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First published in Russian 1916
This translation, made from the 1916 edition, published in Penguin Books 1995
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2011
Translation and Notes copyright © David McDuff, 1995
Introduction copyright © Adam Thirlwell, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and author of the introduction has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-96879-7
Introduction
PETERSBURG
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER THE FIRST
CHAPTER THE SECOND
CHAPTER THE THIRD
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
EPILOGUE
Notes
PENGUIN CLASSICS
ANDREI BELY was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev: a novelist, poet and critic, he became a leading figure amongst Russian Symbolist writers. Born in Moscow in 1880 he studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy at Moscow University, simultaneously interesting himself in art and mysticism. He began to publish in 1902 while still a student, adopting his pseudonym to spare his father, an eminent professor of mathematics, the embarrassment of public association with the still scandalous Symbolists. In 1914 he joined a Rudolf Steiner anthroposophical community in Switzerland. Returning to Russia in 1916 he welcomed the Revolution, but with the increasing restrictions placed upon artistic expression he became disillusioned. After making a forlorn attempt to revive the Symbolist aesthetic through the journal Zapiski mechtateley, he emigrated again in 1921. Bely returned to Russia in 1923 and was left relatively undisturbed during his last years. His work continued to be published in small editions but was largely ignored; nevertheless the influence of his style and ideas upon other Soviet writers was considerable. On his death in 1934, Evgeny Zamyatin wrote of him: ‘Mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, fox-trot – these are some of the sharpest angles that make up the fantastic image of Andrei Bely … [he is] a writer’s writer.’
His first prose works were four short pieces which he designated ‘symphonies’. In 1909 he published a more conventional novel, The Silver Dove; other works include Kotik Letayev (1922) and a series of novels, published during the 1920s and 1930s, under the generic title Moscow. Petersburg was first published in book form in 1916 and was immediately recognized as a work of major literary importance.
DAVID MCDUFF was born in 1945 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandanavian work; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; Complete Poems of Edith Södergran; and No I’m Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. He has translated a number of twentieth-century Russian prose works for Penguin Classics. These include Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The House of the Dead, Poor Folk and Other Stories and Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories; Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories and The Sebastapol Sketches; and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He has also translated Babel’s Collected Stories for Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.
ADAM THIRLWELL was born in 1978. He has written two novels: Politics and The Escape. In 2003 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Miss Herbert, an essay on international novels, was published in 2007 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in London.
First-time readers should be aware that details of the plot are revealed in this Introduction.
The novelist Andrei Bely died of a stroke, in the Moscow of Soviet Communism, in 1934. He was fifty-four. He had been born in the same city: when it was the Moscow of Tsarist Autocracy. It was the ordinary sad story of History. But the more detailed story of his death is even sadder.
His book of memoirs, Between Two Revolutions, had just appeared, with a preface by Lev Kamenev in which all of Bely’s literary activities were termed a ‘tragi-farce’ acted out ‘on the sidelines of history’. Bely bought up all the copies of the book he could find and tore out the preface. He continued visiting the book shops until he suffered the fatal stroke.1
The sidelines of history!
Bely’s epilogue took place in 1934. But this epilogue was also Kamenev’s. It’s true that, with Stalin and Trotsky, Kamenev had once been at the centre of history – the pure Communist impresario. But then the machinations of politics had begun. In 1927 he had been expelled from the Party. He was soon readmitted, but was expelled again in 1932, and then readmitted a year later. This was the context of his terrified preface to Bely’s book. Historically, Kamenev was disappearing. In December 1934, after Bely had died, Kamenev was again expelled from the Party; this time, he was also arrested. Sentenced in 1935 to ten years in prison, he was retried in the first Moscow Show Trial in August 1936. He was found guilty and immediately shot.
This epilogue, however, is only a prologue. It is only Moscow – and so it is only the political version of reality’s multiple forms of disappearance. Whereas the more important story of Andrei Bely and his investigation into reality takes place in another Russian city, Petersburg – the city where Bely became famous. Petersburg was the pretext for his intricate novel called Petersburg – the city that Bely converted into a portable experiment with words.
But then, Petersburg was already an experiment. Before Bely, it had been invented as a problem by another great novelist: Nikolai Gogol. ‘Passing as it were through Gogol’s temperament,’ wrote Vladimir Nabokov, who loved both Gogol and Bely, ‘St Petersburg acquired a reputation of strangeness which it kept up for almost a century …’2 In the mid-1830s, Gogol published a series of Petersburg stories: ‘Nevsky Prospekt’, ‘Nose’ and ‘Portrait’, followed in 1842 by ‘Coat’. In them, he developed the idea that this city called Petersburg was an experiment in what was real. It was built between land and water, its climate was fog, the water was undrinkable: and in this fluid atmosphere it was therefore difficult to tell what was real and what was not: ‘Oh, do not trust that Nevsky Prospect! I always wrap myself more closely in my cloak when I pass along it and try not to look at the objects that meet me. Everything is a cheat, everything is a dream, everything is other than it seems!’3
Petersburg – an exercise in unreality! Pure surface!* This was the city that Andrei Bely invented once again, in his novel called Petersburg.
In this melting greyness there suddenly dimly emerged a large number of dots, looking in astonishment: lights, lights, tiny lights filled with intensity and rushed out of the darkness in pursuit of the rust-red blotches, as cascades fell from above: blue, dark violet and black.
Petersburg slipped away into the night. (p. 198)
This was how to describe the city as a landscape: an abstract metamorphosis of dots. But maybe even this was too definite; maybe it only existed as a sign – a creation of cartographers:
… two little circles that sit one inside the other with a black point in the centre; and from this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it energetically declares that it exists: from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular. (p. 4)
A city as a point, or dot: this is Andrei Bely’s initial act of revolution in his novel Petersburg. It is an invention with multiple effects. And the most important is outlined in this novel by a hallucinating terrorist, who is suddenly possessed by the knowledge that
‘Petersburg possesses not three dimensions, but four; the fourth is subject to obscurity and is not marked on maps at all, except as a dot, for a dot is the place where the plane of this existence touches against the spherical surface of the immense astral cosmos …’ (p. 409)
In other words: everything in this city is on the brink of meaning; everything in Petersburg is potentially a sign.
Even, for instance, a novelist’s name. For Andrei Bely is a pseudonym. (Andrew White!) His initial name was Boris Bugayev.
The reason for this new name was sweetly chic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bely was avant-garde. And the avant-garde he belonged to was Symbolism. The Symbolists believed in renewing literature through a renewed description of the real, and this description would encompass sound coding, synaesthesia, hieroglyphics: the whole alphabet of esoteric craziness. And so naturally a poet could not use his own name. The hipster had to hint at a purer truth. So Bely invented his oddly abstract pseudonym. To the bourgeoisie who knew his parents – like, for instance, Marina Tsvetayeva’s aunt – it only sounded uncouth:
‘… the worst of it is that he comes from a respectable family, he’s a professor’s son, Nikolai Dmitrievich Bugaev’s. Why not Boris Bugaev? But Andrei Bely? Disowning your own father? It seems they’ve done it on purpose. Are they ashamed to sign their own names? What sort of White? An angel or a madman who jumps out into the street wearing his underwear?’4
Tsvetayeva herself, however, adored Bely’s abstract example. But then, Tsvetayeva was a young poet, who loved Bely’s bravura. Bely, writes Tsvetayeva, was always trying to escape the ordinary real: he ‘was visibly on the point of take-off, of departure’ – and his ‘basic element’ was ‘flight’: ‘his native and terrible element of empty spaces’.5 His pseudonym, therefore, was just another way of turning things upside down.
Every pseudonym is subconsciously a rejection of being an heir, being a descendant, being a son. A rejection of the father. And not only a rejection of the father, but likewise of the saint under whose protection one was placed, and of the faith into which one was baptized, and of one’s own childhood, and of the mother who called him Borya and didn’t know any ‘Andrei’, a rejection of all roots, whether ecclesiastical or familial. Avant moi le déluge! I – am I.6
The self was an invention, and so was a city. Everything was fictional. This was the premise of Petersburg, at the start of the twentieth century.
Andrei Bely’s novel called Petersburg appeared in three issues of the magazine Sirin in 1913 and 1914: in 1916 it appeared as a book.
As for its plot: its plot is about a plot. Roughly, this plot takes place over a week or so in Petersburg at the beginning of October in 1905 – just before the General Strike.
A senator, called Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, has a son: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nikolai, unhappy in love, unhappy in life and a student of the philosophy of Kant, has promised to help the revolutionary cause. An obscure adherent to this revolutionary cause delivers to him a package, wrapped in a cloth printed with a design of pheasants, for safe keeping. It turns out that this package is a sardine tin, and the sardine tin conceals a bomb – which Nikolai is then ordered to throw at his own father.
This is the basic plot. It follows the ordering and possible execution of a revolutionary conspiracy. This conspiracy links the various islands of Petersburg: the dive bars and the mansions. But really, of course, these facts are not important. For Petersburg is a city whose true form is infinity: its streets are endless.
There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity. All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.
While beyond Petersburg there is – nothing. (p. 19)
And so the real investigation of this novel cannot be into the contours of a plot. The plot recedes in the infinity of the city. The real plot is the movement of Bely’s sentences. Or, in other words, the plot is simply a pretext for Bely to investigate how language might determine what we habitually, and mistakenly, think of as the real.
According to Petersburg, reality is multi-levelled: like an infinite car park. Yes, this novel is set within the perspective of the infinite; and so its style flickers between the almost-mystic and the almost-materialist – so that this is how a man is described, standing in a candlelit room:
Lippanchenko stopped in the middle of the dark room with the candle in his hand; the shadowy shoals stopped together with him; the enormous shadowy fat man, Lippanchenko’s soul, hung head down from the ceiling … (p. 531)
There is the world of sensation, true: but behind this is everything else. ‘ “… one must admit that we do not live in a visible world …”,’ a hallucination tells a character. ‘ “The tragedy of our situation is that we are, like it or not, in an invisible world …” ’ (p. 408). And so the visible world can suddenly dissolve, within a sentence, into another world entirely – ‘a world of figures, contours, shimmerings, strange physical sensations’ (p. 181).
‘Like a race of people divided into those with long heads and those with short heads,’ commented the revolutionary critic Viktor Shklovsky, in the city that was now Leningrad, writing on Bely, ‘the Symbolist movement was split down the middle by an old controversy. Essentially, it involved the following question: Was Symbolism merely an aesthetic method or was it something more?’: ‘All of his life, Bely championed the second alternative (i.e., that Symbolism is much more than just art).’7
But I’m not quite sure that Shklovsky is accurate. Because it’s true that in his frenetic and haphazard career Bely took up with the Symbolists, and then with the spiritualists, and even the anthroposophists. He was into Kant, and Schopenhauer, and Rudolf Steiner. But this list is only a list of crazes. It indicates a roving interest in flight, in emigration from the ordinary categories: not a sustained mystical vision. The philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, who was a genuine mystic, was one of Bely’s mentors. And Berdyayev had his doubts about the thoroughness of Bely’s thinking. ‘Bely knew very little,’ wrote Berdyayev, ‘and what he knew was confused and incoherent.’8
Rather than the detail of the temporary visible world, Bely preferred its more permanent abstractions: the Cube, the Sphere and the Swarm. With these categories, he described the fluid transitions of reality. But there’s no need to be a mystic to believe that reality is fluid. Even the most empirical of philosophers has been unable to prove that an objective world exists. Our knowledge of reality is never direct. There is an idealism hidden in every realism. And this fluidity of the material world is what Bely loved exploring.*
If a sardine tin can also be a bomb, for instance, then all objects are revealed as potentially ambiguous. Their solidity evaporates: ‘ “they’re what they are – and yet different …” ’ This is one effect in Petersburg of the panic of a revolutionary conspiracy. Another conspirator tries to offer a rational explanation: this slippage in reality is only a ‘pseudo-hallucination’: ‘ “a kind of symbolic sensation that does not correspond to the stimulus of a sensation” ’ (pp. 359, 360).
And I think: but this is really a description of language! That is the coded subject, after all, of Bely’s novel. Language is what creates a symbolic sensation that doesn’t correspond to an actual sensation. Language is what constitutes the disturbing fragility of the real.
In an essay of 1909 called ‘The Magic of Words’, Bely wrote that the ‘original victory of consciousness lies in the creation of sound symbols. For in sound there is recreated a new world within whose boundaries I feel myself to be the creator of reality.’9 The new reality of language is Bely’s constant subject. For he was expert at dissolving the binary oppositions of ordinary philosophy. Everyone knows, say, that a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified: an outer form and an inner content. Only Bely would think that in constructing a sign he might ‘surmount two worlds’ – the inner and the outer. ‘Neither of these worlds is real. But the THIRD world exists.’10
This extra world of the sign is what is investigated in Petersburg – and I mean investigation. This novel is a system of parallel investigations into the minute moments where words materialize as a version of reality.
In Paris, twenty years earlier, in his text called ‘Crise de vers’, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé had outlined the inverted reality that language could produce:
I say: a flower! and, beyond the oblivion to which my voice consigns any outline, being something other than the known calyxes, musically rises an idea itself and sweet, the one absent from every bouquet.11
And Bely knew about this philosophy of the poetic word. But a novel offered more complicated demonstrations. And so in Petersburg he closed the first chapter of Petersburg with a small essay in literary theory. So far, the reader only knows that there is a man called Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and that in this city he is perturbed by a mysterious stranger – one of the novel’s revolutionaries. At the moment the stranger is only a ‘shadow’: he exists only in the Senator’s consciousness. But, adds Bely: ‘Apollon Apollonovich’s consciousness is a shadowy consciousness, because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral existence and is a product of the author’s fantasy: a superfluous, idle, cerebral play’ (p. 67). He is just a character. And with this moment of metafiction, Bely pauses. If he is only the inventor of illusions, then the novelist might as well abandon his novel. But, writes Bely, just because they are illusions doesn’t mean the characters aren’t real. There Ableukhov is: and there we are – reading.
Once his brain has come into play with the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really does exist: he will not disappear from the Petersburg prospects while a senator with such thoughts exists, because thought, too, exists.
And so let our stranger be a real live stranger! And let my stranger’s two shadows be real live shadows!
Those dark shadows will follow, they will follow on the stranger’s heels, in the same way as the stranger himself will directly follow the senator; the aged senator will pursue you, he will pursue you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forth you will never forget him! (pp. 67–8)
You only need to name something, and it is real: even if it is imaginary. It exists, now, in the consciousness of the reader. The real is produced by and produces writing. This is Bely’s artistic premise. Just as from the abstract dot of Petersburg, wrote Bely, rushes the government circular, so the real dissolves into writing – even when you sharpen your pencil: ‘the acutely sharpened little pencil fell on the paper with flocks of question marks’ (p. 483).
This infiltration and contamination of signifiers and signifieds represents the mobile process of Bely’s novel. So that a character’s childhood memory of a fever where a bouncing elastic ball became a man called Pépp Péppovich Pépp, with its bouncing consonants, drifts in a new delirium to become associated with a bomb: so that by the end of the novel the bomb has appropriated this nonsense name as its own, as if it is a character itself. Or a nonsense word enfranshish, which haunts a revolutionary in his nightmares, suddenly inverts itself to become the name of a hallucinated character: ‘ “Shishnarfne, Shish-nar-fne …” ’ (p. 410).
The history of the world as a history of phonetics: that is the wild aim of Bely’s absolute novel.
Writing in Petrograd, in 1923, Bely’s friend Ivanov-Razumnik recounted a moment of conversational acrobatics from Bely:
‘I, for one,’ says Bely, ‘know that Petersburg stems from l-k-l-pp-pp-ll, where k embodies the sense of stuffiness and suffocation emanating from the pp-pp sounds – the oppressiveness of the walls of Ableukhov’s “yellow house” – and ll reflects the “lacquers”, “lustre” and “brilliance” contained within the pp-pp – the walls or the casing of the “bomb” (Pépp Péppovich Pépp). Pl is the embodiment of this shining prison – Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and k in the glitter of p with l is Nikolai Apollonovich, the Senator’s son, who is suffocating in it.’12
The phonic and metrical line of the whole novel, added Ivanov-Razumnik, was drawn in the names of the leading characters.
To invent a world, it turned out, you don’t even need a word: phonemes will do. But this wasn’t quite Bely’s invention. Once again, this is also an effect first discovered in Gogol’s Petersburg stories.
It was another revolutionary critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1919 wrote an essay, ‘How Gogol’s “Overcoat” is Made’, where he noticed that the repeated ak sound in the name of that story’s protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich Bashmachkin, was also repeated in his constant use and overuse of minute Russian words: like tak and kak. The real and the linguistic began to merge, so that Gogol’s text was ‘composed of animated locutions and verbalized emotions’. Gogol’s ak phoneme, a minute melodic unit, was just another aspect of the story’s emphasis on the overlooked, the minor, the forgotten.
But Bely’s theory of phonemes was odder. In his prose, the Gogolian method was shadowed by a complicated, esoteric theory – and it is visible in his reported conversation with Ivanov-Razumnik. The sound of a signifier, thought Bely, has its own meaning separate from the ordinary signified.
In 1922, when Bely was living briefly in Berlin, he published a poem called Glossolalia, subtitled A Poem on Sound. In it, he offered a detailed theory of what phonemes mean: k is suffocation, death and murder; sh and r are the sensations of the etheric body. Twelve years later, when Bely had returned to the Soviet Union, in his final book, Gogol’s Craftsmanship, he revised this theory. In the Soviet Union, the meanings were more prosaically revolutionary: he emphasized pl, bl and kl – as all sounds of bursting pressure. While sh represents the expansion of gases, and r represents explosion.13
In Petersburg, Bely wanted to saturate prose with repeated sounds: even the phonemes would be part of the pattern’s meaning. Bely had once rearranged the hierarchy of Russian vowel sounds: putting u at the bottom of the series and i at the top.* And as he began his novel called Petersburg, Bely would later write, he suddenly heard ‘what seemed like an “u” sound; this sound permeates the whole length and breadth of the novel …’14 The u sound is a sad lament throughout his revolutionary, anxious novel. It is there implicitly: in the constant choice of words with the stress on u; or the exploitation of the fact that Russian nouns and adjectives in the accusative case include that u sound, necessarily. But he also states it, explicitly – in his descriptions of Petersburg at night: ‘have you ever gone out at night, penetrated into the god-forsaken suburban vacant lots, in order to listen to the nagging, angry note on “oo”? Oooooo-ooo: thus did space resound …’ (p. 97). The u sound is the sound of impending revolution: of catastrophe. It is a concealed prophecy.
And of course: this theory that a phoneme is meaningful, Bely’s habit, as Shklovsky put it, ‘of using every word as a springboard for the infinite …’15 – this habit is craziness.
I am not the first person to notice this.
In Petersburg, between 1914 and 1916, when Bely was writing Petersburg, a group of linguists and literary critics, including Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and Roman Jakobson, founded the avant-garde group Opojaz – a jazzy Russian acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. This was their official name, but their real name – the name they became known by in the various battles of the avant-garde – was the Formalists. In Petersburg, of course, at that time, the ruling avant-garde was Bely and the theory of Symbolism. And so, remembered Eikhenbaum in a retrospective essay in 1927 called ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, the first argument they picked in the formation of their avant-garde was with the Symbolists: ‘in order to wrest poetics from their hands …’16
The Symbolists still believed that words were agents of esoteric inquiry. This was why they so adored their sound-effects, their phonemes. Whereas the ‘basic motto uniting the original group of Formalists was the emancipation of the poetic word from philosophical and religious biases to which the Symbolists had increasingly fallen prey …’17 Their allies in this fight were the Futurist poets, who included Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And what they loved were the Futurists’ exuberant experiments with nonsense: which they called, in their mania for definitions, transrational language: or, zaum. With their poems in invented languages, even the possible language of birds, the Futurists in their cabaret performances discovered the autonomy of a word when used in poetry. Or, as Khlebnikov put it, in his essay ‘About Contemporary Poetry’: ‘the principle of sound lives a self-spun life, while the portion of reason named by the word remains in shadow …’18
This self-spun life of sound – so gorgeous! – meant that language in poetry was pure event: a linguistic sign was a delirious airborne shimmer. And in the buoyancy of Futurist poetry the Formalist critics found a proof that language in literature was not a form of access to any higher reality. In this ‘trend toward a “transrational language” (zaumnyj jazyk)’, wrote Eikhenbaum, it was possible to define the poetic sign: not as a route to the mysteries, but a total playfulness: ‘the utmost baring of autonomous value’.19 Or, as Roman Jakobson put it many years later, in 1933, in his essay ‘What is Poetry?’ – poetry was when ‘the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named …’20
Bely’s orchestrations of sound, like his other formal tricks, were always subordinate to the work’s content. The meaning of words had billowed out acoustically with the phonemes. The Symbolists, argued Shklovsky and his friends, had thought that form and content in literature were inextricably linked. Whereas the truth was that a novel or a poem was a rickety machine: there was nothing special about its linguistic elements: the interest was in the outlandish ways these elements were combined. A poem, or a novel, was just a system. And so, wrote Eikhenbaum, in departing from the Symbolist view, ‘the Formalists simultaneously freed themselves from the traditional correlation of “form-content” and from the conception of form as an outer cover or as a vessel into which a liquid (the content) is poured’.21
The problem with the ordinary ways in which novels had been read was that they had always been viewed as a poem: and a poem, according to Bely’s theory, was an expanded sign, whose form and content minutely overlapped. Whereas, argued the Formalists, a novel is too long for this kind of hopeful analysis. It absolutely disproves the ordinary ideas of form and content. A novel is a system that is constantly patching itself up.
And yet the strange thing, I want to add, the lovely thing is that Bely’s novel called Petersburg was nevertheless – against all Bely’s obvious intent – one of the most intricate places where this new way of reading could be proved.
Writing in Leningrad, as he remembered the minutiae of that city’s avant-gardes, Eikhenbaum went on to describe how the sidestep of the ordinary terms like form and content had led to new ways of analysing the machinations of novels: especially in ‘the distinction between the elements of a work’s construction and the elements comprising the material it uses (the story stuff, the choice of motifs, of protagonists, of themes, etc.)’. A novel was really a series of structural devices, ‘subordinating everything else as motivation’. But no novel fully integrated these devices: the fit was never absolute. This is why, according to Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky’s emblematic novels were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Both novels were zanily broken-down: there was no true fit between these novels’ devices and their motivation. In Quixote, this was not deliberate: it was just the result of Cervantes’s delighted mania for interpolating more and more material. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne ‘deliberately tears away motivation and bares its construction’.22 But the effect was the same: a novel was a rickety construction.
And it was with this idea in mind that Shklovsky, in his own book Theory of Prose, went on to consider the prose of Andrei Bely’s novels.
Bely, wrote Shklovsky, was a mystic. He believed in the multi-level reality. (And of course, I am not so sure of this: I’m not sure that Shklovsky was quite accurate about Bely’s intuitions about this abstraction called reality.) But in fact this didn’t mean that his vision and his novels formed a perfect whole. Because, wrote Shklovsky, ‘the particular elements constituting literary form are more likely to clash than to work in concert. The decline or decay of one device brings in its train the growth and development of another device.’23 A novel is a series of devices, true: but there is no reason why these devices will run happily in parallel. The devices invented by Bely never quite proved what he wanted them to prove.
In Shklovsky’s summary, Bely’s invention was a novel that operated on two levels. There was a rudimentary plot, and on this foundation, wrote Shklovsky,
… the author has erected metaphor leitmotivs that serve as superstructures, as high-rise buildings. These structures – let’s imagine them as buildings – are connected to each other by means of little suspension bridges. As the story moves along, it creates pretexts for the creation of new metaphorical leitmotivs which are connected, the moment they come into being, with the leitmotivs already in place.24
But this superstructure, added Shklovsky, then took over from Bely’s mysticism. The pursuit of leitmotivs and patterns distracted Bely from his esoteric aim. And so Shklovsky came to his conclusion: there was no such thing as a unified novel. And I like Shklovsky’s general conclusion: I am just not sure that he is right about why Bely’s prose is so lavishly ornamented. For the shimmer of devices, of phonemes and fictional games, in Petersburg is part of Bely’s absolute refusal of conclusions: his rickety investigation into how a rickety reality might be put together.
Words in a novel don’t function like ordinary words. A novel is a chaotic system. In this kind of system, everything is potentially meaningful. And this is deliberately exploited by Bely in his novel called Petersburg: his strange construction of phonemes and shadows. He invented a novel that was also a conspiracy – where motifs signal to each other, throughout the novel, from one part to another.
In Bely’s system, a novel, like a city, is made up of millions of minute units. Sometimes, these units blossom into motifs: sometimes, motifs dissolve into random detail.
Like, say, sardines … First, they are randomly offered by a landlord in a dive bar, and randomly refused: ‘ “No, landlord, I don’t want the sardines: they’re floating in a yellow slime” ’ (p. 279). Then it turns out that the bomb is in a sardine tin, and so sardines become a crucial unit in the plot. Yet the motif of sardines then continues, at random – in the terrorist’s bedsit: which has a ‘sink and a sardine tin that contained a scrap of Kazan soap floating in its own slime’ (p. 330). Except, this isn’t quite random: because the Russian word for soap – мыло – has the sound ы in it, a kind of English ‘ugh’, which Bely thought was symbolic of formlessness, of evil … and so the pattern continues.
The overlapping systems of Petersburg and Petersburg are a swirl of fragments, a jigsaw of surface. Information is occluded: and its genetic unit is therefore the overheard, impenetrable conversation:
‘Cra-aa-yfish … aaa … ah-ha-ha …’
‘You see, you see, you see …’
‘You’re not saying …’
‘Em-em-em …’
‘And vodka …’
‘But for goodness’ sake … But come now … But there must be something wrong …’ (p. 30)
And this is why Petersburg is a city of conspiracy. It is a melodrama of hidden details: a system that is never quite unified. Meaning might take the form of a pattern; but the pattern is a flicker: it shimmers in and out of focus. At one point, Bely interrupts himself with an abstract summary: ‘The heavy confluence of circumstances – can one thus describe the pyramid of events that had piled up during these recent days, like massif upon massif? A pyramid of massifs that shattered the soul, and precisely – a pyramid! …’ This is the form of Bely’s novel. ‘In a pyramid there is something that exceeds all the notions of man; the pyramid is a delirium of geometry …’ (pp. 448–9).
And this abstract pyramid is an accurate description of how the minutiae of his plot’s conspiracy functions. It is a miniature farce. Nikolai, this serious, sweet scholar of Kant, only found himself giving a revolutionary group a promise of help because of ‘a failure in his life; later that failure had gradually been erased’. Nikolai, the poor schmuck, was unhappy in love: and now he was over the girl: but the promise remained. It ‘continued to live in the collective consciousness of a certain rash and hasty circle, at the same time as the sense of life’s bitterness under the influence of the failure had been erased; Nikolai Apollonovich himself would undoubtedly have classed his promise among promises of a humorous nature’ (p. 92). Humorous! This is how politics is depicted in Petersburg: it is shadowy; it is uncertain; its ideology is tremulous. And of course, Bely was right. You only have to think of the sad epilogue of Bely and Kamenev. It is so difficult, finding the seriousness of history, and politics. It is so much easier to see the structure of farce.
But there is another way of interpreting invisible patterns. This could be a form of pure poetry, true – or it could be a form of revolutionary politics. But it could also be a form of the mystical. This is the final investigation of Bely’s network of details. A revolution overlaps with the mystical in the idea of conspiracy – a hidden network of controlling details, a code present on the surface that is only legible to illuminati. But then, in Petersburg there had always been a connection between the theory of hidden meaning and the theory of revolution. They were both theories of the real, and they both derived from the abstract principles of Hegel – and his diagram of the progress of the Spirit.
And I think of another émigré from Petersburg, Alexandre Kojève – whose seminars on Hegel in Paris in the 1940s were attended by Raymond Queneau; and were admired by Saul Bellow … But no: the story of those seminars is part of another story, another confluence of circumstances; and I don’t want – not now – to write the secret history of the art of the novel.
The year before Bely died, in 1933, the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda went to Koktebel, in the Crimea, on the shores of the Black Sea, for a vacation at the Writers’ Union rest home. Andrei Bely and his wife were there at the same time. In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiography, she records how Bely and Mandelstam ‘enjoyed talking with each other. M. was writing his “Conversation About Dante” at the time and read it out to Bely. Their talk was animated, and Bely kept referring to his study of Gogol, which he had not yet finished.’25
A decade earlier, it was very different. In the 1920 s, Mandelstam loved attacking Bely and the Symbolists. Mandelstam had grown up in Petersburg; he had been taught by one of Bely’s Symbolist friends. And so in the ordinary way, from within his own avant-garde, he had attacked the older avant-garde – ‘the glorious traditions of the literary epoch when a waiter reflected in the double mirrors of the restaurant in the Hotel Prague was regarded as a mystical phenomenon, as a double …’26
But now, everything was different.
In Koktebel, Mandelstam was writing his ‘Conversation About Dante’. It is called a conversation. But no one else is mentioned in the text. And I think that the real person to whom this conversation is addressed is Bely. For Mandelstam is writing about Dante’s Commedia: but really he is continuing the investigations of his former city of Petersburg – the constant probing of how to turn language into art. The Commedia, writes Mandelstam, is ‘a power flow, known now in its totality as a “composition”, now in its particularity as a “metaphor”, now in its indirectness as a “simile”…’ With this idea of a power flow, Mandelstam rejects all ideas of form and content: ‘form is squeezed out of the content-conception which, as it were, envelops the form.’ Instead, writing is pure performance: ‘Poetic material does not have a voice. It does not paint with bright colours, nor does it explain itself in words. It is devoid of form just as it is devoid of content for the simple reason that it exists only in performance.’ Or, in other words: ‘In talking about Dante it is more appropriate to bear in mind the creation of impulses than the creation of forms …’27
Constantly, Mandelstam laments the lack of vocabulary: ‘Again and again I find myself turning to the reader and begging him to “imagine” something; that is, I must invoke analogy, having in mind but a single goal: to fill in the deficiency of our system of definition.’28 And so, since ‘this poem’s form transcends our conceptions of literary invention and composition’, Mandelstam doesn’t offer theories, but improvised metaphors:
We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and greater numbers as they were required. The work of these bees, constantly keeping their eye on the whole, is of varying difficulty at different stages of the process. Their cooperation expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.29
Yes, I think that Mandelstam is talking to Bely. Indirectly, he is offering a precise description, in fact, of Bely’s strange invention in Petersburg. For Mandelstam rejects the idea that Dante was an obscure mystic. Instead, he argues, Dante’s investigations into the meaning of what happens were part of his investigations into the art of composition: ‘the inner illumination of Dantean space derived from structural elements alone’.30 The illumination was an effect of art. Just as a third term, a sign, had emerged as the only true form of the real, in Bely’s investigations into words.
Tsvetayeva thought that Bely was a man in flight. And now – by chance – Mandelstam projects this flight into the structure of Dante’s composition, based on the principle of ‘convertibility or transmutability’:
… just imagine an airplane (ignoring the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. Furthermore, in the same way, this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine.31
The self-assembling flying machine: this fantastical metaphor seems to me to be the best description of what Bely invented in Petersburg: a process of metamorphosis and reversal, a multiple escape …
One must traverse the full width of a river crammed with Chinese junks moving simultaneously in various directions – this is how the meaning of poetic discourse is created. The meaning, its itinerary, cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not be able to tell how and why we were skipping from junk to junk.32
Adam Thirlwell, 2011
1. Emma Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, translated and edited by John Crowfoot (London: Harvill Press, 2004), p. 58.
2. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 10–11.
3. Nikolai Gogol, ‘Nevsky Prospect’, in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, edited by Leonard J. Kent and translated by Constance Garnett, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 238.
4. Marina Tsvetayeva, ‘A Captive Spirit’, in A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, edited and translated by J. Marin King (London: Virago, 1983), p. 100.
5. ibid., pp. 102 and 154.
6. ibid., pp. 151–2.
7. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p. 188.
8. Nikolai Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, translated by Katherine Lampert (London: Godfrey Bles, 1950), p. 196.
9. Quoted in Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 48.
10. ibid., p. 53.
11. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 251, my translation.
12. Ivanov-Razumnik, Vershini (Summits) (Petrograd: Kolos, 1923), p. 110: quoted in Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 93.
13. Andrei Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Gogol’s Craftsmanship) (Moscow: 1934), pp. 306–7.
14. Andrei Bely, ‘Vospominanija’ (‘Memoirs’), in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, nos. 27–8, p. 453.
15. Shklovsky, p. 187.
16. Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, in Readings in Russian Poetics, edited and with a preface by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), p. 6.
17. ibid., pp. 6–7.
18. Quoted in Cassedy, p. 55.
19. Eikhenbaum, p. 9.
20. Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 3, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, edited by Stephen Rudy (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1981), p. 750.
21. Eikhenbaum, p. 12.
22. ibid., pp. 18, 19 and 20.
23. Shklovsky, p. 171.
24. ibid., p. 176.
25. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, translated by Max Hayward (London: Harvill Press, 1999), p. 155.
26. Osip Mandelstam, in The Collected Critical Prose and Letters, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London: Harvill Press, 1991), p. 212.
27. ibid., pp. 402, 408 and 442.
28. ibid., pp. 439–40.
29. ibid., p. 409.
30. ibid., p. 411.
31. ibid., p. 414.
32. ibid., p. 398.
* The city, after all, had been founded as St Petersburg, but it was known as Petersburg, or even Piter: from 1914 it would be Petrograd, and from 1924 it would be Leningrad, until eventually, in 1991, it would become St Petersburg again.
* Just as Lenin loved denying it. In 1909, the exiled Lenin published his strange work of philosophy: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In it, he wanted to prove a total positivism, the absolute objectivity of the world: ‘The “naïve realism” of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist independently of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our self and of man in general.’ The mad italics are Lenin’s.
* With this dislike of the sound u, Bely was again echoing Mallarmé’s ‘Crise de vers’: ‘what disappointment, faced with the perversity that confers on jour as on nuit, contradictorily, here obscure tones, there clear.’
Your excellencies, eminences, honours, citizens!
What is our Russian Empire?
Our Russian Empire is a geographical entity, which means: a part of a certain planet. And the Russian Empire comprises: in the first place – Great, Little, White and Red Rus; in the second – the realms of Georgia, Poland, Kazan and Astrakhan; in the third, it comprises … But – et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.1
Our Russian Empire consists of many towns and cities: capital, provincial, district, downgraded;2 and further – of the original capital city and of the mother of Russian cities.
The original capital city is Moscow; and the mother of Russian cities is Kiev.
Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Piter (which is the same) authentically belongs to the Russian Empire. While Tsargrad,3 Konstantinograd (or, as is said, Constantinople), belongs by right of inheritance.4 And on it we shall not expatiate.
We shall expatiate more on Petersburg: there is Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Piter5 (which is the same). On the basis of the same judgements the Nevsky Prospect is a Petersburg prospect.
The Nevsky Prospect possesses a striking quality: it consists of space for the circulation of the public; numbered houses delimit it; the numeration goes in the order of the houses – and one’s search for the required house is much facilitated. The Nevsky Prospect, like all prospects, is a public prospect; that is: a prospect for the circulation of the public (not of the air, for example); the houses that form its lateral limits are – hm … yes: for the public.6 In the evening the Nevsky Prospect is illuminated by electricity. While in the daytime the Nevsky Prospect needs no illumination.
The Nevsky Prospect is rectilinear (speaking between ourselves) because it is a European prospect; and every European prospect is not simply a prospect, but (as I have already said) a European prospect, because … yes …
Because the Nevsky Prospect is a rectilinear prospect.
The Nevsky Prospect is a not unimportant prospect in this non-Russian – capital – city. Other Russian cities are a wooden pile of wretched little cottages.
And Petersburg is strikingly different from them all.
If, however, you continue to assert a most absurd myth – the existence of a Moscow population of one and a half million – then one must admit that the capital is Moscow, for only in capitals are there populations of one and half million: while in provincial towns there are no populations of one and a half million – have not been, and will not be. And in accordance with the absurd myth it will be seen that the capital is not Petersburg.
But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only seems to exist.7
Whatever the truth of the matter, Petersburg not only seems to us, but also does exist – on maps: as two little circles that sit one inside the other with a black point in the centre; and from this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it energetically declares that it exists: from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular.
in which the story is told of a certain worthy personage, his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence
It was a dreadful time.
Of it fresh memory doth live.
Of it, my friends, for ye
I here begin my narrative –
Melancholy will my story be.1
A. Pushkin
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of most respected stock: he had Adam as his ancestor. And this is not the main thing: incomparably more important here is the fact that one nobly-born ancestor was Shem, that is, the very progenitor of the Semitic, Hessitic and red-skinned peoples.2
Here let us pass to ancestors of a less distant era.
These ancestors (so it appears) lived in the Kirghiz – Kaisak Horde,3 from where in the reign of the Empress Anna Ioannovna4 the senator’s great-great-grandfather Mirza Ab-Lai,5 who received at his Christian baptism the name Andrei and the sobriquet Ukhov,6 valiantly entered the Russian service. Thus on this descendant from the depths of the Mongol race does the Heraldic Guide to the Russian Empire7 expatiate. For the sake of brevity, Ab-Lai-Ukhov was later turned into plain Ableukhov.
This great-great-grandfather, so it is said, was the originator of the stock.
A lackey in grey with gold braid was flicking the dust off the writing desk with a feather duster; through the open door peeped a cook’s cap.
‘Watch out, he’s up and about …’
‘He’s rubbing himself with eau-de-Cologne, he’ll be down for his coffee soon …’
‘This morning the postman said there was a little letter for the barin from Shpain: with a Shpanish stamp.’
‘I’ll tell you this: you’d do well to go sticking your nose into letters a bit less …’
‘So that must mean that Anna Petrovna …’