City of Executioners

Of course, these two traditions often intersect and overlap; a city can undergo a secondary semiotization and become a city-myth—such a process, as is well known, is experienced by the Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky, and more broadly by the image of Petersburg in Russian literature of the late 18th to 20th centuries. For the 20th century, the processes of contamination and combining are even more natural. For example, Yu. Buyda starts from the realistically credible city of his childhood (Znamensk—Velau) and makes a powerful “jump” to the grotesque city, a symbol and an invented authorial myth (this movement is already visible in the writer’s first book of stories, “The Prussian Bride,” where features of different types of city are combined; and as a completed mythologem, the image of the “City of Executions” from the eponymous novel can be offered).

“After the period of mourning, Havana went down to the restaurant and took a place at the bar, refusing outright to meet men in the upper rooms. And when the girls asked her to demonstrate her signature act—lighting a cigar with her behind (for such a cigar, men paid native gold, ten times heavier than the cigar)—she only shook her head: no.

‘But you really did know how to do it once, didn’t you?’ Liuminii asked her one day, having gathered his courage.

Havana smiled disdainfully.

‘Sweetheart, how else would I have won at billiards against Beria, if not for my behind?’ And, more with sadness than with pride, she added: ‘I’m after all a Popova by birth, not some Zhopina.’”