Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Andrei Bely

  ‘Well, and so what does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ And he added abruptly: ‘No, no, no: it’s a lie, it’s a delirium, an abracadabra, a gibe …’

  ‘How would I know? …’

  Nikolai Apollonovich looked at Aleksandr Ivanovich with unseeing eyes; and then into the depths of the street: how the street had changed!

  ‘How would I know? … That doesn’t make me feel any better … I didn’t sleep last night.’

  The top of a carriage rushed swiftly into the depths of the street: how the street had changed – how these grim days had changed it!

  The wind from the shore blew in gusts: the last leaves were scattered; there would be no more leaves until May; how many would there be in May? These fallen leaves were indeed the last leaves. Aleksandr Ivanovich knew it all by heart: there would be, there would be days full of blood and horror: and then everything would collapse; oh, whirl, oh, blow, last days that cannot be compared with anything that went before!

  Oh, whirl, oh blow through the air, you – last leaves! Again an idle thought …

  The Hand of Succour

  ‘So he was at the ball?’

  ‘Yes, he was …’

  ‘He was talking with your father …’

  ‘That’s right: he also mentioned you …’

  ‘He met you in a side-lane afterwards? …’

  ‘And took me to a little restaurant.’

  ‘And his name was? …’

  ‘Morkovin …’

  ‘Abracadabra!’

  When Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, tearing himself away from the contemplation of the twining leaves, at last turned to reality, he realized that Nikolai Apollonovich, running ahead, was jabbering away with a liveliness uncharacteristic of him, to a point that was even extreme; he was gesticulating; with his profile inclined low, his mouth split apart by an unpleasant grin, he looked like a tragic, antique mask which did not combine with the swift agility of a lizard into one consonant whole: in a word, he looked like a grasshopper with a frozen face.

  From time to time Aleksandr Ivanovich merely interjected comments:

  ‘And did he talk about the secret police?’

  ‘Yes, he tried to intimidate me with the secret police, too …’

  ‘Asserting that such intimidation is in the plan of the Party and approved by the Party? …’

  ‘Well, yes, he did …’ Nikolai Apollonovich said with a certain irritation and, blushing, tried to inquire:

  ‘But you yourself, I remember, said that day that the Party prejudices …’

  ‘What did I say?’ Dudkin flared up, sternly.

  ‘I remember you said that the Party prejudices of the lower echelons were not shared by the upper echelons, which you serve …’

  ‘Rubbish!’ – and here Dudkin’s whole torso twitched: and in agitation he kept increasing his pace.

  Nikolai Apollonovich in his turn seized him by the arms with a shadow of faint hope, replying to the questions like a schoolboy, and smiling unnaturally. At last, snatching the moment again, he continued his effusions about the events of the night before: about the ball, about the mask, about the flight through the ballroom, about the sitting on the front step of the small black house, about the gateway, the note; and finally – about the filthy little eating-house.

  It was genuine delirium.

  The abracadabra had jumbled everything up; they had all long ago lost their minds, unless, that was, that which annihilates irrevocably existed in reality.

  From the street towards them rolled thick, black human masses: many-thousand swarms of bowler hats rose up like waves. From the street towards them rolled: lacquered top hats, they rose out of the waves like the funnels of steamships; from the street into their faces foamed: an ostrich feather; a pancake-shaped cap smiled with its cap-band; and the cap-bands were: blue, yellow, red.

  From every side popped out the most importunate nose.

  Noses flowed past in large numbers: the aquiline nose and the cockerel nose; the duck-like nose, the hen’s nose; and so on, and so on …; the nose was turned to one side; or the nose was not at all turned: greenish, green, pale, white and red.

  All this rolled towards them from the street: senselessly, hurriedly, abundantly.

  Nikolai Apollonovich, pleading, and barely able to keep up with Dudkin, still seemed to be afraid to put into shape before him his fundamental question, which had arisen out of the discovery that the author of the dreadful note could not be the bearer of a Party directive; in this consisted now his principal thought: a thought of the most enormous importance – because of its practical consequences; this thought had now got stuck inside his head (their roles were changed: now it was Aleksandr Ivanovich, not Nikolai Apollonovich, who was desperately pushing away the bowler hats that were surrounding them).

  ‘And so, that means, you suppose – and so, that means, in all this a mistake has crept in?’

  Having made this timid approach to his thought, Nikolai Apollonovich felt handfuls of goose-pimples spreading over his body: well, but what if he were to present himself – he reflected – and – overcame his fear.

  ‘The note, you mean?’ said Aleksandr Ivanovich, raising his eyes suddenly; and tore himself away from a morose contemplation of the flowing abundance: of bowler hats, heads and moustaches.

  ‘Well, of course: to call it a mistake is to put it too mildly … It’s not a mistake, but a loathsome piece of charlatanry that has become involved in all this; the absurdity has been maintained in its completeness – with a deliberate aim: to arbitrarily interfere in the relation between people who are closely bound to each other, to confuse them; and in the Party’s chaos wreck the Party’s revolutionary action.’

  ‘Well, help me, then …’

  ‘An impermissible mockery,’ Dudkin said, interrupting him, ‘has been perpetrated – one made of gossip and phantoms.’

  ‘But I implore you, please tell me what I ought to do …’

  ‘And a betrayal has been perpetrated on everything: there is a whiff of something menacing, ominous here …’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m confused … I … didn’t sleep last night …’

  ‘And all of it is a phantom.’

  Now Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin stretched out his hand to Ableukhov in a rush of sympathy; and here, in passing, noticed: Nikolai Apollonovich was significantly shorter than him (Nikolai Apollonovich was not distinguished by his stature).

  ‘Now, now, please gather your composure …’

  ‘Oh Lord! It’s easy for you to say: composure – I didn’t sleep last night … I don’t know what to do now …’

  ‘Sit and wait.’

  ‘Will you come to see me?’

  ‘I tell you – sit and wait: I will undertake to help you.’

  He spoke with such confidence and conviction, inspiration, almost, that Ableukhov calmed down for a moment; but, to tell the truth, in his rush of fellow-feeling, Aleksandr Ivanovich had overestimated the degree of help he could provide … Indeed: how could he be of help? He was solitary, cut off from social intercourse; the conspiracy had blocked access to the very body of the Party for him; for Aleksandr Ivanovich had never been a member of the Committee, even though he had boasted to Ableukhov about the headquarters; if he were able to help, then he could only help by means of Lippanchenko; he could tell Lippanchenko, act through Lippanchenko. Above all he would have to get hold of Lippanchenko. Before he did anything else he must calm this man who had been shaken to the depths of his soul, as quickly as possible.

  And he calmed him:

  ‘I am certain that I will be able to untangle the knots of this loathsome plot: and today, without delay, I shall make the proper inquiries, and …’

  And – faltered: only Lippanchenko would be able to give him the proper information; there was no one else … What if he were not in Petersburg?

  ‘And …?’

  ‘And will give you an answer tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you,
thank you, thank you.’ And Nikolai Apollonovich rushed to shake his hand; at this Aleksandr Ivanovich was in spite of himself embarrassed (everything depended on where the person was and what information he had at his disposal).

  ‘Oh, please don’t: your case touches us all personally …’

  But Nikolai Apollonovich, who until that moment had been in a state of the utmost horror, was only able to respond to each word of support either completely apathetically or – ecstatically.

  And Nikolai Apollonovich responded ecstatically.

  Meanwhile Nikolai Apollonovich had once again flown into the thought that was preoccupying Aleksandr Ivanovich; a certain little fact had struck him: Nikolai Apollonovich both vowed and swore that the dreadful commission proceeded from an unknown, anonymous person; the anonymous person had already written to Ableukhov several times; and it was clear: that unknown anonymous person was actually an agent provocateur.

  What was more …

  From Ableukhov’s confused words one could nevertheless draw a conclusion; his special relations with the Party were at work here, and it was from those special relations that the whole sordid business was growing; Aleksandr Ivanovich made an effort to clarify yet one or two other things; and made the effort in vain: his thought fell like rain into the abundance that was flowing towards them – of moustaches, beards, chins.

  Nevsky Prospect

  Beards, moustaches, chins: that abundance was made of the upper extremities of human bodies.

  Shoulders, shoulders, shoulders flowed past; all the shoulders formed a thick mass, as black as coal; all the shoulders formed a highly viscous and slowly flowing mass, and Aleksandr Ivanovich’s shoulder adhered momentarily to the mass; so to speak, it stuck to it; and Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin followed his capricious shoulder, in keeping with the law of the body’s indivisible wholeness; thus was he thrown on to Nevsky Prospect; there he sank into the blackly flowing mass like a grain of roe.

  What is a grain of roe? It is both a world and an object of consumption; as an object of consumption the grain of roe does not have sufficient wholeness; such wholeness is represented by caviare: the sum total of grains of roe; the consumer is not aware of grains of roe; but he is aware of caviare, that is, of the mass of grains of roe that are spread on the sandwich that is served to him. Thus, in similar fashion, are the bodies of the individuals who fly along the paving of the Nevsky Prospect transformed into the organ of a common body, into grains of roe: the pavements of the Nevsky are the surface of a sandwich. The same thing happened to the body of Dudkin, who flew along here; the same thing happened to his stubborn thought: it instantly stuck to an alien thought, inaccessible to the mind, the thought of an enormous, many-legged creature that was running along the Nevsky.

  They left the pavement; here many legs were running; and silently they stared in wonderment at the many legs of the dark, moving human mass: that mass, incidentally, did not flow, but crept: crept and shuffled – crept and shuffled on flowing legs; the mass was glued together from many thousands of little members; each little member was a body: the bodies moved on legs.

  There were no people on Nevsky Prospect; but a creeping, wailing myriapod was there; into a single damp space multivarious voices were poured – a multivariety of words; articulate phrases broke there one against the other, and horribly there did the words fly apart like the shards of bottles that were empty and had all been broken in one single place: all of them, jumbled up together, again wove into a sentence that flew into infinity without end or beginning; this sentence seemed meaningless and woven from fantasies: the ceaseless flow of the sentence that was formed from meaninglessness hung above the Nevsky like black soot; above the expanse stood the black smoke of fantasies.

  And with these fantasies, swelling out from time to time, the Neva roared and struggled between its massive walls of granite.

  The creeping myriapod is horrible. Here, along the Nevsky, it has been moving for centuries. And higher up, above the Nevsky – there the seasons move: the springs, the autumns, the winters. The sequence there is variable; and here – the sequence of springs, summers, winters is unchanging; this sequence of springs, summers and winters is the same. And the periods of the seasons have, as is well known, their limits; and – period follows period; summer follows spring; autumn follows summer and moves into winter; and in the spring everything thaws. The human myriapod has no such limits; and nothing replaces it; its links change, but it remains entirely the same; somewhere out there, beyond the railway station, its head turns; its tail thrusts into Morskaya; and along the Nevsky shuffle the arthropodal links – without a head, without a tail, without consciousness, without thought; the myriapod creeps as it has crept; it will creep as it has crept.

  Just like a scolopendra!

  And the frightened metal horse rose up long ago over there on the corner of Anichkov Bridge;4 and the metal groom has hung on it: will the groom saddle the horse, or will the horse injure the groom? This competition will last for years, and – beyond them, beyond!

  And beyond them, beyond: ones, twos, threes and couple after couple – they blow their noses, cough, shuffle, laughing and maliciously gossiping, and they pour into the damp expanse with multivarious voices a multivariety of words that have been torn loose from the sense that gave them birth: bowler hats, feathers, service caps; service caps, cockades, feathers; tricorne, top hat, service cap; umbrella, shawl, feather.

  Dionysus

  But someone was talking to him!

  Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin dragged his thought away from the moving tide of abundance; its flowing streams of nonsense polluted pretty well everything; after bathing in the mental collective, his thought also became nonsense; with difficulty he directed it towards the words that chattered into his ear: these words were Nikolai Apollonovich’s; Nikolai Apollonovich had long been beating his ear with words; but the passing words, flying into his ears like splinters, shattered the sense of the phrases; that was why Aleksandr Ivanovich found it hard to understand what was being repeated over and over again into his eardrum; into his eardrum idly, long-windedly, tormentingly, the drumsticks beat out a fine tattoo: Nikolai Apollonovich, tearing himself out of the thick mass, went jabbering on without cease, swiftly.

  ‘Do you understand,’ Nikolai Apollonovich kept saying, ‘do you understand me, Aleksandr Ivanovich …’

  ‘Oh, yes, I understand …’

  And Aleksandr Ivanovich tried to extract with his ear the phrases that were addressed to him: this was not so easy, because the passing words shattered against his ears like a hail of stones:

  ‘Yes, I understand you …’

  ‘There, inside the tin,’ Nikolai Apollonovich kept saying, ‘life must be stirring: the clock inside it has been ticking strangely …’

  At this point Aleksandr Ivanovich thought:

  ‘What tin, what tin is he talking about? And what has any tin got to do with me?’

  But when he had listened more carefully to what the senator’s son was repeating, he realized that it was the bomb he was talking about.

  ‘Life must have stirred inside it when I set it in motion; it was all right, it was dead … I turned the key; even, yes: began to sob, I assure you, like a drunken body, half awake, when it’s shaken out of slumber …’

  ‘So you set it in motion?’

  ‘Yes, it started ticking …’

  ‘The hand?’

  ‘For twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘I put it, the tin, on the desk and looked at it, looked and looked; my fingers reached out for it of their own accord; and – it just happened: my fingers somehow turned the key of their own accord …’

  ‘What have you done?! Throw it into the river immediately!?!’ – Aleksandr Ivanovich cried, throwing up his hands in unfeigned alarm; his neck twitched.

  ‘Do you understand, it made a face at me? …’

  ‘The tin?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I was seized by a v
ery large number of constantly changing sensations as I stood over it: a very large number … Simply the devil knows what … I must confess I have never experienced anything like it in all my life … I was overcome by revulsion – and so much so that revulsion made me burst … All kinds of rubbish came crawling, and, I repeat – a terrible revulsion at it, the incredible, the incomprehensible: at the very shape of the tin, at the thought that sardines had, perhaps, once floated in it (I cannot stand the sight of them); a revulsion at it rose as at some enormous, hard insect that was chattering in my ears its incomprehensible insect chatter; do you understand – it had the effrontery to babble something at me? … Eh? …’

  ‘Hmm …’

  ‘A revulsion, as at an enormous insect whose shell gives off a savour of nauseating tin; there was something part-insect, part-unplated metal dish about it … Can you imagine – I was bursting, nauseated … I mean, it was as if I had … swallowed it …’

  ‘Swallowed it? Ugh, how ghastly …’

  ‘Simply the devil knows what – I swallowed it; do you understand what that means? Became a bomb walking on two legs with a repulsive ticking in my belly.’

  ‘Quiet, Nikolai Apollonovich – quiet: someone may hear us here!’

  ‘They won’t understand any of it: it’s impossible to understand it … This is what you have to do: keep it in your desk, stand and listen to its ticking … In a word, you have to experience it all for yourself, in sensations …’

  ‘But you know,’ Aleksandr Ivanovich said, getting interested in what he was saying now – ‘I do understand you: the ticking … You hear the sound differently; if you only listen closely to the sound, you will hear in it – something that’s the same, and yet different … I once tried to frighten a neurasthenic; began to tap my finger on the table, with a hidden meaning, you know – in time to the conversation; well, so then he looked at me, turned pale, fell silent and when he asked: “Why are you doing that?” I replied to him: “For no reason,” and went on tapping the table. Can you imagine – he had a fit: he was so offended that he wouldn’t return my greeting when I met him in the street … I understand that …’