SOURCE: “Ice and Icon, Spengler in Russia: Boris Pilniak, ‘The Third Capital’ (1923),” in Border Crossings: The West and Russian Identity in Soviet Literature, 1917–1934, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 35–47.

In the following essay, Avins considers Pilnyak's contrast of Russia and Europe in his story “The Third Capital.”

The two basic terms in the political formulas of the day, “we” and “they,” fit a variety of categories—ideological, class, national. Blok's essay “The Collapse of Humanism” shows the chameleon quality of the first person plural. The pronoun both distinguishes the Russian intelligentsia from the masses and denotes a national collective. Toward the end of his essay, Blok turns from the part to the whole. Seemingly contradicting the assurances of Russia's European nature in “The Scythians,” he lyrically describes what separates Russia from Europe. “We have no historical recollections,” he writes, “but great is the memory of the elements; our expanses...