Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

by Bely, Andrei

  Nikolai Apollonovich quickly began to undo the knots of the napkin, pulling at an embroidered end that depicted a pheasant; the short – and rather overactive – Nikolai Apollonovich now resembled the senator: even more did he resemble a photographic snapshot that had been taken of the senator in 1860.

  But why was he fussing so? Calm, oh, he must be more calm! Even so, his trembling fingers could not undo the knot; and in any case there was no point in undoing it: all was now clear. Nevertheless, he untied the little bundle; his amazement knew no bounds.

  ‘A bonbonnière …

  ‘Ah! …

  ‘A ribbon! …

  ‘How do you like that?’

  Like Apollon Apollonovich, Nikolai Apollonovich was in the habit of talking to himself.

  But when he tore off the ribbon, his hopes were crushed (he had had some sort of hope), because inside it – inside the bonbonnière, under the pink ribbon – instead of sweet confectioneries from Ballet’s there was a plain ordinary tin; the lid of the tin burned his finger with a most unpleasant chill.

  At this point, in passing, he noticed a timing mechanism that was affixed to the side: one had to turn a small metal key to make a sharp black arrow point to the scheduled time. Nikolai Apollonovich dully felt a certainty rise up in his consciousness, one that must inevitably prove his wretchedness and weakness: he felt that he would never be able to turn that key, for there was no means of stopping the mechanism once it had been set in motion. And in order to cut off all further retreat right there and then, Nikolai Apollonovich at once embraced the small metal key between his fingers; whether it was because his fingers trembled, or because Nikolai Apollonovich feeling dizzy, had plunged into the very abyss that he had wanted to avoid with all his heart and soul – the key slowly turned to one o’clock, then to two o’clock, and Nikolai Apollonovich … made an involuntary entrechat: flew off somewhere to the side; having flown off somewhere to the side, he squinted back at the desk again: the little tin box continued to lie on the desk; it was a sardine tin, with oily sardines (he had once eaten too many sardines and had never touched them since); a sardine tin, like any other sardine tin: shiny, with rounded corners …

  No – no – no!

  Not a sardine tin, but a sardine tin with dreadful contents!

  The metal key had already turned to two o’clock, and the peculiar life that lay, inaccessible to the mind, within the sardine tin, had already flared into action; and although the sardine tin was still the same, it was not the same; in there were certainly crawling: the hour and minute hands; the bustling second hand was racing around the perimeter until the moment (that moment was now not far away) – until the moment, until the moment when … –

  – the sardine tin’s dreadful contents would suddenly swell up outrageously; would rush and expand without measure; and then, and then the sardine tin would fly into pieces …

  – streams of the dreadful contents would rather nimbly spread in circles, tearing the desk to pieces with a crash: something would burst inside him, smack, and his body would also be torn to pieces; together with the splinters, together with the gas that sprayed in all directions it would be splattered like loathsome blood-red slush on the cold stones of the walls … –

  – it would all take place in a hundredth of a second: in a hundredth of a second the walls would collapse, and the dreadful contents, growing bigger, bigger and bigger, would trail down the dim sky with splinters, blood and stone.

  Into the dim sky shaggy puffs of smoke would swiftly unfurl, letting down their tails on to the Neva.

  What had he done, what had he done?

  For the little box still stood on the table; now that he had turned the key, he must at once take that little box and put it in a suitable place (for example – in the small white bedroom, under the pillow); or at once crush it under his heel. But to hide it in a suitable place, under his father’s plumped-up pillow, so that the old, bald head, wearied by what had just taken place, would fall on the bomb with a bump – no, no, no: of that he was not capable; that was treachery.

  Crush it under his heel?

  But at this thought he experienced something that made his ears positively twitch: he felt such a vast sense of nausea (from the seven glasses of vodka he had drunk) that it was as if he had swallowed the bomb, like a pill; and now something distended in the pit of his stomach: it was perhaps made of rubber, perhaps of the matter of very strange worlds …

  Never would he crush it, never.

  It remained to throw it into the Neva, but there was time for that: he only had to turn the small key twenty times more; and meanwhile it was all postponed; now that he had turned the key, he must immediately extend that meanwhile; but he lingered, sinking into the armchair in complete helplessness; the nausea, coupled with a strange weakness and drowsiness, overwhelmed him dreadfully; and the weakened idea freeing itself from his body, kept drawing for Nikolai Apollonovich some kind of wretched, idle, helpless arabesques … immersing itself in drowsiness.

  Nikolai Apollonovich was an enlightened man; Nikolai Apollonovich had not devoted the best years of his life to philosophy in vain; his prejudices had long ago fallen away from him, and Nikolai Apollonovich found soothsaying and all kinds of miracles foreign to him; soothsaying and miracles were a cause of obscurantism (why was he thinking about irrelevant matters, when he ought to be thinking about this … What was he to think about? Nikolai Apollonovich made an effort to rise out of his drowsiness; and was unable to do so) … were a cause of obscurantism … all kinds of miracles … the concept of the source of perfection; for the philosopher, the source of perfection was Thought; God, in a manner of speaking, or Perfect Law … And the law-makers of the great religions expressed their laws in figurative form; Nikolai Apollonovich, in a manner of speaking, respected the law-makers of the great religions, without, of course, believing in their divine essence.

  Yes: why was he thinking about religion? Was there any time to think … After all, it had happened: so quickly … What had happened? … Nikolai Apollonovich’s final attempt to rise out of his drowsiness was not crowned with success; he remembered nothing; everything seemed peaceful … to the point of ordinariness, and his weakened thought, freeing itself from his body, kept senselessly drawing some kind of wretched, idle, helpless arabesques.

  Nikolai Apollonovich particularly respected the Buddha, in the belief that Buddhism had superseded all other religions in both the psychological and the theoretical regard; in the psychological regard, teaching a love even for animals; and in the theoretical: having developed its logic through the loving agency of Tibetan lamas. Yes: Nikolai Apollonovich remembered that he had once read the logic of Dharmakirti with a commentary by Dharmottara11 …

  This was in the first place.

  In the second place: in the second place (let us observe for our own part), Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov was a man of instinct (not Nikolai Apollonovich number one, but Nikolai Apollonovich number two); from time to time, between the two doors of the entrance porch, he (like Apollon Apollonovich) was assailed by a certain strange, very strange, exceedingly strange condition: as though everything that lay beyond the door was not what it was, but something else: just what, Nikolai Apollonovich could not have said. Imagine merely that beyond the door there was nothing, and that if one were to fling the door wide open, then the door would open on an empty, cosmic immensity, into which all that was left was for one to … throw oneself headfirst, in order to fly, fly and fly – and having flown somewhere, perceive that the immensity was the sky and the stars – the same sky and stars that we see above us, and in seeing do not see. It remained for one to fly there, past strangely immobile, now untwinkling stars and crimson planetary spheres – in absolute zero, in an atmosphere of two hundred and seventy-three degrees of cold. That was what Nikolai Apollonovich experienced now.

  A strange, very strange condition of semi-sleep.

  The Last Judgement

  Such was the condition in which he sa
t facing the sardine tin: seeing, but not seeing; hearing, but not hearing; as though, at that lifeless moment when this weary body crashed into the armchair’s black embrace, this spirit crashed straight from the parquet tiles of the floor into some kind of lifeless sea, an absolute zero degrees; and seeing, did not see; no, saw. When his weary head inclined soundlessly on to the table (and the sardine tin), looking at him through the open door to the corridor was the strange, bottomless thing that Nikolai Apollonovich had tried to throw off, passing to an everyday task: a remote astral journey, or sleep (which, we shall observe, is the same thing); and the open door continued to yawn amidst the everyday, opening in the everyday its un-everyday depth: cosmic immensity.

  To Nikolai Apollonovich it seemed that from the door, standing in immensity, someone was looking at him, that some head was thrust through from out there (one had only to look at it and it vanished): the head of some god (Nikolai Apollonovich would have classified this head as the head of a wooden idol of the kind that one encounters even today among the peoples of the north-east who have inhabited the dim tundras of Russia from time immemorial). After all, it was precisely gods such as these to which, perhaps, in ancient times his Kirghiz–Kaisak ancestors had prayed; those Kirghiz–Kaisak ancestors had, according to legend, had dealings with the Tibetan lamas; they swarmed pretty massively in the blood of the Ab-Lai-Ukhovs. Was that not the reason why Nikolai Apollonovich had experienced a tenderness towards Buddhism? Here heredity was at work; heredity flowed into his consciousness; in his sclerotic veins heredity throbbed in millions of yellow blood corpuscles. And now, when the open door showed Ableukhov immensity, he treated this highly strange circumstance with due indifference (after all, this had already happened): and lowered his head into his hands.

  Another moment – and he would have calmly embarked upon his usual astral journey, unfurling from his mortal shell a misty, cosmic tail, permeating through the walls into the limitless, but the dream was interrupted: ineffably, tormentingly, silently, someone was coming towards the door, churning up winds of non-existence: the terrible old days, like the advancing howl of a moving taxi, suddenly gathered strength in the sounds of an old song.

  Nikolai Apollonovich sooner guessed than recognized that song:

  ‘Aa-ba-a-ate … un-re-est of the paa-aassions …’

  And not long before, the machine had roared:

  ‘Fall asle-e-eep … thou ho-ope– …’

  ‘Aaah’ came a roar from the doorway: the horn of a gramophone? the horn of a taxi? No: in the doorway stood an ancient, ancient head.

  Nikolai Apollonovich leapt to his feet.

  An ancient, ancient head: Confucius or Buddha? No, the person who was looking in through the door was probably his great-great-grandfather, Ab-Lai.

  The brightly-coloured, iridescent silk robe muttered and whispered; for some reason Nikolai Apollonovich was reminded of his own Bokharan robe, which had iridescent peacock feathers on it … The brightly-coloured, iridescent silk robe, on which small, sharp-beaked, golden, winged dragons crawled over a misty, smoky-sapphire field (and into it); the five-tiered, pyramid-shaped headdress with golden brims looked like a mitre; above the man’s head a many-rayed aureole both shone and crackled: a wondrous sight, and one familiar to us all! In the centre of this aureole a wrinkled countenance parted its lips in a Chronic aspect,12 the hallowed Mongol came into the brightly coloured room; and the breezes of millennia wafted in behind him.

  For an initial moment Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov thought that Chronos had come to pay him a visit in the guise of his Mongol ancestor, Ab-Lai (that was what was concealed in him!); his gaze began to move restlessly: in the hands of the Stranger he sought the blade of the traditional scythe; but there was no scythe in his hands: in one yellowish hand, as fragrant as the first lily, there was only an oriental saucer with a small, sweet-smelling heap of pink Chinese apples: paradise apples.

  Paradise was something that Nikolai Apollonovich rejected: paradise, or the garden (which, as he had seen, was the same thing) was incompatible in Nikolai Apollonovich’s mind with the ideal of the higher good (let us not forget that Nikolai Apollonovich was a Kantian; more than that: a Cohenite); in this sense he was a Nirvanic person.

  By Nirvana he meant – Nothing.

  And Nikolai Apollonovich remembered: he – the old Turanian13 – had been reincarnated a great number of times; had been incarnated today, too: in the blood and the flesh of a pillar of the nobility of the Russian Empire, in order to fulfil a certain ancient, secret purpose: to shake loose all the foundations; in the tainted Aryan blood the Ancient Dragon was to flare up and devour everything in flame; the ancient Orient was showering our time with a hail of invisible bombs. Nikolai Apollonovich – an old Turanian bomb – was now bursting with ecstasy, having seen his native land; on Nikolai Apollonovich’s face there now appeared a forgotten, Mongolian expression; now he looked like a mandarin of the Middle Empire, enveloped in a frock-coat for his arrival in the West (after all, he was here with a single and most secret mission).

  ‘Indeed, sir …

  ‘Indeed, sir …

  ‘Indeed, sir …

  ‘Very good, sir!’

  It was a strange thing: how he suddenly reminded him of his father!

  Thus the ancient Turanian, choking with ecstasy, enveloped for a time in a mortal Aryan shell, rushed towards the stack of old exercise books in which the theses of a system of metaphysics he had devised were sketched; both in embarrassment and in joy did he grasp at the exercise books: all the exercise books formed themselves before him into one enormous cause – the cause to which his entire life was devoted (they had come to resemble the sum total of Apollon Apollonovich’s deeds). The cause to which his life was devoted turned out to be not simply a cause of life: the continuous, enormous, Mongol cause could be glimpsed everywhere in the notes under all the headings and all the paragraphs: a great mission that had been entrusted to him before his birth: the mission of a destroyer.

  This visitor, the hallowed Turanian, stood motionless: the darkness of his eyes, which were as dense as night, expanded; while his hands – his hands: rhythmically, melodically, smoothly they rose into the limitless heights; and his garments swished; their sound was like the trembling of passing wings; the smoky field of the background cleared, deepened and became a piece of distant sky, gazing through the torn air of this little study: that dark-sapphire crevice – how had it come to be in this bookcase-lined room? Into it flew the small dragons that were embroidered on the iridescent robe (indeed, the robe had become a crevice); in its depths small stars gleamed … And the olden days infused with the sky and the stars: and from there washed an indigo air, infused with stars.

  Nikolai Apollonovich rushed towards the visitor – Turanian to Turanian (subordinate to superior) with a pile of exercise books in his hand:

  ‘Paragraph One: Kant (proof that he, too, was a Turanian).

  ‘Paragraph Two: value, conceived as no one and nothing.

  ‘Paragraph Three: social relations based on value.

  ‘Paragraph Four: the destruction of the Aryan world by a system of values.

  ‘Conclusion: the ancient Mongol cause.’

  But the Turanian replied:

  ‘The task has not been understood: instead of Kant, it ought to be: The Prospect.

  ‘Instead of value it should be numeration: by houses, floors and rooms, for time everlasting.

  ‘Instead of a new order: the circulation of the citizens of The Prospect – regular, and in a straight line.

  ‘Not Europe’s destruction, but its unalterability …

  ‘That is what the Mongol cause is …’

  To Nikolai Apollonovich it seemed that he was condemned; and the bundle of exercise books in his hands disintegrated into a small pile of ash; while the wrinkled countenance, horribly familiar, leaned right up against him: at this point he looked at an ear, and understood, understood everything: the old Turanian, who had once instructed him in all the
precepts of wisdom, was Apollon Apollonovich; it was against him that, having misunderstood science, he had raised his hand.

  It was the Last Judgement.

  ‘But how can this be? But who is this?’

  ‘Who is it? Your father …’

  ‘But who is my father?’

  ‘Saturn …’14

  ‘But how is this possible?’

  ‘Nothing is impossible! …’

  The Last Judgement commenced.

  Here indeed were some kind of dreams from the past; here indeed the planetary cycles rushed in a wave of billions of years: there was no Earth, no Venus, no Mars, only three nebulous rays revolving around the Sun; a fourth had just burst, and enormous Jupiter was preparing to become a world; only ancient Saturn was raising, from its fiery centre, black waves of aeons: nebulae raced; and now with Saturn, his parent, Nikolai Apollonovich was thrown into immensity; and only distances flowed all around.

  At the end of the Fourth Kingdom he was on the earth, the sword of Saturn hung suspended like an unfinished thunderstorm; the continent of Atlantis collapsed; Nikolai Apollonovich, an Atlantean, was a depraved monster (the earth would not support him – had sunk beneath the waves); after that he was in China: Apollon Apollonovich, the bogdykhan,15 ordered Nikolai Apollonovich to slaughter many thousands (the order was carried out); and in comparatively recent times, when thousands of Tamerlane’s horsemen descended on Rus, Nikolai Apollonovich had come galloping into this Rus on his swift horse of the steppes; after that he was incarnated in the blood of a Russian nobleman; and resumed his old habits: and just as he had formerly slaughtered thousands there, now today did he want to tear and destroy: to throw a bomb at his father: to throw the bomb in the most swiftly passing interval of time. But his father was – Saturn, the circle of time made one turn, and closed; the Kingdom of Saturn returned (here his heart burst with sweetness).