A juggler
pulls rails
from the mouth of a tram,
hidden by clock-faces of a tower.
We are conquered!
Bathtubs.
Showers.
An elevator.
The bodice of a soul is unfastened.
Hands burn the body.
Scream, or don't scream:
'I didn't mean…' -
torments
burn
sharp.
The prickly wind
tears out
a shred of smoky wool
* The poet's father, Leonid Pasternak, was a fashionable painter in Moscow and his
mother, Rozalia Kaufman, a well-known pianist. Scriabin was a close friend of the
family. Under his impact the teenage Boris studied music composition for six years. 'I loved music more than anything else, and I loved Scriabin more than anyone else in the world of music. Scriabin was my god and idol' (F. Bowers, Scriabin, 2 vols. (London,
1969), vol. 1, p. 321).
from a chimney.
A bald-head streetlamp
seductively
peels off
a black stocking
from the street.127
Malevich called Maytovsky's 'From Street into Street' (1913) the finest illustration of 'versified Cubism'.128
Marina Tsvetaeva was equally a poet of Moscow. Her father was Ivan Tsvetaev, sometime professor of Art History at Moscow University and the founding director of the Pushkin Gallery, so, like Pasternak, she grew up in the middle of the Moscow intelligentsia. The spirit of the city breathed in every line of her poetry. She herself once wrote that her early verse was meant to 'elevate the name of Moscow to the level of the name of Akhmatova… I wanted to present in myself Moscow… not with the goal of conquering Petersburg but of giving Moscow to Petersburg':
Cupolas blaze in my singing city,
And a wandering blind man praises the Holy Saviour,
And I present to you my city of church bells
– Akhmatova! - and also my heart.129
Through their friendship in these years, Tsvetaeva gave Moscow to fellow poet Mandelstam as well. 'It was a magic gift', wrote the poet's wife Nadezhda, 'because with only Petersburg, without Moscow, it would have been impossible to breathe freely, to acquire the true feeling for Russia.'130
After 1917 Moscow superseded Petersburg. It became the Soviet capital, the cultural centre of the state, a city of modernity and a model of the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted to build. Moscow was the workshop of the avant-garde, the left-wing artists of the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) and Constructivists like Malevich and Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova, who sought to construct the new Soviet man and society through art. It was a city of unprecedented freedom and experimentation in life as in art, and the avant-garde
believed, if only for a few years in the 1920s, that they saw their ideal city taking shape in it. Tatlin's 'tower' - his unrealized design for a monument to the Third International on Red Square - expressed these revolutionary hopes. A giant striding figure to be made out of steel and iron girders, tiered and rounded like the churches of medieval Muscovy, his would-be creation symbolized the city's messianic role, in the words of the refrain of the Internationale, to 'make the world anew'. From the old idea of Moscow as the Third Rome to the Soviet one of it as leader of the Third International, it was but a short step in the city's mission to save humanity.
Soviet Moscow was supremely confident, its confidence reflected in the huge building projects of the 1930s, the mass manufacture of motor cars, the first metros, and the forward-upward images of Socialist Realist 'art'. Moscow's old wooden houses were bulldozed. Churches were destroyed. A vast new parade route was constructed through the centre of the city: the old Tver Boulevard was broadened out (and renamed Gorky Street), a Revolution Square was laid out on the site of the old market, and Red Square was cleared of its market stalls. In this way the Lenin Mausoleum, the sacred altar of the Revolution, became the destination of the mass parades on May Day and Revolution Day. With their armed march past the Kremlin, the citadel of Holy Russia, these parades were imitations of the old religious processions they had replaced. There were even plans to blow up St Basil's cathedral so that the marchers could file past the Revolution's leaders, standing in salute on the Mausoleum's roof, and march off in one unbroken line.
Stalin's Moscow was thus recast as an imperial city - a Soviet Petersburg - and, like that unreal city, it became a subject of apocalyp-tic myths. In Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita (1940), the Devil visits Moscow and brings its cultural temples crashing down; Satan descends on the city in the person of a magician called Woland, with a band of sorcerers and a supernatural cat called Behemoth. They cause havoc in the capital, exposing it as morally corrupt, before flying off from the Sparrow Hills, where Napoleon (that other devil) had first set his sights on the city. Flying off with them was a young Moscow girl called Margarita, who had sacrificed herself to Woland so as to redeem her beloved Master, the author of
a suppressed manuscript about Pontius Pilate and the trial of Christ. As their horses leaped into the air and galloped upwards to the sky, Margarita 'turned round in flight and saw that not only the many-coloured towers but the whole city had long vanished from sight, swallowed by the earth, leaving only mist and smoke where it had been'.131
And yet throughout the twentieth century Moscow was still 'home'. It was still the mother city it had always been, and, when Hitler attacked it in the autumn of 1941, its people fought to defend it. There was no question of abandoning the city, as Kutuzov had abandoned it to Napoleon in 1812. A quarter of a million Muscovites dug last-ditch defences, carted food to the soldiers at the front and cared for the injured in their homes. With one last desperate effort the Germans were pushed back from the city's gates - a spot still marked today by a giant iron cross on the road from Moscow to the Sheremetevo airport. It was not the Soviet capital but Mother Moscow which was saved. In the words of Pasternak:
A haze of legend will be cast Over all, like scroll and spiral Bedecking gilded boyar chambers And the Cathedral of St Basil.
By midnight denizens and dreamers Moscow most of all is cherished. Here is their home, the fount of all With which this century will flourish.132
4
overleaf: A typical one-street village in central Russia, c. 1910
In the summer of 1874 thousands of students left their lecture halls in Moscow and St Petersburg and travelled incognito to the countryside to start out on a new life with the Russian peasantry. Renouncing their homes and families, they were 'going to the people' in the hopeful expectation of finding a new nation in the brotherhood of man. Few of these young pioneers had ever seen a village, but they all imagined it to be a harmonious community that testified to the natural socialism of the Russian peasantry. They thus convinced themselves that they would find in the peasant a soul mate and an ally of their democratic cause. The students called themselves the Populists (narodniki), 'servants of the people' (the narod), and they gave themselves entirely to the 'people's cause'. Some of them tried to dress and talk like peasants, so much did they identify themselves with their 'simple way of life'. One of them, a Jew, even wore a cross in the belief that this might bring him closer to the 'peasant soul'.1 They picked up trades and crafts to make themselves more useful to the peasantry, and they brought books and pamphlets to teach the peasants how to read. By merging with the people and sharing in the burdens of their lives, these young revolutionaries hoped to win their trust and make them understand the full horror of their social condition.