The city in Russian culture

Abstract

members are anything but corrupt and degenerate). Do not be put off by words denoting hypothalamus and epithalamus on pp. 8 and 9 of Brodskii’s book and proceed to pp. 80–95 for an explanation of the huge significance of labyrinths in world history, culture and civilization and, in particular, for Solovki. Then read the chapter on one of the turning points in Russian history, perhaps as important as, and a result of, the ‘Tatar-Mongol Yoke’ – the ‘successful’ attack by Moscow on Novgorod in the fifteenth century (pp. 113–135). These and other pages implicitly raise the perennial question of whether one can understand contemporary Russia without at least some knowledge of Old Russian, Old Church Slavonic and pre-Petrine Rus’. Myths and legends may be as important as facts, and the outcome of the struggle between the ‘possessors’ and ‘non-possessors’ (pp. 131–132, 138, 170, 254, 264–267) still has relevance for today, as does the seventeenthcentury schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, which still persists. The ‘Old Believers’ had a great impact on the course of Russia’s tragic history (see, e.g. pp. 286–287, 389). How many people were held against their will on Solovki in the period between 1917 or 1923 and 1939, when it was emptied (pp. 344–345)? It is still impossible to be sure, but for some figures see pp. 304, 333, 362 and 414. Whatever the number, it was only a tiny percentage of the at least 25 million political prisoners estimated by A.N. Iakovlev to have been sentenced between 1917 and 1953 by the Soviet authorities in what turned out to be a failed experiment (p. 338). The results of this massive crime can be felt today, although most people both in Russia and elsewhere are remarkably insensitive to this outcome. Brodskii concludes that ‘Russia is ill with Solovki. This is an ailment that cannot be cured either by exorcisms or by conspiracies’ (zagovOrami, zAgovorami, p. 363). His motherland (or fatherland) has still not come to terms with or atoned for its past. Nor have the current Moscow Patriarch and Patriarchate (p. 422). Politics and religion disunite people, culture unites, writes Brodskii (p. 428). But how many cultured people are there in Russia – and in the rest of the world?