Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg”: A Centennial Celebration 9781618115768

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ANDREY BELY’S PETERSBURG A Centennial Celebration

The Real Twentieth Century Series Editor Thomas Seifrid (University of Southern California, Los Angeles)

Editorial Board Stephen Blackwell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) Nancy Condee (Pittsburgh University, Pittsburgh) Caryl Emerson (Princeton University, Princeton) Mikhail Iampolskii (New York University, New York) Galin Tihanov (Manchester University, Manchester)

ANDREY BELY’S PETERSBURG A Centennial Celebration

Edited by OLGA M. COOKE

BOSTON 2017

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cooke, Olga Muller, editor. Title: Andrey Bely’s Petersburg : a centennial celebration / edited by Olga M. Cooke. Other titles: Real twentieth century. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2017. | Series: Real twentieth century | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016052721 (print) | LCCN 2016056173 (e-book) | ISBN 9781618115751 (hardback) | ISBN 9781618115768 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Bely, Andrey, 1880-1934. Peterburg. | Bely, Andrey, 1880-1934— Criticism and interpretation. | Russian prose literature—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PG3453.B84 P5316 2017 (print) | LCC PG3453.B84 (ebook) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052721 Copyright © 2017 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-61811-575-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-576-8 (electronic) Book design by Kryon Publishing, www.kryonpublishing.com Cover design by Jen Stacey Cover photo by Alexander Petrosyan, reproduced by the author’s permission http://aleksandrpetrosyan.com/ https://www.instagram.com/petrosphotos/ Published by Academic Studies Press in 2017 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Dedicated to the memory of Georgette Donchin

Contents

Foreword by Thomas R. Beyer Jr.

vii

Acknowledgments viii Vladimir Nabokov, “On Petersburg” x Introduction by Olga M. Cooke Carol Anschuetz, “Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel”

1 19

Maria Carlson, “Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg” 46 Charlene Castellano, “Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg” 63 Jacob Emery, “Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg” 73 Roger Keys, “Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg”

94

Timothy Langen, “Petersburg as a Historical Novel”

102

Aleksandr V. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton”

116

Magnus Ljunggren, “The Bomb, the Baby, the Book”

134

Anna Ponomareva, “‘Know Thyself ’: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg” 147 Ada Steinberg, “Fragmentary ‘Prototypes’ in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg” 163 Adam Weiner, “The Enchanted Point of Petersburg” 187 Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, “Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession”

227

Contributors

251

Index 254

Foreword This revolutionary novel, explosive and innovative, is still little known, less understood, and inadequately appreciated in the West. The unique ­marriage of sound and sense in the original Russian has stymied translators into English. Were it not for Vladimir Nabokov’s claim that Petersburg was one of the “masterpieces of twentieth-century prose,” the novel might have been largely overlooked in the English-speaking world. Even in his homeland, Bely was met largely by silence for almost fifty years, although he was held in high esteem among Russian émigré scholars. Bely and his Petersburg have been likened to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both require slow, meticulous reading (best aloud) and the scholarly commentary that peels back the layers for the inquisitive mind. The myriad influences on Bely’s own voracious and encyclopedic consciousness are still being ­unraveled. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, a small cadre of Russian ­literary scholars abroad, primarily in the United States and in Europe, gradually helped restore the novel to its rightful place as one of the most stylistically and philosophically complex and demanding prose works of Western ­literature. In the past twenty-five years, Bely has been rediscovered by his native Russian audience, helped by brilliant and bold scholars, and aided by the ­contributions of those in the West who kept alive the memory of the life and works of this eccentric genius. A century after its publication, the novel finds in this volume tributes from across the globe by many of those who are directly responsible for the new appreciation and comprehension of this jewel of Western culture. Bely had hoped that future generations would yield some who could make him accessible to others. This collection of authors more than fulfills his wish. Thomas R. Beyer Jr. C. V. Starr Professor of Russian and East European Studies Middlebury College

Acknowledgments In the spirit of celebrating a centennial year, I would like to express my ­gratitude first to the many Bely scholars who are no longer with us. To those who have passed away, among them people like Leonid Dolgopolov, Georgette Donchin, Ronald Peterson, and Vladimir Piskunov, we owe a great debt of gratitude for their lasting impact in Bely studies. Perhaps more than any other scholar, it was Dolgopolov, who courageously and almost single-handedly kept alive the spirit of Andrey Bely in the Soviet Union, when the author’s great masterpiece was neglected. No scholar can be without Dolgopolov’s monograph on the novel, Andrei Belyi i ego roman “Peterburg” (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988). I would also like to acknowledge the following scholars, who deserve ­special mention for laying the groundwork for Bely studies in the 1970s and 1980s in both the United States and Europe but whose works we could not include in this volume: Vladimir Alexandrov, Peter Barta, Gerald Janecek, John Malmstad, Georges Nivat, Lena Szilard, and Alexander Woronzoff. Naturally, this volume includes pioneers of Bely studies, such as Carol Anschuetz, Thomas R. Beyer Jr., Maria Carlson, Charlene Castellano, John Elsworth, Roger Keys, Magnus Ljunggren, Aleksandr Lavrov, and Ada Steinberg. Our other ­contributors, namely, Jacob Emery, Timothy Langen, Anna Ponomareva, Adam Weiner, and Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, represent a younger ­generation of scholars. Since “Bely returned to his motherland,” there is one scholar, who has been especially instrumental in keeping the Bely flame alive, Monika Spivak, director of the Andrey Bely Museum in Moscow and organizer of three international conferences devoted to “Bely in a Changing World.” Dr. Spivak’s publications, especially Andrei Belyi: Mistik i sovetskii pisatel’ (Moscow: RGGU, 2006), editions, conferences, and collections continue to inspire Bely studies by bringing together hundreds of scholars from around the world and help celebrate the importance of this great writer. Countless other scholars have contributed immensely to Bely studies, in their monographs and essays as well as their continued interest in all of Bely’s works.

Acknowledgments

Without the help of Faith Wilson Stein and Lauren Hill of Academic Studies Press, this project would not have been possible. I feel blessed to have benefitted from their meticulous editing and generous advice. Special gratitude goes to those who read early drafts of this collection, including Brett Cooke and Charlene Castellano, and to Maria Carlson, who translated Alexander Lavrov’s contribution. Finally, I would like to express once again my profound appreciation to all the contributors to this collection. Carol Anschuetz’s article, “Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel,” was originally published in The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. John Garrard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 125–53, and is reprinted here with the permission of Prof. John Garrard. An earlier version of Maria Carlson’s article, “Andrei Belyi’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg,” was published as “Theosophy and History in Andrei Belyi’s Peterburg: Life in the Astral City,” in Russian Literature 58, nos. 1–2 (2005): 29–45, and is reprinted with permission. Jacob Emery’s “Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg” originally appeared in PMLA, Volume 123, No. 1, January 2008, 76–91, published by the Modern Language Association of America. Ada Steinberg’s “Fragmentary ‘Prototypes in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg” was originally published in Slavonic and East European Review 56, no. 4 (October 1978): 522–45, and is reprinted with permission. Adam Weiner’s “The Enchanted Point of Petersburg” was originally published in the author’s By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). Copyright (c) 1998 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.

ix

On Petersburg VLADIMIR NABOKOV

[Bely’s] greatest book, Petersburg, was written during the early years of this century. It is difficult to sum it up in a few words, because, as is the case with a truly great work of art, it itself represents the shortest possible exposition of all that the writer wanted to convey of it. Its manner and tackling of the subject, again as is the case with every truly great work of art, is unique and to be properly understood has to be experienced by reading. And summing up such a book, as I am now about to do, is a thing I hate doing, for it amounts to a crippling of both the writer’s intention and its realization. So now to get it over with as quickly as possible: the story proper is that of a young man, son of an important official/a senator, who, partly seduced by the temptations of terrorism, partly desperate because of a hopeless infatuation with a pretty but brainless woman and because of the silly things he has done in his desperation, agrees to introduce a time-bomb into his father’s house. (The Father absentmindedly had removed it to the study.)1 The bomb explodes with minor damage, and the young man, cured of his dangerous fancies, is seen living his mature years in Egypt, away from his family and from the place of his homicidal attempt. But the point of the book is not in this subject, however intricate and weird psychologically. The true hero of the book is the city by whose name it is called: Petersburg,

Unpublished lecture on Bely from the Berg Collection by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 2015 by Vladimir Nabokov, courtesy of the Vladimir Nabokov Archive at the Berg C ­ ollection, New York Public Library, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. This excerpt from an essay on Soviet literature was typed in English, with a title penciled in Russian, “Posle Bloka” (After Blok), by which it is catalogued. Unsigned, it has the a­ ppearance of a rough draft. This is also indicated by uncharacteristic repetitions in Nabokov’s prose, which, however, convey his evident enthusiasm. Minor corrections in spelling, grammar, and style have been introduced. This excerpt elucidates Nabokov’s often-cited statement that Petersburg is one of the four greatest novels of the twentieth century.   1 Last word crossed out.

On Petersburg

the phantasmagoric city built upon an unstable morass and upon the bones of the serfs who in the time of Peter the Great perished by the thousand working in the bogs up to their shoulders; the city always enveloped by dense fogs and often more like a ghost born out of the misty twilight than a real city of ­buildings and pavements; the city in whose mists mirages and phantoms are born to invade human minds erasing a borderline between truth and fantasy; the city whose beauty was sung by Pushkin, whose domineering spirit existing by itself and outside of the sense of all human volitions that blossom and sway on its mysterious mists, frightened Gogol, appalled Dostoevsky, enchanted Blok; the city whose mysterious self-centered spirit shows yet another facet in the mystic, almost superstitious awe of the Muscovite Bely. There is for instance this passage: Petersburg streets possess one indubitable property: they turn passers-by into shadows. This we have seen in the example of the mysterious stranger. Having come into being as a mental image, somehow he got c­ onnected with the senator’s house; then reappeared upon the avenue, ­following closely the senator in our tale.2

Or this description of a crowded street: All the shoulders constituted a dense slowly flowing stickiness; Alexander Ivanovich’s shoulder glued itself onto it: got stuck in it—so to say; he ­followed his shoulder in conformity to the law of completeness of bodies; and thus he flung onto the Nevsky [Prospect]. What is a caviar grain? There, the bodies on the sidewalk become one body, grains of the same caviar: and the sidewalks of Nevsky are so much sandwich-surface; his thought was immersed in the thinking capacity of the many-legged being, which was scurrying down Nevsky Prospect. Then silently they lost themselves in contemplation of the numerous legs; while the sticky mass crawled: crawled along and shuffled on its many feet; it was pasted together of segments and every segment was a body.   2 This essay appears to contain one of the first partial translations of Petersburg. The novel first appeared in a complete English translation by John Cournos in 1959. Furthermore, it is quite clear that Nabokov is citing the shorter second edition of the novel, which was published in Berlin in 1922. A 1934 letter to Vladislav Khodasevich relates how “long ago” he “read it four times—in rapture.” (I am grateful to Brian Boyd for this information from a Yale University archive.)

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There were no people on Nevsky; but there was there a crawling c­ lamoring centipede; the damp space poured together the multiplicity of voices, forming a multiplicity of words; all words, intermingling, became merged in one sentence; and the sentence seemed senseless; it hung over Nevsky Prospect; and a black smoke of unrealities hung over it. And out of these unrealities, the Neva [River], swelling, roared and beat against her massive granite parapets. The crawling centipede is ghastly; down Nevsky, it runs through the centuries; and higher, above Nevsky—times are running out. There above, things are changing; but here—all is unchangeable; periods of time have their end. The human centipede has no end; all segments change but it itself is the same; the head is turned away from the railway station; the tail is turned off on the Morskaya Street; along Nevsky segment-footed links are shuffling along.

Here people cease to act as people. A weird doom takes over and directs their activities towards unpredictable ends. The book like Bely’s other novels is written in an extremely subjective style, a kind of rhythmic prose, full of unprecedented sharp turns putting sometimes the most trivial words into such unwonted relief that, in their embarrassment, they begin to emit a new, often abstract, sense which you could hardly have ever thought them capable of doing. This queer rhythm and treatment of the language was eventually pushed by Bely to such extremes that his method began to obscure his intention instead of emphasizing it (Finnegans Wake). Bely was a very odd personality—just on the brink between genius and lunacy. He became wildly enthusiastic about absurd philosophies; during his last years and to his death he was an anthroposophist. Unfortunately, I cannot devote any more space to this lurid, exotic, ­aggravating, entrancing phenomenon. His first novel, The Silver Dove, would also merit a translation and a detailed analysis. His later work, as I have just mentioned, is often almost unintelligible. He has in common with James Joyce his absolute departure from, I would say his complete break with, all conventional forms of literature. With the exception of The Silver Dove, all that his novels (as Joyce’s too) have in common with other novels is their being works of fiction written about the same characters from beginning to end and containing a number of pages usually understood to represent a “novel.” Everything else: treatment of the theme, approach, style, every method involved differs widely from those of every other writer and is essentially individually and inimitably his own. This very great writer, untranslated and quite unknown outside of Russia, was also a poet of great originality and talent.

On Petersburg

The time—the end of the XIXth century going into the beginning of the XXth—was a time “fin de siècle,” not only because a numerical century was coming to an end but because it represented the final stage of that period, of that century of Russian culture which began with Pushkin and ended with Blok. [. . .] Great artists in the true sense of the word are only those who added to the treasures of art something that has not been there before them. However attractive a book may seem to us at first sight, however original, we are bound for disappointment if it is not true art in the above-explained sense. Because some day, as we spend more time on reading and thinking, [the] time will come when we discover that true source, the artist who truly made the discovery and gave the world a new revelation, and if our former subject of admiration was not him, we shall soon realize that our worship was m ­ isplaced and that we had simply mistaken a reflection for the true object. Once a thing has been said, and said well, in a perfect fusion of s­ ubject matter and form, no other man can do it again and earn the laurels of a true artist unless he has added a new tremor, a new touch of beauty to what had been done by his ­predecessor. However, there exists another rather odd ­phenomenon: a man of no true ­literary genius may make a discovery, but never succeed in making a perfect work of art with it and then after him, another, a true genius, may come and pick up the poor discovery out of the mud of flat writing, and make of it something truly great and beautiful. Such was the case of Trediakovsky—a third-rate versifier of the XVIIIth century, ­contemporary of Lomonosov. Trediakovsky was the first poet convinced that Russian verse should be metrical, not syllabic. He was right, but he never wrote a good poem: it was Lomonosov who was the first to write real metric verse in Russian. Stream of consciousness was invented by an obscure French writer Dujardin some 50 years ago.3 Prepared by Brett Cooke, Texas A&M University

  3 Édouard Dujardin published Les Lauriers sont coupés (The Laurels Are Cut Down) in 1888. This statement suggests that Nabokov drafted this undated essay in the late 1930s or early 1940s. In a personal communication, Brian Boyd suggests this was likely in late 1940 or early 1941, when Nabokov wrote about a hundred lectures on Russian literature in hopes of teaching at American colleges. That Nabokov does not mention the 1941–45 blockade of Leningrad in his brief history of the city lends additional support to this dating.

xiii

Introduction OLGA M. COOKE

Since that fraught time when the metal Horseman came hastening to the banks of the Neva, since that time, fraught with days when he thrust his steed on to the grey Finnish granite—Russia has been split in twain; the very fates of the fatherland have been split in twain as well; suffering and weeping, until the final hour—Russia has been split in twain. You, Russia, are like the steed! Your two front hooves are raised over the dark, the emptiness; and your two rear hooves are firmly set in the granite earth.1 Andrey Bely, Petersburg

Andrey Bely’s Petersburg not only constituted a turning point in the development of the Russian novel but also, like Igor′ Stravinsky’s Rite of ­ Spring and Vasily Kandinsky’s abstract paintings, participated in inaugurating ­modernism in the twentieth century. Bely’s pivotal achievement, begun in 1911 and completed in 1913, embraced numerous avant-garde features (namely, a shift in ­consciousness, a new way of seeing, verbal experimentation, streamof-­consciousness technique, and the ability to encapsulate an entire age into a few days); in all, it exemplified the symbolist dictum A realibus ad realiora, in which a transcendent reality is seen as superior to appearances of the world.2 Bely’s power as an innovator depended on an interplay of narrative voices, ­creating a mythic epic, which not only sought to apply recent scientific dis­coveries, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, to art,3 but also embraced what Joseph Frank   1 All translations (except those noted) come from John Elsworth’s translation of Petersburg (London: Pushkin Press, 2009).   2 Georgette Donchin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1958).   3 As early as 1907 Bely was the first to use the term “nonobjectivity” (bezpredmetnost′) in his essay “The Future Art,” where the method of creation becomes the “object in itself.” See

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called the “spatialization” of literature.4 Ultimately, Bely’s ­masterpiece ­embodies Vladimir Nabokov’s definition of what constitutes major artistry: “Great ­artists in the true sense of the word are only those who added to the t­reasures of art something that has not been there before them.”5 Viacheslav Ivanov predicted that the novel would “forever hold a place in our literary heritage,” basing his prophecy on the “astral” dimensions of the text, its seismographic ravings, its hallucinatory visions of a “young poet who is vitally drawn into the maelstrom of ruinous events, and who feels the blow of the bronze hooves of the spectral Horseman on his own psyche.”6 Written in rhythmical prose and permeated with leitmotifs, assonances, and alliterations, Bely’s a­coustic effects ­resemble a ­veritable orchestra, according to Konstantin Mochul´skii.7 Basing his ­observations on Bely’s “Cubist” fragmentation, Nikolai Berdiaev ­maintained that for Bely “the holistic coverings of world flesh are demolished, and for him there are already no integral organic forms. The Cubist method of the ­disintegration of every organic being is applied by him to literature.”8 This comment ­approximates the scale of Bely’s immense achievement in Petersburg. On meeting Bely in 1902, Valerii Briusov quipped, “I’ve just met Boris Bugaev, the most interesting man in Russia.”9 Born in Moscow in 1880, Bely was the son of Nikolai Vasil′evich Bugaev, the dean of the Faculty of Mathematics at Moscow University, and Aleksandra Dmitrievna Bugaeva, a socialite and famous Muscovite beauty, who served as the model for Konstantin Makovskii’s bride in the painting A Boyar Wedding Feast. One theme that runs throughout Bely’s memoirs, and is clearly reflected in Petersburg,10 is the Andrei Belyi, “Budushchee iskusstvo,” in Simvolizm (Moscow, 1910; repr., Munich: Fink Verlag, 1969), 452.   4 Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 10. The quality of modern literature that Frank called “spatial” represented a form that grows out of the writer’s attempt to negate the temporal principle inherent in language and “to apprehend their work spatially, in a total thing in a moment of time rather than as a sequence.”   5 See Nabokov’s essay in this volume.   6 Vyacheslav Ivanov, “The Inspiration of Horror: Bely’s Petersburg,” in The Noise of Change: Russian Literature and the Critics, 1891–1917, ed. and trans. Stanley Rabinowitz (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), 209.   7 Konstantin Mochulʹskii, Andrei Belyi (Paris: YMCA Press, 1955), 181.   8 See Nikolai Berdyaev, “An Astral Novel: Some Thoughts on Andrei Bely’s Petersburg,” in Rabinowitz, Noise of Change, 201.   9 Valery Bryusov, The Diary of Valery Bryusov, 1893–1905, ed. and trans. Joan Grossman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 130. 10 Magnus Ljunggren interprets Petersburg as a “working through of Belyj’s traumatic relation to his father.” See his Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Peterburg” (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1982), 9.

Introduction

emotional roller coaster that was to define his schizophrenic childhood. Bely describes how a virtual battle over the control of himself as a child led to what Bely called “the problem of scissors,” one blade of which represented his rational, scientific father, and the other his musical, intuitive mother. As he realized, through delirium, nightmares, and trauma, that he was the source of domestic discord, Bely exclaimed, “They are tearing me to pieces; once again I am terrified to death; I hear words about a separation”; “I am ­defenseless: there’s no nanny, no servant; I have parents and they are tearing me in two; fear and suffering fill me up: again—the scissors.”11 In Petersburg Nikolai Apollonovich’s Dionysian experiences, entailing frightening hallucinations of “being torn to pieces,” clearly hark back to Bely’s filial relationships. After his literary debut with his first published work, Second Symphony, Dramatic, in 1902, Bely was joined by two more members of the so-called Second Wave of symbolists, Aleksandr Blok and Viacheslav Ivanov. To avoid embarrassing his father, Bely decided to use a pseudonym. Although he would remain “Boria” to family and friends, Boris Bugaev officially became Andrey Bely (the “White”). Considered “legendary” and the “darling of Russian ­literary circles,”12 Bely has been called a writer’s writer, the father of Russian modernism, the “Russian Joyce.”13 Bely was such an idol among the youth at the time that everyone, according to Vladislav Khodasevich, would fall “a little in love with him.”14 Petersburg is also a roman à clef, dramatizing Bely’s tragic love affair with Blok’s wife, Liubov′ Dmitrievna Blok, in the form of Nikolai Apollonovich’s pursuit of Sergei Likhutin’s wife, Sof′ia Petrovna. At the same time as the cult of the Beautiful Lady, Bely viewed Blok’s wife as the incarnation of the Divine Sophia. Indeed, along with Sergei Solov′ev, Bely cultivated a vision of a Madonna-like figure to be worshipped and adored even before he met Liubov′.15 By the time Bely began writing Petersburg, five years after his “Petersburg drama,” many artistic changes had occurred in his life: he had had a falling out with his closest friend, Blok; written his first novel, The Silver Dove, 11 See Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930; repr., Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1966), 174. 12 Oleg Maslenikov, The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 106. 13 Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin, ed. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 245. 14 Vladislav Khodasevich, Nekropol′ (Paris: YMCA Press, 1939), 80. 15 Ada Steinberg maintains that Bely’s portrait of Sof′ia Petrovna undergoes a complete reversal of the Divine Sophia. See her “On the Structure of Parody in Andrej Bely’s Peterburg,” Slavica Hierosolymitana (Jerusalem) 1 (1977): 145–53.

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in 1909; met his future wife, Asia Turgeneva; traveled throughout Europe and northern Africa; pursued his studies in theosophy and the occult; and continued his search for a spiritual father, eventually manifested in the figure of Rudolf Steiner. The culmination of this period coincided with his s­ piritual rebirth—namely, his commitment to anthroposophy, called the “most ­important event of his life”16—which occurred on a train trip in Norway in October 1913. Bely had originally planned Petersburg, his second novel, as a sequel to The Silver Dove, conceived as a projected trilogy, called East or West. Among the original titles considered were The Lacquered Carriage, The Admiralty Spire, The Red Domino, and Evil Shadows. At first Bely received an offer of ­publication from Russian Thought, but on submitting his manuscript by Christmas of 1911, Petr Struve, the general editor of the journal, rejected it out of hand. Even Bely’s friendship with Valerii Briusov, the literary editor, could not salvage the original agreement. Worried that Bely’s novel would not find a publisher, Viacheslav Ivanov assembled all of his associates at his Tower and had Bely read aloud to the Anichkovs, Fedor Sologub, and Aleksey Tolstoy, “shouting that my novel was epoch-making.”17 Ivanov insisted, “Boris, there is only one title for your work—Petersburg and so it will be.”18 Thus, Bely ­considered Ivanov the “godfather” of the novel. Thanks to Ivanov’s c­ ampaign and encouragement, after all the fuss that Ivanov had raised, p ­ ublishers came running to print the novel. In 1912 the Nekrasov publishing house considered the manuscript, which by then had been completely revised, but Nekrasov’s edition was never published. Once again desperate to find the means to ­continue his stay abroad with Asia Turgeneva, Bely transferred the manuscript to the miscellany Sirin, whose editor M. I. Tereshchenko s­ erialized the novel in three parts, in the newly founded anthologies of 1913–14. Bely was finally able to bring it out in book form, based on the Sirin edition, in 1916. Petersburg focuses on the attempted assassination of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov by his son, Nikolai Apollonovich, who is ordered by a group of ­terrorists to kill his father. Apollon Apollonovich is an imperial senator ­modeled loosely on Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an ideologue of the extreme right during the reign of Alexander III, while the pseudointellectual neo-­Kantian Nikolai Apollonovich, not unlike Goncharov’s bathrobe-clad Oblomov, occupies a soporific existence but embraces an interest in philosophy and m ­ etaphysics. Both 16 See Ljunggren, Dream of Rebirth, 112–17. 17 Andrei Belyi, Nachalo veka (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel′stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1933), 326. 18 Ibid.

Introduction

father and son are tied to the rational West, but by virtue of the Mongol blood coursing through their veins, they are also servants of the East, ­controlled by an irrational fate that demands retribution for Peter the Great’s egomaniacal sin of placing Russia’s capital on its Finnish shores. Occupying an equally important place is the ubiquitous mystic-terrorist Dudkin, who delivers the bomb to Nikolai in a sardine can, and whose proactive nature in trying to avert the impending assassination plot against Apollon qualifies him as the novel’s main hero.19 Although the explosion of the bomb hurts no one, it leads to the spiritual destruction of virtually every character. Even though the ghost of Christ appears in the novel to triumph over the forces of darkness, in the end the Bronze Horseman wins.20 Ultimately, Bely uses the theme of parricide to illustrate the pervasive deterioration of the family and nation. The streets teem with agents, revolutionaries, spies, bureaucrats, and other Gogolian homunculi, accompanied by malarial canals, crouching buildings, and slums. But this is merely on the surface. Petersburg represents the first time in Russian literature that a city is the hero of the novel. “The Petersburg of October 1905 symbolizes the border of an enormous epoch, behind which dawns the beginning of a new, unknown period,” maintains Dolgopolov.21 He says for Bely only Petersburg could represent the “nexus” of mankind’s destiny.22 In essence, Petersburg the city and Petersburg the novel together merge as a map of the modern mind. As Marshall Berman expounds on Bely’s modernist cityscape, “It [the novel] consists almost entirely of broken and jagged fragments: fragments of social and political life in the city’s streets, fragments of the inner lives of the people on those streets.”23 Bely’s understanding of the modern Russian city was supplemented by impressions gathered from urban life of other cultures, especially his negative views of European cities, in addition to this literary myth. Much of Petersburg was written after an extended tour of France, Italy, and northern Africa.24 Indeed, traveling to these places “convinced Bely that 19 See my “Letuchii Dudkin: Shamanstvo v Peterburge Andreia Belogo,” in Andrei Belyi Publikatsii: Issledovaniia, ed. A. G. Boichuk (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2002), 220–27. 20 According to Leonid Dolgopolov, Christ’s appearance is “the one bright spot in the novel.” See his Andrei Belyi i ego roman Peterburg (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1988), 333. 21 Ibid., 315. 22 Ibid. 23 See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 256. Berman develops the idea that even the punctuation floats alone and is lost in empty space. 24 According to Magnus Ljunggren, “The book was written in 20 different places in five different countries, from October 1911 near Moscow to December 1913 in Berlin.” See

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Russia is destined for a very unique journey through history.”25 Not unlike Dostoevsky’s Slavophilic pronouncements against European culture, Bely’s letters from abroad to Aleksandr Kozhebatkin express an uncanny hatred for everything European: “I return ten times more Russian: my five-month ­relationship with Europeans, with these walking executioners of life, has embittered me greatly: thank God, we Russians are not Europe; we have to treasure our un-Europeanness [. . .]. As a matter of course, every time it comes to the question of ‘Europe,’ I make a point of poking European ugliness right in the eye.”26 What gives rise to the cultural mythology of Petersburg that it would embrace a phenomenon such as a “Petersburg text”? As the citation o­ pening this introduction suggests, Petersburg was built on a literary tradition that highlighted the city’s schizophrenic dimension. Petersburg is not merely an actual city created by Peter the Great; it is also a myth created by the literary greats of the nineteenth century. Operating on multiple levels of intertextuality, the novel engages in a polemical discussion with its literary ­antecedents—the many masterpieces by Russian nineteenth-century literary giants pertaining to the city. From Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman Bely borrows the image of Peter the Great, at once benevolent patriarch and avenging metallic statue, intent on splitting Russia’s consciousness in two. Indeed, no writer, except perhaps Gogol, exerted a deeper hold on Bely than Pushkin. Every chapter of Petersburg is preceded by an epigraph from Pushkin: ­citations from “Ezerskii,” “God Grant That I Not Go Mad,” Boris Godunov, Evgenii Onegin, and especially The Bronze Horseman. Resembling the hero of The Bronze Horseman, Dudkin, “his Evgenii,” emerges directly, according to Bely, from the Decembrists, who attempted a coup d’état in 1825. Insofar as Bely’s hero is an i­ncarnation of Pushkin’s Evgenii “running in vain for a century,” Dudkin ­finishes Evgenii’s task. Looking at the past from the ­present, Bely was influenced not so much by the introduction of Pushkin’s poem (i.e., Pushkin’s paean to Peter’s city) but rather by what Dolgopolov terms “the ­realistic-tragic content of the poem, in which the episode of the mighty Horseman ­pursuing Evgenii ­occupies the ­central place.”27 Bely ­considered Pushkin’s “­bronze-browed giant chased through periods of time right up Magnus Ljunggren, “Peterburg and Switzerland,” in Twelve Essays on Andrej Belyj’s “Peterburg” (Stockholm: Goteborgs Universitet, 2009), 133. 25 Dolgopolov, Andrei Belyi, 295. 26 Ibid., 297. 27 Ibid., 301.

Introduction

to the present moment, closing the well-forged circle,”28 to represent an ­apocalyptic allusion to Peter’s curse on the city, as well as the Nietzschean symbol, so essential to Bely, of “eternal return.” Indeed, Pushkin’s Peter is such an ­omnipresent force in Petersburg that, according to Olʹga Forsh, he is “more alive than any other character in the novel.”29 Nikolai Gogol’s Petersburg Tales resound through the nightmarish, ­ghostlike personalities that inhabit Bely’s cityscape.30 Bely’s are not simply disembodied Gogolian noses, bowler hats, and canes that come alive in the streets, but together they rise up menacingly to create a “myriapod” ­(mnogonozhka). In his Mastery of Gogol, Bely even italicized whole phrases from Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, lining them up with passages from his novel, to pay homage to Gogol.31 Moreover, Gogol’s satirical style, fraught with sound orchestration and symbolism, also attracted Bely, insofar as Gogol was seen, not only by Bely but by all symbolists, as a precursor of modernism. At the same time Bely’s eschatological prophecies are undercut by parody and the grotesque. As Samuel Cioran notes, whereas in The Silver Dove Dar′ial′skii “was spared the author’s parody, all the major characters of Petersburg emerge as rather grotesque exaggerations of some earlier symbolist concept.”32 Just as in Gogol, “the whole novel is a theatre of grotesque masks wearily drifting through a grotesquely distorted, unreal stage.”33 Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and Brothers Karamazov provide ample ­patri­cidal subplots in Petersburg, replete with doubles and love-hate ­relationships between ossified fathers and their bungling revolutionary sons. In this volume, ­contributors Carol Anschuetz and Adam Weiner address the immense Dostoevskian subtexts of Bely’s novel. Nikolai Apollonovich’s r­elationship with his mother also echoes that of Anna and Serezha in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Moreover, Tolstoy’s theme of adultery is explored, albeit in a perversely comic way, insofar as the Ableukhov family crisis begins with Apollon Apollonovich’s wife, Anna Petrovna, running off with her Italian lover. This momentous event coincides both with Nikolai Apollonovich’s failed love affair with Sof′ia Petrovna and with his promise to commit a terrorist act. A family reconstitution, a common Tolstoyan motif, is, 28 Ibid., 411. 29 Ol′ga Forsh, “Propetyi gerbarii,” in Sovremennaia literatura: Sbornik stat′ei (Leningrad: Mysl′, 1925), 34. 30 Mochulʹskii called the city a “ghost,” as well as the population. See Mochul′skii, Andrei Belyi, 174. 31 Cf. Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow-Leningrad: OGIZ, 1934), 297–308. 32 Samuel D. Cioran, The Apocalyptic Symbolism of Andrej Belyj (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 155. 33 Georgette Donchin, introduction to Peterburg, by Andrey Bely (repr., Chicago: Russian Language Specialties, 1967), vi.

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unfortunately, thwarted on the night the bomb explodes, however harmlessly. Indeed, Bely prophesized grimly that his ­twentieth-century bacchanalian novel of filial ties would outdo its Dostoevskian and Tolstoyan forebears. In addition to themes of family despotism and revolutionary nihilism, the implications of ­surveillance in the twentieth century are explored in Bely’s novel. In the present volume Aleksandr Lavrov’s essay on Bely’s indebtedness to novels of ­terrorism, such as Conrad’s Secret Agent and Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, ­elucidates this theme. Petersburg also addresses the political and philosophical issues of its day, using the debacle of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, as well as the failed ­revolution of the same year, as a backdrop. Indeed, with threats of explosions occurring on the microcosmic as well as macrocosmic level, a p ­ reoccupation with the end of the world becomes the essential condition of modern life in Petersburg. Modernist novels à la Bely demand a multifaceted approach. Many a critic has commented on the many-layered qualities of Petersburg. For ­example, George Reavey observed, “It is not easy to render its multiple ­meanings, its brilliance, in another language. As in the case of James Joyce, his works raise many problems for the translator—those of alliteration, allusion, verbal ­association and symbolism, poetic rhythm, ellipsis, onomatopoeia, the transferred image, puns, the symbolism of proper names, ambiguities, a cyclic order, the ­interpenetration of reality and myth, musical refrains and motifs, structure, punctuation . . .”34 To reinforce the supernatural messages that ­emanate from a spaceless and timeless universe, Bely uses noises from the elemental world in Petersburg; the city is charged with constant i­ntrusions based on sound and sensations. The apocalyptic sound of “oo” in the names Ableookhov, Doodkin, and Likhootin and in words like “Peterboorg,” ­“revolootion,” and ­“evolootion”35 streams out into the streets of Petersburg. At one point the sound “oo” stands independently in the text, as though living its own life, clearly displaying the sound as a leitmotif of revolution: “Ooo-ooo-ooo.” There was a buzzing in the space around and through that “ooo” there resounded now and then: “Revolution. . . Evolution. . . Proletariat. . . Strike. . .” And then again: “Strike. . .” And again: “Strike. . .” (130)

In a scene that blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, “oo” pursues Dudkin as he makes his way up a dirty staircase. 34 George Reavey, introduction to The Silver Dove, by Andrey Bely (New York: Grove Press, 1974), xxxvi. 35 My emphasis.

Introduction

Moreover, as the sound of the bomb ticks away in the pulsating s­ ardine can, another expanding image stands in contradistinction to the ossified stony bureaucracy, which Apollon Apollonovich represents. At one point in the sixth chapter, the scene in which Dudkin learns the double agent Lippanchenko has betrayed the revolutionaries, the aforementioned ­myriapod of ­pedestrians begins to gain force, as though it were an active lava flow. As we enter Dudkin’s consciousness, the viscousness of this creeping myriapod is described as ­disembodied organs of a general body: A miscellany of voices—a miscellany of voices—was pouring out into a single moisture-laden space; coherent sentences clashed against each other and broke; and words flew apart there senselessly and terribly like the shards of empty bottles, all broken in a single spot: all of them, mixed at random, were woven together again into a sentence that flew for all infinity, without beginning or end; this sentence seemed senseless and woven from fantasy: the unalleviated senselessness of the sentence thus composed hung like black soot over the Nevskii. (343)

This myriapod shuffles along Nevsky Prospect “with no head, no tail, no ­consciousness, no thought; the myriapod creeps past as it has always crept; and as it has crept, so it will go on creeping. Truly a scolopendra!” (344). This is a world in flux. Winds, cloud formations, mists, bacteria-infested waters, the moon peering on Dudkin’s ecstatic trances, all elemental attendants participate cabbalistically, emphasizing the domination of the spirit world. According to Irina Odoevtseva, Bely expounded on the phantasmagoric dimension of his novel by describing the Petersburg of his creation as a “­spectre, a ­vampire, which materializes out of yellow, rotting, feverish fogs, which I [Bely] ­translated into squares, parallelograms, cubes, and trapezoids.”36 Yet other c­ ritics arrange Bely’s narrative worlds into “two alien worlds” (25), using Bely’s own words from the novel—namely, the “visible” world, consisting of the city prospects and the islands, and the “invisible” world, consisting of the bureaucratic ­government and the revolutionary forces.37 But to comprehend these dazzling forward and backward leaps in time and space, the reader must develop new organs of perception to see in a suprasensible way. To reveal the chaos that exists under the surface of appearances, Bely shattered all planes of vision, and in doing so broke away from three-dimensional representations of reality. 36 Irina Odoevtseva, “Iz knigi ‘Na beregakh Nevy,’” in Vospominaniia o Belom (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Respublika, 1995), 218. 37 Lubomír Doležel, “The Visible and the Invisible Petersburg,” Russian Literature 7 (1979): 466.

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It is impossible to speak about Petersburg without an insight into the most important person in Bely’s life, more important, perhaps, than his two wives and his parents—namely, Rudolf Steiner. In Bely’s biography, one factor comes to the fore: he desperately sought a spiritual master for a guide, in essence, a father figure, to lead him through the myriads of spiritual s­ystems then at his disposal. As Magnus Ljunggren documents in this volume, v­ irtually every convulsive event taking place within the consciousness of his characters in fact occurred in Bely’s life from the moment he met Rudolf Steiner in Cologne, Germany, in May 1912. From that point on, Bely changed the t­ rajectory of the novel, as well as the trajectory of his life. The intensive training Bely undertook on his conversion to anthroposophy ­confirmed to him that ­rigorous exposure to “occult knowledge” would lead to the type of c­ onsciousness raising that he had sought all his adult life. Insofar as Bely, like his fellow symbolists, held that art was an act of theurgy, and that he was himself an initiate in the secret knowledge derived from esoteric philosophers, his meeting with Steiner may have seemed like predestination.38 On the noumenal level (or the “astral” level, as Berdiaev asserted), Bely “plunges man into cosmic infinity” and “hands him over to be torn to pieces by cosmic whirlwinds.”39 Consonant with Steiner’s anthroposophical thinking, Bely’s inhabitants travel in and out of dreams; they have out-of-body, visionary experiences, confirming that they have passed through countless incarnations. As soon as Bely began his so-called Steineriad—that is, his journey throughout Europe in 1912–13, on which he listened to and absorbed Steiner’s lectures—Bely’s anthroposophical experiences “provide[d] the novel exceptional material.”40 Steiner presented a transcendent spiritual realm undergoing evolution, a ­concept without which Petersburg could not be fully understood. Even before Bely became a member of the Anthroposophical Society, whose founding Bely and Asia Turgeneva witnessed in Germany, he integrated his experiences of the occult into his art.41

38 See Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical ­Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 203. 39 Berdyaev, “Astral Novel,” 210. 40 See Ljunggren’s essay “The Bomb, the Baby, the Book” in this volume. 41 The writing of Petersburg was followed by two intense years in Dornach, Switzerland (1914–16). Among the most comprehensive studies of Bely and anthroposophy is John Elsworth’s “Bely and Anthroposophy,” in Andrey Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37–53.

Introduction

As defined by Gerald Janecek, anthroposophy is an “occult system in which the main tenet is that each man contains within himself the potential to attain knowledge of the spiritual world. He develops the power to p ­ enetrate deeper and deeper into this realm by a variety of spiritual exercises which ­cultivate in him the previously dormant organs of supersensible perception.”42 Throughout fin-de-siècle Russia, lecture halls and salons reverberated with the teachings of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Bely’s lexicon of mysticism would echo Steiner, who, like many mystical philosophers of the time, advocated developing new organs for ­spiritual vision. For Bely, such new vision would go hand in hand with a “new language” for higher consciousness. This interpretation accommodates several occult cosmologies simultaneously, and, we can be sure, Bely was aware of them all.43 “A primary reason why the voices of Blavatsky and Steiner were heeded so carefully in Russia at this time,” asserts John Bowlt, “lies in the fact that the Symbolists had been repeating similar things for several years. There is essentially no difference between attitudes toward the inner or higher reality on the part of Steiner and Bely, Blavatsky and Ivanov.”44 As Bely said himself, “All of Petersburg is saturated with anthroposophy, and especially in the striking psychological passages.”45 In a letter written to Ivanov-Razumnik in December 1913, Bely emphasized, My entire novel depicts in symbols of place and time the subconscious life of distorted thought forms. [. . .] My Petersburg is, in fact, a captured image of the unconscious life of people consciously distanced from their own elementalness; the mind of the one who consciously denies the experience of this elementalness will be destroyed by this very force when, for some reason or other, it becomes unbound; the real place where the action of the novel is taking place is the soul of some character not given in the novel, a character overstrained by the working of his brain; and the dramatis personae are forms of thought which have not yet found their way through to the threshold of consciousness, so to speak. And everyday life, Petersburg, 42 Gerald Janecek, “Anthroposophy in Kotik Letaev,” Orbis Litterarum 29 (1974): 246. 43 “The Magic of Words,” to take but one example, attests to Bely’s immersion in and vast knowledge of occult texts. In addition to Blavatsky, Bely discusses Annie Besant, Édouard Schuré, Éliphas Lévi, Fabre d’Olivet, Louis Ménard, G. R. S. Mead, Charles Leadbeater, Steiner, and others. See Andrey Bely, “Magiia slov,” in Simvolizm, 624. 44 John Bowlt, “Esoteric Culture and Russian Society,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 173. 45 Andrei Belyi, Pochemu ia stal simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt′ vo vsekh fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo razvitiia (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982), 94.

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provocation with the revolution going on somewhere in the background of the novel—all this is but the contingent exterior of those forms of thought. The whole novel might have been called “Cerebral Play.”46

Bely considered Cerebral Play as a title for the novel. The first character we see engaging in cerebral play is Apollon Apollonovich. Just as Apollon Apollonovich comes into being by virtue of the author/narrator’s cerebral play, so Dudkin comes into being by the act of Apollon’s cognition; thus, chapter 1 depicts the appearance of Dudkin as arising from Apollon’s thoughts. We learn that, since both characters are, as the narrator reminds us, “products of the author’s imagination” (73), Dudkin is given shape by virtue of Apollon’s perception, just as Apollon is a product of “idle, cerebral play.” “Cerebral play” is defined at the end of chapter 1: Cerebral play is only a mask; beneath this mask proceeds the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us: and what if Apollon Apollonovich is woven from our brain—he will still be able to terrify with another startling existence that attacks at night. Apollon Apollonovich is endowed with the attributes of this existence; and with the attributes of this existence all his cerebral play is endowed too. Once his brain has erupted in the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists—exists in fact: he will not vanish from the Petersburg Prospects, as long as the senator exists with thoughts of this kind, because thought, too, exists. So let our stranger be a real stranger! And let my stranger’s two ­shadows be real shadows! Those dark shadows will keep following on the stranger’s heels, just as the stranger follows straight after the senator; and the senescent senator, dear reader, will come chasing after you too in his black carriage: and from now on you will never forget him! (74)

In other words, the author implicates the reader in his terrorist plot, ­insofar as it is thought-forms that have the capability to affect life on the physical plane.47 These notions are treated by Maria Carlson, Roger Keys, and 46 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg, ed. Leonid Dolgopolov (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Nauka, 1981), 516. My translation is based on Roger Keys’s essay in this volume and on Sanja Bahun, Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 79. 47 Vladimir Alexandrov also discusses Bely’s anthroposophical underpinnings to the image of thoughts taking on a life all their own. See his Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 111–14.

Introduction

Anna Ponomareva in their contributions here. As David Bethea suggests, “The narrator’s chatter can be idle and at the same time an index to the need for an open-ended structure, one that allows the intrusion of the fourth dimension into the three-dimensional realm of habitual cognition.”48 Everyone in the novel is touched by the power of the noumenal. Just as Apollon Apollonovich experiences his second space in cosmic terms (“Sometimes, just before the final moment of daytime consciousness, Apollon Apollonovich would notice, as he dropped to sleep, that all the threads, all the stars, as they formed a ­gurgling vortex, whirled together to create a corridor running off into i­nfinity” (184), so Nikolai Apollonovich and Dudkin tap into mystical revelations via dreams, hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness.49 For Nikolai Apollonovich the growth of his delirium coincides with hallucinations of the world blown to bits, in which he imagines himself to be the bomb: Nikolai Apollonovich understood that he was only a bomb; and he burst with a bang [. . .]. —Pepp Peppovich Pepp, this little ball of terrible import, was quite simply a bomb belonging to the party: it was ticking away there inaudibly [. . .]. Pepp Peppovich Pepp would expand, expand, expand. (321)

It is at this stage that Nikolai Apollonovich inadvertently winds the m ­ echanism of the sardine can. Revelations brought about by contact with the ­noumenon may provide Apollon, Nikolai, and Dudkin with mystical insight, but it is a mystical insight undercut by an inconclusive finale. By the time the bomb finally explodes, after Nikolai repeatedly resists throwing the bomb into the Neva as advised by Likhutin and Dudkin, the blast seems ­anticlimactic. Their brief chance at family happiness is destroyed: soon after Apollon Apollonovich publishes his memoirs, both parents die. The epilogue, which provides a glimpse of Nikolai’s transformation in Egypt, seems as inconclusive as Dostoevsky’s epilogue to Crime and Punishment. Whether one reads the novel on a historical, philosophical, biblical, or mythical level, one will find that the key element, as far as Bely is concerned, is always Logos. More important than the multifaceted layers of the novel is Bely’s love affair with the word, insofar as the only salvation for a world ­crumbling to pieces is in the creative power of words to create new a­ ssociations. 48 David Bethea, “The Apocalyptic Horseman, the Unicorn, and the Verticality of Narrative,” in The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 129. 49 See my “Letuchii Dudkin.”

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In ­addition to expounding on his belief that naming a thing causes that thing to come into being, Bely’s essay “The Magic of Words” maintains that ­“language is the most powerful weapon of creation.”50 Not only does he lavish loving detail on every word, making his rhythmic novel pulsate with ­assonance and alliteration, but Bely shows the reader that in a world on the brink of ­destruction, the most transfiguring force that counters destruction is verbal. As mentioned earlier, the novel exists mainly in two editions, the o­ riginal Sirin edition and the shortened so-called Berlin edition of 1922. Bely revised the book once more for a 1919 German-language edition. Between the two principal editions there were two modified versions, one published in 1928 based on the Berlin edition, and another one in 1935, both with minor changes. John Elsworth maintains, “The more this issue is examined, the more it becomes apparent that it is the ‘Sirin’ edition of Petersburg that must be regarded as the canonical text of the novel.”51 The English translation we are using of the 1916 Petersburg is that of John Elsworth (London: Pushkin Press, 2009), which some of our contributors have amended slightly where they felt that a different rendering would better highlight textual elements particularly relevant to their studies. As for the definitive Russian version, I have used Leonid Dolgopolov’s “Literaturnye pamiatniki” text of Petersburg (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Nauka, 1981).

Contributions to the Volume To celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Petersburg’s first full ­publication, this volume offers a cross section of essays, both old and new, that address the most pertinent aspects of Bely’s 1916 masterpiece. Among its contributors are illustrious Bely scholars, whose works are as relevant today as they were many years ago; I speak of Carol Anschuetz, Maria Carlson, Charlene Castellano, Roger Keys, Aleksandr Lavrov, Magnus Ljunggren, and Ada Steinberg. Younger scholars such as Jacob Emery, Timothy Langen, Anna Ponomareva, Adam Weiner, and Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, whose essays are either republished or newly composed, represent fresh voices in Bely studies. Carol Anschuetz begins her essay “Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel” by calling the novel “an act of provocation.” Considering the importance of surveillance in the novel, as well as in Bely’s life, she posits that 50 Andrei Belyi, “Magiia slov,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, ed. L. Sugai (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 131. 51 Elsworth, Andrey Bely, 116.

Introduction

Petersburg is not so much a philosophical novel as it is a philological novel. The novel, she argues, represents Bely’s attempt to reformulate the problem of theodicy that continually plagued the European conscience, and which in the Russian context entailed the collapse of the autocracy as a victory of Dionysus over the old Apollonian period of order. By illustrating the importance of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, as well as other Nietzschean texts, like Thus Spoke Zarathustra, on the novel, Anschuetz interprets Bely’s achievement as “the intrusion of the spirit of music into poetry.” She also maintains that, while Petersburg may sink back into the swamp from which it emerged, the mythical Petersburg of the novel is a “city of words,” rising out of the flood to be reborn. Maria Carlson’s “Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg” is one of the most cited studies in Bely scholarship. An expert in the Russian occult, Carlson highlights the role of ­cognition, by which Apollon Apollonovich gives form to the world around him. Her d ­ efinition of “cerebral play” begins in occult tradition, entailing the ­fundamental notion that “consciousness creates form.” Thus, not only does Bely approximate the role of creator as theurgist, but virtually every aspect of Petersburg is u ­ nderstood as emanating from the astral world. Carlson also addresses the marriage of personal karma and national karma. Just as the individual is bound by the laws of karma, so is the nation. Thus, one discerns the importance of the Steinerian Christ impulse, represented by the White Domino in the novel. Synesthesia provided Bely, as it did musicians like Aleksandr Scriabin and painters like Vasily Kandinsky, with an opportunity to explore the fusion of the senses. In “Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg,” Charlene Castellano discerns quite a different impulse in Bely’s form-making, this one coming from the French symbolists’ preoccupation with s­ ynesthesia as a metaphysic on which to found their poetry. Castellano finds Bely to be more practically and resourcefully putting synesthesia to use in Petersburg as the narrative principle that structures the novel’s modernist apocalypse. Whether it be the ticking of the bomb, the visage of Cronos, or the ­pronouncements of Saturn, images on every sensory level conspire to create the gnawing feeling that even when it ends, time endures. Perhaps no theme is more central in Petersburg than family ties and generational conflicts. Where does the father begin and the son end? ­ Jacob Emery explores the role of hereditary conflict as evidenced in the ­patricidal theme of the novel. Because the webs of kinship exist on ­multiple levels, Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolai Apollonovich sometimes have trouble ­telling ­themselves apart. Ultimately, Emery’s analysis displays the ­“hermeneutical problems that Petersburg’s omnipresent metaphoric play

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forces on its ­readers,” and it shows how the novel presents itself as the ­realization of a familial metaphor. Roger Keys depicts the elaboration of artifice in Bely’s novel, especially his analysis of “cerebral play,” as well as the art of writing itself, as one of the most controversial features in the novel. Metafictional explanation is now superseded by the narrator’s firm assertion that there are supernatural powers to which the fiction corresponds. Even though the self-conscious narrator assures us that “cerebral play is only a mask,” as Keys maintains, beneath this mask lurks an array of voices: occult, playful, ironic, and, ultimately, obscure. Timothy Langen tackles the role of history in the novel. Langen ­correctly identifies everything in Bely as transforming into symbolist mists and blurs, including the characters themselves. Petersburg has so reduced its i­nhabitants to shadowy figures that, even if all the fragments were r­ econstituted, they would still not approximate a whole. Langen uses the example of ­historiographemes (“existing schemes or ‘abstractions’ for the interpretation of history”) to illustrate a broader understanding of history, rather than simply a ­particular epoch. Instead of being historically accurate, Bely presents a multifaceted view of history that comprehends the ebbs and flows of history in the context of a more Einsteinian worldview, one in which chance and experience and ­unpredictability play a role. In Aleksandr Lavrov’s comparison of Petersburg to Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, there is no proof that Bely knew either novel; nevertheless, the uncanny similarities among all three novels appear to constitute more than a coincidence. Just as the double agent Lippanchenko, the veritable father of the revolutionaries in Petersburg, plots to assassinate Apollon Apollonovich, so Verloc in The Secret Agent, also a double agent, is selected to bomb Greenwich Observatory. Just as in Petersburg, the plot goes awry. For all three authors terrorism and ­surveillance proved to be signs of the times. Clearly, all sensed revolution on the horizon. Revolution did not occur in England, of course, as it did in Russia; nevertheless, politically conservative writers such as Conrad and Chesterton sensed chaos on the horizon. Considering Bely’s enlistment in the Anthroposophical Society when he was precisely in the middle of writing the novel, Magnus Ljunggren ­pinpoints the exact moment when Bely’s novel takes a dramatic turn. By the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913, Bely had radically revised the early chapters of his novel, clearly due to his meeting Steiner. Notably, after Bely began studying Steiner’s lectures in detail, the novel encompassed a new cosmic and satiric dimension: the characters established contact with their astral

Introduction

o­ rigins in visions and dreams. It was as though the final product of the novel ­approximated a baby, a term Bely used more than once. As Ljunggren asserts, “For Bely, the bomb, the baby, and the book are essentially one and the same thing.” Indeed, the Oedipal relationship between Nikolai Apollonovich and his father is duplicated in the way Bely feels about Steiner. According to Ljunggren, Bely felt that he had been “painfully reborn in the likeness of Christ.” Moreover, Ljunggren discusses Bely’s artistic method as a “game of cat and mouse with the reader, and its style ultimately tries to deflect the reader’s gaze from the sacred crux, namely the birth of the u ­ nderlying ­personal ‘myth.’” Bely drew on a great range of philosophical sources, including Eastern mysticism and Plato. Anna Ponomareva employs the dictum Know thyself from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. Tracing the many theosophical books Bely was reading concurrently with his novel writing, Ponomareva focuses on Annie Besant’s and Charles Leadbeater’s concept of thought-forms. Moreover, Bely used his studies of Oriental ideas and his reading of Shcherbatskii’s work on later Buddhists in his character portrayals, especially in his choice of colors. By juxtaposing passages from various translations of Petersburg and by using the language of colors borrowed from theosophical literature, this essay provides an opportunity to look at Petersburg through the prism of Indian ideas. Ada Steinberg addresses the many prototypes for characters in the novel, using Sergei Askol′dov’s notion that fragments of Dudkins and fragments of Ableukhovs “floated in the air” when the novel was written. For example, two worlds are introduced in Petersburg: the visible-tangible world of reality and the “fantastic” plane, which consists of the supersensory, invisible-astral world and the otherworldly-eternal, and which derives only rarely from established tradition. Thus, for example, the traditional phantasmal Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky is supercharged by Bely with the “astral” city (its walls fall to the ground, “breaches” form, astral drafts blow), as is the otherworldly Tatar city with all its classical properties: the turbid river, the shadows of passersby, the world of shadows, and the land of spirits. According to Adam Weiner, just like Dostoevsky’s The Devils, Bely’s novel is a novel of terrorism, but more important, Bely’s interpretation of the devil in Petersburg bears closer resemblance to Steiner’s understanding of Ahriman. To Bely’s mind, Lucifer symbolizes an exclusively spiritual life dominated by the spirit of pride and self-deification, whereas Ahriman represents material life, the spirit of decay, and chaos. Ahriman is the evil spirit who prevents human evolution. Judith Wermuth-Atkinson situates Petersburg in the context of the European Modern. Applying Hermann Bahr’s theory of the modern man,

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along with Ernst Mach’s theory of sensations, Wermuth-Atkinson illustrates how Bely, like his counterparts in the Viennese Secessionist movement, was able to “show modern man his true face.” In addition to forming a mirror image, Petersburg is constructed as a spectacle; in several instances Bely refers directly to life as theater, in Evreinov’s terms, or to life as Verkleidung (costume), in terms of Bahr’s aesthetics, so beloved by Russian symbolists at the turn of the century. Bely expands it to the representation of the whole society and more, of life itself. These brief vignettes, fleshed out in the chapters of this centennial ­commemoration, give some idea of how the novel, like the ticking bomb at its center, explodes into a cornucopia of highly creative intellectual and spiritual adventures.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel CAROL ANSCHUETZ

It may be a provocative gesture to proclaim the end of the Russian novel, but Petersburg reflects the provocative gestures of its author, Andrey Bely. Petersburg is more than a novel about the revolution of 1905; it is an act of provocation like many other such acts committed in the Russian c­ apital. It has justifiably been read as a departure from the Russian nineteenth-­century novel with its psychological analysis of ethical problems. To explain the r­easons for this departure, let us turn to the provocateur ­himself. “Dostoevsky’s vulgarity can be overcome in two ways,” Bely writes in a comparative essay on Ibsen and Dostoevsky. “The catchwords of these two ways are: 1) forward to Nietzsche and 2) back to Gogol. To Gogol and Pushkin—those two primary sources of Russian literature—we must return if we are to save literature from the seeds of corruption and death sowed by the inquisitor’s hand of Dostoevsky. Or else we bear an obligation to clean out, with free and cadent music, the Augean stables of psychology that the deceased writer left to us as an inheritance.”1 These are the reasons for Bely’s departure from the nineteenth-century novel; the nature of the departure, however, is parodic. Let us define parody as a form of imitation in which the similarity between two texts serves chiefly to u ­ nderscore the difference between them. Once we have defined it so, Bely’s move “back to Gogol” implies not one but two strategies: imitation or ­pastiche of Gogol and parody of Dostoevsky. Just as Dostoevsky first acquired his own style by parodying the romanticism of Gogol, so Bely returns to Gogol’s style with its verbal humor by parodying the realism of Dostoevsky. Petersburg reformulates a problem that the West has come to associate with the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: to wit, the problem of theodicy, or the justification of a creator whose world contains evil. It reformulates this problem by allusion to Anna Karenina, in which Russian society and above   1 Andrei Belyi, “Ibsen i Dostoevsky,” in Arabeski (Moscow: Musaget, 1911), 93.

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all the family threaten moral collapse under the pressures of Westernization, and to The Brothers Karamazov, in which the total breakup of the Karamazov family leads Ivan to question the validity of all moral values. What makes Petersburg a radical departure from the nineteenth-century novel is that, for the ethical solution offered by Dostoevsky, it substitutes the aesthetic solution proposed by Nietzsche: “For only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world forever justified.”2 This well-known phrase sums up what Bely meant when he urged a move “forward to Nietzsche” from the traditional concerns of his nineteenth-century precursors. So it is that Petersburg ­simultaneously interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms of Russian literature and represents Russian literature in terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Bely’s representation of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy prepares the climactic episode of Petersburg, in which Nietzsche’s mouthpiece Zarathustra appears to Bely’s terrorist hero, Dudkin, just as the devil appears to Dostoevsky’s atheist hero, Ivan. In d ­ emonstrating this, I shall attempt not so much to interpret the novel as to ­formulate the premises on which an interpretation of it would have to rest. These premises would necessarily be the same as those of Bely, who, like other ­symbolist poets, believed the origin of poetry to be metaphor. Traditional ­rhetoric defines metaphor as an analogy by which particular ­qualities or ­circumstances of two dissimilar objects are perceived to be s­ imilar. On grounds that those particular qualities or circumstances are similar, Bely ­characteristically ­reasons that all the qualities or circumstances of the two objects must be s­imilar. Hence, when Pushkin’s poetry suggests to Bely an analogy between Peter the Great and Prometheus, he will wholly identify Russian history with Greek mythology. This tendency to reason by the logic, or illogic, of analogy helps to explain why symbolist poetry often appears to be ­preposterous. Interpreters are usually tempted either to r­ationalize the ­ preposterous by substituting some commonsensical equivalent or to ­circumvent it entirely by limiting their d ­ iscussion to a catalogue of i­ ntertextual references. The method of this essay will be that of analogy, not because the author believes such logic to be valid, but because Bely believed it to be the basis of myth and because it will enable us to reconstruct the ­internally ­systematic, if otherwise preposterous, thesis that underlies Petersburg.3   2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Clifton Fadiman (New York: Dover Publications, 1995).   3 All quotations of German texts and Russian texts other than Petersburg are translated by the author of this essay.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

The best-known and virtually canonical novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, together with the narrative poetry of Pushkin and the lyric prose of Gogol, formed the basis of an aesthetic education that all literate Russians had and still do have in common.4 The genre in which Russian literature first won recognition in Europe was that of the novel, which, by comparison with the heroic lays of medieval Europe, functioned as a Russian national epic. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the epic genre ceded its ascendancy in Russian literature to shorter prose, and culture in general was felt to have entered a period of decay both in Russia and in the West. Bely’s novel alludes to two events that tended to confirm European decadence in the eyes of ­contemporary observers: Russia’s defeat by Japan at Tsushima (the first defeat of a modern European power by an Asian one) followed by the near collapse of the tsarist autocracy in the revolution of 1905. Nietzsche’s ­philosophy ­supplied Bely’s novel with a broad perspective in which Bely thought he viewed these two catastrophic and even tragic events as Homer viewed the fall of Troy or as Plato viewed the flood of Atlantis. This broad perspective turned the history of European culture into an analogue for the history of Russian literature, which both reaches decadence and begins its resurgence in Petersburg. It is significant that, as one of the earliest writers on European decadence, Friedrich Nietzsche should have been a philologist rather than a philosopher by vocation. He drew on etymology to show that, whereas Judeo-Christian religion opposes good to evil, the original value equation merely opposes strong to weak. From this it followed that the Christians, like the Jews before them, must have inverted the original value equation in a passive revolt against their slave masters. Hence their eschatological vision of a world where the first (that is, the strong) shall be last and the last (that is, the Jews and Christians) shall be first. Nietzsche’s philosophy attempts to reinvert this inversion and thereby to restore the original, “noble” value equation. For that reason, it sometimes ironically couches itself in terms of the same biblical eschatology that it repudiates. Thus, when Nietzsche calls himself the Antichrist of Revelation 13, he means that he is anti-Christian, not that he subscribes to Revelation.   4 Pushkin is a poet known better for his narrative than for his lyric poetry; his poem Evgenii Onegin, which subordinates the lyric to the epic genre, is subtitled “A Novel in Verse.” Gogol was a poet manqué who destroyed all available copies of his only published poem, Ganz [sic] Kuchelgarten. Thereafter he devoted himself to highly lyrical prose, of which the supreme example, his novel Dead Souls, is subtitled “A Poem.” It will become clear from what follows that Bely regarded the mode of Pushkin and Gogol as profoundly musical and hence tragic, in contradistinction to that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

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Judeo-Christian religion views history as a struggle between good and evil in which God must ultimately triumph over the personification of evil. Nietzsche chooses as his mouthpiece the Persian Zarathustra, who founded a religion still more dualistic than Judeo-Christian religion. He does so because legend has it that, unlike the Hebrew prophets, Zarathustra laughed on the very day of his birth. In his view Zarathustra’s devil is the spirit of gravity; yet, to those who fear evil, Zarathustra himself seems to be the devil. Thus, one might say that when Nietzsche chooses Zarathustra as his mouthpiece, Nietzsche laughs at good and evil. Whereas the real Zarathustra preached an ethical relation to life, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who heralds the “superman” of the future, teaches an aesthetic relation to life. It is he who, with the words “God is dead,” diagnoses European decadence as a necessary effect of Christian morals and prescribes pagan self-affirmation as a cure. Nietzsche often refers to the Russian novel—for example, in The Genealogy of Morals where, in indignation at the loss of values in modern h ­ istoriography, he exclaims, “Here nothing thrives or grows any more or, at most, Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoyan ‘pity.’” By “Petersburg metapolitics” Nietzsche evidently means the “Christian” and therefore decadent psychology of ­ressentiment, which he discovers in the characters of Dostoevsky’s novels and particularly in the narrator of Notes from Underground, who singles out Petersburg as “the most abstract and intentional city on the whole globe.” Nietzsche equates the loss of values not only in historiography but in all of culture with what he calls nihilism in philosophy, and, by associating n ­ ihilism in ­philosophy with the Russian novel, he gives Bely grounds to equate n ­ ihilism in ­philosophy with realism in literature. After all, do not the novels of the foremost ­realists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, depict the history of Russia as the history of an intrinsically Christian people? Tolstoy regards the people as Christian because they live in harmony with nature, from which Tolstoy believes Christian morals necessarily spring. Dostoevsky regards them as Christian because they embody the true Israel, chosen to enter Jerusalem at the end of time in accord with God’s p ­ romise to Abraham. There can be no doubt that Bely’s antipathy for Dostoevsky comes as a visceral response to Dostoevsky’s vision of the Russian people as the true Israel. Nietzsche’s philosophy does not give rise to Bely’s antipathy for Dostoevsky, but Bely discovers in Nietzsche’s philosophy the weapons with which to combat “Petersburg metapolitics” and “Tolstoyan ‘pity.’” Those weapons are images of an archaic, pre-Christian, and thoroughly pagan ­culture to which Bely can oppose the Christian ethos of the realist novel. Bely writes Petersburg to restore the original, “noble” value equation to the genre of Tolstoy

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

and Dostoevsky and to imbue it with the myths of Pushkin and Gogol, who are prerealist writers and therefore the true bards of Russian history. The main dramatis personae of Petersburg include Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a onetime philosopher of law now active as a minister of state, and his son, Nikolai Apollonovich, a student of neo-Kantian philosophy who has idly promised a terrorist organization to murder his father. The relations between Apollon Apollonovich and his son duplicate the Oedipal conflict of The Brothers Karamazov, but whereas Dostoevsky’s hero Ivan suffers, like all his brothers, from guilt, Nikolai Apollonovich suffers only from shame. Ivan’s guilt, or something like it, is shifted from the figure of the parricidal son to that of his fellow student, the terrorist Dudkin, who is also a ­potential ­murderer of Apollon Apollonovich. Unbeknownst to Dudkin, who has, n ­ evertheless, delivered a bomb to the Ableukhov house, the terrorist leader and double agent Lippanchenko blackmails Nikolai Apollonovich to keep his forgotten promise. In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan has a nightmare of the devil after an interview with his illegitimate brother Smerdiakov; in Petersburg Dudkin has a nightmare of the Persian Shishnarfne after an interview with the double agent Lippanchenko. In both novels the protagonist’s guilt is brought out by a song that he chances to overhear (in Ivan’s case, a drunken p ­ easant’s song; in Dudkin’s case, the worker Stepka’s) but, whereas Ivan ­overhears this song before his vision, Dudkin overhears it afterwards. In both novels the ­protagonist goes mad but, here again, difference goes hand in hand with ­similarity. Whereas Ivan, once mad, is unable to take action, Dudkin ­murders the double agent Lippanchenko. The significance of these parallels will become intelligible only after an analysis of certain works by Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy, and of the imagery to which they give rise. The title Petersburg alludes to what Pushkin calls “Peter’s creation” (Petra tvorenie) as the locus for the myth of a city founded on a pact with the devil and condemned to destruction by flood. This eschatological myth is recounted by each of the four writers with whom Bely carries on his ­dialogue about the nature of creativity. The best-known account is Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which Bely reads as a poem about the founder of the Russian ­secular state by the founder of Russian secular literature. These two ­secularizers, who, in accord with Nietzsche, might equally be called p ­ aganizers, Bely would see as restorers of the original, “noble” value equation and thus as models for his own enterprise. It is significant that both the poetic norms of The Bronze Horseman and the architectural forms of the city itself are strongly neoclassical because they suggest to Bely the classical imagery of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

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Here Nietzsche posits that ultimate reality is an abyss to which man’s gaze is normally blinded by the principle of individuality. This principle and its destruction are nature’s two art impulses, order and chaos, which the Greeks personified as Apollo, god of dream images, and Dionysus, god of ecstasy. Nietzsche maintains that Hellenic religion views history as a battle not between good and evil but between Apollo and Dionysus. This battle does not, however, culminate in the victory of the one god over the other as analogy would lead one to expect. It generates successive “revolutions” in which both gods undergo victory and defeat at each other’s hands. The Apollonian art of sculpture and the nonimagistic, Dionysian art of music reflect such periodic victories and defeats, but tragedy and only tragedy mirrors the brief truces in which the two gods unite. Then the principle of individuality no longer blinds man to ultimate reality; it becomes a veil through which he gazes, with a terror that leads to ecstasy, into what Nietzsche calls the abyss of destruction. Although this theodicy depends on the equality of Apollo and Dionysus, Nietzsche actually gives Dionysus priority over Apollo when he stresses that the birth of tragedy was inspired by the spirit of music; and once again when, in the last nine chapters of The Birth of Tragedy, he anticipates that a rebirth of tragedy will take place in the operas of Wagner. Nietzsche maintains that, by turning the victory of Zeus over those pre-Hellenic barbarians known as Titans into art, the epics of Homer mark the victory of Apollo over what he calls the “titanic-barbaric” nature of Dionysus. Between the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, however, there lapses a period in which the Olympian art of the Doric period gradually becomes petrified in its own ­sculptural images. Thus, the epics of Homer are merely a prelude to the t­ragedies of Aeschylus, which, by reintroducing the Homeric myths into poetry, mark the victory of Dionysus over the beautiful but now petrified culture of Apollo. The tragedies of Aeschylus express that delicate but all-important balance between nature’s two art impulses that not only raises human culture to its highest point but also justifies the evil committed and suffered by the hero Prometheus to achieve it. Prometheus was a Titan, and the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music was a rebirth of his myth; it embodied a second revolt of the Titans, but this time the god of tragedy, with his “titanic-barbaric” nature, does not surrender to Apollo, the god of epic. He dies tragically in the dramas of Euripides, a poet inspired neither by Dionysus nor by Apollo but by Socrates, the posttragic surrogate for Apollo, who negated all myth in science. Petersburg represents Russia’s defeat at Tsushima and the near collapse of the autocracy as a victory of Dionysus over Socrates—that is, the end of an Apollonian period of order and the onset of a new Dionysian period

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

of chaos. The images in which it does so draw an analogy between the ­neoclassical Petersburg of The Bronze Horseman and the Atlantis of Plato’s late dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. Atlantis was the island city founded by Poseidon’s ­descendant Atlas and later destroyed in an earthquake of such ­magnitude that it sank into the sea, never to emerge again. The memory of this catastrophe was obliterated everywhere but in Egypt, where ­centuries later it was transmitted to the Athenian Solon by a priest of Neis. Plato implies that Solon could have made of the priest’s tale a poem to rival the epics of Homer, although he never did so. Our analogy is that, just as Atlantis was founded by Poseidon’s descendant Atlas, so Petersburg was founded by that intrepid s­eafarer, Peter the Great, on an island subject, like Atlantis, to floods. This basic analogy between Petersburg and Atlantis is latent in The Bronze Horseman, where Pushkin writes that the Russo-Hellenic image of Petropolis emerges from the flood, submerged like Triton to the waist (“And Petropolis floated up like Triton, plunged ­waist-high in the water”). Bely uses the “bearded ­caryatid” ­(technically an “Atlas,” pl. “Atlantes”) that supports the city’s ­bureaucracy to develop Pushkin’s image where he writes that time itself has risen to the ­caryatid’s waist, as though a flood of time were about to engulf the city. However, the analogy between Petersburg and Atlantis will yield broader implications if we substitute Pushkin for Peter the Great. Just as Atlantis was metaphorically founded by Plato, the author of the dialogues, so Petersburg was founded by Pushkin on a basis subject, like that of Atlantis, to doubt. That basis is nothing but myth. To understand the Petersburg of Bely’s novel is to understand myth, and Bely understands myth in direct contradiction to the theories of nineteenth-­ ­ century positivists. Historically, positivism is more than the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte: it is a set of rules for the use of the word ­ knowledge. Traditional metaphysics such as Plato’s posited abstract or occult (that is, hidden) entities that are unobservable by definition. ­Nineteenth-century ­positivists objected that, if these entities are unobservable, they are also unknowable and can be said to exist only as names or words. The positivists thereby abolished the “true” world of Western idealism, but Bely, like Nietzsche, goes further than they. He maintains that, if we abolish the “true” world, we must also abolish the apparent world to which it is opposed. Myth or art (which is the same as myth), unlike science, values appearance more highly than reality because in myth there can be no other reality than the one that appears (like the city of Petersburg in Bely’s prologue). Where appearance begins, error ceases and Nietzsche proclaims, Incipit Zarathustra (Zarathustra begins), or, in other words, Incipit tragoedia (Tragedy begins).

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The actual city of Petersburg may sink, like Atlantis, into the sea, but the mythical city of Bely’s novel rises out of the flood. In this mythical city, which can only be a city of words, exist occult entities that positivism relegates to nonexistence—so that Bely can exclaim, in contradiction to the positivists, that “beyond Petersburg there is nothing!” (27). There is nothing beyond Petersburg because it was founded ex nihilo by Peter the Great as the Westernized capital of an Eastern nation, and because its foundation marked a conscious attempt to obliterate all memory of the landlocked, Mongolian past of that nation. Face to face with this anomaly, Bely undertakes to write an epic about Pushkin’s tale of Petersburg just as Solon might have written one about the Egyptian priest’s tale of Atlantis. The typical subject matter for epic is the heroic past of a nation, a past that is often prehistorical or, in other words, mythical. Evidence of Bely’s intention to write such an epic is that the novel’s prologue begins with the question “What is this Russian Empire of ours?” (11), an echo of the question posed in the Primary Chronicle, “Whence came the Russian land?”; and that the prologue places Petersburg in historical relation to Kiev, described with the words of Oleg the Wise as “the mother of Russian cities” in direct quotation of the Primary Chronicle. Bely’s epic takes the outward form of an eighteenth-century novel, with its characteristic subtitles and rhetorical narrator, but the heroes of this ­eighteenth-century novel are Mongols, whose genealogy, like that of the Slavs in the Primary Chronicle, is traced back to Noah’s flood. To write his epic is, for Bely, to bring up those submerged myths of pre-Petrine Rus′ whose memory positivism has obliterated and thus to induce the rebirth of ­tragedy. Modern, Westernized Russians are blinded to the future and to the past by their scientific optimism, but the ancients foresaw, because they ­remembered, catastrophes like the one that destroyed Atlantis. The terrorist Dudkin f­ oresees a catastrophe like the one that almost destroys Petersburg in The Bronze Horseman. However, the catastrophe foreseen by Dudkin is remembered in terms of pre-Petrine Rus′: Having once reared up on his hind legs, and measuring the air with its eyes, the bronze steed will not set down his hooves: the leap across history — will come; great will be the upheaval; the earth will split; the very mountains will be laid low by the mighty quake; and everywhere our native plains will be raised into humps by it. On the humps will stand Nizhniy, Vladimir and Uglich. Yet Petersburg will sink. (132)

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

Beneath the imagery of Petersburg and Atlantis lurks the originally Nietzschean idea that the waters that flood both cities evoke the same profound terror that overwhelms man whenever he gazes into the abyss of destruction. The analogy between the two cities implies a further analogy between two heroes, Peter the Great, hero of The Bronze Horseman, and the Titan Prometheus, whose role as hero of Prometheus Bound is central to Nietzsche’s theodicy. Nietzsche observes in section 9 of The Birth of Tragedy that from time to time the “high tide of the Dionysian” shoulders the burden of all individuals even as Prometheus’s brother, the Titan Atlas, shoulders that of the earth. On this image Nietzsche bases his observation that the titanic impulse to become the Atlas for all individuals, and thus to destroy the principle of individuality, is the essentially tragic feature that the Dionysian and the Promethean have in common. Nietzsche reasons that the catastrophes of human history are ­justified when we view history as nature’s artwork, and that the reversals of life are justified when man lives life in accord with tragedy, his highest art form. A hero who, like Prometheus, destroys the moral order of the gods must suffer for his guilt, but his act of destruction, unlike that of the Judeo-Christian Satan, is nevertheless justified because it creates a new order on the debris of the old one. The belief that an act of destruction is an act of creation and, conversely, that an act of creation is an act of destruction enables Greek heroes to suffer fate “cheerfully.” Their amor fati is a manifestation of the aesthetic relation to life, which Nietzsche expresses in the formula “All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.” Peter the Great destroyed the moral order of Rus′ to bring culture to the Russians just as Prometheus destroyed the moral order of the gods to bring fire to the Greeks. When the Old Believers branded him with the name of Antichrist, he had to suffer for his guilt, but he, like Prometheus, could suffer “cheerfully” because his act of destruction created a new order on the debris of the old one. However, on Nietzsche’s theodicy Bely constructs an ­interpretation of The Bronze Horseman by which it is not Peter the Great but his victim Evgenii who threatens to destroy the moral order and must suffer for his guilt. Stunned by the loss of his beloved Parasha in one of the floods of Petersburg, Evgenii wanders to the Senate Square where, suddenly provoked by Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great, he ventures to shake his fist at the Titan who founded the city. One might say that, with that shake of the fist, he raises the problem of theodicy or the justification of Peter the Great as a creator whose world contains evil. Yet Evgenii believes, in consequence of his own guilt, that the statue is about to take revenge on him, not he on the statue, and he flees from it in a terror that leads to insanity.

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However, his terror is still the terror that leads to ecstasy because ecstasy, in its etymological sense, means insanity or the alienation of the mind from the will, and not that withdrawal of the soul from the body with which Hellenic religion later associated it. If, as Nietzsche maintains, the birth of tragedy embodied a second revolt of the Titans, then Peter the Great’s victim Evgenii plays the role of the Titan Prometheus to Peter the Great’s Zeus when, in The Bronze Horseman, Evgenii menaces the once-new Petrine order with revolt. Thus, by ­representing not only Peter the Great but also his victim Evgenii as Prometheus, Bely can extend the tragic experience from the Decembrist revolt, about which Pushkin wrote The Bronze Horseman, to the revolution of 1905. Petersburg fully exploits the dialectical give and take of Nietzsche’s ­theodicy by which every Apollonian period contains the possibility of Dionysian chaos and every Dionysian period contains the possibility of Apollonian order. The action of the novel begins at a period when the Petrine order has become ­petrified in the tsarist bureaucracy of the capital, just as the figure of its ­creator has become petrified in the equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Bely’s “new Evgenii” is the terrorist Dudkin, who initiates Nikolai Apollonovich, ­parricidal son of the Apollonian old regime, into the Dionysian mysteries of the Social Revolutionary Party. When the equestrian statue of Peter the Great comes to life, as it does in The Bronze Horseman, Peter the Great in effect casts off his role as petrified creator of the old regime and becomes its destroyer. The Persian Shishnarfne of Dudkin’s vision disappears with the words “I destroy irrevocably,” whereupon the Bronze Horseman appears in his stead, pours his bronze into Dudkin’s veins, and, as though to fulfill Shishnarfne’s mission, destroys him. Although, or even because, this act of destruction t­ errifies Dudkin into insanity, it turns out to be an act of creation because it inspires Dudkin to murder his oppressor, the double agent Lippanchenko, whose corpse he finally bestrides in the posture of the Bronze Horseman. Thus, Dudkin plays the role of Peter the Great, who spurs Russia into an ­eschatological leap across history, as well as the role of Peter the Great’s victim Evgenii, whom the statue in Pushkin’s poem terrifies into insanity. Here the fate of Dudkin recalls that of Nietzsche, whose insanity demonstrated to Bely that, like the superman of his own philosophy, Nietzsche no longer d ­ istinguished between the “true” and apparent worlds of Western idealism.5   5 Andrei Belyi, “Fridrikh Nitsshe,” in Arabeski (Moscow, 1911; repr., Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 60–90.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

When Bely exclaims, in contradiction to the positivists, that “beyond Petersburg there is nothing!” he does not reinstate the “true” world, which positivism abolished, but rather postulates that both the “true” and the a­ pparent worlds are abolished in the word, which has the force to create both the one and the other. Bely associates idealism in philosophy with r­omanticism in ­literature, and insofar as Nietzsche views positivism as symptomatic of what he calls nihilism in philosophy, he gives Bely grounds to associate p ­ ositivism, like nihilism, with realism in literature. The move “back to Gogol” is not, ­however, a move back to romanticism, because it presupposes a move “­ forward to Nietzsche” and to the abolition of the “true” and apparent worlds in ­symbolism. Thus, although Bely’s symbolism is not romanticism, it is like romanticism in that it serves as a polemical weapon against the myth-­negating norms of realism, just as romanticism once served as a polemical weapon against those of neoclassicism. In the mythical city of Bely’s novel, which can only be a city of words, the erroneous distinction between the “true” and the apparent worlds ceases, and, with the appearance of the Persian Shishnarfne, Bely, like Nietzsche, proclaims, “Zarathustra begins—tragedy begins.” This mysterious figure derives from that of the Persian in Gogol’s story “Nevsky Prospect,” in which Petersburg, the capital of the apparent world, p ­ aradoxically embodies what for romantics like Gogol is the “true” world of art. The Persian in this story sells the artist Piskarev opium to induce dreams on condition that Piskarev draw for him a beautiful woman. Such drugs were customarily imported to Russia from Persia, and for that reason Bely, like Gogol, sees his mysterious Persian as a visitor from the dream world of art. Dudkin’s nightmare of Shishnarfne originates in Ivan’s nightmare of the devil, hence the parody of The Brothers Karamazov; but this parody is also an evocation of “Nevsky Prospect” and of another of Gogol’s Petersburg stories entitled “The Portrait.” The portrait in this story constitutes an icon of the Antichrist, which, in part 1, tempts the young artist Chertkov to betray his sacred vocation for the wealth and fame that Petersburg offers a fashionable portrait painter; in part 2 we are told how the eyes of the icon acquired their unholy power and how that power was finally exorcised. Bely concerns himself largely with part 1, in which Chertkov (who does not recognize the portrait for what it is) surmises that, because art like that of the portrait is excessively ­naturalistic, it somehow partakes of the supernatural. The desire to create such art leads the artist to transgress the just boundaries set for human imagination into what Chertkov calls a “terrible reality.” Gogol’s story is about the nature of art, but the art in part 1 is not Chertkov’s art; it is the art of the portrait that tempts him to betray his art. This is to say that, in part 1 of “The Portrait,”

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art is of the devil. Part 2 explains ad hoc that the portrait was painted by a godly artist who left it unfinished but for the eyes when he saw that his subject was possessed, and who later entered a monastery, where he made restitution for his error by painting an icon of the Virgin. Here, art is of the Holy Spirit, but in Petersburg, as in part 1 of “The Portrait,” art is of the devil. This notion Bely combines with Nietzsche’s dictum that Zarathustra’s devil is the spirit of g­ ravity, yet, to those who fear evil, Zarathustra himself seems to be the devil. Not just naturalistic art but all art partakes by its very nature of the ­supernatural, and the “terrible reality” that it opens up corresponds, for Bely, to the abyss in which the principle of individuality meets with destruction. The mysterious figure who appears to Dudkin is not the Judeo-Christian “spirit of gravity” who appears to Ivan; he is Zarathustra, whom we shall call the spirit of levity, and with whom Dudkin’s tragedy begins. For Bely’s evocation of Gogol makes of Shishnarfne a Persian Antichrist, and when this Persian Antichrist appears to Dudkin, Bely’s hero becomes not only a “new Evgenii” but, as it were, a new Chertkov. It is in chapter 6 of Petersburg that Bely makes his move forward to a Nietzschean revision of Ivan’s nightmare by moving back, first to the imagery of Gogol’s “Portrait,” and then to that of Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman. Dudkin lodges, like Chertkov, in a garret on Vasil′evskii Island, to which the moon imparts the sounds and colors of another world. Here the Persian Shishnarfne magically appears to Dudkin as the portrait appears to Chertkov, and ­terrifies him with his bizarre conversation. An important circumstance is that the model for Gogol’s icon of the Antichrist is a Greek, Armenian, or Moldavian moneylender by the name of Petromikhali, to whom Gogol refers as “the Asiatic,” and that, in the second redaction of “The Portrait,” Gogol more than once describes the Asiatic’s swarthy face as “bronze” in color. Thus, Dudkin is visited not only by an Asiatic, the Persian Shishnarfne, but by Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman who, as an image of Peter the Great, is no less an Antichrist figure than Gogol’s portrait. These two consecutive visitors from the dream world of Gogol and Pushkin terrify Dudkin into insanity just as two artworks, a portrait and a statue, terrify the heroes of Gogol and Pushkin, respectively. Bely does not hesitate to acknowledge in Gogol’s Artistry that Dudkin’s nightmare of the Persian Shishnarfne comes from Chertkov’s nightmares of the portrait, but he fails to acknowledge that the double agent Lippanchenko tempts Dudkin to betray his cause just as the portrait tempts Chertkov to betray his art. The theme of betrayal links Dudkin’s nightmare of Shishnarfne with his nightmares of that other Asiatic, the double agent

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

Lippanchenko, from which the nightmare of Shishnarfne develops. We shall see that, because Smerdiakov tempts Ivan to betray his brother Dmitrii, the theme of betrayal also links Bely’s imitation of “The Portrait” with his parody of The Brothers Karamazov. For now, however, the theme of betrayal points to what Petersburg and “The Portrait” basically have in common, to wit, the concept of art as terror, which, in the context of Nietzsche’s ideas, explains Dudkin’s experience. By Nietzsche’s definition, tragedy, as the highest art form, is creation predicated on destruction, and the inevitable response to destruction is terror, albeit a terror that leads to redemptive ecstasy. The concept of art as terror gives rise in Bely’s imagination to the image of the artist as a terrorist, and from there it is only one step to the image of the terrorist Dudkin as an artist. Dudkin tells Nikolai Apollonovich that, because all revolutionaries come from Nietzsche, nonrevolutionaries like Nikolai Apollonovich are for them like the keyboard on which a pianist’s fingers play. Somewhat nonplussed by this allusion to the Dionysian art of music, Nikolai Apollonovich asks, “So you are sportsmen of the revolution?”6 Dudkin complements his allusion to music with an allusion to the Apollonian art of sculpture. “Why not?” he replies. “Isn’t a sportsman an artist? I am a sportsman out of pure love of the art: and therefore I am an artist. It would be good to sculpt from the unformed clay of society an extraordinary bust for all eternity” (113). Thus, in Petersburg the concept of art as terror gives rise to a metaphor that renders terror in politics (terror) synonymous with terror in aesthetics (uzhas). This metaphor most obviously draws attention to itself through Bely’s use of the word suddenly: first, in the context of politics, as an adverb, and then, in the context of aesthetics, as a noun on which the narrator engages the reader in a page-long excursus. “Reader! You are familiar with ‘suddenly.’ Why ever do you hide your head under your wing like an ostrich at the approach of a fatal and ineluctable ‘suddenly’?” (50). Bely’s use of   6 “Sportsman of the revolution” was one of two sobriquets given to the Social Revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov; the other sobriquet was “horse-guardsman of the revolution.” Z. Zenzinov, Perezhitoe (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1953), 301, cited in Manfred Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei Russlands (Cologne: Bohlau Verlag, 1978), 392. Bely’s fourth and last memoir, Between Two Revolutions (Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii), records that Dudkin is a portrait of Savinkov as described to him by the wife of the novelist Aleksei Remizov in 1905. Critics have argued that Savinkov must have been the model for Dudkin because Savinkov, like Dudkin, was ideologically unreliable. Yet surely, if Savinkov was indeed the model for Dudkin, it is because Savinkov, as a terrorist who was also a novelist, conforms perfectly to Bely’s concept of art as terror.

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s­uddenly should in fact be familiar to the reader of “The Portrait” as well as of Petersburg, where it implies that we all feel ourselves pursued by the terrible reality that lurks behind every phenomenon of the apparent world. Suddenly, which in Russian sounds as abrupt as the action it modifies, occurs with idiosyncratic frequency in “The Portrait” (as throughout nearly all of Gogol), but in only one sentence from “The Portrait” does Gogol’s word order set up the expectation that the adverb will be used as a noun. This occurs where Gogol describes how a decade after Chertkov betrays his vocation for wealth and fame, he tries once more to paint a masterpiece and fails because, as the narrator observes, “At thirty years and more it is harder to mount up the tedious ladder of etudes, principles, and anatomy, and harder still to attain that suddenly which ­develops slowly and yields itself only in return for long efforts, great travail, and profound self-­denial.” Here the word suddenly, be it an adverb or a noun, does not indicate the manner in which great art is created: it designates great art as the veil through which man gazes into the abyss of destruction. Bely would have found confirmation for his interpretation of “The Portrait” in part 2 of Gogol’s story, where the portrait actually destroys a member of the painter’s family each time he begins to reveal its secret to the parish priest.7 Each of the dramatis personae in Petersburg is a pursuer who is ­himself pursued by another, and the effect of this unbroken chain of pursuit is to strike terror in the hearts of one and all. The terrorist Dudkin strikes terror in the heart of the old senator, Apollon Apollonovich, when their eyes happen to meet in Nevsky Prospect; and Dudkin’s pursuer, the double agent Lippanchenko, strikes terror in the heart of Dudkin when Lippanchenko approaches him from behind in a cheap pub. The moment of terror is p ­ unctuated in both instances by the word suddenly, which appears typographically set off from the rest of the paragraph. The narrator observes that, in following Dudkin to the cheap pub where Lippanchenko approaches him, we have begun to pursue Dudkin as Dudkin pursues Apollon Apollonovich. This confirms for the narrator that “our role” as readers of Petersburg is to pursue Apollon Apollonovich’s pursuer just as an agent of the secret police would do. But there   7 The narrator of “The Portrait,” who is one of the painter’s two sons, is in fact the only member of the family who does not succumb to destruction by art. “Hardly had he pronounced the first word when my mother suddenly cried out with a smothered voice and fell unconscious on the floor.” In the case of the narrator’s brother, as in that of his mother, this destruction by art is punctuated by the use of the adverb suddenly. “‘At last I shall reveal the whole secret to you. . . .’ Suddenly an abrupt cry forced me to turn around [and] my brother was not there” (italics in original).

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

is an agent of the secret police, and he, like Lippanchenko, is on the qui vive: our role is therefore a “superfluous” role, the artificiality of which stresses its relation to art. Our role as agents who shadow Dudkin and other “shadows” of the underworld is not merely to investigate the back rooms and side streets of Petersburg; it is also to decipher the literary conundrums posed by the very nature of Bely’s novel. Now that the reader follows the action of the narrator’s narrative, the agent will follow Dudkin, Dudkin will follow the senator, and the senator will follow the reader wherever the reader goes, because the novel is the reader’s “suddenly.” The interrelations between Bely and Gogol are far vaster and more pervasive than this brief analysis of Petersburg and “The Portrait” can suggest, but the concept of terror that underlies Bely’s interpretation of “The Portrait” leads him to write in the spirit of his essay on Ibsen and Dostoevsky, “It may be that Nietzsche and Gogol are the greatest stylists of European art, if by ‘stylists’ we understand not style alone, but its reflection in the form of the soul’s life rhythm.”8 With the death of Gogol, the last of the true bards of Russian history, the tragic age of Russian literature comes to an end, only to be followed by the Socratic age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The theoretical man Socrates is, as we have seen, the posttragic surrogate for Apollo, whose intellect reduces the principle of individuality to mere logical schematism. Socrates is also the originator of the distinction between the “true” and apparent worlds that serves, in Nietzsche’s analysis, to justify Christian morals. However, to grasp what it means to speak of a Socratic age in Russian literature, we must refer once more to The Birth of Tragedy. Just as the genre of the tragic age was tragedy, so the genre of the Socratic age was the Platonic dialogue, which, by abolishing the chorus of satyrs and their Dionysian music, undermines the very basis of tragedy. Nevertheless, in the chapter in which Nietzsche treats the Platonic dialogue, he holds out the possibility that the birth of a Socrates who practices music may not be altogether a contradiction in terms. Nietzsche finds his Socratic musician in Richard Wagner, whose operas mark the victory of Dionysus over Socrates just as the tragedies of Aeschylus once marked the victory of Dionysus over Apollo. Moreover, they reintroduce German myths into poetry just as the tragedies of Aeschylus reintroduced Homeric myths into poetry at the end of the Doric period. “What power was it that freed Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle of Dionysian wisdom?” asks Nietzsche. “It is the Heracleian power of music, which, having reached its   8 Andrei Belyi, “Gogol´,” in Lug zelenyi (Moscow: Al´tsiona, 1910), 121.

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highest manifestation in tragedy, can interpret myths with a new and most profound significance.”9 This quotation raises the problem of how the power of music at work in Wagner’s operas can be said to affect Bely’s novel: the solution to that problem is to be found in the reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s thesis that the Platonic dialogue is the prototype for the novel. Nietzsche maintains that in the novel, as in the Aesopian fable, poetry functions as a mere ancilla to philosophy; the novel and the fable are, in Nietzsche’s opinion, the only genres comprehensible to a logician like Plato. Thus, the novel would seem an unlikely cradle for the rebirth of tragedy, yet, if the birth of a Socratic ­musician is not altogether a contradiction, then neither, perhaps, is the birth of a truly poetic novel. By a logic that follows Nietzsche’s (although it is not his), the Socratic musician or, as it were, the Richard Wagner of Russian c­ ulture is not a composer but a novelist, whose art must transform the genre of the Socratic age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky into that of a new tragic age. That novelist is Andrey Bely, and his novel Petersburg is not a philosophical novel, like those of the foremost Russian realists, but rather a philological novel because, in its fundamental structure, it exemplifies certain assumptions about metaphor that Bely held in common with Nietzsche and Aleksandr Potebnia, a Russian philologist whom Bely compared with Nietzsche.10 Those assumptions rest on the idea that cognition is a linguistic illusion that occurs whenever people describe the world by metaphor, and that the cycles of ­intellectual history correspond to cycles of linguistic history, which Bely describes as follows. A word is first of all a sound, and metaphor begins to evolve when that sound calls to mind a poetic image. The poetic image gives birth to myth; myth gives birth to religion; religion gives birth to philosophy; and philosophy, to the scientific term, which lacks both sound and image. The scientific term is no less a product of metaphor than the original poetic word, but science obstructs the transferal of words from their usual contexts to ones in which they have not been used before. That transferal, which is the principle of truly poetic metaphor, occurs only when art renews the sounds and images of words, and the cycle of renewal and decay can thus begin again. Here Nietzsche’s thesis that the rebirth of tragedy is a rebirth of myth leads   9 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 35. 10 Bely lays out these assumptions most systematically in his essay of 1909 “Magiia slov,” in Simvolizm (Moscow: Musaget, 1911). There are similarities between the ideas expressed in “Magiia slov” and those expressed in Nietzsche’s essay of 1873 “Liebe Lüge und Wahrheit im aussermoralischen Sinn,” which Bely could have read in the Grossoktavausgabe, vol. 10 (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1903). Bely compares Potebnia with Nietzsche in “Mysl′ i iazyk (Filosofiia iazyka A. A. Potebni),” Logos 2 (1910): 240–58.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

Bely to infer that the rebirth of myth is a rebirth of metaphor, which must necessarily precede that of tragedy itself. He believes that, by engaging in the mythopoeic activity of transferring sounds and images from the context of nineteenth-century literature to that of his own novel, he stimulates cognition and thereby attains what for romantics like Gogol is the unattainable “true” world of art. His goal in Petersburg is to herald an era of transition from a period of l­inguistic decay to a period of renewal when, as in the childhood of humanity, every man would be a mythopoet. “Such eras,” Bely writes in paraphrase of The Birth of Tragedy, “are marked by the intrusion of the spirit of music into poetry: the musical force of sound is resurrected by the word.”11 The rebirth of metaphor occurs when the word, which is first of all a sound, calls to mind a poetic image. The key image of Petersburg, which elucidates the metaphor of art as terror, is that of the time bomb delivered by Dudkin to the Ableukhov house. This time bomb explodes anticlimactically at the end of the novel with a plosive sound that merely terrifies the old senator but symbolizes a revolution in aesthetics. This revolution in aesthetics takes priority over the revolution in politics that the novel depicts. It brings with it not only the rebirth of tragedy but also, by Bely’s inference, the rebirth of metaphor, which is the basis of cognition. Bely’s opposition of the tragic age of Pushkin and Gogol to the Socratic age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky finds its correlative in his opposition of the resonant poetic word to the scientific term, which lacks both sound and image. The poetic word is epitomized for Bely by the spoken word of oral epic, and the scientific term by the written word of the realist novel. He aspires to impart the resonance of the spoken word to the written word of Petersburg and, in so doing, focuses on Tolstoy’s attitude toward words as that of a typical realist. Tolstoy identified words, and above all the written word, not with the “true” world of nature but with the apparent world of society: this established the inner tension of Tolstoy’s life, which ultimately led to his so-called conversion. Tolstoy wrote novels to unmask the moral delusions to which society is prone but later repudiated even his own novels as evidence of moral delusion. The delusions of the characters in those novels do not always take the form of the written word, but the written word almost invariably signals delusion. Anna Karenina in particular is a realist novel in the context of which words are unreal: Bely transfers the images of Anna Karenina to the context of his symbolist novel. Here they illustrate the petrification of metaphor at the end of an Apollonian period, yet, by virtue of the parodic and fundamentally 11 Belyi, “Magiia slov,” 424.

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metaphorical transferal they have undergone, they also testify to the reality of truly poetic words, Tolstoy’s included. Who is the tsarist minister’s wife whose adultery plays itself out against the background of official Petersburg, from which the adulteress escapes with her young lover in a vain attempt to begin a new life on the Mediterranean? This scenario links Ableukhov’s wife with Karenin’s, but, if we observe that Anna Petrovna Ableukhova abandons her son to the mercy of a husband whose manner is as ice-cold as Karenin’s, and whose ears are just as large, it will link Ableukhov at once with Tolstoy’s characterization of Karenin and with newspaper caricatures of the archreactionary minister Pobedonostsev, who was forced to retire in 1905. Critics usually mention this superimposition of literary and historical images in Petersburg, but none has explained what they mean in the context of Bely’s novel. They mean two things: that Ableukhov, like Karenin, is one of the victims of Russia’s domestic tragedy (be it adultery or revolution) and that Bely’s highly placed copy clerk is a worthy successor, if not to Peter the Great, then at least to the cuckolded minister in Tolstoy’s novel. One might say that Petersburg brings up to date V. I. Lenin’s 1908 interpretation of Anna Karenina, “The Mirror of the Russian Revolution.” To Bely, however, revolution means something quite different from what it meant to Lenin; and exactly what it means depends, in part, on Bely’s own interpretation of Anna Karenina. The domestic tragedy of Tolstoy’s novel is connected with the industrialization of Russia in the 1880s and with the railroad in particular. The potential tragedy of Bely’s novel is connected with the revolution of 1905, by which time the dramatis personae of Anna Karenina have all grown older. The chief victim of the domestic tragedy is in both novels the adulteress’s son, who gradually acquires the very characteristics of his father that drove his mother to adultery. Whereas Anna Karenina shows this process in its incipient stages, Petersburg shows its results: here Anna Petrovna is already an old woman, and Nikolai Apollonovich, her grown-up Serezha, exudes the same lust with which Apollon Apollonovich once raped Anna Petrovna. It is in a fit of thwarted lust that Nikolai Apollonovich promises a terrorist organization to murder his father, and thus in Petersburg the parricidal son, not the adulterous wife (an Oedipus, not, as in Anna Karenina, a Clytemnestra), forces Bely’s superannuated tsarist minister to retire. But inasmuch as the parricidal son does not actually murder his father and the adulterous wife finally makes peace with her husband, the domestic tragedy of Anna Karenina rewrites itself in Petersburg as a comedy. How, then, is this comedy a mirror of the Russian revolution?

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

The answer to this question lies in Bely’s representation of Tolstoy’s two bureaucrats, the cuckolded minister Karenin and his adulterous brother-­in-law, Oblonskii, to each of whom Bely’s own bureaucrat, Ableukhov, offers a parallel. The action of Petersburg begins at Apollon Apollonovich’s writing desk, where we overhear the “cook’s hat” tell the lackey that a letter from Anna Petrovna has arrived. Not only is it Apollon Apollonovich’s function to do paperwork, but his face itself bespeaks his bureaucratic function. It resembles a paperweight in office hours, and papier-mâché in hours of leisure. Apollon Apollonovich is the head of an institution, and his head supplies an analogue to the point on the map from which, in the prologue, printed matter and government circulars emanate. These images have their origin in the same two aspects of Tolstoy’s Karenin that have already been mentioned: his situation as a tsarist minister whose wife has committed adultery and his attitude, as a highly placed copy clerk, to the written word. However, even in the very first scene of the novel these images of Ableukhov as Karenin have already merged with images of Ableukhov as Oblonskii. The first scene of Petersburg, like the first scene of Anna Karenina, describes part of the master’s grand levee, which is in each novel presided over by a manservant. In Anna Karenina the master is the heroine’s brother, Oblonskii, who has been unfaithful to his wife; in Petersburg he is the heroine’s husband to whom she, like Anna Karenina, has been unfaithful. The first scene of each novel links the master’s grand levee with news of the heroine’s arrival to reunite his strife-torn household: in Tolstoy’s novel this news takes the form of a telegram sent by the heroine; in Bely’s, it takes the form of a letter. In Anna Karenina the news serves both to begin the action and to provoke irony in book 4, in which Oblonskii’s wife, Dolly, will intercede with Karenin on Anna’s behalf, just as Anna is now about to intercede with Dolly on Oblonskii’s behalf. In Anna Karenina it serves, in short, to further the dual plot, but in Petersburg, where there is no dual plot to further, the news of Anna Petrovna’s arrival fails to reach Ableukhov because, in his preoccupation with bureaucratic correspondence, he neglects to open her letter. The letter itself has a significance for Petersburg above and beyond the news it bears because, in juxtaposition with other themes that emphasize the written word, it comes to stand etymologically for literature (in Russian, pis′mo for pis′mennost′). Its arrival refers the reader to Anna Karenina and, by referring to Anna Karenina, it also alerts him to the parodic nature of Petersburg as a work of literature whose similarity to Anna Karenina underscores the difference between the symbolist and the realist novel. The difference between Petersburg and Anna Karenina is that although both Bely and Tolstoy take a skeptical attitude toward

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the written word, they do so for different reasons: Bely for reasons of aesthetics, and Tolstoy for reasons of ethics. Nevertheless, this difference between Petersburg and Anna Karenina serves in turn to underscore a far deeper similarity between Bely and Tolstoy, for Bely’s parody of Anna Karenina reaffirms the value of Tolstoy’s two bureaucrats as images that give rise to myth. Apollon Apollonovich, the cuckold, takes on two habits of Oblonskii, the adulterer: his tendency to resolve his anxieties in bons mots (which in Apollon Apollonovich’s mouth become childish riddles) and his propensity, for quite other reasons than those of a cuckold, to forget his wife (as when Apollon Apollonovich neglects to open her letter). The basic parallel between Ableukhov and Oblonskii remains, however: they are both bureaucrats and each proceeds from his levee to an office where he does paperwork, the nature of which is brought home to Tolstoy’s reader by Levin when he drops in on Oblonskii at his office in Moscow. “I don’t understand what you do,” said Levin, shrugging his shoulders. “How can you do it seriously?” “Why?” “Because there’s nothing to do.” “So you may think, but we’re flooded with work.” “With paperwork. Ah well, you have a gift for that,” added Levin. “So you think that I lack something else?” “Maybe you do . . .”

The parallel between Ableukhov and Oblonskii, the Moscow bureaucrat, runs side by side with the more important parallel between Ableukhov and Karenin, the Petersburg bureaucrat; and this parallel directs our attention to the scenes in Anna Karenina immediately after the heroine confesses to her husband at Tsarskoe Selo. Karenin rides back from Tsarskoe Selo to Petersburg, where he solves, as it were, the problem of her adultery by writing her a letter. His satisfaction with this letter as a solution to the problem of adultery expresses itself in his satisfaction with the writing accessories with which he wrote it. These writing accessories lead him to the solution of a very different problem, the issue of the irrigation of the Zaraisk district, which has been raised by a rival ministry against his own. He decides to counter this issue with the issue of the welfare of non-Russian nationalities, and his decision to do so alters the course of his career, which, as the narrator spells out, has hitherto been determined by an attitude toward the written word as skeptical as that of Tolstoy: “The peculiarity of Aleksei Aleksandrovich as a statesman, that characteristic trait proper to him alone, which every outstanding bureaucrat possesses, the one which, together

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

with stubborn ambition, restraint, honesty, and self-confidence, had made his career, consisted in disregard for paper officialdom, reduction of correspondence, and in the most direct possible relation to real issues as well as in economy.” Karenin’s official solution to his wife’s adultery eventually turns out to be that of divorce, by which, in Tolstoy’s words, Karenin translates an affair of life into a paperwork affair. This solution to his wife’s adultery proves no more valid than Karenin’s solution to the issue of the irrigation of the Zaraisk district, which fails when the report of his commission is ridiculed as nothing but “paper written over with words.” Karenin and a party of those who believe that such ridicule expresses a “revolutionary attitude toward paper” are then forced to defend the report of the commission with further testimonies. On his way to gather these testimonies, Karenin stops in Moscow, where Oblonskii drops in on him at his hotel. Karenin announces to his brother-in-law his intention to sue Anna for divorce, yet Oblonskii insists that he come for dinner and, to avoid the subject of his sister, brings up that of his new supervisor, Count Anichkin. “Well then, have you seen him?” said Karenin with a venomous grin. “Of course, he was in our office yesterday. He seems to know his business thoroughly and is very active.” “Yes, but at what is his activity directed?” said Karenin. “At doing his business or at redoing the business that others have done? The misfortune of our government is its paper administration, of which he is a worthy representative.”

When Karenin judges the misfortune of his government to be its paper administration, the possibility of delusion extends itself in the reader’s eyes from Anichkin to Karenin, who is now a representative of that administration as well as its judge, and in turn from Karenin to the Russian empire as a whole. Karenin’s judgment offers Bely the terms in which to emend Lenin’s interpretation of Anna Karenina as a mirror of the Russian revolution, and thus to correlate the “paper administration” of his government both with the realist novel and with the tsarist bureaucracy, which the realist novel so often depicts. Thus, Anna Karenina explains why the career of Bely’s tsarist minister, whose first act in the novel is to write down a “deep” thought, comes to an end when he refuses to sign a paper, and why, in the aesthetic revolution that takes place in Bely’s novel, not only the tsarist bureaucracy, but that other paperwork institution, the realist novel, also comes to an end. The aesthetic revolution that takes place in Bely’s novel is a paperwork catastrophe that, by replacing the written word of the realist novel with the

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spoken word of oral epic, ushers in a new tragic age of linguistic history. When Bely parodies the realist novel, he destroys its ethical content, but, in destroying it, he also preserves what for him is the poetic value of its aesthetic form. Thus, no sooner has the realist novel, with its Christian nihilism, come to an end than the epic genre begins anew in Bely’s symbolist novel. The reasons for this are closely involved with the difference between the two strategies by which Bely moves “back to Gogol.” The strategy of imitation expresses an ­attitude of receptivity toward the past; that of parody expresses one both of receptivity and of hostility, neither of which fully outweighs the other. Herein lies the source of Bely’s two-faced attitude toward Tolstoy, whose images ­illustrate for him the petrification of metaphor at the end of an Apollonian period, yet testify, at the same time, to the fecundity of truly poetic metaphor. Anna Karenina may be the purest example of the myth-negating norms of the realist novel, but, for that very reason, Tolstoy’s characters symbolize a ­necessary phase in the tragic process of destruction and creation. Our analysis of Anna Karenina brings us to The Brothers Karamazov by way of what may seem to be a digression because, although parody of the romantics is just as characteristic of Tolstoy as of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy did not adopt from them the forms of the grotesque and the fantastic, which predominate in “The Portrait” and The Bronze Horseman. However, because Dostoevsky did adopt the forms of the grotesque and the fantastic, he opens himself to the sort of reinterpretation that would invest them with an e­ xplicitly anti-Christian and therefore un-Dostoevskian content. This is ­precisely the sort of reinterpretation Bely gives to The Brothers Karamazov when he ­dramatizes Nietzsche’s aesthetic solution to the problem of theodicy by bringing to life those two Antichrist figures who are also artworks: the portrait of Gogol’s story and the Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s poem. Bely’s parody of Anna Karenina developed the attitude toward the written word that Tolstoy signals intermittently throughout the first half of that novel. His parody of The Brothers Karamazov emphasizes an attitude toward the spoken word that Bely discovers in one particular episode, that of the nightmare in which Ivan converses with the devil. It is complicated by the fact that the petty, realistic devil of Ivan’s nightmare is in himself a parody of the fiery, romantic Satan of earlier writers, and that Bely restores what he feels to be the original, romantic nature of Ivan’s devil by conceiving his parody of The Brothers Karamazov in terms of the interpretation of “The Portrait,” which we have already analyzed. Thus, Petersburg superimposes Ivan’s nightmare of the devil on Chertkov’s and invests the nightmare, which in Dostoevsky bears a preeminently ethical import, with the aesthetic content proper to Gogol.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

This move back to the aesthetic content proper to Gogol constitutes, as always, a move forward to Nietzsche, and it is on that basis that, first in Dudkin’s ­nightmare of the Persian Shishnarfne, and then in his encounter with the Bronze Horseman, Bely’s own account of the myth of Petersburg brings his dialogue about the nature of creativity to its high point. At no point does Bely broach theodicy as a problem to be solved by his characters, as Dostoevsky broaches it in the “Pro and Contra” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, but, in using the terms of Nietzsche’s philosophy, he tacitly assumes Nietzsche’s solution to the problem. He passes over both the philosophical discussion in “Pro and Contra” and the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” which it contains, and seizes instead on Ivan’s conversation with the devil as an episode far more suitable to his own aesthetic. The most self-consciously literary episode in The Brothers Karamazov, it is full of puns and allusions. What is more, it makes the devil, as a kind of ideological double, the plagiarist of Ivan’s cast-off ideas. In short, it could almost have been written by Bely, were it not concerned with ethical rather than aesthetic values. It offers Bely a way to circumvent the ins and outs of the problem of theodicy and yet, at the same time, to manipulate the imagery with which Dostoevsky surrounds it. However, the reader of Petersburg must have some grasp of the problem of theodicy to understand the plot situation that Bely parodies. Ivan maintains that if God is not justified, then there is no God, and if there is no God, then everything is permitted. Although this position ­undermines the validity of ethics, it is basically an ethical position because it rejects the Creator on grounds that his world contains evil and on those grounds alone. Even before the “Pro and Contra” chapter, in which Ivan ­discusses this p ­ osition with his brother Alesha, he has already explained it to his illegitimate brother Smerdiakov, who believes that it gives him carte blanche to murder their father. After the murder of their father takes place, Ivan makes three visits to Smerdiakov, which bring him to the recognition that if Smerdiakov, and not his brother Dmitrii, murdered their father, then he must be guilty of parricide by collusion with Smerdiakov, and that, ­moreover, if he does not confess this at Dmitrii’s trial the next day, he will also be guilty of betrayal. The nightmare of the devil occurs when, just after his third and last visit to Smerdiakov, Ivan breaks his newly made resolution to confess without delay and thereupon lapses into delirium. It is clear from Ivan’s resolution to confess his guilt and from his ­subsequent lapse into delirium that he is not fully convinced of his position that ­everything is permitted; and, in fact, he has already taken the opposite position in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” where he argues, by a

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r­ eductio ad absurdum of his own argument, that the world must contain evil if humanity is to exercise free will. The figure who arises from his delirium ridicules the solution to the problem of theodicy that Ivan offered in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”; and he also ridicules the ethical implication of that solution, which is that Ivan ought to confess his guilt. By a second reductio ad absurdum, he turns Ivan’s argument for the justification of God into an argument for the justification of the devil: good is only good if it be opposed to evil, hence the devil must be necessary to save mankind, if not from sin, then, as the devil says, at least from boredom. Whatever the devil says to Ivan is always in jest, and for that reason his tone is both highly Gogolian and highly Zarathustran. So it is that, when he reappears in Petersburg as the Persian Shishnarfne, he embodies not the Judeo-Christian spirit of gravity but the Zarathustran spirit of levity. The turn he gives to Ivan’s argument for the justification of God recalls the view of evil that underlies the aesthetic solution to the problem of theodicy: namely, that evil is just as necessary a condition for good as destruction is for creation. This is why Zarathustra, who, to those who fear evil, seems to be the devil, is not only the spirit of levity but the spirit of tragedy as well. We have seen that, like Ivan’s nightmare of the devil, Dudkin’s nightmare of the Persian Shishnarfne deals with the guilt of betrayal. Bely particularly alerts us to this guilt in the worker Stepka’s song, which ends with the line, “I have betrayed an innocent to be crucified.” If we focus on how unconscious guilt becomes conscious in Dostoevsky and Bely, the difference between the two novelists will begin to outweigh the similarities on which Bely’s parody is based. Whereas in Dostoevsky the process by which the unconscious becomes conscious entails the faculty of choice (that is, the ethical faculty), in Bely it entails only the faculty of speech, which, for him, is the aesthetic faculty. Bely writes in his essay “The Magic of Words” that “a wizard is he who is wisest in words; who speaks most and thereby conjures.”12 Hence Dudkin, who, of all Bely’s characters, speaks most and thereby conjures the Persian Shishnarfne, is himself a wizard (or, as we inferred before, an artist). Dudkin is trapped in a compulsive syndrome, which the narrator diagnoses in the second chapter of Petersburg: guilt drives Dudkin to drink, drink drives him to talk, and talk drives him to dream of his guilt, which only drives him back to drink again. In his dreams he sees the yellow faces of Tartars, Japanese, or other Asiatic enemies whom he subdues with a single nonsense word, enfranshish. The narrator emphasizes the verbal origin of these 12 Ibid., 431.

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

dreams: “Sometimes he went on talking to himself until he experienced real attacks of persecution mania: arising in his words, they continued in his dreams” (117). It is in the sixth chapter that Dudkin is waylaid on his stairway by the Persian Shishnarfne, whose voice he has just overheard at the dacha of the double agent Lippanchenko. Once Shishnarfne enters Dudkin’s room, the ­contours of his figure progressively disintegrate into a purely “phonic substance.” As they disintegrate, Dudkin gradually recognizes that the phonic substance that they seem to produce is in fact his own voice. Given Bely’s idea that cognition is a purely linguistic activity, Dudkin’s conversation with Shishnarfne can be understood as a model of the speech act. Bely theorizes that “[listeners] think that a speaker’s words emanate from the speaker and that they are real. If it seems so to them, then word magic is created, and the illusion of cognition begins to take effect. Then it begins to seem that behind the words there is some sense and that cognition is separable from the word; but the whole dream of cognition is created by the word.”13 In Petersburg Dudkin dreams a dream that Shishnarfne’s words emanate from Shishnarfne, but Dudkin’s dream of cognition is created by the word enfranshish. Before we can explain why this is so, we must return to the “Pro and Contra” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, and the fourth dimension. Ivan prefaces his rejection of God’s world with an explanation of why it is futile to discuss whether God exists. He maintains that if God does exist, he c­ reated the world in accord with Euclidean geometry and the human mind with a concept of only three spatial dimensions. Now, Ivan observes, there are ­philosophers and geometers who question Euclid and even speculate that ­parallel lines, which cannot meet on earth, may yet meet somewhere in infinity. He c­ autions Alesha never to think about that, and least of all to think about whether God exists, because such questions are unsuitable for a mind that conceives of only three dimensions. Bely underscores his substitution of aesthetic for ethical values when, in reference to Ivan’s discussion with Alesha, he identifies the fourth dimension not with the city of God, but with the city of art, which, for him, is the city of the devil. “Petersburg doesn’t have three dimensions,” Shishnarfne tells Dudkin, “it has four; the fourth is subject to uncertainty and is not marked on maps at all, unless by a point, for a point is the place of contact between the plane of this existence and the spherical surface of the immense astral cosmos” (399).14 13 Ibid., 437–38. 14 Petersburg remains the city of art even if we understand the fourth dimension in terms of the occult. Take, for example, The Fourth Dimension (Moscow: Trud, 1910), in which the author, Petr Demianovich Uspenskii affirms that he is able to perceive a fourth dimension that stands in the same relation to the third as poetry does to prose. The fourth dimension of Bely's novel,

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Here the word “point” alludes to the novel’s prologue, in which the narrator informed us that Petersburg is not merely “apparent” to us in the three dimensions of experience. It also really “appears,” not, as we would expect, because it houses the imperial bureaucracy but because it is signified by a point on the map. This point is a sign without a referent unless its referent be the novel Petersburg, a city of signs for which the real city need not exist. In accord with Dostoevsky, for whom Petersburg was “the most abstract and intentional city on the whole globe,” Bely ­populates this city of signs with the mythical figures of nineteenth-century Russian ­literature. The fourth dimension in which it exists is a verbal dimension, the point of entry to which Shishnarfne finally situates in Dudkin’s throat. “So any point of the Petersburg expanses is able, in the twinkling of an eye, to throw out a resident of this dimension, from which no wall can save him; so a moment ago I was there, among the points on the windowsill, but now I have appeared...” “Where?” Aleksandr Ivanovich wanted to exclaim, but he couldn’t exclaim because his throat exclaimed: “I have appeared...out of the point of your larynx.” (400)

When Shishnarfne explains to Dudkin that in the fourth dimension everything is spaced in reverse order, Dudkin suddenly grasps that the name Shishnarfne is a reversal of enfranshish, the force that has now come for his soul. The notion that in the fourth dimension everything is spaced in reverse order is open to various interpretations, but if the fourth dimension corresponds to the terrible reality of art, then, like art, it holds the mirror up to nature and thus reverses its image as it doubles it. Once Dudkin grasps that the name Shishnarfne is a reversal of enfranshish, he is able to subdue the devil he has conjured and thus finds himself liberated (Bely would say “enfranchised”) from the fear of evil. Shishnarfne has informed Dudkin that his immigration to the fourth dimension would take place in two stages, residence permit and passport, for which Dudkin would qualify by two consecutive crimes. Both crimes, the initial “act” (the word used for terrorist crimes), with which Dudkin associates enfranshish, and the “extravagant measure,” with its metaphorical discourse, is opposed to the imperial bureaucracy. There, in the third dimension, where residence permits and passports are issued, the conceptual discourse of prose prevails. The two Petersburgs meet when, in the Sirin text of his nightmare, Dudkin takes his interlocutor Shishnarfne to be “the passport officer of the world beyond.” As a terrorist and therefore an illegal resident of the capital, Dudkin bears a fictitious passport with the name Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin. In his capacity as passport officer, Shishnarfne hints that, in the fourth dimension, Dudkin goes by the real name of Aleksei Alekseevich Pogorelskii. Readers at home in Russian literature's fourth dimension know that this “real” name is in fact the pen name of a nineteenth-century romantic called Perovskiy (etymologically, “of the pen”)!

Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel

are acts both of repression and of liberation. Dudkin at first repressed the knowledge that Lippanchenko had betrayed the party, and then repressed the knowledge that he himself had betrayed Nikolai Apollonovich to Lippanchenko (just before Shishnarfne appeared). Now, with the word magic by which he conjured Shishnarfne, Dudkin’s previously repressed guilt becomes conscious and we know that, infused with the molten bronze of the Promethean horseman, he will murder Lippanchenko and thus resolve the central conflict of the plot. We have already seen that, after his conversation with the devil, the protagonist of Petersburg, like that of The Brothers Kararnazov, goes mad, and that, whereas Ivan, once mad, is unable to act morally, Dudkin murders the double agent Lippanchenko. But the reason why Dudkin’s conversation with Shishnarfne marks the dramatic and thematic climax of Petersburg is not that it renders his guilt conscious and thereby enables him to act (although it does both those things). The reason is that Shishnarfne, as Dudkin’s alter ego, incarnates the word as music and, although the word as music be designated with a sign on the pages of a novel, it sounds with Dionysian force. Thus, in substituting for the “written” word of the realist novel the spoken word of his own, Bely fulfills his stated obligation “to clean out, with free and cadent music, the Augean stables of psychology.” The imagery of Petersburg, like that of Russian literature as a whole, is overwhelmingly Christian, but Bely, unlike Dostoevsky, is not a Christian ­ writer, and the Petersburg metapolitics in which Bely indulges are distinctly anti-­ Christian. In his hands the eschatological vision of Christianity—not, however, its ethic—produces what might be called the eternal return of the poetic rather than the divine word. Nietzsche calls himself the Antichrist; Bely calls him the Christ of a new (but thoroughly un-Evangelical) gospel, by which we shall all be t­ ransfigured into supermen, first in the spirit, like Nietzsche himself in the Dionysian abyss of his insanity, and then, at Nietzsche’s second advent, in the body. So it is that, in Petersburg, we ultimately perceive the mirror image of the apocalyptic city of God, which is the city of the devil. Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo of Zarathustra as though he were identical with Nietzsche the writer, and of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as though it were the medium through which his ­concept of Dionysus became a “supreme deed.”15 Dudkin is the only character in Petersburg capable of heroic action, but the ultimate act or (as Nietzsche would put it) the “supreme deed” in Petersburg is the terroristic act by which Bely destroys the nineteenth-century novel and creates his own city, his new Jerusalem, of words. 15 Ecce Homo was written in 1888 after the onset of Nietzsche’s insanity, but until 1910 it was available only in the limited and expensive “bank director’s” edition of 1908; as of 1910, the year before he began work on Petersburg, Bely could have (and probably did) read it in the Grossoktavausgabe, 2nd ed., vol. 15 (Leipzig: Alfred Krijner, 1908).

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Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg MARIA CARLSON

Andrey Bely’s symbolist novel Petersburg was first published in the ­journal Sirin in 1913–14 and subsequently reissued as a single volume in 1916. Among its more knowledgeable early reviewers was Bely’s ­colleague, the ­philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948), who needed no prodding to ­recognize Petersburg as an “astral novel” that explored the “intermediary world between spirit and matter.”1 The critic R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946) echoed Berdiaev’s evaluation, ­pointing out that “without knowing Theosophy, ­neither individual places in the work nor the novel (Petersburg) itself as a whole are ­comprehensible.”2 Other contemporaries also recognized the debt of Bely’s novel to the theosophical doctrine of Mme Helena Blavatsky (1831–91), the ­movement’s founder; her heir as leader of the movement, Annie Besant (1847–1933); Charles W. Leadbeater (1847–1934); and Dr. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), later founder of the Anthroposophical Society. Bely saw in theosophy a systematic and meaningful explanation of what seemed to be chaotic, even absurd, events. He saw consolation. In this ­article, I attempt a reading of the larger themes of Bely’s novel based on the ­theosophical worldview I believe he embraced during the writing of his ­proposed trilogy East or West (Vostok ili zapad).

Bely and Theosophy Andrey Bely first encountered theosophy in 1896 but studied it ­seriously only after 1903. He joined the Moscow theosophical circle of Kleopatra   1 Nikolai Berdiaev, “Astral´nyi roman,” Birzhevye vedomosti, July 1, 1916, also cited in Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii, in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 3 (Paris: YMCA, 1989), 437.   2 R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, “Andrei Belyi,” in Russkaia literatura XX veka (1890–1910), ed. S. A. Vengerov (Moscow: “Mir,” 1914–16), 53.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

Khristoforova (d. 1934), and in that lively circle he met several key Russian theosophists, including Anna Mintslova (1860–1910?) and Elena Pisareva (1853–1944). Both Mintslova and Pisareva were members of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, then headed by Rudolf Steiner. They were the first to bring Steiner’s work to Bely’s attention.3 Bely eventually came to prefer Steiner’s more rationalized, and even “Christianized,” Occidental theosophy (termed “anthroposophy” after 1913) to Blavatsky’s and Besant’s neo-Buddhist, Oriental theosophy. After a sequence of doctrinal disagreements between Steiner and Besant, the latter withdrew the German Section’s charter in January 1913. Steiner left the theosophists to found his own Anthroposophical Society that same February. Andrey Bely chose to follow Steiner, becoming one of the Anthroposophical Society’s founding members. Thereafter his spiritual ­development remained linked to Steiner, in whose work Bely saw the legacy of the speculative philosopher Vladimir Solov′ev (1853–1900). Bely’s interest in and knowledge of theosophical doctrine is strongly reflected in both of the two completed volumes of his unfinished t­ rilogy. He first conceived of the novel that became Petersburg in 1908–9 as the second part of his projected trilogy East or West. He completed the first volume of the trilogy, Silver Dove (Serebrianyi golub′ ), in 1909 and began work on the second volume not long afterward. In the c­ ontext of the o­ verlapping ­history of the theosophical and anthroposophical m ­ ovements precisely at the time of the trilogy’s conceptualization and ­realization, it is not useful here to distinguish between the ­“theosophical” and ­“anthroposophical” layers of Bely’s second novel: first, because ­anthroposophy did not formally exist when Bely began writing Petersburg, and second, because Steiner’s system, especially prior to 1913, was heavily based on extant theosophical doctrine to which he ­himself contributed significantly. In this paper, then, I will use the single term “theosophical” to describe those elements derived from the “secret doctrine.”

Mind over Matter: Theurgy and Cerebral Play Bely’s major novel grows out of a “theurgic” act. The “theurg,” or creator, “works like a god” (Gk., theos = god and -ergos = working). He imitates on a   3 For a history of Russian theosophy, its members, and its publications, and a survey of theosophical doctrine, see Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). This article is based on ideas and directions suggested in the afterword to that volume.

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lesser level the divine creation of the universe through the power of conscious, focused thought, expressed as word and assuming form. This idea of focused creative thought is at the root of the novel’s “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra). The cerebral play of the author creates the novel and its characters; within the novel, the cerebral play of the created characters in turn creates the novel’s environment and its other characters. Cerebral play derives from the fundamental occult (theurgic) notion that consciousness creates form; that is, if properly focused, thought can give rise to objective, corporeal being. Unlike scientific positivism, which claims that matter creates thought (thought as electric impulses caused by chemical ­reactions in the matter of the brain, for instance), this fundamental principle of many occult systems claims that, on the contrary, thought creates matter. Consider the operative analogy (and analogy, not deduction, is the basic mode of logic in mythical and occult thought): God abstractly thinks the universe, and then the force of his divine thought, expressed through the divine word, brings the universe into material being. By analogy, humans are capable of a similar act. Blavatsky explains this in Isis Unveiled: As God creates, so man can create. Given a certain intensity of will, and the shapes created by the mind become subjective. Hallucinations, they are called, although to their creator they are real as any visible object is to anyone else. Given a more intense and intelligent concentration of this will, and the form becomes concrete, visible, objective; the man has learned the secret of secrets; he is a MAGICIAN.4

The implications for the author-magician (or symbolist-theurg) who, like a god, creates the universe of Petersburg, are manifold, for not only does the author create, through thought and word, his characters and their universe, but his characters take on a reality of their own and they, in turn, also possess the power to create. In chapter 1, subchapter “Strange Qualities” (Strannye svoistva), we learn that Senator Ableukhov has this very power: The cerebral play of the bearer of bejeweled insignia was distinguished by strange, very strange, exceedingly strange qualities: his cranium became the womb of mental images, which were forthwith embodied in this spectral world. Taking into account this strange, very strange, exceedingly strange circumstance, it would have been better for Apollon Apollonovich not to project from himself a single idle thought, but instead to go on carrying the   4 H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, vol. 1 (New York: Theosophical Publishing House, 1877), 62.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

idle thoughts in his own head: for every idle thought obstinately developed into a spatio-temporal image, continuing its now uncontrollable ­activities—outside the senator’s head. Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: from his head there emerged gods, goddesses and genii. We have already seen: one such genius (the stranger with the little black moustache), arising as an image, continued as a being there and then in the yellowish expanses of the Neva, claiming it was from them he had emerged: and not from the senator’s head; this stranger turned out to have idle thoughts of his own; and his idle thoughts possessed all the same qualities. They escaped and acquired solidity. (44–45)

Senator Ableukhov himself is not consciously aware of his ability to ­generate thought-forms or that he has in fact done so, for the senator is an ­unenlightened prisoner of scientific positivism. He reads the p ­ hilosopher Auguste Comte, whose positivist philosophy Blavatsky had banished to ­“irremediable darkness” almost thirty years before.5 Bely encourages the reader to follow the chain of the senator’s projected thoughts back to its origin. The terrorist Dudkin is the result of the senator’s cerebral play, as is the senator’s yellow house and the senator’s unsatisfactory son. And the senator himself is the result of “the author’s” cerebral play: In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov; we have also seen the senator’s idle thoughts in the form of the senator’s house, and in the form of the senator’s son, who carries in his head idle thoughts of his own; and lastly we have seen another idle shadow—that of the stranger. This shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s ­consciousness, receiving there its ephemeral existence; but Apollon Apollonovich’s ­consciousness is a shadow consciousness, because he too is possessed of ephemeral existence, being the product of the author’s imagination: ­needless, idle cerebral play. (73)

But whom should the reader regard as the above-mentioned “author”? Is the “author” simply the novel’s narrator? Or is the “author” in fact Andrey Bely (who is himself the result of Boris Bugaev’s creative cerebral play)?6 Or should we be seeking the “author” of Petersburg, the city in which our shadow-­characters lead their ephemeral existence? Is not the real “author” of Petersburg (the novel) also the “author” of Petersburg (the city)—Peter the   5 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 77.   6 Andrey Bely is the literary pseudonym that Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev adopted in 1901.

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Great ­himself? After all, the city of Petersburg in which Dudkin, the senator, Nikolai Apollonovich, Sof ′ia Petrovna, Lippanchenko, Shishnarfne, and all the other characters live and act, and which they in turn shape and populate with their own cerebral play, exists only as a consequence of Peter the Great’s “cerebral play” in 1703, as expressed in Aleksandr Pushkin’s own moment of cerebral play, explicitly and implicitly cited throughout the novel’s text—the narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik): On a desolate and empty shore He stood, with great thoughts filled, And gazed afar [. . .] And thought: From here we will threaten the Swede, Here a city will be founded.7

Peter, then, may be considered the original “author” of Petersburg. There would be no Petersburg the novel if Peter the Great had not first brought Petersburg the city into being through the theurgic act of projecting his creative and forceful will, making mind into matter. His willful thought (mysl′ ) led to an enormous series of subsequent willful thoughts, documented in an extensive body of “Petersburg texts,” of which Bely’s novel is the last, culminating expression. It is important that the reader, like Nikolai Apollonovich, ask some important questions: “But all the same there were certain swarms of thoughts there, thinking themselves; it was not he who thought the thoughts, but . . . the thoughts thought themselves. . . . Who was the author of the thoughts?” (421).

Thought-Forms The cerebral play of the author and the characters is not idle, for it generates “thought forms” (mysle-formy or myslennye obrazy), and these thought-forms are capable of assuming material being.8 Thought-forms are a well-known theosophical concept defined in two popular texts known to Bely: Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater’s influential little volume Thought-Forms   7 All translations other than Elsworth’s translation of Petersburg are my own.   8 Bely uses the term myslennye obrazy, which is best translated as “thought-forms.” Robert Maguire and John Malmstad translate this term as “thought-images”; David McDuff and John Elsworth translate it as “mental images.” The idea remains, but the obvious ­theosophical reference is lost. The term was well known to Bely.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

(1901) and Leadbeater’s Man Visible and Invisible (1902).9 Thought-forms, also called “artificial elementals,” are images and forms produced by human thoughts and emotions, usually too fine to be seen in the physical world, but becoming palpable, independent, and even capable of action on the “astral plane.” Thought-forms are themselves composed of “astral matter,” and they live out their “ensouled lives” on the astral plane. These thought-forms, ­projected onto the astral plane by human minds, are capable of affecting life on the physical plane on which humans live. The quality of the thought or the emotion being projected determines the color of the thought-form; the nature of the thought or emotion determines the thought-form’s shape; while the definitiveness of the thought or emotion ­determines the clarity of that shape.10 Rudolf Steiner incorporated many of Besant’s and Leadbeater’s ideas on thought-forms and color into the chapter “Thought-Forms and the Human Aura” in his early volume Theosophy (1904).11 Bely was familiar with the fundamental theosophical concept of the thoughtform and its manifestation in astral matter on the astral plane. The astral city of Petersburg in Bely’s “astral novel” is populated by such thought-forms. Bely had carefully studied Besant’s seminal volume The Ancient Wisdom, in which she closely describes the astral plane and the thought-forms, or ­artificial elementals, that populate it. The passage in which Apollon Apollonovich ­“precipitates” Dudkin is actually a “scientifically” concrete description of the generation of thought-forms onto the astral plane based on Besant’s ­descriptions. Bely also commented on the process in one of his t­heosophical entries in the occult “Commentaries” to his article “The Emblematics of Meaning” (Emblematika smysla): “The entire astral atmosphere around us is filled with ‘artificial elementals’ [iskusstvennymi elementalami]; coming together into a single whole, these elementals form national, class, and other   9 Both volumes were published in numerous popular editions. While neither was precisely translated into Russian in its totality, Bely’s theosophist friend Elena Pisareva published popular paraphrases of both books (as Sila mysli i mysle-obrazy and Chelovek i ego vidimyi i nevidimyi sostav), which were reissued as popular pamphlets over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century. See also Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895), on which the two later books are heavily based.   Thought-Forms also discusses theosophical color theory, interpreting the meaning of the colors of the projected thought-forms and auras. Much of the color imagery in Petersburg can be “decoded” (or at least enhanced) using Besant’s and Leadbeater’s color charts and definitions. 10 Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1971), 15–21. 11 The volume was translated into Russian by Bely’s theosophist friend Anna Rudol′fovna Mintslova and published in Saint Petersburg in 1910.

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atmospheres, i.e., a prism individually breaking apart for us human ideas and feelings, inversely influencing the physical atmosphere of life. They evoke and reinforce the forms of daily life.”12

The Astral Plane Even the casual reader who does not embrace theosophy must soon become aware that the Petersburg of Bely’s novel is no ordinary city. Aside from the predisposition of one of its major sculptural monuments to gallop down the streets of the city at night (as once happened in another famous literary work), the reader finds a Petersburg of murk, silhouettes, mists, fogs, vapors, ­shadows, mirages, smoke, and phosphorescences. Rooms mutter, whisper, and laugh, while automobiles play roulades on the road. Buildings cower, and Vasil′evskii Island, where the workers whom Senator Ableukhov fears live, looks at the senator in fright, while he looks back at the island in fear. The Neva River seethes and shrieks, the houses gaze at passersby with their amber eyes, and the spires of the city gore the northern sky. The residents are not “themselves” at all: in some cases, they are insects (millipedes and myriapods and even spiders); in other cases, they turn into other people or even into black soot on the windowpanes, before disappearing altogether. Sometimes they are no more than hats and mustaches and sleeves and umbrellas—bits and pieces of people who to the Russian reader are reminiscent both of Gogol’s ­synecdochic fragments of Petersburgians and of Dostoevsky’s human ant heap. What kind of city is this that behaves in such a strange, even phantasmagoric, manner? Clearly it is not a city experienced in three physical dimensions by people exercising five physical senses. Physical senses and dimensions, as occultists point out, are not the only (or even the best) measure of reality. For the theosophist (or anthroposophist), the three-dimensional physical plane of dense, corporeal matter in which most people live their conscious lives is just one of several planes, and the lowest and coarsest one at that. There are other, more subtle planes of existence: after the physical plane come the astral and the mental planes, followed by four spiritual planes (seven planes altogether). These various planes of existence, Besant tells us, are “concentric interpenetrating spheres, not separated from each other by distance, but by difference of constitution. As air permeates water, as ether permeates the densest solid, so does astral matter permeate all 12 Andrei Belyi, Simvolizm (Moscow: Musaget, 1910), 498 (italics in the original). Cf. Annie Besant, Ancient Wisdom (1897; Adyar: Vasanta Press, 1939; repr., 1977), 70, etc.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

physical [matter]. The astral world is above us, below us, on every side of us, through us.”13 She explains that “the astral world is a definite region of the universe, surrounding and interpenetrating the physical, but imperceptible to our ordinary observation because it is composed of a different order of matter.”14 The seven planes of being all exist simultaneously, occupy the same space, and are, in fact, differing dimensions, or states of consciousness. Only the physical plane is visible to the average human being, but other planes can be contacted by those who are spiritually trained, mentally ill, drugged into an altered state of consciousness, in a trance, or dreaming. The world of the astral plane, which theosophists also call the “fourth dimension,” exists simultaneously with and in the same space as the physical world, looks very much like it, and is every bit as real. “Astral world scenery,” explains Besant, “much resembles that of earth in consequence of its being largely made up of the astral duplicates of physical objects.”15 The inhabitants of the astral plane are not exactly human beings, but the thoughts, feelings, fears, desires, wishes, and impulses that human beings feel or think on the physical plane and then project into astral matter. On the astral plane, these thoughts, emotions, and impulses take on visible, concrete forms and become a living force themselves. “While they maintain a separate existence they are living entities, with bodies of elemental essence and thoughts as the ensouling lives, and they are then called artificial elementals, or thought-forms,” Besant explains.16 The German theosophist Franz Hartmann adds to our picture of the astral world: “If a man thinks a good or an evil thought, that thought calls into existence a corresponding form or power within the sphere of his mind, which may assume density and become living, and which may continue to live long after the physical body of the man who created it has died.”17 Thus, Senator Ableukhov’s fears of assassination and terrorism are projected as thought-forms into the astral matter, and there they mold ­ the astral matter into the shape of the terrorist Dudkin and his sardine-tin bomb, both of which become real and interact with the senator’s son. Nikolai 13 Besant, Ancient Wisdom, 63. Note that Besant was not versed in the latest science at the time of her writing; the theory that the medium of ether permeated all space and ­transmitted light and radio waves was discredited by the end of the nineteenth century. The movement of thought-forms, however, is understood to occur through the medium of ether. 14 Annie Besant, Man and His Bodies (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975), 34–35. 15 Besant, Ancient Wisdom, 65. 16 Ibid., 67. 17 Franz Hartmann, An Adventure among the Rosicrucians (Boston: Occult Publishing, 1887), 83; the Adept (Mahatma) is speaking.

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Apollonovich’s parricidal thoughts of snipping a vein in his father’s neck with a pair of scissors, and his fear of the bomb that Dudkin has given him, interact with Dudkin’s mad obsession with the Bronze Horseman; these thoughts are projected into the astral plane, where they manifest themselves in Dudkin’s murder of Lippanchenko with a pair of scissors to the stomach, from which gases escape (as from the bomb), leaving Dudkin astride Lippanchenko’s body with his right arm outstretched, in the pose of the Bronze Horseman. “These elementals master us if we do not master them,”18 Hartmann warns. In the astral world, “thought and action, will and deed, are one and the same thing,” writes Besant.19 The thought on the physical plane ­simultaneously becomes the deed on the astral plane. The physical and astral planes are not divided from each other except through humans’ ability to perceive them; in reality they interpenetrate each other and constantly interact. When human beings engage in cerebral play and send out their thoughts and feelings (as thought-forms) to take on independent astral bodies and existences of their own, they take a risk, since thought-forms have the power to boomerang back and influence the events that occur on the physical plane in ways that are not immediately clear to observers in the physical plane. Such astrally inspired events may appear arbitrary and incomprehensible to dwellers on the ­physical plane, but they have their own ineluctable logic in the cosmic scheme of things. Thus, Senator Ableukhov, a thought-form produced by “the author’s” cerebral play, or Dudkin, a thought-form produced by the senator’s cerebral play, live separate lives and affect events and people—as tsarist bureaucrat and radical revolutionary on the physical plane, and as ancient Turanian and dooming Horseman on the astral plane, precipitating the astrally created r­ evolution of 1905 into physical matter. Astral matter, or “elemental essence,” has considerable fluidity. It ­consists of fogs and shadows and continually changing shapes that appear and d ­ isappear as human thought impulses, positive and negative, benign and evil, constantly massage the elemental essence. Bely’s descriptions of shadows appearing from and disappearing into the Saint Petersburg fog echo Besant’s description of astral matter in Man and His Bodies (the same book that Sof ′ia Petrovna is reading in Bely’s novel). Besant writes that the astral world is “full of ­continually changing shapes; we find there ‘thought-forms’—forms 18 Ibid., 90. 19 Besant, Ancient Wisdom, 123–24. Consider this in the context of Dostoevsky’s novels, ­especially Brothers Karamazov, in which the abstract thoughts and ideas of the Karamazovs become the concrete, vile acts of Smerdiakov.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

c­omposed of elemental essence and animated by a thought—and we also notice vast masses of this elemental essence, from which continually shapes emerge and into which they again disappear.”20 She adds, “An astral entity will change his whole appearance with the most startling rapidity.” Astral matter “takes form under every impulse of thought, the life swiftly remoulding the form to give itself new expression.”21 Astral matter’s ability to reshape itself explains why characters in Petersburg constantly mutate and change into other forms and persons, reflecting ­historical, literary, political, and philosophical realities: the Semitic Mongol—the student Lipenskii—Lippanchenko—the yellow face in Dudkin’s ­wallpaper; Shishnarfiev—Shishnarfne—Enfranshish; Voronkov—Morkovin; the Russian Ivanov and the Japanese Vonavi; the Bronze Horseman—the Flying Dutchman—the pipe-smoking sailor—the Bronze Guest—he who “destroys irrevocably”—“Death, crowned in bronze.” This is why metaphors are realized and why slippers and wallpaper come alive and suitcases reshape themselves and caryatids despair in Bely’s novel. All are the products of Russian thoughts massaging the astral matter throughout Russia’s history. The characters and the events in Bely’s novel, even the seemingly ­irrational revolution of 1905 itself, have been precipitated out of the astral matter in which they have existed since 1703 and back onto the physical plane of late September–early October 1905. Since that day in May 1703 when the city of Petersburg was founded, generations of Russians—tsars, ­aristocrats, ­workmen, bureaucrats, intelligenty, writers, painters, musicians, servants, ­sailors, spies, yardmen, visitors, and many others—have passionately loved and feared and hated Petersburg, its founder, its streets, its river, and its houses. For two ­hundred years the tsars who ruled and died in Petersburg, the writers who wrote of Petersburg, the bureaucrats who sent circulars from Petersburg, the anarchists who threw bombs in Petersburg, the workers who toiled in Petersburg, the Decembrists who plotted in Petersburg, the secret police and the double agents who spied in Petersburg, the officers, the ­society ladies, the foreigners—all sent their thoughts out into the astral plane, and their thoughtforms created the shadow city of Saint Petersburg. This astral Saint Petersburg became “the capital of the Shadow Land” (396, as Shishnarfne tells Dudkin).22 20 Besant, Man and His Bodies, 39. 21 Besant, Ancient Wisdom, 65. 22 The famous medium Elizabeth d’Esperance (1855–1919) wrote a book about her experience with mediumistic projection into the astral plane, The Shadow Land (London: George Redway, 1897).

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Time, History, and the Astral World Rudolf Steiner explained that the astral world, in addition to its many other interesting properties, is also the “inverse unravelling of things,” a mirror image of the physical world that works in reverse (Bely includes an extraordinary number of reflections and mirror images in his novel). Steiner explains that in the astral world, everything that exists is revealed as it were in a mirror, inversed. In the astral light the cipher 365 must be read backwards: 563. If an event unfolds before us [in the physical world], it is perceived in reverse sequence [in the astral world]. In the astral world the cause comes after the effect, whereas on Earth, the effect follows the cause. In the astral world, the aim appears as the cause—proving that the aim and the cause are identical.23

History thus simultaneously runs forward in the physical world and backward in the astral world. This chronology controls the world of Bely’s Petersburg on both the individual and the national level. Dudkin experiences time backward: “Alexandr Ivanovich experienced these experiences in reverse order” (131). The enigmatic Shishnarfne, an “objectionable elemental” from the astral plane attracted by Dudkin’s ­drinking, smoking, and other questionable acts, tells Dudkin, “Our spaces are not yours; everything there flows the other way. . . . And a simple Ivanov there is a Japanese, for the name, read backwards, is a Japanese one: Vonavi” (401). The subchapter “Petersburg” (in chapter 6) reprises the themes of space, ­dimension, and time initiated in the prologue (the “black point” on the map) and allows Shishnarfne to clearly state the astral situation: “Petersburg doesn’t have three dimensions, it has four: the fourth is subject to uncertainty and is not marked on maps at all, unless by a point, for a point is the place of contact between the plane of this existence and the spherical surface of the immense astral cosmos; so any point in the spaces of Petersburg is c­ apable in the t­ winkling of an eye of throwing up a resident of this dimension” (399–400). The rather literal Sof ′ia Petrovna literally experiences the inverse ­phenomenon of “astrality” after her encounter with the White Domino:24 Sofia Petrovna Likhutina forgot what had happened. Her future collapsed into black night. [. . .] A segment of the recent past broke away into that 23 Rudolf Steiner, An Esoteric Cosmology: Eighteen Lectures delivered in Paris, France, May 25 to June 14, 1906 (Blauvelt, NY: Spiritual Science, 1987), 60, 59. 24 See footnote 30.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

grey-black night; [. . .] After that segment of the recent past the whole of the past day broke away: [. . .] No sooner did she move on in quest of some ­support for her consciousness, no sooner did she try to evoke the ­impressions of the previous day—than the previous day broke away again, [. . .] it broke away and crashed down to some utterly dark depths. (232–33)

First Sof ′ia Petrovna’s recent flirtation with Nikolai Ableukhov, then the period of her marriage, then her wedding day (in counterchronological order) all fall away and she returns to a preincarnation state: “The whole of her life flashed by, the whole of her life dropped away, as though her life had never happened and she herself—was just a soul as yet unborn” (233). In Nikolai Apollonovich’s dream, Chronos-Saturn, Absolute Time himself in the body of Apollon Apollonovich, informs him that “this was the calendar running backwards” (321), and Nikolai reexperiences his past incarnations, again in counterchronological order, from his aristocratic, ­pampered Aryan present back through his incarnations as a steppe nomad with Tamerlane, a cruel henchman of the Chinese emperor (his father, Apollon Apollonovich), to his form as a depraved and destructive monster during the age of Atlantis. Through his dream Nikolai begins to understand the awful burden of his own fate, who and what he really is, and what role he is destined to play in the “Mongol business.” On the national level, Russia’s astral history in the novel runs backward to the repeated invasions of Slavic lands from the east by the horsemen of the Central Asian steppes. When they invaded the Slavic lands, the Mongols (or Scythians, or Polovtsy, or any other of the many steppe tribes) “caused” an “effect” that eventually produced the Muscovite princes and the d ­ istinctive features of the Russian autocracy. That autocracy produced Peter, and Peter produced Petersburg, the physical embodiment of Western ­ materialism, ­imperial control, and stifling bureaucracy. The Petrine idea g­enerated the ­radicals and terrorists (the Bronze Guest calls Dudkin “son”) and in turn “caused” the revolution of 1905. The revolution of 1905, the result of the disastrous defeat of the Russian fleet in the straits of Tsushima at the hands of the Japanese navy in May 1905, “causes” the invasion of Russia by the yellow peril (Manchurian caps, yellow faces), a new Mongol invasion.25 Russian history will have returned to its starting point because the final “aim,” the Mongol domination of Russia, is also the original “cause.” 25 Vladimir Solov′ev had predicted a new barbarian invasion of Russia from the east (yellow peril, pan-Mongolism, the New Scythians); his notion found resonance among the symbolists, especially Bely and Aleksandr Blok. Steiner greatly respected Solov′ev’s work and ideas.

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History also runs back to Peter, who doomed Russia “irrevocably” as surely as the Mongols from the East did, by invading Russia from the west with Western ideas and Western habits that were not compatible with the Russian national spirit. Peter is responsible for the destructive duality between East and West, the steppe and the city, Turanian and Kantian, narod and ­intelligentsia, Slavophile and Westernizer, God seeker and God builder, Muscovite and Petersburgian: “Since that fraught time when the metal Horseman came hastening to the banks of the Neva, since that time, fraught with days, when he thrust his steed on to the grey Finnish granite—Russia has been split in twain; the very fates of the fatherland have been split in twain as well; suffering and weeping, until the final hour—Russia has been split in twain” (131–32). In the astral novel, the collective Oriental image of Genghis Khan’s army of “iron horsemen” eventually merges with the Occidental individual image of the single Bronze Horseman, who descends on Russia from the west. The sounds of the Bronze Horseman’s metallic hoofbeats on stone (“As though a metallic steed, clanging loudly against the stone” [233]; “Across the c­ obbles surged a cumbersome, clangorous clatter—over the bridge: towards the islands. The Bronze Horseman flew by into the mist” [405])26 are in turn echoed by the hoofbeats of the iron horsemen of the steppes: “But listen, listen hard: a clatter. . . . A clatter from the steppes beyond the Urals. The clatter is approaching. It is the iron horsemen” (468). But whether the metal horseman, the invader, the destroyer, comes from the east or the west is not, in the end, important. Throughout the novel Bely constantly returns the reader to those two major turning points in Russian history: to the Eastern “mission” of the “iron horsemen” and the Western “mission” of the Bronze Horseman.

Russia’s Mission and Russia’s Karma A nation’s historical past matters in theosophy, because the past as manifested on the astral plane runs “backward” from the past into the present, where it affects events occuring in present time and space. This “inverse unraveling” 26 The vocabulary, imagery, and orchestration of Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik echo everywhere in Bely’s novel:   Как будто грома грохотанье —   Тяжело-звонкое скаканье   По потрясенной мостовой.   И, озарен луною бледной,   Простерши руку в вышине,   За ним несется Всадник Медный   На звонко-скачущем коне.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

of history is the mechanism by which the law of karma operates. A nation’s history, then, is the accumulation of its karma over centuries, and a nation’s karmic debt, positive or negative, will inevitably demand repayment. The law of karma is a Buddhist idea that became a central concept of ­theosophy. It is the cosmic law of ethical causation, and it affects both ­individuals and nations. Positive and negative actions over multiple lifetimes or throughout a nation’s history are credited and debited, and the future of the individual or nation is determined by past behaviors. Not only the individual but also the world itself is bound by the ineluctable and inescapable laws of karma. Steiner’s statement about cause and effect (cited earlier) results from his belief in karma and is an expression of how it functions. Blavatsky termed karma “the law of retribution”; Steiner found in it his theodicy. National karma was one of the topics that Rudolf Steiner addressed in a private and exclusive meeting with the Russian delegation during a ­theosophical lecture cycle in Helsinki on 11 April 1912.27 The purpose of Steiner’s presentation was to outline the role of the Russian national soul in the spiritual salvation of Europe and the world. According to Steiner, Russian spirituality was to be the cosmic force that would initiate the long journey of humanity, which had fallen deep into matter, back to the realm of spirit. Steiner told his listeners that Russia “was placed geographically between the European West [. . .] and the Asiatic East” for this very purpose.28 In Steiner’s cosmology, only the Russian national soul could ­mediate between the warlike materialism, positivism, and i­ndividualism of the West and the destructive, blind collectivity and spiritual ­passivity of the East. In the West, meanwhile, the rise of positivist and c­ ritical ­philosophies (e.g., those of Kant and Comte) were making it i­mpossible for Europe to receive the Second Coming of Christ and so begin ­humanity’s ascent out of matter; at the same time, the c­haotic ­destructive urge (of the Mongols) and the old 27 Bely was not present at this lecture, although he would certainly have had access to the notes and reports of his friends and colleagues, including Margarita S­ abashnikova-­Voloshina, who did attend. Bely did not meet Steiner until he attended the latter’s lectures in Cologne in May 1912, very shortly after the Helsinki lectures. At that time, he decided immediately to become one of Steiner’s students. 28 Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature, lectures read in Helsinki 3–14 April 1912 (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1992), 228. Steiner’s meeting with the Russians was closed, and the content of his communication to the Russian members was not published until 1968, when it appeared in vol. 158 of ­Steiner’s Complete Works. In Russia the materials were known to Steinerians through notes made by the participants. Bely, who had not yet met Steiner at that point (they would meet only a month later, on 7 May 1912), knew of the lectures from colleagues.

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spiritual cultures (Buddhism) of the East also had to be ­superceded, for the task of the Russian national soul “is not to ­preserve the past [immutability] but to carry new impulses into the future.”29 The “new impulses” would arise in Russia, the only culture in which the national spirit was open to the Christ principle.30 The forces of darkness will do everything possible to prevent the Russian national soul from manifesting its spirituality. These forces will attempt to “freeze” Russia into inaction and immutability (the “Mongol business”) and dense matter (Peter’s legacy). Steiner repeatedly stressed Russia’s great ­responsibility to all of humanity and warned the Russian delegates that “your danger will be that the strength of [the Russian national] soul in your ­personalities can surround you with astral clouds, which would then block your way to the objectively spiritual. Your fire and warmth could spread around you a cloudy aura through which the spiritual would be unable to penetrate. Your very enthusiasm for the spiritual could hinder the spirit from finding its way to you.”31 In the novel Petersburg, Bely depicts how Russia’s largely negative karmic debt comes due with the revolution of 1905–6. All the negative deeds and thoughts that Russia had projected onto the astral plane over centuries of its history were suddenly precipitated back onto the physical plane in the form of the revolution. The revolution of 1905–6 was the culmination of the ­enormous sequence of astral effects and causes running backward through ­history into the present. The revolution was nothing less than the e­ xpression of the collective negative karma of the Russian people. Only the brief ­appearance of the etheric Christ, in the form of the White Domino, offers hope that Russia’s negative karma might be redeemed by Russian spirituality. Steiner’s lecture contains the core themes that emerge from Bely’s Petersburg: the destructive binaries of East and West, irrationalism and logic, spirit and matter, mysticism and positivism; Russia’s dark karma impeding 29 Steiner, Spiritual Beings, 229. 30 In 1910 Steiner claimed that the etheric body (vital life body, life force) of the Christ had never left the earth after the death of Jesus’s physical body, but has continued to walk among humankind, invisible, as the Comforter. Individuals who were spiritually developed could sense him but not see him. The etheric Christ, said Steiner, would begin to reveal himself during the twentieth century (what Steiner called the Christ principle or Christ impulse). As individuals develop their organs of spiritual sight through theosophy, they will again see the Christ and open their hearts to receive his true, mystical message. In Bely’s novel, the figure of the “tall, melancholy one,” the White Domino who comforts Sof ′ia Petrovna, is plausibly an early sighting of Steiner’s etheric Christ. 31 Steiner, Spiritual Beings, 227.

Andrey Bely’s Astral Novel: A Theosophical Reading of Petersburg

Russia’s bright mission; immutability preventing new impulses; and the hope offered of the Christ impulse. Bely saw all of his own and Vladimir Solov′ev’s mystical intuitions about the new barbarians from the East and the threat of Western positivism and materialism confirmed in Steiner’s talks and writings.

Conclusion In Petersburg’s beginning is also its end: “But Petersburg will sink” (132). The history of Petersburg, as city, as myth, as political actor, as literary text, has ended. Petersburg was an idea that had manifested and taken shape, but the idea has been changed by the storms of Russian history. The Bronze Horseman has galloped away; the Thunder Stone stands empty (Nikolai Apollonovich observes that “a shadow obscured the Bronze Horseman. And it seemed the Bronze Horseman was not there” [272–73]). The double agent Lippanchenko is dead. On the advice of Shishnarfne, the “objectionable elemental,” the t­ errorist Dudkin has completed his passport application to the fourth dimension and descended into madness and, one supposes, astrality. Senator Ableukhov has left the city and retired to the provinces to write his celebrated memoirs and to die. Nikolai Apollonovich, after a trip to Egypt to learn the secrets of the Sphinx, has become a hermit in the Russian countryside, worrying about the enormous karmic baggage he has been carrying around as an Ableukhov. Attempting to reverse his own karma and thereby incrementally to change Russia’s, he pursues spiritual knowledge. He has entirely abandoned Kant. “It is said that most recently he had been reading the philosopher Skovoroda” (564), we learn in the penultimate phrase of the novel, in the epilogue.32 Grigorii Skovoroda (1722–94) was a maternal ancestor of Vladimir Solov′ev’s and, arguably, the Eastern Slavs’ only completely original p ­ hilosopher. Skovoroda’s well-known epitaph is unstated but implicit here: “The world tried to trap me, but it did not catch me.” Perhaps Nikolai Ableukhov’s p ­ assionate new interest in the occult will reveal the “truth” to him in time for him to escape from the nets of maya, the delusions of the material world, and the weight of his 32 In a later revision of his 1908 poem about Kantian philosophy, “Iskusitel′,” for inclusion in a collection of his complete poems by Sirin (never published), Bely added several stanzas, including this one:  Оставьте . . . В этом фолианте   Мы все утонем без следа!   Не говорите мне о Канте!!   Что Кант? . . . Вот . . . есть . . . Сковорода . . .   See John Malmstad, A. Belyj: Gedichte, vol. 3, Kommentar zu den Gedichte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1982), 225.

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personal karma. In Skovoroda and Solov′ev, the antithesis of the Kantian critical philosophy he once embraced, Nikolai seeks the threads of Russia’s own, natural evolution, captive of neither East nor West. “A very slight understanding of the astral world will thus act as a most powerful stimulus to right thinking, and will render heavy the sense of responsibility in regard to the thoughts, feelings and desires that we let loose into this astral realm,” warns Besant, offering as good a theosophical moral to Bely’s novel as any.33 Echoing her thought, Rudolf Steiner offers his own observation and warning, and it hangs ominously over the end of the novel: “What we sow in the astral world we reap on earth in future times.”34 Some readers may be contemptuous of “occult influences” in literature and the arts, but Petersburg, a novel that begs for detailed commentaries but does not lend itself as easily to the extraction of larger meanings, can ­productively be read “theosophically” (as well as in more traditional ways). In setting his novel on the astral plane, Bely created a coherent and, to the occult mind, a real universe—he described quite concretely what happens in refined matter, perceived through spiritual organs of perception, honed by ­theosophical meditations and anthroposophical studies. An occultist could conclude that Petersburg is actually a “realistic” novel, when read as a concrete depiction of the city as it exists in the fourth dimension, on the astral plane. Knowledge of theosophical doctrine by no means explains everything in Bely’s enigmatic novel, and space unfortunately does not permit a detailed unpacking of all the relevant imagery. Still, theosophy can enhance the r­ eader’s understanding of some of Bely’s more inaccessible images and themes. But this is a symbolist novel, after all, and even if we identify the specific ­theosophical sources of its imagery, we cannot always assign a single, u ­ nambiguous ­meaning to each image. Moreover, the nature of occult thought itself, with its esoteric cosmogonies and cosmologies, is certain to send the reader around in circles: two concentric circles and a dot, to be precise.

33 Besant, Ancient Wisdom, 69. 34 Steiner, Esoteric Cosmology, 64.

Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg1 CHARLENE CASTELLANO

Andrey Bely is generally considered to be the only one among Russian poets to realize fully the synesthetic potentials of the word. Yet the critical literature provides no analytical studies of the synesthetic quality of Bely’s works. My own investigation into this matter, where the novel Petersburg is concerned, has yielded an understanding of synesthesia as an aesthetic principle ­governing the apocalyptics of Bely’s narrative. Synesthesia is best known to literature in the form of the m ­ ultisensory experiences characterizing the poetry of the French symbolists. That ­poetry evolved a particular perception stemming from the concept of universal ­analogy as natural law. It was concerned largely with the connections among sensations and the connectedness of corresponding sensations to signs. Where the workings of the sensory mechanism were concerned, the French s­ymbolists were interested in discovering whether each sense order, once s­timulated, in turn stimulated another, or whether a single stimulus could appeal ­simultaneously to more than one order. Where the act of writing was concerned, these writers wondered whether sensation evoked sign or vice versa. Most of all, the symbolists strove to learn something about sensory linkage that would lend credence to the sensationalist theories of knowledge they embraced, something that would make those theories a valid basis for their metaphysic of creativity. The direction of Bely’s questions about creativity and synesthesia took a somewhat different tack. Bely strove to find in sensory linkage not the ­epistemological   1 This article combines 1993 and 1994 Moscow conference presentations at the Gorky ­Institute of World Literature’s First and Second International Conferences on the Life and Works of Andrey Bely, delivered and published in Russian but making a first ­appearance in English here.

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ramifications of universal analogy but rather a validation for his prophetic views of impending apocalypse. Accordingly, he transferred s­ynesthesia from its native habitat—poetry—into prose, where it pits a ­cyclical against a unilinear arrangement of time. This use of synesthesia as a structural principle for prose constitutes an innovative application of the languages of the senses to literature. It is in the novel Petersburg that the relationship of synesthesia, as ­narrative structure, to time, as theme, is most fully elaborated. The story revolves around the tensions between Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the Oedipal son of Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a powerful figure upholding the tsarist regime during the days immediately preceding the unsuccessful Bolshevik revolution of 1905. Some two years prior to the novel’s action, the senator’s wife ran off to Spain with an Italian singer. The event was an unhappy one for Nikolai, and it marked the beginning of his interest in Oriental mysticism, his disinterest in attending his university classes, and his failure to uphold the rituals of the orderly, domestic existence that is now the senator’s mainstay. The senator is disturbed, for example, by Nikolai’s failure to join him each morning for breakfast, by the Bukhara dressing gown Nikolai now exclusively wears, and by the Oriental decor setting Nikolai’s room apart from the others in the progressively western European Ableukhov household. The senator is disturbed most of all by the acquaintance Nikolai has struck up with a certain mangy little stranger, who, like Nikolai, haunts the university but does not attend classes there. Unbeknownst to the senator, this stranger is an agent of the political underground that is now hatching a plot to ­assassinate him. One day, the stranger appears at the Ableukhov home, carrying a m ­ ysterious little bundle, which he turns over to Nikolai. Nikolai ­absent-­mindedly accepts the bundle, paying no attention to it or to the stranger: his thoughts are ­completely wrapped up in the masquerade ball he is to attend that evening. Having failed to communicate his message, the stranger departs. That evening, at the masquerade ball, Nikolai receives a note in which it is explained to him that the package he has ignored contains a bomb, which he is to use in carrying out the promise he made to the underground party to facilitate its plan to assassinate his father. Nikolai is horrified. He ­remembers no such promise, and on reading the note, he rushes home to open the package, hoping that some error has been made. However, he finds that the package does indeed contain a bomb: a curious little homemade time bomb housed in a sardine tin, sporting a key. Nikolai inexplicably winds the key, and the mechanism begins to tick. He is suddenly overtaken with a sleepiness that he tries, but fails, to fight off. As he loses consciousness, Nikolai slumps over the desk atop which the bomb is perched, and his ear comes to rest on the ticking mechanism.

Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

Nikolai dreams, and in his dream, the tensions between himself and his father are played out. This dream is the one portion of the novel I will discuss in detail as I demonstrate the centrality of synesthesia to the novel’s poetics and thematics. We encounter the dream at the novel’s midpoint. It constitutes a subchapter of the text entitled “The Day of Judgment.”2 As to its poetics: the dream is, I maintain, shaped by a set of audial and visual sensations, which are in some way comparable to the bomb’s ticking, and which allow Nikolai— and perhaps the reader, too—to experience a moment whose dimensions are apocalyptic. Where the dream’s thematics are concerned, I maintain that the workings of synesthesia define the central force generating the story to be an eternally unresolved conflict between cyclical and linear perceptions of time. Before I present this theme, I would like to give a better idea of what I mean by analogically related sensations. In this regard, it is to be remembered that Nikolai falls asleep with his ear resting on the ticking time bomb. As he dreams, he hears a number of sounds, which, like ticking, are rhythmic—and which, therefore, can be read as transformations of this audial signal from the waking world into dream-world images. It is to be noted, furthermore, that these dream images derive from the idea with which the clock’s ticking is patently associated: time. To cite an example: at a crucial moment in the dream, the sound, in the original Russian, of “tak-s . . . tak-s . . . tak-s”3 is heard, and the sound reminds Nikolai of his father. The remembrance makes sense, insofar as we know from elsewhere in the novel that the word tak-s characterizes the senator’s muttering when he talks to himself. At the same time, the onomatopoetic value of “tak-s . . . tak-s . . . tak-s” cannot be denied. The utterance imitates the tick of the bomb feeding into Nikolai’s ear, and constitutes a transformation of that tick into terms relating not only to the idea of time but to a related and equally central issue: fatherhood. To cite a second example of analogically related sensations (and this is an example I will return to later), in the presence of his father, Nikolai is said to hear a “loud mumbling” of “turn—turn—turn.” This time the word, though rendered in Cyrillic, is not Russian but rather a Russian spelling of the French word for “turns” or “it is turning,” which describes the event the father figure   2 Andrey Bely are, Petersburg, trans. John Elsworth (London: Pushkin Press, 2009). All English translations taken from pp. 312–21, except where noted.   3 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (Petrograd, 1916; repr., Moscow: “Nauka,” 1981). All Russian citations are taken from pp. 235–40.

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is mumbling about. “Turn—turn—turn,” like “tak-s . . . tak-s . . . tak-s,” makes not only semantic but onomatopoetic sense. For it too creates an alliteration that re-creates a rhythm that reminds us of the bomb’s ticking. Thus it is that “tak-s” and “turn” are analogies for the ticking of the bomb we imagine to begin just before Nikolai is overtaken by sleep, as he takes the little metallic key of the bomb’s clockwork mechanism into his fingers and turns it. At this moment, a “particular kind of life, beyond the mind’s comprehension” begins “seething in the sardine-tin” as “a fussy little hairspring measuring seconds” sets off “on its circular gallop right up to the moment [. . .] when . . .” Note the “circular gallop”: a visual image is melded to the bomb’s ­ticking. I will return to this and other visions of circularity in the dream, for the evocation of analogical sensations is not confined to the realm of audition. It spills over into visual, tactile, and olfactory spheres as well. For example, the sound of “tak-s . . . tak-s . . . tak-s” is accompanied by Nikolai’s feeling that his blood is pounding in his temples. The sound thus elicits a tactile response that corresponds to “tak-s . . . tak-s . . . tak-s” and to all the sensations to which that in turn corresponds. Many such examples can be cited, but rather than continue in this vein, I will describe the events that these sensations create in Nikolai’s dreaming mind. As the dream opens, Nikolai sees a cosmic abyss yawning beyond the open door of his room. The abyss takes on the shape of a “wrinkled c­ ountenance,” which appears to be the source of the “winds of millennia” (in the original Russian, tysiacheletnie veterki) wafting in through the door. Nikolai struggles to see just whose face this is. He makes a number of unsuccessful identifications, then, when he spies the face parting its lips “with a chronic look,” Nikolai concludes that the figure who has come to the door is Cronos.4 At this point we might wonder why Nikolai should construe a pair of parted lips to be “a chronic look.” We might also wonder why the chronic look must belong to Cronos. I will set the former questions aside for now; the latter question is more immediately answered by considering the phonetic similarity of the words “chronic” (in Russian, khronicheskii) and “Cronos” (Khronos). Because of this phonetic similarity, it makes auditory sense that the chronic look specifies the figure’s identity to be Cronos.   4 In both the Russian and in Elsworth’s translation/transliteration, this name is rendered as Khronos. However, the Russian word, Khronos, corresponds both to the English Cronos (sometimes spelled in English as Kronos and sometimes, Cronus) and to the English Chronos. Both have pertinence in Nikolai’s dream, as I discuss elsewhere, but the present discussion centers on Cronos.

Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

The phonetic similarity of “chronic” to “Cronos” gives rise to an e­ tymological issue about which a few words are in order. Cronos’s name is not etymologically related to another Greek word, chronos, meaning time. I don’t know whether Bely was aware that a popular misunderstanding of the two words as related—a misunderstanding that dates back to classical times—is responsible for the interpretation of the mythological Cronos as Father Time, the old man whose scythe, as agricultural implement, indicates that he is nature’s progenitor. I am sure, however, that Bely well knew that in classical literature, Cronos is the Titan who, with his scythe, castrated his father so that he could usurp his throne, and then swallowed his children so that they could not attempt to overturn his reign. This story makes Cronos a representative of a wish to end the succession of generations and the cycles of time. In the “Day of Judgment” dream, a Chronic Cronos could equally well be he who progenerates or he who seeks to end progeneration. The a­ mbiguity is characteristic of the thoughts eventuating in synesthesia. What synesthesia does, on the thematic level of the novel, is to multiply the meanings of its ­figures. Here, Chronic Cronos is both Father Time and aggressor against father. Similarly, the ticking of the bomb means both time and fatherhood. This convergence of meanings on a set of converging sensations is the ­thematic impact made by the analogies among sensations. Comparable s­ ensations create comparable ideas, and as we shall see, the closer the ­connections among sensations are perceived to be, the more violently ideas collide. To further elaborate on the novel’s theme, I now return to the question I put aside a moment ago: Why should Nikolai construe a pair of parted lips to be “chronic”? An answer is approached by remembering that when the face of Cronos first appears, Nikolai thinks this face to be the source of the “winds of millennia” “waft[ing]” into his room. As Cronos’s lips part and release the wind, they acquire the winds’ main characteristic—their thousand-year ­duration. So, then, “chronic” is an appropriate term for these lips. At this juncture, the specific length of the winds’ duration deserves ­comment. The concept of a millennium gradually acquires its significance for Nikolai’s predicament as the image of Cronos develops over the remaining course of the dream, as we shall see. Here’s what happens at this point: upon identifying Cronos’s face, Nikolai looks to Cronos’s hand for the “traditional scythe.” But he finds not a scythe, but a platter of apples. Looking outside the dream for a moment, we can see that the s­ ubstitution of apples for scythe is motived in a number of ways. First, as mentioned e­ arlier, classical tradition takes Cronos’s scythe to be a symbol of the harvest. The same tradition frequently sees apples as symbols of fertility and progeneration.

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Since the apples and the scythe represent allied notions, the substitution of one for the other makes good traditional and poetic sense. Second, the substitution of apples for scythe is motivated on a structural and, more specifically, a synesthesic level. Here, a sensory analogy between the two objects obtains in the similarity of their shapes: both are rounded. I will argue later that this roundedness is neither so trivial nor ­coincidental as it might at first appear to be. For now, I will point out only that the face of Cronos is rounded; that the apples are heaped atop a platter, also rounded; that the sardine tin housing the bomb has rounded corners; and that c­ lockworks—the image to which much of the dream’s material is assimilated—are composed of wheels and gears and round faces. Remember, too, the “circular gallop” of the “fussy little hairspring” set in motion when Nikolai began to wind the bomb’s clock. To return to the evolution of Cronos’s image in the “Day of Judgment” dream: Nikolai sees that the apples on Cronos’s platter are of that variety called “Chinese apples” or “apples of paradise.” The sight of paradise apples reminds Nikolai that he, being “a Nirvanic man,” rejects “paradise, or a garden (which as he saw it, was the same thing).” This rejection of the JudeoChristian notion of paradise is our first clue, beyond the dream’s title, to the millennial significance I mentioned earlier of the winds wafting Nikolai’s way. For the Garden of Eden is the origin of that form of time that moves in one irreversible direction until the millennium and the Day of Judgment bring human history to its preordained end. The winds thus signify the apocalyptic dimensions of the events unfolding here, and Nikolai’s rejection of this linear time scheme is indicative of his desire to be free of his promise to the political underground, and, as we shall see, his historical destiny. To continue tracing out the lines of Cronos’s development: Cronos ­reappears toward the end of the dream in the garb of his Roman counterpart, Saturn, ruler of the golden age and patron of philosophical contemplation, who, when the members of the Pantheon were reinterpreted as planetarian rulers, was taken to be the highest and most tyrannical of these. In the “Day of Judgment” dream, a planetarian Saturn indeed tyrannizes Nikolai and, in so doing, brings him to some profound philosophical realizations. As Saturn appears in Nikolai’s sky, Nikolai metamorphoses into Jupiter, son of Saturn (comparable to the Greek Zeus) and patron of rational ­intelligence. Saturn throws Nikolai-Jupiter into the distances of infinity, and for a moment, it seems to Nikolai that he is outside time. From this vantage point, he remembers that he wants to “throw a bomb at his father; to throw a bomb at swift-flowing time itself. But his father was Saturn, the circle of time turned upon itself and closed; the empire of Saturn returned.”

Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

The closing of time’s circle is what Nikolai sees as he orbits Saturn. And as he orbits, he sees that “everything was perishing” because of Nikolai’s desire to destroy his father. Nikolai tries to deny this desire, but Saturn declares that it is “too late: [. . .] everything is collapsing: it is all falling back to Saturn.” At this juncture Nikolai hears the “loud mumbling” of “turn—turn— turn,” which I mentioned earlier. It is a repetition of “ça tourne,” which is how Saturn, in correcting Nikolai’s “cela tourne,” not only puns on his name but also describes the motion that all the planets and the whole universe is undergoing. Nikolai, who is himself madly whirling, feels that “this was the calendar running b­ ackwards.” Against the background of the Garden of Eden idea evoked by the apples, this is, I might point out, a heretical view. For only cyclical time turns back on itself. Linear time, in contrast, moves forever forward toward its end in apocalypse. Nikolai is thus confused by this reversal. His confusion is evidenced by the question he asks his father: “But what kind of chronology is this?” “None at all,” Saturn replies, “The calendar, Nicky, is null.”5 The implications of Saturn’s words are clear: the millennial winds that wafted in with the dream’s opening have now blown time away. As Saturn pronounces the word “null” (nulevoe), “the terrible import of Nikolai Apollonovich’s soul” is turning into “a round zero” (kruglyi nul′ ), which, as it turns, “[turns] into an agonizing sphere.” It seems to Nikolai, in his anguish, that “there was the logic—the bones would be blown to pieces.” Recalling that Nikolai, as a type of Jupiter, is an exponent of rational intelligence, we see that reason cannot stand up to the philosophical challenges posed by the mighty figure of Saturn, Father Time. Now that Nikolai-Jupiter is devoid of his reason, he asks the mighty Saturn a very philosophical question, “What does ‘I am’ mean?” I must explain that the question does not come out of nowhere. The archaic diction of Nikolai’s Russian words for “I am” (ia esm′ ) is reminiscent of the biblical “I am the Word” (Ia esm′ Slovo), the rhetoric of the Second Coming, that is, the Day of Judgment. It is apocalyptic thinking, then, that prompts Nikolai’s question about the meaning of the words I am. In replying to the question, Saturn follows along the lines the ­interchange has taken: “I am? Zero” (nul′ ). “Well, and zero?” Nikolai begs for more. Saturn makes the pronouncement, “That, Kolenka, is a bomb.” With these words, “Nikolai Apollonovich understood that he was only a bomb; and he burst with a bang.”   5 My translation.

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The explosion rouses Nikolai from his sleep; he doesn’t remember his dream; and the reader is left wondering what it means to Nikolai that he is a bomb and only a bomb. To put the question another way: Why is his dreaming mind’s realization that he is merely an instrument of destruction so explosive? The answer is to be found, I believe, in the novel’s juxtaposing images of time’s duration to images of time’s end. The suggestion that time is ­limited comes from the ticking of the bomb (once wound, the bomb must ­detonate), from the dream’s title, and from the apples of paradise. The s­uggestion that time has no limit is made by Saturn’s status as a planetary cycle, as well as by Nikolai’s nirvanic visions of himself as undergoing infinite spiritual ­reincarnations (these I have not described here). In this juxtaposition of infinite to finite time eventuates an apocalypse of ambiguous consequence. The apocalypse Nikolai witnesses could bring all time to an end; it could equally well bring one of time’s cycles to an end while it initiates another. This ambiguity is what reduces Nikolai to a mere instrument of ­destruction. He sees destruction deprived of its power to do battle with time: rather than eliminate time, destruction participates in both its linear and cyclical workings. Thus, Nikolai is ultimately a historical being, fated to live within time while he struggles to get beyond it. To grind an old saw: his father is bigger than he is. I would like, at this point, to put the thematics of the dream to rest and to make some final comments on its poetics. Recall my prior mention of an analogy between the ticking of time and the roundness characterizing the dream’s shapes. The return of Saturn makes clear the ancient connection between time and the image of a circle circling: Aristotle claimed that “time itself is thought to be a circle,” and Plato saw time as “the revolving image of eternity.” But more important than these words alone to an appreciation of Bely’s use of synesthesia as a scheme for apocalypse is the awareness that this ancient tradition is manifested in Petersburg on a variety of sensory levels, and this m ­ ultiplicity of sensory responses creates the illusion that a single ­stimulus—be it the bomb’s tick or time as pure abstraction—is ­simultaneously translated into the languages of the senses. I noted by way of introduction that one of the French symbolists’ ­burning questions about synesthesia concerned the simultaneous appeal of a single stimulus to more than one sensory order. What is at stake in this question is a transcendental view of the universe as essentially integral and only ­apparently diverse. Bely’s use of synesthesia as a structural principle in Petersburg ­constitutes an assertion on his part of a similar but simulated

Synesthesia as Apocalypse in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

t­ranscendental view. The assertion is persuasively made as Bely willfully ­legislates a whole array of correspondences among sensations. They are arbitrary, yet taken together, these correspondences appear to be not so much a matter of artistic originality as they are a matter of biological necessity: anyone with ­sensitivity can access the universe’s essential integrity. What’s more, the “Day of Judgment” dream reveals that the universal integer in Bely’s “­ transcendental” presumption is simply and purely time. The careful reader will notice that in Nikolai’s dream, the apparently ­biological necessity of correspondence among sensations takes the ­recognizable form of a speech act. Recall that from Cronos’s parted lips issue millennial winds and a variety of clocklike mutterings. The image of a speaker speaking is created when Cronos parts his lips and releases the winds. Cronos’s blowing is contiguous with Saturn’s pronouncing the word “zero,” which in Russian (nul′ ) also requires parted, rounded lips. As we have seen, it is the word “zero” that communicates the explosive self-knowledge the dream imparts to Nikolai. Moreover, it is a word that acquires its communicative power by appealing to every level of Nikolai’s sensory mechanism. That is to say, it is not the sound of the word alone but rather the combination of the sound (of the millennial winds) with the vision of the zero (the mouth’s circle) and the kenosis (tactile sensation) of whirling out of control that makes for Nikolai’s apocalyptic realization. In other words, it is the simultaneous perception of a stimulus by more than one sensory order that allows Nikolai’s consciousness to expand to the point where it can understand the apocalyptic dimensions of the parricide scheme in which he is entangled. This response by many senses to a single stimulus is (as was explained at the outset) the essence of synesthesia, and in Bely’s text (as I wish to emphasize here), it is also the essence of apocalypse. The equivalence between s­ ynesthesia and apocalypse comes about because the stimulus to which Nikolai ultimately responds is the spoken word, and by his response, the spoken word for Nikolai becomes revelatory. Thus, the biblical expectation of the revelation of the Word is ironically enacted in the “Day of Judgment” dream, where the word cannily works its wonders by working its way through to every level of the dreamer’s sensory experience. The apocalypse eventuating in Saturn’s speech extends beyond the ­sensory perceptions composing Nikolai’s dream. Further analysis would demonstrate that all the thematic and poetic material of the novel is organized by the same principle of synesthesia; in other words, all characters and events are in some sensory way analogical to the central word “zero.” That is to say, the novel makes of synesthesia an artifice by which to simulate the construction of a

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meaningful reality. In that literary reality, meaning is exclusively a product of arbitrary analogies masked as necessary correspondences between all the experiences and appearances (from images to events to the heroes themselves) composing the text. By transplanting synesthesia from its native habitat, poetry, into prose, Bely fulfills another of the French symbolists’ burning ambitions: to sustain in literature the experience of synesthesia, an experience that every synesthete knows to be the most fleeting of sensate moments. In sustaining the fleeting moment, Bely does for literature what the Apocalypse is thought to do for time itself, and this is to convert a succession of moments into an indivisible duration. Because synesthesia is the scheme that allows Bely to achieve this contradiction in temporal terms, it emerges from Petersburg as a powerful figure for the apocalypse.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg JACOB EMERY

Kinship and Literature The main character of Andrey Bely’s 1916 novel Petersburg, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, “has his father’s ears”—oversized, greenish ones that protrude from either side of his head. Taken literally, the statement is patently bizarre: the ears are of course Nikolai Apollonovich’s own. Yet figuratively such statements are ­satisfying not only for parents who parcel their children’s features out among ­relatives but also for literary artists. Tropes of parent-child identity form the basic structure of Petersburg along with any number of other books that center on a ­perceived ­identity transmitted across generations. An inquiry into the role of kinship metaphor is relevant not only to Petersburg—generally considered the pinnacle of Russian literary modernism and a rough analogue to James Joyce’s Ulysses—but also to wider theoretical issues of r­ hetoric, exchange, and fictionality. Bely was an avid theorist of symbol and metaphor, in addition to his career as a novelist. He parses the metaphoric process in his essay “The Magic of Words” (“Magiia slov”), arguing that when we refer, for example, to the crescent moon through the trope of “the moon-white horn in the sky,” “the substitution that posits the process of metaphorical assimilation referring to ‘horn’ indicates (1) the determination of the genus through the species (horn through white horn) and (2) a qualitative distinction between objects (a moonlike horn is qualitatively distinct from any other kind of horn).”1 Referring Bely’s schema back to the metaphor of a boy’s having his father’s ears, we can easily discern both the generalizing movement between species and genus (the epithet “father’s ears” encompasses other large, greenish ears, not the   1 Andrey Bely, Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, ed. and trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: ­University of California Press, 1985), 107.

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father’s alone) and the individuating distinction made between objects (these ears distinguish this child from the children of other fathers, whether their ears are large and greenish or not). The figure turns on the identity conjured up between dissimilar individuals by the magic of creative language. Metaphor is the e­ ssential postulation of identity out of difference; in logical transcription, Bely notes, metaphor would appear as A = B.2 This ­identification has a sociological aspect in the metaphorically grounded system of substitution and exchange that occurs in heredity. To use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s summation, “Every society first desires to reproduce itself; it must thus possess a rule to assign children the same status in the social structure as that of their parents,”3 whose places the children take. Reproduction is always r­eproduction of labor; the problematic of equivalence and exchange foregrounded in literature can be traced beyond literature to the processes of equivalence and exchange that organize the social economy.4 While ­discourses like politics and law o­ rdinarily shy away from admitting their basis in the ­equivalence and exchange of identities, literature sometimes revels in the fact and turns to k­ inship as a key example. As Mark Turner notes, “Kinship ­relations give . . . our closest ­metaphors for metaphor itself. . . . Generations produce a kind of living anaphora: from parent to child we see repetition and variation, ­similarity and difference.”5 Petersburg—whose two major ­editions, in 1916 and 1922, bracket the Russian revolution and its attempt to ­revolutionize ­society from the family up—­represents a unique attempt to ­combine m ­ etaphor and ­kinship into a single literary complex. Indeed, the novel’s first c­ hapter begins with a wry interrogation of kin ­identity’s limits. Parodying the ­eighteenth-century convention of introducing ­characters in ­genealogical terms, Bely drily informs us that “Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of exceedingly venerable stock: he had Adam for his ancestor” (13). The statement is funny, to be sure, and on the face of it absurd, but the heredity theme running through the whole novel warns us against ­discounting its significance. An inventive, stylistically venturesome account of a young man commissioned by a revolutionary group to assassinate his   2 Ibid., 108.   3 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View from Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 57.   4 The linkage of social and literary processes of exchange might be accomplished either through concepts of base and superstructure or through the structural argument that brings the study of kinship, economic, and linguistic exchange under the rubric of a general “science of communication,” argued for by Lévi-Strauss in his Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 83.   5 Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: U ­ niversity of Chicago Press, 1987), 193.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

father, a c­ onservative senator, the book is no simple rehashing of the Oedipal scheme but rather a dense, vertiginous tissue of figurative language. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of hereditary identity, which it holds to be serious and real. One deeply touching scene in the novel recounts how the senator-father touches the hand of his son, the would-be parricide, and dismisses his instinctive reaction of terror with the argument that his son “was the flesh of his flesh: and it was shameful to be afraid of his own flesh” (294). The son, who also senses the continuity between his father’s identity and his own, is “sensually his father’s absolute equal; he was most of all astonished by the fact that psychically he could not tell where he finished and where in him the spirit of the senator began, the bearer of those sparkling ­bejeweled ­insignia that glistened on the gleaming leaves of his embroidered breast” (144). The novel never misses an opportunity to point out where father and son share a distinguishing trait (a fondness for watermelon or a ­susceptibility to ­indigestion or the habit of talking to themselves), and they seem to have trouble telling themselves apart, each at several points mistaking his own reflection for his relative. A full reading of the heredity theme in Petersburg implicates a trope of parent-child identity on every level of the novel’s composition: Bely’s play with sound patterns involves individual phonemes and morphemes in the webs of kinship; the related play with sonic resemblances between words leads us to perceive the book’s constant punning as the revelation of family resemblances on the level of the word; hereditary preoccupations are, as we have already seen, readily identifiable on the level of the sentence; the general movement of the narrative is driven by the tension between parricide and family identity; and the novel’s metafictional admission that it is “spawn” (otrod ʹe) transforms the book itself, on the highest diegetic level, into the realization of a familial metaphor.6 After all, according to Petersburg’s author, metaphoric language is the ultimate inheritance—“the one useful legacy we have to leave to our ­children.”7 For the moment, however, I want to stress only that Petersburg grapples continuously with the basic conundrum that parent and child are at once the same person, in the same flesh, yet somehow horribly, i­nexplicably   6 On the level of reception as well, we often contextualize books through elaborate ­metaphoric genealogies or kinships. Bely even plays on the metaphor of intertextual ­relatedness insofar as Apollon Apollonovich’s ears are themselves inherited from a literary forebear: the cuckolded husband in Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, also a large-eared political functionary married to a philandering wife named Anna.   7 Bely, Selected Essays, 110. See Andrei Belyi, Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 1:244.

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different—so different that one of them is capable of killing the other. This ­conundrum of (non)identity involves Petersburg immediately in the basic problems of philosophy—“To think is to identify,” suggests Theodor Adorno, while “dialectics is the consistent sense of ­nonidentity”8—as well as in the ­literary and linguistic operation of metaphor. Indeed, the book is doubly structured by the kinship theme’s problematic of identity and n ­ onidentity because the coherent development of its plot is driven by the threat of ­parricide—the radical division of son and father into subject and object— even as the aesthetic unity of its rhetorical structure is grounded in statements of parent-child identity. When the bomb with which Nikolai Apollonovich is to kill his father explodes harmlessly in the last few pages, the novel fizzles anticlimactically: the tension between familial identity and familial violence defused, the plot has nowhere to go. My argument is that these issues are part and parcel of Bely’s e­ xtravagantly metaphoric style, in which words are substituted freely, always referring beyond themselves to the more literal words that they replace, without obscuring the fact that they have been exchanged for those words and remain different from them. The power of symbolic thought, as Bely writes in a 1910 essay, leads us “out from ourselves, as from an insignificant grain of sand in the desert of existence, to ourselves as Adam Kadmon, as to a universe where I, you, he are all one, where father, mother, and son are all one. . . . And this ‘one’ is the symbol of a mystery that never reveals itself.”9 In Bely’s thought, kinship ­identity becomes representative of a radical if unrealized potential for universal identity through creative language.   8 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 5.   9 Bely, Selected Essays, 133. I have slightly literalized Cassedy’s translation. “Мы идем от себя как нечтожной песчинки бытия к себе как Адаму Кадмону, как к вселенной, где я, ты, он—одно, где отец, мать и сын—одно. . . . И это одно—символ нераскрывающейся тайны.” See Bely, Kritika, 1:76. Both this passage and the first sentence of Petersburg’s first chapter trace human lineage back to Adam—the single point of origin of the human race. These genealogical evocations of human origin might be compared with the last words of the novel’s brief prologue, which trace the origin of the novel to a single point by noting that the eponymous city of Petersburg appears on maps “in the form of two concentric circles with a black point in the middle; and from this mathematical point, which possesses no dimensions, it energetically proclaims that it exists: from there, from that said point, swarms of printed books issue in a torrent; from this invisible point with great momentum issue circulars” (12). In the last sentence of the prologue and the first sentence of the initial chapter, which pinpoint the mythic sources of text and humanity respectively, Bely invites us to compare the multiplying words that proceed from the germinal point of Petersburg (the novel’s title and hence its first word) with the multiplying generations that proceed from Adam (the first human being of Old Testament tradition, who created language by inventing the names of all the things of the earth).

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

Conceptual Copulas The anthropologist Robin Fox observes that while “it is possible to i­magine a society that ignored kinship ties altogether and built its social system ­completely out of other sets of relationships . . . no such society has ever ­existed.”10 One of the great tasks of literature—in works as diverse as Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, Herodotus’s Histories, and Georges Perec’s W—has been to imagine alternatives to the consanguineal family, but these imaginings have always been opposed to the prevailing fact that sexual reproduction is also the reproduction of labor and the perpetuation of social categories, that it is the engendering of the children who will take our places when we die.11 Hereditary identity is a notable instance of the principles of social exchange that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted were the basis of human interaction: “No society can exist without exchange, no exchange without a common measure, and no common measure without equality. Thus all society has as its first law some conventional equality, whether of men or of things.”12 Enacting these principles of exchange on the figurative landscape of fiction, a book like Petersburg insists that people related by blood are the same and performs that assertion in a metaphoric matrix of identity and substitution. Hampering our ability to diagnose this metaphoric character, however, is the absence of an ironclad definition of metaphor, even though we have an intuitive sense of metaphor’s relation to identity and substitution. This lack of a definition is not for lack of trying, since the trope has remained central in literary studies since Aristotle called it the “most ­important” element of style.13 While there is a grain of truth to the s­tatement that “all theories of metaphor are footnotes to Aristotle,”14 this is largely because Aristotle’s writings on metaphor are maddeningly short on details, and they have accumulated millennia’s worth of glosses and reinterpretations. His basic 10 Robin Fox, Encounter with Anthropology (New York: Dell, 1965), 95. 11 In We children are produced by technological means and assigned numbers at birth. See Evgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Natasha Randall (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 21. Herodotus describes a Libyan tribe that practices promiscuous sexual relations and that assigns children fathers several years after birth in his History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 347. In Perec’s W names, social status, and the ­opportunity to breed are all conferred by success in sporting events. See Georges Perec, W; or, The Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (Boston: Godine, 1988), 100, 125. 12 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 189. 13 Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1958), 49. 14 Paul Gordon, The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 20.

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model of metaphor as the substitution of a figurative term for a literal one has been recast variously as synonymy (lion means Achilles, neither more nor less) and as a mystical overflow of signification (the metaphor is indescribably more than either lion or Achilles and defies our primitive notion of meaning). Compounding the problem, Aristotle theorizes and gives ­examples of only a limited set of metaphors, leaving it unclear how his taxonomy of the trope might be extended to a more general definition. A wide range of schools has accordingly developed to deal with the ­variegated faces of metaphor. Some scholars, following Quintilian, hold that metaphors are essentially compressed similes; others defend the view that m ­ etaphoric language derives its force from an emotional connotation of the metaphoric word. The “controversion theory” pioneered by Monroe Beardsley explains metaphor as the foregrounding of a logical absurdity on an i­mmediately apprehensible level of a text, an aesthetic device that forces the reader to “seek a second level of meaning on which something is being said.”15 What is now called the interaction theory first surfaced in the second century CE in the writings of Hermogenes of Tarsus, who contends that what is “called Metaphor by the grammarians” is properly understood as a moment “when a term not relevant to the subject matter but signifying some ­extraneous object of reference is introduced into a sentence so as to unite in its significance both the subject at issue and the extraneous object in a composite concept.”16 Finally, since the 1970s broader interest in fields like cybernetics and a­ nthropology has been sparked by the theory of cognitive metaphor, which argues that, while metaphors may be expressed or instantiated in words, “the metaphorical ideas themselves are conceptual matters, matters of thought that underlie the particular words that express them.”17 While each of these ­theories has a strong point, none of them is entirely ­satisfactory. Yet, even as the competing conceptualizations of metaphor have become a ­theoretical morass, nonspecialists use the term metaphor happily and indiscriminately in reference to various figures of resemblance, identity, and substitution. Some

15 Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, 1958), 138. 16 Quoted in W. Bedell Stanford, Greek Metaphor: Studies in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936), 14. In modern criticism this idea is usually cited in reference to the writings of Max Black and I. A. Richards. Richards typifies metaphor as the interaction between a figurative term, or “vehicle,” and a literal “tenor,” or “what is really being said” (97), resulting in “a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction.” See his Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 100. 17 Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty, 15.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

appeal to intuition may be practically necessary, even if it is dangerous to assume that we can know metaphor when we see it, as the philistine knows art. A solution to—or at least a satisfactory explanation of—this impasse might be found in the opposition between identification and predication. In an aside, Paul Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor describes this opposition as the fundamental polarity of language, which on the one hand is rooted in named individuals, and on the other hand predicates qualities, classes, relations and actions that in principle are universal. Logic works on the basis of this dissymmetry between two functions. The identifying function always designates individuals that exist (or whose existence is neutralized, as in fiction). . . . By contrast, in having the universal in view, the predicate function concerns the nonexistent. . . . The dissymmetry of the two functions thus also implies the ontological dissymmetry of subject and predicate.18

Ricoeur uses this distinction to demonstrate that some conflicts between ­theories of metaphor derive from a misconception of language as ­operating exclusively in one or the other of these modes. However, the distinction between identification and predication may also provide a window into why metaphor resists definition. It seems to me that a predicative approach to metaphor is necessarily ­inexact in that, while poetic metaphor flirts with universality by promising “a universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else” (to use Northrop Frye’s apt formulation), it does so by means of specific acts of identification and exchange in a fictionality “in which the formula ‘A is B’ may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even ‘black is white,’ which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance.”19 Metaphor may therefore be most ably defined by Frye’s conclusion that “the metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of the A = B type” because Frye’s definition (or that of Bely, who encapsulated metaphor using exactly the same formula) is essentially a tautology that identifies metaphor as an act of ­identification. The predicate of a metaphoric sentence like “A is B” is a literally false one that further identifies, characterizes, and individuates the present subject of the metaphor instead of referring beyond that subject to any e­ xterior, potentially universal predicate. Its truth-value is a dialectical 18 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge, 2003), 81–82. 19 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 124.

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recursion to the identity of the subject rather than the analytic formulation of a fact: Hegel’s Logic, in what we can read as a summation of the ­metaphoric process, defines the ­philosophical subject as “the identity of identity and non-­ identity.”20 Even while the metaphoric movement includes an ­abstraction (from species to genus, say, as in Bely), it nevertheless concludes in an act of extreme ­individuation. To highlight this aspect of metaphor has the added advantage for literary studies of enjoining scholars to engage the ­specifics of the literary text rather than to seek confirmation in it of a predicative, ­potentially ­normative preconception about metaphoric language. Although fictional existence may be “neutralized,” as Ricoeur drily puts it, that existence is nevertheless manifested to the reader by virtue of the tropes that hypothesize it, the set of contingent copulas that, by insisting that A equals B within the horizon of the text, create literary meaning or even, according to Bely, create a cognitive reality—what “in the deepest essence of my creative s­elf-­assertion I cannot help believing is the existence of some ­reality whose symbol, or ­representation, is the metaphorical image I created.”21 This essay asks an old, broad question: How are we to approach these contingent realities and synthesize their figurative being with our own? How does fiction provide its reader with encoded models for interpreting the system of figures constituting it? I suggest that the tropological structure of Petersburg contains in kinship an immanent metaphorization of itself, with which it can be identified and through which it can be described. Indeed, all literary works, being tissues of tropes, metafictionally comment on the metaphoric process of identification that informs their composition, if only because, as Paul de Man has demonstrated, there exists between the figurative modes of a text a productive tension that makes every act of reading a potential allegory of reading.22 Furthermore, the m ­ etaphoric s­ tructures of a text do not exist in a vacuum but are themselves ­identified with parallel systems of identification and substitution—like kinship or economic exchange— thematically present in the same text; as such, these ­structures ­proclaim their existence in a complex including both the immediately metaphoric processes of language and metaphorically interpretable aspects of society. Far from being a simple reflection of or comment on society, literature is cognate with it because the same kind of creative thinking underlies them both. 20 Quoted in Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 7. 21 Bely, Selected Essays, 110. 22 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 17.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

The Great Word As one might expect of a novel written by a theorist of metaphor, Petersburg’s figurative underpinnings are sweeping yet intricate. A full inquiry into those underpinnings is beyond the scope of this essay, which aims rather to sketch out the hermeneutical problems that Petersburg’s omnipresent ­metaphoric play forces on its readers and to show how the novel presents itself as the ­realization of a familial metaphor. A passage from the first chapter ­demonstrates ­metaphor’s activity in the novel. The wealthy senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov has just left home in his carriage. As he nears the Nikolaevskii Bridge over the river Neva, “Apollon Apollonovich [thinks]: about the stars, about the i­ncoherence of the thunderous stream [of people] flowing past; and, rocking on his black ­cushion, he trie[s] to calculate the power of the light received from Saturn” (31).23 At this initial stage, it seems as if the two objects of Apollon Apollonovich’s thought—heavenly bodies and the proletarian flow of people crossing the bridge—are connected only metonymically, by his contemplating stars (Saturn in particular) while perceiving the crowd of workers outside the windows of his carriage. The relation between the parallel processes of thought and perception is revolutionized through a metaphoric act of identification a few lines ­further on. Among the horde of people crossing into Petersburg from Vasil′evskii Island, Apollon Apollonovich recognizes a shabby man carrying a bundle, who once visited his son’s room at their home. Apollon Apollonovich experiences a queer reaction, explainable only by the fact that this man, Aleksandr Ivanovich Dudkin, is carrying the time bomb with which Apollon Apollonovich’s son, Nikolai, will shortly be asked to murder his father (although at this point in the narrative, none of the three men knows the package’s contents, which are not disclosed until halfway through the book). The moment of ­recognition or identification, when Apollon Apollonovich makes eye contact with the ­unwitting bearer of this murderous instrument, is doubled to reflect the ­senator’s psychic and sensual reactions, respectively. As he contemplated the flowing silhouettes—bowlers, feathers, caps, caps, caps, feathers—Apollon Apollonovich likened them to points in the ­firmament; but one of those points, breaking loose from its orbit, rushed with dizzying speed straight at him, taking on the form of a huge, crimson sphere, that is to say, I mean:— 23 Note that the bridge and Apollon Apollonovich’s son share the name Nikolai.

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—as he contemplated the flowing silhouettes (caps, caps, feathers), among those caps, feathers and bowlers Apollon Apollonovich caught sight, at the corner, of a pair of wild eyes: the eyes expressed one ­impermissible quality: the eyes recognized the senator; and, recognizing him, went wild; maybe the eyes had been waiting for him on the corner; and, catching sight of him, they opened wide, they shone, they flashed. (31)

The first paragraph renders the literal march of the plot ­indecipherable by articulating it through a strange, disconnected image drawn from Apollon Apollonovich’s internal world. First we see that the senator’s twin ­preoccupations, the imagined fundament and the perceived passersby, have been linked by analogy rather than coincidence: Apollon Apollonovich has likened the proletarians to points in the celestial vault. The basis of this likeness is for the moment unintelligible, but the flow of text takes Apollon Apollonovich’s train of thought at face value and proceeds to describe how one of these heavenly bodies—presumably Saturn, the last-named object of the senator’s calculations—falls out of its orbit and rushes toward the senator in the form of a crimson sphere. This heavenly body is now identified as a member of the crowd of w ­ orkers by the narrator, who breaks in, using the formula “that is” (to est ʹ), to tell us that the description of the planet falling out of its orbit is in fact a paraphrase of the description of Dudkin’s eyes widening in recognition (or vice versa). The two paragraphs purport to describe the same incident, though they share only the motif of the expanding circle and are otherwise wildly divergent. Their relation provides a mise en abyme of the novel’s complicated tropological substructure. “Established here is the pattern that underlies the entire novel,” note Robert Maguire and John Malmstad of these juxtaposed passages, “a sphere, or a circle, that widens and brings about disintegration and death. At this point we do not know that we are dealing with a symbol.”24 Yet the symbol’s function in Petersburg is unorthodox. A literary symbol is usually understood to encapsulate a work’s preoccupations; the textbook example is the titular subject of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, an apparently flawless crystal vessel that is in fact worthless because of a crack running under the gilt. Although only an expert eye can discern the fault, the bowl can split apart at any moment, just like the unhappy family whose agonies the novel details. The bowl’s presence on the mantelpiece above the family hearth there24 See Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xxi.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

fore serves as a touchstone that knits together the vagaries of the plot. But instead of tying Petersburg’s strands together into a compact image, the motif of the ­expanding circle interrupts the narrative midsentence and fractures it into two parts. These parts are presented as equivalents even though they have no semantic relation. Indeed, the link between them, the expression “that is,” ­conventionally used to introduce a restatement or clarification, is ­literally only a copula, a simple statement of identity. These two paragraphs, this ­expression insists, one describing the heavenly vault and one describing the earthbound pedestrian, are the same object(s), despite the obvious and ­apparently unbridgeable differences between them.25 In his critical writings, Bely calls symbol and metaphor synonymous in their purest forms, and the key symbol of his greatest novel operates in this passage in the metaphoric mode by individuating the two passages even as its presence in both serves to identify them with each other.26 Although Bely was a proud theorist of the symbolist movement in literature, his take on the symbol as a concept was, as Iurii Lotman has insightfully commented, an idiosyncratic one. Unlike his symbolist colleagues, Bely sought not only new words or even just new meanings for old words—he sought a new language. The word ceases for him to be the sole bearer of linguistic meaning. . . . As a result the field of meanings is rendered ­boundlessly complex. On the one hand, semantics exceeds the limits of the discrete word—it gets “spread” through the whole text. The text is made into a great word, in which discrete words are only elements, complexly affecting one another in the integrated semantic unity of the text. . . . On the other hand, the word decomposes into its elements, and lexical ­meaning is transferred to units of the lowest levels: morphemes and phonemes.27

Lotman’s essay specifically addresses Bely’s poetry, but a similar tension between the “integrated semantic unity” of the text and its continuous ­disintegration into constituent elements is at play in Bely’s novels as well, and in Petersburg 25 The problem of connecting differences is underscored by the fact that the scene takes place on a bridge between the opposed worlds of the aristocratic city center and working-class Vasilʹevskii Island. 26 Bely, Selected Essays, 109. 27 Iurii Lotman, “Poeticheskoe kosnoiazychie Andreia Belogo,” in Andrei Belyi: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. Stanislav Lesnevskii and Aleksandr Alekseevich Mikhailov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1988), 439. In Glossolalia (Glossolaliia), Petersburg’s arcane companion text, Bely himself writes that the “sounds of speech” contain the “meanings of an enormous word . . . concealed by a metaphorical cloud.” See Andrey Bely, Glossolalie: Poem über den Laut, trans. Thomas R. Beyer Jr. (Dornach, Switzerland: Pforte, 2003), 41–42.

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especially: Bely was as concerned with meter and assonance in his prose as in his verse, and he once went so far as to remark that his novels were long, metered narrative poems and that he wrote them in prose only to save paper.28 Even though the heavenly bodies and proletarian passersby have no semantic ground in common apart from that which the narrator asks us to accept on faith, they are linked through the micro- and macrostructures of the text: first through euphony (the same sound combinations are repeated in both paragraphs, particularly the morphemes shar- [sphere] and shir[expand], which are otherwise unrelated) and second through a barrage of images of roundness (the points, orbits, spheres, bowler hats, and dilating eyes), which signals a shared imagistic substructure. While euphony continuously draws our attention to elements of Bely’s language that are smaller even than the word, the round images invoke the symbol of an expanding circle that is common to the entire text. Both of these aspects relate figurative identity to kinship. On the one hand, the novel’s thematic unity is related to the family identity shared by all Adam’s descendants despite their differences, since symbolic thought creates a world in which “I, you, he are all one, where father, mother, and son are one.” On the other, Bely’s exploitation of chance similarities between sounds is simply an artistic adaptation of the pun, a device he claims in his autobiography to have inherited from his father, apparently an inveterate punster.29 Nikolai Apollonovich’s father shares this fondness for punning, and most of his jokes are puns on family relationships: for example, Apollon Apollonovich’s first pun, on borona (harrow) and baron (baron), turns a servant of peasant stock into a noble scion (22), and the senator’s generation of illegitimate meanings can be correlated with the possibility that he has illegitimate children.30 These puns on heredity showcase the relations created by sonic similarities pervading the novel and predispose us to consider these similarities as family resemblances.31

28 Gerald Janecek cites Bely’s claim that “between poetry and artistic prose there is no boundary” in his “Rhythm in Prose: The Special Case of Bely,” in Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. G. Janecek (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 86. 29 Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 71. 30 Other puns tell of a grafin (pitcher) being espoused to a grafinia (countess) and a khalda (loose woman) being the wife of a Khaldei (Chaldean). 31 This is especially evident in Dudkin’s case, since his relation to his metaphoric father (a statue of Tsar Peter the Great) is literalized in the novel’s sonic landscape largely through alliteration—the shared substance of sounds and letters that signify the two characters’ suitability to pun each other long before the statue addresses Dudkin as his “son” (411).

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

A Universe Akin The nature of any symbolic unity resulting from the novel’s puns and ­metaphors remains in question, however, largely because we see that u ­ nity’s unsettling traces in dismembered words. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that every image in the book can be traced back to the circle symbol as surely as the c­ haracters’ lineage can be traced back to Adam, yet the s­ ymbol’s ­fractured ­omnipresence serves, like the bomb that is the circle’s most o­ bvious i­ ncarnation, to atomize the text as much as to unite it.32 The twinned ­paragraphs d ­ escribing the mutual recognition of Apollon Apollonovich and Dudkin ­supposedly deal with a single phenomenon, but they present a g­ ratuitously doubled e­ ntity.33 Both the starry sky and the plodding ­pedestrians are ­presented through images of an expanding circle, but the symbol is denied its potential for ­unifying action by being split into two pieces of text, which have only the one ­symbolic motif in common. Because the figurative image of the planet falling out of its orbit precedes the literal description of Dudkin’s dilating eyes, because the novel frequently operates in a hallucinatory mode, and because the two images have no semantic ground in common, the h ­ ierarchy between the l­iteral and figurative is disrupted. One way of conceptualizing the catachrestic difference expressed in this self-proclaimed identity may be to refer to the parallel processes of sensation and contemplation that organize Apollon Apollonovich’s experiences on the bridge and whose contrast is a recurrent motif. As we saw in the passage quoted above formulating Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich’s 32 Petersburg’s overarching and omnipresent symbol, the circle, is pervaded with and may even derive from occult representations of Adam and Adamic language. Just as Petersburg begins by mentioning Adam, so too the first page of H. P. Blavatsky’s magnum opus Isis Unveiled invokes “the Divine Essence emanating from ADAM like a luminous arc proceeding to form a circle.” See Helena Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, 2 vols. (Point Loma, CA: Aryan Theosophical, 1919), 1:1. Glossolalia, Bely’s attempt to establish the precepts of a universal language, is deeply engaged with Adamic language and ends by invoking the eschatological reunion of all languages in a single perfect tongue and the reunion of all people in a single family: “There will come the brotherhood of peoples: the tongue of tongues will rip apart our tongues.” See Bely, Glossolalie, 249. In Petersburg these preoccupations are manifested, for instance, in an astral journey on which Nikolai Apollonovich experiences his identity with the entirety of his lineage, stretching back to the beginning of the human race (315–17). 33 Such gratuitous doubling is a frequent device in the novel. For instance, “He felt that his body was spilt out into the ‘universe,’ that is to say, the study” (59); “In the first place, he did not avail himself of the services of his carriage . . . secondly: in the most literal, and not transferred meaning, he sped in the dark night along the quite unpopulated street” (250).

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mutual identity, the son is “sensually his father’s absolute equal; he was most of all astonished by the fact that psychically he could not tell where he f­ inished and where in him the spirit of the senator began” (144). The father-son ­equivalence, initially put in terms of bodily sensation, is repeated and said to be a mental process, thereby dividing identity into two modes of ­experiencing that identity. Similarly, we can understand Apollon Apollonovich’s divergent mental and sensual preoccupations—the astronomical calculations and the earthly passersby—first in psychic, then in physical terms as the repetition of a single universal symbolic identity, which annihilates the polar ­opposition between earth and sky as easily as it annuls that between sensation and ­contemplation.34 Petersburg’s reader encounters a hermeneutical problem because the text contains no internal barriers to meaning, something almost every Bely scholar has been forced to come to terms with. John Elsworth has observed that “the principle of the reduction of apparent opposites to identity is one that can be seen in operation throughout the novel,” so “all choices are in the end the same.”35 Nor were Bely’s contemporaries unaware of the problem. In a 1916 review that remains one of the best critical pieces of writing on Petersburg 34 This reading is borne out by a closely related passage in Bely’s 1909 “Emblematics of Meaning” (“Emblematika smysla”). The passage describes “unified symbolic life” as a repossession of the garden of Eden, where “the heaven of cognition, along with the earth of life, is henceforth one firmament in which heaven and earth mingle as one. . . . For earth here is the symbolic earth of Adam Kadmon.” See Bely, Selected Essays, 132. Adam, the primordial man, is the progenitor of all human beings and language, for “whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof ” (Genesis 2:19): in Adamic language, a lost mode of symbolic thought fervently sought after by mystics, every word was a true name, identical with what it represented. Moreover, this passage from Bely’s essay, which tells us that the mystical goal of symbolic thought is to merge the earth and sky, strongly resonates with our key passage from Petersburg, which by stating the identity between the night sky imagined by Apollon Apollonovich (“the heaven of cognition”) and the stream of proletarians he in fact perceives (“the earth of life”) creates a metaphoric unity without obviating their difference: “Heaven and earth mingle as one.” Bely thus enacts in the figurative landscape of Petersburg what his earlier theoretical essay had set as the goal of symbolic thought, the revelation of “unified diversity” through creative language; heaven and earth, thought and sensation represent the extremes to be bridged by the magic of words. According to Bely’s aesthetic theories, every act of poetic figuration is thus a partial disclosure of the world as Adam experienced it—a perfectly integrated system of true names—just as revelations of genealogical relationships prefigure the eschatological unity of the human family. 35 John Elsworth, Andrei Bely: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101, 103. Lotman’s theory of the “great word” is another example; see also Vladimir Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 105. Most recently, Langen has summed up the novel as “a sustained

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

to date, the philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev describes how “even the images of people . . . lose the firm boundaries separating one person from another and from the objects of the world surrounding them. . . . One person melts into another person; one object melts into another object; the physical plane into the astral plane; the cerebral process into the experiential process.”36 Like many contemporary reviewers, Berdiaev pointed to the relationship between Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich as the key ­example of the novel’s ambiguous identities.37 Bely’s colleague Viacheslav Ivanov (who had suggested the title Petersburg to the author) even considered father and son to share a common I, “a convergence of opposites and a system of ­absolute identity. . . . The son’s terrorism and the father’s reaction are one and the same.”38 This vast, complex novel suggests—however implausibly—that it can be reduced to a single mystical unity, of which the ambiguous identity shared by Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolai Apollonovich is the figure.39 For example, it seems reasonable to identify Saturn, the expanding ­crimson sphere that threatens Apollon Apollonovich when he catches sight of the man who is carrying the bomb, with the bomb itself, which is meant to kill the senator with its explosive expansion. But we must consider that Nikolai Apollonovich, who is to plant the device in his father’s house, “is a bomb” (321) and is therefore metaphorically identical to Saturn. Moreover, Apollon Apollonovich suffers from dilation of the heart, “the sensation [. . .] of a growing, crimson sphere, on the point of exploding and bursting into pieces” (33), and the bomb is therefore metaphorically incarnate in his flesh

36 37 38 39

meditation on the nature of unity.” See Timothy Langen, The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xiv. Nikolai Berdiaev, “Astralʹnyi roman: Razmyshlenie po povodu romana A. Belogo ­Peterburg,” in Andrei Belyi: Pro et Contra, ed. D. K. Burlaka (St. Petersburg: Izdatelʹstvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004), 413. Berdiaev continues, “It is difficult to determine where the father ends and where the son begins. These enemies, who present opposing points of origin—bureaucracy and revolution—are combined into some kind of an uncrystallized, formless whole.” Ibid. See Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa: O romane Andreia Belogo Peterburg,” in Burlaka, Andrei Belyi: Pro et Contra, 409. The fragmented unity aspired to by the novel might explain why its two editions are so curiously interchangeable despite the drastic and often seemingly random cuts made in the 1922 version. Although many apparently crucial scenes were cut in the later redaction— including the passages that most obviously state that Nikolai Apollonovich “has his father’s ears”—the novel remains imbued with the principles of identity and exchange in which those scenes are implicated and retains the theme of hereditary identity as its primary model. Thus, every part of the novel remains able to signify, or to symbolize, the whole, even as its shrinking substance does so in an increasingly elliptical or telegraphic fashion.

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as well—after all, as we are frequently reminded, parent and child share the same flesh and blood. Father and son, victim and parricide, are already united in the murder weapon, which is also Saturn; the name Saturn refers to both the planet and the Titan of classical mythology who devoured his children and was murdered by one of them. While Nikolai Apollonovich and Apollon Apollonovich occupy the center of the knot, we can continue to trace these metaphoric identities to include every character and motif in the text. One of Virginia Woolf ’s characters observes that, in the world of literary symbol he inhabits, “nothing was simply one thing”;40 Petersburg takes this observation one step further by suggesting that everything is composed of so many things that all of them might as well be one thing. Remembering Frye’s definition of the literary universe as “a universe in which everything is ­potentially identical with everything else” through the agency of ­metaphor, we can accept that Bely attempts to push such global identity to its extreme— toward, as we have seen, “a universe . . . where father, mother, and son are one.” As I hope to demonstrate here, this all-encompassing ­realization of ­metaphor—a device by which apparently metaphoric elements of a text are reinterpreted as literal, existent components of the fiction, radically ­destabilizing the easy categorization of tropes and realities as distinct from each other—is a method by which the book conceptualizes its own genesis for the benefit of the reader.

Things Engendered “Petersburg’s characters live in a book, of course,” notes Timothy Langen. “What is unusual is the extent to which they themselves interpret their world as if it were a book. They seek symbols and hidden meanings in the world around them, just as we readers of Petersburg seek them.”41 In their ­exploration of the literary universe they inhabit, Petersburg’s characters sometimes blaze a trail for the reader. Nikolai Apollonovich’s childhood memories are a case in point. He, Kolenka, was called not Kolenka but—his father’s spawn. He became ashamed. Later the meaning of the word spawn was fully revealed to him (through observation of shameful antics in the lives of domestic animals), and, he remembered—Kolenka cried; he transferred his shame at his own generation on to his shame’s culprit: his father.

40 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, 1955), 277. 41 Langen, The Stony Dance, 15.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

He used to stand for hours in front of the mirror watching his ears grow: and grow they did.

And it was then that Kolenka understood that everything there was living in the world was—a “spawn,” that there weren’t any people, because they were all “things engendered”; even Apollon Apollonovich himself turned out to be a “thing engendered.” (445)

Thus, little Kolenʹka arrives at his first inkling of the depraved gnostic ­universe he inhabits by staring at himself in the mirror and watching his ears grow.42 Apollon Apollonovich’s most prominent physical feature is his ­enormous ears; this feature is reflected even linguistically, since the family name, Ableukhov, contains the Russian word for “ear” (ukho). Something in the observation that Kolenʹka “has his father’s ears”—a point proved to him by his a­ lienated image in the glass—leads the boy to the conclusion that everything and e­ verybody, up to and including his own progenitor, are spawn, things e­ngendered. The reflection, according to the novel’s peculiar logic, makes possible both Kolenʹka’s generalizing leap of the imagination from his own ears to his father’s ears and the recognition that the two pairs of ears are identified with each other by the same process that makes Kolenʹka his father’s spawn; at the same time, Kolenʹka achieves the abstraction ­necessary to understand the common origin of humanity in sexual intercourse. Using the terms Bely outlines in “The Magic of Words,” we readily discern in this passage the two functions of metaphor: to qualitatively distinguish the subject of the metaphor and to generalize one of its attributes. Nikolai Apollonovich is specified by his i­dentification with Apollon Apollonovich (indeed, he is almost invariably referred to by name and patronymic, so the linguistic marker of his identity is already branded with his father’s name), but their shared quality of being engendered is common to everything in the text. Perhaps 42 The ambivalent identity of and difference between father and son have clear resonance with the Lacanian mirror stage, which conceptualizes the formation of self-identity through the metaphor of a mirror; in identifying herself or himself with the alienated image in the glass, the psychological subject conceives for the first time of the self as a totality, as if from outside—an identity that “will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.” See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1997), 4. In Petersburg the image of Nikolai Apollonovich’s self in the glass is, however, ambivalently marked with the identity of another, his parent (as is his name, a linguistic sign of personal identity that bears a trace of his father in the omnipresent ­patronymic). This is true even from Nikolai Apollonovich’s infancy, when his father dangled him before a mirror and pointed at their shared reflection, saying, “Look, my boy, at those funny people” (300; lit., “aliens” or “those belonging to someone else”)—thus marking with strangeness and ambivalence the primal moment of self-identification.

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the same ­information is imparted by the novel’s opening quip that Apollon Apollonovich is descended from Adam, but the lineage comes nonetheless as a great blow to the youthful scion of the Ableukhov house. It should not, perhaps, come as any surprise to the reader, for whom Apollon Apollonovich’s status as a thing engendered has been carefully ­prepared. In the most overtly metafictional section of the novel, the narrator interrupts the first chapter to explain the crucial concept of “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra; 74).43 People imagine things, the narrator avers, and what they imagine acquires independent being; when someone imagines people, those imaginary people believe that they are real, proceed to indulge in their own cerebral play, and generate new people, who generate new people ad ­infinitum. Petersburg’s initial conceit is that everything in the novel was ­imagined by the first character it introduces: Apollon Apollonovich, the center of his own mental universe and the ostensible source of everything that inhabits it—for “Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: from his head there emerged gods, goddesses, and genii.”44 One of the i­ncarnated images born from this cerebral womb is Dudkin, the stranger whom the ­senator initially took for a falling star, Saturn, when he saw Dudkin carrying the bomb across Nikolaevskii Bridge; another is Apollon Apollonovich’s son, who is ultimately charged with delivering that bomb. In this scheme a metaphoric Jupiter or Zeus becomes the father of a metaphoric Saturn or Cronos, who is Zeus’s father in classical myth, where he threatened his children with infanticide and was killed by his own son. The tree of generations, or of cerebral parentage, turns into a vicious circle: the novel’s characters, all of whom are now identified both as engenderers of cerebral children and as perpetrators of parricide or infanticide, circulate on the carousel of ambivalent familial identity. In a convoluted dream sequence, Nikolai Apollonovich recognizes his father as Saturn and realizes that “(in the exploded self ) someone else’s ‘self ’ was revealed: this ‘self ’ had rushed in from Saturn and to Saturn it returned” (320).45 In this dream the concept 43 The scholarship in cerebral play is one of the richest resources in Bely criticism; see especially Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction, 109–18. 44 The progenies of the senator’s imagination are homologous with the branching of Adam’s family tree, as Elsworth has noted: “If his son is his product in this sense too, then the notion of paternity can be extended to cover all such relations of cerebral genesis, and Dudkin is his son no less than Nikolai Apollonovich. We then enter a complex system of interchangeable paternal, filial and sibling relationships”; Elsworth concludes that “behind all these particular relationships between the individual characters of the novel lies the original paternity of Peter the Great to his offspring, the city.” See Elsworth, Andrei Bely, 97. 45 The imagery is heavily informed by Bely’s occult beliefs in the return of a saturnine epoch.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

of self-identity, the I, does not bind the self into a cohesive whole. Instead, the self bursts out in a destructive circuit of rupture with and return to the primal parent that is both its origin and its telos. The process of ­circulating ­identities symbolized or engendered by Saturn is extended to the whole text when Nikolai punningly misunderstands the word Saturn as its French ­homonym ça tourne. The phrase “it turns,” by now applicable to the whole novel’s ­swirling imagery and constant cycling of textual identities, becomes a comment on how the elements of the fiction turn into one another—through kinship-associated puns like ça tourne / Saturn and, more generally, through the activity of tropes, a word that frequently occurs in Bely’s critical writings and that is derived from the Greek word tropos, or “turn,” as in the English or Russian expression “turn of phrase” (oborot rechi). Just how deeply these intertwined processes of linguistic turning and imaginative engendering run is suggested at the end of the cerebral-play ­passage, when the narrator confides in us that “this shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s consciousness, receiving there its ephemeral existence; but Apollon Apollonovich’s consciousness is a shadow consciousness, because he too is possessed of ephemeral existence, being the product of the author’s imagination: needless, idle, cerebral play” (73). Little Kolenʹka’s shocking epiphany late in the novel that his father, like everything else in the world, is a “thing engendered” sexually has thus been prefigured by the narrator’s coy admission that the father, like everything else in the book, is a “thing engendered” by the literary imagination. Somewhere between these two points, the apparently innocent ­metaphor of “engendering” a character out of authorial fantasy comes to define a h ­ orrific universe conceived in parricidal and infanticidal sin, a sin that is p ­ erpetually multiplied in text and in human generations. The witty assertion that Apollon Apollonovich is descended from Adam is no longer a joke but a statement about the fictional universe’s origin and mode of being. The ghost of humorousness remains, of course—if nothing else, the narrator has played a mean-spirited joke on Nikolai Apollonovich—but it is now accompanied by an insistent host of questions about the nature and function of what we might call, to use phrasing that succinctly touches on metaphor and heredity, reproduction in art.

Conclusion: Realizing Metaphor The novel’s origin in cerebral play is thus superimposed on the process of realization of metaphor. In closing, I would like to focus for a moment on the possible relevance of Bely’s use of this device to a larger philosophy of

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fictionality. As far as I have been able to determine, realization of metaphor (realizatsiia metafory) first appears as a critical term in Viktor Shklovskii’s groundbreaking Theory of Prose, in which we read that Bely’s “metaphor ­leitmotivs exist prior to their realization in the world.”46 The realization of poetic metaphor (as when the figurative engendering of fictional characters is materialized as sexual engendering), accomplished when metaphoric objects are rescued “from the limbo of nonexistence and reintroduc[ed] as existents in the ­presented world of the text, further foreground[s] the ontological ­dimension” of fiction,47 which encompasses questions about what world the text describes and how that world is created and sustained. The concept of cerebral play already challenges the idea that the ­constituent elements of fictional universes can be neatly categorized as ­existent or nonexistent. This pervasive ontological doubt appears to have affected the author as well as the text, since in the drafts of his memoirs Bely notes that in writing Petersburg he felt himself to be surrounded by “completely delirious images, evoked by the experience of . . . ‘Petersburg’; and for a long time I lived exclusively in them, so that the limit between fiction and reality was lost.”48 The narrator of Petersburg claims that his fictional creations can transgress the limit of the novel and emerge into the reader’s world, and Bely’s diaries present his own experience as proof of that claim. At stake is nothing less than the nature of reality. The novel tests the limits of its fictionality by conceiving of everything in it as a thing e­ ngendered by cerebral play and then by realizing the familial metaphor when Kolenʹka ­recognizes his father’s ears in his own reflection. In such a moment of ­anagnorisis—the moment of recognition in Aristotle’s tragic plots, its locus classicus being when the parricidal son realizes with horror his relation to his victim—readers experience an epiphany about the nature or identity of the fictional universe with which they are presented. The literal process of ­generating offspring is rendered indistinguishable from the metaphoric ­process of generating fiction. By the time we finish reading about Kolenʹka’s revelation, 46 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 175. The term comes up once more in reference to Bely (Shklovsky, 181) and a third time in connection with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (165). This model of the novel’s emergence from the brain into the world is consistent with Bely’s more mystical, mythopoeic theory of metaphor—a literalized version of the realization of metaphor itself—which insists that the metaphoric image is magically endowed “with ontological being independently of our consciousness.” See Bely, Selected Essays, 109. 47 Brian McHale, Postmodern Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 134. 48 Quoted in Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Peterburg” (Stockholm: Almqvist, 1982), 32–33.

Kinship and Figure in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg

we are convinced of the literal meaningfulness of the fact that all things are things engendered, yet that revelation seems only to realize—to have been itself engendered by—a metaphor internal to the text. In the ­meantime, the primacy of the literal is drastically undercut. The categories of the literal and the figurative are placed in doubt, so much so that the novel indeed seems capable of engendering itself through the ubiquitous process of metaphor and the boundless identity that metaphor creates. The logic of mythopoeia in metaphor thus forms a vital strand in the novel, whether one looks at the bombastic claims of the narrator, at the n ­ ovel’s actual rhetorical composition, or at Bely’s theoretical writings, which lay forth a philosophy of creation through symbolic thought. Both because the ­novel’s origin is ascribed to a kinship metaphor and because the realization of that metaphor is so sweeping as to include “everything that exists” in the world of the novel, we can read the book’s thematic preoccupations with the ­problems of hereditary identity as refracted images of its preoccupation with its own nature as and origin in figurative language. The heredity theme in this self-contemplative novel grounds a textual dynamic through which the novel can represent and contemplate itself, much as little Kolenʹka, in the mise en abyme above, comes to a realization about his nature—and the nature of the world that he inhabits—through a recognition of his father’s features in his own reflection.

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Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg ROGER KEYS

Toward the end of 1905 Bely published an article entitled “Ibsen and Dostoevsky,” which contained a virulent attack both on Dostoevsky’s fictional art itself and on what Bely took to be the harmful influence exerted by the writer on the ­subsequent development of Russian literature.1 In Bely’s view Dostoevsky was a profoundly negative, “unmusical” phenomenon, because he insisted on revealing only the depths of the Russian character, with no flights into the higher regions of the spirit and no nobility. The “Augean stables” of Dostoevskian ­psychology were to be cleansed by the “spirit of music,” he declared, and a return made to the “thoughtful tranquility” of Pushkin and Gogol. Dostoevsky, one was to believe, carried an image of the “radiant life” within him, but he did not know how to attain it either in his own day-to-day existence or, by implication, in his art. Bely then went on to evoke what he considered to be most characteristic in Dostoevsky’s treatment of city life: “Gloom and tedium surrounded him. Lights from low taverns leered in the freezing autumnal fog, while suspicious ­individuals—petty thieves or detectives—scented out information. The black shadow of corruption had descended on the radiant image of future life.”2 Bely’s words were astonishingly prophetic of the atmosphere and ­characters of his own novel Petersburg, written more than six years later, but set precisely during that autumn of 1905 when the article was most likely composed. It was ironic, and tragically so for Bely, that what had seemed to him so ­reprehensible a few years earlier—namely, Dostoevsky’s failure, as he saw it, to embody a   1 Andrei Belyi, “Ibsen i Dostoevsky,” Vesy, no. 12 (1905); reprinted in Arabeski (Moscow: Musaget, 1911), 91–100. Cf. Aleksandr V. Lavrov’s account of the circumstances surrounding the writing of this article in his “Dostoevsky v tvorcheskom soznanii Andreia Belogo (1900-e gody),” in Andrei Belyi: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. S. Lesnevskii and A. Mikhailov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1988), 131–50.   2 Belyi, “Ibsen i Dostoevsky,” 94.

Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

positive image of future life in his work—should become the hallmark of the ­symbolist writer’s own greatest fictional creation. The a­rticle “Ibsen and Dostoevsky” provided Bely with an opportunity to ­formulate what might be seen as one of the central dilemmas of his own ­creative work, ­therefore. How could fictional art be made the means of a­ sserting the truth of the author’s own metaphysical beliefs, a “truth” valid simultaneously within the imagined world of the fiction and beyond it? As we can see from the semantic ­indeterminacy of Bely’s Second Symphony and his first novel The Silver Dove,3 the fact was that fiction could not be made to subserve such incommensurable ends at all. Although there might well be a coincidence between the “imaginative truth” of art and the “universal truth” of philosophy and religion, the two “truths” ­proceed from different logical assumptions and do not entail each other. As with most novelists, Dostoevsky’s acceptance of this fundamental artistic premise was implicit and most likely instinctive, but it was not a conclusion that Bely found congenial at any time. It would be forced on him in the end, however, as he came increasingly to realize the true nature of his own artistic and theoretical achievement. “Properly speaking,” he wrote to Ivanov-Razumnik in 1915, “all the articles, books and verse written during the period after the Symphonies (from 1905 to 1912) were equivalent to transferring the moods and ­aspirations of the Symphonies to a mental zone where it was no longer possible for me to speak about them: that is to say, they were removed from literature and the word. The actual center of my Christian aspiration I carried silently within me. The youthful boldness and naiveté with which I had expressed what was most sacred to me could not but lead to the dispersal of the very ground of my ­utterance (Ashes, The Urn, Petersburg).”4 By comparison with The Silver Dove, Petersburg signals an even greater shift toward ambiguity and irony with all that this implies for the possibility of embodying supraempirical, which is to say religious or mystical, ­meanings, whether positive or negative. At the opposite pole from the authoritative ­authorial word—as presented in the symphonies and, to a certain extent still, in The Silver Dove—is the utterance lacking all authority, the novel ­offering so many possible perspectives that it ends up lacking any. This is the p ­ henomenon that appears to confront the reader of Petersburg, and Russian literature had   3 See R. J. Keys, “Bely’s Symphonies,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. ­Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 19–59; and R. J. Keys, “The Unwelcome Tradition: Bely, Gogol and Metafictional Narration,” in Nikolay Gogol: Text and Context, ed. Jane Grayson and Faith Wigzell (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 92–108.   4 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, 20 November 1915, in the addenda to Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 520.

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seen nothing like it since the days of Gogol. It is exemplified in the opening pages of the novel, in the words of the celebrated prologue.5 The prologue has always attracted the particular attention of ­critics, ­perhaps because they sense that it may in some way contain a “key” to the ­fictional enigma that follows. Certainly, its prominent position in the s­ tructure of Petersburg and the fact that it alone, of the novel’s many s­ubchapters or glavki, remained completely unaltered in subsequent ­reworkings, lend weight to such an assumption. Johannes Holthusen regards it as a clear s­tylistic parody of Gogolian skaz narration,6 while Ekaterina Starikova sees it as ­“combining the intonations of an official document with the intonations of a street ­demagogue mocking that document and ready to refute it and ­crumple it in his hands.”7 What one might have assumed to be a s­traightforward address to the reader from the implied author or narrator about the story that follows turns out to be no such thing. In the first place, it is very difficult to gauge the tone of voice in which the prologue is uttered. Is the speaker to be taken seriously (in which case he appears to be hampered by a means of expression that he is unable to master)? Or is he himself making fun of chancery idiom to deride the p ­ olitical status quo, as Starikova conjectures? Or is it the implied author mocking ­narrators, both reliable and unreliable, as Holthusen implies? What sense is it possible to make of what the speaker actually says, f­urthermore? Whom is he addressing? Everybody, it transpires (“Your Excellencies, your Highnesses, Lords and Ladies, Citizens!” [11]). He then goes on to ­question the concrete, physical reality of Russia (“What is this Russian Empire of ours?”), gradually reducing this concept to its constituent parts (“Greater Rus, Lesser Rus, White Rus and Red Rus,” etc.), then to its cities, especially its capitals (Moscow, Kiev, Petersburg), and comes to rest eventually on the image of Nevsky Prospect. The passage culminates in the following logical syllogism: “And in accordance with that ridiculous legend [that there exists a population of a million and a half in Moscow and that must be the capital] it transpires that the capital is not Petersburg. But if Petersburg is not the ­capital, then Petersburg does not exist. It merely seems to exist” (12). As Steven Cassedy has observed, this whole passage ­“masquerades as a kind of proof of existence. [. . . But] it is as though the author, while t­reating fundamental questions of being and non-being, had gone out of his way to   5 Ibid., 9–10.   6 Johannes Holthusen, “Belyj und Petersburg,” in Der russische Roman, ed. B. Zelinsky (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1979), 286.   7 E. G. Starikova, “Realizm i simvolizm,” in Razvitie realizma v russkoi literature, ed. U. R. Fokht et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 3:229.

Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

twist logic in order to demonstrate that our traditional means for ­treating fundamental questions are without sense.”8 What can be concluded about the tone of the prologue, therefore? Is it serious or mocking? If mocking, then what exactly is being mocked and from what point of view? It is difficult to reply to these questions with any degree of certainty. One inference might be that it is precisely this ­uncertainty—of ­meaning, regarding the words on the page, and of response, regarding the reader—that the prologue is designed to foster. And on the basis of this ­uncertainty the narrator determines to plunge us into the plot. “However that may be,” he continues, “Petersburg not only seems, but truly ­manifests itself—on maps: in the form of two concentric circles with a black point in the middle; and from this mathematical point, which possesses no ­dimensions, it ­energetically proclaims that it exists: from there, from that said point, swarms of printed books issue in a torrent; from this invisible point with great momentum issue circulars” (12). Here Bely introduces, albeit in a form that is difficult to elucidate at this early point, one of the most important and ­paradoxical symbolic images of the novel. To quote Lubomír Doležel, “Bely links the existence of the visible city to the ‘invisible point’ at its center. Thus, at the very beginning of the text, the fundamental opposition in the ­semantic base of the novel is introduced: the opposition between the visible and the invisible narrative worlds”9—by which Doležel means that in Petersburg the world of the here and now (the “visible world”) may not mark the limit of possible experience. The powers that ultimately move the universe—if such there be—may lie beyond empirical appearance (that is, exist in the “invisible world”) and yet intervene in human affairs in ways that may reveal their supraempirical origin. The narrator does not usually assert or even make explicit the kind of opposition that Doležel has pointed to (How can he, while remaining within the bounds of fiction?). Even more than with The Silver Dove, readers have to interpret the novel’s “symbolic” subtext for themselves, weighing up the relative significance of the characters’ experiences and beliefs, the l­eitmotival repetitions, the plot developments, and so on. Admittedly, the narrator does occasionally intervene himself with lyric statements about character and   8 Steven D. Cassedy, “The Novel of Fragmentation: Belyj, Rilke and Proust” (dissertation, Princeton University, 1979), 48.   9 Lubomír Doležel, “The Visible and Invisible Petersburg,” Russian Literature 1, no. 5 (1979): 466.

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event, the direction of history, the fate of Russia, and so on, but these are relativized as part of the narrator’s personal beliefs: they possess no wider ­prophetic significance in themselves beyond that individualized context. At the root of everything in this novel lies ambiguity, the fact that it is impossible to make definite statements about the meaning, or value, or ontological status of anything within the fiction. As John Elsworth writes, “Petersburg offers no simple alternatives, no easy scheme of dualities, and no clear guidance from the narrator as to the stance the reader should adopt.”10 Nothing can be clearly authenticated, and this appears to be as true for the reader as it is for the individual characters, for the narrator, and perhaps even, finally, for the implied author. I have argued elsewhere that The Silver Dove contains a foundation of authoritative belief vested in what Johannes Holthusen dubbed its “poetic” narrator.11 In Petersburg, by contrast, Bely has gone much further down the path of disillusion and skepticism—skepticism regarding the possibility of affirming religious belief through the medium of fiction at all and, beyond that, although this remains at the level of implication only, skepticism as to whether there exists anything beyond the here and now of the perceptible universe. At this point all possibility of an “objective,” authoritative viewpoint may disappear, leaving only the author’s “subjective” vision. Irony, as Lilian Furst has written in one of her books on the subject, becomes “dominant, engulfing and corrosive.”12 If there is ambiguity between the character and narrator perspective in The Silver Dove—to facilitate the supraempirical subtext (the narrator appears to support his characters’ belief that they really do have access to supersensory realms)—then this has gone much further in Petersburg. Not that there is much confusion about the attribution of viewpoint in free indirect speech (although this does occur).13 Instead, and this is specifically stated by the ­narrator on more than one occasion, the narrator and characters actually fuse together, and all are identified as being phantasms of the implied, or perhaps even of the biographical, author’s own mind. One example is to be found in the opening chapter: 10 John Elsworth, “Petersburg as a Charmed Circle” (unpublished paper delivered at St Andrews University, December 2, 1977). The quotation is verbatim as noted by me at the time. 11 See Keys, “The Unwelcome Tradition”; and J. Holthusen, “Erzähler und Raum des Erzählers in Belyjs ‘Serebrianyi golub,’” Russian Literature 4 (1976): 325–44. 12 Lilian R. Furst, The Contours of European Romanticism (London: Methuen, 1979), 36. 13 Whose vision of Apollon Apollonovich as the god Saturn, devourer of the Titans and enemy of progress, is presented at the end of chapter 5, for example: the son’s or the narrator’s?

Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov; we have also seen the senator’s idle thoughts in the form of the senator’s house, and in the form of the senator’s son, who carries in his head idle thoughts of his own; and lastly, we have seen another idle shadow—that of the stranger [Dudkin]. This shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s ­consciousness, receiving there its ephemeral existence; but Apollon Apollonovich’s ­consciousness is a shadow consciousness, because he too is possessed of ephemeral existence, being the product of the author’s imagination: ­needless, idle cerebral play. (73)

Bely subsequently pointed to a similar phenomenon in Gogol: “You do not really know where the action is taking place, whether in the space depicted by the author or in Gogol’s own mind.”14 But the clearest statement of this theme occurs in a letter that Bely wrote to Ivanov-Razumnik soon after completing the novel: “The real place where the action of the novel is taking place is the soul of some character not given in the novel, a character overstrained by the working of his brain; and the dramatis personae are forms of thought which have not yet found their way through to the threshold of consciousness, so to speak. And everyday life, Petersburg, provocation with the revolution going on somewhere in the background of the novel—all this is but the contingent exterior [uslovnoe odeianie] of those forms of thought. The whole novel might have been called ‘Cerebral Play’ [Mozgovaia igra].”15 Such an interpretation of Petersburg, which I shall call the minimal metafictional view of the novel, has been advanced by a number of critics since Bely’s day, and by none as persuasively as by Steven Cassedy. “The model we have [. . .] for the authorial figure behind Petersburg,” he writes, is of a creating intelligence which can split into different parts and speak in different voices. [. . .] The authorial figure [. . .] is, above all, one. We know this not only because everything always returns to him and remains inside. [. . .] We know it also because there is a mind at work throughout the ­creative process, which observes the process, comments upon it and objectifies it by remaining distant.

If we follow such indications, Cassedy continues, “and see behind the multiplicity of narrative voices in Petersburg a single creative subjectivity [. . .], the question remains where we can locate this subjectivity.” Here the critic hits on the concept of a “subjective lyrical novel which dramatizes and artistically 14 Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow-Leningrad: Issledovanie OGIZ, 1934), 45. 15 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, December 1913, in Peterburg, 516.

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elaborates the workings of a human consciousness. [. . .] It is this ­containment in an integral creative subjectivity which gives wholeness to a world whose character is posited as being fragmented. [. . .] The world reverts [. . .] ­ultimately to the one self which created it and whose limits give it ­wholeness.”16 There is a sense in which such attempts to “monologize” the ­significance of the novel, as Bakhtin would have put it, to unify its meanings at the level of an all-engulfing “subjectivity”—that of the implied author o­ bjectifying his own thoughts and experiences—do not provide a completely ­satisfactory account of the entire content of Petersburg, however. There are so many e­ lements in the novel that cannot be explained in that way; there are so many “narrative facts,” as Doležel calls them, that cannot be wished away as the delusions or phantasms of the narrator.17 There are characters, they do exist independently, events do take place that cannot be reduced to the status of narratorial ­illusion. And if this is true of Bely’s depiction of the empirical world, it is by no means self-evident that he would have wished his reader to think of the supernatural world, embodied in the symbolic subtext, as ­necessarily ­illusory either. On the contrary, it is entirely typical of Bely that, having advanced the ­possibility of a metafictional resolution himself in the passage from the novel that I have already quoted, he should proceed in the very next ­paragraph to ­“disauthenticate” it, to cast doubt on it precisely from the p ­ osition of m ­ ystical authority. “The author,” he writes, “having once ­displayed these pictures of illusions, ought quickly to remove them and break off the thread of the ­narration with this very sentence; but . . . the author will not behave like this: he has sufficient right not to do so” (73). The ­metafictional explanation is now superseded by the narrator’s firm assertion that there are supernatural powers to which the fiction corresponds. “Cerebral play,” he assures us, “is only a mask; beneath this mask proceeds the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us: and what if Apollon Apollonovich is woven from our brain— he will still be able to terrify with another startling existence that attacks us at night” (74). The narrator’s word is no more the final court of appeal in this novel than is that of any of its confused protagonists, however. Moreover, in ways that there is, alas, no space to consider fully here, the empirical plot and ­characterization generate expectations of moral and psychological coherence that are often difficult, or even impossible, to reconcile with the mythic and supernatural implications of the symbolic subtext.18 The delicate balance 16 Cassedy, “The Novel of Fragmentation,” 66–67, 73, 77–78. 17 Doležel, “The Visible and Invisible Petersburg,” 489. 18 See Starikova, “Realizm i simvolizm,” 238–39.

Metafiction in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

between empirical and supraempirical meanings that Bely so painstakingly established in The Silver Dove seems significantly attenuated in Petersburg. At crucial points in the novel, the metafictional explanation then returns in what I shall call its maximal form, embodying the meaning advanced by Viacheslav Ivanov in his article “Two Elements in Contemporary Symbolism” some three years earlier and denied so vehemently by Bely at the time19—the suggestion that, for the “idealistic” as opposed to the “realistic” symbolist, all ­knowledge and all c­ognition are relative, that all potential meanings are s­ubject to ­disconfirmation, and that there is therefore no transcendent dimension to existence beyond that of blind chance and eternal chaos. Little wonder then that Bely was the first critic to embrace the minimal metafictional explanation of his novel. By so doing, he was able at least partly to neutralize the terrifying message that he saw hovering above the ruins of its countless supraempirical “symbols” and “mythologemes.”

19 V. I. Ivanov, “Dve stikhii v sovremennom simvolizme,” Zolotoe runo, nos. 3–4, 5 (1908); reprinted in Po zvezdam (St. Petersburg: Ory, 1909), and again in Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1974), 536–56. Bely’s response was the feuilleton “Na perevale. XII ‘Realiora,’” published under his real name, B. Bugaev, in Vesy, no. 5 (1908): 59–62; reprinted in Belyi, Arabeski, 313–18.

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Petersburg as a Historical Novel TIMOTHY LANGEN

A novel set in the historical past invites a split between two frames of r­ eference: on one level, the story of a nation or an age, to some degree familiar to ­readers from sources outside the novel itself; on another level, the story of the ­novel’s own characters. They cannot read the yet unwritten histories of their time, and their experience of history is in this sense direct, unfiltered by later ­interpretations. In simplest and most optimistic terms, then, the historical novel offers a sort of interaction between two perspectives—one direct but unaware, one sophisticated but out of touch—that can correct and enrich one another in the manner of a hermeneutic circle. The characters’ plane breaks up the abstractions of “history” and returns complexity and unpredictability to the story; the historical plane imparts some significance beyond the merely local or exemplary. In this essay I will argue that Petersburg as historical novel works against this split and instead presents a view of historical experience (by characters, readers, writers) as a constant process on every level of action, interpretation, and correction. It is not self-evident that Petersburg ought to be considered a h ­ istorical novel at all. For while there is no firm chronological boundary beyond which material is too contemporary for a historical novel, nonetheless, in Dan Ungurianu’s words, “the action should take place in a time that is viewed by ­contemporaries as a different epoch.”1 Petersburg, published in 1913–14, is set during the p ­ olitical turmoil of 1905; in this sense one might want to call it a novel of recent history, set during a time that feels a little bit different. Allowing for the v­ ariability that Ungurianu stresses, one might suppose in general terms that the lapse of some five to ten years allows some but not all of the congealing of history against which a historical novel in the normal sense might be set. Many of the actors and events are still in force; others have run their course;   1 Dan Ungurianu, Plotting History: The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 11.

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

the terms of debate are starting to feel dated, but they are not yet fixed in their relation to a bygone time; many of the important episodes have emerged, but their significance is still taking shape in the flow of subsequent events. This quality of partial separation and partial connection characterizes not only the chronological frame of Petersburg (for its readers) but also its very method of rendering the experience of history (among its characters), and it is in this sense that one may consider it a historical novel. In other words, one important part of the historical experience of 1905 was precisely the desire and effort to discern the broader historical patterns (if any) that that moment fit into and how it fit into them. Thus, the characters of Petersburg do not only feel and act; they also think about evolution and revolution, about mysticism and Marxism, about conspiracies and the implications of importing American agricultural equipment, and about their own relation to these things. This understanding of the historical novel, as concerned not just with the details or flavor of a particular epoch but also in some way with larger ­historical patterns, achieved its fullest expression in Georg Lukács’s Historical Novel, published later in the century but drawing on traditions and ­assumptions available in large part to Bely and his contemporaries. For Lukács, the ­mission of the historical novel is a kind of coordination of the personal with the ­historical: “What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the ­retelling of great ­historical events, but the poetic reawakening of the people who ­figured in those events. What matters is that we should re-­experience the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in ­historical reality.”2 The return of experience to history, then, is the historical novelist’s task, the fusion of two orders, intimate and grand sociopolitical, each of which possesses its own cogent form of discourse. Among Lukács’s most important examples is War and Peace, a book Bely reread as he began work on what was to become Petersburg.3 For Lukács, much of the success of the historical novel’s reintegrative task seems to ride on the choice of characters. Why are the minor aristocrats in Scott or Tolstoy popular figures, why is the fate of the people reflected in their experience? The reason is simple. Both Scott and Tolstoy created characters in whom personal and socio-­historical fates closely conjoin. Moreover, certain important and general aspects of ­popular   2 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 42.   3 On this topic, see Magnus Ljunggren, “Lev Tolstoj and Peterburg,” in Twelve Essays on Andrej Belyj’s “Peterburg” (Göteborg, Sweden: Göteborgs Universitet, 2009), 103–15.

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experience are expressed directly in the personal lives of these ­characters. The genuinely historical spirit of Scott or Tolstoy appears precisely here.4

The historical novel thus seems to require characters in whom the personal is joined with the sociohistorical, as a way of coordinating those two planes. The characters need not be the novel’s main heroes, as the example of Tolstoy’s Kutuzov illustrates. “Thus, the fact that Kutuzov is a minor figure ­creates the basis for his profound and authentic role, artistically and ­historically, of mediator between ‘below’ and ‘above,’ between the immediacy of reaction to events and the highest possible consciousness in these particular ­characters.”5 Kutuzov is successful because so many individual (“below”) experiences are treated in War and Peace; he can combine those immediate experiences with “consciousness” typical of the perspective from “above.” Lukács seems to see part of the problem the same way Tolstoy did: abstraction, the way of ­understanding experience, always distorts that experience. Thus, you either participate directly and don’t understand; or you don’t participate and instead theorize abstractly and inaccurately or irrelevantly; or you participate and later recount and thus falsify your own experience. Lukács seems to agree that ­something like this is the problem, and he sees Kutuzov as a solution or bridge. Yet Lukács does not share Tolstoy’s thoroughgoing skepticism about largescale histories as they later emerge; phrases like “historical mission” and “great historical event” do not denote problems for him, but rather broader stories that must be integrated with smaller, more personal ones. Tolstoy, by contrast, seems unable to condone large-scale historical narratives beyond the simplest and most factual notions (such as the movement of peoples from west to east and then east to west). The Battle of Borodino, for example, reached a certain result and acquired a certain significance for subsequent Russian history. The juxtaposition of this general knowledge (often left at the level of implication) with the experience of particular characters who cannot know the broader, later “real-world” significance is a key technique in War and Peace as in other historical novels. However, for Tolstoy the ­historians’ explanations of any battle and its importance are consistently and n ­ ecessarily flawed—and often enough simply untenable. Tolstoy’s dominant h ­ istoriographical gesture, then, is to reverse a customary irony at the characters’ expense, and instead to treat the “informed” view of historians as the naive term in the o­ pposition. The opposition itself, though, remains central to his historical novel: the ­participants do not and cannot understand what they are doing, while ­communities of   4 Lukács, Historical Novel, 285.   5 Ibid., 288.

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

historians and subsequent generations do have a ­synoptic view (though for Tolstoy a faulty one). In Petersburg, by contrast, readers have no recourse to a received ­history against which the novel’s events can be measured. Readers may be ­familiar with the events of 1905, to be sure, but there is no dominant, coherent ­extratextual story evoked as any sort of norm, not even something as ­schematic as Tolstoy’s movement of peoples eastward and then westward. East and West remain, but as polyvalent signifiers tending toward some catastrophe, resolution, or d ­ issolution unknowable within the novel’s horizon or the reader’s. Bely thus takes Tolstoy’s approach even further in the same direction: not only the ­problem but to a large extent the essence of history converges with the problem of knowledge and interpretation. It is not only the historians but the participants as well who try to see the big story in the little details—and that interpretive attempt, with all its difficulties and necessary failures, is part of historical experience itself. Many of Bely’s contemporaries commented on these difficulties, whether they attributed them to Bely’s personal shortcoming or to something inherent in the time and place rendered in the novel. Vladimir Piast, for example, saw in Petersburg a picture dominated by the characters’ mentality, with only a glancing relation to the reality of Saint Petersburg in 1905. In his opinion, the novel lacks the ability to synthesize its epoch or even to evoke a small part of it with precision; it is instead enlivened by the sheer force of Bely’s artistry.6 For Sergei Askolʹdov, by contrast, the novel renders an uncertainty and even confusion that is part of the epoch itself. “In Russia of the last ­century there was much more of the typical and the commonplace. The ­beginning of our century is already a new epoch, an epoch of the destruction of every sort of structure and norm of life.”7 Askolʹdov goes on to say that the ­characters in Petersburg strike the reader as very odd and yet somehow familiar, even “typical” in some strange, contemporary sense. History itself, for Askolʹdov, is particularly unknowable at this moment: Falconet’s statue gives a vision of Russian history jumping into something radically new and uncertain. If we read ahead to Lukács’s theory of the historical novel, we will note that his ­principles of character selection ultimately rest on a notion of typicality or ­representativeness: the characters whose personal struggles or ­accomplishments   6 Vladimir Piast, “Roman filosofa,” in Andrei Belyi: Pro et contra, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. ­Petersburg: Izdatelʹstvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitarnogo Instituta, 2004), 398–400. My translation, here and elsewhere of sources cited in Russian.   7 Sergei Askolʹdov, “Tvorchestvo Andreia Belogo,” in Lavrov, Andrei Belyi: Pro et contra, 509; first published in Literaturnaia mysl ʹ, alʹmanakh 1 (Petrograd: Myslʹ, 1922).

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best reflect or embody those of their age as a whole are ­natural heroes for ­historical novels.8 If, as Askolʹdov claims, typicality itself is on the wane, the novel seems hard-pressed to find those outstanding individuals who can ­coordinate the planes of the historical and the personal. Or perhaps Bely’s characters are typical precisely in their quirky atypicality. Introducing a part of the novel in 1912, Bely emphasized the s­ atirical aspect of his writing—that is, precisely that attitude toward historical events that does not require one to know how it all turned out or what it all meant. “Here I consider it pertinent to say something about the f­undamental ­conception of the novel as well. This conception may be observed with ­reasonable clarity in the author’s satirical relation toward the principles of ­ideology, abstracted away from life, by which our bureaucratic circles are guided, and by which our extreme parties too were guided in the era of 1905.”9 Apart from the emphasis on satire, the most obvious point for later readers familiar with the rest of Bely’s work is the equivalence of extremes in the political realm—­corresponding as it does to a more general symbolist ­tendency to unite ­opposites. Both the reactionary bureaucrats and the extreme revolutionaries are guided by some sort of abstract ideology. But the negative implications attached to the word “abstract” ­(otvlechennyi) are striking coming from a writer so fond of flights of theory. Much of the p ­ hilosophy Bely had been reading indicated to him that a c­ ritique of a­ bstraction per se is misguided, inasmuch as cognition without ­categories (and thus without abstraction) would be impossible.10 Perhaps, as Bely’s belief in creation before cognition might seem to indicate, the problem is with frozen abstractions that are not broken apart and remade. Thus, while Bely’s prefatory remark suggests that he may be presenting material in Petersburg in as concrete and lifelike a form as possible, eschewing abstraction, his method is very different. He populates the novel with many abstractions, trying not to avoid them but rather to interrogate each with every other (and Piast, for one, criticizes the novel precisely for being so abstract, in the article cited above). To the extent that it is a historical novel, then, Petersburg sets diverse   8 See, for example, Lukács, Historical Novel, 313–14.   9 Andrey Bely, “Predislovie k knige ‘Otryvki iz romana Peterburg,’” 1912, Institut Russkoi Literatury (IRLI), f. 79, op. 3, ed. khr. 30, quoted from Andrei Belyi, Peterburg: Roman v vosʹmi glavakh s prologom i epilogom, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 498. 10 Vladimir Solovʹev, one of Bely’s most important philosophical influences, had defended in 1880 his doctoral dissertation, “A Critique of Abstract Principles”; but like Solovʹev Bely saw abstract thought as something inadequate by itself and in need of supplementation, not as something that should or could be avoided altogether.

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

historiographemes (as we may roughly label existing schemes or “abstractions” for the interpretation of history) alongside one another, not in the naive faith that we can then know the past directly, but in the more modest and worldly hope that what we know and our ways of knowing it will enter into a relation of mutual adjustment and incremental improvement.11 An early remark by the narrator, just after a description of the ­cityscape of Saint Petersburg with its motorcars and trams, shows just this idea of historiography as perpetual adjustment: “In advance I must correct an ­ ­inaccuracy that has crept in; it is not the fault of the author, but of the author’s pen: at this time trams were not yet running through the city: the year was nineteen hundred and five” (24).12 Whether the narrator’s errant pen ­represents semiconscious narrative habit, unconscious forces, abstract d ­isconnection from life, or some demonic principle associated with Saint Petersburg itself, the point is that anachronism—and by extension historiographic error in general—is counteracted effectively only by deliberate effort. Piast refers to this passage as evidence of the novel’s indifference to historical specificity, but then one wonders why the narrator would bother to stage the mistake before ­correcting it. The passage seems on the contrary to draw ­attention to details of chronology, and to the work of recounting and correcting. This is the first of what we might call Petersburg’s historiographemes: the problematics of documentation, concerned with access to and ­preservation of the what and when of history. Indeed, right from Manzoni’s On the Historical Novel, the first major theoretical work devoted to the genre, the simultaneous operation of two orders of events, one factual and verifiable, one invented by the writer, has been understood to generate the core tension of the ­historical novel itself.13 From the very beginning of Petersburg, with its list of ­holdings of the Russian empire and truncated recounting of the Ableukhovs’ lineage, or the passage at the beginning of chapter 2 devoted to the Chronicle of Events, documentation is crucial to the functioning of both state and ­personal ­narrative, and at the same time is outrageously vulnerable to distortion. This theme persists through the novel. Journalism, for example, is both an i­ndispensable source 11 My argument here bears some resemblance to that of Andrew Wachtel, who uses the notion of “intergeneric dialogue” to interpret Russian literary works that deal with the historical past. See An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 12 For more on trams and Petersburg, see Alyson Tapp, “‘The Streetcar Prattle of Life’: Reading and Riding in St. Petersburg’s Trams,” in “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900– 1921, ed. Olga Matich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 123–48. 13 Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel, trans. Sandra Bermann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). Originally published in 1850.

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of information and a medium subject to the whims of readers, w ­ riters, and ­publishers. “What is a newspaper reporter? In the first place, he is a ­representative of the periodical press; and as a r­ epresentative of the press (the sixth continent of the world) he receives five copecks per line, or seven, or ten, sometimes fifteen or twenty, as he conveys in his lines e­ verything that has h ­ appened and much that has not” (77). Journalists o­ perate in a context of institutions and interests; their work must be understood in that context (and other contexts) and not as a presumptively reliable account of what has happened. Apollon Apollonovich’s bureaucratic circulars are similarly rooted in personal, particular, and in this case partisan considerations. “Apollon Apollonovich had conducted relentless hostilities with [the ninth] ­department by means of paper and, where necessary, of speeches, facilitating the import into Russia of American reaping-machines (the ninth department was not in favor of their import)” (15). And yet even Apollon Apollonovich, skilled polemicist though he is, cannot guarantee the proper functioning of his ­memoranda at a distance. As a rule the paper with [Apollon Apollonovich’s] signature circulates as far as the provincial administration; all the state councilors receive the paper: the Chichibabins, the Sverchkovs, the Shestkovs, the Teterkos, the IvanchiIvanchevskiis; from the provincial capital the Ivanchi-Ivanchevskiis correspondingly distribute the papers to the towns of Mukhoedinsk, Likhov, Gladov, Morovetrinsk and Pupinsk (all of them regional capitals); and then Kozlorodov, an assessor, receives the paper. The entire picture changes. Kozlorodov, the assessor, having received the paper, ought to have ­settled into a britzka, a cabriolet, or simply a rickety cab, to go rollicking over the ruts—through the fields and the forests, past hamlets and hovels—and to have got gradually stuck in the clays or the mud-colored sands, exposing himself to assaults from striped upright mileposts and striped turnpike beams (in the wastes Apollon Apollonovich waylays travelers); but instead of this Kozlorodov simply sticks Ivanchi-Ivancheskii’s demand into his side pocket. And nips off to his club. Apollon Apollonovich is on his own: as it is he spreads a thousand versts; he can’t manage it all by himself; nor can the Ivanchi-Ivanchevskiis. There are thousands of Kozlorodovs; and behind them stands the man in the street, whom Ableukhov fears. (450)

It is not so much that Ableukhov represents history while the “man in the street” represents experience, the novel’s task being somehow to unite the two. Rather, in his very fears, schemes, and frustrations, Ableukhov is as human as any

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

Kozlorodov or man in the street. What he writes, like what the ­journalists write, is shot through with human intentions and frailties. Yet those very ­documents will form the basis of what history gets written. It is not a ­nihilistic argument: the point is not that documents are flawed and ought to be ignored, rather that documents are flawed and ought continuously to be corrected—as the narrator demonstrates in the trivial case of trams that did not exist in 1905. A second historiographeme concerns what we might call the rhythm of history, its tendency to flow steadily or to burst suddenly, and to repeat itself or to proceed in one direction only; we might think of it as part of the how of history. Bely makes much of suddenness and even raises “­ all-at-once” to a principle (50–51). The bomb itself, in its capacity for explosion, is of course the novel’s central emblem of suddenness. But suddenness ­characterizes many of the novel’s other major developments too, such as Apollon Apollonovich’s fall. “In twenty-four hours—no, in no more than twelve (from midnight to midday)—Apollon Apollonovich flew headlong down the steps of his ­political career” (452). Yet Apollon Apollonovich has in fact been on the decline for some time. “To tell the truth: even before this fateful night Apollon Apollonovich had seemed to many a dignitary observing him to be somewhat threadbare, ­consumed by a secret illness” (452). Suddenness and continuity are to some extent matters of perception, it would seem—and perhaps even further: ­neither is perceptible without the other. Thus, the octogenarian doorman (33) and the “bearded man of stone” (67) serve as near constants against the ­punctuated episodes of history around them, deteriorating surely as all p ­ hysical things must, but imperceptible in their difference from their ­yesterday’s self. Yet they too are dual in their temporal nature: one day the doorman must suddenly die, while the statue will perhaps explode (356–57). The same goes for the biggest temporal punctuation of all, the Apocalypse, which pervades the novel as a theme or even a possibility but somehow manages to accentuate the ­duration and uncertainty of the novel’s present—as if the message were that only with the Apocalypse will time stop and the Last Judgment come, and until that time events and gray days will go on and on. In a similar way, time has both a circular and a linear aspect in Petersburg. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad have discussed Bely’s attempt to ­reconcile “linear” (real) and “circular” (ideal) thinking in his article “The Line, the Circle, the Spiral—of Symbolism.”14 It seems to me the work of 14 Andrei Belyi, “Liniia, krug, spiralʹ—simvolizma,” Trudy i dni, nos. 4–5 (July–October 1912): 13–22, cited in Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 96–144.

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the novel here is not so much to resolve the nature of temporality for one side or the other, nor even to propose a rationally tenable compromise, but rather to provide v­ arious figures of interaction. Thus, in the middle of a frenzied conversation with Nikolai Apollonovich, Dudkin’s attention falls on some swirling leaves. There was a rush of wind from the sea: the last leaves fluttered down; there would be no more leaves till May; how many people would be there no more in May? The fallen leaves were truly the last leaves. Alexandr Ivanovich knew it all by heart: there would be bloody days, full of horror; and then—everything would collapse; so swirl then, whirl around, you last, incomparable days! So swirl then, whirl in the air, you last of the leaves! Another idle thought . . . (338)

Each leaf “dies” (or falls away from the tree), never to return, in a trajectory as linear as that of the people who will be dead by May. Yet not only the leaves swirl around in a circle; it will all happen again, year after year, and every autumn there will be “last, incomparable days” before winter. This autumn may be an especially calamitous one, but if so it may fall into another, larger cycle in the rise and fall of civilizations. It may perhaps feel like wisdom, this intertwining of lines and circles, but no knowledge is imparted by it—and it is indeed “idle” in this sense, a figure for contemplation, perhaps a reminder not to get too attached to one model, one abstraction. Why things happen is what we may call the historiographeme of ­causality, and here the novel suggests three ways of explaining. They are (1) local and tactical, (2) medium-range and atmospheric or contextual, and (3) long-range and hidden or obscure. As with documentation and chronology, with ­causality the novel acts not to reduce all to one, but rather to show the interaction of explanatory possibilities. Petersburg is ostensibly a novel about a terrorist plot, and the conniving of various characters figures prominently in it. Just as Apollon Apollonovich does bureaucratic battle against ideological opponents, rebuffing them with as little as a snub at a party, so too the revolutionaries manipulate and ­provoke, ­control and deceive. These energetic and vigilant actions flow from the assumption that details matter, that (for example) one had better make sure Nikolai Apollonovich carries out his promise to assassinate his father, because it will not happen on its own. Petersburg balances the tactical theme with a kind of situational ­causality in which individual actions or motives seem beside the point. This is the world of swarms of people and self-thinking thoughts, of provocation and contagious

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

chattering. Dudkin tells Nikolai Apollonovich about something in the air: “I can’t define it with words: I can call it a universal hankering for death; and I revel in it, with delight, with bliss, with horror” (121). If indeed this feeling is universal and pervasive, then it may seem that situational factors, cloudy though they may be, must overwhelm even the most skillful tactical machinations. Yet Petersburg’s causal historiographeme is not stratified in this way: the local-tactical and the midrange-situational are in constant ­interaction. Dudkin, after all, admits to Nikolai Apollonovich that he is a sort of ­provocateur, and Apollon Apollonovich’s speeches “soundlessly spread poisons over the ­opposing party” (15). One may, in other words, try to manipulate not only another person or a particular event but also a mood, a feeling, or an atmosphere. Moreover, the causative efficacy of environments is not absolute. As Nikolai Apollonovich ­contemplates his own actions, he rejects at first the notion that he is responsible and seems instead to entertain a conception of causality as extremely cloudy or diffuse. Could it be that all this (what, we shall see anon) took its course consciously in his will, in his swiftly beating heart and in his inflamed brain? No, no, no! But all the same there were certain swarms of thoughts there, thinking themselves; it was not he who thought the thoughts, but . . . the thoughts thought themselves. (421)

These thoughts may come from the prospect, where “all personal thoughts turn into an impersonal porridge,” and here the obvious objection arises: “But if it was indeed the porridge thinking, he was doing nothing to prevent the porridge from pouring through his ears. And that was why the thoughts were thinking themselves” (422). One can meet one’s circumstances well or poorly, and on this basis Nikolai Apollonovich concludes that he is a scoundrel. The long-range view perceives patterns that may not be visible up close or even from midrange, and so here a contrast between the apparent and the important tends to be emphasized. Modern students of history will think here of some versions of Marxism (especially those with a relatively sharp base-superstructure model) or perhaps of Braudel and the Annales school. Askolʹdov typifies many of Petersburg’s readers in seeing the promise of some sort of coherence beneath the novel’s apparent chaos. For him the “surface” of history is a kind of marionette theater, whereas Petersburg points its readers to the depths of history in which causes persist as causes (and not only in their effects), freedom and design are intertwined, and linear and circular forms merge into a mysterious spiral.

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This bifurcation of surfaces and depths, with causative efficacy attributed predominantly to the latter, is of course provoked by the novel itself, with its many clear references to various mystical systems—and above all to theosophy and anthroposophy, with which Bely was then smitten. As Maria Carlson puts it, “Bely saw in theosophy a systematic and meaningful explanation of what seemed to be chaotic, even absurd, events.”15 The explanation runs as follows: The characters and the events in Bely’s novel, even the seemingly irrational revolution of 1905 itself, have been precipitated out of the astral matter in which they have existed since 1703 and back onto the physical plane of late September–early October 1905. Since that day in May 1703 when the city of Petersburg was founded, generations of Russians—tsars, aristocrats, workmen, bureaucrats, intelligenty, writers, painters, musicians, servants, sailors, spies, yardmen, visitors, and many others—have passionately loved and feared and hated Petersburg, its founder, its streets, its river, and its houses. For two hundred years the tsars who ruled and died in Petersburg, the writers who wrote of Petersburg, the bureaucrats who sent circulars from Petersburg, the anarchists who threw bombs in Petersburg, the ­workers who toiled in Petersburg, the Decembrists who plotted in Petersburg, the secret police and the double agents who spied in Petersburg, the officers, the society ladies, the foreigners—all sent their thoughts out into the astral plane, and their thought-forms created the shadow city of Saint Petersburg. This astral Saint Petersburg became “the capital of the Shadow Land” (as Shishnarfne tells Dudkin). [. . .] In the novel Petersburg, Bely depicts how Russia’s largely negative karmic debt comes due with the revolution of 1905–6. All the negative deeds and thoughts that Russia had projected onto the astral plane over centuries of its history were suddenly precipitated back onto the physical plane in the form of the revolution. The revolution of 1905–6 was the culmination of the enormous sequence of astral effects and causes running backward through history into the present. The revolution was nothing less than the expression of the collective negative karma of the Russian people. Only the brief appearance of the etheric Christ, in the form of the White Domino, offers hope that Russia’s negative karma might be redeemed by Russian spirituality.16

The petty differences among factions at any point in time will fade, while the damage they do with their physical and psychic violence persists. Right 15 See Maria Carlson’s essay in this volume. 16 Ibid.

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

or left, perhaps even east or west, they play out mythic or mystical patterns with causes and effects beyond the range of their doctrines and even their ­consciousness.17 Thus, the “unity of opposites” that informed symbolist ­aesthetics can be understood on the historiographic plane as an equivalence of extremes. Any reader of Petersburg, and certainly any reader of the scholarship devoted to it, is aware of the operation in it of mystical or hidden forces. It is a different question whether these forces define the novel’s ultimate ­horizon of meaning, a discourse capable of containing other discourses while not itself being contained. If so, the project of historiography would be to work ­carefully from the events to the archetypes or prophecies, showing how everything fits. It would be at bottom a providential form of historiography. Petersburg encourages readers at least to try this way of thinking, from start to finish and especially just after Nikolai Apollonovich has started the bomb’s countdown mechanism, in a section called “The Day of Judgment” (315–22). Here the events of Nikolai Apollonovich’s life and of his consciousness meld with his ancestry, Kant, Chronos, Atlantis, and various other elements to form not so much a coherent interpretation of what has gone before as a sense that any explanation must reach far beyond the apparent, must delve into patterns available to the mind not through pure ratiocination but through the rhythms of ancient myths and religions. These rhythms are, however, subject to the same confusion and ­pettiness as everything else in Petersburg. One serious problem with occult or ­extraempirical paradigms is that they are only partly occult. They are, like the parables in the Gospel, available to some, to those capable of hearing and understanding. In this sense they are no longer an ultimate interpretive horizon but rather one element among many that can be commented on, acted out, used for worldly human purposes. After Sergei Likhutin confronts Nikolai Apollonovich, physically restraining him and tearing off a coattail, the latter denies any involvement with the bomb and reproaches his friend for reading a compromising note intended for him. “Since the note to me had been opened,” the senator’s son seized upon his remark with pleasurable malice, “then,” . . . he shrugged his shoulders, “then Sofia Petrovna, of course, had every right (this smacked of irony) to

17 For a similar argument, though less strictly theosophical, see Dmitrii Sazhin, ­“Biurokratiia— revoliutsiia—khaos v romane Andreia Belogo Peterburg,” accessed February 19, 2013, http://www.ibif.org.ru/articles/nachalo14/14-07.pdf.

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tell you, as her husband, about its content,” Nikolai Apollonovich ­muttered arrogantly through clenched teeth; and—continued to advance. “I . . . I . . . lost control,” Likhutin offered in his defence: his gaze fell on the unfortunate coat-tail, and he fastened on to that. “That coat-tail, don’t you worry: I’ll sew it on myself . . .” But Nikolai Apollonovich, with the faintest of smiles on his lips— handsome, his face lit from within—went on reproachfully waving his hands in the air: “You knew not what you did.” His dark-cornflower, deep blue eyes and his shock of shining hair expressed a vague, unutterable sadness: “Go: denounce me, don’t believe me . . .” And he turned away . . . (500–501)

Here Nikolai Apollonovich uses the words of Jesus in a bit of interpersonal jujitsu, not in a genuine gesture of self-sacrifice but, on the contrary, in the malicious enjoyment of suffering inflicted on his friend. Yet it is not even this simple, for as the narrator goes on to explain, Nikolai Apollonovich yearns to participate genuinely in sanctified suffering—but he cannot, as he has ­suffered for no one but himself. None of this disproves the explanatory force of Christianity or theosophy or any other doctrine. But it does bring them onto a level with other ideas and events in Petersburg, capable of explaining, confusing, or deceiving, with no unassailable, transcendent horizon against which to check. “As researchers have justly pointed out,” writes M. A. Nikitina, “due to the limitations of his worldview A. Bely represented the historical meaning of the first Russian revolution in a highly confused way, notwithstanding that he was shaken by the grandiosity of its events.”18 Here Bely appears as ­something of an author-hero, oddly like Iurii Zhivago in this respect. The author only partially understands the historical significance of his own time, but he senses something important (even grandiose) in it. The later author (or critic) ­understands it better but finds interest in the efforts of those with more limited perspectives to comprehend their world and act (and write) effectively in it. Thus Nikitina’s claim that it is in Bely’s extreme subjectivity that he is most objective: he gives precise expression to the thoughts and feelings of an entire class of people (the bourgeois intelligentsia).19 18 M. A. Nikitina, “1905 god v romane Andreia Belogo Peterburg,” in Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 godov i literatura (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), 184. 19 Ibid., 193.

Petersburg as a Historical Novel

However, as I hope may be clear by now, Bely’s confusion—at least in the sense of a jumble of historiographemes—is not an unconscious p ­ roduct of personal limitations but rather a deliberate approach to rendering h ­ istorical experience. That approach relies neither on using a settled narrative (e.g., “The significance of 1905 is . . .”) nor on refuting all such narratives (as Tolstoy in War and Peace seems at times to do). Instead it juxtaposes many ­significance-generating systems onto one another, implying not only that the truth of an experience may not be reducible to a single order of explanation but more fundamentally that historical experience itself centrally involves these half-blind attempts at interpretation, with the writer’s age no more ­justified than any other in assuming the whole truth is available to it. Perhaps indeed there is an ultimately knowable karmic order that governs everything, transcending petty tactics and clarifying what otherwise seems cloudy. Perhaps there are instead environments and tendencies that favor one or another o­ utcome, and to some degree must simply be endured. Perhaps these are both mystifications, and history is made by those who, like Apollon Apollonovich or Konstantin Pobedonostsev, know how to plan and execute. But these modes of interpretation need not exclude one another, just as documentation can be a source of knowledge and a source of c­ onfusion, and events can flow smoothly through time or in bunches. The ways in which these possibilities interact is the real perplexity. The genius of Petersburg is to perplex its reader at almost the same level as its characters, rendering the part of living historically that is the experience of trying to figure it out.

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Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton ALEKSANDR V. LAVROV1

A classic writer of English literature and a Pole by nationality, Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born in or near Berdichev on the territory of what is now Ukraine, into the family of Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–69), a poet-romantic and participant in the Polish national liberation movement. Conrad thus spent the first ten years of his life on the territory of the Russian empire. He steadfastly hated the country that had enslaved his native land, all the while manifesting an equally steadfast interest in specifically Russian issues, images, and situations. This interest was most fully realized in his novel Under Western Eyes (1911), in which scholars rightly see evidence of his development of Dostoevskian themes harking back to Crime and Punishment and The Possessed (although Conrad did not like Dostoevsky). The action of Conrad’s novel unfolds in Petersburg and Geneva, in the milieu of the Russian revolutionary émigrés. Its major plot ­elements consist of a terrorist act (the murder of the ­minister of internal affairs by a student); the handing over of the act’s p ­ erpetrator to the gendarmes by a fellow university student; the recruitment of the latter by the Okhranka [the Russian imperial secret police]; his infiltration, in the guise of a t­ errorist ­persecuted by the Russian authorities, into the inner circle of the political é­migrés-conspirators; and, finally, the self-exposure of the failed p ­ rovocateur. Most representatives of the revolutionary elite are portrayed in the novel ­objectively, but beneath some of the lampooned disguises the reader can easily guess at the real-life prototypes: in part, the portrait of the brutal fat man Nikita, a murderer of gendarmes and police agents   1 Translated from the Russian by Maria Carlson. This article appeared originally as Aleksandr Lavrov, “Andrei Belyi mezhdu Konradom i Chestertonom,” in Lotmanovskii sbornik, vol. 3 (Moscow: OGI, 2004), 443–57; and in A. V. Lavrov, Andrei Belyi: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 180–97.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

who turns out to be a traitor and a spy, is transparently Evno Azef (1868–1918), the famous provocateur who was exposed in early 1909. The story is told by a first-person narrator who constantly points out the e­ motional, psychological, and moral distance that separates him from the objects he depicts: “a mute witness of things Russian, unrolling their Eastern logic under my Western eyes.”2 Joseph Conrad’s novel appeared in Russian translation in 1912—about the time that Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg, which dealt with the same motifs of revolutionary terror and provocation, was nearing completion. Conrad’s novel, however, was not the first instance of his use of similar subject matter. Conrad anticipated his “Petersburg-Geneva” novel in a “London” novel, The Secret Agent (1907), in which the objects of his keen psychological analysis turn out to be very similar plot situations and turns, genetically connected both to Russian literature and to the conflicts of recent Russian history. The hero of the title is Mr. Verloc, a London shopkeeper and paid informant for a foreign embassy. He is embedded in the milieu of English and ­international anarcho-terrorists and is the vice president of a revolutionary society called the Future of the Proletariat. The first secretary of the foreign embassy [Mr. Vladimir] forces Verloc to devise and carry out an elaborate provocative act—to blow up the Greenwich Observatory and in so doing, to attack the very temple of science, which in turn-of-the-century consciousness was a major and highly respected idol. The act was intended to persuade the liberal English authorities to take a harder line against revolutionary organizations, both domestic and foreign. And so the bomb explodes. Verloc had decided to have mentally retarded Stevie, the younger brother of Verloc’s wife, Winnie, carry out the plot. He assumed that if his brother-in-law were arrested, he would not be punished because of his mental condition. But Stevie, in ­executing the ­provocation, accidentally [trips in Greenwich Park and] ­perishes in the ­premature explosion. In a fit of frenzied rage at the death of her adored brother, Winnie Verloc kills her husband. She trusts Mr. Ossipon, one of Verloc’s revolutionary comrades, to help her; after he betrays and robs her, she commits suicide. In addition to the Verloc family and the foreign ­initiators of the provocation, the web of intrigue entangles the revolutionaries and a­ narchists (among them a certain infernal theoretician and practitioner of terrorism known as the Professor), police detectives, and ­representatives of English high society. The plot of Andrey Bely’s Petersburg clearly corresponds to The Secret Agent in places. In Bely’s novel, the function of Conrad’s main hero is assumed   2 Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (London: Methuen, 1911), 376. First Russian translation: Na vzgliad Zapada, trans. E. Pimenova (Moscow: Polʹza, 1912), 314.

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by Lippanchenko, a government “secret agent” who is ­ simultaneously the leader of a revolutionary group. Lippanchenko is the instigator of the provocation—an (unsuccessful) assassination attempt on the life of an ­ all-powerful s­tatesman, Senator Ableukhov. Lippanchenko gives the bundle with the bomb—the “sardine-tin of terrible import” (in Conrad’s novel the bomb is packed in a “tin varnish can”)—to the half-mad illegal revolutionary and mystic Dudkin to give to Ableukhov’s son Nikolai, who had once made a promise to “a c­ ertain reckless party”; Dudkin incites the son to plant the bundle on his father. In both novels the political intrigue and provocative criminal intent revolve around a cruel family drama. In Conrad’s novel the drama is resolved tragically (the bomb explodes and kills Stevie); in Bely’s novel the parricide occurs only on an intellectual level (the bomb explodes, but does not kill the senator), although Nikolai Ableukhov experiences the event with the utmost force and acuity. Both the English and the Russian novelists wreak vengeance on their provocateurs in a similar way: in The Secret Agent Winnie Verloc avenges the death of her weak-minded brother by stabbing her husband with a carving knife in their home; in Petersburg Dudkin, having understood at last Lippanchenko’s true nature and descended into complete madness at the same time, enters Lippanchenko’s home and kills him by ripping him open with a pair of scissors. Both novels stress the ­interpenetration of the social and political spheres, which only superficially appear to be antagonistic and incompatible with each other. We have no documentary evidence that would absolutely confirm that Andrey Bely knew of Conrad’s novel before he began work on Petersburg, just as we have no comments, either comprehensive or fleeting, by Bely himself about this or any other novel by Joseph Conrad. But neither do we have grounds to deny categorically the possibility that Bely read The Secret Agent in the late 1900s or early 1910s; on the contrary, we have an aggregate of indirect arguments that indicates that Conrad’s novel may have come to the attention of the author of Petersburg. Andrey Bely’s retrospective “Rakurs k dnevniku” [Outline for a diary] and other autobiographical and documentary compilations contain notes of hundreds of works that he read and give some indication of when he read them, accurate to within a month. Works that fall in the realm of belles lettres are only episodically mentioned in these notes, which predominantly list books about philosophy, history, psychology, the occult, the natural and exact sciences, histories of science and religion, and so on—works that Bely did not simply read but studied and on which rest his attempts to formulate his own worldview and build a theory of symbolism. They document his persistent

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

attraction to broadening his general horizons and increasing the areas of his professional knowledge. Even those books of verse and literary prose that made a strong impression on Bely and about which he commented in print or in private letters are not recorded in his autobiographical material. Many belletristic works receive only a brief, aggregate mention, such as “I’m reading many novels for relaxation” (May 1917).3 Neither did Bely have the habit of registering in his retrospective notes those works published in the periodical press (with the exception of those cases in which one or another publication turned out to be closely connected with the circumstances of his own literary life). Thus, Bely’s “silence” about Conrad does not by itself signify that the works of the English author passed by him unnoticed. The Secret Agent was published in a Russian translation by “Z. V.” (Zinaida Vengerova [1867–1941]) in 1908. It appeared in one of the most ­representative and widely read metropolitan journals, Vestnik Evropy [European herald] in the April, May, and June numbers of that year. The name of Joseph Conrad was then practically unknown to Andrey Bely, as it was unknown to most Russians who did not read English (although a ­careful reader might have ­remembered Conrad’s name after two of his s­ tories, “Iunostʹ” [“Youth,” 1898] and “Avanpost tsivilizatsii” [“An Outpost of Progress,” 1897], were translated and published in Russkii vestnik [Russian herald], 1901, no. 4, and in Russkoe ­bogatstvo [Russian wealth], 1902, no. 5, respectively). The Secret Agent, ­published in Vestnik Evropy, could have attracted Bely by its title: “­ mysteries,” secret ­organizations, the hidden springs that move the social mechanism are topics that always evoked a burning interest in Bely and excited his i­ magination. His overdeveloped attraction to such topics declares itself in the plot sequences of most of his major ­narrative works. ­This ­interest became particularly strong in the years that immediately preceded the c­ onceptualization and writing of Petersburg. It was just then, in the period of the first Russian revolution and the years that followed, that Bely plunged into the ­atmosphere of the most radical tendencies with abandon. He made contact—albeit ­superficially and emotionally rather than in any substantive way—with illegal organizations, so that he was able to make out what trailed in their invisible wake: secret agents, criminal investigators, provocateurs. That period was also when the ­invisible, the secret, became manifest: the exposure of Azef in January 1909 had a t­hunderous impact on Russian society. Azef was one of the ­founders and leaders of the SRs [Socialist Revolutionary Party] and the head of its Boevaia organizatsiia [Terrorist organization], which was r­esponsible for a   3 Andrei Belyi, “Rabota i chtenie,” RGB [Russian State Library], f. 25, k. 31, ed. khr. 6.

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series of terrorist acts. At the same time, Azef spent fifteen years as a secret collaborator working for the Department of Police. (Conrad’s close friend and fellow writer, Ford Madox Ford, later claimed that Azef served as the prototype of Mr. Verloc, but this statement can hardly be true: The Secret Agent was completed two years before the exposure of the provocateur Azef.4) At that moment, in the very small world of Moscow’s literary bohemia, in the milieu surrounding Boris Zaitsev (1881–1972), an event occurred that was less remarkable than the exposure of Azef, but for Bely, perhaps, no less ­meaningful, since it touched him personally if indirectly: in the autumn of 1910, a “secret agent” was ­discovered in his own social sphere. The secret agent was Olʹga Fedorovna Putiato, an organizer of c­ haritable evenings in aid of revolutionary organizations (in his memoirs Bely gives a ­different variant of her name: Putsiato). At one time she had been the ­companion of Viktor Strazhev (1879–1950), a poet and critic of the ­symbolist circle and a close friend of Boris Zaitsev. Suspicions about Putiato’s activities as an agent provocateur fell on her common-law husband as well, appeared in print, and resulted in a burdensome investigation that was exacerbated by the protests of the aggrieved and demoralized Strazhev. An arbitration court of honor subsequently ruled that he had been falsely defamed.5 The formal vindication of Strazhev, however, was unable to mitigate the bitterness of the stressful experience that the writers who had had business dealings with Putiato or had simply been acquainted with her had undergone. Bely ­remembered: The Zaitsevs were shaken; to be friends with an agent provocateur meant that the shadow also falls on oneself; [. . .] the agent provocateur had selected a pretty good observation post; writers who considered themselves left-wing flocked to the Zaitsev apartment: symbolists, semisymbolists, and just plain writers. My memory of Putsiato was shaped by a most unpleasant incident with the police, from which I barely extricated myself. [. . .] I don’t   4 See E. S. Sebezhko, “Problematika i khudozhestvennoe svoeobrazie romana Dzh. Konrada Tainyi agent,” in Voprosy russkoi i zarubezhnoi literatury, ed. I. E. Grineva and Z. I. Levinson (Tula: Tulʹskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii institut imeni L. N. Tolstogo, 1971), 217.   5 N. D. Teleshev (1867–1957) relates this story in his memoirs, without specifically mentioning Strazhev’s or Putiato’s names; see Nikolai Teleshev, Zapiski pisatelia: Vospominaniia i rasskazy o proshlom (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 61–64. B. K. Zaitsev also mentions the episode in his memoir Moskva; see the chapter “Delo bogemy,” in his Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, ed. E. Voropaeva and A. E. Tarkhov, vol. 2 (Moscow: Terra, 1993), 389–97. See also letters from B. K. Zaitsev to I. A. Novikov (from 1 and 28 October 1910 and 5 June 1911) and to V. I. Strazhev (from 9 March 1913), in Zaitsev’s Sobranie sochinenii: Pisʹma 1901–1922, vol. 10, ed. T. F. Prokopov, with notes by O. V. Vologina (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2001), 74–75, 77, 79, 102, 333–34.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

understand why they didn’t arrest me as they did a series of other writers who socialized with Putsiato. [. . .] I think that in her secret plans we who attended her soirees played the role of little worms for the attraction of fish; the fish might have been the young people (male and female students). [. . .] The exposure of Putsiato and the shocking exposure of Azef more than convinced me that 40 percent of the things that were caused by the “underground” in those years must in fact have been caused by the Department for Defense of Public Security and Order [Okhranka].6

Enriched by the experience of having met a real “secret agent,” Andrey Bely was certainly in a frame of mind to pay particular attention to the latest English novel that described a similar individual. If we assume that we have grounds for this suggestion, then we can in good faith take one more step in our extrapolations. The plot elements common to both The Secret Agent and Petersburg are complemented by ­coincidence or similarity in the individual aesthetic choices made by the two writers. Bely’s Petersburg in Petersburg and Conrad’s London in The Secret Agent resemble each other in many ways, thanks to the similarity of the authors’ optics and the coincidence of emotional coloring in their selection of details to describe the cityscape. The city of Petersburg is truly the main hero of Bely’s novel: mysterious, gloomy, spectral, a mystical city-symbol, saturated with delirium and hallucinations, drowning in slush and fog, the city itself appears as a grandiose historical provocation perpetrated by Peter the Great himself and constantly renewing itself in every one of the lesser provocations played out in the novel’s plot. Conrad creates London through more economical stylistic means, but in the same tonal range: he emphasizes “the bleak rawness of an autumn evening,” “the misty darkness of a wet London night,” an “open triangular space, surrounded by dark and mysterious houses,” the “gloomy and sinister appearance” of Verloc’s house.7 In Petersburg, the color yellow clearly dominates all other colors: the “yellow” house of Senator Ableukhov, who is himself the “little yellow” old man; the “yellow” wallpaper in Dudkin’s room; Lippanchenko’s “yellowish” face, “dark-yellow” suit, and “yellow” boots; the “yellow-faced” apparitions   6 Andrei Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 245–46.   7 Vestnik Evropy, no. 6 (1908): 705–7. [Translator’s note: The author takes his textual ­examples from Vengerova’s Russian translation of Conrad’s novel. These textual examples are here translated into English without reference to Conrad’s original text, since Bely would have read the Russian translation, not the English original.]

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that persecute Dudkin. The historiosophical subtext here is provided by the yellow peril, the danger from the East and Asia, which Bely, following Vladimir Solovʹev’s lead, considered to be real and threatening.8 The same color dominant can be traced through The Secret Agent: the ground u ­ nderfoot “shot through with gold,” the “golden atmosphere,” “copper-red gleams,” the “rusty appearance” of Verloc’s coat, a “yellow wall,” a “yellow cord”—all these characteristics are concentrated at the start of chapter 2 of the novel.9 In Bely’s Petersburg, the world of the city—contrived, calculated, and false—is ­constantly likened to geometric figures. The title of one of the ­subchapters is “Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes.” In Conrad’s novel the secret agent ­himself is designated by a geometric figure (the triangle) in his ­conspiratorial efforts. From under the pens of the two writers the residents of Petersburg and London arise like an assemblage of marionettes, deprived of any i­ndividualized ­attributes that would intrinsically differentiate them: Bely’s faceless “stream of people” and “human myriapod”10 correspond to Conrad’s “narrow street, populated only by an insignificant portion of humanity,” which the professor-terrorist perceives in this manner: “Infinite, like a cloud of locusts, industrious as ants, thoughtless, unconscious, like the elements, humanity blindly moved ahead, absorbed by its aim of the moment, methodical in its movement, impervious to feelings of pity—impervious even to terror.”11 The analogies between the plots of the two novels are located ­primarily in the subplot involving the intrigue engineered by Lippanchenko in Petersburg. In this case, the “general” line of similarity is once again encrusted with the most curious coincidence of detail. It is fair to say that the aggregate of characteristics from which Bely creates the figure of Lippanchenko—the “fat man” with a double chin, a “yellowish” face, short fingers, “low-browed head,” “hunched back,” and “thick neck”—comes together to form a portrait of Azef,12 as he was sketched, for example, by Boris Savinkov: “fat, hunched over, taller than average height, small hands and feet, and a short, thick neck. His face was round, puffy, swarthy-yellow, and his skull narrowed at the top. [. . .] He had a low forehead, dark brows, slightly protruding hazel eyes, a   8 See Andrei Belyi, Peterburg: Roman v vosʹmi glavakh s prologom i epilogom, ed. L. K. ­Dolgopolov and A. V. Lavrov, with notes and commentary by S. S. Grechishkin, L. K. Dolgopolov, and A. V. Lavrov, 2nd ed., Literaturnye pamiatniki (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2004), 645.  9 Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1908): 722–23. 10 Belyi, Peterburg, 21, 25. 11 Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (1908): 318. 12 Leonid Dolgopolov, Andrei Belyi i ego roman “Peterburg” (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1988), 273.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

big, flattened nose, high cheekbones, [and] very thick lips, and the lower part of his face was prominent.”13 “Secret agent” Verloc, depicted by Conrad before the external appearance of Azef was widely known, has the same f­eatures: Verloc is a large, lazy man, vulgar and incompetent to the point of incurring the censure of those in charge (“Why have you put on so much weight? Your appearance does not suit your profession. Who would mistake you for a hungry proletarian? Under no circumstances would that ever happen. Devil take it, what kind of socialist or even anarchist are you?!”).14 All the same, the external appearance of Conrad’s provocateur is similar to the others in his revolutionary group: Comrade Ossipon is “big and brawny,” with “a bony forehead” and a “corpulent body”15; Michael is, the “Apostle” of anarchism, is endowed with extravagant bodily dimensions: “fat as a barrel, with an enormous stomach and distended, pale cheeks,” “elbows swollen with fat,” “pathetic in his incurable obesity,” “a monstrously fat man with the eyes of an innocent child,” and so on.16 Morbid ­obesity is accented ­repeatedly. Azef, it goes without saying, presented himself to Andrey Bely’s inner vision before any other analogous image—but is it not p ­ ossible that the associations that gave form to his depiction of the character of Lippanchenko included the memory, conscious or unconscious, of the corpulent characters in the English novel? The motif of sacrifice is distinctly heard in The Secret Agent (this is how Winnie Verloc perceives the death of her brother). Sacrifice encompasses ­different psychological levels, ranging from a sublime notion of sacrifice to its brutal parallel, the act of cannibalism. The explosion that tears apart the body of Stevie, Verloc’s mentally retarded dependent, into bloody fragments echoes in the novel’s text in the theoreticizing statements of the revolutionaries (“. . . what, in my opinion, is the current state of the economy? I call it cannibalistic. People are slaking their greed on the living flesh and the warm blood of their neighbors. Nothing else will satisfy them.”). This talk excites Stevie’s beclouded consciousness (Mrs. Verloc worries about her brother, for “He was out of his mind with something he overheard about eating people’s flesh and drinking blood”).17 The idea of cannibalism is embedded in a series of corresponding images, which take on additional 13 Boris Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, in his Izbrannoe (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 331–32. 14 Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1908): 731, 727. 15 Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (1908): 306, 304. 16 Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1908): 741; Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (1908): 335, 337. 17 Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1908): 748, 752.

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dimensions of meaning because of the central role of sacrifice to the plot. In this regard, no statement is accidental: that Winnie Verloc, prior to her ­marriage, had had an affair with a butcher’s son and that the “memory of the early romance with the young butcher” revives in her memory after she has killed her husband;18 that Stevie’s remains look like “raw material for a cannibal feast”;19 that Verloc, returning home in the confusion that followed Stevie’s death, could not at first touch his food (“cold beef ”), but later felt an u ­ nappeasable hunger and began to eat, a process carefully and repeatedly recorded: “. . . he cut himself a piece of meat and began to eat”; “He began slowly to eat”; “Mr. Verloc again went to the table where the meat sat. He was o­ vercome by an unappeasable hunger”; “He put aside the carving knife with which he was getting ready to cut a piece of meat.” After killing Verloc with that same carving knife, his wife overturned the table, and “the plate with the meat fell to the floor.”20 In Petersburg, the episode with the ­evening party that precedes the murder of Lippanchenko does not mention meat as food, but it is still noteworthy that a valid ­lexical substitute figures here instead: the provocateur spends the last hours of his life alone with his g­ irlfriend, Zoia Zakharovna Fleish (Fleisch is German for “meat”). Both Conrad’s and Bely’s murders are arranged in the Guignol manner with an accent on shocking gastronomic associations. Winnie Verloc stabs her ­husband with the ­carving knife he had used to slice the meat; in Bely, Dudkin’s actions in killing Lippanchenko reveal direct analogies with the butchering of an animal carcass, as well as with the serving of a meat dish at the table: “He realized that his back had been cut open; just the way you cut the white, hairless skin of a cold sucking-pig in horseradish”21 (an analogous parallel appears in The Secret Agent: “He would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then,” Mrs. Verloc says about her brother’s reaction to the story “of a German soldier officer half-tearing off the ear of a recruit”).22 The Russian translation of The Secret Agent that was published in Vestnik Evropy had been carefully edited to remove any evidence of Russians’ ­participation in the plot line, clearly to avoid any “political” complications in getting the novel published in Russia.23 The first secretary of the foreign 18 Vestnik Evropy, no. 6 (1908): 759. 19 Vestnik Evropy, no. 5 (1908): 322. 20 Vestnik Evropy, no. 6 (1908): 746–47, 753, 757. 21 Belyi, Peterburg, 386. 22 Vestnik Evropy, no. 4 (1908): 753. 23 Compare this with a later, more satisfactory Russian translation: Dzhosef Konrad, Tainyi agent, trans. M. Matveeva, ed. V. A. Azov (Leningrad-Moscow: Petrograd, 1925).

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

embassy, Mr. Vladimir, for example, was renamed Mr. Valʹder. Any direct “Russian” r­eferences were camouflaged, but the work’s subject matter, with all its familiar features, remained obvious even with the distorted names, and the foreign London setting was not nearly enough to douse the interest of any ­interested reader living in Russia and burdened by Russia’s particular problems. Another novel of London life on the “secret agent” theme appeared in Russian translation in 1914, after the completion and publication of Andrey Bely’s Petersburg. This was Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s (1874–1936) famous The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), a novel with not one but many “secret agents.” If we are able only to presume that Bely might have been acquainted with Conrad’s work, then in the case of Chesterton’s novel we need not resort to the subjunctive mood. In the last belletristic work that Bely ­completed, the novel Maski (Masks; 1930), one of the arranged plot conflicts evokes this analogy from the author: “I remembered—Chesterton describes how the anarchists captured themselves, having become ­plainclothesmen; and how the police, running away from those whom they caught, overtook them; they all ran, together—along the line of a circle.”24 Bely depicts the p ­ rimary plot machination that shapes Chesterton’s plot inaccurately here: the anarchists in his novel do not become plainclothesmen; on the contrary, as the game ­proceeds, it becomes clear that the anarchists are plainclothesmen d ­isguised as ­ anarchists; they are “secret agents” working to counteract the anarchists’ ­destructive i­nitiatives. This was apparently a characteristic error of memory about the plot of a novel read long ago. Still, the central paradox of Chesterton’s novel, h ­ ighlighting the d ­ isparity between face and mask, between essence and ­appearance, and ­identifying the anarchists-­ ­ overthrowers with the ­ detectives-protectors, fixed itself in Bely’s ­consciousness durably and for a long time. Bely probably read The Man Who Was Thursday soon after his return to Russia in August 1916, following a long sojourn in the countries of w ­ estern Europe, primarily in Switzerland. In a letter to Ivanov-Razumnik of 16 June 1917, Bely touched on the contemporary Russian political ­situation and ­predicted that the recent February Revolution was fraught with the ­potential to turn into a counterrevolution, that the observable intensifying ­movement “leftward on the circle” threatened to produce “the quintessence [. . .] of provocateurs, policemen, and German spies.” He added, “Have you read Chesterton’s story The Man Who Was Thursday? I am afraid that our fear of the middle way will soon place us in the same position as the heroes of

24 Andrei Belyi, Moskva (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1989), 394.

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this ­novel.”25 Several weeks later, on 27 July 1917, Bely wrote again to the same correspondent about his next creative project, which he was ­determined to realize immediately, that very August: “I have a theme for a story à la Chesterton, ‘About that which no one writes about.’”26 Here we understand his reference to be to the same Chesterton novel. No evidence has yet been found to show that Bely immediately set out to realize this proposed project. It is entirely possible that he may never have started on it at all. Still, it is revealing that for a certain period of time, The Man Who Was Thursday represented for Bely a starting point, a trampoline of sorts, for his own creative pirouettes. If, in turning to Conrad’s The Secret Agent, we encountered probable, but not indisputable echoes of that novel in Bely’s most famous work, Petersburg, then as far as The Man Who Was Thursday is concerned, we face an unquestionably impossible task but one that would definitely appeal to the taste of the author of the novel and his favorite heroes—to find indisputably Chestertonian influence in an ­unwritten work. The Man Who Was Thursday is an unusual example of an original genre, a philosophical adventure-fantasy novel with mythological projections. Seven of its characters, provided with undercover pseudonyms corresponding to the seven days of the week, also correspond to the seven days of creation and serve to some extent as their embodiment in human form. The ­novel’s ­criminal-police plot, originating on the outskirts of London, gradually grows into a global phantasmagoria. Meanwhile, the actions of the characters and the logic of their behaviors appear to be the result of the intentions of a ­demiurge or higher being called Sunday. Sunday is head of the Anarchist Council and simultaneously a mysterious figure of sorts who recruited all the agents for police work; he is a manifestation of supraindividual “cerebral play,” if we might appropriate Bely’s formulation from Petersburg. Bely, in reading Chesterton’s novel, could not help but notice certain similarities to his own major brainchild, both in the working out of plot conflicts (such as the double identity of “secret agents” and “shakers of foundations”) and in the general parabolic movement of the narrative from an observable and ­conditional ­reality to an imagined and absolute reality. It has been rightly observed that all of Bely’s works prove to be “one big word,” in which individual words are only elements, intricately interacting within the integrated semantic whole 25 Andrei Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska, ed. Aleksandr Lavrov et al. (St. Petersburg: Atheneum-Feniks, 1998), 119. 26 Ibid., 124.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

of the text.27 All of Bely’s major prose that is not structured in the form of a “symphony” represents the “big word,” in the form either of unmediated, autobiographical, narrative introspection or of ­introspection mediated by the turns of a crime novel and the system of characters, major and episodic, that such a narrative requires. Despite its eccentricity, Chesterton’s unique ­narrative model combines into one seamless whole both the pragmatics of the plot and the metaphysics of the author’s worldview, both the deliberately invented, masquerade-game plot and the religio-mythopoeic agenda that underlies and directs it. Bely could have considered this model and used it in his own attempt to create new kinds of narrative designs while still exploiting the same plot-generating archetypes, the same m ­ odifications of his “one big word.” If the elements of traditional plot construction stand out in Bely’s novels, then they include, according to Khodasevich’s precise observation (in his article “Ableukhovy—Letaevy—Korobkiny,” 1927), both the ­characters that represent “monstrous and horrible caricatures, the purest product of fantasy” and the fantastic and chimerical relationships of these characters, deprived of any everyday v­ erisimilitude—“things, ­changing their contours,” and all possible kinds of “kibitzers, spies, eavesdroppers, ­firebrands.”28 All of these indispensable ­components of Andrey Bely’s ­discursive code are also ­present in Chesterton’s novel, the characters of which form a host of “spies” and ­“firebrands.” Chesterton’s novel also has a parodic component—it turns the standard devices and patterns of the crime fiction genre inside out; it ­“profanes” them, a strategy that Bely could have comprehended both as a covariation of what he had already achieved in Petersburg (which is ­structured as a parody and travesty of the myths of Russian history and Russian ­literature) and as an interesting example of the use of unexpected, playful devices, s­ uitable for future exploitation. We can only guess at the content of the narrative events that Andrey Bely intended to give form to in his work “about that which no one writes about,” but his concept undoubtedly presupposed a nonstandard, paradoxical plot, similar to the one in Chesterton’s novel. At the time, however, Bely created no large-scale narrative work using invented characters and plot twists born of the author’s fantasy; moreover, he soon came to understand that writing “about that which no one writes about,” even with a specific, preplanned plot oriented on 27 Iurii Lotman, “Poeticheskoe kosnoiazychie Andreia Belogo,” in his O poetakh i poezii: Analiz poeticheskogo teksta (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 1996), 683. 28 Vladislav Khodasevich, “Ableukhovy—Letaevy—Korobkiny,” in Andrei Belyi: Pro et contra. Lichnostʹ i tvorchestvo Andreia Belogo v otsenkakh i tolkovaniiakh sovremennikov; antologiia (St. Petersburg: Izd. Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2004), 734, 749.

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what had been achieved earlier, on literary examples or analogies, was admittedly unfeasible. Bely experienced and comprehended the cataclysms of the revolutionary years as a form of catastrophic resolution to a global crisis, enveloping all spheres of life. He found it impossible to write about a new, radically changed, and not-yet-stabilized world in traditional ways, not even within the parameters and tradition of his own earlier writing. “I have almost nothing to write about: any definitive theme disgusts me. Though I say that there is almost nothing to write about, this does not at all mean that I have run out of themes; on the contrary, my themes have proliferated”—in this way did Bely sketch out the state of his creative affairs in January 1919.29 In this situation Bely’s one and only mainstay became the world of his own experiences and impressions. The transmission of the rhythm of his inner life became the foremost and only accessible literary means for its manifestation: “I am going to speak about a chance event of the day, about the weather, a book, the brotherhood of all people, what I dreamt of, even something I have never seen; I want to present all of this to myself; I want to describe here what happened within me, in my world of consciousness, when this or that ‘event’ appeared in it.”30 The most consistent and ambitious realization of this creative plan became the cycle of autobiographical works gathered under the general title “Ia. Epopeia” [I. An epic work]. “Epic” in this case is understood as an “inner” epic, an attempt to explicate events taking place in the author’s inner world and experienced by his self-conscious “I.” Like all of Andrey Bely’s grandiose ­projects, this concept was not realized as originally ­conceived and ­proportioned. Its largest completed fragment attained an independent life under the title Zapiski chudaka [Notes of an eccentric] (its original title was “Ia. Epopeia. Tom pervyi, Zapiski chudaka. Chastʹ pervaia, Vozvrashchenie na rodinu; 1918–1921” [I. An epic work. Volume 1, Notes of an eccentric. Part one, Return to the homeland, 1918–1921]). It was an ­autobiographical ­narrative of Bely’s life in the anthroposophical milieu of Dornach, Switzerland, and his subsequent return to his homeland by a circuitous route through France, England, and Scandinavia. The work is characterized by numerous digressions of a memoiristic-meditative kind that depart from the work’s narrative line. In his retrospective autobiographical and annalistic notes, Bely touches only laconically on the actual events that form the basis of this work: . Taking leave of Bauer, Steiner (lengthy), with all friends, and departure; but the English refuse entry, so return to Dornach [. . .] 29 Andrei Belyi, “Dnevnik pisatelia,” Zapiski mechtatelei, no. 1 (1919): 125. 30 Ibid., 131.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

Finally on 8 August departure from Dornach with Potstso [. . .]; via Bern–Neuchâtel–Paris–Le Havre–Southampton to London. London. A week of ennui; we are followed; a meeting with Malikov; finally— departure; via Newcastle–Stavanger–Bergen to Christiania. Christiania (Oslo). An ordeal; then via Haparanda–Tornio to Petrograd. Petrograd. We arrived on 23 August [. . .].31

In “Ia. Epopeia,” as Marietta Shaginian observed, “Bely’s goal was to ­reproduce a piece of everyday life, filtering it through an evolving human self-­ consciousness.”32 This authorial strategy makes it possible for all ­parameters and attributes of objective reality in the author’s interpretation to be d ­ isplaced or modified by the transfiguring consciousness of the subject. Only images ­possess authentic and immutable reality as they arise and work their way through the inner world of the narrative’s hero. They flow, change, enter into free association, present themselves hyperbolically; they are emotionally transcoded by the reflections of those realia to which they correspond in the three-dimensional world. Many significant circumstances of Andrey Bely’s two-week journey found no, or almost no, reflection in Zapiski ­chudaka. For example, his fellow traveler and close friend, the like-minded A. M. Potstso (1882–1941), who spent every day of the journey with Bely, is mentioned in the course of the narrative only in passing, in two or three phrases, while the “meeting with Malikov” (the son of N. A. Malikov, the famous Tolstoyan and participant in the anthroposophical building in Dornach, whom Bely later tried to help in every way)33 is noted in Bely’s retrospective notes but is not mentioned in the London chapters of the book at all. Instead, various petty and quite possibly random particulars and details of everyday life, encrusted with metaphorical significance, find hypertrophied expression. Under Bely’s pen, the lengthy and, by all indications, grueling journey, although not accompanied by any extraordinary events, takes place in a mysterious, visionary dimension. It turns into a phantasmagoria in which one and the same motif, wherein the hero is followed and persecuted by hostile, external forces, is played in different harmonies. Bely never developed an independent, invented plot “a là Chesterton,” but in Zapiski chudaka he was nevertheless able to develop in his own fashion much of what was contained in Chesterton’s novel, and which could enrich, by additional “belletristic” associations and 31 Andrei Belyi, “Rakurs k dnevniku,” RGALI [Russian State Archives of Literature and Art], f. 53, op. 1, ed. khr. 100. 32 Marietta Shaginian, Literaturnyi dnevnik (St. Petersburg: Parfenon, 1922), 78. 33 See Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska, 114–17.

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harmonics, that complex of impressions and experiences that the writer took away from the vicissitudes of his “return to the homeland.” Chesterton’s novel has an explanatory subtitle—A Nightmare, or, in N. L. Trauberg’s recent Russian translation, A Terrible Dream—that justifies, in the eyes of the skeptical rationalist, the conglomeration of completely ­impossible events that are presented in the novel. The dream-like nature of events is also indicated in the text: “. . . that which followed, was so improbable, that it could easily have been a dream.”34 Zapiski chudaka was received by the critics as a product of hallucinatory creativity, born of an assemblage of “nightmare images of contemporaneity” beyond number: “New images flicker, and they, too, are nightmares: cities, streets, railway carriages, clerks, soldiers, etc.”35 Corresponding, generalizing attestations of concrete objects, aesthetically depicted, are strewn throughout the text of Bely’s book. One of its ­chapters is titled “Phantasmagoria,” another, “A Dream.” The fictionality of the sequence of images is underscored at each step: “The impression of n ­ ightmare frequently overcame me,” “terrible forces clawed at me,” “in the night, ­ ­confusion created a monstrous abracadabrian delirium,” “in the midst of this world mirage,” “the walls into which I collapsed after the strange dream,” “I dreamt it all,” etc.36 Although most of the episodes in Zapiski chudaka take place in this h ­ allucinatory, dreamlike dimension, this narrative feature is especially ­manifest in the book’s series of “English” chapters. Apparently based on reality, the narrative strands about receiving a transit visa in Switzerland to pass through England and being unexpectedly delayed in London awoke in Bely’s ­consciousness a fantastic complex of suspicions and fears, which, when transformed into aesthetic reality, became the mainspring of the “inner” plot of Zapiski chudaka. Chesterton’s Gabriel Syme, having become “a member of a new detective corps working to expose broad conspiracies,” discovers, through an accumulative series of adventures, that the“unfamiliar world” formed by the Secret Conclave of European Dynamiters, consists of persons just like himself, costumed detectives in stage make-up, ostensibly “battling a vast conspiracy” but in reality spying on each other.37 In Zapiski chudaka, the ­ubiquitous detectives constitute a major and many-faced force that is pitted 34 Dzh. K. Chesterton, Chelovek, kotoryi byl Chetvergom: Koshmar, trans. E. S. Kudasheva, Universalʹnaia biblioteka, no. 973–75 (Moscow: Polʹza, 1914), 14–15. 35 P. S. Kogan, “Literaturnye zametki. I. Epopeia Andreia Belogo,” Krasnaia novʹ, no. 4 (December 1921): 272. 36 Andrei Belyi, Zapiski chudaka (Moscow, 1922), 1:120, 1:122, 1:136, 2:31, 2:229, 2:232. 37 Chesterton, Chelovek, kotoryi byl Chetvergom, 62, 70, 172.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

against the hero-narrator, who recognizes and sees only them among all the people he encounters. The representatives of the ­fictitious ­organization of “Invisible Detectives” each have their own particular d ­ isguise, but the English ­component dominates in Bely’s text: “Holmeses of all lands and p ­ eoples,” “Sherlocks, plainclothesmen, officers, bureaucrats of three m ­ inistries of most-enlightened England, policemen,” “an Englishman, the director of ­counterintelligence,” “Englishmen and their detectives, or more accurately, not their detectives, but detectives pursuing them (i.e., detectives pursing ­brotherhoods, provisionally and temporarily disguised as Anglo-Saxons).”38 Finally there is the many-faced, gray-haired, silver-headed “sir” who is, in a sense, the demiurge of the nightmare and who controls the hero’s consciousness. Chesterton has a similar description of the external appearance of President Sunday, apart from the incredible hugeness and corpulence of his figure (so characteristic a feature and curious in correlation to the images of the “secret agents” that Belyi described above)—his head [. . .] crowned with gray hair”; the gray hair of President Sunday is remarked upon repeatedly with different variations: “his face, with his white hair whistling in the wind,” “the old gentleman with white hair,” “the great white head,” “a silver bloom on his head,” “his locks whirled up above his brow, like a silver flame.”39 Chesterton’s ­detectives wear their anarchist c­ amouflage as if it were a masquerade ­costume: disguised by their stage makeup, they appear to be dangerous criminals; ­without it, they appear in their authentic forms. In Bely’s work, all the “­ international d ­ etectives” and “gang of agents” also present themselves as characters in a global masquerade play: we “paid attention: a shapeshifter, a disguise, a spy”; “a monstrous ­masquerade was performed [. . .] horrible masks trailed along at the train stations”; “the plainclothesman (this is a mask),” etc.40 Like a detective novel, Chesterton’s work begins with the exposure of a series of “London secrets,” gradually segues into a conditionally fictional d ­ imension, and finally changes into a mystery-phantasmagoria, thus t­ransforming the ­contours of tangible reality into the shape of conditional, symbolic action. The phantom-detectives who streak across the pages of Zapiski chudaka are deprived of independent existence; they are only reflections and tokens born of the dynamics of the author’s imagination, semblances of other realia, s­ignals sent from otherworldly, metaphysical spheres. Bely’s imagination gives birth to the “General Astral Headquarters” in the same way that Chesterton’s ­imagination 38 Belyi, Zapiski chudaka, 1:28–29, 1:24, 2:68. 39 Chesterton, Chelovek, kotoryi byl Chetvergom, 71, 221–22, 226, 231, 244, 254. 40 Belyi, Zapiski chudaka, 1:32, 1:129, 1:132.

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produces President Sunday, who in the end turns out to be a symbol of the universe and a reflection of God the Father, Ruler of Heaven and Earth. The “gray-haired sir,” contemplating the hero of Zapiski chudaka “from his office in the astral conduit,” directs a “swarm of shadows”—­“ministers,” “detective-­ doubles,” who pursue the hero “through all the ­intersections of London”41 and continue to pursue him in his subsequent ­travels. All these images—or rather one, single image, ­manifested in a m ­ ultiplicity of illusory shapes and variants— are, as the author ­repeatedly observes, of a profoundly conceptual nature: the ­“international association of d ­ etectives” is a­ ssimilated to the “brotherhood, lying in wait for all the most ­delicate shifts of ­consciousnesses”; “all joys, all horrors, sirs, Lloyd-Georges, spies are precipitations of my rising consciousnesses; they were realized in the depths of personality; they later slipped out in my dreams”; “the ‘sir’ whom I saw is the unity of the spies’ consciousnesses”42 (in Chesterton’s novel, Sunday, who directs the characters who represent the other days of the week, ­accumulates into himself all the energy that moves the world order). The material ­fictionality of these images signals that they are of the same nature as the “astral” spheres. The detective is “an open air-vent, through which the waste of an unconceivable world is drawn toward us”; “dread at the detective’s appearance is dread of the approach of my secret depths toward my self”; the hero sees himself among “spectral, capering ‘­misters’ who have suddenly left the firm ground of the earth and found themselves swarming in Thomson’s cosmic vortex,” while the “capering sir” rushes past “into the spaces of the cosmic void” and represents “the reality of the world beyond.”43 Still, the ­“prophetic” ­fantasies of the Russian and English authors, no matter how much their flickering ­detective-marionettes resemble each other, serve to reveal completely different artistic intentions. Andrey Bely uses the dream-­generated plainclothesmen to submerge himself in his own “unfathomed depths” and to translate the epic tale of the dynamic existence of his own, inner “I” into verbal images. The ­meaning of his work lies above all in the self-oblivious aspiration to go beyond the ­horizons of consciousness into an ambivalent world that both attracts and frightens, that is ­immeasurable and strange, that annihilates all stable concepts and categories. Those same dream-­generated “­ plainclothesmen” in the “­ nightmare” born in the c­ onsciousness of Chesterton, guardian of the ­establishment and a most ­confirmed ­optimist, serve ultimately to ­vanquish a­ narchic nihilism and to ­reaffirm the ­predetermined ­harmony of the world order. 41 Ibid., 1:24, 1:27, 2:51. 42 Ibid., 1:151, 2:113, 2:182. 43 Ibid., 1:188, 1:191, 2:31, 2:61, 2:60.

Andrey Bely between Conrad and Chesterton

One of the anarchist-detectives in Chesterton is a Pole named Gogol. Of course Andrey Bely could not avoid noticing the unexpected use of the family name of his favorite writer. Neither could he avoid noticing, when reading The Man Who Was Thursday, similarities to the motifs that he used to great effect in Petersburg: “A man’s brain is a bomb! [. . .] My brain seems to me to be a bomb[. . .] A man’s brain must expand, even if it breaks up the whole world!”44 Having discovered in the phantasmagoric images of Chesterton’s “crime” novel a ­multitude of k­ indred characteristics that “spoke” to him, Bely was capable of reflecting, directly or indirectly, the impressions of this ­familiarity in his ­subsequent c­ reative works. The direct reflection—a novel à la Chesterton—did not happen. Still it seems to me that The Man Who Was Thursday ­nevertheless was embedded into Bely’s prose indirectly—in one of the layers of “primordial memory” that dictated to the writer the story of his “return to the h ­ omeland.”45

44 Chesterton, Chelovek, kotoryi byl Chetvergom, 86. 45 For a review of Chesterton’s novel in Russian cultural life of the 1920s, see two articles by M. E. Malenkova, “‘Sketch po koshmaru Chestertona’ i kulʹturnaia situatsiia NEPa,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 78 (2006): 32–59; and “NEP, FEKS, i Chelovek, kotoryi byl Chetvergom,” in XX vek. Dvadtsatye gody: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. R. Iu. Danilevskii et al. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2006), 273–98. [Translator’s note: The “sketch” in the first-mentioned article refers to a play based on Chesterton’s novel. Directed by Aleksandr Tairov, it premiered on 6 December 1923 at the Moscow Chamber Theatre.]

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I On the surface level, Bely’s “novel” Notes of an Eccentric recounts Leonid Ledianoi’s (a pseudonym) trip home through war-torn Europe in 1916 from the Anthroposophical Commune in Dornach, Switzerland. In his afterword Bely makes common cause with this Ledianoi, declaring that he and the writer are one and the same. It is safe to say that the genre-crossing “novel” is highly autobiographical, even if Boris Bugaev is still hiding behind his nom de plume. A little way into the “novel” Ledianoi reveals something about his writing technique that is closely related to the real theme of Notes of an Eccentric and seems to hark directly back to Bely’s work on Petersburg a few years earlier. In the passage entitled “Author and Person” Ledianoi writes about the significant inner experience that underlies a novel. It cannot be incorporated into an ordinary plot (siuzhet). The story (fabula) and style usually pare down the foundation of the plot, which is the author’s “sacred spiritual experience.” Even as the novel is transformed into a whole, all that remains is a “stub.” The critic looks for the idea of the novel but does not know how to unearth it from where it lies hidden. Ledianoi reminds the reader that Sophocles’s great dramas arose out of mysteries whose centers were precisely these “events of inner significance.” The history of the theater shows how drama eventually developed into farce, and this also happens on the microlevel when the author’s inner experience is transformed into the plot of a novel. In this way every serious novel becomes a game of cat and mouse with the reader, and its style ultimately tries to deflect the reader’s gaze from the sacred crux, namely the birth of the underlying personal “myth.”2   1 Translated by Charles Rougle.   2 Andrei Belyi, Zapiski chudaka (repr., Lausanne: Éditions l’Age d’Homme, 1973), 1:62–63.

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Now Ledianoi claims that he wants to tear off the veil, speak for himself, tell how he once was shaken for life by an experience that manifested itself as a “terrible volcanic eruption” and turned his entire view of life upside down. It was as if a “bomb” had been dropped within him.3 His nom de plume, now in inverted commas (read “Bely”), had long threatened to take him over and become a shadow—as in Andersen’s story of the double—or even several shadows brutally dominating him. Now, when his own self has been reborn in an “event of inner significance,” he finally has a grasp of this tyrannical writer’s mask. His “I” becomes a Christlike suckling babe in a manger to be “loved” and “tenderly nursed,” for it is extremely vulnerable and exposed to the hard pressure of the “shadows”—the projections he has been living with the whole time.4 Thus, Ledianoi—or rather “Ledianoi”—returns amid the chaos of war and political paranoia to Russia via Norway. A circle has closed. The newborn higher individuality, the frail babe within the writer, had been born three years earlier in the same place, in Christiania and Bergen. But it had been destroyed and perished in Dornach to the sound of exploding mines at the front just a few kilometers away. It was as though the war was his own, as though he himself had caused it through the very act of his birth.5 Now he believes that he is returning to his native land with a “dead three-year-old” in his baggage and with renewed memories of the critical—and novel-generating—mystery of birth he went through here in Norway in 1913.6

II It had begun for Bely with his meeting with Rudolf Steiner in May 1912 in Cologne. Accompanied by Asia Turgeneva, he had left Russia to get some peace and quiet and finish Petersburg, which he expected to have ready by the summer of 1912. In Brussels he worked on chapter 4, in which Nikolai Ableukhov is first forced to admit that he has promised to assassinate his father. There in Cologne Bely attended Rudolf Steiner’s lecture “Christ in the Twentieth Century.” It was a revolutionary experience that convinced him to travel to Munich in July to begin occult training. Remarkably, after the meeting with Steiner—and with his cosmogony, which Bely began studying in detail through his lectures—the novel opened   3 Ibid., 1:64–65.   4 Ibid., 1:76.   5 Andrei Belyi, Nachalo veka: Berlinskaia redaktsiia (1923), ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2014), 800.   6 Belyi, Zapiski chudaka, 2:75.

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out into a new cosmic and satiric dimension, as the characters established contact with their astral origins in visions and dreams. In particular the Oedipal relationship between Nikolai and his father was activated by Bely’s new dependence on Steiner. Chapter 5 was written near Paris in May and June 1912 just before Bely entered the Theosophical Colony. Here father and son finally have a crucial meeting that figures dramatically in Nikolai’s feverish nightmares at the end of the chapter. It is at this point that the novel really acquires its distinctiveness. Realizing this, Bely postponed finishing it and set off instead following Steiner’s lectures around Europe on what he called his “Steineriad,” which for the next year and a half would provide the novel exceptional material. In a remarkable development in chapter 5, Nikolai Ableukhov begins to show interest in the bomb and murder weapon that he had previously shunned. This is logical, for removed from the filthy rag in which it was wrapped, the bomb in the shiny sardine tin represents his own unconscious and the hidden psychic realities that the novel is now confronting with the aid of Steiner’s theosophy. As Nikolai fiddles with the tin, he accidentally activates the ticking timer in the bomb. The bomb in the tin appears to assume a dual character as it begins living its own parallel life within Nikolai. There in his belly it swells and grows and expands catastrophically. It seems even to be transformed into a ­menacing homunculus with a name consisting of plosives: Pepp Peppovich Pepp. Nikolai realizes that this is no ordinary sardine tin but a “sardine-tin of terrible import” (312). This combination of three Russian words—a ­headword with a postposed genitive noun modified by an adjective—is varied at different places in the text of the novel.7 It quite clearly resonates in Leonid Ledianoi’s description of the writer’s personal mystical experience as “events of inner significance” and, now with a preposed genitive, in his characterization of his time in Norway as “days of indescribable significance.”8 This is thus the

  7 Thus the variations “streams of that terrible import” (313), “this little ball of terrible import” (referring to Pepp, 321), “objects of the most terrible import” (325), and “the terrible import of Nikolai Apollonovich’s soul” (321). All are closely connected with the bomb, and all occur in chapter 5, written just after Bely’s meeting with Steiner. Yet another variation, “the note of terrible import” (246), referring to the letter demanding that Nikolai fulfill his promise to murder his father, was probably added to chapter 4 when Bely reworked the earlier parts of the novel in the fall of 1913.   8 Belyi, Zapiski chudaka, 1:59. Cf. the contamination of these two epithets in the description of Senator Ableukhov’s sudden political retreat and dismissal under the terrorist threat as “an event of indescribable significance” (475).

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personal “myth” in Notes of an Eccentric that became the pared-down, cropped, not entirely visible foundation of Petersburg. There is a remarkable parallel relationship here. As the bomb swells, so does the novel, acquiring new and unexpected proportions. An intense ­twenty-four-hour chain of events remains to be depicted in the novel that a short time ago appeared to be approaching its end. Bely was forced to ­realize that Petersburg was not, as he had stated earlier, an obstacle to his occult ­training. On the contrary, theosophy became the basis of the novel’s new ­reality, psychological probing, and extravagant satire. Bely’s peculiar experiences under the pressure of Steiner’s personality now appear to underlie the political and psychological intrigue of Petersburg. Surely influenced by Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra expressly pleads for the importance of “pregnancy,”9 he feels that he has been impregnated by the theosophical leader. Thus, the work of art as such and its central politico-psychological symbol have fused. To his detractors—especially Emilii Medtner, who warned him that occultism would dry up and kill his art—Bely constantly stressed at this time that his relationship with Steiner was deeply personal.10 And indeed it was. Entwined with Steiner’s lecture themes and theosophical activities, a ­psychic drama was being played out between the two men, and Bely, who had strongly and early on identified with Christ, was now “embodying” Steiner’s central Christ theme. In accordance with Vladimir Solovʹev’s prophecies about a coming community of “God-Men” and Steiner’s teaching that the “­ spiritual researcher” is capable of developing the “Christ impulse” within himself through meditation, Bely felt that he had been painfully reborn in the l­ ikeness of Christ. In 1912 this subject was especially important for Steiner, since he was in the process of gradually severing himself from theosophy and its increasingly strong Oriental accentuation and ties to Buddhism. The m ­ ystery of Golgotha, Steiner declared, was the center and goal of history. This is the background against which Bely would stage his father-son syndrome under Steiner. Bely seems to be projecting onto Steiner his own   9 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra in Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe VI:1, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968), 200, 358. It is worth noting that under some influence by Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence wrote in his posthumously published essay on Thomas Hardy in the early fall of 1914 that young men should give life to the woman within and allow themselves to be impregnated by the Word and give birth to the Idea. See his “Study of Thomas Hardy (Le Gai Savaire),” in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 44. 10 See, for example, Bely’s letter of 21–22 March 1913 to Blok, in Andrei Belyi and Aleksandr Blok, Perepiska 1903–1919, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2001), 500.

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fundamental patriarchal authorities: his father and professor of mathematics Nikolai Bugaev; Vladimir Solovʹev; and parallel with Solovʹev, Saint Serafim, the object of Bely’s intense prayers and supplications as a youth. Now he felt as one with Steiner’s emerging doctrine, which toward the end of 1912 would be called anthroposophy—“human wisdom.” He sensed he was being reborn in the likeness of Christ, on the way to realizing his Christ impulse and t­ransformation into a spiritual human being. There is, of course, some ­significance in Steiner’s maintaining that Russia had a special relationship to Christ and that the Second Coming would take place on Russian soil. Bely’s identification with Christ bordered on outright megalomania, c­ olored throughout by his empathy with Nietzsche and the knowledge that the ­philosopher’s mental illness was marked by fantasies of greatness. In July 1912 Bely arrived at what was still the Theosophical Colony in Munich and began meditation exercises according to Steiner’s instructions. In August he attended the congress of the German Theosophical Section in Munich at which Steiner definitively broke with theosophy, which had ­transferred its center to India and proclaimed the young Krishnamurti a new incarnation of Christ in the east. In September Bely listened excitedly to Steiner’s characterization of Christ in a series of lectures in Basel based on the Gospel according to Mark. In early October he withdrew for a time to Vitznau on Lake Lucerne to incorporate Steiner’s cosmology into ­meditations ­morning, noon, and night. At the same time, he worked on chapter 6 of the novel, which is set at night on Petersburg’s islands and is filled with ­hallucinations and visions of horror. There Nikolai Ableukhov awkwardly describes to the island dweller and revolutionary Dudkin his terrifying trances and feverish dreams of the bomb. Dudkin, who is naturally enough the more insightful of the two, interprets them to be resurrected Dionysian rites, in which the god is torn to pieces and reborn, and soon he himself enters into the ­delirious nightmares that will ultimately destroy his reason. Bely wrote an article in parallel with this sixth chapter of the novel e­ ntitled “Circular Movement” that appears to derive directly from his ­meditation ­exercises. There he speaks of the “shining giant” that is the “Self,” that takes shape within the individual who studies the Gospel according to John and Also sprach Zarathustra.11 He seemed to be returning to his feeling that within him was another person, a spiritual being resembling both Christ and Zarathustra. In the early drafts of his memoirs he describes the remarkable and difficult

11 Andrei Belyi, “Krugovoe dvizhenie (Sorok dve arabeski),” Trudy i dni 4–5 (1912): 59.

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experiences—tensions, sensations of stretching, spiritual growth—constantly generated at this time by meditation.12 Christmas 1912 marked the symbolic birth in Berlin of Steiner’s ­“spiritual science”—anthroposophy. On December 26, before a small group of ­followers, Steiner gave a talk on Christ that preceded the founding of the independent Anthroposophical Association the following day in Cologne. In the original version of his memoirs, Bely notes afterwards being “in love with myself: with anthroposophy, our movement”—for they were one. He felt as though a “Christ child had been born deep within” him and Turgeneva.13 In his commentaries in Reminiscences of Steiner, Bely depicted Steiner on the podium, delivering his lecture on Christ in Cologne and resembling Serafim of Sarov, the great Russian saint who meant so much to Bely.14 Serafim was always clad in white, an allusion to the white light of Christ’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. This was closely connected with Bely’s choice of pseudonym: around the turn of the century he had dreamed of “the white child,” the resurrected Christ of Revelation dressed in white, and the figure bore certain features of Zarathustra, who spoke of awakening the child within.15 Reflecting Bely’s own intoxicated experiences in the spring of 1901, the young hero of his first work Second Symphony, Dramatic beholds a Moscow woman, whom he calls “the Fairy-Tale”—“the woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation, she who labored to bring forth the resurrected Christ.16 Significantly, early in the century Bely wrote in anonymous letters to the “Fairy-Tale’s” prototype, Margarita Morozova, that in her presence it seemed—very much in keeping with his hero’s vision—as though he were carrying an infant in his arms who was his reborn self. Here he added in the same words as in the passage from the memoirs cited above: “I invoke myself. 12 Belyi, Nachalo veka, 791–93. 13 Ibid., 664. 14 For a detailed discussion of Bely’s cult of Serafim in the first years of the century, see John Malmstad, “Andrey Belyj and Serafim of Sarov,” Scottish Slavonic Review 14 (1990): 21–59, and 15 (1990): 59–102. 15 Andrei Belyi, Simfoniia (2-ia, dramaticheskaia), in Simfonii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 134. Associating also with Nietzsche’s notion of the future “blond beast,” Bely at this time regarded Nietzsche as a “white child.” “Material k biografii” in Andrei Belyi, avtobiograficeskie svody, ed. A.V. Lavrov and Dzh. Malmstad (Moscow, 2016), 55. 16 Important in this connection is that in conversations with Vladimir Solovʹev, Dostoevsky had interpreted “the woman clothed with the sun”—who gives birth to the child who will rule the world with a rod of iron—as a prophecy about Russia’s messianic mission in the world. Solovʹev, “Tri rechi v pamiatʹ Dostoevskogo,” in Izbrannoe (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1990), 105–6.

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I am in love with myself.”17 It seems that Vladimir Solovʹev had fertilized him then as Steiner did now, generating literary creation and the birth of the debut work that he describes in the memoirs as a “bomb” in the Moscow of his father’s generation.18 On the evening of 26 December 1912, under the direct impression of Steiner’s lecture, Bely wrote a long letter to his adversary Emilii Medtner. His tone was triumphal. He spoke about nervous tension but also about the enormous creative flow he experienced under Steiner’s protection and about his ambitious literary plans—“an enormous thirst for great fundamental works.” In defiance of Medtner’s misgivings, he was inseparable from the new “spiritual science” at this moment. Petersburg, he wrote, was in the process of becoming twice as artistically mature as its predecessor The Silver Dove. It was to be included in his life’s Hauptwerk, the novel trilogy that now “filled his soul.” As soon as Petersburg was finished he would begin working on the ­synthesis part.19 Although they were delayed, his prophecies came true to some extent, for the planned Invisible City became Kotik Letaev, a new, powerful, and c­ andidly autobiographical novel that bore the imprint of anthroposophy. How did Bely refer to his novel at this juncture? There was only one word that could describe what it meant to him, and just to be sure, he i­talicized it in his letter to Medtner: “my child.” Petersburg is Bely’s only work that he openly characterized as his offspring, although later he referred to it more ­metaphorically as a “brainchild.”20 He felt he was pregnant, and his ­pregnancy is catastrophically and satirically reflected in the convulsions the bomb t­ riggers within Nikolai Ableukhov. A little over a month into 1913 at a general meeting that Bely attended in Berlin, Steiner founded the Anthroposophical Society. During the spring Bely returned for a time to the Russian countryside to be able to write in peace and 17 Bely, undated 1901 letter, in “Vash rytsarʹ”: Pisʹma Andreia Belogo k M. K. Morozovoi 1901– 1928, ed. A. V. Lavrov and Dzh. Malmstad (Moscow: Progress-Pleiada, 2006), 42. 18 Andrei Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 348. 19 Bely to Emilii Medtner, 26 December 1912, in Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov et al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 512, 514. 20 On two occasions Bely stressed that it was his own “detishche” and was under no ­circumstances to be taken from him—once in a note from 1921 and in his letter of 27 September 1925 to Ivanov-Razumnik (this time in reference to the stage version of the novel). See “Iz dnevnikovykh zapisei ‘K materialam o Bloke’ (1921),” in Peterburg, 521; and Andrei Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska 1903–1919, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Progress-Pleiada, 1998), 333. It is worth noting that Bely issues an identically worded warning in Zapiski chudaka in reference to his threatened, tenderly cherished spiritual infant (1:76).

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to process his many impressions in the form of the long seventh chapter of the novel. He wrote to Blok that despite the physical distance he could no longer distinguish Steiner from himself, that Steiner had become “the best part of Andrey Bely’s soul.”21 The most important passages of chapter 7 hark back to Bely’s “mystery.” There is a detailed description of Nikolai Ableukhov’s continued sensation that “something” preposterously, infinitely huge is swelling up inside him, accompanied by the satirical explanation that it is due to the flatulence and digestive disorders “from which all the Ableukhovs suffered” (440). At the same time Nikolai experiences his patricide syndrome psychologically, as well. He feels like a “spawn” (otrod ʹe) of his father.22 As is apparent even from the etymology of the Russian word, there is something within him connected with birth and with shame and misfortune—an original sin complex out of which his patricidal impulse develops. In the summer of 1913 Bely (and Turgeneva) returned to the Anthroposophical Colony in Munich. Bely was in a state of high tension. The question now confronting him was whether he should dedicate his life to anthroposophy. On September 20, the cornerstone of a “spiritual science” center was laid in Dornach, and an anthroposophy section was founded the same day in Moscow. In October Bely attended Steiner’s lecture in Christiania on the “fifth gospel,” which promised new research findings on the mystery of Golgotha, and followed him to Bergen to listen to “Life Between Death and New Birth,” which was delivered to a relatively limited audience. It was as though he had put off finishing the novel in anticipation of this crucial moment.

III In Norway Boris Bugaev / Andrey Bely did in fact experience the culmination of his mystery of birth. He emphasizes in his memoirs that this was and remained the most important event of his life.23 As expected, it also provided vivid material for the conclusion of the novel and the bomb that explodes in the Ableukhov family’s “yellow house” on the embankment of the Neva. The experience was a turning point in Bely’s life and works and proved extremely beneficial artistically, resonating via Petersburg in everything he subsequently 21 Bely to Blok, 3 March 1913, in Belyi and Blok, Perepiska, 414. 22 Belyi and Blok, Perepiska, 332. 23 Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 181.

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wrote in various genres. It is no coincidence that his mid-1920s bipartite novel Moscow, which again describes a city that is at the same time a split personality, is set in the fall of 1913. In the 1927 letter to Ivanov-Razumnik in which he extensively comments and attempts to summarize metaphorically his artistic evolution, he speaks of the “peculiar” four-year period between the beginning of his “Steineriad” in 1912 and his journey home from Dornach in 1916, referring to the crucial moment of initiation as “a boundary with an initiatory bundle” (rubezh s posviatitel ʹnym uzelkom). It is of course the bundle containing the bomb in Petersburg that has determined his choice of imagery here. He acknowledges that this initiation culminating in Christiania and Bergen provided his art with “inexhaustible” material.24 Without ever quite unveiling it, Bely’s later works revolve in various ways around the mystery in Norway. He himself finds it ambiguous and difficult to grasp. His most detailed description is in the final chapter of Reminiscences of Steiner, entitled “Steiner in the Theme of Christ,” in which he writes that in Christiania Steiner gave a “spiritual-scientific” explanation of Jesus’s c­ rucifixion and resurrection as Christ. The “Master,” as he called Steiner, appeared holy, with a halo around his head. At the same time, he seemed unsure of himself and began stuttering, transformed into the defenseless infant in the manger. Paraphrasing Paul’s letter to the Galatians 2:20 (“I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”), Bely describes Steiner’s message thus: “Henceforth it is not I who is the Master, but he!”25 In the dynamic—and narcissistic—interplay between lecturer and listener, the two seem suddenly to change sides, and Bely acquires features of Steiner’s Christ. The past, he writes, became a corridor in which two “messengers” from the past and the future met, and in their ­mystical fusion was born the suckling infant, his own higher self,26 ­simultaneously ­mirroring himself, reborn in Steiner, as the defenseless Christ child. At the same time, of course, this was a purely Oedipal situation in which the son basically took the place of the father—the exalted ideal self.27 Obviously identifying with Ibsen’s upwardly striving heroes Brand, Solness, and Rubeck, and in connection with the high point of his trip, 24 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, 1 March 1927, in Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska, 501. 25 Andrei Belyi, Vospominaniia o Shteinere, in Bely, Rudol ʹf Shteiner i Gete v mirovozzrenii sovremennosti. Vospominaniia o Shteinere (Moscow: Respublika, 2000), 515. 26 Ibid., 519. 27 Bely had in fact anticipated this experience in his 1907 article “Fridrikh Nitsshe,” in which he referred to Nietzsche as God’s murderer. He says that the old God was transformed into the child that Nietzsche’s “soul” wanted to “give birth to.” In the same way, Christ seemed to transform the Father into “his child.” See his “Fridrikh Nitsshe,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, ed. L. A. Sugai (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 184.

The Bomb, the Baby, the Book

Bely felt the urge to communicate to Steiner what he had experienced and to c­ onfirm that he had decided once and for all to dedicate his life to ­anthroposophy.28 This he did on the train between Christiania and Bergen as it moved through the Norwegian mountains on a bright, sunny day. Symbolically separated from Steiner by the door of the train car, he failed to make contact, ­however, and on the return trip to Germany via lectures in Copenhagen he was p ­ aralyzed by confused, guilty feelings. In Berlin he finished the novel in some six weeks. In early 1914 Bely fell to his knees in apocalyptic-mystical exaltation on Nietzsche’s grave near Leipzig.29 It was as though Judgment Day were at hand. The “day of the bomb” in the novel was at an end, and with it Bely’s “Steineriad.” In February 1914 he moved in at Dornach, but he never was able to cope with its stationary existence. Only when he managed to break free in 1915–16 did he find any peace in which to write. By then the material for what would become Kotik Letaev lay ready within him. With his birth through Steiner and the tenets of anthroposophy as the overarching point of reference throughout, he attempted to portray in that candidly autobiographical work his actual birth in Moscow in 1880 and the two crucial years between the ages of three and five,30 relating how his consciousness had once taken shape in fever and a state of trance. In a personal note probably written in 1921–22 about the mysterious birth of his “spiritual self ” in Norway, Bely acknowledges the curious fact that the experience “belied my sex.” He felt himself a Mother of God giving birth.31 In his little publication Revolution and Culture, which interprets the 1917 February Revolution as an “act of birth” and of course makes liberal use of bomb symbolism, he notes, “In the prerevolutionary period the soul of sophisticated artists opens up femininely to the inner impulses of the spirit; it is in the soul that the act of conception by the spirit takes place.”32 Preceding this passage, he alludes to the babe leaping in the womb of John the Baptist’s 28 In “Material k biografii,” Bely writes that he sometimes now felt he was Steiner’s “beloved son” (159), but this was obviously not the whole truth. 29 See Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, 1 March 1927, 501, and Belyi, Zapiski chudaka, 1:61. 30 It should be noted that the birth convulsions in both Petersburg and Kotik Letaev are ­associated with the hero’s early fever cramps—the “birth” of his consciousness in dizziness and heat. 31 Andrei Belyi, untitled memoir fragment, in A. V. Lavrov, “Rukopisnyi arkhiv Andreia Belogo v Pushkinskom Dome,” in Ezhegodnik Rukopisnogo Otdela Pushkinskogo Doma na 1978 god (Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie, 1980), 59. 32 Andrei Belyi, Revoliutsiia i kul ʹtura (repr., Letchworth, UK: Prideaux Press, 1971), 15. As late as 1921 Bely sometimes referred to himself in his artistic role as a pregnant woman with a “fetus” in her belly that risked being born a “monster.” “Dnevnik pisatelia,” Zapiski mechtatelei 2–3 (1921): 116.

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mother Elizabeth when she meets Mary (Luke 1:41). This was what he himself experienced on the eve of the Revolution: “The babe leapt in the womb.”33 The drama in Norway is reflected satirically in the final chapter of Petersburg. Nikolai Ableukhov has admitted his patricidal impulse and says that he hopes the evil contraption (which his father absentmindedly removed from his room while he was out) will no longer wreak havoc. His mother is back from an amorous adventure in western Europe, and the family has been reunited. Now Nikolai acquires features of a “holy” icon, and he is described in terms that stress his blondness, his whiteness, and the childlike innocence of his appearance. His stomach, however, continues secretly to stretch and swell, and he resembles both a fat-bellied spider and a brooding hen.34 And suddenly Pepp is there again; he is expanding, and the ticking has returned. Squatting half asleep in the corridor of the house early in the morning, he hears the deafening roar of the exploding bomb. His father is unharmed but psychically broken. Nikolai rushes toward him “as a nurse might rush into the middle of the roadway to grasp a three-year-old mite who had fallen down there” (559).35 They have now exchanged roles. Dressed only in his nightshirt, Nikolai’s terrified little father takes shelter in the water closet. Nikolai tries to reach him, but the door is locked.36 In the epilogue, after a bout of nervous illness Nikolai is torn away from the spectral city and the Russian nation. His father lapses into senile second childhood—a process that began with the relentless ticking of the bomb— and is already dead when Nikolai, increasingly Christlike with his long beard, returns to the Russian countryside from a long trip to foreign continents. The year, significantly, is 1913. Nikolai is reborn.

33 Belyi, Revoliutsiia i kul ʹtura, 14. 34 In the early “Berlin version” of his memoirs, Bely does in fact compare himself as he was working on Peterburg to a hen laying eggs. Nachalo veka, 729. 35 It should be noted that in connection with the explicit maternal symbolism centering on Nikolai, the servants in the Ableukhov household have earlier been heard to refer to the approaching church holiday of the Nativity of the Mother of God (535). 36 Bely’s satirical method is to take his most pivotal mystical experiences and bring them down to the lowest possible level. As the bomb ticks away and Nikolai is about to attain his inherent likeness to Christ, the entire process is, as we have seen, accompanied by allusions to a “pregnancy” obviously arising from stomach gas and cramps. In such a context, perhaps the plot of the novel cannot help but climax outside “the place comparable to no other”—the toilet—with father and son on opposite sides of the door. The blast that rocks Russia in “a kind of roar comparable to no other” seems to have taken place in Nikolai’s bloated belly as well. In such a manner Bely ultimately profanes his most “sacred” experience in Christiania and Bergen as an intestinal explosion.

The Bomb, the Baby, the Book

Thus, it seems there is not enough room in the same place for both “father” and “son.” In his memoirs, Bely notes a “peculiar connection” between himself and his father that echoes throughout his works.37 In the novel father and son are said to coalesce, for we are told that Nikolai cannot distinguish any clear psychic boundary between the two. Allowing himself to be reborn— and recreating himself in his father’s ideal image—also means finally driving out his paternal authority.

IV We have seen how Bely’s distinctive religio-occult psychophysical experiences in the proximity of his “Master” contributed to a unique and aesthetically powerful portrayal of Russia’s 1905 political conflict, laying the vivid if not immediately apparent foundation of one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century. In such a reading, Petersburg is a metanovel in which the bomb motif mirrors its own genesis. On different levels, for Bely, the bomb, the baby, and the book are essentially one and the same thing. Bely wrote with a certain degree of self-insight some fifteen years later in Reminiscences of Steiner that perhaps his “myth” and “mystery” could be ­interpreted as something that befell a “Narcissus”—that is, what Freud calls a narcissist.38 Bely emphasizes that such experiences risk aggravating the ­condition of “unhappy, sexually unhealthy individuals.”39 This may be a kind of distancing insight that together with aesthetic stimulation evidently enabled him, ultimately, to avoid the fate of the mentally ill Nietzsche, who had declared himself to be a crucified Dionysus.40 The concluding explosion of the bomb in Petersburg has its natural sequel in the opening depiction of “Kotik’s” convulsive birth in Kotik Letaev. The imagery of the earlier work similarly set its mark on Bely’s novels, 37 Belyi, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, 51. See also my Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Peterburg” (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 1982); “The Son’s ­Liberation from the Father: On the Epilogue to Peterburg,” in Paraboly: Studies in Russian Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. N. Bogomolov et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2011), 153–62; and “The Father-Son Drama: Peterburg as the Key to the Works of Andrej Belyj,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 48 (2014): 55–68. 38 Freud launched the notion of “narcism,” as he called it, in an article entitled “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus,” written in fact in 1913 and published in Jahrbuch für ­psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 6 (Leipzig: Franz Deuticke Verlag, 1914). 39 Belyi, Vospominaniia o Shteinere, 518. 40 See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, section 6, vol. 3, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), 605.

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­ emoirs, philosophical essays, literary studies, and works in various genres. m The ­exploding bomb is a recurrent symbol in all contexts. The fundamental ­generational conflict between the positivist fathers and symbolist sons is portrayed throughout in the light of the politico-psychological drama in the novel. Like Senator Ableukhov, the older generation in the memoirs largely lapses into childhood and dies off around 1905 as the sons carry out their explosive attacks and rebellions on various levels. The uncanny thing is that the mystery of birth in Norway reflected in the novel seems so calculated and studied. With roots in Revelation and Zarathustra and staged precisely nine months after the birth of anthroposophy in late December 1912 and Bely’s first distinct sensation of conception and pregnancy, at the very moment he reached Christ’s same age of thirty-three (26 October 1913), it had a radical and revolutionary impact on his art by way of Petersburg. Seldom has a single work so thoroughly colored an entire oeuvre.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg ANNA PONOMAREVA

Bely’s contemporary Fedor Stepun highly valued Bely’s theoretical w ­ riting, in particular “The Emblematics of Meaning.” He pointed to the ­following ­characteristics of his work: “Bely’s thinking is an exercise on aerial bars, [concealed] under the dome of his lonely self. The acrobatics (see The ­ Emblematics of Meaning), however, is not an empty cerebral game. As in all acrobatics, a lot of hard work and mastery went into it.”1 It is clear from the quotation that it is not easy to describe Bely’s ­thinking. It is too peculiar. Stepun suggests two interpretations. One is ­metaphorical: it compares Bely’s thinking to acrobatics. The other is slightly more specific, “not an empty cerebral game.” The principle of analogy is used in the first ­definition. The second definition will be expanded and clarified below; it is based on d ­ iscussing what Bely’s thinking is not. It is a so-called negative definition. Bely’s novel Petersburg is chosen as a source of information in which f­ urther elements of his thinking are traced. Ideologically, the novel pays ­tribute to Bely’s writings on the theory of symbolism, in particular to the ­contemporary theory of knowledge, but it also points to new developments in his views. Looking at Petersburg as a smooth, rather than abrupt, ­expansion of Bely’s previous thinking provides both challenges and advantages. Moreover, it gives an opportunity to portray Bely as an all-around thinker who is not hostile to or ignorant of a number of Oriental, predominantly Indian, ­philosophical and religious ideas. Instead, he seems content to use them creatively in his literary practice.2   1 See Fedor Stepun, “Pamiati Andreia Belogo,” in Vospominaniia ob Andree Belom (Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Respublika, 1995), 169. Henceforth, all translations, with the exception of John Elsworth’s Petersburg, are mine.   2 Maria Carlson’s article on theosophy in Petersburg gives much-needed support in pursuing this vision of Bely. See Carlson’s article “Theosophy and History in Andrey Bely’s P ­ etersburg:

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The purpose of this article is twofold: to explain why and to show how the aphorism Know thyself penetrates the foundation of Petersburg. First, the ­principle will be briefly explained. Second, information on Bely’s life and i­nterests at the time of writing the novel will be provided. This will be ­followed by looking at his reading list of that period to identify what ­published ­materials contributed to Bely’s perception of Know thyself. Later, conceptual parallels will be drawn between his reading and writing. And finally, textual evidence will be given to exemplify the transition of contemporary religious and philosophical ideas from special literature to Bely’s Petersburg.

Know Thyself Socrates’s statement from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, written around 370 BCE, leaves no doubt as to how to live one’s life wisely. Socrates refused to spend his time on frivolous enjoyment: “But I have no leisure for them [the things of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures] at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous . . .”3 Half a millennium later, in the second c­ entury CE, Pausanias, a Greek geographer, traveler, and writer, saw the inscription in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. One can visualize Socrates’s words and ­imagine the house of the many-talented Greek god of prophecy, music, ­intellectual pursuits, healing, plague, and the sun. Thus, Pausanias’s discovery points to the divine origin of the motto. Encouraged by Apollo, many humans have tried to implement his ­principle in their lives. While some did not succeed, nevertheless, they kept trying throughout the centuries. Even more astonishing is that after Plato’s Socrates, there was an effort to discuss the importance of the maxim Know thyself in philosophy and literature. Thus, whether in life or art, the maxim is still impressive. Bely’s work, in particular, provides evidence for his ­permanent search for identity and knowledge of himself. A quick glance at his memoirs, personal diaries, and biographical novels signals that knowing himself constituted Bely’s passion. Life in the Astral City” in this volume. Bely’s epistemological interests are discussed in my previous research. See Anna Ponomareva, “Andrei Bely and Indian Culture: A Study of the Role of Indian Ideas in the Work of Andrei Bely” (unpublished thesis, University of Manchester, 2001). Petersburg, however, has not been considered there.   3 Plato in Twelve Volumes, trans. Harold N. Fowler, vol. 9 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 229e, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus: text:1999.01.0174:text%3DPhaedrus:section%3D229e.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

Knowing His Life and Work: Bely on the Keyboard Structure of His Existence and Literature Bely’s letter of March 1–3, 1927, to Ivanov-Razumnik is both ­enormous in length and odd in content. Nevertheless, it represents a thorough s­ elf-­evaluation of Bely’s work.4 It is impossible to find a more precise ­description of Bely’s legacy in terms of his personal development and work. Bely divides his life into seven-year periods. This helps him to show clearly that there are similar ­developments in different periods and to justify twists in his existence. The fifth section of his “keyboard” life, encompassing the years 1909–15, is very revealing.5 According to Bely, “the novel had already been thought through in 1912.”6 He also adds some peculiarities to this description by pointing to 1911 and 1912 as years associated with the writing of Petersburg and to the fact that by 1913 it had a “tail end.” Bely also records his ideological shifts there. They are phrased differently: from the paradigm of theory of knowledge to the philosophy of language and from his preoccupation with logic to a deep interest in occultism. Bely also applies special tags to name his various time periods: “Symbolism and Criticism” is attached to the period from 1900/1901 to 1908/1909. “The Epoch of Novels” is associated with 1908/1909–12. It is followed by “An Intermediate Period” of three years, up to 1915/1916, to which Kotik Letaev and Bely’s novel Epopee—My Life belongs.7 His other interpretations, taking two seven-year periods, 1901–8 and 1909–16, and producing their combined diagrams, argue the existence of one syncopal note, a transitional point, in the chosen period. The note is ­associated with 1908–9. This is exactly the interval in which radical changes in ­direction take place.8 Such details in Bely’s arguments illustrate that his previous ­interests in the period of 1901–8 were constantly shaping the ­preoccupations of another year period, 1909–16, to pursue and exploit other ideas. His earlier interests were still there, but in a new form and in another direction.   4 It has been available to researchers since 1974. However, a more accurate copy was only published in 1998. See Andrei Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska, ed. A. V. Lavrov and John Malmstad (St. Petersburg: Atheneum, Feniks, 1998), 481–514.   5 Since Bely himself was a talented pianist, perhaps he chose the number seven in musical terms of keys and notes. The interval of seven stands for the seven white keys or white notes of keyboard instruments: C, D, E, F, G, A, B. Bely’s diagrams also contain black keys or black notes, as occasionally he noted events that occurred between two years, or two white keys.   6 Belyi and Ivanov-Razumnik, Perepiska, 495.   7 Ibid., 485.   8 Ibid., 497.

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Knowing Sources: Bely’s Reading List Various bibliographies and diaries are part of Bely’s legacy. By tracing his ample documentary, one can establish what Bely actually read in a particular period of time. For example, Bely’s unpublished manuscript “Material k biografii (sostavlen dlia lichnogo polʹzovaniia)” lists the following books: 1904 (December, Moscow)—[. . .] I am reading Shcherbatskii . . . 1909 (May, Moscow)—[. . .] I am rereading the whole “Teosofskii vestnik”; the entire time I am studying The Secret Doctrine in detail . . .9

Fedor Shcherbatskii’s work Teoriia poznaniia i logika po ucheniiu pozdneishikh buddistov (Theory of knowledge and logic according to later Buddhists) was published in Russian in two volumes from 1903 to 1909. This book is mentioned again in Bely’s memoirs Nachalo veka (The beginning of a century).10 The Secret Doctrine is another item in the list. Even though Madame Blavatsky’s work had not been translated in his lifetime, Bely frequented K. P. Khristoforova’s theosophical circle, where he became acquainted with this book, as early as 1908.11 The Theosophical Bulletin (actually called Vestnik teosofii), begun on January 7, 1908, was a religious and philosophical journal published in Saint Petersburg. Two important works by Annie Besant and Rudolf Steiner were published there in installments: Besant’s The Ancient Wisdom, translated by Pisareva, and Steiner’s How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation in Laletiv’s translation.12 Insofar as twenty issues had been published by the end of 1909, Bely was exposed to an enormous amount of material on the subject. Two popular texts by Besant and Leadbeater were the sources of Bely’s understanding of thought-forms.13 Interestingly enough, another source of   9 Andrei Belyi, “Material k biografii (sostavlen dlia lichnogo polʹzovaniia),” RGALI ­(Rossiiskii arkhiv literatury i iskusstva), f. 53, op. 1, n. 100, list 48. 10 See Andrei Belyi, Nachalo veka (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 69. That Bely possessed this book is also confirmed by Lavrov in “Perepiska s Andreem Belym 1902– 1912,” ed. S. S. Grechishkin and A. V. Lavrov, in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 85, Valerii Briusov (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 374, http://www.imli.ru/structure/litnasled/soder85.php. 11 Malmstad’s publication on Bely’s interests in theosophy argues that in the autumn of 1908, when Bely began to attend the theosophical circle, K. P. Khristoforova, his teacher and head of the circle, presented him with a copy of the book. Andrey Bely, “Kasaniia k teosofii,” ed. John Malmstad, in Minuvshee, no. 9 (1990): 462. 12 Annie Besant, The Ancient Wisdom (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1897). Rudolf Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten? (Berlin: C. A. Schwetsche und Sohn, 1904–5). 13 According to Carlson, they are Thought-Forms (1901) by Besant and Leadbeater and Man Visible and Invisible (1902) by Leadbeater. She also claims that Bely was familiar with these

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

Bely’s knowledge of the concept is found in the chapter “Thought-Forms and the Human Aura,” which is an extract from Steiner’s book Theosophy, an Introduction to Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man.14 The article is called “O chelovecheskoi aure” (On the human aura).15 Steiner points to Leadbeater’s book Man Visible and Invisible in his c­ hapter and advises his readers to compare his interpretations with Leadbeater’s ­statements.16 Thus, Pisareva’s translation of Steiner’s chapter is the most likely source of Bely’s information on “thought-forms,” in particular the specific language of colors.

New Knowledge Gained As mentioned before, Bely claimed that the foundation for his 1909–15 ideas went back to 1901–8. When one glances at this earlier period, one cannot help but note that Bely’s ideas were largely associated with his contributions to the development of the theory of symbolism. Most of these ideas were contained in three collections, Symbolism (Simvolizm), The Green Meadow (Lug zelenyi), and Arabesques (Arabeski). This body of critical and theoretical material exceeds the limit of a single and unified approach. The essays in Symbolism focus more on philosophy than on literature. In “The Emblematics of Meaning,” for example, Bely tried to establish the concept of a symbol by inquiring about the origin of knowledge. Challenging science first, he soon realized that its parameters are too narrow and do not cover the variety and complexity of knowledge. Bely then moved on to religious and ­philosophical ideas. Inspired by his reading of Blavatsky and the Upanishads, extracts of which had been partly published in Johnston’s translation in 1896,17 he ­translated the Vedantic principle of tat tvam asi (I am thou) into ­symbolist language. The Indian formula that embodies the unity of divinity and ­ humanity became the triad of his symbolism, symbol—Symbol—Symbol

14 15 16 17

books. See Carlson in this volume. In her note 9, Carlson, however, mentions Pisareva’s publications Sila mysli i mysle-obrazy and Chelovek i ego vidimyi i nevidimyi sostav as possible sources of Bely’s familiarity with the concept. However, these pamphlets were printed only in 1912 in Kaluga; it was too late for Bely to use any information from Pisareva’s books. It was published in German as Theosophie: Einführung in übersinnliche Welterkenntnis und Menschenbestimmung in 1904 and appeared in three consecutive issues of Vestnik teosofii in 1911, nos. 10–12. It is again in Pisareva’s translation, but this time it is from German. “O chelovecheskoi aure d-ra Shteinera,” trans. E. P. [Pisareva], Vestnik teosofii (1911), 10:15– 22; 11:8–13; 12:19–22. Ibid., 10:22. “Otryvki iz Upanishad,” trans. V. V. Johnston, Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 31, no. 1 (1896): 1–35.

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Embodied.18 In this context, knowledge becomes universal, and the starting point of cognition is knowing thyself, understood as identifying, preserving, and growing the seeds of divinity in one’s human existence. When it came to Buddhism, Bely used Shcherbatskii’s work on the theory of knowledge in later Buddhism as the source of further information and examples of true reasoning. First of all, Buddhism praises perception. Moreover, later Buddhism does not separate real, nonillusory, perceptions from cognition. Instead, they are interchangeable concepts. Shcherbatskii argues that perception has four types in the Buddhist view. The first three ­varieties can be better classified as stages of perception: (1) external, (2) ­internal, and (3) self-awareness, which records the connection between stages one and two, as well as their realization of one’s self. The fourth type is the perception of practitioners of yoga.19 The second volume of Shcherbatskii’s work represents his systematic overview of the Buddhist theory of knowledge. Insofar as he made several valuable comments about perception, Bely likely found Shcherbatskii’s ideas attractive and used them in Petersburg. He could also directly borrow from Shcherbatskii the following: “Besides that, Dharmottara mentions one ­function of perception many times (vyāpāra, NBT.3 13–14; 6. 21–22; 11. 12), the one that makes an object to look real (sākşātkāri). In other words, it produces visual images or, it is better to say, gives to the subject of perception knowledge related to the existence of the object in front of him or her in ­reality, in the area of his or her feelings” (italics in original).20 “Feelings” is a key concept here; a possible connection between f­eelings and images is proposed. So, when objects are made to be real, they are ­transformed into images and identified by feelings, not perceptions. It looks as though Dharmottara is too specific in his characteristics of images; he points to visual images only, leaving aside other types. Bely, however, twists and expands the concept by adding verbal elements to it. In this way, Bely foresees the next possible development of his work, the direction of creating verbal images of one’s feelings. Shcherbatskii’s work confirmed Bely’s accurate understanding of Dharmottara. In his introduction to the translation of Dharmakirti’s work, Shcherbatskii points to a strong link between reasoning and verbalization. 18 Ponomareva, “Andrei Bely and Indian Culture,” 69–96. 19 For more information, see Fedor Shcherbatskii, Teoriia poznaniia i logika po ucheniiu pozdneishikh buddistov, pt. 1, “Uchebnik logiki” Dkharmakirty s tolkovaniem Dkharmottary (1903; repr., St. Petersburg: Asta-Press, 1995), 101–10. 20 Ibid., 121.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

In his view, later Buddhists are responsible for changing their perception of cognition, from cognition itself to its representation in words.21 The following textual evidence from Dharmottara’s commentary supports Shcherbatskii’s introductory remark: “We think that cognition (precisely, the ability to think) is an aptitude to considering (those) images that can make strong connections with words.”22 Not only did reading Shcherbatskii shape Bely’s thinking; it also directed his attention to psychology. He began to see and depict reality through visual and verbal channels. He also deepened his view of the world by including several nonscientific ideas. Bely’s preoccupation with philosophy at that time of his career is known.23 Moreover, the concept of perception was at the center of discussions among the representatives of different philosophical schools at the beginning of the twentieth century. Bely looked critically at a number of interpretations of the concept and chose mysticism. The following confession from 1907 ­illustrates his development of mysticism through philosophy: “1907: I am reading Deussen’s Philosophy of the Upanishads (a big book) with great interest. I am debating over philosophy with Balʹmont. I see my turn to mysticism via philosophy and consider the concept of Symbolism.”24 The importance of mysticism for Bely came first through theosophy, and subsequently through anthroposophy. In addition to addressing his needs, these two alternative worldviews helped Bely in furthering his chosen path of knowing himself. “Theosophy is not neo-Buddhism”—this aphorism belongs to Kamenskaia, the editor and publisher of the Theosophical Bulletin in 1908– 13.25 She presented a paper entitled “Theosophy and God-Building” at the meeting of the Religious-Philosophical Society on November 24, 1909, in Saint Petersburg.26 The paper was published a few months later in her ­journal in February 1910.27 Kamenskaia, however, argued about the ­ differences between theosophy and Buddhism, more on the basis of definitions than 21 Ibid., 49. 22 Ibid., 91. 23 For example, see Belyi, Nachalo veka, 543. 24 Belyi, “Kasaniia k teosofii,” 450. 25 Anna Kamenskaia, “Teosofiia i bogostroitelʹstvo,” in Religiozno-filosofskoe obshchestvo v Sankt-Peterburge (Petrograde): Istoriia v materialakh i dokumentakh, vol. 2, 1909–1914 (Moscow: Russkii putʹ, 2009), 19. The whole section in Kamenskaia’s presentation is ­dedicated to explaining her point on the differences between theosophy and Buddhism. 26 Bely was a full member of the society. For more information, see Religiozno-filosofskoe obshchestvo v Sankt-Peterburge (Petrograde): Istoriia v materialakh i dokumentakh, vol. 3, 1914–1917 (Moscow: Russkii putʹ, 2009), 519. 27 Anna Kamenskaia, “Teosofiia i bogostroitelʹstvo,” Vestnik teosofii, no. 2 (1910): 62–78.

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c­onceptually. In the spirit of her time, Kamenskaia addressed the issue of ­cognition too, stating, “God-Searching and God-Building uncontrollably merge in the soul of that person who has already found God in his or her own soul, who has managed to find secret threads that link our undisclosed God with the Universal God. As God-searching and God-Building are united in God-Knowing, a human being should know oneself before God-knowing.”28 Kamenskaia’s belief in self-knowledge as a starting point of one’s belief in God matches the expectations of people who are seeking new ideas related to cognition. The failure of science, and to some extent of philosophy, to explain its omnipotent power over knowledge invites others to contribute to the ­discourse. This, in particular, explains the rapidly growing popularity of theosophy in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to being viewed as a new universal science and a new wisdom, theosophy also played a role in contemporary discussions of perception by offering a new, advanced version, the perception of a practitioner of yoga. Theosophy establishes its own terminology. It also stages the process of cognition. Without going into detail about the theosophical view on eternal knowledge and cognition, let us concentrate on its peculiar understanding of perception. It should be visual. Two possible explanations come to mind to justify the theosophical choice. First of all, in comparison with philosophy, theosophy sees itself as a practical knowledge, not an abstract one. So, any experience, large or small, should have a visual form to help describe and ­communicate one’s experience. The requirement of having a visual form may also have roots in the theosophical concept of light, a spiritual substance. According to theosophy, human beings should be able to see the eternal light of universal wisdom. Meditation, too, plays its essential part there: it has been underlined earlier in Shcherbatskii’s classification of the later Buddhist ­perceptions, in which the fourth type of perception, a yogic perception, is mentioned. According to Besant and Leadbeater, human beings perceive everything in thought-forms, consisting of three groups: (1) objects, (2) feelings, and (3) thoughts. For both thinkers, the most challenging is an accurate reproduction of the third group, or thoughts. It is the most interesting too: “Thought-forms of this third class almost invariably manifest themselves upon the astral plane, as the vast majority of them are expressions of feeling as well as of thought. Those of which we here give specimens are almost wholly of that class, except that we take a few examples of the beautiful thought-forms created in definite 28 See Kamenskaia, Religiozno-filosofskoe obshchestvo, 2:32.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

meditation by those who, through long practice, have learnt how to think.”29 The very last phrase, “have learnt how to think,” is crucial here, as it u ­ nderlines a connection between the “thought-forms” of concept and cognition. Without any doubt Bely was very attracted to theosophical ­thought-forms, particularly as they were interpreted in colors. The tradition of ­interpreting various colors has deep roots in history. For example, Goethe’s work, ­especially his focus on colors, has been the subject of studies by many generations of researchers. Leadbeater presented his own version in which colors are codes standing for human emotion.30 According to Leadbeater, people have their own auras, their psychological images, and they may be perceived by an experienced person who is trained to see and interpret thought-forms using existing color codes. For example, to Leadbeater, the color red possesses the following meanings: Red.—Deep-red flashes, usually on a black ground, show anger; and this will be more or less tinged with brown as there is more or less of direct ­selfishness in the type of anger. What is sometimes called “noble indignation” on behalf of someone oppressed or injured may express itself in flashes of brilliant scarlet on the ordinary background of the aura. Lurid, sanguinary red—a colour which is quite unmistakable, though not easy to describe—indicates sensuality.31

This passage clearly depicts the passionate associations of the color red, ­ranging between anger and love. We see Bely’s use of the color red in Petersburg, ­especially in his depiction of the red domino, somewhat differently.

Petersburg Is Meditation It has been mentioned above that Bely’s novels, as well as many of his other works, are largely autobiographical. Petersburg is not an exception. The novel was written when Asia Turgeneva became his partner and his affair with Liubovʹ Blok had already ended. In practice, it is likely that Blok’s image was 29 Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1901), http://www.gutenberg.org./files/16269/16269-h/16269-h.htm. 30 His book was published under the general title Man Visible and Invisible (1902), which is how it is cited by Steiner in his Theosophy (1904). Leadbeater’s general title, however, receives further clarification on the front page; it appears as Examples of Different Types of Man as Seen by Means of Trained Clairvoyance. Chapter 13 of Leadbeater’s book provides information on interpreting colors. 31 Charles W. Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible (New York: John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1903), 81.

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still in Bely’s mind.32 According to Dolgopolov, “So, Bely is spending his time in the circle of two women, one is in his thoughts, another is in his life.”33 On several occasions in his memoirs, Bely confessed the autobiographical sources of Petersburg, highlighting his psychological crisis of 1906: “The theme of the red domino in Petersburg stretched out over the years from these days, where I hid behind a mask.”34 Later, in Between Two Revolutions, Bely repeated this detail again, emphasizing the domino’s bodily dysfunctions in autumn 1906.35 His pain is portrayed on the pages of Petersburg too. In the novel, Bely describes his feelings via the description of Nikolai Ableukhov’s sufferings: “There were some flaccid appendages floundering senselessly in a puddle; he tried in vain to gain control of those appendages: the flaccid appendages would not obey him; to look at they had all the outward appearance of legs, but he could not feel his legs (he had no legs)” (243). Bely’s letter of 1906 from Paris to Emilii Medtner states the d ­ ifferences in his perception of Liubovʹ Blok’s image: “[She] became bigger than the world, bigger than the sun, and blacker than the night.”36 The text of Petersburg also provides evidence that her image had moved to another level in Bely’s mind; it came to exist above perception and matter. Just as she became a thought-form, so he (who had been previously attached to her) became a thought-form. Insofar as both thought-forms needed space to live, Petersburg ­accommodated them. In the novel, the city itself is also turned into a ­thought-form. Perceptions associated with the “Petersburg drama” of Liubovʹ and Bely have been ­transformed into visual images. Together with the main characters, other participants in the period of their liaison are also driven to another plane, to fiction. All of them manifest their own bodies and minds and live as verbal images in Petersburg. In the process of writing his novel, Bely meditated on his past and imagined himself as a yoga ­practitioner, using the terminology of later Buddhists, but not theosophists. In other words, he inserted his ­recollections of the affair on the astral plane, to know himself better. 32 The prototypes for the Likhutins might be the Bloks themselves, Liubovʹ as Sof ʹia and Aleksandr as Sergei. 33 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 542. 34 Andrei Belyi, “Vospominaniia o Bloke,” in Epopeia: Literaturnyi ezhemesiachnik pod redaktsiei Andreia Belogo, vol. 1 (Moscow: Gelikon, 1921), 187–88. 35 Andrei Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 91, 97–98. 36 Bely to Emilii Medtner, 1906, Archive of the State Library of Russia, f. 167, n. 1, op. 51, cited in Leonid Dolgopolov, Andrei Belyi i ego roman “Peterburg” (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1988), 135.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

Let us consider some examples from the novel that exemplify the ideas mentioned earlier. In the portrait of Sof ʹia Petrovna Likhutina, we have, to a large extent, a portrait of Liubovʹ Blok on the astral level. Moreover, it is Bely’s meditation on her image, not Liubovʹ herself, as she is not in front of him but exists only in his feelings. Bely uses the language of colors borrowed from theosophical literature available at the time. As the accurate use of colors is paramount in interpreting the image, the original quotation will be provided with its two translations. After the original passage, the first translation is by Maguire and Malmstad; the second one is by Elsworth. Sof ʹia Petrovna Likhutina is introduced for the first time in the novel in the following way: Софья Петровна Лихутина отличалась, пожалуй, чрезмерной растительностью: и она была как-то необычайно гибка: если Софья Лихутина распустила-б черные свои волосы, эти черные волосы, покрывая весь стан, упадали-б до икр; и Софья Петровна Лихутина, говоря откровенно, просто не знала что делать ей с этими волосами своими, столь черными, что, пожалуй, черней не было и предмета; от чрезмерности ли волос, или их черноты — только, только: над губками Софьи Петровны обозначался пушок, угрожавший ей к старости настоящими усиками. Софья Петровна Лихутина обладала необычайным цветом лица; цвет этот был — просто жемчужный цвет, отличавшийся белизной яблочных лепестков, а то — нежною розоватостью; если же что-либо неожиданно волновало Софью Петровну, вдруг она становилась совершенно пунцовой.37 Sofia Petrovna Likhutina was distinguished by the extraordinary luxuriance of her hair.38 And she was unusually lissome. Had Sofia Petrovna Likhutina let down her black hair, the hair would have enveloped her entire torso and fallen to the calves. Speaking frankly, she did not know what to do with this hair of hers, so black that, perhaps . . . but in any event: a fine down was appearing above Sofia Petrovna’s lip which threatened to turn into a mustache in her 37 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg: Roman v 8-mi glavakh s epilogom (Petrograd: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1916), I:80. 38 There is a commentary attached to the sentence by Maguire and Malmstad. They argue that Bely intentionally uses the phrase: “This tendency to point simultaneously by at least two models [Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s Grushenʹka of The Brothers Karamazov] is characteristic of Bely’s parodic techniques throughout the novel.” See Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert Maguire and John Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 316.

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old age. She was possessed of an unusual ­complexion; the hue was, well, that of pearl iridescent with the rosy ­whiteness of delicate apple blossom petals. If anything agitated the bashful Sofia Petrovna, she turned poppy red.39 Sofia Petrovna Likhutina was distinguished, you might say, by an excess of vegetation: and she was extraordinarily supple: if she loosened her black hair, this black hair would cover her entire frame and fall as far as her calves; and Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, if the truth be told, simply did not know what to do with the hair of hers, so black that I dare say there was no object blacker; whether from the excess of her hair; or from its blackness—only, only: on Sofia Petrovna’s upper lip a slight fluff was to be seen, which threatened her with a real moustache in later years. Sofia Petrovna Likhutina was possessed of an extraordinary facial expression; this complexion was—simply the colour of pearls, distinguished by the whiteness of apple blossom, or sometimes—by a tender pink; if something caused her a sudden agitation, then Sofia Petrovna would all at once become crimson. (78)

It is clear from the description above that the portrait of Sof ʹia Petrovna Likhutina hugely benefits from the intelligent use of colors. Bely makes his first point by repeating again and again the word “black,” which is the color of Likhutina’s hair. It also represents feelings in the theosophical theory of colors. According to Leadbeater, “Thick black clouds in the astral body i­ndicate hatred and malice. When a person unhappily gives way to a fit of passionate anger, the terrible thought-forms of hate may generally be seen floating in his aura like coils of heavy, poisonous smoke.”40 Likhutina’s aura is not viewed as coils of “heavy, poisonous smoke” but rather is enveloped in the color black; it is cocooned in her black hair. The two translations offer similar ­ representations: her body would be either “enveloped” (Maguire and Malmstad) or “covered by her black hair” (Elsworth) when they “had [been] let down” (Maguire and Malmstad) or “loosened” (Elsworth). The ­translators use different shades of pink and red to depict Likhutina’s face and its ­expressions. The “rosy w ­ hiteness” of Maguire’s and Malmstad’s version emphasizes the healthy ­complexion of Likhutina’s face. Elsworth’s “pink” indicates her ­embarrassment. Pisareva’s work Sila mysli i mysle-obrazy provides a summary of Leadbeater’s interpretations of colors.41 Stating that mixed colors are evidence of mixed feelings, Pisareva points to the importance of having clearly nonidentifiable 39 Ibid., 38–39. 40 Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible, 81. 41 E. P. [E. F. Pisareva], Sila mysli i mysle-obrazy (Kaluga: Tipografiia Kaluzhskogo G ­ ubernskogo Zemstva, 1912).

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

colors in one’s aura. For example, if one’s aura presents itself in the delicate, clear, and transparent color of crimson, this thought-form radiates love. If an aura is not clear or has several spots, a different interpretation is offered; this thought-form represents not pure love, but egoistic passion. The Maguire and Malmstad translation describes Sof ʹia Likhutina’s hue as “that of pearl iridescent with rosy whiteness.” The color is not transparent and clear; it is a mixture of two colors. By applying the theosophical interpretation of colors, it becomes clear that passion and egoism are part of Sof ʹia’s ­character. Elsworth’s translation portrays Likhutina’s face as a pulsation of colors, of pearls, white, and pink. Again, more than one color is used there; transparency is not ­present. The colors send a clear message about Sof ʹia’s feelings, which are identical with the interpretation of Maguire and Malmstad: Sof ʹia is not in love; she tries her best to entertain herself by playing the game of passion. The case of using different versions of red is more complicated. Bely’s brush paints Likhutina’s face using puntsovoi, the brightest of reds. Using Leadbeater’s terminology, this red is “lurid, sanguinary red”; it stands for ­sensuality. Maguire’s and Malmstad’s “poppy red” is much closer to the ­original than Elsworth’s crimson. Poppy red is the color of poppies, the ­flowers ­associated with the battlefields of World War I. These small red ­flowers are symbols of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives. As mentioned before, for Bely, Liubovʹ Blok ceased to be the subject of spiritual love; she ­manifested another type of love, sensual love, the one that leads to ­destruction and ­nonexistence. Likhutina’s facial expressions are crimson in Elsworth’s translation. While the color, in Leadbeater’s symbolism, indicates love,42 in Petersburg, on the other hand, Likhutina’s image is far from radiating love. In both translations, however, “crimson” is used to describe the coat of the fateful domino.43 A bold cadet cites the following quatrain at the Tsukatovs’ ball: Кто вы, кто вы, гость суровый, Роковое домино? Посмотрите — в плащ багровый Запахнулося оно. (1916, IV, 84) Who are you, sombre visitor, Fateful domino? See—the cloak of crimson Wraps him head to toe. (210)

42 Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible, 82. 43 Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 108; trans. Elsworth, 210.

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It is unlikely that the domino brings any love to the ball. It brings anger. That is why Bely applies a particular red, bagrovyi, a deep red with some brown in it. To Leadbeater, the element of “brown” highlights also possibilities of selfishness.44 If more brown is added, it will be evidence of avarice, which manifests itself in the feelings of one’s aura. When Bely meditated on his past in the text of Petersburg, he tried to understand himself better at the time of his liaison with Liubovʹ Blok. Bely portrayed Nikolai Ableukhov as a selfish, angry, and avaricious person in the novel. In this way, in his life, the means of “trained clairvoyance” helped Bely to separate himself from his past. The next passage is taken only from the Sirin edition of Petersburg. Consequently, Elsworth’s translation provides us with a depiction of the destructive passion of the main character in full, as the accurate transcription of all colors is now given: Сам себя он забыл; забыл свои мысли; и забыл упования; упивался собственной, ему предназначенной ролью: богоподобное, бесстрастное существо отлетало куда-то; оставалась голая страсть, а страсть стала ядом. Лихорадочный яд проницал его мозг, выливался незримо из глаз пламенеющим облаком, обвивая липнущим и кровавым атласом: будто он теперь на все глядел обугленным ликом из пекущих тело огней, и обугленный лик превратился в черную маску, а пекущие тело огни — в красный шелк. Он теперь воистину стал шутом, безобразным и красным (так когда-то она сама называла его). Мстительно над какою-то — свoею, ея ли? — правдою надругался теперь этот шут вероломно и остро; и опять-таки: любил, ненавидел? (1916, IV, 85–86) He had forgotten his own self; forgotten his thoughts; and forgotten his hopes; he was intoxicated by his own predestined role: the godlike, ­passionless creature had flown away; naked passion remained, and passion turned to poison. A feverish poison penetrated his brain, poured unseen from his eyes in a cloud of flame, entwining him in clinging blood-red velvet: as though he now looked at everything with a charred face out of flames that seared his body, and that charred countenance turned into a black mask, and the flames that seared his body—into red silk. He had now truly become a clown, an ugly red clown (as she had once called him). Now this clown was pouring scorn—perfidiously, vengefully, incisively— on someone’s truth—his own, or hers?—and once again the question: was it love, or hate? (212) 44 Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible, 81.

“Know Thyself”: From the Temple of Apollo at Delphi to the Pages of Petersburg

Neither Nikolai Ableukhov nor Sofʹia Likhutina are present in the passage, but their images are made to be real. Just two colors are added to the ­description of the main characters, and this addition creates a big difference. Black and red help readers to feel both images, in particular hate and love, which the colors radiate. So, in the novel as in his life, Bely again and again tried to separate himself from one image, which was too painful and too dear at the same time. Moreover, the passage exemplifies the techniques of meditation. It highlights the transformation of Nikolai Ableukhov’s “I” into “an ugly red clown” step by step. At the end of his spiritual transformation, it is not Nikolai who is in love or who hates, but the clown. In other words, by describing the change in Nikolai Ableukhov’s perception of himself, Bely highlights the benefits of meditation, which helps to distance oneself from suffering by removing all personal links with the source of the experienced pain. In Bely’s example, Nikolai Ableukhov’s self finds another home for itself in meditation; his sufferings remain with the clown. The image of the clown is created as the new subject, in which Nikolai Ableukhov’s self is not present anymore. The technique also provides opportunities to better see the old subject, in which Nikolai Ableukhov’s self previously existed, as it is clearly positioned before one’s eyes. Thus, in meditation, the clown has been made real by the old ­subject in order to know himself better.

Concluding Remarks This article has provided an opportunity to look at Petersburg through the prism of Indian ideas, either in their original form or in their theosophical interpretation. One cannot overestimate their importance in Bely’s thinking. According to information provided by Bongard-Levin in his publication on Blok and India, in 1909 Indian philosophical ideas were so popular that a project was discussed between Bely and Medtner to invite specialists on Indian philosophy and art to publish their work in the journal of Musaget, Medtner’s publishing house. Citing unpublished correspondence between Bely and Medtner, Bongard-Levin names these specialists. They are Vera Johnston (1864–1923), a theosophist and translator; Sergei Olʹdenburg (1863–1934), a Russian Orientalist, professor of Buddhist studies, and member of the Russian Academy of Science; and Nikolai Rerikh (1874–1947), an artist. ­Bongard-Levin also argues that Bely had planned to write an article on Paul Deussen (1845–1919), a German Orientalist and Sanskrit scholar.45 45 See Grigorii Bongard-Levin, “Blok i indiiskaia kulʹtura,” in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 92, bk. 5, Aleksandr Blok (Moscow: Nauka, 1993), 594, http://www.imli.ru/structure/litnasled/ soder92.php.

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This article has also explained Bely’s contemporary studies of Oriental ideas and pointed to his reading of Shcherbatskii’s work on the later Buddhists, in which the Buddhist theory of knowledge is discussed. The article has argued that behind Bely’s reason for studying epistemology is his general interest in knowing himself better. In this context, looking at Petersburg as a novel that expresses words of approval for meditation provides a new approach. This approach highlights the presence of Indian elements in Bely’s thinking and praises a technique that offers the opportunity to understand oneself in depth and, to some extent, to master one’s life.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg ADA STEINBERG

I Even during Bely’s own lifetime, his novel Petersburg provoked highly contradictory reactions in literary circles and among critics. Viacheslav Ivanov regarded Petersburg as a “semichaotic” work,1 probably having in mind not so much the absence in it of a definite sequence of events as the pervasive feeling of colossal disorder only partly brought about by the merging of all the elements. From the viewpoint of everyday life, the novel for some seemed “completely improbable”;2 for others it was reminiscent of the terrible world of Edgar Allan Poe, of “Baudelaire’s devilry,”3 or of Gogol’s fantastic world, made even more complex by “irrationality and mysticism.”4 Still others, however, like Sergei Askolʹdov, perceived in Petersburg, along with the obvious fantastic element (“Such a reality is unknown in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement”), a certain totality of “surprisingly familiar” everyday phenomena.5 In his article Askolʹdov does not allude to the principle of the merging of two worlds, which was later regarded as typical of all of Bely’s work,6 but rightly notes their conflicting coexistence: “There were   1 Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa,” in Rodnoe i vselenskoe: Statʹi 1914–16 (Moscow: Leman i Sacharov, 1917), 89. In all cases the translations are mine.   2 Ivanov-Razumnik, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi (St. Petersburg: Alkonost, 1919), 97.   3 M. Lirov, “Literaturnoe obozrenie,” Pechatʹ i revoliutsiia (Moscow), no. 2 (1924): 120.   4 Zh. Elʹsberg, “Tvorchestvo A. Belogo—prozaika,” Na literaturnom postu (Moscow), nos. 11–12 (June 1929): 49.   5 S. Askolʹdov, “Tvorchestvo A. Belogo,” in Literaturnaia myslʹ (Petrograd), alʹmanakh 1 (1922): 88 (my emphasis; unless noted, italics within translated quotations are mine).   6 Struve mentions “the typical Bely mixture of realism and fantastic delirium.” Gleb Struve, Soviet Russian Literature, 1917–1950 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 11. In my view, Struve oversimplifies Bely’s complex world.

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no terrorists like Ableukhov and Dudkin in Russia,” but nonetheless “fragments” of Dudkins and Ableukhovs “floated in the air of the time.”7 Here Askolʹdov is one of the first to apply to Petersburg one of the tenets of the fantastic method in art as formulated by Bely in his essay “Ivanov”8—namely, (a) the presence in the most fantastic images of a “more complex reality resulting from the mutual intersection of various fragments of the everyday sequence of events.”9 Askolʹdov does not go beyond this postulate of Bely’s. However, it is precisely the remaining tenets of the fantastic method (“way,” or putʹ, as Bely calls it) that reveal the mechanism by which the whole system “works.” In view of the exceptional importance of these tenets for this study, they are listed briefly: (b) the mounting of the accumulated “fragments” in one whole is a­ccomplished in accordance with an artistic sequence, not a dayto-day one—that is, a sequence “facilitating the nonexistent combinations of existing images”;10 (c) in the process of equalization, comparison, attraction, ­repulsion, and, finally, fusion, the concretion (konkretizatsiia) of the image is greatly diminished, making way for its complete abstraction; in this way a specific symbol arises; (d) in a work of art,11 the path from the real to the fantastic demands that the ­“conventionality” of reality be stressed: “Only in this way is its fantastic element revealed.”12 Thus, in the essay “Ivanov” Bely gives a clear indication of how the ­interplay between the two planes of the world—the real and the fantastic— should be accomplished. However, in applying the tenets in Bely’s essay to his novel Petersburg, it is necessary to take into account the complexity with which these planes are modeled: in the novel the real plane consists of the visible-tangible and visible parodistic worlds13 and is constructed according to the more or less traditional canons of literature at the turn of the century.   7 Askolʹdov, “Tvorchestvo A. Belogo,” 88. Askolʹdov puts inverted commas around the word fragments because he has taken it from Bely’s article “Ivanov.” There is no irony concealed in this word.   8 This is one of three articles devoted to Chekhov in which, while talking of the staging of the play Ivanov, Bely postulates the basic method of “realistic” art. Bely contrasts this with the method of “fantastic” art. Thus, we receive, albeit indirectly, a definition of the fantastic method. See Belyi, “Ivanov,” in Simvolizm: Kniga statei (Moscow: Musaget, 1910), 405–8.   9 Ibid., 405. 10 Ibid., 406 (my emphasis). 11 “Work of art” has replaced the word staging since in summarizing his remarks in the article Bely does the same. Ibid., 407. 12 Here the quotation has been rephrased: Bely examines the path from “the fantastic to the real.” Ibid. 13 This question is discussed further in A. Steinberg, “On the Structure of Parody in Bely’s Peterburg,” Slavica Hierosolymitana, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1977), 132–57.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

The fantastic plane consists of the supersensory, invisible-astral world and the otherworldly-eternal, and derives only rarely from established tradition. In fact, it is completely oriented toward the mysticism of Solovʹev and the theosophical gnosticism of Blavatsky and Besant, and only partly toward the anthroposophy of Steiner.14 In the attempt to elucidate the problem of fragmentary “prototypes” in the novel Petersburg, one must not only concentrate on the visible-tangible world of the city and its heroes but also make a conventional division between it and the other worlds of the novel. But the visible-tangible world is itself made much more complex by the superimposition of the “prototypes” of the traditional theme of Saint Petersburg the city and its heroes. The structural sequences of this world constantly cross one another, contrast with one another, and are broken by the imposition of the structures of the other worlds. For this reason, these other worlds will be touched on more than once. In essence, all these worlds constitute a single archetype of the world created by Bely and seen exclusively from his viewpoint. There now follows a discussion of the “conventionality” (uslovnostʹ ) of the visible-tangible world in the novel.

The City In his novel Bely selects, synthesizes, and significantly broadens the traditional Petersburg theme as established in nineteenth-century literature. If in Pushkin Saint Petersburg is the second capital of Russia, the stage for a terrible calamity with tragic consequences for one hero, in Bely, Petersburg is the center of the universe, the springboard for an inevitable cosmic catastrophe threatening to destroy the whole human race. Such hyperbolism leads to a great expansion in scope of the traditional Petersburg theme. This expansion is consistently adhered to on all planes of Bely’s novel. Thus, for example, the traditional phantasmal Petersburg of Gogol and Dostoevsky is supercharged in Bely with the “astral” city (its walls fall to the ground, “breaches” form, astral drafts blow) and with the otherworldly Tatar city with all its classical properties: the turbid river, the shadows of passersby, the world of shadows, the land of

14 This is borne out by a huge catalogue of mystical and theosophical literature in which Rudolf Steiner is represented by only one work. See A. Belyi, “Kommentarii,” in Simvolizm: Kniga statei, 458, 460, 461. Besides this, according to Bely himself almost half the novel was written before he was taken prisoner by Steiner in 1912: “I wrote Petersburg by immersing myself in the story of its fourth chapter” (my emphasis). See A. Belyi, “Iz vospominanii,” Beseda (Berlin), no. 2 (July–August 1923): 95.

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spirits, the fishing schooners, the bulldog.15 On the plane that interests us, the traditional, everyday characteristics of Saint Petersburg (climate, buildings, statues, streets) are subjected to the following process in Bely’s novel: a.  The accumulation in a sort of artistic “treasure house”16 of fragments from literary texts on the theme of Saint Petersburg by nineteenth-century poets and writers b.  The return of these fragments anew to the bosom of literature strongly supercharged with specific lexical units (this can already be observed in Dostoevsky’s early works)17 and also, at times, with a single “lexeme” (leksema) c. An accompanying concatenation of new everyday phenomena ­connected on the one hand with the achievements of technology ­(electricity, the automobile) and with the unprecedented growth of information (the newspapers), and on the other with the real events taking place at the “time” of the novel (the meeting, the strike, the reception on the occasion of the conclusion of the treaty of Portsmouth). The new lexical units are interwoven with the old units that have been amplified by Bely and fuse with them. The traditional “time” for events taking place in Petersburg is generally the end of autumn or the beginning of winter, when the bad weather—an unpleasant characteristic of the Petersburg climate—sets in. Pushkin wrote very clearly, albeit metaphorically, of this: “Over darkened Petrograd / Breathed November with [its] autumnal cold” (The Bronze Horseman). Following Pushkin, Gogol abandons the metaphor (“As is the custom in Petersburg the wind blew on him from all four corners of the earth, from all the lanes. In a flash it blew a quinsy into his throat,” The Overcoat), but, in return, he intensifies the blowing of the wind (by using two adverbial modifiers of place, repeating the word “all”) and establishes a definite relationship of cause and effect (the wind—quinsy). In comparison with Gogol, great amplification is noticeable in the early Dostoevsky: “It was a terrible night—a November night, wet, foggy, rainy, snowy, fraught with swollen cheeks, colds, deliriums, quinsies, all possible 15 Only in the first edition of Petersburg in book form (Petrograd, 1916) is this city mentioned openly: “Two black-maned horses carried away the pale Pluto. They carried him to Tartary over the waters of the Phlegethon” (389). Cf. “The waters of Phlegethon splash, the vaults of Tartary tremble” (Pushkin’s “Proserpina”). In the very abbreviated Berlin edition of 1922 and in the republications that followed (Moscow, 1928, and Moscow, 1935, posthumously), Tartary is not mentioned, only hinted at. 16 This is borne out by the huge amount of research material collected and classified by Bely in his Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow-Leningrad: Gos. izdatelʹstvo khudozhestvennoi ­literatury, 1934). 17 Ibid., 285–91.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

kinds of fever, in a word, with all the gifts of a Petersburg November” (The Double). The amplification is expressed in the accumulation, on the one hand, of adjectival predicates (November, wet, foggy, rainy, snowy, fraught) r­ elating to the “cause”—the bad weather—and, on the other, of nouns (Gogol’s “quinsy” with the addition of swollen cheeks, colds, deliriums, all kinds of fever) concerning the “effect.” Dostoevsky’s adjectival predicates “rainy” and “snowy” merge in the ­subject of Bely’s sentence—“sleet” (izmorozʹ ): “Sleet sprinkled the streets and Prospects, the pavements and the roofs. [. . .] It sprinkled the passersby: it bestowed influenza on them; along with the fine dust of the rain, colds and influenza crept under the upturned collars: of schoolboy, student, civil ­servant, officer, nondescript; and the nondescript (the man in the street).”18 Here a kind of return to Gogol can be noted (Bely retains approximately the same scheme for the relationship of cause and effect: wind—quinsy; sleet—feverish cold) while Dostoevsky’s method of amplification is preserved. In the quoted extract the amplification is achieved by using the plural ­(feverish colds, ­influenzas) and relates to inanimate objects (streets and prospects, pavements and roofs) as well as to live people (passersby: the schoolboy, the student, the official, the army officer, the man in the street) as if all in equal measure are experiencing the bad weather. However, this is by no means the end of the process in Bely. Some of the lexemes (feverish colds, influenzas) transfer immediately into the almost identical semantic field of the “turbid, ­bacteria-infested water of the Neva” (sometimes in the variants: “the green waters swarming with bacteria,” see I, 63, 73, 164, 246; II, 23, twice). In the symbolist t­radition water is identified with the mirror19—invariably painted a green color in Petersburg, as it is in Bely’s other novels. The color is c­ ontaminated by its semantic f­eature, which is related to disease: ­decomposition, ­putrefaction, dying. In the novel, clouds, fog, buildings, the faces of passersby, of ­personages, are painted green. However, it is in the statue of Peter that this color is most strongly ­supercharged of all. Simultaneously, the phonic series (verbal ­orchestration) 18 Andrei Belyi, Peterburg (Berlin: Epokha, 1922), part I (subchapter “The Carriage Flew off into the Mist”), 22. Henceforth, all quotations taken from the original Russian novel will be given in the body of the article by indicating the part (in roman numerals) and the pages (in arabic numerals). 19 “The sea is as if a cast / Mirror of the clear heavens” (“U moria,” V. Briusov); “The ocean slumbered like a mirror, / The evil storms went away” (“Korabli prishli,” A. Blok); “Eau froide par l’ennui dans ton cadre gelée” (“Hérodiade,” S. Mallarmé). On this question see Oleg Maslenikov, “Russian Symbolists: The Mirror Theme and Allied Motifs,” Russian Review 16, no. 1 (January 1957): 42–59.

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also draw ­attention to themselves by underlining, sometimes subtly, ­sometimes ­importunately, the ­abovementioned semantic features. Fixed in the Petersburg theme by Pushkin and Dostoevsky, the terrible Horseman is made much more complex in Bely’s Petersburg. The lexemes ­(influenzas, feverish colds) from the visible-tangible plane (“the green waters swarming with bacteria”) are transferred to the otherworldly plane under the similar sign of illness, dying, evil. In this way the Neva is identified with the Styx, one of the rivers in the kingdom of the dead whose waters were c­ onsidered poisonous. From this there arises a whole series of associative links leading from the ruler Peter to the ruler Ahriman-Chronos-Titan (cf. Peter’s gigantic height); to Hades, son of Chronos; and, finally, to the Antichrist.20 Chronos, or Saturn, is projected onto the “astral world” (the identical dreams of the senator and his son, I, 183–86; II, 52–58) and onto the parodistic world (Peter and Aleksei parodied in Dudkin, Nikolai Ableukhov, and the senator). Thus, these coexisting worlds collide, intersect, and penetrate one another in the most complex game, and the “climate” of the visible world, on which is superimposed the “climate” of the literary theme of Petersburg, is identified with the “climate” of the other worlds. In Bely a superficial, feverish animation prevails in the center of the city and on its outskirts. The face of the city is suffused with “fragments” of motifs from the Petersburg theme in The Bronze Horseman: Along the animated banks Crowd the huge stately edifices Of palaces and towers [. . .] Bridges hang over the waters; Her islands have become covered With dark-green gardens [. . .] and bright is The Admiralty spire [. . .] I love the martial liveliness Of the playing-fields of Mars, [. . .] The tatters of those flags of victory, The glitter of those bronze caps, [. . .] Over the indignant Neva 20 In this synthesis of Persian, pre-Olympian, and ancient Roman cosmogony and Christian legend, Bely pays tribute to Blavatsky and Solovʹev. The ancient Persian Ahriman, the “hostile spirit” Ormuzd, the ruler of the kingdom of the dead, the head of the demons of hell who bring misfortunes and illnesses to people, is combined with the pre-Olympian Chronos, the youngest of the Titans, who overthrew his father Uranus (Sky) and swallowed his sons, and then joined Hades-Pluto and Solovʹev’s Antichrist. See Helena P. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical University Press, 1950), 2:85, 2:301, 3:418, 4:58, 4:86. See also V. Solovʹev, “Short Story about Antichrist,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia polʹza, 1901–7), 7:556–58.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

Stands with outstretched hand The idol on a bronze horse.

It is also suffused with “fragments” of these motifs as reinterpreted and t­ ransferred by Gogol into the theme of a phantasmagoric, devilish Petersburg. This Petersburg is first seen from the heights of the heavens by the smith Vakula, riding on a devil (“Good God! Rumble, crash, sparkle . . . tramp of a horse’s hooves, sound of wheels resounding like thunder . . . bridges shook; coaches flew; postilions shouted”); it is presented in a vivid picture to the postmaster listening to the story of Captain Kopeikin (“There is some sort of spire in the air, like some devil, you can imagine, without any, that is, without touching anything . . . bridges just hang there”). (Cf. similar motifs in Bely’s Petersburg: “the spire flees,” “the Admiralty runs like an arrow beneath the sky,” “the coach flies,” “the r­ umblings of quivering cabs resound,” “the suburbs are swarming with people,” etc.) However, in Bely the process of reinterpretation is made much more ­ complex by associations with historical facts and contemporary events ­significant in the composition of the plot. Beneath the superficial ­magnificence of the palaces hides another terrible essence.21 At one time, bloody crimes, ­parricides, were committed in them; they “run with blood,” they “show c­rimson.” Thus, in the Mikhailovskii Palace, Pavel Petrovich was killed and his son, the future emperor Alexander I, was a party to this ­heinous crime (II, 191–93). The terroristic act on his own father that Nikolai Ableukhov has c­ ommitted in his mind finds echoes in this murder (II, 165– 69). The ­equestrian monument to Nicholas I (I, 28; II, 91), the tsar who was defeated in the Crimean campaign, alludes to the defeat of Nicholas II in the ­Russo-Japanese War. But it is the equestrian statue of Peter—the founder of this un-Russian, superterrestrial city; the creator of a new state organization; the conqueror of many wars—that has dominion over all the magnificent palaces, buildings, and statues. However, all his achievements cannot hide the countenance of Peter the filicide (cf. Chronos-Saturn). In Bely the islands cannot be covered with “dark-green gardens,”22 not only because the action of the novel takes place in autumn, but also because the islands represent the breeding ground of revolution, the carriers of chaos 21 It is interesting to note that in Dostoevsky the motif of Pushkin’s palaces changes beyond all recognition. It is the “crystal palace” or “crystal building” of Chernyshevsky, with whom Dostoevsky is conducting a fierce polemic on the pages of Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment without ever naming the author of the novel What Is to Be Done? 22 Compare in Dostoevsky: “Thus did Raskolʹnikov walk over the whole length and breadth of Vasilʹevskii Island. . . . He turned to the Islands. . . . The green and freshness at first pleased his tired eyes.”

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and devastation. The bridges do not hang there: they are thrown across the waters of Lethe, and it is already “too late” to dismantle them (I, 34). Every minute the bridges are being crossed not by bronze but by Manchurian caps (a variant of this is shaggy Manchurian caps or simply shaggy ones). Using the capacious device of Gogolian metonymy, Bely gives a strong supercharge to this detail beneath which is hidden a terrible essence. The Manchurian cap is an attribute of the defeated soldiers, bearing the infection of pan-­Mongolism back to their motherland.23 The spiritual culture of long-forgotten a­ ncestors has poured into their veins24—a culture that, by its impact, will bring about the irreversible destruction of the whole Christian world. Thus, a c­ ompletely “real” detail coming into contact with the otherworldly world (of the ­ancestors) is transformed into a symbol of the Mongol invasion. The shaggy caps produce a whole series of perturbations: They change the composition of the “myriapod” (mnogonozhka) on the Nevsky (cf. “How many feet” [skol ʹko nog] had left their trace on it,” “Nevsky Prospect”); “The composition of the myriapod was changing; and an observer could already note the appearance of a black shaggy cap from the blood-stained fields of Manchuria” (I, 107) or “The horde had already shown itself on the Nevsky in the shape of a Manchurian cap” (II, 175). They strive, they hold meetings: “Manchurian caps began to pour out into the street” (I, 126, twice) or again “at the gloomy building the crowd consisted only of ordinary citizens and Manchurian caps” (I, 127, twice). They take part in demonstrations, “forcing their way into the shaggy masses: Manchurian caps, cap bands, peaked caps” (II, 91) or again “when the cab flew by all the bowlers, top hats, cap bands, feathers, furs, shaggy caps began to shuffle and stamp” (II, 162). The feverish animation of the city (“Along the animated banks”) is achieved by Bely on the one hand by means of amplification and the ­proliferation of “fragments” (of lexical units or single lexemes) of the ­traditional Petersburg motifs on which are superimposed new, contemporary motifs, and on the other by the dynamic of a huge number of verbs. The amorphous mass of 23 According to Solovʹev it was not only the Far East (Japan, Manchuria, China, and India) but also the Middle East that was preparing to act against the Christian world for the last time. See his “The Enemy from the East,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 5:410. This is mentioned more than once in the novel: “Yellow faces flooded the region: legends of the horsemen of Genghis Khan were awakened,” “China grew troubled,” “The yellow heel made a daring ascent to the ridges of the heights of Port Arthur,” etc. 24 In Bely, Solovʹev’s “pan-Mongolism” is closely interwoven with Blavatsky’s teaching about the coexistence of all spiritual cultures of the past in the present. Hence, in all of P ­ etersburg’s heroes, even its anonymous ones, there flows Asiatic blood. Helena P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (Los Angeles: Theosophical University Press, 1931).

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

people thus rushes along, runs, flows, races, dashes, darts out, pokes about, and so forth (on the Nevsky there are a myriapod, a myriapod creature, streams of people, shadows; on the islands there are a swarm of many t­housands, a crowd, a horde, bodies). In the crowd, every now and then, noses scurry along—a proliferation of the Kovalev motif in “The Nose”—in ­conjunction with variants of lexemes from Poprishchin’s delirium and Shponʹka’s dream: “For every side a nose darted out. An eagle nose and a cock nose; a duck nose and a hen nose; and—further, further . . .—a ­greenish, a green, a red one. They rolled up: senselessly, hurriedly, abundantly” (II, 77). Compare this with the device of proliferation with Kovalev’s nose and of paronomasia (Kovalev— kovyliali) in The Double: “The drivers would in no way agree to take Mr. Golyadkin. . . . It was impossible to take two perfect likenesses. . . . But with each blow of his foot on the granite of the pavement, there darted out,25 as if from under the ground, one perfect likeness. And all these perfect likenesses followed each other and hobbled [kovyliali] after Mr. Goldiadkin Sr. so that there was nowhere to escape from these perfect likenesses . . . so that a terrible multitude of perfect likenesses was born,” and so forth. This nose goes into the composition of an extended metonymy, the bearer of which is a police spy—a new and significant “character” in Bely’s Petersburg: “Bowler hat, stick, coat, ears, nose, and mustache” (I, 73, 164) and its variants “bowler, stick, beard, and nose” (I, 246) and “bowler, coat, stick, beard and nose” (II, 9). New also are the cries of the newsboys and the uproar of street urchins selling antigovernment “Yid” magazines (I, 19, 241, 242)26 or of those

25 In the 1922 Berlin edition of Petersburg, Bely abbreviated the “nose” motif but preserved this verb that Dostoevsky also uses. Neither did he reject the sign of proliferation ­(“abundantly”) present in Dostoevsky (“a terrible multitude was born”). See the first edition of Petersburg in book form (Petrograd, 1916), 287. 26 The word “Yid” (Bely’s quotation marks) expresses the senator’s Pobedonostsev-like anti-­ Semitism. On the occasions when the story is being told by the narrator, these little magazines simply have a red cover (I, 28, 107; II, 154). It seems to me, however, that this word also expresses the hate the Russian intelligentsia, including Bely, felt for the press king of that time—S. M. Propper, the publisher of the paper Birzhevye vedomosti and the journal Ogonek. For this conclusion, see B. Bugaev, “Shtempelevannaia kulʹtura,” Vesy (Moscow), no. 9 (1909): 72–80; A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow-Leningrad: G ­osudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1960–63), 7:115; and S. Iu. Vitte [Witte], ­Vospominaniia: Tsarstvovanie Nikolaia II (Berlin: Knigoizdatelʹstvo “Slovo,” 1922), 52, 53. It is very possible that in Petersburg Propper’s Birzhevye vedomosti and Ogonek are signified by the so-called Dnevnik proisshestvii, in which an important place is given to the “red domino,” just as under the nonexistent Tovarishch is concealed Prince Meshcherskii’s Grazhdanin.

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same Manchurian caps thrusting out a badly printed broadsheet (I, 106).27 Alongside the “rolling” and “flying” coaches, as in Pushkin’s and Gogol’s time (“The street was crammed with carriages, coaches rolled up one after another,” “The Queen of Spades”; “Coaches flew,” “Christmas Eve”), the idol of the century, the automobile, makes an imperious declaration of its existence. “Its throat rises,” sometimes in the “voice of automobile roulades” (I, 26), ­sometimes in “taxi wails” (II, 52), sometimes in the “melodious cries of ­roulades” (II, 249). Against the background of these mechanized “cries” stand the motif of “Chopin’s thundering roulade” (I, 22; II, 259, 260, 261), “Beethoven’s old sounds” (II, 38), the “old-fashioned romance” (II, 12, 44, 52),28 all linked with the distant past of certain personages and perceived on the one hand as “old times,” as some kind of anachronism,29 and on the other as ­signifying the terrible mechanization of a century that has buried the live performance of the soloist or the live voice of the singer. The ­remaining ­attributes of the automobile (“flying tire,” “shining reflectors”) are manifestly associated with the winged, fire-breathing, apocalyptic dragon that is clearing the way for the “yellow Mongol mugs” (I, 132, 167; II, 152). The ­concentration of ­ambivalent semantic features in the lexeme “automobile” (movement: tire/wing; light: reflectors/fire breathing) is found also in other lexemes. Thus, in the little entertainment cafés (Dostoevsky’s taprooms), alongside the world of drunken customers, there coexists the otherworldly world (in one of these cafés sits Peter, the ruler of the netherworld, just dismounted from his horse), and at the noisy masquerades the White Domino-Christ appears (II, 10, 12, 18; I, 233). The grand reception on the occasion of the conclusion of peace is composed of “fragments” of Piskarev’s dream: “He saw all at once so many esteemed little old men and men no longer young with stars on their frock coats.” Compare this with Bely where the “fragment” is presented metonymically: “Little old men: whiskers, beards, bald heads, chins, and chests decorated with orders” (I, 144, 145). For this occasion a grandiose parade of troops unfolds: “The white horses of the Cavalry,” “azure and blond horsemen,” “blood-red h ­ ussars 27 In a conversation with Witte, the director of the Police Department, Lopukhin, declared that in its basement the department had a printing works where broadsheets of a provocative and often seditious nature were printed on machines confiscated from arrested revolutionaries. The primitive nature of the machines was the reason for the bad printing. Vitte, Vospominaniia, 73, 74. 28 The romance in question is that of N. V. Kukolʹnik, “Doubt” (1888), in Pesni i romansy russkikh poetov (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1965), 565. 29 In Blok’s poem “Shagi komandora” (1910–12), which was written at approximately the same time as Petersburg, this anachronism is even more obvious: “A black silent motor flies past like an owl, / Its lights splashing in the night. / With silent, heavy steps, / The ­Commendatore enters the house.”

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on gray chargers . . . the earth shrieks . . . the orchestras summon . . . the ­trumpet sounds . . . the drum crashes” (I, 146, 147). And here the semantic features of the colors and sound are ambivalent.30 But all the bustle of this “center of the universe”—the cries of the ­newsboys, the clatter of flying coaches, the automobile “roulades,” the old-­fashioned romances, the summoning of military orchestras—all this is drowned by an imperious, continual, subterranean rumbling, which ­threatens to plunge the whole world into total darkness. This rumbling makes its p ­ resence felt through the powerful impact of the verbal orchestration on the sound “oo” or of onomatopoeia: “oo oo oo oo—oo oo oo oo—oo oo oo oo; thus did it sound in the open places” (I, 107, 108), or again, “and through the ‘oo oo oo’ there sounded at times: revolution . . . evolution”;31 and again, “some note on ‘oo’” (II, 161). By repetition such lexemes as, for example, “ispuganno” (frightened), “khmuroe” (gloomy), “mutʹ ” (haze), “smutnye” (vague), and “pust” (deserted), which contain a specific semantic feature, and other l­exemes—“mandzhurskie” (Manchurian), “mnogotrubnye” (many-chimneyed), “bezrukii” (armless), “pereulok” (lane), “shuba” (fur coat), “mufta” (muff ), “ulitsa” (street), and so forth—are also contaminated as a result of the similarity in sound. Such imparting of meaning to a specific sound adds a kind of “fourth dimension” to the numerous cases of a­ mbivalence in the semantic features of the lexemes already existing independently: the “oo” sound is raised up into a symbol of the dying city.

II The Characters The visible-tangible world of the characters in Petersburg is distinguished by fragmentary “prototypes” of the traditional heroes of the Petersburg theme in the nineteenth century, as well as by “fragments” of actual prominent ­statesmen of the time or of well-known terrorists. Moreover, this world is also made more complex by “fragments” of the personal life of Bely, who 30 This may be compared with the horses and horsemen of the book of Revelation 6:2, 6:4, 6:8; the sound of the trumpet with Revelation 4:1, 8:7, 8:8, 8:10. 31 The lexemes “revolution, evolution” resound even in Likhutina’s hothouse. They belong to the Social Revolutionary repertoire in which these concepts were not mutually exclusive: “Revolution is nothing but the maximum acceleration of evolution.” See V. Chernov, Rozhdenie revoliutsionnoi Rossii (Paris: Iubileinyi komitet po izd. trudov V. M. Chernova, 1934), 14.

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had tried, like the other Russian symbolists, to achieve a complete fusion of his life and his art.32 The concentration of such a great number of “fragments” of ­various people in one and the same personage and the crossing of several story lines— the ­historical-political, the mystical-theosophical, the adventure-­detective, and the family-“love” line—determine the conventionality of such a ­personage. All the main and secondary characters in Petersburg are united by the common blood or spiritual ties of kinship, which manifests itself in the following signs: a. Asiatic blood flows in them all. The ancestors of the Ableukhovs were Turkic peoples (tiurki), living at one time in the Kirghiz Kaisatsk horde; Dudkin’s double is the cunning Persian Shishnarfne; Likhutin is a second lieutenant in His Majesty the King of Siam’s such-and-such regiment, and his wife is the Angel Peri; Lippanchenko is a mixture of Semite and Mongol. Even Ivanov—there is no such hero in the novel, but Bely introduces precisely this most widely used Russian surname as a synonym for a “Russian”—is Japanese and called “Vonavi,” or “Ivanov” backwards (II, 130). The Asiatic aspect of the heroes is sometimes also emphasized by details of the interiors of their homes and their everyday life: Nikolai Ableukhov’s Oriental study, where he struts about in his Bukharan dressing gown and tatar skullcap, or Sof ʹia Likhutina’s hothouse, in which Japanese pictures of “Fuji-Yamas” are arranged. b. They all act under the influence of a crisis experienced in the recent past (the family crisis of the senator as a result of his wife’s flight; the “love” crisis of his son because of the broken relationship with Likhutina) or in the present: a crisis of consciousness is experienced both by Dudkin, disillusioned with Nietzsche and trying to find a way out in theosophy, and by Nikolai, who has broken with Kant and is standing at the crossroads.33 All these ­personal crises are intensified by real political and governmental crises and by the crisis within the Social Revolutionary Party. 32 See Aleksandr Blok, Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame (1905), in which the dream of the “Eternal Feminine” merges with the dream of earthly love for L. D. Mendeleeva; see also Briusov’s novel The Fiery Angel (1907), in which the mystical and everyday problems of the medieval German heroes (Ruprekht, Genrikh, and Renata) give way to the autobiographical problems of the twentieth-century Russian heroes (Briusov, Bely, and N. P. Petrovskaia). See also Andrei Belyi, “Iskusstvo,” in Arabeski: Kniga statei (Moscow: Knigoizdatelʹstvo “Musaget,” 1911), 215: “Life is individual creation” (Bely’s emphasis). 33 Bely’s own crisis of consciousness is undoubtedly reflected in the crises of consciousness of these heroes. At the time he was writing Petersburg (1911–13), Bely had moved away from Nietzsche and Kant and the neo-Kantianism of Rickert and Cohen. His Solovʹevism was more and more giving way to Blavatsky’s theosophy, and from 1912 to Steiner’s anthroposophy. See note 14.

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c. Almost all the characters are provocateurs, with the great master of provocation, Lippanchenko, at their head. Provocation “sits in Dudkin’s very soul” (I, 39). In all people Dudkin catches an “elusive provocation” “in that very same little giggle” (I, 122, Bely’s emphasis).34 A collaborator on the paper “Diary of Events,” Neintelʹpfein (a significant name consisting of the words nein and fein—literally, not fine, i.e., coarse, an ignoramus) also turns out to be, as often happened at that time,35 a police collaborator (I, 168). Against the background of the real activities of people like Zubatov, Gapon, and Azef that contribute to the confusion and disorganization of the Social Revolutionaries, the provocative acts of the heroes in Petersburg take on a cosmic essence. The following serve as a significant indicator of the kinship of the heroes and as a key to work out their characters and interrelationships: (a) the ­identical rhythmical structure of their surnames, forenames, and p ­ atronymics (Apollón Apollónovich Ableúkhov, Nikolái Apollónovich Ableúkhov, Alekséi Alekséevich Pogorélʹskii) or of their forenames and patronymics (Sof ʹia Petróvna, Anna Petróvna); and (b) the similar phonic structure of their surnames expressed in one common stressed sound (Dúdkin, Ableúkhov, Likhútin), in the repetition of a specific digraph (Ableukhov—Lippanchenko), or in twin names (Nikolai Lippanchenko—Nikolai Ableukhov; Anna Petrovna—Sof ʹia Petrovna).

The Statesman A. A. Ableukhov Senator Ableukhov is multifaceted to the highest degree. Superimposed on him are “fragments” of the features of several Tolstoyan heroes, of specific dignitaries of that time, and even of Bely’s father, the celebrated mathematician N. V. Bugaev. Moreover, in the senator the novel’s family story line intersects with the mystical-theosophical line, as a result of which “fragments” of the features of Peter, Zeus, Apollo, and Saturn can be traced in him. In relation to the everyday-family and official tenor of Senator Ableukhov’s life, Bely disregards “fragments” of the “significant personage’s” features of Gogol and Dostoevsky (Councillor of State Berendeev) and clearly prefers Tolstoyan models. 34 See the memoirs of V. Burtsev, Borʹba za svobodnuiu Rossiiu: Moi vospominaniia, 1881–1922 (Berlin: Gamaiun, 1923), 71, 216, 217, 250, 251, which are colored by his strenuous endeavor to unmask the elusive provocative activities of Landezen, Kensinskii, the former inmate of the Schlüsselburg prison Starodvorskii, Bzhozovskii, and, finally, Azef. 35 See the curious remark in the diary of E. A. Sviatopolk-Mirskaia, ed. A. L. Sidorov, Istoricheskie zapiski (Moscow), no. 77 (1965): 257: “The other day Lopukhin told Pepka [her husband, the minister Sviatopolk-Mirskii] that Zverev, being a professor, was on the payroll of the Police Department as a secret agent.”

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However, whereas Tolstoy gives the barest description of interiors, Bely, in contrast, arranges the interior in great detail, decorating it in specific colors and to it “adding sound” (ozvuchivaia). A “fragment” of old Count Bezukhov’s drawing room, clear-cut in its laconicism, is woven into a verbose ­description of Senator Ableukhov’s drawing room: “The gold pier-glasses swallowed everything up on all sides in their greenish mirror surfaces . . . and mirror threw to mirror its reflection” (II, 34). Compare this with Tolstoy: “A drawing room with mirrors . . . repeating several times the reflections.” The ­unpleasant ­awkwardness that Pierre feels in the reception room of his dying father is expressed in the attitude he assumes: “He sat down . . . placing his large hands on his symmetrically planted knees, in the naive attitude of an Egyptian statue.” And the displeasure of the senator, obliged to sit through a ball at the Tsukatovs’, expresses itself in approximately the same attitude: “Apollon Apollonovich sat solemnly like a stick . . . his little legs with their sinewy calves rested perpendicularly on the carpet, the lower parts formed, in relation to the upper parts, ninety-degree angles [symmetry!]; Apollon Apollonovich looked like an Egyptian figure drawn on the carpet” (I, 238–39). However, the Tolstoyan “fragments” take on new semantic features in Bely’s text. The green mirrors, as we have already said, are identified in the novel with the “waters of the Neva swarming with bacteria”; in other words, the Ableukhov drawing room is a microcosm of the kingdom of the dead, whose ruler is the ­senator-Pluto. The frozen attitude of the “Egyptian” is ­indissolubly linked with the senator’s love of symmetry, which will be d ­ iscussed later. These few “fragments” from War and Peace recede before the huge number of ­“fragments” characterizing Karenin and superimposed on the senator: the senator’s big ears, which are mentioned in almost the first pages of the novel (Karenin’s big ears ­“discovered” by Anna), his love of order—the ­establishment of a lettering and numbering system for all the shelves and little shelves, planimetry and symmetry (Karenin’s “very strict neatness”), his habit of breaking bundles of pencils to suppress a nervous or excited condition (“the bad habit of clasping his hands and cracking his fingers,” which always calms Karenin), and so forth. All these characteristics create the scheme for the novel’s family story line in preparation for the m ­ eeting of Anna Petrovna and the grown-up Nikolai, which parodies the meeting of Anna Arkadʹevna and the little Serezha. At home or out visiting, the senator repeats the gestures of Professor Bugaev36—feeling his pulse or clutching his heart from time to time (I, 36, 36 See A. Belyi, Nachalo veka (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo ­khudozhestvennoi kulʹtury, 1933), 246: “There [at the university] he seemed so young and healthy, but at home he turned blue, gasped for breath, clasping his pulse.”

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

213 twice, 218; II, 203). In the department, like Professor Bugaev at the university, he collects his strength, although this strength is different from the professor’s “rush” of good health since it is regarded “in the Newtonian sense” as an “occult power” (I, 67). In the department the senator has grown into a kind of center of the universe: “Here he seemed to be a point of ­energy-­radiating power” (I, 67).37 By virtue of Newton’s law of gravity—regarded as occult by Blavatsky38—this center (the senator) attracts all terrestrial bodies. Such supernatural power also raises the senator to the status of some kind of deity. As a result, a simple “fragment” from the everyday life of Professor Bugaev takes on a completely new semantic feature (supernatural, godlike) and the family story line of the novel crosses with the mystical-theosophical line. But besides this “fragment” from everyday life, through antithesis a highly significant “fragment” from the philosophical thinking of Professor Bugaev is also superimposed on the senator. For Professor Bugaev “suffering was a bridge to the highest forms of harmony”;39 for the senator the highest form of harmony is pure contemplation, which leads man away from everything sensual and thus soothes him. Clearly the origin of this difference lies in the senator’s attachment to Pythagoras, for whom cerebral contemplation became the greatest virtue of purification and transformed the contemplator, in Plato’s words, into a “geometricizing god.” The figures contemplated by the senator (“pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, trapeziums” [I, 30])—­important for the Pythagoreans— lead to the mathematical mysticism of Pythagoras since they all originate in the number, which for the Pythagoreans is e­ verything. It is not accidental that the square joins these figures: “After the straight line the square was the figure that, of all the symmetries, most soothed him [the senator]” (I, 30). In Pythagorean thinking the figure of the square originates in significant numbers and is

37 “The Pythagoreans regarded the universe as a sphere; at its center was fire. . . . The fiery seed was the original unit. . . . From this unit all things sprang just as from the number One unlimited numbers spring.” N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 279. 38 “Isaac Newton . . . was a thorough believer in magnetism as taught by Paracelsus, Van Helmont, and by the fire-philosophers in general. No-one will presume to deny that his doctrine of universal space and attraction is purely a theory of magnetism.” See Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 177 (my emphasis). Here, in fact, Blavatsky mixes the Newtonian law of gravity with the Pythagoreans’ mystical designation of the cosmos: a circle with a point in the center. In the novel not only the senator but the city also is designated by this symbol: “From this mathematical point . . . Petersburg declares . . . that it is: from there, from this point . . . the circular flies swiftly.” “Prologue,” Petersburg, 12. 39 Belyi, Nachalo veka, 42.

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considered sacred.40 The mystical symbol of the square (tetraktys of the decad) was designated by the point (1), by the line (2) originating in the point, by the plane (3) originating in the line and, finally, by the solid body (4) originating in the plane. And all the figures add up to the decad: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10.41 This explains the soothing effect of this figure on the senator. Certain lexemes of the Pythagorean vocabulary are scattered ­throughout the entire novel, but they are concentrated specifically in the subchapter “Squares, Parallelepipeds, Cubes” from which the examples are taken: “Above all he loved the rectilinear prospect: this prospect reminded him of time flowing between two vital points,” “The senator’s soul became inspired when the lacquered cube cut the line of the Nevsky,” “For hours on end Apollon Apollonovich took joy in the small four-cornered walls as he sat in the center of his black . . . cube,” and so forth. In this subchapter the senator’s speech ­characteristics are completely absorbed by the expressive vocabulary of the erudite narrator. It is as if the narrator is playing out the scene of the ­senator’s conversation with himself, a conversation in which, in fact, the narrator’s ­attitude to life and his point of view are defined. The phenomena of “love,” “inspiration,” and “enjoyment” in the senator’s contemplation of all these shapes and figures are a manifestation of the narrator’s t­heosophical view of the world. In the senator it only serves to emphasize once again the divinity of abstract thought in relation to earthly, concrete sufferings. Here, almost from the opening pages of the novel, the family story crosses with the m ­ ystical-theosophical. However, the function of this crossing lies in p ­ reparing for the uncrowning, by means of parody, of the senator in all his divine “hypostases” or Pythagorean “reincarnations” (Apollo, Zeus, Peter, Pluto, and Saturn). In the senator’s contemplations, yet another characteristic emerges that relates him to Pythagoras: his reactionary aristocratism. Great is Apollon Apollonovich’s contempt for the “myriapod” on the Nevsky and for the “human swarm numbering many thousands” on the islands. He cannot bear priests’ sons—“he was always aware of a bad smell coming from their feet” (I, 239). This is a direct allusion to Pobedonostsev, 40 “Some of these figures had a peculiarly solemn significance. For instance four . . . was held sacred by the Pythagoreans. It is the perfect square. . . . It is the emblem of moral justice and divine equity geometrically expressed; and the ineffable name of Him, which name ­otherwise would remain unutterable, was replaced by this sacred number 4, the most binding and solemn oath . . . the Tetraktys.” Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 9. See also Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2:158; 4:174; 5:113, 5:420, 5:421. 41 See E. Zeller, “Tetraktys of the Decad,” in Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy ­(Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1969), 52.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

an allusion followed by others: his anti-Semitism,42 his reactionary political activity, his former career (the senator, like Pobedonostsev, was a professor of law). However, almost nothing is known of the senator’s activities. The ­lightning-quick circulars, the “Phlegethonian waves of paper” emanating from this “bat” with huge “wing”-ears are metaphors unrelated to specific historical facts.43 Bely removes Pobedonostsev from the historical setting and, making use of the idea of reaction embodied in Pobedonostsev, realizes it symbolically in the senator. The senator-“Pobedonostsev,” like the senator-“Pythagoras,” is godlike: he can be likened to Zeus hurling down thunderbolts and to Pluto causing “dozens and dozens of catastrophes” with his “Phlegethonian waves,” and he is also the “godlike Ableukhov of the Kirghiz Kaisatsk horde.”44 However, it is only in the astral world of dream that his distant Mongol origin is revealed—a Mongol origin so clearly manifest, in real life, in the features of the director of the Police Department, Lopukhin,45 a contemporary of the senator (cf. the identical initials and the paronym: A. A. Ableukhov / A. A. Lopukhin). Lopukhin was really a “man of Plehve’s school,”46 as the senator often liked to say of himself. But A. A. Lopukhin is only a person bearing the same surname as the Kasogan (Cherkessian) prince Rededi, nicknamed Lopukha (cf. the Senator’s nickname “Ukhov”) and who was the forefather of the Lopukhins, a family that died out in 1873. This family of the “high nobility” (II, 54) is reincarnated in the Turanian Ableukhovs:47 “Nikolai Ableukhov galloped into this holy Rusʹ on a stallion of the steppe . . . [and] was incarnated in the blood 42 See note 27. 43 Compare “Pobedonostsev spread his owl wings over Russia / And there was neither day nor night / But only—the shadow of the huge wings.” A. Blok, Vozmezdie. This is not the first time that common imagery (the owl’s huge wings and the bat’s huge ears) has been observed in both poets. Having read Bely’s article “Lug zelenyi” (Vesy, no. 8 [1905]: 5–12), Blok was amazed by the similarity of the title and thoughts of this article with the second chapter of “Bezvremenʹe,” on which he was working at the time. See Blok’s letter to Bely, 2 October 1905, in Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 8:135. 44 This is a paraphrase of the first two lines of Derzhavin’s “Felitsa.” 45 “He [Lopukhin] looked at Burtzeff with his slightly slanting eyes which showed the distant traces of Mongolian blood.” B. Nikolayevsky, Aseff the Spy: Russian Terrorist and Police Stool (New York: Garden City, 1934), 13. 46 Together with Zubatov and Shtiurmer, Lopukhin was a close colleague of Plehve. Director of the Police Department under Plehve, he continued to occupy this post until the eve of the issuing of the Manifesto of 17 October 1905, after which he retired. See Vitte, Vospominaniia, 92, 93. 47 “The Turanian was evidently the savage and nomadic Caucasian.” Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 576 (my emphasis).

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of a Russian nobleman” (Nikolai’s dream, II, 56). In the play of the ­paronyms Lopukhin/Ableukhov, Blavatsky’s theosophical theory of ­reincarnation and the migration of the Aryans crosses with the mysticism of Solovʹev’s pan-­ Mongolism.48

Terrorists and Provocateurs: Dudkin, Nikolai Ableukhov, and Lippanchenko In Petersburg the actions of the terrorists and provocateurs are considered from the viewpoint of the years 1911–13 (the years in which the novel was written), when the fact that the Police Department played the part of provocateur had long been common knowledge. For this reason the later events of 1906–9 are superimposed on the real events of 1905, which contain in themselves, as in a kernel, all their further growth and development. By March 1905, in the wake of the mass arrests of terrorists, ­confusion and skepticism had begun to break out among the untouched Social Revolutionaries. By the end of that year Tatarov’s activities as a provocateur had been exposed. Information about Azef ’s activities had come out as early as 1902, but his authority was so great that the denunciations were not believed right up until 1908, when he was exposed by Burtsev. All these events were reflected in the novel in a manner peculiar to Bely, who perceived them as some kind of mystical sign of the times. Numerous “fragments” of people, character, appearance, ­autobiography, ideology, and actions of terrorists (Gershuni, Savinkov, Nazarov, Kachura, Dulebov) and provocateurs (Tatarov, Azef ) change places ­kaleidoscopically, ­concatenating with “fragments” of certain characteristics of the traditional heroes of the Petersburg theme in nineteenth-century literature. Thus, the “wretched habitation” of the raznochinets Dudkin differs very little from the “cupboard room” of Raskolʹnikov. In his home life, he is r­eminiscent of Poprishchin, who “spent most of his time lying on the bed,” or of Raskolʹnikov, who “threw ­himself onto the divan and sat a whole hour without moving,” “had dinner and again stretched out on the divan.” Before committing the murder, Dudkin, like Ivan, talks with his double. He commits the murder in Smerdiakovian fashion and then goes out of his mind like Evgenii, Poprishchin, and Ivan. By way of this complicated dotted line, Bely brings about a new fusion that links the 48 “It has generally been agreed among Orientalists that the Aryans 3000 years B.C. were still in the steppes east of the Caspian. . . . Two kindred streams began to flow, one northward over the Caucasus, and the other westward over Asia Minor and Europe.” Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 433 (my emphasis).

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

highly contradictory “fragments” of c­ ontemporary events that form the basis for the development of the novel’s adventure-detective story line. In the novel Dudkin, like Raskolʹnikov, suffers from insomnia, but, unlike Raskolʹnikov, he does not dream of “Africa, Egypt, and some oasis or other,” and, unlike Poprishchin, he does not “discuss the affairs of Spain.” Dudkin hallucinates, and on the yellow wallpaper of his little room there appears the “fateful face with very narrow Mongol eyes . . . shot with saffron yellow reflections. Now a Semite, now a Mongol . . . directed his gaze full of hate. . . . Through the tobacco smoke the Semite or Mongol moved his yellow lips” (I, 57, 123; II, 63, 101). The carrier of this yellowness, which is masked in the “Turanian” Ableukhovs, is Lippanchenko. The reflections of his face envelop Dudkin and pour into his soul.49 Dudkin himself, apart from his black mustache, has no distinguishing features. The mustache substitutes for Dudkin’s face just as lavishly described faces substitute for other characters, because Dudkin is only an emanation of Lippanchenko who, in his turn, is engendered by the senator-“Zeus.”50 In the relationship of Lippanchenko-Azef toward his medium, Dudkin’s two-sidedness is manifested: he is Gershuni (“From the Yakutsk region I made a successful escape; I was taken out in a barrel of cabbage” [I, 116]), and, as such, Lippanchenko “flatters” him (II, 101).51 But he is also Savinkov and, as such, only a pawn in the hands of a skillful player. There is nothing in common between this man and the former courageous terrorist. ­Dudkin-Savinkov is a broken man, tormented by skepticism and “seeking a new religion” that could “justify terrorism for him.”52 The desire to wipe out the senator is a ­distant echo of Nietzscheanism as expressed in Dudkin-Savinkov’s look of 49 In his Reminiscences of A. A. Blok, Bely writes, “The terror of the East is an outpouring of the yellow Chinese soul into our soul.” See Epopeia (Berlin), no. 4 (1923): 140, my emphasis. 50 After the arrest of Gershuni in 1903, Azef became head of the “Organization for Action” (Boevaia organizatsiia) and acted on the authority of Plehve, the minister for Home Affairs, and of Plehve’s close colleague, Lopukhin, the director of the Police Department. Senator Ableukhov was also a “man of Plehve’s school,” and from his head, as from the head of Zeus, were born various Pallas Athenes. One of these was the student with the mustache, the emanation of Lippanchenko (I, 47). 51 “In Ratayeff’s opinion Gershuni possessed the power of influencing people almost to the point of hypnotism; and Aseff would seem to have fallen under his spell.” B. Nikolayevsky, Aseff the Spy, 64. 52 This information about Savinkov was communicated to Bely by S. P. Remizova. Savinkov secretly visited the Remizovs and asked them to tell Merezhkovskii that he wished to meet him. Fearing the police, Merezhkovskii refused this request. “Remizova’s words depicted Savinkov at the end of 1905 just as I portrayed the terrorist.” See A. Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Leningrad: Izdatelʹstvo Pisatelei, 1934), 69–70.

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hate on encountering the senator; “the Stranger’s eyes widened, began to shine, flashed” (I, 34, 36, 46).53 In Dudkin’s hatred are concealed “fragments” of the active Nietzscheanism of George O’Brien, the main hero of RopshinSavinkov’s novel. George hates the governor, “his steely eyes, his sunken cheeks.”54 (Cf. “the senator’s stony eyes surrounded by dark green hollows,” I, 18.) Like Dudkin, George remembers his spell in exile: “I remember I was in the north . . . in a Norwegian fishing settlement. . . . Bare cliffs, gray sky. . . . The fishermen in leather jackets haul up their wet nets. It smells of fish and blubber oil.”55 (Cf. “He, Dudkin, thought, but no, the thoughts thought themselves; and they revealed a picture: tarpaulins, ropes, herrings. . . . Between the bags a worker dressed in black leather kept on hoisting the bag and stood out against the fog of flying surfaces” [I, 42].) It is as if Dudkin’s “picture” continues the action begun in the preceding picture: there the fishermen in leather jackets haul in the heavy, wet nets, here the workman in the leather coat loads (keeps on hoisting) the heavy bag; there it smells of fish, here herrings are mentioned; in both “pictures” the weather is dull. If “fragments” of O’Brien’s active Nietzscheanism erupt in Dudkin’s ­passive hatred, “fragments” of the coachman Vania,56 who has grave doubts as to whether terror is justified, emerge in Dudkin’s confusion. This ­secondary character in Ropshin’s novel—the antithesis to George—is a practicing Christian. Vania often quotes from the Gospels and is very familiar with Serafim Sarovskii.57 Dudkin, too, is a believer: he “wears a cross under his shirt and a little icon depicting Serafim Sarovskii’s prayer hangs above his bed” (II, 62). However, instead of the Gospels Dudkin reads “the history of gnosticism, Gregory of Nyssa, the Apocalypse” (I, 116) and, later, is familiar with the teaching of certain schools of “experience” (II, 88). In other words, Dudkin is the Savinkov who is disillusioned with Nietzsche and is searching for a new religion in theosophy and Solovʹevism; the new religion is discovered at last in anthroposophy. Here, undoubtedly, an important “fragment” from Bely’s own life (the milestones in his tormenting search that pointed the path to Steiner) 53 At the “World of Art” exhibition, Remizova pointed out Savinkov to Bely. Savinkov’s “two piercing, shining eyes” made Bely avert his gaze. (The senator also turned from Dudkin’s gaze.) Ibid., 77. 54 V. Ropshin, Konʹ blednyi (St. Petersburg: Izdatelʹstvo Shipovnik, 1909), 78. 55 Ibid., 79. 56 In Chernov’s opinion Savinkov-Ropshin “reflected in the dialogues of Konʹ blednyi [Vania’s and George’s dialogues] something of the deepest experiences of such people as Kaliaev and Sazonov.” V. N. Chernov, Pered burei: Vospominaniia (New York: Izdatelʹstvo imeni Chekhova, 1953), 294. 57 Ropshin, Konʹ blednyi, 63.

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is ­superimposed on the previous “fragments.” The signs along this path are codified in the significant lexemes “gnosticism” (theosophy), “Apocalypse” (Solovʹev), and “experiences of the schools” (Steiner).58 This “fragment” from Bely’s life is also superimposed on another terrorist—the “theoretician” Nikolai Ableukhov. But in Nikolai, Dudkin’s former Nietzscheanism gives way to “Kantianism.” Nikolai is not only a theoretician; he is also a man of action. These two concepts—theory and practice—cannot be reconciled with Social Revolutionary principles,59 and the fact that they can be r­econciled with Nikolai’s demands should be understood metaphorically (Bely as the ­theoretician of symbolism; Bely, as poet and writer, putting the theory into practice; mention will be made later of other features of Nikolai’s resemblance to Bely). Nikolai, as theoretician, distorts Kant’s call to duty. According to Kant, duty, in all circumstances, is absolute, independent of transient, ­subjective feelings. It is true that the objective content of duty is a variable category, but duty is always subject to conscience (“the categorical imperative of moral law”). Nikolai, as “theoretician,” prompted by his “failure in life,” promises the party to carry out a terroristic act on his own father. Nikolai, as “man of action,” is a hyperbolization of a terror whose ethics are based on specific moral principles.60 Nikolai’s “Kantianism” is a piece of bitter irony by Bely at his own expense. The irony becomes most poignant in the parody of Bely’s own humiliating “failure in life” (the romance of Bely and Liubovʹ Blok / the “romance” of Nikolai and Sof ʹia Likhutina). Nikolai is a parody of Hermann (“Queen of Spades”) and Harlequin (Balaganchik). If, in Dudkin, the novel’s adventure-detective line crosses with the mystical-theosophical line, in Nikolai the “love” line crosses with the ­ adventure-detective line. At first sight the story is simple in the extreme: Lippanchenko decides that the time has come to kill the senator and, through 58 The “experiences” of which Dudkin speaks are inextricably linked with the experiences to which Bely was subjected in 1912 in Munich, in Steiner’s “school.” See Belyi, “Iz ­vospominanii,” 122–23. 59 The SR theoreticians (Chernov, Gots) did not commit acts of terrorism. The terrorists regarded them with skepticism. See Chernov’s opinions of Savinkov in Pered burei, 293. See also Petersburg: “I [Dudkin] am a colonel in the movement, [. . .] but you, Nikolai Apollonovich, with your principles and your intelligence, you’re an NCO [. . .] because you’re a theoretician.” 60 There was no similar case in the practice of Russian terrorism. Savinkov writes that the terrorist Kaliaev put off the murder of Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich because his wife and three children were in the coach with him. Vnorovskii acted in the same way in the case of Admiral Dubasov. See B. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista (Kharkov: Proletarii, 1926), 55, 56. It is interesting that Bely anticipated the ideal possibility of the theme of parricide because of ideological considerations (see Babelʹ ’s story “Pisʹmo”).

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his intermediary Dudkin, he reminds Nikolai of the promise he has made to carry out the terroristic act on his father. In reality, the story becomes much more involved, apparently through a mere trifle. On handing over the bomb, Dudkin forgets to give Nikolai Lippanchenko’s letter, and while the letter passes from person to person and does not reach the addressee the action stands still. However, the expected denouement does not take place even when the letter is in Nikolai’s hands, for, at this decisive moment, the story line breaks off ­completely and makes a sharp turn in an unexpected direction, thereby destroying the expectations created by the novel. Lippanchenko’s ­commission is rejected by Nikolai and, like a boomerang, it comes down fatally, by means of Dudkin, on that very same Lippanchenko. Thus, Lippanchenko’s ­presence is strongly felt at the very beginning of the novel immediately after “Pallas Athene—the Stranger with the mustache” (Dudkin, the emanation of Lippanchenko) is born from the head of the senator-“Zeus,” and at the end when the senator ceases to be a “point of energy-radiating power.” Bely opens the novel with the act of creation: “Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of honorable stock: he had Adam for his ancestor. And this is not the main thing: more important still is the fact that one of this honorable stock was Shem, the forefather of the Semitic, Hessitic, and red-skinned ­peoples” (I, 15). This clearly bears witness to the mythological cultural model on which Bely laid a theosophical cover.61 The senator’s “Pallas Athenes”62 (myths about monstrous provocateurs as a manifestation of Solovʹev’s pan-Mongolism), which emerge in the first pages of the novel, immediately destroy the grandeur of the beginning. The end of the “Pallas Athenes” is obviously meant to be taken as the complete annihilation of the beginning, as a parody: Lippanchenko’s corpse is Peter’s horse that had once reared up (“You, O Russia, are like a steed!” [I, 130]), and Dudkin, doomed, having a face at last, but mad, is Peter himself. Most terrible of all, of course, is the fact that the activities of the ­provocateurs did have a basis in history since beneath the novel’s mystical cover of theosophy and pan-Mongolism are concealed, as sometimes also ­happens in the case of myths, real historical events. For this reason it is of no importance that from the chronological point of view the Azef presented in Bely’s novel was the Azef not of 1905 but of 1908–9. 61 In Blavatsky’s theosophical teaching a distinction is drawn between Adam-Kadmon, a purely spiritual being, and Adam “the second,” in his pride striving to become like the Creator (cf. the senator-“Zeus,” “Apollo,’’ “Pluto”). See Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 297. “Sim” (Simorgh) is the most ancient Persian phoenix born many millions of years before Adam. See Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 3:396, 4:188. 62 In one “Pallas Athene” is present the semanticized sound “oo” (Doodkin); in the second, the sound “bl”/“pl” (Lippanchenko), both of which characterize Senator Ableukhov.

Fragmentary “Prototypes” in Andrey Bely’s Novel Petersburg

Lippanchenko-Azef is a collective name bringing together all the ­ rovocateurs (Starodvorskii, the former inmate of Schlüsselburg; Kensinskii; p Bzhozovskii et al.), including Tatarov.63 But there can be no doubt that of all these it was Azef who served as the source for Bely’s creation Lippanchenko. Lippanchenko’s unpleasant appearance completely corresponds to the description of Azef given by his contemporaries;64 the name Bely thought up for him is almost identical to one of his undercover names.65 Azef the frequenter of cafés chantants, variety shows, and operetta66 is replaced in the novel by Azef the violinist picking out a languorous, old-fashioned romance by Glinka. Several Social Revolutionaries considered that under his exterior coarseness was hidden a “responsive and tender person”:67 in Petersburg he plays dolls with the cook’s daughter. Even a detail like the double image of his family life is taken up in the novel: his lover is the unattractive, Russified German Zoia Fleish.68 All this pays “history” its due. In essence Lippanchenko’s significance is entirely concentrated in his diabolical activity, which takes on a cosmic character by virtue of his multinationality. He is a khokhol (Ukrainian) not only because he has a Ukrainian surname but also because he hides under the name of Gogol’s Greek, Mavrokordato, who has stepped straight down from the picture in Sobakevich’s drawing room. But instead of Mavrokordato’s red trousers, Lippanchenko—for compositional considerations—is enveloped in “yellow steam.” The hellish fire of the color red is preserved only in his tie. Bely, of course, well understood that the Gogolian personage who steps out of his portrait presents an exceptional capacity for associative links not 63 Tatarov’s betrayal, which paralyzed the terrorists’ activity “from March to October 1905” (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 14), is replaced in Petersburg by Azef ’s betrayal. 64 Azef ’s appearance was repulsive: “fat, a puffy, swarthy yellow face, a skull narrowed towards the top, dark chestnut hair, thick lips,” and so on. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 22. See also V. Burtsev, Borʹba za svobodnuiu Rossiiu, 265; and “Azef,” compiled by Bely from the diaries of the provocateur, with letters of the Okhrana and secret instructions, in Za kulisami okhrannogo otdeleniia, ed. V. Tuchkin (Berlin: H. Caspari, 1910), 17. 65 In 1910 Azef was living in Berlin under the name Lipchenko. See B. Nikolayevskii, Konets Azefa (Berlin: “Petropolis,” 1931), 10. Bely was amazed by this coincidence: “Could I then know that Azef was living in Berlin at that very same time [when the novel was being written] under the pseudonym Lipchenko . . . and if you take into consideration that the conception of Lippanchenko, like a delirium, was constructed on the sounds l-p-p, then the coincidence appears truly striking.” “Vospominaniia,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow), nos. 27–28 (1937): 454. 66 Nikolayevskii, Konets Azefa, 25. 67 Tuchkin, Za kulisami, 18. 68 In the novel Lippanchenko-Azef treats the woman he lives with in a discourteous manner. In reality, Azef left his wife for a German woman whom he met in one of the Petersburg cafés chantants in 1907. They lived, inseparable, until Azef ’s death. ­Nikolayevskii, Konets Azefa, 11, 24.

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only with the otherworldly world and fateful magic but also with terrible destruction (cf. Gogol’s “The Portrait”). Like a werewolf, Lippanchenko“Mavrokordato,” “engraved full length,” takes on another appearance, now and again propagating himself in numerous nationalities, “in Tatars, Japanese, or oriental People” (I, 119). Lippanchenko’s multiplying masks are enciphered in the sound “y”—the sign of the plural (“Before him [Dudkin] sat some kind of ‘y’” [I, 58]) or a specific collective noun (“The Stranger [Dudkin] began to think [about Lippanchenko]: ugh, vileness—Tartary” [I, 58]). For this reason Lippanchenko’s other masks—the “Semite” (Azef was a Jew) or the “Mongol”—are also perceived as collective. Taken all together, they too raise Lippanchenko into a complex symbol of pan-Mongolism. Bely took pains to christen Lippanchenko with Tatarov’s first name (Nikolai) and have him killed exactly as Tatarov was killed, with a ­“metallic” object in his own house. The only difference is that Dudkin-“Nazarov” disemboweled Lippanchenko with scissors (nozhnitsami), whereas the ­ real Nazarov stabbed Tatarov with a knife (nozh). Thus, the murder of Lippanchenko-“Azef ” is adjusted to the provocateur Tatarov’s murder, which took place in January 1906. Like all the characters in Petersburg, Lippanchenko is a conventional ­character. The conventionality of all the novel’s characters is emphasized by deliberately complicating the perception of Petersburg’s visible-tangible world in which the characters’ actions unfold. Bely accomplishes this in the ­following ways: a. The superimposition of fragmentary “prototypes” of the traditional Petersburg theme and its personages onto the contemporary Petersburg and its characters b. The concatenation of “fragments” of the otherworldly and astral worlds and “fragments” of mystical characters with characters and a city already weighed down by the superimposition mentioned in (a) c. The parodistic degradation of these otherworldly and astral worlds and the characters inhabiting them d. The deliberate displacement of certain historical events taking place in Petersburg and the obliteration of the historicity of the people involved in them e. The imparting of meaning to a specific sound and specific color, thereby raising the city and its characters alike into symbols But the deliberate conventionality of reality is only a means, a path leading to Bely’s sacred goal: the fantastic nature of the otherworldly world. And if for Viacheslav Ivanov the fantastic nature of such a world was higher than reality (“A realibus ad realiora”), for Bely it was the highest reality, “A realibus ad realissima.”

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg ADAM WEINER

It was a major concept of Bely’s aesthetic thinking that positive cultural change occurs only as the result of theurgic creativity. By theurgy (“divine action”) Bely meant an activity that was purposeful and ritualistic, a ­striving for ­contact with God through the magic of incantation. Petersburg itself, ­however, describes something quite different: “idle cerebral play.” Almost i­mmediately, at the end of the novel’s first chapter, the narrator confesses to being an idle creator, and we can apprehend Bely’s anxiety that the novel will fail to bring about the desired spiral movement, instead becoming bogged down in its own demonic categories, as circularity and self-­referentiality undo the ­creative word. Bely scholars have argued that Petersburg ­nonetheless achieves the spiral movement of what Bely considered “eternal books,” and that Bely “leaves us in no doubt at all that we as readers—and he as ­narrator—have moved beyond the book yet have been able to do so only in and through the book.”1 Bely himself stated that the novel becomes not a theurgic spiral but a ­diabolurgic or charmed circle, as every movement that explodes from any of its potentially creative points collapses back into those points at the close.2 The author’s ­retrospective pessimism has helped shape the argument I present here, in which I will describe Bely’s cosmic anxiety over the ultimate i­mplications of his Russian symbolist aesthetics of life-art (zhiznetvorchestvo). It is as if the   1 Robert Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 144.   2 Andrei Belyi, Nachalo veka (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelʹstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1933); and Nina Berberova, “A Memoir and a Comment: The ‘Circle’ of Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: A Critical Review, ed. Gerald Janecek (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 115–16. See Khodasevich, to whom Bely showed a diagram representing the structure of Petersburg as two intersecting circles. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Andrei Belyi,” in Koleblemyi trenozhnik: Izbrannoe, ed. G. E. Velikovskaia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1991), 304.

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author, from a distance, is watching with hope and horror (mostly horror) while the narrator populates his fictional universe with evil beings designed to cross over the paper bridge of the novel—and walk straight into real life. By stressing the possibility, even the necessity, of incursions by ­two-­dimensional (artistic) beings into the three-dimensional (“real”) world, Bely enters into conspicuous conflict with the church. His insistence on the book’s three-dimensional form opposes the Orthodox Church’s i­nterdiction against three-dimensional artistic representation, or graven images, toward which it has traditionally taken a hard line, deeming such forms to be ­idolatrous and demonic. Bely in fact takes his antidoctrinal audacity even further by persistently maintaining the presence of a fourth dimension, from which the Satanic invasions and possessions portrayed in the novel are launched. Bely carves even the White Domino, his Christ figure and the novel’s one potential source of goodness, out of wood, and in so doing challenges the Orthodox iconoclastic position on graven images. Petersburg’s generally n ­ egative ­representation of the church reflects a conflict in early ­twentieth-­century Russia between the clergy and intelligentsia, as well as a widespread exodus from the church on the part of Russia’s artists. Lev Tolstoy had just demanded e­ xcommunication from the Orthodox Church. The Russian symbolists, led by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Zinaida Gippius, who formed their Religio-Philosophical Assembly in the early years of the century, while passionately concerned with religious issues, tended to reject church doctrine, which they often characterized as ossified and useless dogma.3 Vasilii Rozanov explained that those who sought truth in spiritual things were l­eaving the church, where it was “cold,” for heterodoxies and sects, where it was considerably ­warmer.4 Bely, too, was questing for spiritual heat, but a basic attachment to the Christian worldview would not allow him to ­portray religious deviations as more desirable than Orthodoxy, no matter how he yearned for spiritual progress. His first novel, The Silver Dove, exposed readers to the malignant “warmth” of a Satanic cult, and the cool treatment of the church in Petersburg reflects Bely’s desire to return to an occult or a­ postolic—in short, a more direct—experience of Christianity. The symbolist alternative to religion, “life-art,” offered a compromise between what Bely considered ossified church doctrine and its demonic ­corruption in cult and heresy. For Bely the most important figure by far in   3 Donald Treadgold, “Russian Orthodoxy and Society,” in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 29.   4 Ibid., 30.

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the symbolist religious context was the protosymbolist poet and religious ­philosopher Vladimir Solovʹev, who also played an important part in Bely’s personal life. Solovʹev considered art “a divine action, or ‘theurgy,’” “artistic creation [being] an equivalent of divine creation”; theurgic art had the dual purposes of “self-creation in imitation of Christ as well as the ‘organization of reality’ through ‘man’s realization of the divine principle in empirical reality.’”5 Bely’s aesthetics follow Solovʹev in his slogan that “art is the creation of life” and in his thesis that artistic creation always has a religious aspect.6 Bely’s essay “The Line, the Circle, the Spiral—of Symbolism” (1912) argues that symbolism is the “union of theosophy and theurgy” (theosophy being, for Bely, the ideal philosophy, and theurgy the ideal form of evolution), and that the symbolist’s goal is to become godlike by “the act of creating in God oneself and others.”7 Of particular interest for its help in shaping Bely’s Petersburg is Solovʹev’s last great work, The Three Conversations.8 The Three Conversations, which takes the unique form of a dramatic prose dialogue in three parts ending with an apocalypse, is an investigation into the nature of evil and the role it has yet to play in society and history. Solovʹev presents his dialogue as an attempt to answer one of the most troubling questions of Christianity: “Is evil only a ­natural shortage, an imperfection that vanishes in line with the growth of good, or is it an actual force, taking control of our world by means of temptations, so that the success of our struggle with it requires that we have a point of support [tochka opory] in another order of being?”9 The answer is that evil is both an absence and a force. Bely takes Solovʹev’s “point of support in another order of being” in Petersburg and transforms it into the “point of view” and the point of inspiration of the novel’s world: thus, Three Conversations and Petersburg both open on the image of a “point” (tochka). But Bely will cast doubt on the nature of such points, as well as the “order of being”—in Bely’s language, the   5 Irina Paperno, introduction to Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 7.   6 Ibid., 16.   7 Andrei Belyi, “Liniia, krug, spiralʹ—simvolizma,” Trudy i dni 4–5 (July–October 1912): 20 (henceforth, “Line” in the text). Here Bely is in harmony with the symbolist aesthetics of Nikolai Berdiaev, who defined theurgy not only as “the collaborative act of man together with God—the god act, the godman’s creativity” but also as the artist’s “collaborative continuation with God of Creation.” See his “Smysl tvorchestva: Opyt opravdaniia cheloveka,” in Filosofiia tvorchestva, kul ʹtury i iskusstva v dvukh tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 236–37. Cf. also 236, “Symbolist art is the bridge . . . to theurgic art.”   8 Vladimir Solovʹev, Tri razgovora (New York: Chekhov Publishing House, 1954).   9 Ibid., 19.

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“fourth dimension”—that encompasses them. And if the buttressing point in Petersburg’s struggle with evil turns out to belong to the Devil’s realm, then it is nothing but a black hole, and the struggle will fail, the novelistic cosmos swallowed up in the end by the hole that engendered it. Solovʹev begins his first conversation by describing an imaginary new ­religion that is supposedly taking root in the Russian provinces. The practitioners of this strange sect, called “Hole-worshippers” (dyromoliai) ­ drill a hole in a dark corner of their hut, place their lips against the hole, and repeat, “My hut, by hole, save me!”10 So long as the Hole-worshippers call their huts “huts” and holes “holes,” says Solovʹev, they remain insanely, but harmlessly, mistaken in their faith, having but ridiculously simplified the ­worship of God. But the sect falls into heresy and evil when they begin to call their hut “the kingdom of God on earth” and their hole “the new Gospel.”11 Solovʹev then explains his parable by shifting to his real opponent in The Three Conversations: those rationalist thinkers who preach Christian values ­without having any real faith in Christ. “Although ‘intelligent’ Holeworshippers call themselves not Hole-worshippers, but Christians, and call their faith the Gospels, still Christianity without Christ and the Gospels, that is the good news, without the very good that is worthy of being spread, namely without actual resurrection into the fullness of blissful life—this is the very same empty space as the hole drilled in a peasant’s hut. It would not be necessary to speak about all of this if the fake Christian flag that tempts and confuses many of the weak were not raised above the rationalist hole.”12 Such rationalists, as Solovʹev’s spokesman, a certain Mr. Z, explains in the third conversation, ­represent the anti-Christian spirit, for in “throwing out of the Gospel text its very essence”—that is, Christ’s identity as the Son of God and his promise of resurrection for the faithful—they not only worship an absence, a hole, but also an impostor, claiming that their modified faith is a truer, more enlightened, kinder version of Christianity.13 Z illustrates his point during his reading of a text he says was written by a deceased holy man, “A Short Tale about the Antichrist” (“Kratkaia povestʹ ob Antikhriste”). In this apocalyptic narrative, the Antichrist spreads evil by writing books—a fact that will have obvious implications for Bely’s demonic novel, Petersburg. The work that raises him to absolute power over the earth is an exemplar of 10 Ibid., 20. 11 Ibid., 21. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 185.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

the sort of “Christian” rationalist thought that obviously enraged Solovʹev—a book delineating a Christian worldview “without once mentioning Christ.”14 For Solovʹev, then, evil is not merely the hole left by the absence of good but also the active will of this hole to gape ever larger, devouring ­increasingly more good. And evil grows by the seductive power of imposture, by t­ empting God’s creatures to resist his goodness in the name of something easier to believe in, closer at hand. Z defines anti-Christianity as “not simple unbelief, the refutation of Christianity, or materialism . . . but . . . religious i­ mpostorship, when the name of Christ will be coopted by those forces of humanity that are, in practice and at the core, foreign and directly belligerent to Christ.”15 Beyond the absence of good, then, evil is the actual, successful resistance by the world’s lower qualities to its higher qualities, on the “individual,” ­“societal,” and “physical” levels. On the individual level, explains Z, evil is the resistance of our bestial passions to the loftier movements of the soul. On the societal level, it is the resistance by the masses, already enslaved to their individual evils, to attempts to save them by the best among them. Finally, on the physical level, evil is the resistance by the body’s material elements to the power of life and light that holds that body together in the beautiful form of an organism. Physical evil is the greatest of the three for Solovʹev, because the force that would break apart the good and beautiful forms of Creation is death, and death’s victory implies the ultimate triumph of evil. Since Solovʹev’s personal, moral, and aesthetic authority was so great for Bely, it is not surprising that Petersburg should build its ethics on the edifice of his precursor’s discourse on evil. It is for this reason that Petersburg not only depicts evil as the hole of good’s absence but also describes the actual presence of evil, on all three levels as described by Solovʹev. On the individual level, evil is represented by the Ableukhovs’ “froggish” lust, which “spawns” Nikolai Ableukhov and evolves into his bestial passion for Sof ʹia Petrovna Likhutina: the base sexual urge brings about the end of the Ableukhovs’ ­marriage in one generation and in the next sullies Nikolai’s pure friendship with the Likhutins, nearly destroying their marriage in the process. On the societal level, evil is both the stagnant, repressive bureaucracy of the Russian state and paradoxically also the revolutionary movement that would bring it down: at this level the White Domino recalls Solovʹev’s description of the “best” in society who would save each person from the person’s individual evil but whose saving efforts are stubbornly resisted by the masses entrenched in evil. On the physical 14 Ibid., 206. 15 Ibid., 146.

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level, evil is the bomb—the “sardine tin of terrible contents”—that would rip apart the form of the human body. But here is where Bely transcends Solovʹev’s model of evil: for Bely the novel Petersburg itself becomes a bomb—a book of terrible contents—thrown at the individual reader, at all of Russian society, and even at the world. Bely now envisions evil on a metaphysical level beyond Solovʹev’s three levels: here is a fourth level to match Bely’s metaphysical fourth dimension. For the book explodes forth from the point of nonbeing, into our thoughts, where we will never be free of its evil emanations.

I. A Gogolian Fig in Petersburg’s Charmed Circle By the time of Petersburg’s composition, Gogol had been recognized by writers and critics associated with the symbolist movement as an author obsessed with the demonic. Merezhkovskii had portrayed Gogol as an artist whose struggle with the Devil carried over from the arena of literature into life itself. His Gogol and the Devil argues that Gogol’s writings were inspired by the realization that the Devil is but one’s own banality (poshlostʹ ) and driven by Gogol’s desire to purge himself of this evil through self-deprecating laughter.16 Merezhkovskii suggests that when Gogol renounced his artistic achievement in order to ­exorcise evil from his personal life, he may sadly have made himself more r­ idiculous than his art had depicted the Devil. The eccentric Vasilii Rozanov had simply i­dentified Gogol with the Devil: “‘There was a legion of demons in him,’ as it is said of someone in the Gospels, ‘and they torment and scream within him.’ Gogol, too, ­resembled such a ‘demoniac,’” and his “legion” of demons were his own literary works.17 Rozanov likens Gogol to the sorcerer in “A Terrible Vengeance,”18 ­claiming that Gogol affected his reading public with his works as the sorcerer horrifies the heroes of the tale: “And they backed away, and they cried out, grasping one another by the hands: ‘It’s the sorcerer.’”19 In Gogol’s “nature,” says Rozanov, is an “ancient principle of black magic” that is “the t­alisman of his strength” as an artist, the origin of “his secret and rational power.”20 In Gogol’s Craftsmanship,21 Bely further develops these ideas, a­ dapting, for instance, Rozanov’s notion that Gogol’s “devils,” from the sorcerer to Chichikov, 16 Dmitry Merezhkovsky, “Gogol and the Devil,” in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert Maguire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 55–102. 17 Vasilii Rozanov, “Gogolʹ,” in Mysli o literature (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 278. 18 N. V. Gogolʹ, “Strashnaia mestʹ,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1937). 19 Rozanov, “Gogolʹ,” 279. 20 Ibid. 21 Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: Issledovanie OGIS, 1934; repr., Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982).

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

are nothing but self-portraits, or as Bely put it, “Gogol’s ­autobiography.”22 Bely writes that “Gogol likened the artist in himself to the ‘sorcerer,’ who ­summoned Katerina’s soul: ‘Rusʹ ! . . . What i­ ncomprehensible tie secretly binds us? . . . Why is it that everything within you has turned upon me eyes full of expectation?’ Thus he ‘practices sorcery’ over his ­conceptualization of Russia: with pen in hand.”23 “The Devil,” Bely writes, “was essential to Gogol in order to give an accounting of himself to himself; it was his deus ex ­machina.”24 The Devil, then, is understood as the “God” of Gogol’s artistic “world,” the unifying principle of his work. Given Bely’s intense involvement with Gogol during his creation of Petersburg, it is not surprising that he began to conceptualize his own authorship in dualistic, Gogolian terms. Bely characterized his own first two novels as dark works treating two kinds of demonism. The Silver Dove described the “Luciferian” forces of “Eastern” elementalism, destruction: this is Bely’s take on Solovʹev’s “pan-­ Mongolism.” Petersburg centered on the pride of “Ahrimanian,” “Western” cerebral abstraction. My two novels, Petersburg and The Silver Dove, depict two horrors of our life, which does not take daring to the limit: liberation in the heartless Head and in heartful mindlessness. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov runs from life into the “head”: he travels in it, wanders: but this “head” is the yellow house of Ahriman: an enlarged skull. And the madness of the Heart drives to the freedom of the brain—Darʹialʹskii: he burns in his zeal. From within the carpenter Kudeiarov, Lucifer peers out at him: he perishes.25

Composing these first two novels of a planned trilogy was for Bely a gloomy and vile process that had to be carried out in order finally to conclude with My Life.26 This last novel was to represent a synthesis, reconciling the equally 22 Ibid., 54. Cf. also Andrei Belyi, Vospominaniia o Bloke (Moscow, 1922; repr., Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 175. During the spring of 1906, when Bely and some friends were reading Gogol together with great engagement and intensity at the Solovʹev dacha, they would have conversations like the following: “‘Everywhere, everywhere: there is this sneer. And—it smells like the unclean spirit.’ ‘The sorcerer has appeared again!’ . . . ­‘Everywhere is the Red Jacket [the name of one of Gogol’s short stories about devils]. . . . And look here: even nature—is sneering Gogolishly [usmekhaetsia Gogolem].’” 23 Masterstvo Gogolia, 71. 24 Ibid., 190. 25 Andrei Belyi, Na perevale (Berlin: Z. I. Grschebin Verlag, 1923), 142. 26 In a letter to Blok of 1912, Bely wrote, “I’ve exhausted myself with my novel. . . . I’m sick of digging around in filth.” See Leonid Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg,’” in Bely’s Peterburg (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 564.

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evil “thesis” and “antithesis” of his first two novels: “the East in the West or the West in the East and the birth of the Christlike Impulse in the soul.”27 It is telling that Bely never transcended the demonism of The Silver Dove and Petersburg: he never gave literary shape to the sacred ideal that was to be My Life. And, as with Gogol, fiction remained a surer vehicle for conveying evil and ugliness. Bely’s identification of an “Ahrimanian” spirit in Petersburg resonates on many levels of the novel. “Such is my framework,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Ivanov-Razumnik, “Silver Dove is the East without the West; and, ­therefore, out of it arises Lucifer (a dove with a falcon’s beak). Petrograd is the West in Russia, i.e., Ahrimanian illusion, where technical mastery + the naked abstraction of logic create a world of Maya.”28 Bely here has adapted the language of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, an occult belief system that Bely practiced (until he realized that Steiner was the Devil!). According to Steiner’s system, the Christian and Zoroastrian names for the Devil, Lucifer and Ahriman respectively, signify opposing tendencies of the universe, either of which must be evil without its antihesis to balance it out. Lucifer symbolizes an exclusively s­ piritual life dominated by the spirit of pride and self-deification, Ahriman—material life, the spirit of decay, and chaos.29 But Bely modified Steiner’s ­framework, making “Lucifer” into a symbol of material evil and “Ahriman” into one of abstract evil. Bely also mixed in the concept of “maya,” a prominent term of Hindu philosophy signifying the i­llusoriness of the perceived world. By creating in Petersburg a “world of Maya,” of the “naked abstraction of logic,” he warns of the danger of “Ahrimanian illusion.” Thus understood, Ahriman helps clarify Bely’s relation to Gogolian demonism. In a deep sense, Bely and Gogol are literary siblings, and Bely ­frequently attempted “to indicate the unique affinity and even identification of the two.”30 Bely, like Gogol before him, was confused about the source of his inspiration. Both felt themselves summoned by their country to perform the poet’s sacred function: anathematizing Russia’s profane present and ­prophesying her messianic future. Yet in each case responding to this seductive

27 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, 20 November 1915, in Peterburg, 520. 28 Ibid. 29 Cf. Vladimir Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction, Russian Research Center Studies 83 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 145; and the annotations to Belyi, Peterburg, 689n40. 30 Thomas R. Beyer, “Belyj’s Serebrjanyj Golubʹ: Gogolʹ in Gugolevo,” Russian Language Journal 30 (Fall 1976): 86.

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call through novelistic labor produces not the sacred “Book,”31 but a paper void with a terrifying counterreality all its own. If we take Ahriman to be the spirit of pure abstraction, then this devil makes an important ­distinction between Bely’s and Gogol’s representation of evil. For while Dead Souls warns of the evil by which the human soul (the abstract) hardens, ­reverting into dumb matter, Petersburg depicts the opposite evil: abstract cerebration blows a hole in the consciousness where love for other worldly creatures should be, and the abstract thinker consequently explodes in violence against what is solid and good, against Creation. However, if we interpret Ahriman’s ­abstraction as a ­tendency in art for technical mastery to overshadow ethics, then this is the devil that binds Bely to Gogol. It was absolutely Gogolian of Bely to come to view his Fourth Symphony as having been usurped by the Devil. “I did not know Ahriman, but, of course, he attempted from his ­kingdom to ­suffocate and p ­ ervert my Symphonies; and my fourth Symphony, The Goblet of Blizzards, represents such a perversion, where the ­technical problems of verbal ­counterpoint led to blasphemy.”32 Ahriman tempted Bely into literary blasphemy, corrupting a sacred truth with the wicked obsession of technical virtuosity. Insidiously, this formal mastery expressed itself in a proclivity for c­ reating artistic c­ ontrasts to an ideal that eventually ­overshadowed the ideal itself. In Gogol’s Craftsmanship, Bely characterizes The Goblet of Blizzards as a ­Gogol-inspired work (his first three symphonies, by c­ ontrast, were “Nietzschean”) that marks the start of a new, Gogolian phase of his ­authorship.33 It is significant that Bely uses the word “counterpoint” both to characterize Dead Souls and to define the demonism of The Goblet of Blizzards. He explains that the sinister c­ haracter Kudeiarov in the first novel of his Gogolian phase, The Silver Dove, “is an admixture of Murin with the s­orcerer and with Panʹko.”34 The jarring j­uxtaposition of benign Rudii Panʹko and sinister Murin is characteristic of Bely’s c­ ounterpoint principle. To sum up, Bely sees a diabolism of contrasts and counterpoint as a defining feature of his Gogolian phase. Through play on the word gogol ʹ (the Russian for “goldeneye,” a ­species of duck), Bely explained the process through which the Devil-heroes of Gogol’s 31 A. M. Panchenko, “Istoriia i vechnostʹ v sisteme kulʹturnykh tsennostei russkogo barokko,” in Trudy otdela drevnerusskoi literatury 34 (1979): 195. 32 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, 20 November 1915, 520. 33 Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 297. 34 Ibid., 301. Murin is the heroine’s demonic husband in Dostoevsky’s “The Landlady” (Khoziaika); the name “Murin” signifies a certain species of small, black devil in Old Russian demonology. “The sorcerer” is the principal hero of Gogol’s “Terrible Vengeance.” Rudii Panʹko is the narrator of Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831).

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early works possessed later works as tonalities of fear and pride in the voice of the author. Such is the “Nikosha” that stuck fast in Gogol like a splinter. . . . The splinter popped out in the form of Khlestakov-Nikosha; and then the “Devil” vanished; in his place, here and there, flashed the tailcoat of a bureaucrat appearing in n variations until . . . the ex-bureaucrat with the theatrical enterprise of Dead Souls. Gogol had identified in himself the boastful little “gogol” [gogol ′ka].35

In his own novels, too, Bely makes birds into a symbol of the author. Doves yield to crows as we move from The Silver Dove to Petersburg, and the flocks of sinister black birds in Petersburg signal an authorial presence that is demonic. At a critical moment in Nikolai’s development, black flocks of ­bird-thoughts descend on him from a foreign consciousness. “Flocks of thoughts flew up from the centre of consciousness like flocks of ferocious birds frightened by a storm, but there was no centre of consciousness: there was a gloomy hole, yawning there, before which Nikolai Apollonovich stood bewildered” (246). The fact that the thoughts are “sent” to Nikolai from somewhere above the novel’s action suggests that the center and origin of the book’s creative energy is not Nikolai’s consciousness, which, after all, has been supplanted for the moment by this “gloomy hole,” but someone else’s. Indeed, Nikolai is sometimes aware that he and his world are but “mental symbols of purely logical constructions.” Strangely, through such shifts of consciousness, in which he almost grasps that he himself is but a fictional construct, he actually achieves theurgy, becoming “a truly creative being” (59). Alas, Nikolai ultimately fails to become the center of the new universe that he cannot create: “In this room Nikolai Apollonovich had so recently grown into an autonomous, self-existent centre. [. . .] Here he had so recently comprised the sole centre of the universe; but ten days had passed; and his self-consciousness had got shamefully mired” (531). The narrator, having created the heroes in idle rumination, turns from one to the other in the hope that some creative thought will take wing from them. Solovʹev is the bridge connecting nineteenth-century demonic literature to Bely’s Petersburg: for just as the hole of Nikolai’s consciousness is related to Solovʹev’s discussion of evil as good’s absence—here the void where a theurgic creativity belongs—so the frenzied flocks remind us that evil in Solovʹev also implies an active resistance to good. 35 Ibid., 190. Apparently, Bely and his friends began to call Gogol “Gogolek” as a term of endearment in 1906. See Bely, Vospominaniia o Bloke, 174–75.

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Bely later attributed this paradigm of authorial thoughts descending on the confounded protagonist to Gogol’s “Notes of a Madman”: “The s­enator himself is ‘idle cerebral play,’ which has leapt from the author; these are refrains of the theme of ‘N[otes of a] M[adman]’: ‘people imagine that . . . the brain is located in the head; altogether untrue: it is brought by the wind from the side.’”36 When Nikolai’s father Apollon is stripped of his “authority,” the author’s “plume” makes its presence felt through the same imagery. Apollon has been placed near the novel’s creative center at the end of chapter 1, where the entirety of the novel’s cosmos is said to be a product of his idle cerebral play. But by the end of the action, Apollon’s cerebration proves hapless, and he himself regresses into a state of senile infantilism; he is purged for failing to enact positive, creative change in the world of Petersburg: “And the sharpened pencil drops on to the paper in a flock of question marks” (495). Apollon’s sharpened pencil disassociates him from the center of creative consciousness occupied by the all-important “author’s pen” (24). The “flocks of question marks” underscore Apollon’s failure to be a mind creating new thoughts for the world. The bird imagery reinforces the notion that the protagonists, being nothing but the narrator’s “cerebral play,” have no power, or even interest, in their own right, but only inasmuch as they comment on the creative power hovering birdlike above the novelistic artifice they inhabit. Behind these images in The Silver Dove and Petersburg is an implicit ­revision of the dove of Christian iconography: the white dove of the Holy Spirit through which the divine Logos is disseminated throughout Creation. Bely’s silver dove, to say nothing of his frenzied crows, represents a medium through which a more ambivalent creative word embodies itself in the ­novelistic world. Bely’s discussion in On the Pass of the “revolt of gnosticism” and the “struggle against the prior limit of knowledge” helps elucidate the meaning of this novelistic aviary. “The man who has come to know himself,” writes Bely, “is many-eyed, winged, tailed, and columbine-serpentine.”37 In a ­passage that speaks directly to the “Luciferian” symbolism of The Silver Dove, Bely explains that “transformed ‘serpents’ are birds. . . . The serpent clothed in the Dove erupts before us visibly in the dark face of the Khlyst.”38 If the silver dove symbolizes the Luciferian essence of the cult of the body, then the black birds convey the Ahrimanian obsession with the cerebral that is the central concern of Petersburg. According to Bely, man, in his timeless 36 Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 304. 37 Belyi, Na perevale, 136. 38 Ibid., 137.

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quest for ­knowledge, came upon “a winged infernal serpent,” the sight of which has spooked him from the path leading to sacred, world-altering Truth: “The pure Dove of spirituality did not descend; a black crow, the knowledge of ­philosophical abstractions—descended: and—cawed . . . for centuries.”39 Nikolai’s misguided, fruitless philosophical readings in Petersburg, his slavish preference of Kant and Cohen’s abstractions to “the Golgotha of sufferings of the self-conscious ‘I,’” provoke authorial disgust.40 Nikolai’s punishment is the visitation of crows—and he recoils in terror. Bely anchors humanity’s faltering quest for truth in original sin: when Adam and Eve desired knowledge outside of God, they found the serpent and punishment instead. It is an evil power that sends down the dark vision of crows on those failing in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. This malignant retributive power is represented in On the Pass by the evil sorcerer Klingsor (co-opted from Wagner’s opera Parsifal). Klingsor “drives the [holy] Dove from us,” and “behind Klingsor stand Ahriman, Mephistopheles, and—darkness.”41 The source of the crow thoughts in Petersburg would appear to be the author. If this author is to be understood to be something like Klingsor, then it is a tragic irony of Bely’s symbolist poetics that, having determined through his art to become a heroic Russian Parsifal for his country, Bely should come to view his authorship as such dark sorcery. From the very start, the narrator confesses that his story is untruthful; yet he claims that “it is not the fault of the author, but of the author’s pen” (24). The narrator’s insistence that not he but his pen is to blame for the novel’s lies has a clear parallel in Nikolai’s feeling that he did not set the bomb but that his “fingers reached out to it of their own accord; and—just like that: they somehow turned the key by themselves” (345). We see this same scenario enacted time after time in the novel with all the principal characters. The devil Shishnarfne is the original possessor and Nietzschean jailer of Dudkin’s soul. Shishnarfne is sent to Dudkin, like the crows to Nikolai, as the embodiment of Dudkin’s punishment for having failed in his “revolt of gnosticism.”42 Shishnarfne enters the novel as the voice of a Persian singer and revolutionary, a certain Mr. Shishnarfiev. Dudkin hears Shishnarfiev singing in a gramophone recording at Lippanchenko’s dacha. Later that afternoon, Shishnarfne himself appears at the dacha, and Dudkin 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 140. 42 Cf. Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 130–31.

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sees his silhouette. When Dudkin returns to his garret room that evening, Shishnarfne is waiting for him: “His insanity itself, in essence, stood before him now as an account rendered by his deranged sense organs to his conscious ‘self ’; and the Persian subject Shishnarfne symbolized an anagram” (407). Just what this anagram is—we shall see presently. For the present I want to note that in adopting the Gogolian image of madness as cerebral activity “brought by the wind from the side,” Bely applies to that image a diabolical shade when he incarnates Dudkin’s madness as Shishnarfne. That the narrator has chosen a specifically Persian demonic form for the messenger he sends to his hero answers to the “Ahrimanian”—that is, Zoroastrian dualist—demonism at work in Petersburg. As mentioned already, there is a central distinction in Bely’s works between the goal-directed (creative-symbolic) cognition typical of divine “authors” and the demonic, because idle, cerebral play Petersburg describes. Here we see Bely’s abhorrence of the random movements of “unnecessary” thoughts and shapes conjured up in the idling brain, for if the brain is at play, who, or what, is in fact doing the conjuring? The answer: no one, ­nothing. But no one is the Devil, nothing—evil. It is just this “nothing” that ­possesses mankind to ensure that it never creates anything meaningful and lasting, and so idle ­cerebral play is the demonic temptation that leads away from theurgy, ­humanity’s sole ­justification to God. According to a chain of ­creators and ­creations made explicit by the narrator in a key passage of the first ­chapter, the narrator’s ­cerebral play creates the novel’s first c­ haracter, Senator Ableukhov, “My ­senator” (13), whose own idle thoughts create a shadow that terrifies its creator and turns out to be the second character, Dudkin, a ­revolutionary carrying a bomb intended to assassinate the ­ ­ senator. Dudkin, the evil spirit who emerges from Apollon’s cerebral play, himself creates the demon Shishnarfne through analogous cerebral play. In a speech in Helsinki delivered before the novel’s action, Dudkin had ­expostulated a theory he now renounces as “Satanism”: “It was in Helsingfors that all that idle ­cerebral play had started too, in response, it seemed, to someone’s suggestion” (392). Truly, an idle mind is the devil’s playground, and the devil of Dudkin’s idle mind, Shishnarfne, now comes to Petersburg for his soul. As Dudkin enters his apartment, which he knows to be haunted, he tries to calm himself with the thought that “the kinds of events that might happen to him now—were n ­ othing but idle c­ erebral play” (388); yet idle cerebral play is the life-­generating principle of the novel’s world! Thought into existence by Dudkin, Shishnarfne enters Dudkin’s room as a man but soon becomes a shadow, and finally a disembodied voice that takes up residence in his larynx, thereby possessing Dudkin.

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The novel’s paradigm of idle thoughts creating shadowy, demonic beings points to the theodicy of Zoroastrian dualism, which traces the creation of Satan or Ahriman, the lord of shadows and destruction, to the appearance of a doubt or of the idea of an adversary in God’s thoughts during the creation of the cosmos.43 While the Zoroastrian model casts the narrator as the God of the novelistic universe, the narrator is himself but a shadow that has emerged from the idle cerebral play of the author. In the first two editions of the novel, the narrator offers a suggestion that was not to appear in any future editions: “Perhaps the Petersburg writer is an atmospheric phenomenon? In that case, all that you hear and all that you see here is only idle cerebral play.”44 For Bely, theurgic creation can only follow after a purposeful, if cruel, destruction. If an author is to achieve the spiral of symbolism and creation of an eternal book, it is clearly through changing the reader’s perception of reality. And since, for Bely, a change of reality involves a change of myth, Petersburg ­supplants the Judeo-Christian cosmogony by its own novelistic creation myth, c­ omplete with a creator, who will emerge as demonic by contrast with the biblical God. In Gogol’s Craftsmanship, Bely describes the metamorphosis of “fiction” into “reality” on the three narrative levels of Petersburg. The first level is that of character: “The senator’s head transformed its point of view, the fiction of the bomb, into reality; such a transformation of consciousness into being is achieved by the senator’s son in caricatures of the neo-Kantian Cohen’s system; and the thought about the bomb becomes, through the cogitative efforts of the papa and his little boy, a real bomb, because of which the empire perishes.”45 The senator’s reality is demonic because it is the incarnation of his idle cerebral play: according to Bely’s way of thinking, it is only through p ­ urposeful, theurgic cognition that ethically desirable creation may be enacted. The ­narrator’s creation of the senator is sooner diabolurgic than theurgic: “The author is h ­ orrified: the thought about the senator who thinks that his son is friendly with a bomb-thrower has become the reality—of the bomb, the bombthrower, and the senator’s son, who makes an attempt on the life of his father, and of the senator, who has such suspicions.”46 Finally, in order to describe 43 Cf. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, Symbols and Values in Zoroastrianism: Their Survival and Renewal (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 44. For a different reading, see Alexandrov, who derives the novel’s incarnation of thoughts from Steiner’s anthroposophy and its shadow imagery from Neoplatonic features of Bely’s worldview. Alexandrov, Major Symbolist Fiction, 111. 44 In R. I. Ivanov-Razumnik, Vershiny, “Peterburg” Belogo (Petrograd: Kolos, 1923; repr., Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), 143. 45 Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 304. 46 Ibid.

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how the transformation of “fiction” into evil reality is carried out at the third ­narrative level of “the reader,” Bely quotes the familiar conclusion of his novel’s first chapter: “The aged senator will, he will chase after you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and you will never ever forget him.”47 Bely’s intention is to replace a Creation that has degenerated into Ahrimanian circularity by exploding the reader’s “point of view” on what constitutes reality and how life is generated and transformed. But the expression of that intention in the text reflects the author’s profound doubt about the moral implications of the task.48 The explicitly demonic erection of Petersburg by the Flying Dutchman, who is one of Peter the Great’s avatars in the novel, suggests the demonism of the narrator’s “erection” of a book, swarming out of the center of the demonic city: “The Flying Dutchman [. . .] came winging to Petersburg [. . .] to raise here as an illusion his misty lands and give the name of islands to a wave of scudding clouds; for two hundred years the Dutchman lit the hellish lights of drinking-dens, and the Christian people thronged and thronged into the hellish drinking-dens, spreading putrid pestilence” (25). To put additional stress on Peter’s demonism in constructing his city, Bely makes an unmistakable allusion in this passage to Gogol’s “Devil” (sam demon) who “lights the street lamps” of Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect “in order to show everything in a false light.”49 Peter’s demonic creation of Petersburg, his “drafting of parallel lines” on the void of the swamps, becomes a model for the author’s creation of Petersburg in parallel lines drawn on the void of the blank page. The printing of the novel itself is linked with Apollon’s circulars in the ­prologue: “From that said point, swarms of printed books issue in a ­torrent; from this invisible point with great momentum issue circulars” (12). “Petersburg [. . .] manifests itself—on maps: in the form of two ­concentric circles with a black point in the middle; and from this mathematical point, which possesses no dimensions, it energetically proclaims that it exists: from there, from that said point, swarms of printed books issue in a t­orrent” (12). This eccentric geometry will show up again in Bely’s reading of Dead Souls, which Gogol’s Craftsmanship describes as a dot within a circle: “An attentive examination should ascertain . . . a point, drawn in the middle of an empty circle, which 47 Ibid. 48 Cf. Alexandrov’s suggestion that “Bely’s conception of artistic inspiration . . . resembles closely a seizure of an artist by coercive cerebral play.” See Alexandrov, Major Symbolist Fiction, 122. 49 N. V. Gogolʹ, “Nevskii Prospekt,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow: Nauka, 1937), 39.

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is a fiction; the point is the tip of a long tendril, crawling out like a s­erpent [zmeia]: this worm, growing into a monster, is a concealed ­personality.”50 The “personality” (lichnost ʹ) described in this passage is Chichikov, who for Bely is, like the sorcerer of “A Terrible Vengeance,” another “fig” or “fiction” ­standing for Gogol himself. Bely also comments on his own use of this image in Petersburg, revealing that the “point” marking Petersburg is a pun playing the meaning “point on a map” against “point of view” (tochka zreniia): the “point of view” is also a “point within a point.”51 The prologue’s black dot, a point within two concentric circles, is realized in the novel as follows: Shishnarfne’s viewpoint is the black dot, which exists within Dudkin’s, the inner circle, which, in turn, is enclosed by Apollon’s viewpoint, the outer circle. Alexander Woronzoff compellingly argues that the “point” of the prologue is evoked by the spot of black soot that Shishnarfne becomes just before he possesses Dudkin in the section of the novel entitled “Petersburg.” “Recalling the map of reading in the ‘Prolog,’ the outer circle Petersburg includes the inner circle ‘Peterburg,’ which in turn contains the black spot S[h]is[h]narfne, the point that releases the swarm of printed words in the novel.”52 If Shishnarfne is a “fig” concealing the narrator, then the black dot Shishnarfne leaves behind is the dot of the “author’s pen,” and the “printed book” “swarms” from that point, a construct recalling at once Solovʹev’s evil “hole” and “point of support in another order of being.” One result of the authorial apprehension concerning the ethics of ­substituting novelistic creation for Creation is the literary or artistic texture of the world of the novel. Examples abound of the novel’s awareness of its status as artifice. Thus, Apollon “scans” the inventory of his house as if it were verses of poetry (14). During a spell of “idle cerebral play” as the s­enator returns home at dawn, the city appears to him not as “a stone colossus, but a ­structure of ethereal lace that stood there, made out of the most delicately worked patterns” (269). As he runs through the streets, the consonants and vowels of the cityscape cohere into murmurs and sighs, reminding us of Apollon’s literary descent from Gogol’s Akakii Akakievich, who never knows whether he is walking along the street or copying a text. The people on the Nevsky Prospect are mere words that make up an “endless phrase flying into eternity”; evidently, this “phrase” is composed not only of the given novel but of all 50 Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 90. 51 Ibid., 304. 52 See Alexander Woronzoff, “The Hieroglyph in Andrej Bely’s Peterburg: A Reading of Sisnarfnè/Enfransis,” Slavic and East European Journal 34, no. 1 (1990): 34.

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the works of Russian literature that compose what has become known as the “Petersburg myth”: “This sentence seemed senseless and woven from fantasy: the unalleviated senselessness of the sentence hung like black soot over the Nevskii; the black smoke of fantastic tales enveloped all its space” (343). No ordinary city, Petersburg is sooner a sinister literary myth that can be invoked but not inhabited, while the “black soot” of Petersburg’s “phrase” directs us to the black soot into which the devil Shishnarfne transforms in Dudkin’s room, the satanic smudge that, in turn, becomes the black contour of the paragraphs, words, letters, and dots on the pages of the novel. Shishnarfne is described as “incredibly artistic” (360) when he first appears in the novel as Mr. Shishnarfiev singing on the gramophone at Lippanchenko’s dacha. This epithet connects Shishnarfne with the artist who creates Petersburg. The narrator describes Shishnarfne’s possession of Dudkin later that day by the phrase “that other consciousness had been unfolding ­harmonious images before him” (415), a passage that clearly evokes the ­narrator’s depiction of his own narrational illusionism at the close of the first chapter, “The author, having once displayed these pictures of illusions, ought quickly to remove them and break off the thread of the narration” (73). In this way is Shishnarfne’s demonic possession of Dudkin likened to the ­narrator’s ­“invasion” of the reader’s brain at the end of chapter 1. In fact the Ahrimanian demon Shishnarfne begins to sound undeniably like the narrator in the key section of chapter 6 that mirrors the novel’s title, “Petersburg.”53 “For the Russian Empire,” Shishnarfne intones, “Petersburg is the most ­typical point [punktik]. . . . Take a geographical map . . . . But concerning the fact that our capital city, so well adorned with monuments, belongs also to the world beyond the grave . . .” (396). In Shishnarfne’s speech rings a clear echo of the narrator, particularly of the novel’s prologue. The parallel is carefully crafted: Shishnarfne mirrors the narrator’s diction perfectly with its ellipses, multiple starts, bureaucratese, and geographic-touristic cant. Needless to say, Shishnarfne now divulges an aspect of Petersburg that the narrator had ­somehow omitted in the prologue: its infernal nature. This deeper meaning of Shishnarfne is tied up in Bely’s analysis of Gogol. Gogol’s Craftsmanship contains comments that help confirm Shishnarfne’s link to the narrator and help us to decipher the “anagram” of Shishnarfne. In his analysis of Gogol’s influence on Petersburg, Bely remarks that the word shish—“a fig,” “a contemptuous gesture”—is the key verbal unit contained within “Shishnarfne,” as well as its mirror reflection “Enfranshish” (304). The ­expression shish pokazat ʹ 53 Cf. Alexandrov, Major Symbolist Fiction, 120, 127.

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(to give a fig) denotes the action of revealing to one’s interlocutor “a fig,” which is to say nothing at all, thus deceiving the expectation of a real revelation. In other words, what Shishnarfne represents is not only what the unsuspecting reader understands him to be—whether that be a Persian revolutionary fighter-singer, Dudkin’s hallucination, or even an Ahrimanian devil. Gogol’s Craftsmanship holds the answer to the riddle of how such a “fig” functions. Bely claims that the reader ­uninitiated in Gogol’s intensely ­allegorical style will peer into “A Terrible Vengeance” only “to see a fig.”54 Bely asks, “Why did we believe Gogol that Katerina’s father is a ‘sorcerer’? Because we did not properly read the f­ undamental device in his p ­ ortrayal.”55 Bely asserts that Katerina’s father is ­nothing other than Gogol’s own self-portrait: “Gogol likened the artist in himself to the ‘­sorcerer.’”56 Gogol’s sorcerer is for Bely a symbol of the author, and since Bely admits to using this “Gogolian” device in Petersburg, we have just cause to view Shishnarfne, Bely’s Gogolian “fig” of Petersburg, in the same light—as an ­“anagram” of the text’s authorial persona. Bely shows that, despite Shishnarfne’s demonic signification, the true source of demonism in the novel is the narrator, for whom Shishnarfne is but a mask. This is one way of ­decoding the anagram of Shishnarfne. There is another. Elsewhere in Gogol’s Craftsmanship, Bely develops the idea that with Petersburg he has taken the Gogolian device of demonic possession, as exemplified by Gogol’s “Portrait,” from the level of character (Gogol’s ­ Chartkov, Bely’s Dudkin) to that of narrator. In the scene of the delirium taking place in [Dudkin’s] moonlit room on Vasilʹevskii Island, Chartkov’s sensation before the moonlit portrait is exaggerated. . . . The Persian Shishnarfiev crawled into him . . . while into Chartkov’s soul had crawled the Persian, or Greek, who jumped out of the portrait . . . but the crawling, like the swallowing of the “bomb” by the ­senator’s son, is the punning delirium of the crawling from the senator’s head of the senator’s thoughts, which begin to exist: a house with a son wandering in it; the senator himself is the “idle cerebral play,” which has fluttered out of the author.57

Reading a note from an agent provocateur, Nikolai is possessed by black bird-thoughts that, instead of issuing from his “center” of conscious­ ness, enter from without into the hole where that center should be (246). 54 “Videtʹ figu.” See Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 45. 55 Ibid., 56. 56 Ibid., 71. 57 Ibid., 304.

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Now lacking his own consciousness, Nikolai is possessed by the “panmongolian,” “Turanian,” “occult,” in short “Luciferian,” spirit of his ancestor Ab-lai (317–18), to which his “wildly slanting eyes” attest when he meets Dudkin (330). But Nikolai’s possession by Ab-lai and Dudkin’s by Shishnarfne bear on the narrator. In Petersburg, demonic possession is triggered in the narration, which is the g­ eneration of character and plot from demonic, bird-like, idle thoughts that “flutter out of the author” (i.e., narrator). Bely’s narrator calls attention to the illusionism of his narrative at the end of the first chapter: “Cerebral play is only a mask; beneath this mask proceeds the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us” (74). Shishnarfne—the incarnation of the cerebral play of Dudkin, himself the incarnation of the play of Apollon, who is in turn the incarnation of the narrator’s cerebral play—is part of the diversion by which the narrator “invades” the reader’s brain. As the final and most explicitly demonic link in the narrator’s chain of creation through idle cerebral play, Shishnarfne forms a bond with the first link in that chain, the narrator, forging of the chain an enchanted circle. Thus are we reminded that the “world” of Petersburg is a world of maya, of illusion. But, despite all the warnings, Apollon, Dudkin, Shishnarfne, and, most important, the narrator achieve a real cerebral status in the brain of the reader who must mentally process these chains and circles of demonic creation. As the narrator explains of Apollon’s perception of Dudkin, “Once his brain has erupted in the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists—exists in fact: he will not vanish from the Petersburg Prospects as long as the senator exists with thoughts of this kind, because thought, too—exists” (74). Shishnarfne begins as a voice on a recording, takes on flesh as a demon who visits Dudkin in his garret room, next becomes a sheet of black paper, then a black dot, a black point, which travels across the room to wind up in Dudkin’s larynx, now Dudkin’s own voice. The narrator, too, begins as a “voice” perceived by the reader, ­transforms himself into all the “illusions” of the narration (that is, the ­protagonists and action in which the reader comes to believe in the reading process), ­nevertheless hinting all the while that he is but a sheet of ink-­blackened paper, and becomes a mere voice again as the reader closes the book. But now the narrator hopes to have become an internal voice for the reader whose brain has been invaded by the “unknown forces” and occult life of his narrative. In the foreword to the 1913 journal edition of Petersburg, Bely writes that in Petersburg, the “author takes up the point of view of ­illusionism ­[illiuzionizma] and draws life in his novel with exaggerated ­abstractness.”58 Shishnarfne, with his shady ephemerality, epitomizes the narrator’s 58 Belyi, Peterburg, 498.

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a­ bstractness: he is the illusionist sorcerer in the narrator. Narrating the return of Anna Petrovna, Nikolai’s mother and Apollon’s wife, the narrator as much as confesses to such illusionism, stating that “a moment in our narration was like a full cup of events” (522). By doing so, the narrator hints at a truism of his novel, and indeed all novels—that, in his novelistic world, the truth of time’s flow in “reality” has been sacrificed to the demands of narrative form. As a result, he says, the “outlook” or “point of view” (krugozor) of narration has been charmed into a confused concentration on events other than the most important one—namely, Anna Petrovna’s return: “Those twenty-four hours in our narration expanded and scattered throughout psychic spaces: as a hideous dream; and they closed off the vista all around; and the author’s vision became embroiled in psychic space; it was occluded” (521). The idiom zamknutyi krug (a vicious/charmed circle) now becomes zamknutyi krugozor (a vicious/charmed viewpoint). This “charmed viewpoint” is a result of the “leaden” or slowing effect that the cerebral play has on the narration—of the fact that every point of view ­represented in the novel “explodes” forth from the narrator’s point of view only to contract back into that infinitely elastic narratorial “point” at the close. This is another way of saying that the novel’s one true ­protagonist is the narrator himself. Dolgopolov has perceptively commented that, in ­reading Petersburg, one is haunted by the impression that “someone is ­constantly ‘mocking’ the world, imagining it and compelling his imagination to ­materialize, but finally becoming fully dependent on the ‘phantoms’ e­ ngendered by him.”59 Northrop Frye describes the act of reading as a ­simultaneous movement in opposing directions, one an outward or centrifugal m ­ ovement, through which readers seek the real-world phenomena signified by a ­narrative, the other an inward or centripetal movement, through which they attempt to make sense of the deep structures and meanings of that narrative.60 But the ­narrator of Petersburg, by insisting that his narration is nothing but ­cerebral play, ­illusion, and maya, discourages the reader from engaging in Frye’s ­centrifugal search for ­correspondences outside in “reality.” Yet by structuring Petersburg on the ­ubiquitous image of the expanding circle, the narrator offers centrifuge itself—and of an explosively violent nature—as the reward for the reader’s centripetal quest for structure: “And imagine further that all centripetal ­sensation [tsentrostremitel ʹnoe oshchushchenie] is completely lost; and in the 59 Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia,” 571. 60 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 71.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

urge to expand beyond measure physically we have been torn to pieces” (517). Thus, Bely jolts us into replacing Creation with his demonic figment. All of the protagonists emanate from the narrator’s idle cerebral play in the first chapter and retreat thither at the close, expanding centrifugally and shrinking back centripetally. However, the narrator himself is but a figment, expanding and ­contracting in the brains of the reader and of the author. Indeed, the narrator himself ­suggests this paradigm in the first chapter: “Every segment could be surmised to distance itself from every other, like one planetary system from another; the relation of neighbor to neighbor was much like the relation of a pencil of rays from the firmament to the retina, which carries to the brain center along the telegraph of the nerves a vague, astral, flickering message” (30–31). Likewise, each viewpoint represented in the novel is at once an expansive cosmos and a tiny synapse of someone else’s brain. Apollon is a figment of the narrator’s imagination and the reader’s, but he is also the vast “world” in which Nikolai and Dudkin exist. The narrator is but a flickering message in the reader’s brain, yet the reader “enters” into the narrator’s cosmos through reading. But while the reader has merely to imagine or recreate this novelistic world in order to enter it, the authorial persona actually constructs it by authorizing his primary creation: the bursting and contracting narrator. Bely wrote in a letter to Ivanov-Razumnik (December 1913) that the “true setting of my novel is the soul of a certain personage not portrayed in the novel, exhausted by ­cerebral work, while the characters are mental forms.”61 The emotional cry of the narrator of Dead Souls, “Rusʹ! What do you want from me?” is the key passage for Bely’s argument in Gogol’s Craftsmanship that Gogol’s spiritual “sickness”—a combination of dangerously inflated pride and the horror of his perceived isolation as an artist—induced Gogol to ­portray himself in the demons of his fiction, eventually destroying his ability to create. “Gogol saw himself as some kind of traitor, sorcerer. . . . In A T[errible] V[engeance] the sorcerer killed not the monk, but the ‘sorcerer’ Gogol—­himself. . . . Indeed, there was no ‘sorcerer’: the ‘sorcerer’ is Gogol’s sickness.”62 It is not clear when Bely began to interpret Gogol in this way, for while he began to read Gogol seriously in the years leading up to Petersburg, his study was not written until the 1930s. Bely’s critique of Gogol’s diseased sense of authorship is a half-concealed self-critique as well. Indeed, in the letter to Ivanov-Razumnik already cited, Bely suggests that by writing Petersburg, he 61 Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, in Peterburg, 516. 62 Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 94.

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was able to purge himself of a kind of “spiritual provocation, the embryo of which many of us carry in ourselves inconspicuously for many years until the sudden development of some spiritual disease.”63 Bely’s statement is akin to Gogol saying that he had purged himself of his evils by embodying them as the “monsters” of his fiction. Klingsor is emblematic of Bely’s implied author in the way that Shishnarfne is of the narrator of Petersburg. Konstantin Mochulʹskii, in his discussion of The Silver Dove, claims that the effect of passages describing the dark, occult, and evil rites of the “Doves” on the Russian reader is “nearly hypnotic.” “The author attains such a power of artistic and mystic ­suggestion that it is ­impossible to break out of the magic circle of his words. This is not ‘literature’ but a genuine and terrible occult experiment, the cloyingly ­repulsive vertigo of zeal. We experience the spiritual temptation and sinful delight of s­ectarianism as real.”64 Petersburg works insidiously on the reader and “bewitches us by its hypnotic suggestion.”65 In the already-cited passage from the author’s foreword to Petersburg, Bely states that the narrator “takes up the point of view of illusionism and draws the world and life in his novel with exaggerated abstractness, for it is this very abstractness that prepares the ­tragedy of the principal characters.”66 The narrator’s illusionism differs from the hocus pocus of realist novelists by virtue of its complex relation to the novel’s theme of sorcery and demonism. This crucial relation of narration to theme is what prepares the tragedy of the protagonists, which, ironically, is the tragedy of not being able to embrace the kind of authorial demonism ­manifested by the implied author. This person, quite conscious of the way his novel makes a theme of its creation, narration, and reading, conceals ­throughout the text secret images, symbols, and “anagrams” ­cohering into an allegorical reading. The allegory in turn establishes connections between ­novelistic production (pen, ink, paper, and voice) and demonism (sorcery, ­illusionism, phantoms, and black birds). The key device for manipulating such a complex a­ llegorical framework derives from Bely’s reading of Gogol: through this device, the apparent “devil” of a demonic narrative turns out to be an “anagram” m ­ eaning “fig, nothing,” while the source of the true demonism is the author, whose “spiritual sickness” plays out in the demonic forms of the action. 63 In Peterburg, 516. 64 Konstantin Mochulʹskii, Andrey Belyi (Paris: YMCA Press, 1955), 165. 65 Ibid., 169. 66 Peterburg, 498.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

II. Dostoevsky, Reaction, and Revolution in Petersburg While the role of Dostoevsky’s Devils in the conceptualization and plot of Petersburg is clearly important, Bely’s use of it was as if “unwilling, forced.”67 According to Aleksandr Lavrov, zhiznetvorchestvo—signifying the ­transformation of the world through art, or the artist’s theurgic capacity—is Dostoevsky’s most important sphere of influence on Bely. Bely at first agreed with Merezhkovskii’s circle on the theurgic success of Dostoevsky’s works but soon changed his mind, and his attitude toward Dostoevsky ­immediately changed before and during the composition of Petersburg, becoming ­polemical, often belligerently so. As Bely explains in a ­reminiscence of his essay of 1905 “Ibsen and Dostoevsky,” “Tactical considerations force me to mitigate Dostoevsky in the struggle against ‘Dostoevskyism’ ­[dostoevshchina]: and I write: ‘Back to Gogol and Pushkin—these primary sources— . . . we must return in order to save literature from the seeds of decay and death that were planted there by Dostoevsky’s Inquisitorial hand’ (1906); Merezhkovskii, Gippius, Volynskii, Rozanov—are horrified.”68 In “Ibsen and Dostoevsky” Bely worried that Dostoevsky “had something in common with the decline of Russian literature” and that “the Dostoevsky cult would lead us to ­emptiness.”69 It is characteristically eccentric of Bely to find “­emptiness” in the m ­ etaphysical tangles of Dostoevsky, and not in the so much more evident Gogolian void. But in the claim that the “unbelievable complexity of Dostoevsky, the unspeakable depth of his images is a halfway simulated abyss sometimes drawn right across a surface,”70 the reader of Petersburg sees more than an eccentric critique, for this is the very image by which Petersburg will describe Peter the Great’s erection of Petersburg in the “abyss” of the Finnish gulf and, by extension, the author’s penning of Petersburg: “It was Peter who once upon a time drew parallel lines across the marshes” (29). In Petersburg there is a concealed Dostoevskian theme that reflects Bely’s fear of retrograde art, the fear that his novel would create nothing new, fail to move culture forward, increase the empty hole of evil anti-art. Anticipating Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, who is repeatedly characterized by ears ­resembling bat wings, Bely writes that “Dostoevsky didn’t have eagles’ wings, but ­perhaps—bat wings [netopyrinye].”71 In Ableukhov Bely expresses his ­anxiety 67 Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia,” 550. 68 Andrei Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 185. 69 Andrei Belyi, “Ibsen i Dostoevskii,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, ed. L. A. Sugai (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 195. 70 Ibid., 196. 71 Ibid., 195.

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about artistic ­creation reduced to naught by the bat-like and Dostoevskian evils of “cowardice and impurity expressed in heaviness of style.”72 Here again is the failure of the gnostic quest, and so Bely ends his essay by affirming that the voices of Zarathustra and Ibsen summon the creators of culture to new heights, away from all “the promises [made] in little taverns, where mystics are chummy with policemen, where the police precinct has more than once been passed off for eternity, even if an eternity in the form of ‘a bathhouse with ­spiders.’”73 Bely’s idealism insisted that, having started along the path of his new thought, though that thought led him to murder, Raskolʹnikov must persevere in his quest: to swerve from this path into a tavern where he confesses his sin to a policeman is but Raskolʹnikov’s reactionary return to the old ethics, and for Dostoevsky to condone this confession is artistic failure. Ironically, two central scenes of Petersburg happen to be conversations in a Dostoevskian tavern between Bely’s Raskolʹnikov-like heroes and secret police operatives.74 Bely’s fear of falling into Dostoevskyism goes a long way toward ­explaining his horror at The Devils. During late 1908, the period when he was drafting The Silver Dove and Petersburg, Bely took The Devils with him to Petrovsko-Razumovskoe, where the “Nechaev affair” (the immediate ­historical inspiration for The Devils) had taken place, and there performed farcical improvisations on Dostoevsky’s novel for his friends. This gives some indication of how obsessed Bely was with The Devils as he approached what is in many ways his answer to it: Petersburg. Bely also wrote a fascinating c­ ritique of The Devils that was to be reflected in the attitude toward the demonic taken by the authorial personae of Petersburg. In his criticism, Bely focused on Shatov as sanctified hero and on Peter Verkhovenskii as demonized villain, and faulted Dostoevsky for such a characterization. Bely’s own evaluation of Shatov is meant to correct The Devils: “Shatov is the blackest . . . reaction. . . . Is this Christianity? This is a loathsome caricature of it.” The startling conclusion that Bely comes to is that “it was necessary to kill Shatov, the false priest and false prophet so dear to Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.”75 72 Ibid., 195–96. 73 Ibid., 201. 74 See Berdiaev’s review of Petersburg, “Astralʹnyi roman,” which criticizes Bely’s novel for an “excessive dependence on [Dostoevsky’s] Devils.” Nikolai Berdiaev, “Astralʹnyi roman: Razmyshlenie po povodu romana A. Belogo Peterburg,” in his O russkikh klassikakh (Moscow: Vysshaia shkola, 1993), 314. 75 In A. V. Lavrov, “Dostoevskii v tvorcheskom soznanii Andreia Belogo (1900-e gody),” in Andrei Belyi: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. Lesnevskii and Mikhailov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatelʹ, 1988), 146.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

His article claims that Peter’s revolutionary nihilism is a tenable position, and in fact a prerequisite for the transformation of Russia for which Bely thirsted. Bely’s revisionist reading of The Devils was to shape the characterization of Petersburg. In two related essays of 1912, “Line” and “Circular Movement,” Bely develops the concept of “eternal books.” These are books like the Gospels, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the works of Gogol. Such works “are not books: they are creations welded from sparks.”76 Ideally, theosophical and theurgic art explodes the “circular movement” of cultural stagnation, lifting h ­ umanity onto a higher spiritual level in the enactment of “spiral movement”; Bely prefers a spiral dynamics to a linear or circular for describing historical and cultural movement. The linear is simply out of the question. In Petersburg, the narrator mocks Apollon’s linearity: “Every verbal exchange, in Apollon Apollonovich’s view, had a clear purpose, straight as a line” (236). According to the narrator, Apollon himself is “the most perfect combination of lines” (306). The title of the fourth chapter of Petersburg, “Chapter Four, in Which the Line of the Narrative Has Broken,” suggests, among other things, that Petersburg represents an innovative “break” in the classical narrative “line” of Russian literature. While Bely’s symbolist masterpiece clearly creates a rift with the past, it also runs the risk of falling into a circular dynamics with its resurrection of characters and scenes from many classics of nineteenth-century Russian ­literature. Reading Petersburg, one readily apprehends the author’s ­anxiety that the novel in fact represents circular, not spiral movement, and thus falls into one or both of the “two perversions of symbolism”: “the Luciferian ­temptation of philosophical dogmatism” and “the Ahrimanian illusion of ­evolution.”77 In his exploration into these two perversions of divine creativity, the ­narrator clarifies his relation to his precursors, the narrators of Dead Souls and The Devils. If the Ahrimanian illusionism of Bely’s narrator is his Gogolian ­heritage, it is in his Luciferian dogmatism that he resembles the ­narrator of The Devils. Like Dostoevsky’s narrator, Bely’s is a ­manipulative and jealous god to his characters who longs to take the reader into his private i­deological ­outlook—an outlook shaped by a polemic against “Shatovism.” The secret ­ideology of Bely’s narrator revolves around the issues of t­errorism and a­narchy—the a­uthorial demonism that Dudkin and the other p ­ rotagonists are not ­sufficiently daring to take to its extreme. So Bely parodies the u ­ ltraconservatism of Shatovism and 76 Belyi, “Liniia, krug, spiralʹ—simvolizma,” 13–22. 77 Ibid., 20.

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embraces the radicalism of Petr Verkhovenskii.78 Bely’s defense of Verkhovenskii is his portrayal of Lippanchenko, the terrorist/provocateur who masterminds the plot against Senator Ableukhov. The parallels between Lippanchenko and Verkhovenskii are numerous and evident. Lippanchenko’s claim that “in the party we act, as you know, on the basis of facts. . . . But the facts, the facts . . .” (376) evokes Petr’s demand for “fakty, fakty i fakty.”79 Like Petr, Lippanchenko has a ­hyperbolically physical demonic aspect: he is repeatedly characterized as “chimera,” “Mongol,” and “monster,” obese and sweaty, with lips like chunks of yellow salmon and unsettling protuberances on his forehead. Lippanchenko also reminds us of Petr in his brutal attitude toward his subordinate ­revolutionaries, whom, we learn, he has extorted and even murdered. Yet Lippanchenko’s frightful, “poetic” aspect is to a significant degree undermined by the fact that it is conveyed to us through an unreliable filter, for most of the vilifying and demonizing occurs in the perceptions of Dudkin, who hates, fears, and will soon murder Lippanchenko. Lippanchenko, though, has a touching “prosaic” side as well. As his concubine Zoia tries to convince an incredulous Dudkin, the apparently terrible “personage” (osoba) Lippanchenko is really just a “big child,” and Dudkin for an instant considers the fact that “on this occasion the person was not terrible; [. . .] but the person it was” (362). As Lippanchenko plays his “swan song” on the fiddle to Zoia— and as Dudkin creeps toward his dacha with a pair of newly purchased scissors and a terrible intention—the character that critics have too readily branded the “loathsome Lippanchenko”80 becomes touching. And he smiled; she smiled too; they nodded to one another; he—with a youthful vigour; she—with a shade of embarrassment, that betrayed a muted pride and her old adulation of him (of Lippanchenko?)—she cried out: “Oh, what an . . .” “Twang-twang . . .” “Incorrigible infant!” (514)

By giving his provocateur a “human face,” and by making him the victim, instead of the perpetrator, of murder, Bely undermines the ideological 78 See Iurii Tynianov’s discussion of the “double task” (430) and “double structure” (433–36) of parody in his “Dostoevskii i Gogolʹ (k teorii parodii),” in Arkhaisty i novatory (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1967), 412–55. Tynianov argues that what is usually understood as “parody” involves both “mockery” of certain elements of the model text and “imitation” of others. 79 F. M. Dostoevsky, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk, 1972), 241. 80 Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 136.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

norms of Dostoevsky’s novel: gone are the sympathy for “Shatovism” and the ­antipathy for “Shigalevism.” Lippanchenko is a corrective for the narrator’s demonizing of Peter in The Devils. In his collection of essays entitled Arabesques, Bely admits to a ­remarkable sense of his own authorship, writing, “My works are a bomb, which I throw.”81 And the narration and production of Petersburg are indeed designed to evoke an exploding bomb. But Bely goes even further, bolstering his surprising ­metaphor by making the inverse true as well, so that the “actual” terrorist bomb propelling the plot, the “sardine tin of terrible contents,” is likened to a literary text. Sof ʹia Likhutina’s thoughts develop this i­dentification: “And what if . . . Nikolai Apollonovich did keep in his desk things of such terrible c­ ontents [uzhasnogo soderzhaniia]?” (225). The appropriate word for ­describing the “contents” of a container would be soderzhimoe (that which is contained), while Bely’s soderzhanie (contents) is normally reserved for the more abstract sense of “contents,” as of a book. The bomb is further ­likened to this particular book when Sof ʹia reasons that “a bomb is something round which you must not touch” (226; Bomba — eto chto-nibud ʹ krugloe, k chemu prikosnutʹsia nelʹzia), for the image of a circular explosion from a point cannot but recall the prologue’s “printed book” demonically rushing forth from the “point” of the “author’s pen.” In the section entitled “Pepp Peppovich Pepp,” Nikolai’s thoughts about the bomb further develop this ­suggestive word play: “A sardine-tin like any other: shiny, with rounded edges. . . . No, no, no! . . . Not just a sardine-tin, but a sardine-tin of terrible contents ­[uzhasnogo ­soderzhaniia]!” (312). The bomb’s connection with the demonism of the n ­ arrative becomes clear when Nikolai is possessed by the “sardine-tin of ­terrible contents,” which is now identified as an incognito of Pepp Peppovich Pepp, the demon of Nikolai’s childhood nightmares. After this, the bombdevil begins “authoring” thoughts in Nikolai’s brain: “Who was the author of the thoughts? [. . .] It was not his head thinking, it was . . . the sardine-tin” (421). This scene of course recalls Dudkin’s possession by Shishnarfne, who punishes Dudkin for his failed revolt of gnosticism, exhorting him to accept fully the demonism that he has recently recanted. Likewise, Nikolai has been trying to wriggle out of his promise to blow up his father, Apollon. Both Dudkin and Nikolai are possessed by emissaries of the narrator who begin to “author” thoughts of terrible contents in their brains. The authorial intention of linking the bomb with the narrative is realized in “Pepp Peppovich Pepp” 81 In Nadezhda G. Pustygina, “Tsitatnostʹ v romane Andreia Belogo Peterburg,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo Universiteta) 28, no. 414 (1977): 82.

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by the graphic representation of the text on the page. The passage d ­ escribing the ­detonation of the bomb is divided into three “concentric circles” of text: a doubly indented ­paragraph, surrounded above and below by the larger circle of a singly indented p ­ aragraph, itself located within a third circle of ­unindented text. Each “circle” of text contains the phrase “terrible contents” and the image of an explosion outward from a point (312). Thus, through a persistent play with words and their spacing on the page, and through situational rhyme, Bely transforms the narrative, the book itself, into the bomb that ticks away and finally explodes in its plot. But the ­detonation of the book represents a danger less for the protagonists, who are, after all, uninjured by the bomb’s blast, than for the reader. In fact, On the Pass quite explicitly discusses the “explosion” of the reader, understood in the broader sense as the perceiver of culture: The time for daring has come: if we do not perceive it, we will nonetheless feel it: we will feel it as a swallowed bomb; we must fly up over ourselves: if we do not fly up—we will blow up. Life is bursting: reeling. The skull will be shattered: the radiant Dove of the future will descend into the opening of our explosions.82

Nikolai, who is a bad reader of culture (Kant, Cohen, Skovoroda) and who certainly lacks “daring,” feels his “gnostic” failure as a swallowed bomb ­bursting his skull apart in a wild hallucination; Apollon experiences ­similar sensations. The bomb-like book poses a threat to those who are unable through their quest of reading to transform existing culture. Bely’s essay “The Tragedy of Art” depicts Nietzsche, for Bely Europe’s greatest artist, as ­throwing the “bomb” of Zarathustra at European culture.83 It goes without saying that Petersburg would prefer the reader who “flies up over himself ” with the help of the novel to the one who is “blown up” by it. In Bely, then, we have a n ­ arrative form that differs fundamentally from Dostoevsky’s Devils, for, instead of s­upplanting readers’ views of history (reality, Creation) with diabolical novelistic emanations, Bely seizes narrative as the ultimate weapon for destroying and creating anew readers, and thus culture. And so the narrator’s treatment of the reader is not only conniving and threatening but terroristic. This is particularly true of the passive reader who must be exploded into a new cultural consciousness, less so of the creative 82 Belyi, Na perevale, 142. 83 See Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 140.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

reader who may be trusted to “fly up over himself ” of his own accord. At the end of the first chapter, the narrator warns, “The senescent senator, dear reader, will come chasing after you too in his black carriage: and from now on you will never forget him!” (74). The narrator contemptuously describes Nikolai as an “ostrich” in his equivocation over murdering his father (441) and also applies this epithet to the reader—an “ostrich” hiding his head (50). Dudkin’s quest through reading, though failed, is clearly the most daring of all the protagonists’ and helps to divulge the sort of texts Bely’s ideal reader would peruse, as well as give some indication of how a theurgic reading is carried out. Like Bely, Dudkin is a proponent of Nietzsche, mystical writings, and Revelation and is in the process of reading a history of gnosticism during the novel (111). Dudkin becomes a literature coach for Nikolai, whom he has reading Revelation and certain mystics. He explains to Nikolai, significantly in the section of the novel entitled “Revelation,” the difference between a­ llegory, which he defines as a symbol that has through overuse become a cliché, and true symbol, which is “an invitation to experience something artificially” (353). The narrator’s observation that the bomb has now become “cerebral” (333) answers to Dudkin’s idea of the true symbol, for, while it can be said of every object that exists “physically” in the novel’s world that it exists cerebrally for the reader, the narrator’s emphasis on the transformation of the bomb really is an invitation to experience it artificially. Here is a symbolist summons to readers to experience for themselves the horror and evil that possess the characters of the novel. The narrator’s extensive use of the familiar second-­person pronoun permits the reader to share in Dudkin’s experience of demonic possession and madness: “And you walk through them”; “You know very well yourself ” (402). The narrator warns readers that while “Petersburg is a dream” (467), a literary construct, this novelistic illusion contains the potential to come to life in readers’ brains, transforming them into Dudkins (or Evgeniis): “You will wander like a madman round the Petersburg Prospects” (468). The campaign of terror against the timorous reader comes to a head when the narrator relates to us our own detonation: “And unbearable crashes will resound, which you might not even have time to hear, because before they strike your eardrum, your eardrum will be shattered (and that’s not all)” (556). Or, “You will fly off into the outer atmosphere. [. . .] Every point of the body experiences a mad urge to expand beyond measure, to expand to the point of horror (for example, to occupy a space equal in diameter to the orbit of Saturn) [. . .] and in the urge to expand beyond measure physically we have been torn to pieces” (517). Art, particularly the text itself, becomes an explosion of evil, chthonic “content” that, in detonating its own containing

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“form,” destroys the perceiver/reader as well. Illustrative of this principle is the comparison of an old romance that begins to play on the tavern’s ­gramophone to “a volcanic explosion of subterranean paroxysms hurtling upon us from the depths” (275). It will be recalled here that Shishnarfne enters the novel’s action as a voice on a gramophone. Curiously, the recorded reactions of Bely’s contemporaries show that the first readers of Petersburg did indeed feel the threat of the novel of terrible contents: Aleksandr Blok, for instance, wrote in his journal that he and his associates (P. Struve, M. Tereshchenko) e­ xperienced Petersburg as an “evil work.”84 Likewise, Briusov asserted that the “central merit of the novel is, of course, its malice.”85 Bely’s On the Pass explains that Petersburg is about Nikolai’s failure through a lack of “daring” to blow up Apollon’s “yellow house of Ahriman,” to kill his father and the Ahrimanian spirit of pure logical abstraction that Apollon represents. The stagnancy of Ahriman must be exploded by the rage of Lucifer in order that culture break free of its decaying orbit and be reborn in spiral movement. Nikolai’s dream vision suggests that he is the bearer of the Ableukhov family’s ancient “Turanian” spirit of destruction and is engaged in the terroristic “mission of the destroyer.”86 Like his terrorist brother Dudkin, Nikolai is the bearer of the spirit of Luciferian material evil (terror, violence) in its eternal opposition to the equally evil spirit of Ahrimanian spiritual evil (abstraction, idle cerebral play). Nikolai, however, fails in his mission. It is in such a spirit that Bely had defended Petr Verkhovenskii as a proponent of “progress,” of new culture. While endorsing the sort of nihilistic destructiveness that Petr ­represents, Petersburg nonetheless characterizes the urge to blow everything up as “Satanism” and demonic possession. Dudkin, we learn, had been a public proponent of something he called “healthy barbarism” at a period before the start of the novel’s action. In a speech he made in Helsinki, “all c­ ontemporary phenomena were divided by him into two categories: symptoms of outlived culture and healthy barbarism, which was compelled for the time being to conceal itself under a mask of refinement (the appearance of Ibsen and Nietzsche), and under that mask to infect the hearts of men with the chaos that was already secretly calling in their souls” (392). Obviously, Dudkin’s 84 “Zloe proizvedenie.” See Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vosʹmi tomakh, vol. 7, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 224. Bely recalled that “Struve . . . had many objections against the tendency of Petersburg, finding that it is very evil and even skeptical.” See Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 438. 85 Belyi, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 438. 86 Belyi, Na perevale, 237.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

desire “to contaminate the heart” is related to the narrator’s plan of invading the reader’s brain with occult forces “under the mask of cerebral play.” Dudkin realizes, too late, that his conversations “with himself and others aroused in him a sinful state of mind” (116), and now he condemns his prior views on terror as “devilry” (besovshchina), “possession by the force of terror” (138). In Petersburg, as in The Devils, “demonic contamination” amounts to the adoption of “ungodly” theories—to speaking, as Stepan Trofimovich ­memorably puts it, “in other people’s words.” Bely’s novel realizes this ­metaphor, for Shishnarfne’s disembodied voice literally becomes Dudkin’s, entering into his body and taking up residence in his voice box. As Shishnarfne explains to his victim, “The biology of the shadow has not yet been studied; and that is why you will never come to terms with a shadow: you won’t understand its demands; in Petersburg it makes its way into you through the bacilli of all manner of illnesses, which you swallow along with water from the tap” (398). In “Circular Movement,” too, Bely depicts authors as “bacilli” that enter into readers as a harmful contagion: “We accepted Nietzsche; and we accepted all of Nietzsche’s strangeness. That means: Nietzsche was the bacillus of our illness.”87 The demonic contamination of Petersburg’s “illness” is the invasion of the reader’s brain, which the authorial personae hope to achieve under the mask of cerebral play. Petersburg, like Zarathustra, seethes with demonic bacilli. The Satanism Dudkin first embraces and later rejects is the spread of moral contagion through the artifice of novelistic narration. Dudkin calls this demonic process “the uprising of the arts against ­established forms” (392), and I think it is clear that the very ­narration of Petersburg represents such a revolt. Dudkin had once claimed that “Christianity has outlived its time,” praising Satanism as “healthy barbarism” (392) and advocating “the summoning of the Mongols” (392). Thus, Dudkin was a proponent of the Luciferian “pan-­Mongolism” that Bely, following Vladimir Solovʹev, thought to be ascending. However, as the narrator contemptuously points out, Dudkin “consequently took fright of Mongols”: “He had become clearly aware of the link between that theory and Satanism [satanizmom]” (397). Now, during the time period of the narration, Dudkin attempts to exorcise himself of his Eastern demonism by reading Revelation and Stepka’s sacred Trebnik, and by intoning a word he has, in a disastrous blunder, contrived as a prayer of e­ xorcism, “Enfranshish.” Alas, “Enfranshish” contains the same shish (fig) as its palindrome twin “Shishnarfne,” and so, once summoned, Shishnarfne comes for his soul. 87 Andrei Belyi, “Krugovoe dvizhenie,” Trudy i dni 4–5 (July–October 1912): 68.

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The title character of Dudkin and Bely’s favorite “eternal” book, Zarathustra, argues for a re-creation of values, whereby destruction and demonism emerge as desirable norms. For Zarathustra, great “creators,” including great authors, always become destructive from the perspective of society (the status quo, the norms and values of the day). “Change of values— that is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.”88 The creator’s attack on existing values is always diabolical from the point of view of the society under attack: “You are going the way of the creator: you would create a god for yourself out of your seven devils.”89 Zarathustra finally realizes that his “final sin” is “Pity”: pity for those among his c­ ontemporaries who share his “nausea” over the present state of man and culture, who long to re-create mankind in the “superman,” but who are not themselves c­ reators like Zarathustra.90 Bely notes in On the Pass that Nietzsche “blew up the ‘good’ within him, ‘for the good cannot create.’”91 Bely’s ideology dictated “blowing up” anything and anyone that stood in the path of creative progress, and he evidently tried to drive pity from his heart during those years and even ­contemplated murder himself.92 Pity, then, is the final sin in Petersburg’s re-creation of values. It is Nikolai’s pity for his father, Dudkin’s pity for Nikolai that prompt them to weasel out of their commitments. If the authorial intention behind Petersburg was to embrace Luciferian destruction and blow up the yellow house of Ahriman, the embrace is halfhearted. Nikolai fails to destroy his father, Apollon, and the Apollonian spirit, and his failure is due to what Zarathustra would characterize as the “sins” of pity and fear. But Dudkin is caught up in this sinful pity, as well. For, i­ronically, it is pity that prompts Dudkin first to release Nikolai from the obligation to assassinate his father, and then to murder Lippanchenko. Yet Dudkin’s murder of Lippanchenko is a profoundly ambivalent act, with Ahrimanian and Luciferian connotations. Lippanchenko, though the ­plotter 88 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 171. 89 Ibid., 176–77. 90 Ibid., 436. 91 Belyi, Na perevale, 150. 92 See Vospominaniia o Bloke, 168, where Bely acknowledges the debt his belief in the “revaluation of values” owed to Nietzsche (as well as Bakunin and Saint John): “I understood the Gnostic judgment ‘what is true has value’ as the subjugation of abstract concepts about truth to the creation of values, to individual paths that overturned and exploded old forms: bundles [tiuki]. As far as these ‘bundles’ were concerned, my philosophy dictated: ‘Blow ’em up!’ This philosophy intersected the question posed by everyone back then: ‘Is it permissible to kill?’”

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

of Luciferian terror and chaos, has become as entangled in Ahrimanian ­cerebralism as the great bureaucrat Apollon in his department. Apollon and Lippanchenko’s interchangeability is systematically established: they are both yellow (the “yellow house of Ahriman”), and they both have great, bony gorilla skulls, enlarged by cerebral play.93 Ironically, then, in ­attempting to renounce the Luciferian spirit of “healthy barbarism,” Dudkin ­vindicates that selfsame Luciferian spirit, striking a blow against the Ahrimanian p ­ rinciple in Lippanchenko and thus failing to alter the status quo. But the antithetical interpretation is yet tenable: since, as Bely argues in “Line,” the symbolist creation of culture is perverted by “the Luciferian temptation of ­philosophical dogmatism”; it is a “Luciferian” bond that unites the two great dogmatists Apollon and Lippanchenko, and Dudkin’s act of murder must represent Ahrimanian demonism. In Bely’s symbolic hall of mirrors, both Apollon and Lippanchenko “submit the egos and wills of their ‘sons’ to p ­ reordained laws and schemes that provoke murderous if ultimately futile reactions.”94 There indeed is a line of intersection between the demonic planes of Ahriman and Lucifer: idle Ahrimanian cerebralism must eventually lead to entrenched Luciferian dogmatism and vice versa. Eastern destruction and Western abstraction both represent foreign worldviews that lead to evil when imposed on Russia, with her need to find her unique path to higher culture and ­spiritual renewal. For Bely, higher culture cannot spiral up from the charmed circle of forms maintained through idle cerebral play but must be created actively, ­ purposefully, by individuals more daring than Nikolai and Dudkin, even than Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. One must be pitiless to blow up the yellow house of Ahriman. But the theurgic individual, according to the argument of “Line,” becomes godlike not only through the destruction of the old forms of Creation but through “the act of creating in God oneself and others.”95 While Bely wanted destruction toward a creative end, his narrator of Petersburg entraps himself and all of his characters in an infernal circle of destruction. Dudkin, though he is probably the closest thing to a positive hero in the novel, ­annihilates satanically but fails to create in God. His head is too muddled, both by alcoholism and revolutionary dogmatism, for a godlike act, which requires a creative as well as destructive element. 93 See also Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 115. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 139: “Bely believed that destructiveness should go hand in hand with liberation and creativity.” For a different reading, see Alexandrov’s assertion that “Bely has transvalued evil into something closer to good.” In Major Symbolist Fiction, 131.

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The anagrammatic shish in Shishnarfne has a decipherment we have not yet considered. In its original, Old Russian usage, a shish was a spy. Another fairly rare meaning of shish is “devil.”96 It is the root of shishimora (kikimora) and shishiga, a word that actually appears in the novel as Mr. Shishiganov in the list of surnames that the double agent—shish!—Morkovin uses to bait Nikolai Ableukhov (274). Bely uses both meanings by making Shishnarfne a secret agent sent not from Persia, of course, but from the land of ­shadows, in order to spy on Dudkin, making sure he never escapes the prison of ­circular ­movement. Vladislav Khodasevich recollected that during the Petersburg period Bely was himself obsessed with “certain spies, provocateurs, dark personae,” which, he claimed, were following him in his peregrinations through Europe and Russia: “They would peek at him, they would trail him, they wanted to ruin him in the literal sense and in some other senses as well.”97 “The police lurked in wait for the criminal, tracked him and punished him, in short acted altogether like the powers of darkness. . . . In his eyes p ­ olitical provocation took on demonic features in the most exact meaning of the word. . . . Police of all kinds, of all shades, of all countries plunged him into maniacal terror.”98 Given Bely’s physical and metaphysical horror of police agents and spies, it is fascinating that he should collude the way he does with Shishnarfne, Petersburg’s chief undercover shish. Conspiring with the narrator, Shishnarfne is able to ensnare Dudkin irretrievably in circular dogmatism. The use of alcohol as bait answers to the idiom khmel ʹnye shishi—the tipsy shish-devils, which Russians are supposed to see when they have “drunk themselves to the little devils” (dopitʹsia do chertikov). Dudkin has indeed “drunk himself to the Devil,” and he consequently sees a “tipsy shish”—Shishnarfne. Dudkin is ashamed of his Christian impulse to exorcise this shish and escape the circle of terror. In front of his politically progressive guest, the Persian revolutionary Shishnarfiev, really the Ahrimanian devil Shishnarfne, Dudkin is afraid to pronounce the “word ‘Breviary,’ so compromising for a free-thinker” (395). And while Bely’s attack against the stagnant forms of contemporary Russian culture does not spare the “philosophical dogmatism” of the Orthodox Church, it is implied that Christianity is more than mere dogma. The narrator’s description of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, the “dark walls of an immense temple, raised by human hands” (404), evokes Christ’s promise to 96 See S. V. Maksimov, Nechistaia, nevedomaia i krestnaia sila (St. Petersburg: Poliset, 1994), 55–59. 97 Khodasevich, “Andrei Belyi,” in Velikovskaia, Koleblemyi trenozhnik, 303. 98 Ibid., 305.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

“destroy this Temple made by human hands, and in three days build another, not made by human hands” (Mark 14:58). The symbolist artist strives to be a Christian in the way the very first Christians were, as active creators of new culture, not as the passive receivers of a frozen Christian doctrine nearly two thousand years old. Likewise, the bomb’s explosion is supposed to be a further echo of the big bang, or shall we say a variation on the theme of God’s creation of the world. Because of the failure of his revolt of gnosticism, Dudkin lacks the creative attitude toward Christianity epitomized by the opening of John’s Gospel, and so his terror art is a circular failure, and we last see him astride the murdered Lippanchenko, in a pose that can only be a parody of Falconet’s statue The Bronze Horseman. We know of Bely’s intention to redefine in Petersburg the moral viewpoint of The Devils, but now, in light of Bely’s symbolist revision of Christian values, we can better understand the failure of Nikolai, Lippanchenko, and Dudkin to redeem Petr Verkhovenskii. Taking up the abomination of Ahrimanian evil as its theme, Petersburg seeks to redeem Verkhovenskii’s farrago of destruction by exalting the figure of the revolutionary. Luciferian violence in Petersburg, demonic as it is, should explode the equally demonic Ahrimanian circularity of contemporary culture, thus preparing the way for progress. Yet Nikolai and Dudkin’s destructive action is doomed to futility by the ambivalence of the evil force driving them: they are equally proponents and opponents of Ahrimanian and Luciferian demonism and therefore ineffectual as agents of change. To make matters worse, they lack creativity. According to Bely, Dostoevsky preaches the “blackest reaction” through his martyred hero Shatov, himself a “loathsome caricature” of Christianity. The idea is to replace Shatov’s fanatical ravings with a theurgic form of Christianity. Bely attacks Dostoevsky through the dichotomy of ­novelistic creation versus historical “chronicling.” The Devils takes Pushkin’s monk Pimen as the ­paragon of the holy chronicler, who practices a sacred genre of literature no longer possible in Dostoevsky’s day. The narrator of The Devils, Anton Lavrentievich G-v, presents himself as a chronicler of the disastrous events described in the novel, but, as I argue elsewhere,99 he mostly ­manages to entangle himself in the devilry he tries to describe. Petersburg presents the chronicle as the Ahrimanian opposite of theurgic or “eternal” books. The ­epigraph to the last chapter of Petersburg is Pimen’s description in Boris

 99 Adam Weiner, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston, IL: ­Northwestern University Press, 1998).

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Godunov (act 1, scene 5) of the limited view of the world to which he has been reduced after a lifetime of chronicling. The past slips by me . . . Was it long ago that it rushed on, eventful, Seething like the ocean? Now it is silent and calm: Not many faces has memory preserved for me, Not many words reach me. (521)

This epigraph ironically links Pimen’s doddering chronicle writing to the ­authorship of Apollon and Nikolai, who both pen chronicle-like monographs at the close of the novel. It also suggests a distinction between a perceived ­literary ideal of truthful, impartial chronicling in The Devils and the kind of writing exemplified by Petersburg, and in particular by the last chapter of Petersburg, which begins with the narrator’s confession of having altered time, which “in our narration expanded and scattered throughout psychic spaces” (521), in short, of having subverted history’s flow for the purposes of narrative art. Bely’s narrator makes his scornful attitude toward the “factual” ­chronicling of life quite clear, particularly in his contempt for the n ­ewspapers and ­chronicles of 1905, to which he prefers a certain “Diary of Events” (Dnevnik proisshestvii), which obviously never existed, even in the novel’s f­antastic world. Insisting (much as G-v insists on the factual basis of The Devils) that the “Diary” is “fact,” the narrator suggests that he has ­incorporated it as a base for his narrative (75). Typical of the sort of “facts” that this chronicle presents is a report on “the disappearance of a certain literary man,” who turns out to be Darʹialʹskii, the protagonist of Bely’s previous novel, The Silver Dove. In a characteristically circular operation, then, the narrator is offering Bely’s past fiction as the “factual” basis of Bely’s current fiction. Indeed, shortly thereafter, the narrator confesses that the mechanics of this “Diary of Events” involves transforming a fact into a “series of occurrences that had never occurred, but which were a threat to public order” (78). This novel presents the slavish chronicling of events as miserably inferior to their creative transformation. Yet at the novel’s close Nikolai is in the process of writing a “monograph” entitled The Instructions, or Precepts of Tuauf to His Son Pepi. Nikolai’s book is a treatment of a classic of ancient Egyptian literature that praises the scribe’s profession above all others.100 Nikolai first fails in his mission of Luciferian destruction to blow up the “yellow house of Ahriman,” proving himself unable 100 See Peterburg, 684n14.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

to fulfill the ideal of the symbolist creator of new culture and life; it is hardly surprising, then, that he now retreats into the undaring, utterly untheurgic activity of chronicling. Nikolai’s monograph takes up the profession of the scribe, who, after all, copies, and thus propagates old culture, rather than create it anew, and so his gnostic quest founders. To put this in other words, on the death of his father, Nikolai replaces him, becoming the chief of the scribes. In Apollon’s department, after all, scribes had scribbled nonsense all day long: “Scribes at the desk [. . .] in front of each: a pen and ink and a respectable pile of paper” (448). Apollon Apollonovich, whose namesake is the god of poetry and music, is one of the potential creators of the novel. Though himself “a person who has arisen from nonexistence” (15), Apollon, in his creative capacity, evokes comparisons to the gods of antiquity: “Apollon Apollonovich was in a certain sense like Zeus: from his head there emerged gods, goddesses, and genii” (45). According to the narrator, the “extremely strange quality” of Apollon’s cerebral play is the fact that “shades” (such as his son and Dudkin) emanate from his thoughts and then begin to exhibit the same proclivity for cerebral play as Apollon (45–46). The narrator makes the demonic nature of such creation rather clear by describing the “occult force” of Apollon’s bureaucratic office: from his bureau, Apollon shoots “serpentine lightening” from his head, as the serpentine Medusa shoots arrows (66). The narrator’s claim that Apollon’s office is the only important locale in the entire novelistic world (298) suggests that this bureau is very much like the “point” of the prologue from which the novel issues, and that Apollon represents some parodied form of the novel’s authorship. If Apollon represents the state of the arts for contemporary (1905) Russia, he champions a stagnant and sterile travesty of art, a pagan form with no “symbolic,” “theurgic” capacity whatever. The caryatid outside his office window, along with the statues and paintings on classical themes in his home, reflects this cold art of petrified form and idle content. As Apollon sinks into senility, he maniacally cleans the dust-covered books of his enormous library. This recalls a passage in “Circular Movement” in which Bely contrasts the symbolist’s “cultural creation” with the kind of “preservation” typified by libraries, which are merely devoted to “rebinding the creation of a prophet in a suede binding,” and by museums, where “that which is created is coated with dust.”101 “We have squinted at the comforts of the office, at the bookshelves, at the despair of teatime; if we plan to return, then we have not understood: Zarathustra perished from the return in order that we, the witnesses of his 101 Belyi, “Krugovoe dvizhenie,” 70.

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death, might not return.”102 The dusty books buried in Apollon’s library have had as little impact on culture as his “circulars,” the ill-aimed missiles issuing from his office, have had on the agricultural practices of the Russian empire. In Nietzsche’s terms, Apollon’s aesthetic sensibility is purely Apollonian and possesses no Dionysian element; in Bely’s terms it is the destructive triumph of the line and the circle, but not the spiral’s theurgic creation. So when Nikolai arrives at the end of the novel at the viewpoint that “all culture . . . everything has died,” he becomes fully the heir to his father. His new pessimism is appropriate to one who has preferred the chronicling of old life to the creation of new. Perhaps more surprising than Nikolai’s d ­ espondency is the narrator’s lament “Life itself is deathly,” which resonates with Nikolai’s frame of mind and conveys despair of the possibility of life regenerating (562). The narrator’s uncharacteristically gloomy outburst gives vent to his anxiety at Nikolai’s failure to throw a Luciferian bomb at his Ahrimanian father Apollon, much less the theurgic bomb of an “eternal book” at his culture. At the same time, the narrator himself has just “placed a dot” (tochku stavim zdezʹ) at the end of his narrative (560), thus closing the “charmed circle” that begins with the prologue’s point (tochka). By doing so, he indicates that his own creation, the novel itself, is no more than a chronicle, an Ahrimanian promulgation of dead culture. The quest to write an eternal book and re-create the world has failed at every level. While Petersburg tries to explode such themes from The Devils as ­chronicling and political demonism, Bely’s novel is in another sense a very serious continuation of The Devils. Nadezhda Pustygina astutely observes that the central term of Petersburg, “idle cerebral play,” derives from the ­clownish Captain Lebiadkin’s claim in The Devils that “Russia is a play of nature, but not of the mind.”103 It is precisely such suggestive material in the text of The Devils that Bely’s artistic daring brings out into the open. Lebiadkin’s strange formulation in The Devils becomes in Petersburg the primary artistic principle of cerebral play. According to a paradigm in Petersburg typified by Shishnarfne, idle cerebral play creates ephemeral, illusory worlds of shadow (25, 36), which “restrict [the reader’s] vision” of Creation by erecting “foggy planes” (33). The novel’s first chapter heading, “In Which Is Told of a Certain Worthy Person, His Cerebral Play and Ephemerality of Being” (13), implies, among other things, that artistic creation is more ephemeral than Creation itself. The narrator’s despair at the close of Petersburg arises, it seems, from the 102 Ibid., 71. 103 Pustygina, “Tsitatnostʹ v romane Andreia Belogo Peterburg,” 86.

The Enchanted Point of Petersburg

anxiety that his novelistic emanations will exist only as long as the novel is read. As we have seen, the failure to create something lasting is rendered in the novel as the expansion of a “circle,” or a “zero,” from a point, and the ultimate collapse of that circle back into its origination point. And now we, too, have come full circle, back to Solovʹev’s hypothetical “Hole-worshippers”: Bely, like Solovʹev, tests the tenet of Christian monism, which traces all phenomena to one divine source and defines evil not as a ­phenomenon or thing but as an absence. For if the circles of cerebral play in the novel are “zeros,” absences, they are, by the Christian definition, evil. In fact, Christian monism paradoxically converges in the novel’s paradigm of c­ erebral play with Zoroastrian dualism, which views evil as shadow, the absence of light. Bely’s cerebral “playthings” are evil unless, or until, they produce, through ­readers’ cognition, some lasting change. The demonic shade Shishnarfne is the sin of eternal return, the perpetual evil of the charmed circle. “Circular Movement” explores the demonism of these black dots, the vexed points from which books and culture expand only to collapse back on themselves in the end. This collapse is the failure of the “eternal return,” in which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, to Bely’s horror, learns to rejoice. For Bely, Zarathustra’s decision to descend from the height he had attained, enacting the eternal return, represents his and Nietzsche’s rejection of the divine and spiritual in favor of the earthly and demonic. Bely’s comments on Zarathustra’s self-characterization as the “sleeping dragon” are well worth examining. In these cited words there lies a black dot; this black dot grew into a storm cloud—in Nietzsche’s soul. Here are these words, “I . . . am a slumbering dragon.” What is a dragon? A dragon is the union of a pangolin and an eagle: the eagle expands through the air; the pangolin steals along the ground. The pangolin is Zarathustra’s earth and the eagle—his spirit. The unification of pure spirit and earth leads through the reptile. The overcoming of the reptile is the passing by, onto a greater height. But Zarathustra stopped here (the scene with the dwarf ). Overwhelmed by the spirit, Nietzsche feels the first shuddering of the reptile—in himself.104

The “serpent” (zmeia) that Bely uses to characterize the circular structure of Dead Souls and the “dragon” (drakon), or “reptile” (gad), of this passage both 104 Belyi, “Krugovoe dvizhenie,” 65.

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speak to the evil Bely saw in circular returns. After the placement of the first black dot of the first letter on the first page of a book, an author’s return to that dot at the end of the book—his failure to move his consciousness, his reader’s, his society’s to a “greater height”—is a capitulation to the power of the “dragon” of the “earth,” and to Ahriman, the “prince of the world.” “Ahriman, revealing the descents to us, summons us into the very depths of the earth in order to focus us on our puny interests.”105 Such a creative failure would seem to be the final implication of Petersburg’s “charmed point of view” (zamknutyi krugozor). Nina Berberova, in “A Memoir and a Comment: the ‘Circle’ of Petersburg,” supports the idea that Bely viewed his novel in such pessimistic terms. According to Berberova, when Vladislav Khodasevich asked Bely in 1923 to describe the structure of his latest work, which was later entitled The Beginning of the Century, Bely answered, “It is a line. And Petersburg, no matter what Berdiaev said, is a c­ ircle.”106 In a letter of late 1912, Bely describes Petersburg as a “sketch” (eskiz), in which he could see the “outlines” (kontury) of “a great, great canvas.”107 This letter may provide a clue as to how to reconcile, on the one hand, the despair of writing, u ­ biquitously conveyed in Petersburg through the allegory ­connecting diabolism with the ­production of the book, and, on the other, the authorial hope that Petersburg will somehow rise above the demonically “­circular” forms of “Dostoevskian” chronicling in the great spiral movement of a history-changing book. For this hope, too, is present in the text as an astonishingly profound and vitally creative use of novelistic language and form.

105 Ibid., 72. 106 Berberova, “A Memoir and a Comment,” 115–16. 107 In Peterburg, 512.

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession1 JUDITH WERMUTH-ATKINSON

In spite of being deeply rooted in Russian literary tradition, Petersburg in fact reflects different traditions—Russian culture, classicism, German p ­ hilosophy of the romantic period and of the turn of the twentieth century, French ­modernism, and others. In my book The Red Jester: Andrei Bely’s “Petersburg” as a Novel of the European Modern, I contextualize Petersburg in the aesthetics of Bely’s time, specifically the movement called the Modern (die Moderne), which developed in the German-speaking part of Europe at the turn of the ­twentieth century. Analyzing the novel in the context of the Modern shows that the poetics of this key modernist text was not the product of the influence on Bely’s work of any one national literature, philosophy, culture, or time period. Rather, it ­demonstrates the need to acknowledge Petersburg as a transcendent work of European aesthetics that codefines the Modern, a work that may have ­influenced the development of the European novel more than has been realized. Using the example of the Viennese Secession, in this article I will demonstrate the way Bely reflected philosophical and aesthetic ideas in his novel. At the turn of the twentieth century, the question of ­communication between outer and inner reality fascinated scientists as well as artists and authors. The modern materialist worldview of Western culture was ­characterized by an implicit division between the objective or physical realm of existence, called also an outer system, and the subjective or psychic realm of existence, called an inner system. This predominant worldview was based on Newtonian ­classical physics. A change in this view was rooted in the r­evolutionary ­scientific ­developments at the turn of the century. For ­modernists, Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) undermined the very basis of materialism. It ­challenged the idea that   1 Revised excerpts from my book The Red Jester: Andrei Bely’s “Petersburg” as a Novel of the European Modern (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012).

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properties of matter, such as space, time, or energy, have an ­objective existence independent of observation, and suggested that the observer may be involved with the ­determination of the observed p ­ roperties of matter. Consequently, the modernists believed that Einstein placed the inner and the outer systems in a relationship of ­interdependence, and that he introduced a new concept of the observer as a participant. This concept led to a unitary idea of reality (called by C. G. Jung unus mundus), in which matter and psyche, or the material and the spiritual, were not separated from each other. During the movement called the Modern (die Moderne), one of the major questions in aesthetics was once again the relationship between reality and appearance (Sein und Schein). This general concern was looked at from different angles. In the first place, philosophy, psychology, and literature were concerned with dreams and their role in human life. Freud’s early article “The Dream Is a Fulfillment of a Wish,” published already in 1895–99, and his first book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) posed the questions of replacing action by a dream, and, generally, of the degree of reality present in dreams. In fact, the new perception of reality was fundamental in the development of analytical psychology and for establishing a new view of the unconscious. Another aspect of the problem of reality and appearance was the use of different artistic methods of obliterating the borders between reality and ­spectacle, between truth and lie, or between mask and man. The term die Moderne itself was originally coined in 1886 to denote the first attempts to move toward a change of the view of reality. From the ­perspective of the new unitary view of reality, turn-of-the-century authors and artists looked at the self from many different angles. A few years before Freud’s Interpretation and Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912; English translation: Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916), and even before Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, Ernst Mach posed the q­ uestion of the relationship between the physical and the psychical world or between subject and object. His study Analyse der Empfindungen (1885; The Analysis of Sensations)2 was in the focus of scientific as well as a­ esthetic ­discussions. The artistic perception of Mach’s new theory of the self and its relation to reality led to the formation of new aesthetic principles in art, literature, and even music. At the heart of these new principles was the old question of the very existence of reality. Questioning the existence of reality led to questioning the limitations of expression, even with regard to language. Language was the ­subject of the   2 All citations from Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations (New York: Dover Publications, 1996).

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empiriocritical theory of Fritz Mauthner and of some metaphysical or esoteric theories represented by Maurice Maeterlinck and Madame Blavatsky. The work of Hermann Bahr, a significant literary figure in fin-de-siècle Vienna, most likely drew Bely’s interest to Ernst Mach’s theories in Analysis of Sensations and also to particular literary works related to Mach’s view of reality, such as Arthur Schnitzler’s play Der grüne Kakadu (1899; The Green Cockatoo). The names of Mach, Bahr, and Schnitzler were all well known to the writers of the Silver Age from the pages of the literary journal Vesy. Mach’s name is among those Bely himself mentions in his comments on Oswald Külpe’s book Ocherki sovremennoi germanskoi filosofii (Essays on ­contemporary German philosophy).3 The name of Hermann Bahr appears multiple times on the pages of Vesy. The journalist Maximilian Schick emphasizes that this is “a fine Viennese writer, . . . a refined and free-spirited European,”4 and elaborates on his aesthetic approach to theater. In the section “Chronicles” of the first issue of the journal, there is a report about the staging of Schnitzler’s play The Green Cockatoo in Paris, in which the author points out that this play is “well known to the Russian audience.”5 In Petersburg, Bely focuses rather on the aesthetic transformation of Mach’s theories by Hermann Bahr. To Bely, Bahr’s aesthetics, which ­represented the aesthetics of the Viennese Secession, was apparently the ­conduit of the ­contemporary view of the self shared by many Western authors of the b­ eginning of the twentieth century. Bahr appointed himself an aesthetic missionary to turn-of-the-century Vienna, much as Bely did for Russia. Bely, who, in my view, saw Petersburg as a novel of the European Modern, must have needed to discuss Bahr’s views as well as other major theories of the time. In this article I will focus on Bely’s views of the ego and of reality based on the theory of Ernst Mach, and on the references to Hermann Bahr’s aesthetics called new idealism. In his book Understanding Hermann Bahr, Donald Daviau asserts that the publication as well as the study of Bahr’s work has been severely hindered in the last fifty years by two circumstances: first, the problems with the rights to Bahr’s works, including the Nachlaß (literary estate), and second, a negative opinion, particularly among German authors, inherited from the polemics and satires of Karl Kraus,6 that was passed on unrevised from one generation to another.   3 See Vesy, no. 1 (1904): 58–59.   4 Ibid., 84.   5 Ibid.   6 Karl Kraus (1874–1936): literary and cultural critic, writer, essayist, and satirist. In 1899 he established the polemic and satiric magazine Die Fackel. Daviau points out that Kraus “devoted a significant part of his life and talent to writing polemics and satires against his

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According to Daviau, Bahr’s contemporaries called him a mediator of modernity and the “man of the day-after-tomorrow” (der Mensch von ­übermorgen). Having begun his career in politics, Bahr soon preferred to write journalistic essays covering broad areas of art, literature, music, science, and philosophy. He was editor of the Berlin Freie Bühne, coestablisher of the Vienna weekly Die Zeit (where he edited the feuilleton section), dramaturg of Burgtheater, and director in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin under Max Reinhardt. As Daviau asserts, Bahr worked across national lines, considered himself an Austropäer (a combination of Austrian and European), and devoted a large part of his life to a cultural program of unifying the European nations. His views, according to Daviau, are still relevant for the European Union.7 Bahr contributed also to the development of individual artists and writers, as well as to the aesthetic developments in art and literature. He considered himself to be the founder of the group that became known later as JungWien (Young Vienna).8 While Daviau rightfully defines this claim as “self-­ aggrandizement,”9 Bahr was certainly the spokesman and the theoretician behind this group. He was also a passionate supporter of Arthur Schnitzler; believed that he had discovered Loris (Hugo von Hofmannsthal); provided, through his essays, a detailed insider view of the Viennese Secession; and shared with his admired friend Gustav Klimt the cause of “modernizing art in Vienna along the model of other leading European nations in order thereby to usher Austria culturally into the twentieth century.”10 One of Hermann Bahr’s favorite artworks by Gustav Klimt was the ­drawing Nuda Veritas (see fig. 1), created as an illustration for the first issue of the Secessionists’ magazine Ver Sacrum (1898–1903). The drawing represents a two-dimensional figure (Klimt’s new method to emphasize an abstract ­concept) of a nubile waif who holds an empty mirror up to modern man. At her feet there are two vernal symbols, which show the hope for rejuvenation. On the top, above the figure, there is a quotation from L. Schaefer: “Wahrheit ist Feuer und Wahrheit reden heist leuchten und brennen” (Truth is fire, and to speak the truth means to shine and to burn). In Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Austrian contemporaries.” See Donald Daviau, Understanding Hermann Bahr (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2002), 315.   7 Ibid., 470.   8 Jung-Wien was an aesthetic movement at the turn of the twentieth century, represented by a group of people whose leader was Hermann Bahr. Their goal was to move away from naturalism. Their publication was Die Zeit (Time) and their meeting point, the famous Café Griensteidl.   9 Daviau, Understanding Hermann Bahr, 256. 10 Ibid., 162.

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

Carl Schorske explains that this drawing represents one of the major aims of the Secessionist ideology—to create a new art whose function was “to speak the truth about modern man.”11 Thus Nuda Veritas became one of the most expressive symbols of the Secession. In the words of Otto Wagner, who shared with Klimt the view that the new aesthetic forms should express “the truth of the hectic, purposive, capitalist urbanity,”12 Secession was supposed to “show modern man his true face.”13 There were two aspects to the idea of showing modern man his true face: on the one hand, it implied a Nietzschean rejection of historicism and inherited culture, which, according to the Secession, served to conceal the modern identity of the bourgeois man; on the other hand, the big question was what modern man would see in the empty mirror, which was supposed to reflect the finest nuances of his sensibility (nerves) and the awareness of the unconscious. In Bely’s description in the chapter “What Costumier Might That Be?” the mirror does not simply reflect Nikolai Apollonovich’s face but rather shows him his true face. The face, as if independent, is in a “tormentingly strange” way the same—his own. “You might have said that it was not Nikolai Apollonovich gazing at himself from the mirror.” That very thing, his own face, looking back from the mirror is “unknown” to the person to whom it belongs. The face that belongs to Nikolai Apollonovich is as good as a costume. The mirror shows back the truth—the “pale” and “languishing” face of “a demon of space” (60). In Petersburg Bely uses the mirror image approximately twenty times, almost always in the context of the Secessionist symbol devised by Klimt in Nuda Veritas. Bely could have certainly adopted Klimt’s image of Nuda Veritas without the mediation of Hermann Bahr since in the Secession the drawing had gained an emblematic value, expressing the new concept of the inner truth of modern man that is the truth of the psyche, not of reality. However, in Petersburg it is the combination of the theme of the mirror (or truth) with the theme of costume (Verkleidung) and constant change (ewige Veränderung) that justifies the interpretation of Bely’s use of the mirror emblem as a ­representation of Bahr’s aesthetics. The reason for Bahr’s fascination with the theme of Klimt’s drawing is the fact, as Daviau emphasizes, that since his first essay on Ibsen in 1887, Bahr’s “rallying cry had been ‘the call for truth.’”14 11 Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 215. 12 Ibid., 74. 13 Ibid., 215. 14 Daviau, Understanding Hermann Bahr, 154.

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In this sense Nuda Veritas was the best example for Bahr’s view that Klimt “painted the Weltanschauung of his day.”15 In Petersburg, costume has also the function of juxtaposing the Secessionist idea of constant change to historicism. In the chapter “A Ceremony,” as if to provoke a polemical discussion of this juxtaposition, Bely created one of the twenty mirror images in the novel, the description of Apollon Apollonovich getting dressed up in his old uniform for the “day of extraordinary things” (141) in front of a mirror, as a precise replica to the mirror image of his son in “What Costumier Might That Be?” discussed above. Further, after performing ablutions . . . Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, like all the other ageing dignitaries, confidently fastened himself this day in starch. . . . After this, going through to his dressing room, Apollon Apollonovich took from a cupboard (as did all the other ageing d ­ ignitaries) his red-lacquered boxes, where lay, beneath the lid on a bed of soft velvet, all the rare and precious medals. For him, as for others (smaller than others) a lustrous uniform with a breast of gold was brought in; white trousers of heavy cloth were brought in, a pair of white gloves, a specially shaped cardboard box, the black scabbard of a sword, over which a silver fringe dangled from the hilt; under the pressure of a yellow fingernail all ten red-lacquered lids flew open, and from those lids were extracted: a White Eagle, the corresponding star and a blue ribbon; finally an item of bejeweled insignia was extracted; all of this took its place on the embroidered bosom. Apollon Apollonovich stood before the mirror, gold and white (all gleam and tremor!), with his left hand holding his sword to his hip, and with his right—holding to his chest the plumed three cornered hat and the pair of white gloves. (143)

Here, Bely refers again to the concepts of truth and of costume. However, if the description of Nikolai Apollonovich in front of the mirror is a reference to Hermann Bahr’s image of modern man (in the sense of sensuality or nerves), the image of Apollon Apollonovich in front of the mirror represents rather the opposite. The costumes of the old generation (the starched shirt; the pair of white trousers of heavy cloth and the lustrous uniform with a breast of gold; the red-lacquered boxes; the white gloves; the rare, precious medals; the black scabbard of a sword over which a silver fringe dangled from the hilt) raise a question of memory, tradition, and historicism. These c­ ostumes were taken out from their cupboards by “an ageing dignitary” only in order 15 Ibid., 179.

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

to go to a “certain important place” (141) where a “spectacle” took place and “all was lacquer, luster, and gleam” (141). Bely leaves no doubt that here the ­purpose of this masquerade-like dress-up ceremony, which corresponds to Bahr’s notion of Verkleidung, was to maintain tradition, or in other words to preserve: “This was a day of extraordinary things; and it was bound to, of course, to shine; and shine it did, obviously” (142).16 Moreover, Bely attaches a political meaning to the sense of tradition by emphasizing that “this brilliant array, dressed in ranks by the rod of the master of ceremonies, comprised the central axis of our wheel of state” (142). It is the masquerade (costume) that creates ­“extraordinarily important people” with “extraordinarily solemn faces” (142). In front of the mirror, however, the dressed-up figure “­ somehow ­resembled a circus rider” (143). This interpretation of Bahr’s notion of ­costume or Verkleidung represents Bely’s unique and original twist: pure truth (Nuda Veritas) shall hold up the mirror not only to modern man but also to the old generation and to the imperial government, which uses tradition as mask. This view that neither old nor young can see the truth about themselves is confirmed in several more instances in the narrative. In “A Bad Sign,” in the scene in which Apollon Apollonovich carries Nikolai Apollonovich, his then little child, up to the mirror, Bely makes an unambiguous statement in the same sense: “In the mirror, old man and the little one were reflected: he would point out the reflections to the boy and say: ‘Look, my boy, at those funny people’” (300). If the Secession, and particularly Gustav Klimt and Hermann Bahr, posed the question of the truth about modern man, Bely also tries to give some answers to these questions. One of his contributions to modernity, as it was understood at the turn of the twentieth century, is defining in emblems some of those unconscious qualities or wishes that looked back at modern man from the mirror. We can find one example of such emblems in the c­ hapter “A Bad Sign” quoted above, in which both father and son look in the mirror like strangers: “Apollon Apollonovich stumbled in midst of his speech, and ran to the mirror again (at that moment the clock chimed), and from the mirror death in a frock-coat glanced at Nikolai Apollonovich, a reproachful gaze focused on him, fingers drummed; and with a shout of laughter the mirror cracked” (301). Apparently, in this scene, Nikolai Apollonovich p ­ rojects his own patricidal wish on the reflection in the mirror and, thus, the truth comes 16 Here David McDuff’s translation better preserves Bely’s implication of having respect for tradition by using the verb to shine forth, i.e., “This was a day of extraordinary events; and it was bound to, of course, to shine forth; it—shone forth, of course.” Andrey Bely, ­Petersburg, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 2011).

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out of it as Death in a costume, his father’s frock coat. This personification of the young Ableukhov’s unconscious wish corresponds with a topic of the confrontation of modern man with death as a persona, a topic that deeply concerned turn-of-the-century literature. In the chapter “Pompadour,” one of the truth-images looks back at Sof ʹia Petrovna from the slightly deflected oval mirror, in front of which she stands when she comes home after the ball. In this scene, Sof ʹia Petrovna appears in her ball attire, which has the function of a costume as in the ­previous mirror scenes. Here, Bely establishes an opposition between the wishful image Sof ʹia Petrovna has of herself and truth. The chapter begins with the image of the persona that Sof ʹia Petrovna would wish to be seen as—Angel Peri. However, when Sof ʹia Petrovna disappears “into the depth” of the mirror (215), this image changes. First, out of the foam of lace and muslin emerges “a b­ eautiful woman with luxuriously bouffant hair and a beauty spot on her cheek: Madame Pompadour!” (215)—another wishful image opposite to that of Angel Peri. The pretended angelic qualities that the heroine is clumsily and unsuccessfully trying to put on herself as a mask when in the presence of others contradict the openly scandalous emblematic image of the courtesan, which deep down Sof ʹia Petrovna may well wish but is not able to ­duplicate either. While Sof ʹia Petrovna keeps looking at her tight, décolleté bodice, under which her bosom swells “like living pearls,” at the froth of Valenciennes lace that is everywhere around and beneath the décolletage, and at the p ­ anniered skirt, which looks “as though it was rising in the breath of languid zephyrs” (215), the image in the mirror changes yet again: “But it was strange: in this costume she seemed suddenly older and less pretty; instead of her little pink lips, indecently red lips, overly heavy lips, splayed out, spoiling her face; and when her eyes squinted, then in Madame Pompadour something of the witch appeared for a moment” (215). The truth that Sof ʹia Petrovna sees in the mirror obviously has several faces, starting with that of her socialization as Angel Peri, and going through that of her true and perhaps suppressed s­exuality and e­ roticism, to the w ­ ishful dream of being a courtesan. Put together, the features of all these faces form a face of a femme fatale—an important concept in fin-de-siècle art and l­iterature. Eventually, the mirror shows back to Sof ʹia Petrovna also her biggest fear—growing old. In this scene Bely uses the image of the femme fatale to emblematize Sof ʹia Petrovna’s wishful thinking, and at the same time he uses Sof ʹia Petrovna to emblematize a particular psychology of the “­want-to-be femme fatale” in the Russian quasi-high society of the time. In addition, the physical description of Sof ʹia Petrovna in her ball costume and particularly the description of her hair are reminiscent of Klimt’s rich and

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

colorful erotic female figures, and especially of his Athena and of the figures in Fish Blood (fig. 2a and 2b). Throughout the narrative Bely not only represents but repeatedly ­questions the theories, concepts, and ideas to which he refers. The concept of Nuda Veritas is no exception. In the chapter “Out of His Mind,” Bely presents Sergei Sergeich Likhutin in a fragile state of mind, in which “his thoughts were conclusively confused, as was everything” (257). Bely implies the possibility that to Sergei Sergeich, who “began his cogitation by analyzing the actions of his unfaithful wife, but at the end [. . .] caught himself in senseless drivel” (257), the solid plane (of mirrors) was impenetrable, “and rooms reflected in the mirror were genuinely rooms” (257). In other words, Bely is ­polemicizing: Is analysis and looking for the truth behind that which we see always helpful? How far into the private sphere should the analysis go? “In those genuine rooms lived the family of some recently arrived officer; he would have to cover the mirrors: it was awkward to be examining with inquisitive glances the behavior of a married officer with his young wife; you might come up against all kinds of drivel there” (257). Apparently Bely’s conclusion is that as a “most simple-hearted man” (258) who tries to analyze intellectually, Likhutin “had shattered against a wall: but through into the depth beyond the looking glass he could not penetrate” (258). Likhutin realizes that his mind “shattered against the mirror” (258–9) and believes, therefore, that he “ought to take the mirrors out!” (259). In this way Bely shows that the highly intellectual or psychological approach to truth in the Secession has only a relative human value. It does not help everyone. Nevertheless, Bely’s polemical treatment of the mirror-emblem in Petersburg does not contradict Bahr’s view of truth and the Secessionists’ ­perception of Nuda Veritas in any way. We can understand this better against the background of Bahr’s essay “Wahrheit, Wahrheit” (Truth, truth), p ­ ublished 17 also in Überwindung des Naturalismus. Here, Bahr asserts ironically that when the “great search for truth was started there were as many kinds of truth walking on the street as there were young authors.” He refers to the fact that young authors who belonged to the Secession movement were expected to distance themselves from the old generation and to come up with some new kind of “better, more profound, and more truthful truth” if they wanted to become famous. Practically, he was warning against turning the search for truth into fashion and eventually into “Komödienmoral” (mock morality).18 17 Hermann Bahr, “Wahrheit, Wahrheit,” in Überwindung des Naturalismus (Berlin, 1904), 141–51. 18 Ibid., 143.

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Bely, who was no less concerned with the truth about modern man than Bahr or any other contemporary European author, used a most expressive megaemblem corresponding to Bahr’s warning against Komödienmoral— Petrushka. The character of the minstrel clown (balagan) Petrushka is deeply rooted in Russian cultural tradition and was perhaps part of the skomorokh ­performances.19 It certainly existed in medieval Russian culture in the puppet shows during street fairs, especially at the time of Maslenitsa (Butter or Pancake Week), a holiday similar to Shrovetide.20 Characters of the Western European commedia dell’arte and the French harlequinade were first known through visiting Italian troupes performing at the court of Empress Anna (1730–40), as well as through Aleksandr Pisarev’s translations of Molière’s comedies. However, the characters of commedia dell’arte and the French ­harlequinade were no part of home-born Russian theater, art, or literature. The Western buffoon figures Pierrot, Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Columbine were revived in Russian literature by the poets, artists, and writers of the Silver Age to become recurring themes of Russian modernist art when the Russian, often bizarre, variants of commedia dell’arte were performed in small cabaret theaters such as Krivoe Zerkalo (The Crooked Mirror), Brodiachaia Sobaka (The Stray Dog), or Priut Komediantov (Comedians’ Asylum). In 1893 the Bolʹshoi Theater staged Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci, and in 1900, the Italian c­ omposer Riccardo Drigo, who had been the conductor of the Saint Petersburg Italian opera since 1878, staged his ballet Harlequinade ­dedicated to the empress Aleksandra Fedorovna. In 1910 Ballets Russes staged the Carnival, set to the music of Schumann and choreographed by Michel Fokine.21 After 1906 the cabaret theater in Russia was associated with the experimental ­theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who became famous by staging The Acrobats, a small play by the Austrian writer Franz von Schonthan, in 19 Skomorokhi are usually defined as minstrels. However, they had different skills and talents and were thus described as umelets (versatile person, singular): They participated in national festivals and at family celebrations as clowns, mummers, buffoons, actors, dancers, ­acrobats, puppeteers, magicians, animal trainers, storytellers, and performers of epic songs. They often used masks in their performances. 20 Maslenitsa is a Russian folk holiday that relates to both pagan and Christian tradition. It is celebrated during the last week before the beginning of the Great Lent and has the ­character of a Roman Catholic carnival. Its name originates in the tradition of eating pancakes (bliny), which on one hand symbolize the sun, and on the other are rich food prepared with animal products (milk, eggs, and butter) during the week when meat is already forbidden. 21 Michel Fokine (Mikhail Fokin, 1880–1942): a groundbreaking Russian dancer and ­choreographer. In 1909 he became the resident choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris.

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

which Meyerhold played the role of the aging clown Landowsky. Among the other popular h ­ arlequinades of Meyerhold were Aleksandr Blok’s Balaganchik (The Fairground Booth; 1906) and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Schleier der Pierette (Columbine’s Scarf; in Russian Sharf Kolumbiny). Following the developments in Russian theater, stage ­settings, and costume designs, the harlequinade appeared also as a topic in the paintings of Benois, Sudeikin, and Sapunov.22 Generally, the interest of the Silver Age in the harlequinade was based on the fact that the modern version of commedia dell’arte offered unique possibilities for symbolization. Just a few years before Petersburg was published, in 1910, Stravinsky wrote Petrushka’s Cry and Russian Dance and turned them, under Diaghilev’s ­influence, into two of the most successful Russian ballets, whose premiere was in Paris in June 1911. Hence, the buffoon figure of Petrushka became famous and very prominent in Russia and in western Europe at the same time when Hermann Bahr was describing the search for truth in ­tragicomic terms as Komödienmoral. In the figure of Petrushka, so deeply rooted in the Russian tradition and, at the same time, so explicitly Western European, Bely found the most expressive emblem—an emblem that was like a bridge between the two cultures, between comedy and tragedy, and between truth and mask or reality and appearance. Thus, he superimposed the image of Petrushka on his emblematic character of Nikolai Apollonovich. While in the chapter “A Bad Sign” Nikolai Apollonovich sees the r­ eflection of his father in the mirror as death (in a frock coat), Apollon Apollonovich sees the reflection of his son in the mirror as Petrushka. On the morning after Apollon Apollonovich has seen Nikolai Apollonovich in his flame-red domino (his costume), he waits for his son because, as both had realized, “they had a conversation in store” (293). Nikolai Apollonovich shoots off up the stairs and then rushes into the drawing room lit by the sun (297–98). And now Apollon Apollonovich sees the reflection of his son in the mirror as Petrushka. Here Bely multiplies the mirror image: The mirrors were gleaming merrily: and all the mirrors burst out l­aughing, because the first mirror, which looked into the hall from the drawing room, reflected the white countenance of Petrushka, as though covered in flour, while the fairground Petrushka himself, bright red as blood, came running from the hall (his footfalls pattered); at once the mirror threw the reflection 22 Alexandre Benois (Aleksandr Benua, 1880–1960): Russian artist, art critic, and designer for Ballets Russes; Serge Sudeikin (Sergei Sudeikin, 1882–1946): Russian artist and set designer associated with Ballets Russes; Nikolai Sapunov (1880–1912): Russian artist and set designer, associated with Meyerhold’s productions.

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across to another mirror; and the fairground Petrushka was reflected in all the mirrors; it was Nikolai Apollonovich who had come rushing into the drawing room and stopped as though rooted to the spot, his eyes ­wandering in the cold mirrors, because of what he had seen: the first mirror, which looked into the hall from the drawing room, had shown Nikolai Apollonovich the reflection of a certain article; a deathly skeleton in a buttoned-up frock coat, possessed of a skull, to right and left of which protruded a naked ear and a small side-whisker; but between the side-­whiskers and the ears there emerged, larger than was right, a pointed nose; and over the pointed nose two dark eye-sockets were raised reproachfully. . . . Instead of his son all that Apollon Apollonovich saw in the mirrors was a red fairground marionette; and catching sight of the fairground marionette, Apollon Apollonovich froze; the fairground marionette ­ stopped in the middle of the hall in such strange perplexity . . . (298–99)

Here, Bely presents Nikolai Apollonovich, a “reticent young man” (299), as Petrushka. However, in this passage there is a delicate hint that Petrushka should be seen also in the context of the Western tradition and perhaps more particularly in the context of the Paris performance of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. This is the only chapter in the novel in which Bely uses the French version of the name Nikolai, Nicolas (299), and even highlights it. In the scene quoted above, the image of Petrushka looks back at the ­protagonist not from one but from many (or all) mirrors, which laugh. Apollon Apollonovich, who clearly sees his son as the “red fairground ­marionette” (299), approaches him directly with the statement, “So that’s what it is: a domino” (299). Nikolai Apollonovich’s answer is “Yes, well . . . a lot of people were in masks. . . . So I got myself a . . . costume, too” (299). By multiplying the mirror images Bely poses a question: What does the domino represent? Do all the mirrors reflect Nikolai Apollonovich’s costume, which serves as a mask or metamorphosis (Verwandlung) in Bahr’s terms, or do they reflect the truth as in the empty mirror held to modern man in Klimt’s Nuda Veritas? The apparent confusion can be clarified only through another major turn-of-the-century theory to which Bely refers in Petersburg: Ernst Mach’s theory that the ego must be given up (the ego cannot be saved)—“das Ich ist unrettbar,”23 a theory shared also by Bahr. Ernst Mach’s Analyse der Empfindungen (Analysis of Sensations) was first published in 1885. In the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it 23 Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 20.

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again attracted the attention of scientists and authors. Mach’s theory was presented in summary in a more popular way in the series Enleitung in die Philosophie (Introduction to philosophy) by Wilhelm Jerusalem, as well as in a more detailed version in Theodor Beer’s Weltanschauungen eines modernen Naturforschers (The Views of a Modern Natural Scientist).24 In 1904 Hermann Bahr presented part of Mach’s theory in his essay “Das unrettbare Ich,”25 which contributed to the establishment of the view of reality and appearance that became so significant in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. In summary, Mach explains that a body is only a complex of elements such as colors, sounds, and pressure, which are connected, on the one hand, with one another and, on the other hand, function in their connections with time and space. Associated with these complexes of elements are also the d ­ ispositions of mind, the feelings and volitions. Mach’s core idea is that it is not the bodies that produce sensations but the complexes of ­sensations ­(elements) that make up the bodies. “Out of this fabric, that which is more fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and expresses itself in language.”26 The preponderance of that which appears to be relatively permanent in the connections of elements, as opposed to that which is changeable impels us “to the partly i­nstinctive and partly ­voluntary and conscious economy of mental presentation and d ­ esignation. . . . That which is presented [at the same time] in a single image receives a single ­definition (Bezeichnung), a single name.”27 Based on this interpretation of the body, Mach further explains the ego as a complex of memories, moods, and feelings that are joined to the human body; thus, it appears to be ­relatively permanent. The apparent permanency of the ego results only from its continuity or the slowness in the changes of its ­elements. Continuity, however, is only “a means of preparing and c­ onserving what is contained in the Ego. The principal thing is this content and not the Ego.”28 Neither the ego nor the body is permanent in an absolute sense. To Mach “thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combination of elements, nothing apart from their so-called attributes (Merkmale).”29 Thus, what Mach calls the “pseudo-philosophical question of the single thing with its many attributes” 24 Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923): Austrian Jewish philosopher; Dr. Theodor Beer (1866–1919): Austrian natural scientist. 25 Hermann Bahr, Dialog vom Tragischen (Berlin: Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 1903), 79–102. 26 Mach, Analysis of Sensations, 2. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Ibid., 24. 29 Ibid., 5.

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arises,30 in his view, only because we overlook the fact that we are not able simultaneously to comprehend the elements in a ­summarized single image and to analyze them individually. This is the basis for Mach’s statement that “the Ego must be given up”31 and for Hermann Bahr’s assertion that the ego cannot be saved, as in the essay title “Das unrettbare Ich.” However, the content of the ego, a­ ccording to Mach, is not confined to the individual but remains preserved in the memory or the consciousness of others, even after the death of the ­individual. In this way, contents of consciousness that have a universal significance are attached to other individuals and exist in some kind of impersonal or ­suprapersonal form, “independently of the personality by means of which they were ­developed.”32 In a footnote Mach mentions the natural human wish to p ­ reserve our personal mem33 ories beyond death. According to him, ­however, an appropriate ­psychological analysis of the content of the ego will show that we shall “no longer place so high a value upon the Ego,” and we shall “be willing to renounce individual immortality.”34 Consequently, we will stop placing more value on the secondary, the ego, rather than on the primary, its content. Mach’s belief is that “in this way we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other Egos and the overestimation of our own.”35 Already in the beginning of the novel, in the chapter “Strange Qualities,” Bely establishes Apollon Apollonovich as a man who perceives things in the surrounding world as a complex of elements in Mach’s terms, and who allots to the images he perceives designated generalizing names: We have cast a glance round the beautiful residence, taking our lead from the general feature with which the senator was wont to endow all objects. For example: — —On those rare occasions when Apollon Apollonovich found himself in the bosom of nature he saw there just what the rest of us see; that is to say: he saw the blossoming bosom of nature; but for us this bosom ­immediately divided into different features: violets, buttercups, dandelions and carnations; but the senator resorted these individual features to unity. We, of course, would have said: “There’s a buttercup!” 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 24. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 25. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

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“There is a forget-me-not! . . .” Apollon Apollonovich said simply and concisely: “Flowers . . .” “A flower . . .” . . . He would have described with laconic brevity his own house too, ­consisting for him of walls (that formed squares and cubes), of windows cut through them, parquet floors, chairs, tables; the rest is mere detail. (45–46)

This, perhaps ironic, reference to Mach’s idea that things are complexes of memories, moods, and feelings that are joined to the human body becomes even more concrete in the description of the way “the illusion of a room was built up” (46) and in the assertion that “the things that flashed by (pictures, the piano, mirrors, the mother-of-pearl, veneered tables)—in short, whatever flashed by could not possess any spatial form: it was all just an irritation of the cerebral membrane, unless it was a chronic malfunction . . . of the ­cerebellum, perhaps” (ibid.). When the illusion of a room is built up it is only to fly apart, “leaving no trace, erecting its own misty surfaces beyond the bounds of consciousness” (ibid.). Completely in accordance with Mach’s conception of the economy of mental presentation and designation, Apollon Apollonovich “would have described . . . his own house” and all these fleeting complexes of impressions engraved on his memory “with laconic brevity” (ibid.). In “A Bad Sign,” Bely refers particularly to Mach’s explanation of the ­perception of the body as a seat of the ego and to the need to give up the concept of the ego as a permanent immortal entity. He does this by means of Nikolai Apollonovich’s observation of the body of his father whose ego (or I) is simply attached to and dependent on his body: At the same time Nikolai Apollonovich was thinking that this slight, ­five-foot body of his father’s, which couldn’t be more than a couple of feet in circumference, was the centre and the periphery of a certain immortal centre: that was where, when all was said and done, the “self ” was located; and any plank of wood, if it toppled down at the wrong time, could crush the centre: crush it once and for all. (299)

Further, in the chapter “Alarm,” Bely describes Apollon Apollonovich’s body even more precisely as a combination (sovokupnostʹ 36) of elements that is simply given the name body: “Several times Apollon Apollonovich changed the 36 The translation of the Russian word sovokupnostʹ (sum total) as “combination” does not very clearly reflect Bely’s reference to Mach’s theory. Here David McDuff offers a better equivalent—“aggregate.”

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position of the combination of sinews, skin and bones called [­imenuemykh] his body” (241). Even though the body is described both in this chapter and in “A Bad Sign” as a complex of elements (as consisting of “bones, sinews, and veins” [238] or of “skin, bones, and blood” [300]), it nonetheless appears to Nikolai Apollonovich as some immortal center. In other words, in the eyes of a modern man, Apollon Apollonovich is not yet ready to give up his ego. This very immortal center, the ego, a combination of skin, bones, and blood, which Bely calls pregrada (obstacle or cordon) was “destined by an ordinance of fate to be blown to pieces” (300) or to be given up. Bely introduces the image of Petrushka in Petersburg as a sad and ironic reflection of the Secessionist image of modern man based on Mach’s and on Bahr’s theory of the doomed ego that cannot be saved. In his attempt to establish an emblem of this image of modern man, Bely finds the new Harlequin version of the old Russian character Petrushka most a­ppropriate. The new buffoon, adopted from western Europe and developed further in Russian art, theater, and poetry of the Silver Age, was not simply a tomfool. This character expressed ironically the finely tuned and fragile sensibility of the psyche and its need of Verkleidung or costume as it was understood by Hermann Bahr and the entire aesthetics of the turn of the twentieth century. It reflected best Mach’s concept of the ego and the body seen as a complex of colors, sounds, feelings, and moods that is constantly changing. In Russia, the playwright and theater director Nikolai Evreinov defined this concept artistically in his original idea of theatricalization of life.37 In the same way as Hermann Bahr discussed Verkleidung or costume, or as Bely’s protagonists dress and undress in front of mirrors as if at a masquerade, Evreinov wanted to dress life “in holiday clothes, to color it with the color of the theater, to return it to its former theatricality.”38 In Petersburg Bely uses a number of devices typical for commedia dell’arte. The most consistent one among them is the use of the harlequinade as a megametaphor in describing Nikolai Apollonovich. Bely’s version of a clown, however, is very complex. Formally, it is a combination between the Western buffoon character, the aesthetic view of the sensibility of modern man, and the image of a uniquely Russian folk tradition puppet—Petrushka. In addition, in Nikolai Apollonovich, Bely combines the character of a buffoon with that of a jester, and also with the image of a holy fool. Each one of these characters represents a particular aspect of 37 Nikolai Evreinov (1879–1953): Russian dramatist and theater director. 38 Olga Soboleva, “Harlequinade and Symbolist Art,” accessed April 8, 2005, http://www. sussex.ac.uk/Units/russian/Ruslang/blok/history.html.

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the novel’s protagonist and aims to establish a particular emblem as a link to the contemporary views of man, culture, and humanity. It is notable the particular Petrushka scene in “A Bad Sign” parallels the color scheme, the visual images, and especially the psychology of Stravinsky’s ballet. Stravinsky’s ballet, performed first in the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet on June 13, 1911, depicts a masquerade fair festival in Saint Petersburg during the week of Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) in the 1830s. The three main ­characters, Petrushka, the Ballerina, and the Moor, are first presented as lifeless ­puppets. The Old Wizard casts a magic spell, and the revived puppets begin a ­vigorous Russian dance. Behind the show curtains, Petrushka lives in a prison-like room, kept there by the Wizard. He feels anger toward the Wizard, and he is in love with the Ballerina (a typical Pierrot motif ), who rejects him and engages in an affair with the Moor. Having escaped from his prison-like cell, Petrushka tries to interfere with the seduction of the Ballerina. Since he, however, is small and weak, he has to run for his life, chased by the Moor. The Moor catches Petrushka at the fair and hacks him down with an ax. In order to restore peace at the fair, the Wizard shakes sawdust from the corpse, reminding everyone that Petrushka is only a puppet. In the evening, when the crowd disperses, Petrushka’s ghost appears on the roof of the puppet theater and cries out his anger. Horrified, the Wizard runs away, and the audience is left to wonder what was reality, and what appearance. In the chapter “A Bad Sign,” Nikolai Apollonovich appears in the mirrors in a red domino, similar to the red shirt of Petrushka from the traditional street shows. The street Petrushka shows began with loud laughter (or ­alternatively a song) behind the curtains. In Bely’s description, which is here similar to a theatrical staging, it is the mirrors that “burst out laughing.” Nikolai’s face, described as the “white countenance of Petrushka,” which looks “as though covered in flour” (298), is reminiscent of the character of Pierrot, the French version of a clown. Pierrot, who might have originated in Turkey more than four thousand years ago, and who certainly existed in the oldest amusement park, Bakken (Dyrehavsbakken) in Denmark, had a modern version of a white-faced mime, created by the Bohemian-French actor and mime J­ean-Gaspard Deburau (1796–1846; fig. 3). Thus, Bely, like Stravinsky, refers to the Western version of a buffoon, and particularly to the character of Pierrot. Another, visual, reference to Pierrot in the image of Bely’s Petrushka is the extremely big mouth. In “A Helping Hand” Bely emphasizes the ­ grotesque clownish combination between Nikolai Apollonovich’s gabbling and gesticulating and his “petrified” (Elsworth) or

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“frozen” (McDuff ) face with its gaping mouth, as if split apart, like that of an antique tragic mask: When Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin finally tore himself away from the contemplation of the swirling leaves and returned to reality, he realized that Nikolai Apollonovich, running ahead, was gabbling on nineteen to the dozen with a vivacity uncharacteristic of him; he was gesticulating; he was bending his profile forwards with his gaping mouth leering ­unpleasantly, resembling an ancient tragic mask, which quite failed to create a h ­ armonious whole, with the brisk restlessness of a lizard: in a word, he looked like a jack-in-a-box [poprygunchik] with a petrified face. (339)

This combination was unlike the image of Petrushka found in old Russian woodcuts (fig. 4). Rather, it was typical for the awkward appearance of the French Pierrot who had a broad red mouth, sometimes surgically cut in order to make it larger, and who, being often mute, had to use gestures and ­grimaces to express his tragic passions. The description of the red domino at the ball, a scene of carnival, matches precisely this French variant of a clown: “Poor domino: as though it had been he who had been caught out in some ­misdemeanour—it remained bent over in a jutting silhouette; with its rustling red arm thrust out, as though it were mutely imploring them all not to drive it from this house back into the Petersburg slush, imploring them not to drive it back from this house into the damp, malevolent mist” (210–11). At the same time, it emphasizes the difference between Meyerhold’s Pierrot in Blok’s The Fairground Booth and Benois’s Petrushka in Stravinsky’s ballet (fig. 5a, b). However, in his image of Nikolai Apollonovich as Petrushka, Bely integrates elements not only of the Western Pierrot but also of Harlequin. In “A Mad Dog Had Howled,” Sergei Sergeevich Likhutin thinks that Nikolai Apollonovich uses the red domino as a disgusting, foul way to escape the delicate situation between himself and Sof ʹia Petrovna, like a Harlequin: “Red domino! . . . It was foul, [gadostʹ ], foul, foul! . . . To take no notice of his ­insistent letter, to insult his honour as an officer with his clownish antics ­[arlekinskaia vykhodka], to insult his beloved wife with his spiderish ­posturing!! . . . And Sergei Sergeyevich Likhutin swore to himself on his honour as an officer—that he would crush the spider, cost what it may” (176). Likhutin’s interpretation of wearing the red domino as “clownish antics” (Elsworth) or “escapades” (McDuff ) matches one of the typical characteristics of Arlecchino (the Harlequin)—namely, that he uses witty tricks to escape from the holes he has dug for himself. In addition, the image of the spider in this paragraph

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

refers also to commedia dell’arte since, along with Pierrot and Harlequin, the spider (pailasse, paiats) was one of the popular buffoon figures. Analysis of Bely’s use of the harlequinade in Petersburg, and particularly the use of Stravinsky’s Westernized version of Petrushka as a megametaphor in the character of Nikolai Apollonovich, shows that Bely transformed an old Russian folk character into an emblem of modern man as seen by the poets and other theoreticians at the turn of the twentieth century. As an emblem, Bely’s Petrushka represents Hermann Bahr’s view of modern man, which in fact is a specific twist of Mach’s theory of sensations. In the chapter “He Failed to Explain Himself Properly,” which stands out as an ideological summary of Bely’s view of modern man in the novel, there is a description of Nikolai Apollonovich that brings together the harlequinade, Bahr’s idea of costume, and Mach’s theory of the ego: His broad shoulders began to shake fitfully. . . . Nikolai Apollonovich was weeping uncontrollably; at the same time: freed from his crude [grubyi] animal fear, Nikolai Apollonovich became entirely fearless; more than that; at that moment he even wished to suffer; that, at all events, was how he felt at that moment: he felt he was a hero, offered up for torment; suffering publicly, debased; his body, in his sensations, was a body in torment; his senses were torn apart, as his whole “self ” was torn apart; from the rupture of his “self ” he expected—a blinding ray of light would flash and a familiar voice would pronounce to him, as always—would pronounce within himself: and for himself: “You have suffered for my sake: I am standing over you.” (501)

The real human body has the jerky, fitful movements of a clown puppet. Nikolai Apollonovich weeps uncontrollably like a Harlequin. At the same time, he wishes to suffer (like Pierrot) because he is a tormented hero (like Stravinsky’s Petrushka). Moreover, he suffers and he is debased publicly (also like Stravinsky’s Petrushka at the fair). His body is tormented by his s­ ensations (as in Bahr’s idea of modern man who is “nerves, nerves, nerves”), and his senses are as torn apart as his “self,” an idea that corresponds with Mach’s theory of the I (ego) that consists of physical and emotional sensations and cannot be saved because it is only a temporary and not a permanent complex of elements. Additionally, Bely presents here his very own interpretation of the I (self) that cannot be saved. He compares the suffering of the tormented self of modern man to the suffering of Christ. Nikolai Apollonovich expects a familiar voice to speak to him, within him, for him alone. However, he hears no “voice of reconciliation” saying, “You have suffered for my sake” (501). Why not? Because Bely poses the question

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of the i­mpossibility of the r­econciliation of modern man. The cause of this impossibility, he believes, is the ego itself, the egoism and the chaos that he saw in the psyche of his ­contemporary fellow man—two more issues concerning turn-of-the-­twentieth-century philosophy and aesthetics. Because he had not suffered for anyone’s sake: he had suffered for himself. . . . He was supping, as it were, the brew he had himself concocted out of ugly incidents. That was why there was no voice. And why there was no ray of light either. In the place of his previous “self ” there was darkness. He could not bear that: his broad shoulders began to shake fitfully. (501)

Consequently, one of the problems that Bely saw in the sensibility of modern man was the darkness that replaces the instable “self ” that turns life into a comedy and man into a puppet-like hero or a suffering clown. Hence, this paragraph shows Bely’s polemical questions addressed to Mach’s theory: first, What would remain of modern man after the complex of elements or s­ensations called ego (I) is taken apart? and second, Is Christ, who had suffered for others, and whose voice would speak within us, the thread that holds the ego together and prevents it from turning into an unstable, s­ uffering puppet? Such a conception of modern man would have matched Bely’s ­anthroposophical concern about the state of the spiritual in the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as his perception of Christ.39 In conclusion, I emphasize that in a unique, dialogical way, Bely ­combines in Petersburg Klimt’s concept of Nuda Veritas with Hermann Bahr’s idea that modern man means sensibility and permanent change (“Nerves, Nerves, Nerves . . .” and costume), and also with Mach’s concept of the ego that cannot be saved. The buffoon clown Petrushka is the only character that can express this combination of concepts concerning modern man in a metaphorical form, almost as one of the two-dimensional abstractions in Klimt’s paintings. This makes it the most fitting image to use as an emblem of modern man in the novel. However, Bely develops the concept of ­commedia dell’arte, rediscovered in the Russian Silver Age, beyond the limits of a single character. He expands it to the representation of the whole society and more, of life itself. The entire narrative of Petersburg is constructed as a spectacle, and in several instances Bely refers directly to life as theater, in Evreinov’s terms, or to life as Verkleidung (costume), in terms of Bahr’s ­aesthetics. The scene of Nikolai Apollonovich giving an account to his father after the ball explains this i­nterpretation clearly; Nikolai Apollonovich appears in the red 39 Both issues are discussed in my book The Red Jester.

Reality and Appearance in Petersburg and the Viennese Secession

domino at a carnival in Saint Petersburg (an image similar to the Butter Week fair in Stravinsky’s ballet). He explains to his father that at the ball “a lot of people were in masks. . . . So I got myself a . . . costume too” (299). Even Apollon Apollonovich makes no exception among the people w ­ earing a ­spectacle costume. Every now and then, he also appears as “a deathly ­skeleton in a buttoned-up frock-coat” (298) or in his festive military uniform. The ball, a gathering of the Petersburg quasi-high society, is also presented as a ­carnival at which everyone is “expecting masks” (208). Further, in the ­chapter “I Destroy Irrevocably,” Nikolai Apollonovich sees, in his turn, Pavel Yakovlevich Morkovin as a ten-legged spider (pailasse) with a ghastly l­aughter. Here, Bely has a literal exclamation in his own authorial voice: “But it was all play-­acting” (283) or a “comedy” (in McDuff ’s translation, 284). This appears to be Bely’s generalization of his theatrical, comedy-like approach to the whole ­narrative. He needed this approach in order to present his novel Petersburg as a megametaphor of the question of reality and appearance in the life of modern man at the beginning of the twentieth century.

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Fig. 1  Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas. Illustration for Ver Sacrum 1 (1898). 1898, Drawing, 20 x 4.5 cm. Öster­ reichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria.

Fig. 2a  Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene. 1898, Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 cm. Vienna Museum, Austria.

Fig. 2b  Gustav Klimt, Fish Blood. Illustration for Ver Sacrum 1 (1898). 1898, Drawing, 20 x 4.5 cm. ­Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria.

Fig. 3  Auguste Bouquet, portrait of the French mime Jean-Gaspard “Baptiste” Deburau in his stage costume as Pierrot (1830). Portrait du mime Deburau, artiste au Théâtre des Funambules, Französische Nationalbibliothek.

Fig. 4  A late ­nineteenth-century woodcut showing the Russian fairground puppet Petrushka. Courtesy of the ­Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, ­Northwestern University.

Fig. 5  Alexandre Benois, design of Petrushka’s costume for the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1911). Courtesy of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University.

CONTRIBUTORS Carol Anschuetz lectured in Russian literature at the University of Texas at Austin, Yale University and Stanford University from 1972-1981. “Bely’s Petersburg and the End of the Russian Novel” was the last article of her ­academic career. She now lives in Washington, D.C. Thomas R. Beyer, Jr. is the C.V. Starr Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. A founding member of the Andrey Bely Society, he has written about Bely’s relationship to Rudolf Steiner, his time abroad in Dornach with Asia Turgeneva, and his years in Berlin. He has also translated Bely’s The Christened Chinaman and Glossolalia. Maria Carlson is Professor Emerita of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, where she taught Russian literature, culture, intellectual history, and folklore. A specialist in esoteric philosophies, she is the author of ‘No Religion Higher Than Truth’: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia 1875-1922 (Princeton, 1993). Charlene Castellano, Professor Emerita, Carnegie Mellon University, authored “Vspominaia serebrianyi vek: Sinesteziia i apokalipsis v romane A. Belogo Peterburg,” in Novyi istoricheskii vestnik, ed. Sergei Karpenko (Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, No. 5, 2001, 17-50). This is one of several articles advancing Synesthesia: Imagination’s Semiotic in Andrei Belyi’s ‘Petersburg’ (Cornell University, 1980) from which more will come.​ Brett Cooke, Professor of Russian, Texas A&M University, authored Pushkin and the Creative Process and Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We, (co-) edited Sociobiology and the Arts, The Fantastic Other, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Art, Critical Insights: War and Peace and related special issues. He is presently compiling studies of opera and subjectivity in Russian prose. Olga M. Cooke is Associate Professor of Russian at Texas A&M University. She has published articles on Andrey Bely, Symbolistm, and Gulag literature. She is also editor of Gulag Studies. Soon to be completed is a biography, The Most Interesting Man in Russia: Andrey Bely’s Life in Letters. John Elsworth is Professor Emeritus of the University of Manchester. He studied in Cambridge and Moscow and taught for 23 years at the University

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Contributors

of East Anglia, Norwich, before moving to Manchester. He is the author of several works on Andrey Bely, and, besides Petersburg, has translated Bely’s first novel, The Silver Dove. Jacob Emery teaches Slavic and Comparative Literature at Indiana University and has published on topics ranging from medieval coinage to aerial photography. His first book, Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism, is scheduled to appear with Northern Illinois University Press. Roger Keys taught Russian language and literature at the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2013. He is the author of The Reluctant Modernist: Andrei Belyi and the Development of Russian Fiction 1902-1914. He is now retired and lives in Oxford. Tim Langen is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Missouri, where he teaches Russian literature, language, and cultural history. He is the author of The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg. Aleksandr Vasilievich Lavrov has been a Research Fellow at the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1971. Author of 6 monographs and more than 500 articles on Bely, Briusov, Blok, Voloshin, Ivanov-Razumnik, Gippius, and many others, he is also a laureate of the Pushkin Prize and the Andrey Bely Prize. Magnus Ljunggren defended his doctoral thesis The Dream of Rebirth. A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel Peterburg at Stockholm University in 1982. He is presently Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Gothenburg. His most important monograph is The Russian Mephisto. A Study of the Life and Work of Emilii Medtner (1994, in Russian 2001). Anna Ponomareva is a Teaching Fellow in Translation Studies at CenTraS, University College London. She also teaches Russian at Imperial College London, University of Southampton and University of Surrey. Recent publications focus on Theory of Translation and Language Pedagogy. She is now completing her PhD thesis “Translation Methods: the Case of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in English” at University College London, UK. Ada Steinberg taught Russian literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In addition to her articles on Bely and Symbolism, she is the author of Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge, 1982). Adam Weiner teaches Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College. He is the author of By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in

Contributors

Russia (Northwestern University Press, 2000) and How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). Judith Wermuth-Atkinson is a literature scholar and an author. She has received her Ph.D from Columbia University where she also taught world literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Previously she had studied and taught at Ludwig-Maximillian University (Munich) and at Kliment Okhridski Univesity (Sofia). In addition to a number of academic publications she has published non-fiction and a memoir.

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INDEX A

Adam, 74, 76, 76n9, 84-85, 86n34, 90, 90n44, 91, 184 Adorno, Theodor, 76, 80n20, Aeschylus, 24, 33 Alexander I, 169 Alexander III, 4 Alexandrov, Vladimir, 12n47, 86n35, 90, 194n29, 200n43, 201n48, 203n53, 219n95 Anschuetz, Carol, 7, 14-15 Anthroposophy, anthroposophist, xii, 4, 10-11, 12n47, 46-47, 52, 62, 112, 128129, 134, 138-146, 153, 165, 174n33, 182, 194, 200n43, 246 Antroposophical Society, 10, 16, 46-47, 140 Apocalypse (apocalyptic), 7-8, 15, 45, 63-72, 109, 143, 172, 182-183, 189-190 Apollo, Apollonian 15, 24, 28, 31, 33, 35, 40, 148, 175, 178, 184n61, 218 Aristotle, 70, 77-78, 92 Askol’dov, Sergei, 17, 105-106, 111, 163164 Astral, astrality, 2, 10, 15-17, 46, 51-62, 85n32, 87, 112, 131-132, 136, 148n2, 154-158, 165, 168, 179, 186, 207 Astral Plane, 51-62, 87, 112, 154, 156 Atlantis, 21, 25-27, 57, 113 Azef, Evno, 117, 119-123, 175, 180-181, 184-186 Azov, V. A., 124n23

B

Bahr, Hermann, 17-18, 229-233, 235-242, 245-246 Bahun, Sanja, 12n46 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 100 Bakunin, Mikhail, 218n92 Ballets Russes, 236, 237n22 Bauer, Michael, 128 Beardsley, Monroe, 78 Beer, Theodor, 238

Bellos, David, 77n11 Benois, Alexander, 237, 244, 250 Bely, Andrey Arabesques, 151, 213 Green Meadow, The (Lug zelenyi), 151 “Ia. Epopeia.”(I. An Epic Work), 128129, 181n49 Kotik Letaev, 140, 143, 145, 149 Masks, 125 Revolution and Culture (Revoliutsiia i kul’tura), 143 Second Symphony, 3, 95, 139 Silver Dove, The (Serebrianyi golub’) xii, 3-4, 7, 47, 95, 97, 98, 101, 140, 188, 193-197, 208, 210, 222 Zapiski Chudaka (Notes of an Eccentric), 128-131, 134, 134n2, 135n6, 136n8, 137140n20, 143n29 Berberova, Nina, 187n2, 226 Berdyaev (Berdiaev), Nikolai, 2, 10, 46, 87, 189n7, 210n74, 226 Berman, Marshall, 5 Bermann, Sandra, 107n13 Besant, Annie, 11, 17, 46-47, 50-54, 55n2021, 62, 150, 154-155, 165 Bethea, David, 13 Beyer Jr., Thomas R., vii, 83n27, 194n30 Birzhevye vedomosti, 171n26 Black, Max, 78n16 Blavatsky, Helen 11, 46-49, 59, 85n32, 150151, 165, 168n20, 170n24, 174n33, 177, 178n40, 179n47, 180, 184n61, 229 Isis Unveiled, 48, 49n5, 85n32, 170n24, 177n38, 178n40, 179n47, 180n48, 184n61 Secret Doctrine, The, 150, 168n20, 178n40, 184n61 Blok, Aleksandr, x, xii-xiii, 3, 57n25, 137n10, 141, 155, 161, 172n29, 174n32, 179n43, 216, 237, 244 Balaganchik (The Fairground Booth), 183, 237, 244

Index

Vozmezdie, (Retribution) 179n43 Blok, Liubov’ Dmitrievna, 3, 155-160, 174n32, 183 Bogomolov, N., 145n37 Boichuk, A. G., 5n19 Bongard-Levin, Grigorii, 161 Bowlt, John, 11 Boyd, Brian, xin2, xiiin3 Braudel, Fernand, 111 Bronze Horseman, 5, 28, 40-41, 54-55, 58, 61 Bryusov Valery (Briusov, Valerii), 2, 4, 150n10, 167n19, 174n32, 216 Fiery Angel, The, 174n32 Buddhism, Buddhists 17, 47, 59-60, 137, 150, 152-156, 161-162 Bugaev, Boris (Bely, Andrey), 2-3, 49, 101n19, 134, 141, 171n26 Bugaev, Nikolai Vasil’evich, 2, 138, 175-177 Bugaeva, Aleksandra Dmitrievna, 2 Burlaka, D. K., 87n36-38 Burtsev, V., 175n34, 180, 185n64

C

Carlson, Maria, 10n38, 12, 14-15, 47n3, 112, 116n1, 147n2, 150-151n13, Cassedy, Steven, 73n1, 76n9, 96, 97n8, 99, 100n16 Castellano, Charlene, 14-15 Cerebral Play, 12, 15-16, 47-50, 54, 90-92, 99-100, 126, 187, 197, 199-207, 216217, 219, 223-225 Chekhov, A. P., 164n8 Ivanov, 164, 164n8 Chernov, V., 173n31, 182n56, 183n59 Chernyshevsky, N. G., 169n21 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 8, 16, 116, 125127, 129-133 Man Who Was Thursday, The, 8, 16, 125127, 129-133 Christ, 5, 15, 17, 59-61, 112, 135-139, 142, 144n36, 146, 172, 188-191, 220, 245-246 Christians, Christianity, 21-22, 33, 40, 45, 95, 114, 168n20, 170, 182, 188-191, 194, 197, 201, 210, 217, 220-221, 225, 236n20 Chronos, 57, 66n4, 67, 113, 168-169 Cioran, Samuel, 7 Cohen, Hermann, 174n33, 198, 200, 214 Comte, August, 25, 49, 59 Conrad, Joseph, 8, 16, 116-126

Secret Agent, 8, 16, 117-123, 126 Under Western Eyes, 116, 117n2 Cooke, Brett, xiii Cosmic, 10, 13, 16, 54, 59, 66, 132, 136, 165, 175, 185, 187 Cournos, John, xin2 Cronos, 15, 66-68, 71, 90 Cubist, Cubism, 2

D

Danilevskii, R. Ia., 133n45 Daviau, Donald, 229-231 Deburau, Jean-Gaspard, 243, 249 De Man, Paul, 80 Derzhavin, Gavriil, 179n44 “Felitsa,” 179n44 Decembrists, 6, 55, 112 Deussen, Paul, 153, 161 Dharmakirti, 152 Dharmottara, 152-153 Diaghilev, Sergei, 236n21, 237 Dionysus, Dionysian, 3, 15, 24, 27-28, 31, 33, 45, 138, 145, 224 Doležel, Lubomír, 9n37, 97, 100 Dolgopolov, L. K., 5-6, 12n46, 14, 95n4, 106n9, 122n8, 122n12, 140n19, 156, 193n26, 206, 209n67 D’Olivet, Fabre, 11n43 Donchin, Georgette, 1n2, 7n33 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xi, 6-7, 13, 17, 19-23, 33-35, 40-45, 52, 54n19, 94-95, 116, 139n16, 157n38, 165-168, 169n21-22, 171n25, 172, 175, 195n34, 209-214, 221 Brothers Karamazov, 7, 20, 23, 29, 31, 40-43, 54n19, 157n38 Crime and Punishment, 13, 116, 169n21 Notes from Underground, 22, 169n21 Possessed, The (The Devils), 7, 17, 116, 209-214, 217, 221-222, 224 Drigo, Riccardo, 236 Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques, 200n43 Dubasov, F. V., 183n60 Dujardin, Édouard, xiii Dulebov, Egor 180

E

Einstein, Albert, 1, 16, 227-228 El’sberg, Zh., 163n4 Elsworth, John, 1n1, 10n41, 14, 50n7-8, 65n2, 66n4, 86, 90n44, 98, 147n1, 157-160, 243-244

255

256

Index

Emery, Jacob, 14-15 d’Esperance, Elizabeth, 55n22 Evreinov, Nikolai, 18, 242, 246

F

Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 27, 105, 221 February Revolution, 125, 143 Filicide, 169 Flying Dutchman, 55, 201 Forsh, Ol’ga, 7 Frank, Joseph, 1, 2n4 Frye, Northrop, 79, 88, 206 Fokht, U. R., 96n7 Fokine, Michel, 236 Ford, Ford Madox, 120 Fowler, Harold N., 148n3 Fox, Robin, 77 Freud, Sigmund, 145, 145n38, 228, Furst, Lilian, 98

G

Gapon, Georgii 175 Genghis Khan, 58, 170n23 Gershuni, Grigorii, 180-181, 181n50-51 Ginsburg, Mirra, 3n13 Gippius, Zinaida, 188, 209 Goethe, Johann, 155 Gogol, Nikolai, xi, 5-7, 17, 19-21, 23, 29-33, 35, 40-42, 52, 94, 96, 99, 133, 163-167, 169-170, 172, 175, 185-186, 192-197, 201-204, 207-211, Dead Souls, 21n4, 195-196, 201, 207, 211, 225 “Devil,” 201 Petersburg Tales, 7 “Portrait, The,” 29-33, 40, 186, 204 “Nevsky Prospect,” 29, 170 “Notes of a Madman,” 197 “A Terrible Vengeance,” 192, 202, 204 Goncharov, Ivan, 4 Gordon, Paul, 77n14 Gots, Mikhail, 183n59 Grayson, Jane, 95n3 Grazhdanin, 171n26 Grechishkin, S. S., 122n8, 150n10 Grene, David, 77n11 Grineva, I. E., 120n4 Grossman, Joan Delaney, 2n9, 189n5-6 Guignol, 124

H

Hammond, N. G. L., 177n37 Hardy, Thomas, 137n9 Hartmann, Franz, 53-54 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 80 Logic, 80 Hermogenes of Tarsis, 78 Herodotus, 77, 77n11 Hildermeier, Manfred, 31n6 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 230 Holthusen, Johannes, 96, 98 Homer, Homeric, 21, 24-25, 33

I

Ibsen, Henrik19, 33, 94-95, 142, 209-210, 216, 231 Idealism, 25, 28-29, 210, 229 Ivanov, Viacheslav, 2-4, 11, 87, 101, 163, 186 Ivanov-Razumnik, R.V., 11, 46, 95, 99, 125126, 129n33, 140n20, 142, 143n29, 149, 194, 195n32, 200n44, 207

J

Jacobson, Claire, 74n4 James, Henry, 82 Golden Bowl, The, 82 Janecek, Gerald, 11, 84n28, 187n2 Jerusalem, Wilhelm, 239 Johnston, V. V., 151, 161 Joyce, James, vii, xii, 8, 73 Ulysses, vii, 73 Finnegans Wake, xii Judeo-Christian, Cosmogony, 200 Notion of paradise, 68 Religion, 21-22, Satan, 27 Spirit of gravity, 30, 42 Jung, C. G., 228 Jung-Wien (Young Vienna), 230

K

Kachura, Foma 180 Kaliaev, Nikolai, 182n56, 183n60 Kamenskaia, Anna, 153-154 Kandinsky, Vasily, 1, 15 Kant, Immanuil (Kantian), 59, 61,61n32, 62, 113, 174,183, 198, 214

Index

Keys, Roger, 12n46, 14, 95n3 Khodasevich, Vladislav, xin2, 3, 127, 187n2, 220, 226 Klimt, Gustav, 230-234, 238, 246, 248 Kogan, P. S., 130n35 Korzeniowski, Apollo, 116 Kozhebatkin, Aleksandr, 6 Kraus, Karl, 229 Krishnamurti, 138 Kudasheva, E. S., 130n34 Kukol’nik, N. V., 172n28 Külpe, Oswald, 229 Kutuzov, Mikhail, 104

L

Lacan, Jacques, Lacanian, 89n42 Langen, Timothy, 14, 16, 86n35, 87n35, 88 Lavrov, Aleksandr, 8, 14, 16, 94n1, 105n6-7, 116n1, 121n6, 122n8, 126n25, 135n5, 137n10, 139n15, 140n17-18, 143n31, 149n4, 150n10, 209, 210n75, Lawrence, H. D., 137n9 Leadbeater, Charles W., 11n43, 17, 46, 50-51, 150-151, 154-155, 158-160 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 236 I Pagliacci, 236 Lesnevskii, Stanislav, 83n27, 94n1, 210n75 Lévi, Éliphas, 11n43 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 74, 74n3-4 Levinson, Z. I., 120n4 Lirov, M., 163n3 Ljunggren, Magnus, 2n10, 4n16, 5n24, 10, 14, 16, 17, 92n48, 103n3 Lomonosov, Mikhail, xiii Lopukhin, A. A., 172n27, 175n35, 179-180, 181n50 Lotman, Iurii, 83, 86n35, 127n27 Lukács, Georg, 103-105, 106n8

M

Mach, Ernst, 18, 228-229, 238n23, 239-240 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 229 Maguire, Robert A., 50n8, 82, 109, 157, 157n38, 158-159, 187n1, 192n16, 198n42, 212n80, 214n83, 219n93-95 Makovskii, Konstantin, 2 Maksimov, S. V., 220n96 Malenkova, M. E., 133n45 Malikov, N. A., 129 Malikov, A. K., 129

Mallarmé, S., 167n19 Malmstad, John, 50n8, 61n32, 82, 95n3, 109, 139n14-15, 140n17, 149n4, 150n11, 157, 157n38, 158-159, 187n1, 198n42, 212n80, 214n83, 219n93-95 Manzoni, Alessandro, 107 Maslenikov, Oleg, 3n12, 167n19 Marxism, 103, 111 Materialism, 57, 59, 61, 191, 227 Matich, Olga, 107n12 Matveeva, M., 124n23 Maugham, Somerset, 31n6 Mauthner, Fritz, 229 McDuff, David, 50n8, 233n16, 241n36, 244, 247 McHale, Brian, 92n47 Mead, G. R. S., 11n43 Medtner, Emilii, 137, 140, 156, 161 Ménard, Louis, 11n43 Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 181n52, 188, 192, 209 Meshcherskii, Vladimir 171n26 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 236-237, 244 Mikhailov, Aleksandr Alekseevich, 83n27, 94n1, 210n75 Mintslova, Anna, 47, 51n11 Mitchell, Hannah, 103n2 Mitchell, Stanley, 103n2 Mochul’sky, Konstantin, 2, 7n30, 208 Modernist, modernists 5, 8, 15, 227-228, 236 Molière, Jean Baptist, 236 Mongol(s) mongolian, 5, 26, 55-60, 170, 172, 174, 179-181, 186, 212, 217 Morozova, Margarita, 139 Mysticism, mystic, mystical, xi, 5, 11, 13, 17, 60-61, 64, 78, 86n34, 87, 92n46, 95, 100, 103, 112-113, 118, 121, 136, 142-144, 153, 163, 165, 174-186, 208, 210, 215 Myth, mythical, mythology, 1, 5-6, 8, 13, 15, 17, 20, 23-26, 29, 33-35, 38-41, 44, 48, 61, 67, 76n9, 88, 90, 100, 113, 126-127, 134, 137, 145, 184, 200, 203

N

Nabokov, Vladimir, x-xiii, 2 Nazarov, Fedor 180, 186 Neo-Kantianism, neo-Kantian 4, 23, 174n33, 200 Newton, Newtonian, 177, 177n38, 227

257

258

Index

Nicholas I, 169 Nicholas II, 169 Nichols, Robert L., 188n3-4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Nietzschean, 7, 15, 19-25, 27-31, 33-34, 40-41, 45, 137-138, 139n15, 142n27, 143, 145, 174, 174n33, 181-183, 195, 198, 214, 218n92, 219, 224-225, 231 Birth of Tragedy, The, 15, 20n2, 23-24, 27, 33, 34n9, 35 Genealogy of Morals, The, 22 Ecce Homo, 45, 45n15, 145n40 Prometheus Bound, 27 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), 15, 22, 25, 29, 45, 137-138, 146, 211, 214, 217219, 225 Nihilism, nihilists, 8, 22, 29, 40, 109, 132, 211, 216 Nikitina, M. A., 114 Nikolayevsky, B., 179n45, 181n51 Novikov, I. A., 120n5

O

Occult, occultism, 4, 10-11, 11n43, 15-16, 25-26, 43n14, 48, 51-52, 61-62, 85n32, 90n45, 113, 118, 135, 137, 145, 149, 177, 188, 194, 205, 208, 217, 223 Odoevtseva, Irina, 9 Oedipus, Oedipal, 17, 23, 36, 64, 75, 136, 142 Old Believers, 27 Ol’denburg, Sergei, 161 Orient, Oriental, 17, 47, 58, 64, 137, 147, 161-162, 174, 180n48, 186 Orlov, V. N., 216n84 Orthodox church, Orthodoxy, 188, 220

P

Panchenko, A. M., 195n31 Pan-Mongolism, 57n25, 170, 180, 184, 186, 193, 217 Paperno, Irina, 189n5 Parricide, 5, 41, 71, 75-76, 88, 90, 118, 169, 183n60 Parody, parodic, 7, 19, 29, 31, 35, 37-42, 74, 96, 127, 157n38, 164, 168, 176, 178, 183-184, 186, 211, 212n78, 221, 223 Pavel I ( Pavel Petrovich), 169 Perec, Georges, 77 W, 77

Peter the Great, xi, 5-6, 20, 25-28, 36, 50, 84n31, 91n44, 121, 201, 209 Petrovskaia, N. P., 174n32 Petrushka, 236-238, 242-245, 249-250 Piast, Vladimir, 105-107 Pimenova, E., 117n2 Pisarev, Alexandr, 236 Pisareva, Elena, 47, 51n9, 150-151, 151n1315, 158 Plato, Platonic, 17, 21, 25, 33-34, 70, 148, 177 Critias, 25 Phaedrus, 17, 148 Timaeus, 25 Plehve, V. K., 179, 181n50 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 4, 36, 115, 171n26, 178-179 Ponomareva, Anna, 13-14, 17, 148n2, 152n18 Positivism, positivists, 25-26, 29, 48-49, 54, 59-61, 146 Potebnia, Aleksandr, 34, 34n10 Potstso, A. M., 129 Primary Chronicle, 26 Prokopov, T. F., 120n5 Prometheus, 20, 24, 27-28, 33, 45 Propper, S. M., 171n26 Pushkin, Aleksandr, xi, xiii, 6-7, 19-30, 35, 40, 50, 58n26, 94, 165-166, 168, 169n21, 172, 209, 221 Boris Godunov, 6, 221-222 Bronze Horseman, The (Mednyi vsadnik), 6, 23, 25-28, 30, 40, 50, 58n26, 166, 168, 221 Evgenii Onegin, 6, 21n4, “The Queen of Spades”, 172, 183 Pustygina, Nadezhda G., 213n81, 224 Putiato, Ol’ga Fedorovna, 120 Pythagoras, Pythagoreans, 177-179

Q

Quintilian, 78

R

Rabinowitz, Stanley, 2n6, 2n8, Randall, Natasha, 77n11 Reavey, George, 8 Remizov, Aleksei, 31n6 Remizova, S. P., 181n52, 182n53 Rerikh, Nikolai, 161

Index

Revolution, 8, 12, 16, 24, 31, 35-36, 39, 74, 87n37, 99, 103, 144, 169, 173n31 1917 February, 125, 143 of 1905, 8, 19, 21, 28, 36, 54-55, 57, 60, 64, 112, 114, 119 of 1917, 31 Revolutionaries, revolutionary, 5, 7-9, 16, 31, 54, 74, 81, 106, 110, 116-120, 123, 128, 135, 143, 146, 163, 172n27, 191, 198-199, 204, 211-212, 219-221 Richards, I. A., 78n16 Rickert, Heinrich, 174n33 Ricoeur, Paul, 79-80 Ropshin, V., 182, 182n56 see also Savinkov Kon’ blednyi, 182n54-57 Rougle, Charles, 134n1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 77 Russian Thought, 4 Russkii vestnik (Russian herald), 119 Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian wealth), 119

S

Sabashnikova-Voloshina, Margarita, 59n27 Sapunov, Nikolai, 237 Satire, satiric, satirical, 7, 16, 106, 136-137, 140-141, 144, 144n36, 229n6 Savinkov, Boris, 31n6, 122, 180-182, 183n59, 185n63 Sazhin, Dmitrii, 113n17 Sazonov, E. C., 182n56 Schaefer, L., 230 Schick, Maximilian, 229 Schnitzler, Arthur, 229-230, 237 Grüne, Kakadu, Der, 229 Schleier der Pierette (Columbine’s Scarf ), 237 Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest, 74n4 Schonthan, Franz von, 236 Acrobats, The, 236 Schorske, Carl, 231 Schumann, Robert, 236 Carnival, 236 Schuré, Édouard , 11n43 Scriabin, Aleksandr, 15 Sebezhko, E. S., 120n4 Serafim of Sarov, 138-139, 182 Sergei Aleksandrovich, Grand Prince, 183n60 Shaginian, Marietta, 129 Shcherbatskii, Fedor, 17, 150, 152-154, 162 Sher, Benjamin, 92n46 Shklovsky (Shklovskii), Viktor, 92 Shtiurmer, B. V., 179n45

Sidorov, A. L., 175n35 Silver Age, 229, 236-237, 242, 246 Sirin, 4, 14, 46 Skovoroda, Grigorii, 61-62, 214 Soboleva, Olga, 242n38 Social(ist) Revolutionary Party (SR), 28, 119, 174, 183n59 Socrates, 24, 33-35, 148 Sologub, Fedor, 4 Solon, 25-26 Solov’ev, Sergei, 3 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 47, 57n25, 61-62, 106, 122, 137-138, 139n16, 140, 165, 168n20, 170n23-24, 180-184, 189-193, 196, 202, 217, 225 Three Conversations, The, 189-190 Stanford, W. Bedell, 78n16 Starikova, Ekaterina, 96, 100n18 Stavrou, Theofanis, 188n3-4 Steinberg, Ada, 3n15, 10n38, 14, 17, 164n13 Steiner, Rudolf, 4, 10-11, 16-17, 46-47, 51, 56, 57n25, 59-6-62, 128, 135-143, 145, 150-151, 155n30, 165, 174n33, 182-183, 194 Stepun, Fedor, 147 Sterne, Laurence, 92n46 Tristam Shandy, 92n46 Stravinsky, Igor’, 1, 237-238, 243-245, 247, 250 Petrushka, 238, 243-244, 250 Petrushka’s cry, 237 The Right of Spring, 1 Russian Dance, 237 Strazhev, Viktor, 120 Struve, Gleb, 163n6 Struve, Petr, 4, 216 Sudeikin, Sergei, 237 Sugai, L. A., 14n50, 142n27, 209n69-71 Sviatopolk-Mirskaia, E. A., 175n35 Symbolic Identity, 86 Image(s), 86n34, 97 Subtext, 97, 100 Thought, 76, 84, 86n34, 93 Unity, 85 Symbolism, symbolist, 1, 3, 7-11, 15-16, 18-20, 29, 35, 37, 40, 46, 48, 57n25, 62-63, 70, 72, 83-86, 95, 101, 106, 109, 113, 118, 120, 143, 146-147, 149, 151, 153, 159, 167, 174, 183, 187-189, 192, 198, 200, 211, 215, 219, 221, 223 Synesthesia, 15, 63-72

259

260

Index

T

Tairov, Aleksandr, 133n45 Tapp, Alyson, 107n12 Tarkhov, A. E., 120n5 Tatarov, Nikolai, 180, 185-186 Teleshev, N. D., 120n5 Tereshchenko, M. I., 4, 216 Terrorism (terror, terrorist), x, 4-8, 12, 16-17, 20, 23-28, 31-36, 44-45, 49, 53, 57, 61, 75, 87, 110, 116-122, 163, 169, 173, 180-184, 185n63, 198, 211-221 Theosophical Bulletin (Vestnik teosofii), 150, 153 Theosophy (theosophical), 4, 15, 17, 46-53, 58-62, 112, 114, 136-138, 147n2, 150161, 165, 174-184, 189, 211 Theurgy, theurgic, 10, 15, 47-50, 187, 189, 196, 199-200, 209, 211, 215, 219, 221, 223-224 Tolstoy, Aleksey, 4 Tolstoy, Lev, 7, 19-23, 33-40, 75n6, 103105, 115, 157n38, 175-176, 188 Anna Karenina, 7, 19, 35-40, 75n6, 157n38 War and Peace, 103-104, 115, 176 Trauberg, N. L., 130 Treadgold, Donald, 188n3 Trediakovsky, Vasily, xiii Tsushima, 21, 57 Tuchkin, V., 185n64, 185n67 Turgeneva, Asia, 4, 10, 135, 139, 141, 155 Turner, Mark, 74, 78n17 Tynianov, Iurii, 212n78

U

Ungurianu, Dan, 102 Uspenskii, Petr Demianovich, 43n14

V

Velikovskaia, G. E., 187n2, 220n97-98 Vengerova, Zinaida, 119, 121n7 Ver Sacrum, 230, 248 Vestnik Evropy (European Herald), 119, 124 Vesy, 229 Viennese Secessionist Movement, 18 Vitte (Witte), S. Ui., 171n26, 172n27, 179n46 Vnorovskii, Boris, 183n60 Vologina, O. V., 120n5 Volynskii, Akim, 209 Voropaeva, E., 120n5

W

Wagner, Otto, 231 Wagner, Richard, 24, 33-34, 198 Parsifal, 198 Wachtel, Andrew, 107n11 Weiner, Adam, 7, 14, 17, 221n99 Wermuth-Atkinson, Judith, 14, 17-18 Wigzell, Faith, 95n3 Woolf, Virginia, 88 Woronzoff, Alexander, 202

Z

Zaitsev, Boris, 120 Zamyatin, Yevgeny (Evgenii Zamiatin), 3n13, 77, 77n11 We, 77 Zelinsky, B., 96n6 Zeller, E., 178n41 Zenzinov, Z., 31n6 Zoroastrism, Zoroastrian, 199-200 Zverev, S., 175n35 Zubatov, S. V., 175, 179n46