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My approach has been to investigate Moscow as a city that can be best envisioned using an aesthetics of cinema. With this aesthetics as a theoretical focus, I consider two central myths of Moscow---as Third Rome and Big Village. A cinematic aesthetics most appropriately captures and renders Moscow in motion, a city in which temporal and spatial layers merge and coexist: we can cut from one space or time to another via montage, or we can envision multiple spaces and times in a kind of superimposed frame. Moreover, Moscow, reinstated as capital of Russia and newly created capital of the Soviet Union, coincidentally rises to world power at a time when the aesthetics of cinema was undergoing constant innovative theoretical and practical progress. Using the aesthetics of cinema to investigate both cinematic and literary works, I argue that the two myths coexist in time and space, and that, while one may enjoy ascendancy---the Third Rome in the 1920s and 1930s, the Big Village in the 1950s and 1960s---the two myths repeatedly and self-consciously invoke each other. I have not tried to make an exhaustive catalogue of references to Moscow in film and literature, but rather to investigate the cultural mechanisms that the cinematic image of Moscow inspires in certain works, from Lev Kuleshov's Mr. West and Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, to Marten Khutsiev's Il'ich's Gate and Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki.