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

Abstract

Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:These notes were found later among his [Zhivago's] papers: “When I came back to Moscow in 1922 I found it deserted and half destroyed. So it has come out of the ordeals of the first years after the revolution: so it remains to this day. Its population has decreased, no new houses are being built, and the old ones are left in disrepair.But even in this condition it is still a big modern [sovremennyi] city, and cities are the only source of inspiration for a new, truly modern art.The seemingly incongruous and arbitrary jumble of things and ideas in the work of the Symbolists (Blok, Verhaeren, Whitman) is not a stylistic caprice. This is a new order of impressions taken directly from life. Just as they hurry their succession of images through the lines of their poems, so the street in a busy town hurries past us, with its crowds and its carriages at the end of the last century, or its streetcars and subways at the beginning of ours. Pastoral simplicity does not exist in these conditions. Its pseudoartlessness is a literary fraud, an unnatural mannerism, a bookish phenomenon, not inspired by the countryside but taken from the shelves of academic archives.