SOURCE: “Pil'njak's ‘The Third Capital’: Russia and the West in Fact and Fiction,” in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 39–51.

[In the following essay, Avins contends that “The Third Capital” is important “for its extended treatment of the contrast between Europe and Russia present in a number of his other works.”]

The Russian preoccupation with Europe is reflected in the works of many Russian writers and expressed in many forms. It appears in eighteenth-century adventure tales, travel writings, and satire, and in contemporary poetry and prose. Often the writer's look westward is simultaneously an act of introspection—a probing of Russia's identity. This is true of Odoevskij's Russian Nights (1844), which mingles philosophical dialogues with the fantastic; it characterizes, too, fiction like Dostoevskij's “The Gambler” (1866) and Leskov's “The Left-Handed Craftsman” (1881). Dostoevskij, whose novels also involve Russia's interrelationship with the West, addresses it more directly in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) and other journalistic writings. The novels of Turgenev and Tolstoj might be cited as further indications of the theme's diversity and pervasiveness.

A new phase in the history of this issue begins with the Bolshevik Revolution. One landmark of the era is Blok's poem “The Scythians,” written in early 1918. Renewed interest in Russia's relation to Europe is evident in essays and fiction of the 1920s. Boris Pil'njak was among the writers of that period who focused on the West in the course of exploring Russia's past and present. Pil'njak's first major work, The Naked Year (1922), contains several often cited passages invoking the Revolution as a healthy, catalytic force eradicating the corrupting European elements in Russian culture. The idea that Russia's Westernization has ended is affirmed in one character's pronouncement that “the Revolution has brought about a polarity between Russia and Europe.”¹

The image of an awakened Russia standing in opposition to an increasingly moribund Europe is sketched in The Naked Year but not developed. It arises only in the context of Russia's inner conflict between its “Eastern” and “Western” elements, one of the principal themes associated with Pil'njak. Some of his early stories also engage this duality, and he develops it more fully in the novel Machines and Wolves (1925). The West figures here as the realm of industrial progress, and the question is raised whether Russia, after a revolution Pil'njak likes to portray as anti-European, is to betray its recaptured roots and yield to the essentially Western machine. Pil'njak resolves this issue by suggesting that technology need not be viewed as a Western phenomenon, that it can be absorbed as one dimension of the new Russian identity.² As in The Naked Year (and in his 1930 novel, The Volga Flows to the Caspian Sea) the author's chief concern is Russia's postrevolutionary experience; the current state of Europe remains tangential.

Pil'njak visited Europe in 1922 and 1923, and European settings surface occasionally in his fiction. His travels to the Far East later in the decade are described in two works of reportage: The Roots of the Japanese Sun (1927) and A Chinese Tale (1928). A trip to the other side of the Pacific is chronicled in O'Kej (1933), subtitled “an American novel.” Pil'njak wrote no account of his European impressions comparable to these works. Among his writings, however, is one which places Europe in a central role and dramatizes both its condition and that of Soviet Russia. He is quoted as having written it with the European reader in mind, “right after returning from Europe—using raw material.”³ The work he refers to is a long povest' titled “The Third Capital,” published in 1923.⁴

“The Third Capital” merits study not simply as a neglected work of the early Pil'njak: it is important also for its extended treatment of the contrast between Europe and Russia present in a number of his other works. Pil'njak's anatomy of Russian life continues, but his field of vision is broader. He moves beyond the issue of an inner East-West dichotomy and juxtaposes Russia as a whole with the West. The opposition that dominates “The Third Capital” is not internal but international. It is an opposition more complex than one may at first discern—grounded in setting, character, and incident, but also conveyed through style and symbol.

Pil'njak was termed the most characteristic writer of the 1920s because his prose exemplifies the dissolution of generic norms and the collapse of literature's boundaries (Gofman, 7–9). “The Third Capital” conforms to this image: its seemingly disparate components include fictional material and sections tending to journalism. Like his other early works it was regarded as an anarchic mass of fragments, “each striving for autonomy” (Tynjanov, 305). But although it is fragmented, its segments are drawn into a coherent whole. Their unity can be understood through the roles played by “fact” and “fiction.” These terms function not only as stylistic markers: they are indicative also of key elements in Russian and Western existence. “The Third Capital” is unusual in its schematic use of fictional and documentary prose, and in its interrelationship of form and meaning.

One central fiction links Russia and the West, providing an explicit manifestation of their differences. It involves two characters: the Russian Emel'jan Emel'janovič Razin and one “mister Robert Smith (Smit), an Englishman, a Scotsman” (120).⁵ The story of Smith and Razin, who are plainly emblematic of the bourgeois European and the postrevolutionary Russian, spans nearly the entire work. In quantitative terms it does not dominate the povest'; it is interrupted, sometimes at great length, by other levels of narrative. It is, however, the only strand of “The Third Capital” which contains an exposition, conflict, and resolution; it is the only complete plot. Although Pil'njak states in an opening section that there are no characters but “Russia, Europe, the world, faith, unbelief” (112), these men function as protagonists. An analysis of the work might begin by considering them more closely.

Razin is obviously a namesake of both the eighteenth-century Cossack rebel Emel'jan Pugačev and his seventeenth-century predecessor Sten'ka Razin. This Razin, however, is no peasant leader of mass movements; the name grants him attributes which at first he appears to lack. He is an intellectual, a philologist who now serves as secretary of a district department of education. Razin spends his nights closeted with books in one of those decaying provincial houses that recur in Pil'njak's writing. An act of banditry links him with his historical forebears: he takes Smith under false pretenses to the woods, shoots him in the back, and robs him. Elsewhere Pil'njak identifies razinovščina and pugačevščina with the pre-Petrine, purely Russian peasant spirit that is resurfacing in the Revolution. By thus naming his character the author identifies him with this mentality and asserts his Russianness; by making him an intelligent he endows him with reason as well as instinct. The tension between a rational and an elemental Russia, which in other works Pil'njak presents through multiple characters, is embodied here in one figure. Russia's dualism is internalized in Razin, and he confronts the West as a composite—scholar, bureaucrat, and outlaw.

The Revolution has purportedly not embittered Razin, but his inability to tolerate the era's privations is emphasized. This leads him to make a trip to Europe, an episode that is related briefly and elliptically. Three months after his departure he returns with goods to use and sell. His journey is described in terms which contrast a Russia crippled by hardship with a carefree Europe. The blizzard characteristic of Pil'njak is unabated in Razin's Russia as well. As he moves westward we see a change in climate that is social as well as meteorological: “Blizzards raged, snowdrifts swept over Russia—in Germany the sky was pale, like German romanticism, and the snow had already melted, in the Tyrol you had to take off your coat, in Italy the lemon trees were in flower” (118). On returning Razin becomes disoriented, the features of Russia and Europe confused in his mind. But if his sanity has been shaken by the contrast between Russia and Europe, the experience has also heightened his perception. His apprehension of Russia's situation has been made unbearably acute. Frustration drives him from the provinces to Moscow, where he encounters and eventually murders Smith. At his trial he makes it clear that his motive was not ideological but economic. Razin robs Smith for the same reason that he goes abroad: both incidents show a desperate Russia driven to plundering Europe.

But the Europe depicted by Pil'njak, for all its mildness of climate, is itself in a state of crisis. Strains of Spenglerism pervade this work. They issue from several sources: tendentious narrative, paraphrase of contemporary thinkers, and musings of assorted characters, including Mr. Smith⁶ Smith is painted as the typical British capitalist: we are told at length about his Edinburgh upbringing, his conventional and crumbling marriage, the reign of habit and comfort in his London existence. Smith comes to Russia on business and lives there in colonialist luxury. But he is not complacent: he is aware of, even obsessed with, his impending death and that of his culture. In letters and inner monologues he ruminates on the decline of civilization in Europe and its rebirth in Russia.

This theme is introduced as early as the first page, where the narrator sets the scene by declaring: “Lent of the eighth year of the World War and of the death of European culture (according to Spengler)—and the sixth Lent—of the Great Russian Revolution” (111). Time is figured in terms of both European civilization and Russian, as if they existed in different dimensions. The contrasting time frames are valorized: European time is being counted toward its demise, whereas Russia (by an implied comparison reinforced by the adjective “great”) is temporally advancing. Here and in other ways to be demonstrated, Pil'njak suggests the possibility of Russia's renascence, of the achievement of the Third Rome alluded to in the title. The image of rebirth often seems overshadowed, however, by descriptions of Russia's present misery. Europe and Russia, notwithstanding the opening comparison and references to Spengler, have an element of congruity: both are moribund. Smith's antagonist is not the superhuman, triumphant Ivan of Majakovskij's “150,000,000” (1920) but a figure who, like his victim, feels confronted by death. Razin has no vision of a brighter future. His statement to the court begins: “I request that I be shot. I am dead anyway.” (221.) Europe, in the person of Smith, is dying because its time has come; Razin's Russia is being ravaged by the after-effects of revolution. The idea that they are experiencing parallel deaths runs through “The Third Capital.”

The account of Smith's and Razin's worlds and of their relationship, fragmented though it is, points to a way of ordering other parts of the work. These include substantial excerpts, virtually unaltered (but acknowledged), from Bunin's “The Gentleman from San Francisco” (1915) and Vsevolod Ivanov's “Hollow Arabia” (1922). The incorporation of passages from other fiction (including his own) is a favorite device of Pil'njak, often noted with disfavor by critics. Tynjanov, for example, finds his extensive use of citations unprecedented, and caustically observes that there is no need to speak for oneself if someone else can do it instead (303). While at times Pil'njak abuses this practice, it functions here effectively and to a definite end: the pair of excerpts furthers the contrast between the dying West and suffering Soviet Russia which the Smith-Razin fiction introduces. The borrowed section of Bunin's story concerns the luxurious routine of shipboard life, and does not include the wealthy protagonist's death. But the story would probably be known to Pil'njak's readers, and by quoting part of it he is admitting the rest of it into his work as well. It is clear that Smith and the “gentleman” have similar fates. “Hollow Arabia” involves death by starvation and allegations of cannibalism in postrevolutionary Russia. While Bunin describes a death of decadence and excess, Ivanov (like Pil'njak in his treatment of Razin) is concerned with the state to which man can be reduced by upheaval and deprivation. These two bits of fiction, then, complement Pil'njak's skeletal plot.

The remaining sections cannot be categorized as readily. They leap from provincial towns to European capitals, from the stone streets of Tallinn to the North Pole. We see exiled officers, Paris dandies, drunken peasants. These vignettes and episodes have been described by Gofman as a “literary inventory” (10). But they need not be regarded as a series of unconnected units. If one approaches them in terms of the work's overall design, an interesting feature emerges. They can be divided into two groups: the sections set in Russia tend to resemble non-fiction, while those dealing with non-Soviet circumstances have an affinity with fiction.

This identification of “fictional” and “foreign” and “non-fictional” with “Soviet” might be described in terms of two prose trends which gained prominence during the twenties. One is “factography” (literatura fakta)—writing which eschewed the literary and claimed a commitment to “naked material.” The other, represented in the extreme by then-popular translated novels, is a polar tendency relying on dynamic plots and exotica. Pil'njak employs both kinds of prose, mixing the exotic and ornamental with the documentary, in many of his works. In “The Third Capital,” the contrast between Soviet and foreign existence is manifested in a contrast between these two types of narrative.

The terms “Soviet” and “foreign” are used because this dichotomy is more precisely one of Soviet Russia and the rest of the world than of Russia and Europe. There are three principal locales: Western Europe, the Baltic (largely Tallinn), and Russia. The events in Tallinn primarily involve Russian émigrés, and thus might be placed on the “Russian” side of an opposition. But Russia in “The Third Capital” is specifically Soviet, and the Estonian capital is clearly foreign ground (as it had been since 1918). The city is discussed in terms which emphasize its Western roots. The Baltic countries have escaped “soviets, devastation, and famine … because they do not have the Russian national soul, the Russian-sectarian hypnosis” (163–64). It becomes apparent on looking beyond the story of Smith and Razin that “The Third Capital” is shaped not only by an opposition between Russia and Europe, but also by a distinction between the new world of Soviet Russia and everywhere else. For this reason, and because of the kind of writing set there, the Baltic belongs with the rest of Europe in the non-Soviet category.

In what way are these non-Soviet sections more “fictional” than the Soviet? They include the stories of Smith's brother Edgar on a doomed polar expedition; of Smith's wife, who after an affair with Edgar has gone to Paris; of double agents, depravity, and romance in Tallinn. Scenes of exploration, mystery, adultery, and adventure are played out by characters who are individualized and intermittently reappear. These episodes are partially-executed plots representing a variety of fictional modes. There are echoes of Jules Verne, Turgenev, and Pil'njak's more immediate literary ancestor Belyj.⁷ The fragments situated in Russia are less extended, and resemble journalistic vignettes or anecdotes rather than fictional episodes. A Soviet document opens the povest'—a notice announcing the establishment of a bathhouse in a former seminary. The incidents recounted by Pil'njak range from the amusing to the grotesque. He tells of a switchman who walks the tracks with the Gospels in his bag and the ABC of Communism open in his hand; a swindler who sells a peasant an electric lamp, claiming that he need simply nail the plug to a wall; a yardkeeper who during the worst part of the famine eats his wife and then goes mad. The characters may be named, but they are nevertheless without identity. Each is an isolated case, described simply and then dismissed.

Some differences between the work's non-Soviet/fiction and Soviet/non-fiction elements might be illustrated by comparing two sections: one set among Russian émigrés, the other in Razin's hungry town. The former depicts a young girl named Liza Kalitina, namesake of the heroine of A Nest of Gentlefolk: Pil'njak is making an explicit gesture toward the nineteenth-century novel. Liza, whose family has resettled in Tallinn, leads a comfortable, carefree life. Her naiveté and vibrancy are conveyed repeatedly in an extended section that shows her running through snow-covered pines to the sea, being kissed for the first time, at home with her family. Her portrait is created through ornamental description, rhythmic narrative, and dialogue. The following excerpt, replete with imagery, is indicative of Pil'njak's style: “…—and you know that this is peace, that the earth has taken your heart in its hands … that the world, the earth, man, blood, chastity (chastity, like the bitterness of birch in June)—are one and the same: purity, a young girl, Liza Kalitina.” (186.)

There is a second Liza in the povest', a schoolgirl whose story is both a substantive and stylistic contrast. This Liza is described briefly and colloquially. She is preoccupied not with love, but with degradation, which comes at the hands of a middle-aged neighbor. As the narrator relates: “… well, so this Kalistratyč, without even turning out his wife, took himself Liza for a mistress, for bread, for a pound and a half, maybe. …” The wife takes her grievance to the street, where “little boys … threw stones at all three of them” (212). Liza Kalitina, the epitome of innocence, has in the second Liza an antithesis—a Soviet counterpart who prostitutes herself to stave off starvation. The episode involving Liza Kalitina might be the beginning of a novel: we have the introduction of the heroine, the domestic background, the entrance of the lover. The second Liza is not a potential fictional heroine but a faceless type, the subject of an anecdote: “. … She was fifteen, going on sixteen, she was like all schoolgirls.” Her circumstances are presented without commentary and never referred to again. Both Lizas are Russian, but they are foreign to each other, literally and figuratively, Kalitina, a relic of an earlier era, has nothing in common with contemporary Russian life.

Soviet Russia is contrasted to prerevolutionary Russia as well as to the émigré West. The qualities of fiction associated with the West are also evident in Pil'njak's evocation of the past. He embodies the old era in a manor house on a December night, where a woman prepares for a rendezvous: “… she pours the cognac with trembling, cold hands, cold, like the frost, and burning, like cognac … and her lips are cold, trembling, grown hard in the dry silence, in the frost.” (113–14.) This setting reappears much later in one of Pil'njak's scenes of post-revolutionary life. The lyricism and sensuality of the earlier passage are gone, replaced by a direct recounting of fact. Absent, too, are the descriptive detail and the sense of fictionalized experience: “In that manor house, the health authorities established a recreation center. In honor of the center's opening a ball and supper was held. Everything was beautifully served. And at the ball, during supper—there were stolen from the table plates, spoons, and forks, and a few chairs were even taken from the dance hall. …” (204.)

The Western characters, like the non-Soviet Russians, seem more fictionalized than documented. Mrs. Smith, starting a day of elegant Parisian indolence, “in the cool shade, walks from one room to another:—lace, silk, peignoir—morning” (188). A more dramatic piece of fiction describes her brother-in-law's morning in the Arctic, on the day when his troubles begin: “But at six o'clock Captain Smith was awakened by a jolt. So—ice again. … All around drifted bands of fog, blue, like Danish porcelain. …” (167.) Pil'njak's treatment of the West includes some reportage as well; the use of journalistic narrative is not wholly limited to Soviet settings. However, these sections are consistent with the work's basic Russia-West opposition. Some passages—descriptions of London life, for example—provide background on Smith, and thus are linked to the Razin-Smith plot.⁸ They serve also to develop the picture of European civilization in crisis. “Mr. Smith knew,” Pil'njak writes, “… that all the English, all England was coming to a standstill, growing sclerotic …” (177). Characterizations of European life as a whole are no less tendentious. The nightclubs and morgues of Europe become metaphors for its condition. They have in common an agglomeration of unclothed bodies, no longer human. A naked woman dances expressionless to the “naked rhythm of violins,” while in the morgues of “Rome—London—Vienna—Paris—Berlin” there lies “a young woman, her left breast cut off, a piece of breast—meat—lies next to her on the zinc” (160). The sensuality associated with the foreign—with Liza Kalitina, Smith's wife, bygone Russian winter nights—is shown here in a grotesque, perverted form.

The characterization of Western behavior as destructive and deviant is furthered in a passage describing the guillotining of one “Landrju,” attended by thousands of Parisians. One finds on investigation that a man named Henri Landru was executed in 1922 for the murders of ten women and a boy. He had promised to marry each of the women, taken them to his home, and then strangled them and burned the bodies. Pil'njak does not refer to Landru's crime or trial, which had been widely publicized and might have been known to his contemporary readers. Neither does he propose a connection with Russian life. A comparison is prompted, however, by the numerous references to cannibalism in Russia. This phenomenon appears in a variety of contexts. In one effective scene a Soviet peasant soldier, welcoming a group of immigrant Russians returning to their homeland from America, bluntly informs them that “in the Volga region people are eating each other.” He continues: “B-but,—comrades,—that doesn't scare us, because we are in power, we are our own masters” (132). The cannibalism existing in Russia is treated as a fact of life—a terrible but instinctive act. Landru's preying on humans is criminal and perverse. It stems from a diseased imagination (the realm of fiction), rather than from the reality of starvation. Soviet life in this work is generally ruled by exigency, and a contrast between superfluity and necessity is one feature of the non-Soviet/Soviet dichotomy. (The Bunin and Ivanov excerpts are a case in point.) The distinction between fiction and fact which obtains in much of the work is not only stylistic; it involves also a distinction between a West largely oblivious of its impending crisis, and a Russia where the impact of crisis is being universally experienced.

The meanings of fact and fiction are amplified in several sections which collectively form the tale's conclusion. Razin, who has taken a position as Smith's interpreter, accompanies him to a performance held by “the Indian yogi Ben-Said.” Pil'njak describes the traditional performances of such magicians, who for centuries had traveled across Russia mystifying audiences with feats like fire-swallowing and walking on nails. This one is of a different breed. He appears in a frock coat and patent leather shoes, surrounded by the customary props. His intentions, however, are unexpected. He begins by informing the audience:

He, Ben-Said, was no Ben-Said and no Hindu,—but a peasant from the province of Samara, Pugačev district, a laboring son of the republic who had never been in India, that he would now demonstrate the methods of Indian magic and would prove that they had nothing whatever to do with any mysterious power but were only tricks, sleight of hand, training and endurance,—that previously magic had been used by the powerful of the earth to keep the masses enslaved in ignorance.

(215)

The new era's Ben-Said has no use for fictions: he devotes himself to revealing the reality they mask. It is through the thoughts of Mr. Smith that Pil'njak suggests the importance of this idea. Later that evening he is suddenly struck by the sensation that this yogi, who refuses to fictionalize himself and who exposes falsehood, is “the key to understanding Russia and the Russian Revolution” (217).

The crucial nature of this incident is not made explicit. But the performer's condition is consistent with Pil'njak's portrayal of postrevolutionary existence. The lives of those in Russia have been stripped of illusion—both from their perspective and from that of the reader, who views them through the author's straightforward prose. Some have come to recognize the impossibility of evading reality; some, like Ben-Said, have purposefully chosen not to obscure it. The harshness of this reality has brought others, like Razin and the cannibal yardkeeper, to madness: unable to physically mitigate hardship, they have mentally escaped it altogether. The story of Ben-Said is a kind of key to Pil'njak's Russia because it illustrates the absence of fictions that marks the characters' experience and the author's style.

The last section set in Russia dramatizes the qualities of starkness and extremity associated with Russia throughout. Pil'njak, now speaking in the first person, brings us on a spring day to an old church where valuables are being gathered in order to supply food for the hungry. Among the ornaments dismantled is the silver mounting on an icon of the Virgin and Child. The mounting, tarnished and wax-encrusted, covers much of the painting. When it is removed the Virgin comes alive in a new image: “The Virgin seemed bared, brought closer, she had come, had drawn near, leaned down, … protecting all those mourning and being born, she was the key to all Russian revolutions and revolts” (225). This incident, like Ben-Said's performance, involves a turning from fiction to reality. Like the magician, the Virgin of the new era is unadorned, divested of mystery. But for Pil'njak she is an object of worship in this state as well: she represents the promise of a healed, renewed Russia. An earlier passage describes Russia as “this fearful, incredible country, where they have cannibalism and a new religion” (172). A major element of this “new religion” is faith in the future. Russia, now sunk in crisis, can seek comfort by looking ahead. Belief in the future is the one “fiction,” the one transcendent, remaining to the Soviet. It is the one “fiction” which Pil'njak's West, approaching its final crisis, cannot live out.

The barrenness of the West's future is illustrated in the following and final section of the work. It returns to the polar expedition of Edgar Smith, now hopelessly ice-bound. Captain Smith, alone with the remains of his crew, continues to follow the same kind of strict daily routine which has earlier been attributed to English life. Here the rigidity and unnaturalness of that life are brought to their extreme. It is evident from Pil'njak's other works involving polar exploration that he is fascinated by the idea of a world cut off from civilization, beyond national boundaries. In his 1925 story “Zavloč'e,” for instance, polar regions are identified with neither Russia nor Europe: the term “Europe” designates the inhabited world, as opposed to the Arctic. In “The Third Capital,” however, the polar region is not a realm apart, but an extension of the West. The parallelisms which pervade this work also leave their mark on its concluding pages. The two final scenes—the transfigured Russian Virgin in springtime and the impassive Briton trapped forever in a field of ice—must be regarded as the final players in the Russia-West drama.

These images of spring and winter are precisely those which mark the courses of world cultures in The Decline of the West. The West, here and in Pil'njak, is arriving at the end of its life cycle, marooned in eternal winter. Spengler describes the final stage of a culture as a freezing of forms, “the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion … petrifying world city following mother earth. …”⁹ One recognizes the role of these opposing terms in “The Third Capital.” Russia, though it has undergone a kind of death, is not afflicted with the West's paralysis. In a passage prefacing the icon scene, Russia is described as having other life cycles to come; the narrator affirms: “I know: all living things, like the earth in springtime, in dying, are renewed again and again” (224).

What makes this renewal possible, in Pil'njak's view, is not only the force of history but also the force of faith. In Spengler's theory, rising nations are “possessed of the stuff of which cultures are made: creative spontaneity and religious devotion.”¹⁰ The preceding analysis has identified postrevolutionary Russia with quite different qualities, stressing its realistic apprehension of reality. But the povest' also reveals another aspect of the Russian mentality, one which places it in Spenglerian terms as a culture in the ascendant. Ben-Said's behavior is interpreted as illustrative of Russia's “factual” perspective. This idea can be inferred from Pil'njak's treatment of Russia throughout the work; the opposite conclusion, however, is explicitly suggested. Smith's thoughts after the performance include the insight that the “yogi” is important precisely because he is exceptional—because “he was the only one in Russia who was not lying” (219). “I have thought a great deal about the will to see,” Smith reflects, “and have found it of the same order as the will to wish: there turns out to be another will—the will not to see, when the will to wish conflicts with the will to see. Russia lives by the will to wish and the will not to see; this lie I consider a deeply positive phenomenon, unique in the world.” (219.) Russian life, in a view which seems attributable also to the author, has become permeated by lies in order to make living possible. Faith sustains Russia—but a faith that exacts a price. What characterizes the mass of Russians is perhaps not fact but a kind of fiction: the necessary fiction of the visionary. Fact predominates in the Soviet sections, in the sense that Pil'njak documents Russia's crisis and shows Russians facing its realities. But fiction enters also, in the form of a need to look beyond facts, to transcend them. Russia has the “religious devotion,” the “will to wish and the will not to see,” that enables it to look with hope toward the future.

The expressions of optimism conveyed in “The Third Capital” were evidently not forceful enough to convince some readers of Pil'njak's orientation. Vjačeslav Polonskij, discussing the work in Novyj mir in 1927, finds it impossible to define its position vis-à-vis Russia and Europe. Pil'njak seems antagonistic towards Europe, he writes, but could he be hopeful about Russia while portraying it so negatively? (179.) Aleksandr Voronskij also objects to Pil'njak's overly bleak image of Russia and to his ambiguity; he advises that a writer who deals with political issues is obliged to put his thoughts in order.¹¹ Neither critic mentions a twice-repeated passage near the end in which Pil'njak addresses the matters of intention and interpretation. He disavows any claim to accuracy by confessing that he has consciously engaged in distortion, that “of course: all this is untrue, unhistorical, all this is only a key which unlocks the romantic in history” (225). The drama of Soviet and non-Soviet, he implies, is more closely allied with the genre of romance than with that of history. The author's admission indicates that his conception of “The Third Capital” involves a tension between the objectively valid and the literary—a tension which, as has been shown, pervades the work. The impulses of non-fiction and fiction, contrasted throughout in Pil'njak's depiction of Soviet Russia and the West, are fittingly contraposed in his characterization of the narrative.

A conflict between the roles of chronicler and poet is acknowledged by Pil'njak in other works as well. Introducing his American travels in O'Kej, he waxes lyrical about the world's division into East and West. He then interrupts in the third person to restrain himself, asserting his reportorial persona: “—and the writer was thinking all this untruthfully, because to think thus is romanticism [romantika], characteristic of writers, but wholly unnecessary.”¹² Unnecessary, perhaps, in a work that purports to be documentary. But this kind of vision is necessary to Pil'njak in “The Third Capital” as a means of countering the reporter's evidence. Pil'njak can depict Russia's future positively because he enlists the aid of romantika, presenting the mixture of realism and utopianism in the Russian mind.

The literary treatment of Russia and the West took varied forms in the 1920s, as in other periods. Erenburg's works on this theme include ventures into the picaresque (Julio Jurenito, 1922) and into melodrama (The Love of Jeanne Ney, 1924). Majakovskij used reportage and verse. Several works contemporary with “The Third Capital” which contrapose Russian and Western also resemble it in being stylistically innovative. šklovskij is explicit about the centrality of an East-West opposition in Zoo (1923), and about its attempt to go beyond the novel. His manipulation of narrative, like Pil'njak's, is interrelated with an expression of contrast between two mentalities. A quite different experiment in prose, Fedin's Cities and Years (1924), has many features of conventional fiction; in its use of plot and character it resembles an adventure novel. Fedin's reordering of chronology, however, is a challenge to the historical muse: it points to the inadequacy of the linear and the value of creative distortion. These works, and “The Third Capital,” form a part of the continuing assessment of Russia's relationship to the West. Pil'njak's povest' is significant in the context of his oeuvre and era, and in the history of this strain of the Russian literary tradition.

Notes

1. Boris Pil'njak, Golyj god (1922; rpt. Chicago: Bradda, 1966), 101. This is said by Gleb Ordynin in his conversation with the priest.

2. Gary L. Browning develops this conclusion in “Civilization and Nature in Boris Pil'njak's Machines and Wolves,” SEEJ, 20 (1976), 155–66.

3. These words are quoted by N. A. Kovarskij, “Svidetel'skoe pokazanie,” Boris Pil'njak. Stat'i i materialy (L.: Academia, 1928), 88. Kovarskij gives no source, and I have been unable to locate it.

4. Both the title and generic designation of the work warrant comment. The former (which was later changed to “Mat'-mačexa”) is not referred to in the text. It is presumably an allusion to the Third Rome. D. S. Mirsky—who mentions the work in his introduction to the Pil'njak anthology Tales of the Wilderness (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1924), xxiii—translates the original title as “The Third Metropolis.” Gleb Struve, Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin 1917–1953 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 40, does the same. Its first appearance was in the form of an excerpt in Rossija, No. 2 (1922), 1–5, under the title “Dva mira (iz povesti ‘Tret'ja stolica’).” It was first issued in full, as “Tret'ja Stolica,” in the anthology Krug, book 1 (1923), 199–295. The early editions with this title are in the collection Nikola-na-Posad'jax (rasskazy), book 3 (M.-SPb.: Krug, 1923), 105–227, and in a separate volume entitled Tret'ja Stolica (Berlin: Slovo, 1924). (Capitalization in the title is inconsistent.) The first publication as “Mat'-mačexa” is in Pil'njak's Povesti, II (Nikola-na-Posad'jax: by the authr, 1924), 39–159. In Sobranie sočinenij (M.-L.: Gosizdat, 1929), IV, 109–227, where it appears as “Mat'-mačexa,” it is prefaced by the note: “The povest' first appeared under the title ‘Tret'ja stolica.’” It is not apparent why Pil'njak adopted this new title. It can be translated literally as “Mother-Stepmother,” but also recalls the flowering plant Mat'-i-mačexa (coltsfoot). In his dedication (to Remizov) Pil'njak refers to the work as a povest'. Viktor Gofman, “Mesto Pil'njaka,” Boris Pil'njak. Stat'i i materialy, 10, expressing the widespread view that clear distinctions among genres are absent in Pil'njak, finds no reason why The Naked Year should be termed a novel while “The Third Capital” (which is approximately the same length) is not. Contemporary critics have devoted some attention to the work, but in more recent criticism it receives brief mention, if any. Early articles with useful material include: Aleksandr Voronskij, “Literaturnye otkliki,” Krasnaja nov', 12 (1923), 333–43; V. Pereverzev, “Na frontax tekuščej belletristiki,” Pečat' i revoljucija, No. 4 (1923), 127–33; B. M. Zubakin, “Boris Pil'njak,” Rossija, No. 5 (1923), 29–30; Jurij Tynjanov, “Literaturnoe segodnja,” Russkij sovremennik, No. 1 (1924), 291–306; Viktor šklovskij, “O Pil'njake,” Lef, No. 3 (7) (1925), 126–36; Vjačeslav Polonskij, “šaxmaty bez korolja (O Pil'njake),” Novyj mir, No. 10 (1927), 170–93.

5. Page references are to the following edition of “The Third Capital”: Boris Pil'njak, Sobranie sočinenij (M.-L: Gosizdat, 1929), IV, 109–227. The title in this edition is “Mat'-mačexa.” Pil'njak uses a figure named “Mr. Smith” in other works as well to play the role of foreigner. Richard Smith appears in “The Big Heart” (1926), which involves an opposition between European and Mongol culture. Mr. Smith and Mr. Wright serve as caricatures of the Western disdain for the East. Kovarskij is referring to Mr. Smith in “The Third Capital” when he suggests that in the Japanese reportage Pil'njak himself “plays the role of Mr. Smith in the Soviet Union” (93).

6. The writings referred to are those of the eminent sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. A long passage on the devastating effect of the World War on Europe (162–64) is represented as an address by Sorokin. The source of this passage (which may not be textual) is not clear. Some of the ideas and phrases appear to be borrowed from Sorokin, Sovremennoe sostojanie Rossii (Prague, 1922), 12–14, although Sorokin's subject here is the impact of the Revolution on Russian society. In his later writings Sorokin devotes much attention to the crisis of the West.

7. šklovskij, 127, notes in Edgar Smith a resemblance to the hero of Verne's The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.

8. Parts of the London descriptions are similar to those used in Pil'njak's story “The Old Cheese” (1923), which takes place both in London and Soviet Russia. The story was included in a small collection entitled English Stories (M.-L.: Krug, 1924), which also contained “Speranza” and “Excerpts from ‘A Tale in Letters, Which is Boring to Finish.’” The latter story, too, has sections on London closely resembling those in “The Third Capital.” Insight into Pil'njak's treatment of London can be gained from the writing of Nikolaj Nikitin, who accompanied him on his 1923 European trip. Nikitin described their eperiencesin a travelogue called Now in the West (Sejčas na Zapade) (M.-L.: Petrograd, 1924). This collection of impressions and letters is dedicated to “my comrade B. Pil'njak.” It contains several references to Pil'njak which bear on “The Third Capital” and support the idea that his “reportage” is highly subjective. On hearing Pil'njak's letters to his wife Nikitin writes: “He described—in a beautiful, literary, stylized way—how we spent yesterday.” Commenting on his companion's somewhat fanciful account of the English at leisure, Nikitin warns: “If he writes like that—don't you believe it. Words … (as Hamlet would say).” (26.)

9. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), I, 31.

10. The formulation is that of Erich Heller, “Oswald Spengler and the Predicament of the Historical Imagination,” The Disinherited Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957), 183.

11. “Literaturnye otkliki,” 338. Voronskij objects not only to the distorted pictures of Europe and of Russia but to the relation which obtains between them in the work. He cites one instance in which a character, which no apparent rebuttal from the author, describes Europe as being subordinate to and dependent on a newly dominant Soviet state. A mužik who lectures immigrants at the border credits Russia with having given Europe the Third International, thus holding the key to Europe's future. Voronskij protests the inaccuracy of this formulation, stressing the historically integral relationship between Russia and the West.

12. Boris Pil'njak, O'kej. Amerikanskij roman (M.: Federacija, 1933), 16.