Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  ‘No, no, no; it’s impossible to understand it … There was something that rose up, came back to my memory – some kind of delirious fantasies that were unfamiliar and yet familiar …’

  ‘You remembered your childhood – didn’t you?’

  ‘It was as though a bandage had been removed from all my sensations … There was a stirring above my head – you know? My hair stood on end: I understand what that means; only it wasn’t that – not my hair, because one stands with one’s head exposed. To have one’s hair stand on end – I understood that expression last night; and it wasn’t my hair; it was my whole body, standing, like hair – on end: it was bristling with little hairs; and my legs and my arms and my chest – they were all as if made of invisible fur that was being tickled with straw; or like this, too: as if one were getting into a cold bath of Narzan mineral water and there were little bubbles of carbon dioxide on one’s skin – tickling, pulsating, racing – faster and faster, so that if one froze, the throbbing, pulsating and tickling would turn into some kind of powerful feeling, as though one were being torn to pieces, as though the limbs of one’s body were being pulled apart in contrary directions: as though in the front one’s heart was being torn out, while in the rear, in the rear, from one’s back, like a long branch from a wattle fence, one’s backbone was being torn out; as if one were being pulled up by one’s hair and down by one’s feet into the bowels of the earth … One moved – and everything froze, as though …’

  ‘In a word, Nikolai Apollonovich, you were like Dionysus being torn to pieces … But, joking apart: now you are speaking quite a different language; I do not recognize you … You are not speaking in Kantian terms any longer … I haven’t heard this language from you before …’

  ‘But I just told you: it’s as though a bandage had fallen – from all my sensations … Not in Kantian terms – that’s true, what you said … Kant is out of it completely! … There everything is different …’

  ‘There, Nikolai Apollonovich, logic has been introduced into the blood, or rather, the sensations of the brain in the blood or – dead stagnation; and so now you have received a real shock from life, and the blood has rushed to your brain; that is why in your words one can hear the pulsation of real blood …’

  ‘You know, when I stand above it, and – tell me, please: it seems to me – yes, but what was I talking about?’

  ‘It “seems” to you, you said,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich confirmed …

  ‘It seems to me – that I swell up all over, that I’ve been swelling up for a long time: perhaps for hundreds of years; and that I’m walking around, without noticing – like a swollen monster … It really is dreadful.’

  ‘It all comes from your sensations …’

  ‘But tell me, I’m … not …’

  Aleksandr Ivanovich smiled sympathetically:

  ‘On the contrary, you’ve grown thinner: your cheeks are drawn and you have circles under your eyes.’

  ‘I stood there, over it … But it wasn’t “me” standing there – not me, not me, but … some, so to speak, giant with the most enormous idiot’s head and a sinciput that had not grown together; and at the same time – my body was pulsating; on absolutely every part of my skin I felt little needles: they were stabbing and pricking me; and I plainly felt the pricking – at a distance of at least a quarter of an arshin from my body, outside my body! … Eh? … Just think about it! Then a second, and a third: a huge number of jabs in a completely physical sensation – outside, beside my body … While the jabs, the throbbings, the pulsations – you understand! – outlined my own contours – beyond the limits of my body, outside my skin: my skin was inside my sensations. Was that it? Or had I been turned inside out, with my skin facing inwards, or had my brain jumped out?’

  ‘You were simply beside yourself …’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to say “beside yourself”; everyone says “beside yourself”; that expression is just an allegory, supported not by physical sensations, but at best merely by emotion. But I felt beside myself in a completely physical, physiological sense, and not at all in an emotional one … Of course, in addition, I was also beside myself in your sense: that is, I was shocked. But the main thing wasn’t that, but the fact that the sensations of my organs flowed around me, suddenly expanded, dilated and exploded into space: I exploded, like a bo – ’

  ‘Sh-hh!’

  ‘Into pieces! …’

  ‘Someone might hear …’

  ‘But who was it standing there, experiencing – me, or someone else? It happened to me, inside me, outside me … You see what verbiage results? …’

  ‘Remember, earlier, when I visited you, with the little bundle, I asked you why I was I. You didn’t understand me at all at the time …’

  ‘But now I understand it all: but it’s dreadful, really dreadful …’

  ‘No, it isn’t dreadful – it’s the genuine experience of Dionysus: not verbal, not literary, of course … The experience of the dying Dionysus …’

  ‘Simply the devil knows what!’

  ‘Now calm down, Nikolai Apollonovich, you’re dreadfully tired; and no wonder: to go through so much in the course of a single night … It would knock anyone off his feet.’ Aleksandr Ivanovich put his hand on Nikolai Apollonovich’s shoulder; the shoulder was at the level of his chest; and that shoulder was trembling; Aleksandr Ivanovich now experienced quite plainly and simply a need to get away from Nikolai Apollonovich, who was trembling nervously before him, in order to give himself a clear and calm account of what had happened.

  ‘But I am calm, completely calm; you know, I wouldn’t mind having a drink now; a bit of courage and uplift … I mean, can you tell me for certain that the commission is an illusion?’

  Aleksandr Ivanovich could do nothing of the kind; none the less, with unusual fervency, Aleksandr Ivanovich merely snapped out:

  ‘I guarantee it …’

  A Revelation

  At last he managed to get away.

  Now he must start striding; keep striding, and again striding – until his brain was completely stupefied, in order to collapse at a table in the eating-house – to reflect, and drink vodka.

  Aleksandr Ivanovich remembered: the letter, the letter! He was supposed to have delivered the letter himself – on the instructions of a certain person: delivered it to Ableukhov.

  How he had forgotten it all! He had taken the letter with him when he had set off then for Ableukhov’s – with the little bundle; he had forgotten to deliver the letter; had delivered it soon after to Varvara Yevgrafovna, who had told him that she was going to meet Ableukhov. That letter might have proved to be the fateful one.

  But no, and no!

  It was not that one; that one, the fateful one had, according to Ableukhov, been delivered at the ball; and – by some kind of masker … The masker, the ball and – Varvara Yevgrafovna Solovyova.

  No, and no!

  Aleksandr Ivanovich calmed down: so that letter was certainly not this one, the one that had been delivered by Solovyova and sent to him by Lippanchenko; so he, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, was not implicated in this matter; but – and this was the main thing: the dreadful commission could not have proceeded from the person; this was the principal trump card in his hands: a trump card that vanquished his delirium and all his delirious suspicions (those suspicions had rushed through his head when he had promised, vouched for the Party – for Lippanchenko, because Lippanchenko was his organ of communication with the Party); had he not had this trump card in his hands, if, that was to say, the letter had come from the Party, from Lippanchenko, then the person, Lippanchenko, would have been a suspicious person, and he, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, would have been associated with a suspicious personality.

  And the delirious dreams would have arisen.

  Hardly had he put all this together and was already preparing to cut across the flood of carriages in order to jump into a horse-car that was speeding towards him (there were, after all, no trams y
et), than a voice hailed him:

  ‘Aleksandr Ivanovich, wait … Wait a moment …’

  He turned round and saw that Nikolai Apollonovich, whom he had left an instant before, was running after him, panting, through the crowd – trembling and sweaty all over; with a feverish light in his eyes he was waving his stick over the heads of the astonished passers-by …

  ‘Wait a moment …’

  Oh, good Lord!

  ‘Wait: I can’t just let you go like that, Aleksandr Ivanovich … Look, there’s something else I want to tell you …’ He took him by the arm and guided him to the nearest shop window.

  ‘Something else has been revealed to me … Was it a revelation I had perhaps – there, as I stood over the little tin? …’

  ‘Listen, Nikolai Apollonovich, I have to go now; and I have to go in connection with a matter that involves you …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes: I won’t take a moment … Just a second, a third …’

  ‘Well – all right then: I am listening …’

  Now Nikolai Apollonovich displayed in his appearance something that was quite simply inspiration; in his joy he had evidently forgotten that not everything had been untangled for him yet, and that – above all: the tin was still ticking, tirelessly traversing the twenty-four hours.

  ‘It was as though I had a revelation that I was growing; I was growing, if you know what I mean, into immeasurability, traversing space; I assure you that this was real: and all the objects were growing with me; the room, and the view over the Neva, and the spire of Peter and Paul; they were all swelling up, growing; and then the growing stopped (there was simply no more room left for growth anywhere, into anything); but in this fact, that it was ending, in the end, in the conclusion – there, it seemed to me, was some kind of another beginning for me: a post-terminal one, perhaps … Somehow it seemed extremely preposterous, unpleasant and deranged, – deranged – that was the principal thing; deranged, perhaps, because I didn’t possess an organ that would have been able to make sense of this meaning, which was, so to speak, post-terminal; instead of my sense organs I had a “zero” sense; and I perceived something that was not zero, and not one, but less than one. The whole absurdity was, perhaps, only that the sensation was a sensation of zero minus something – five, for example.’

  ‘Listen,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich interrupted, ‘I had rather you told me this: did you receive the letter through Varvara Yevgrafovna Solovyova? You did, didn’t you? …’

  ‘The letter …’

  ‘Not the little note … the letter that came through Varvara Yevgrafovna …’

  ‘Oh, you mean the one about that poem with the inscription “A Fiery Soul”?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that: in a word, the letter that came through Varvara Yevgrafovna …’

  ‘Yes, I got it, I got it … No – as I was saying, this zero minus something … What was that?’

  Oh, Lord: still about the same thing! …

  ‘You ought to read the Apocalypse …’

  ‘I have heard from you before the reproach that I am unfamiliar with the Apocalypse; but now I shall read it – I shall read it without fail; now that you have finally put my mind at rest about … all this, I feel an interest awakening within me in the circle of your reading; you know, I shall settle down at home, drink bromide and read the Apocalypse; I’m most enormously interested: something has remained from the night: everything is what it is – yet different … For example, look, here: the shop window … And in the shop window there are reflections: there is a gentleman in a bowler hat walking past – look – off he goes … It’s you and I, do you see? And yet it’s – somehow strange …’

  ‘Yes, it is somehow strange,’ said Aleksandr Ivanovich, nodding his head in confirmation: Lord, but this fellow seemed to be a specialist in the field of ‘somehow strange’.

  ‘Or then again: objects … The devil only knows what they really are: they’re what they are – and yet different … I perceived that from the tin: the tin was a tin; and yet – no, no: it wasn’t a tin, but a …’

  ‘Shh!’

  ‘A tin with dreadful contents!’

  ‘Well, you’d do best to throw the tin into the Neva; and everything will come right again; everything will return to its place …’

  ‘No, it won’t, it won’t, it won’t …’

  He sadly dodged the rushing couples; sadly he sighed, because he knew: it would not come right again, it would not, would not – not ever, ever!

  Aleksandr Ivanovich was astonished at the flood of garrulity that had gushed from Ableukhov’s lips; to be quite honest, he did not know what to do with such garrulity: whether to try to calm him down, to support him, or, on the contrary – to break off the conversation (Ableukhov’s presence was simply weighing him down).

  ‘Nikolai Apollonovich, it’s just your sensations that appear strange to you; it’s just that you’ve been sitting too long with Kant in an unaired room; you’ve been struck by a tornado – and you’ve started to notice things about yourself: you have listened carefully to the tornado; and you have heard yourself in it … Your states of mind have been described in a variety of forms; they are the subject of observations, of study …’

  ‘But where, where?’

  ‘In fiction, in poetry, in the psychiatries, in occult resarch.’

  Aleksandr Ivanovich could not help smiling at the scandalous (from his point of view) illiteracy of this intellectually developed scholastic and, having smiled, continued seriously:

  ‘A psychiatrist …’

  ‘?’

  ‘Would call …’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes …’

  ‘All that …’

  ‘That everything is what it is, and yet different?’

  ‘Well, call it that if you will – for him the more usual term is: pseudo-hallucination …’

  ‘?’

  ‘That is, a kind of symbolic sensation that does not correspond to the stimulus of a sensation.’

  ‘Well, so what: saying that is equivalent to saying nothing! …’

  ‘Yes, you’re right …’

  ‘No, it doesn’t satisfy me …’

  ‘Of course: a modernist would call this sensation the sensation of the abyss – that is to say, he would look for an image that corresponds to a symbolic sensation that is not normally experienced.’

  ‘So there’s an allegory here.’

  ‘Don’t confuse allegory with symbol; an allegory is a symbol that has become current usage; for example, the normal meaning of your “beside oneself”; while a symbol is your appeal to what you have experienced there – near the tin; an invitation to experience artificially something that you experienced for real … But a more suitable term would be a different one: the pulsation of the elemental body. That is precisely how you experienced yourself; under the influence of a shock the elemental body within you gave a perfectly real shudder, for a moment became separated, unstuck from your physical body, and then you experienced all the things that you experienced there: trite verbal combinations like bezdna (abyss) – bezdna (without a bottom) or vne … sebya (beside (outside) … oneself) acquired depth, became a vital truth for you, a symbol; according to the doctrine of certain schools of mysticism, the experiences of one’s elemental body turn verbal meanings and allegories into real meanings, into symbols; and it’s because the works of the mystics abound in these symbols that now, after what you have experienced, I advise you to read those mystics …’

  ‘I told you that I will: and – I will …’

  ‘And as for what happened to you, I can only add one thing: sensations of that kind will be your first experience beyond the grave, as Plato describes it, adducing in evidence the assertions of the Bacchantes … There are schools of experience where these sensations are deliberately provoked – do you not believe me? … There are: I can tell you that with certainty, because the only friend I have – and he is a close friend – is there, in those schools; the schools of experience trans
form your nightmare by means of hard work into a harmonious accord, studying its rhythms, movements and pulsations, and introducing all the sobriety of consciousness into the sensation of expansion, for example … But why are we standing here? We’ve talked for far too long … What you need to do is go home now and … throw the tin into the river; and stay at home, stay at home: don’t set foot anywhere (you are probably being followed); so stay at home, read the Apocalypse, drink bromide: you’re dreadfully exhausted … Though perhaps you’re better off without bromide: bromide dulls the consciousness; people who abuse bromide become incapable of doing anything … Well, and now I rush away, and – on a matter that concerns you.’

  Having pressed Ableukhov’s hand, Aleksandr Ivanovich suddenly slipped away from him into the black stream of bowler hats, turned from that stream and shouted once more from there:

  ‘And throw the tin in the river!’

  His shoulder adhered to the other shoulders; he was swiftly carried off by the headless myriapod.

  Nikolai Apollonovich gave a shudder: life was bubbling in the little tin; the timing mechanism was working even now; he must go home quickly, quickly; in a moment he would hire a cab; when he got home, he would put the tin in his side pocket; and – into the Neva with it!

  Nikolai Apollonovich again began to feel that he was expanding; at the same time, he felt: it was drizzling.

  The Caryatid

  There, opposite, the crossroads showed black; and there was the street; the caryatid of the entrance porch hung there stonily.

  The Institution towered up from there; the Institution, where the person who dominated everything was Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov.

  There is a limit to the autumn; to winter, too, there is a limit: the very periods of time themselves flow by in cyclic fashion. And above these cycles hung the bearded caryatid of the entrance porch; giddily its stone hoof is crushed into the wall; it looks as though it might break loose in its entirety and spill into the street as stone.