by Bely, Andrei
ANDREI BELY
Petersburg
A Novel in Eight Chapters
With a Prologue
and an Epilogue
Translated by
DAVID MCDUFF
and with an Introduction by
ADAM THIRLWELL
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
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
PETERSBURG
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.
Introduction
First-time readers should be aware that details of the plot are revealed in this Introduction.
SIGNS NAMES WORDS NOVELS SYSTEMS!
Moscow
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.
Petersburg
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
In other words: everything in this city is on the brink of meaning; everything in Petersburg is potentially a sign.
Names
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.
Petersburg
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.
Reality
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’ – t
he 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.
Words
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.
