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Snow White and the Enchanted Palace: A Reading of V.I. Lenin’s Architectural Cult
This essay examines the architectural cult of Vladimir Lenin as it emerged in the Soviet Union after his death in 1924. The analysis focuses on the interrelation of two structures—the Lenin Mausoleum (in which the embalmed leader lies permanently in state) and the Palace of Soviets (the never completed skyscraper planned to be topped with a 100-meter statue of Lenin)—and their role in modeling a new form of political sovereignty. Examining the chronotopic contours of the discourse surrounding these buildings, I describe four available interpretations of Lenin’s position, suspended between natural death and symbolic afterlife. Although the different readings contradict one another, I argue that the object of the architectural discourse is their hybridization, deferring a decision about the meaning of the October Revolution’s post-Leninist phase. In a final section, I examine Andrei Platonov’s 1930 novella The Foundation Pit as an alternative hybrid model, which uses the melancholic and fetishistic tendencies of the post-revolutionary period to sustain its readers until the advent of communism.