Petersburg (Penguin Classics)
Page 69
7 vint: a card game.
8 the order of St Andrew: the highest order of the Russian Empire, established in 1698.
9 the Cabinet of Curiosities: Kunstkamera – the first Russian public museum, founded by Peter the Great. In 1718, Peter issued a ukase commanding that all human and animal ‘monsters’ were to be sent to the museum.
10 Do not te-e-e-mpt me: ‘Do not tempt me without need’ (Ne iskushai menya bez nuzhdy), the romance by Glinka, an 1825 setting of Baratynsky’s poem ‘Dissuasion’ (Razuverenie, 1821).
11 the man was sitting astride the corpse: Dudkin sits astride the dead Lippanchenko in an obvious and grotesque parody of the Bronze Horseman.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
1 The past moves by before me: the epigraph is taken from Pushkin’s tragedy Boris Godunov (1825) (VII, 17), Pimen’s monologue. The last line has been changed slightly by Bely.
2 the Protection in Winter: the Orthodox Feast of the Protection (Pokrov) is on 1 October; the Nativity of the Mother of God is from 7 to 12 September; ‘St Nicholas in Winter’ (Nikolai zimniy) is the day of the decease of St Nicholas the Miracle Worker, 6 December.
3 khalda: the Russian word for ‘a brazen hussy’.
4 Mantalini: the name of a frivolous and sentimental character in Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839). Bely was very fond of Dickens’s work, which he read often. ‘Mindalini’ has overtones of ‘almonds’, being derived from the Russian word mindal’.
EPILOGUE
1 The February sun is on the wane: Bely lived in Tunisia during January and February 1911.
2 gandurah: one of Bely’s own definitions of this word reads: ‘The gandurah is an Arabian coloured shirt that comes down to below the knees; the Arabs wear it under a cloak.’
3 chechia: ‘a round Tunisian fez with a very long tassel’.
4 Zaghouan: a Tunisian mountain range.
5 the museum at Bulaq: a museum of Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1858, and situated in Bulaq, a port of Cairo.
6 The ‘Book of the Dead’: a collection of 150 spells meant to be recited by a dead man to protect himself from injury in the world beyond.
7 Manetho: Manetho of Sebennytos, an Egyptian scholar and priest who lived around 400 BC and wrote a description of the Egyptian royal houses.
8 the piles of Gizeh: the pyramids outside Cairo.
9 Duauf: Duauf, or Dauphsekrut, an Egyptian king of the Middle Kingdom (20–18 centuries BC) whose letter to his son (‘The Instruction of Duauf’) is a celebrated work of ancient Egyptian literature.
10 Skovoroda: Grigory Skovoroda, the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher and poet (1722–94), a Neoplatonist and moralist.
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First published in Russian 1916
This translation 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
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ISBN: 978-0-14-196879-7
* 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.’
* Pushkin.