Author Archives: Augustus Gilchrist '20

What’s in a Name? Ontological Crisis!

Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman is a masterpiece-the trouble is that it, like any masterpiece, has far too much worth unpacking for this humble blog post to cover. I will start with a small detail; I will enter through the servant’s door, Frol Skobeev’s coin jingling in my petticoats.

Throughout the poem, St. Petersburg is called by four different names. In the third stanza of the Prologue, it is Petra tvoren’e (creation of Peter), in the sixth stanza it is grad Petrov (city of Peter). In the first stanza of Part 1 it is Petrograd (Peter-city), in the fourth it is Petropol’ (Petropolis). With each name change, her aspect changes as well- from a strict and beautifully-ordered object of love, to the unshakeable death-knell for the elements, back to a November-kissed darkened city, and finally (and most dramatically) to ‘Triton, immersed up to the waist.’ The city is mutable and protean, stamped with Peter’s mark, yet failing to settle into one shape.

The effect of this on the reader (this reader, to be precise) is one of untethering. Pushkin gives us a poetic description of the city in the Introduction, but without a stable identity to pin it on, both the description and the city seem to escape the realm of the concrete. The city is a spatial non-sequitur, and only when the flood comes, bringing with it human tragedy and the destruction of concrete physical objects, can she be pinned down and transformed into a backdrop for small-scale grief-it is significant that St. Petersburg is given no further names in Part 2 of the poem, as Evgenii contemplates his loss and slips into madness.

Is it any wonder, then, that Petersburg has developed around itself a myth of unreality, that for Herzen it “disappears from my eyes in the fog”, unique and elusive in being “the embodiment of the general abstract notion of a capital city”? The idea of St. Petersburg being an ‘unreal city’ is not my own-it is a complex (and fascinating!) cultural trope, which we will discuss next class. It is interesting, however, to observe the small tweaks in language that can buttress this unreality-a syllable here, an allusion there, and St. Petersburg recedes into the night…*
*Read Andrei Bely’s Petersburg for this and more.

Courting (Disaster)

As I watched this adaption of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, I was struck by the (apparent) subtext of Grirogy’s (ie, the ‘Tsarevich’) courtship scene with the Polish noblewoman Marina Mniszek. Thompson points to the recapture of Moscow in 1612 by a nascent ‘national movement’ as a clear symbol of Russian determination to regain control over their fate from foreigners and usurpers. Avraamy Palitsyn’s work on ‘Pseudo-Dmitry’ pulsates with vitriol against foreign, non-Orthodox elements: the False Dmitry gives the hated Catholics a ‘written promise’ to deliver Russia up to the ‘Antichrist’ of Papism, as the Poles squander Russia’s ‘ancient’ patrimony and bathe themselves in various holy vessels. Although the recapture of Moscow takes place after the events of Boris Godunov, one could reasonably expect that any work depicting the Time of Troubles, a time charged with swirling crosscurrents of religious and national fervor, would reflect some of these themes.

The danger is of reading too much into a portly ex-Monk begging a haughty princess for her hand. Earlier in the class, we talked about the role the feminine played in Russian culture, that eternal incarnation of the ever-loving mat’. The princess mocks this sort of love-her eyes lifts skywards (a parody of ‘true belief’?), and with glazed eyes she ironically pronounces that her and the tsarevich will live on ‘love alone.’ Then her face changes, and Grigory is reminded that if love is all he wants, in Russia he’ll find all the ‘rosy-cheeked women’ he wants. Rosy cheeks, vital with lifeblood and the ‘feminine’, are to be found in Russia, but Grigory rejects this kind of love with a shrug-it will ‘smother’ him. He offers the princess a flower, a shred of the vital, natural world, but the foreigner rejects it-only the throne can win her heart. Russia, lost and confused in the form of Grigoriy, seeks the ‘love’ of the West, tricked by Blok’s ‘suffocating mortal odor.’ The West (the heretical West!) is not interested, unless Russia will submit in her entirety. Finally, let’s talk about the staging of this scene. Darkness hangs over the stage, and on either side of the center, receding into that darkness, stand two rows of classical-esque toga-bearing statues with their backs turned. Mute idols of the Western tradition, they betray the true fruits of this union-power to the Poles, Russia degraded and left in darkness. This, of course, is not an authoritative reading-it’s just food for thought! (bread and salt, if you will).

Scratch a Russian, Find a Paradox

When we began this class, Fyodor Tyutchev’s question confronted us- “What is Russia [?]” Questions of national origin and national ‘character’ (a term that, while reductive, proves useful when examining how an idea is expressed in cultural productions) pertaining to Russia take on a multiplicity of complicated and oft contradictory forms. Is Russia the ‘Europe of Peter the Great’, or is it an ‘Asiatic’ anomaly, stamped with the legacy of Tataro-Mongol occupation? While both of these definitions are problematic, I will narrow in on the second, and examine how the notion of the ‘Asiatic’ is engaged with in two works-Alexander Blok’s 1918 poem The Scythians, and Sergei Eistenstein’s 1938 epic Aleksander Nevsky.

In the first stanza of the poem, Blok appears to be making an unambiguous statement on Russian identity- “Yes, we are Scythians! Yes, Asiatics, with greedy eyes slanting!” Russia is explicitly positioned as a crossroads of cultures, and given a world-historical mission as a “shield” dividing the ‘hordes’ of Asia from Europe. The nature of the synthesis between the ‘Scythian’ and the ‘shield’ is obscured and, to the ‘Oedipus’ of the European tradition, inscrutable. Russia is a “Sphinx”, a sensuous and bloody dualism, the bearer of a “love as sets our hot blood churning” for the fruits of European culture, yet with a capacity for the violence of the steppe. Europe’s rib-cages burst beneath the “impulsive ardor” of Russian adulation, a legacy of the ‘Mongolic’ stamp left by “breaking in wild horses to the rein, and taming slave-girls to our grip.” Blok acknowledges the Petrine tradition of borrowing, yet ‘others’ Russia as an entity capable of receding before Europe, presenting an ‘asiatic mask’ when betrayed. She does not leave without first offering an olive branch, an invitation to “hammer [your] swords into ploughshares”, to accept Russia’s call “To peace and brotherhood and labour”. Here, perhaps, is an echo of the Slavophiles, of Nikolai Danilevsky’s ‘Slav Role’ as distinct from the West, yet capable of serving as a guiding light.

Eisenstein’s film offers a radically different engagement with concepts of the ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Russianness’. Much of what is said (and left unsaid) in the film can, of course, be attributed to the exigencies of producing a film about beating back the Germans in 1938-priests are occult and cruel, the rich are incapable of leadership, and many of the Teutonic helmets bear a curious resemblance to stahlhelms. Putting all that aside, I want to draw attention to a scene towards the beginning of the film, when Prince Alexander rejects the offer to join the Golden Horde. To the entreaty of the Mongol dignitary Alexander responds with a proverb (containing the folksy da nye of the peasant idiom, but the role of the peasants in Alexander Nevsky is a topic for another blog post)- “It’s better to die than to leave your homeland.” The Tatar is rejected, and Russianness, through connection to native land, is affirmed. As the Mongols march off, an old man suggests that Prince Alexander fight them. In the face of the German onslaught, the Prince cautions patience- “with the Mongols we can wait.” In Blok’s poem, the confrontation and contradiction of the Russian with the ‘Asiatic’ is foregrounded, reveled in. Alexander Nevsky brings a very different notion of Russianness to the table-the Mongol will remain unconfronted, the asiatic mask tucked away.