A window on Russia: The Moscow myth in twentieth-century Russian literature and culture (Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Afanas'evich Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky)

My dissertation explores the Moscow Text and the development of the Moscow myth as a literary, philosophical, and cultural phenomenon in the 20th century within the context of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. Viewing the Moscow myth through the prism of literary as well as cultural studies I show that in the twentieth century Moscow can be considered a "window on Russia."; With Moscow undergoing a number of historical and socio-political changes in the course of its history, the Moscow myth has been reevaluated many times, in particular, during the Silver age, early Soviet literature, and Russian postmodernism. In the first part of my dissertation, I concentrate on Tsvetaeva's, Mayakovsky's, and Bulgakov's refigurations of the traditional Moscow myth as formulated in the classics of Russian literature. In a separate chapter on Bulgakov, in which I consider a variety of his texts in addition to Master and Margarita, I analyze Bulgakov's reversal of the traditional paradigm of the Moscow myth within the context of the Moscow-Petersburg dichotomy, demonstrating how Bulgakov's Moscow acquires many features associated with the Petersburg myth. I view the Moscow of Marina Tsvetaeva as the embodiment of the traditional Moscow myth and, revealing how Tsvetaeva's vision of Moscow changes, show how the Soviet Moscow departs from its traditional mythology. I examine refigurations of the traditional Moscow myth, as epitomized in Tsvetaeva's Moscow in the second part of my dissertation, devoted to the texts of Bulat Okudzhava and Nikolai Klimontovich.; My chapter on Russian postmodernism discusses the concept of the city as a philosophical reference point within the context of official ideology and addresses the literary phenomenon of Moscow within the framework of postmodernist aesthetics (as seen in texts of Dmitrii Prigov and Vladimir Sorokin), as well as in popular culture. My research on post-perestroika Moscow includes a comparative analysis of Ukrainian postmodernist Iurii Andrukhovych's controversial novel Moskoviada and Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady. Andrukhovych's appropriation of Mickiewicz's urban and Imperial criticisms of St. Petersburg for his portrayal of contemporary Moscow further confirms my thesis about the reversal of Moscow's and Petersburg's status in the Russian cultural mythology of the twentieth century.