 485n prodigal (son), 72, 109, 219, 227, 228n projection, 55, 70, 90, 93, 104, 105, 121, 123, 124, 151, 154, 157, 195, 205, 216, 229, 236, 299, 316, 331, 337, 341, 378, 380, 385, 404, 417, 447,492 Prometheus, Promethean, 35, 67, 358, 370, 371, 373

521 provincial, 80, 82, 152, 155, 183, 191, 193, 207, 209, 218, 221, 238n, 248, 252, 253, 362, 342, 369, 460 pseudo-domestic, 432, 482, 488 Pseudo-House, 70, 107n pseudo-myth, 417, 428, 449 psyche, -chic, 54, 63, 70, 93, 215, 237, 251, 291, 292, 303, 306, 314, 325, 361, 422n psychiatry, -tric, 261, 423, 472-474, 479, 480, 482, 484, 487, 488 psychology, -gical, 11, 13, 30, 3, 48, 54, 62, 66, 67, 70, 73, 98, 100n, 102n, 110, 122, 127, 132, 133, 136, 145, 149, 151n, 154, 155, 165, 187, 194, 196, 200, 233, 251, 270, 306n, 327, 334, 335, 351, 353, 361,366, 397, 402, 410, 421, 423, 424, 467, 469, 472, 480, 491, 493 psychopoetic(s), 53-56, 58-61, 63, 72, 73, 90, 92, 97, 104, 121, 123, 126129, 133, 134, 137, 139, 146, 150, 151, 65, 171, 189, 192, 195, 196n, 197, 198, 228, 236-238, 247, 251, 253, 258-261, 266, 269, 275, 288, 300, 303, 309, 341, 362n, 375, 470, 480, 492, 493 Pugachev, E., 120, 145, 345, 346 Purgatory, 479 Pushkin, A.S., 61, 83, 84, 91n, 92, 96, 101-137, 139, 145n, 146, 147, 150n, 151, 153, 160, 163, 232n, 233n, 248, 297, 298, 299, 430, 434, 450n, 453n, 491 Quintilian, 62 Radishchev, A.N., 447 rationalism, -ist, 49, 51, 99, 166, 185, 252, 300, 330, 332n, 355, 362, 381, 429n, 433n, 466 ravine (ovrag, obryv), 203-205, 209, 210, 289n, 372, 374, 375, 466, 468 raznochinets, 168, 300 Realism, 49, 50, 61, 96, 128, 136, 159, 163, 165, 176, 195, 232, 257, 281, 385, 393, 460, 467, 493 refuge, 70, 97, 124n, 217n, 218, 238n,

522


325, 430, 432, 433, 438, 474 representation, 11, 13, 19, 20n, 33, 55, 61, 66-69, 95, 97, 116, 152, 169, 188, 267, 382, 402, 443, 477 representation, symbolic, 19, 69 revisited, -ting, 61, 62, 72, 73, 125, 194, 197, 347, 358, 468, 493 Revolution(ary), 49, 61, 69, 84, 85, 87, 88, 1341, 132, 298 299, 303, 310, 315, 317, 319, 337, 338, 341346, 349-352, 353n, 354, 360, 363, 364, 368-371, 373-375, 378, 380, 381, 388, 380, 400, 409, 419, 423, 424, 428, 434, 439, 492 Rilke, R.M., 57, 59n rite de passage, 72 ritual, 14,29,32,33,45-48, 74, 92n, 99, 180-182, 185, 206, 232, 359, 462, 463 Road, 67, 68, 72, 121, 143-145, 156, 157, 178, 222, 270, 31, 364, 377, 432, 450, 451 Romantic, -cism, -cist, 61, 69, 96, 99, 102, 114, 124, 131-134, 139, 141, 144-146, 150, 152, 160, 201, 247, 248n, 252, 257, 283, 329, 330, 382, 446, 457, 491 roof, 28, 29, 32, 34, 36, 38, 50, 54, 55, 99, 100, 102, 116, 117, 121, 128, 129, 143, 172, 175, 177, 178n, 184n, 202, 203, 216n, 242, 243n, 259, 260n, 316n, 317, 318, 232, 344, 401, 430, 469n, 471, 480, 488 routine, 22, 71, 90, 91, 108, 161, 177, 183, 185, 187, 191, 201, 205-207, 213, 214, 224, 225n, 231, 232, 262, 268, 343, 358, 373, 374, 385, 386, 400, 407, 410n, 428 ruin, 88n, 135, 136, 155, 162, 177, 178n, 216n, 260n, 294, 341, 343, 345, 413 rural, -lity, 46, 49, 50, 92, 99, 100, 104, 112, 113, 122-126, 151, 152, 159, 164, 165, 167, 176, 182, 192, 196, 199, 204, 208, 212, 224, 225, 233, 235, 247, 371, 463, 469, 491493 Russianness, 84n, 124, 182, 186, 189,

192, 198, 199, 212, 232, 369 Saltykov-Shchedrin, M.E., 14, 50, 156, 159, 162, 164, 217-230, 232, 233, 247, 248, 471n, 492 samodur, 49, 80 Scythian, 46, 69, 338, 339 secular, 87, 319 sedentary, -riness, 20, 22, 23n, 35, 67-69, 160, 457 Self, 12, 30, 54, 58, 59, 67, 139, 236, 237, 288, 303, 305, 323, 325, 326, 362, 392, 401, 428, 479, 480, 486 semiosis, 65, 73 semiotic(s), -cal, 11, 12, 15, 22, 24, 27, 28, 33, 53, 62, 63, 65, 67, 77, 80, 85, 95, 97, 102, 139, 154, 180, 181, 183, 186, 236, 238, 241, 275, 281, 287, 291, 309, 314, 339, 384, 401, 422, 448 Sentimentalism, -ist, 102, 114, 447 serf, -dom, 49, 50, 160, 166, 172, 177, 179, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188, 191, 193, 217, 218, 220, 222, 224, 225, 242, 254, 264, 279n setting, 36, 65, 67, 68, 70, 72, 81n, 82, 92, 95, 96, 110, 133, 134, 141, 145, 147, 151, 159, 163-167, 171, 176, 199, 194, 195, 199, 208, 232, 233, 238, 241, 244-248, 251-253, 262, 264, 266, 268, 274, 276-279, 282, 284, 347, 349, 350, 353, 358, 360, 369, 386, 394, 395, 399, 419, 422, 423, 428, 448, 455, 461, 465, 468, 469, 471, 488, 492 settlement, to settle, 27, 30, 81, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 60, 73, 98n, 104, 111, 113n, 146, 151, 156, 161, 174, 175, 191, 192, 193n, 194, 209, 211, 222, 343n, 373, 394, 420, 430, 454, 479 shelter, 21, 26, 33, 43, 50, 58-60, 116, 118, 119, 133, 135n, 144, 148, 254, 274, 325, 369, 379, 387, 389, 431, 434, 449, 452, 454, 481, 482 Silver Age, 257, 337 sky, 32, 34, 116, 144, 202, 203, 240n, 243, 284n, 286n 292, 317, 320n

Index 323, 359, 396n, 464n, 485n Slavic, 14, 20n 25, 99,m 180, 378n slavophile, 14, 51, 93, 98-100, 157, 159-161, 166, 167, 176, 187, 192, 205, 207, 300, 371, 386n, 417, 453, 492 social, 11, 19, 21, 22, 24-30, 40, 41, 47-49, 51, 67, 69, 71, 79, 80, 9092, 95, 96n, 97, 100n, 111, 117, 118, 132-134, 136, 154, 161, 166, 169 171, 176, 181, 198, 192, 201, 218, 223, 231, 232, 246n, 248, 251, 263, 264, 272, 283, 286, 293, 294, 300, 342, 347, 350, 352, 354, 355, 358, 367, 369, 377, 378, 380n, 381-384, 386, 388, 389, 392, 395397, 399, 401, 406, 408, 410, 417, 421, 423, 428, 437, 446, 447, 452, 453, 460, 465, 466, 472, 475, 478, 479, 489, 493 Socialism, 319, 377, 383, 390, 404, 405, 417 Socialist construction, 364, 378, 393, 420 Socialist Realism, 382n, 384, 385, 389, 393, 460, 493 society, 19, 22, 25, 48, 50, 79, 85, 91n, 96, 100, 111, 112, 128, 132, 141, 168, 187n, 192, 217, 248, 273, 337, 353, 354, 356, 373, 375, 378, 379n, 381-383, 388, 393, 414, 421, 425, 437, 449, 457, 471-473, 475, 477, 478, 488 society tale, novel, 96, 133, 232n Solzhenitsyn, A.I., 87, 88, 251, 386, 414n, 425, 437-443, 479 Sorokin, V., 164, 238, 410n, 459-470, 471, 493, 510n soul, 22, 53, 54, 56-58, 67, 74n, 103, 113, 116n, 122, 123n, 130n, 136, 140n 143, 152, 155-157, 166, 168, 184, 191, 196n, 217, 218, 223n, 225, 228n, 229n,244, 287-289, 290, 291, 294n, 307, 313, 323, 325, 334n, 335, 371, 378, 396, 416n, 439, 445, 446, 452, 470, 481n, 483, 485n Soviet, 87n, 329, 351, 353, 354, 368,

523 377-379, 380n, 381-385, 387-389, 390, 392, 393, 395-399, 404, 405, 410, 412n, 413-415, 417-423, 425, 428, 429, 431, 433n, 437, 438, 441, 442, 445, 446, 449, 452-454, 456, 457, 471-473, 475, 478, 479, 488, 489, 492 Soviet Union, 88, 364, 386, 395, 405, 420, 425, 427, 438, 472, 474, 488 spatio-evaluative, 67, 164 spatio-functional, 425 spatio-modal, 343 stair(case), 247, 265, 292, 302n, 398, 406, 407, 410n, 445, 452, 453 Stalin, -ism, -ist, 251, 352n, 378, 381, 383-389, 391, 393-395, 400, 402, 404-406, 410, 413, 414, 417, 420, 437 superfluous men, 136, 168, 198 Symbolism, 137, 257, 281, 283, 287, 288, 309, 310, 338, 339, 492 Tacitus, 46 Tatar Yoke, 47, 79, 180 temple, 32, 35, 38n, 289n, 297, 305, 307n tenement-house, 92, 247, 318, 388 tent, 21, 25n, 35, 38n, 116, 192, 193n territory, 27, 30, 32, 47, 209, 426 Terts, A., 422 Testament, New, Old, 34 threshold, 29, 33, 73, 116, 117, 135, 200, 206n Tiutchev, F.I., 114n, 145n tomb, 34, 57, 288n, 364 topology, -gical, 97, 164, 209, 210, 212, 236-238, 240, 279n, 452, 457, 480 Tolstoi, L.N., 91, 92n, 160, 164, 230, 232-233, 247, 248, 249n, 257, 434, 462, 492 transformation, 13, 63, 72, 121, 123, 127, 129, 137, 146, 181, 229, 237, 281, 287, 288n, 289-292, 300, 302, 303, 306, 309, 310, 315, 323, 234, 364, 381 transgress, -ion, 110, 209, 247, 486n trespassing, 107, 413

524


Trifonov, Iu.V., 377-404, 475 Tsar, -ism, -ist, 48, 85, 86n, 90, 160, 250, 385 Turgenev, I.S., 60, 61, 68, 73, 136, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166-168, 169n, 171-198, 207, 225, 233n, 245, 254, 265, 266, 269, 279, 454, 462 Two-world model (dvumirie), 281, 309, 360 typology, -gical, 22, 24, 27, 35, 44, 48, 67, 68, 70, 77, 87, 95, 104, 165, 167, 186, 194, 205, 262, 279, 281, 338n, 348, 356, 369, 381, 383, 448, 457, 492

vertical, -ity, 54, 80, 85, 97, 241, 317, 319n, 366, 367, 375, 383, 399, 452, 453 Vesta, 27, 38n, 105, 206 Viazemskii, P.A., 115, 117 village, 23, 27-29, 31, 61, 93, 108, 113, 124, 141n, 153, 168, 172, 175, 178n, 184, 185, 203, 264, 206, 211, 214n, 215n, 226n, 236, 240n, 247, 248, 263-265, 267, 372, 385, 438, 439, 441, 442n, 443, 465, 466 Virgil, 25, 37-39, 109 vital, -ity, 82, 156, 164, 188, 276, 313, 342, 346, 365, 465, 489, 493

Ulysses, 36-38 unconscious, 54, 56, 154, 203, 204, 247, 254, 306n, 365, 369, 421 Underground , 70, 97, 107n, 246n, 251, 253, 431, 445, 471, 472, 477, 478, 480, 482, 483, 493 U. Man, 92, 247, 250, 251, 253, 429, 472, 473 unhomely, 140, 274, 293 universe, 15, 24, 34, 58, 59, 143, 146, 153, 188, 240, 283, 286, 299, 300, 303, 307, 310, 315, 316, 359, 370, 389, 445, 450, 457, 459, 482, 488, 489 urban, -nity, 60, 80, 90-93, 96, 97, 112, 126, 128, 130, 133, 134, 145, 147, 149, 151, 152, 159, 165, 176, 180, 196, 199, 200, 231-233, 247, 262-264, 273, 282-284, 286, 287, 293, 297-299, 309-311, 316-319, 323, 324, 331, 338, 360, 380, 389, 419, 420, 422, 448, 449, 452, 457, 472, 480, 482, 489, 491-493 usad’ba, see: estate, utopia, -n, Utopian House, 60, 70, 99, 123, 126, 129, 136, 141, 165, 167, 252, 267, 315-317, 318n, 319, 321, 340, 341, 354-356, 360n, 362-364, 366, 368, 369, 378, 381, 390, 419, 423, 433, 449, 455, 488, 481

wall, 25, 29, 30, 33, 36, 42, 43n, 54, 55, 60n, 84, 109, 143, 148n, 174, 195n, 203, 252, 267n, 282, 286, 287n, 289n, 293n, 295n, 299, 300, 302, 311, 312n, 314, 317, 320, 355, 359n, 362, 394n, 425, 434, 440, 449, 481-484, 486, 488 wanderer, 72, 73, 76n, 120, 197n, 364n, 369 wedding, 74, 462, 464, 467 Western, 14, 19, 20n, 24n, 28, 29, 33, 44, 46, 49-51, 80n, 85, 98, 99, 103n, 107, 133, 136, 180, 189, 344, 453, 491 westernise(d), Westerniser, 49-51, 99, 166, 167, 193 wild, the (wilderness), 21, 40, 41, 43, 84, 115, 116n, 129, 140, 144n, 153156, 174, 176, 204, 205, 206n, 208, 216n, 218, 246n, 254, 258, 313, 314, 324, 330n, 377, 408, 465, 466 window, 32, 55, 56, 58n, 73, 74n, 78, 83-85, 102, 108n, 114, 119n, 122n, 148n, 149, 151, 152n, 154, 177, 178n, 184n, 194n, 196n, 197, 208n, 216n, 238, 243n, 260n, 270, 273n, 278, 284, 289n, 290-293, 312, 312n, 313n, 321n, 322-324, 344, 354n, 355n, 387, 398, 400, 401n, 403n, 404, 407, 409, 416, 449, 469n, 478n, 485n womb, 32, 57, 219n, 284n, 285, 319, 367n

vault, 34, 142, 143n, 144, 230, 304, 305, 319, 332, 359

Index Womb-House, 70, 306 world-order, 68, 69, 132, 230, 232, 252, 415 world-picture, 48-50, 65, 66, 68, 70, 77, 84, 90, 134, 141, 164, 165, 167n, 169, 186, 194, 225, 279, 281, 283, 286, 297, 303, 338, 339, 342, 365, 390, 461, 464, 467, 468, 479, 488, 491, 492 yard, 27, 28, 155n, 201n, 216n, 243n, 254n, 267n, 271, 248n, 287, 389, 394, 396, 421, 422n

525 Zabolotskii, N.A., 329-335, 470n Zamiatin, E.I., 14, 59, 79, 82, 303n, 319, 339, 340, 357-362, 369n, 389, 423n, 424, 425n, 426n, 434, 435n, 488 Zapadniki, 51 Zeus, 35, 252, 300, 301 Zhukovskii, V.A., 117, 118n Zinov’ev, A.A., 422 Zoshchenko, M.M., 422

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