Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Andrei Bely

  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, Shishnar-fne …” ’ (p. 410).

  The history of the world as a history of phonetics: that is the wild aim of Bely’s absolute novel.

  Phonemes

  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.

  Signs

  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 a
nd 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.

  Novels

  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.

  Systems

  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.

  Koktebel

  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.