Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 10

Petersburg paints a vivid picture of the capital of the world’s largest land empire during the autumn of 1905. Russian culture was then at its most brilliant and innovative. Literature, music, theater, and ballet were beginning to win fame throughout the world. But the society from which they sprang seemed shaky. Japan had just proved victorious in a war that Russia was supposed to have won easily. Political agitation and social unrest were on the rise. Outright revolution was being preached and prepared; and from January 1905 on, the country was shaken by a series of mutinies, uprisings, assassinations, and strikes. There was a widespread feeling among those who witnessed such events that the old values were no longer adequate to the new realities, and that Russia teetered on the edge of some dreadful catastrophe. This ominous feeling, with the attendant moods of anxiety, apprehension, and disorientation, permeates Bely’s Petersburg from the first page to the last.

Appropriately enough, conspiracy and terror are the forces that move the novel. The story looks like simplicity itself. Nikolai Apollonovich, an impressionable university student, has gotten entangled with a revolutionary terrorist organization, which plans to assassinate a high government official with a time bomb. The twist is that the official is Nikolai’s father, Apollon Apollonovich, and that Nikolai himself is entrusted with planting the bomb. It is duly delivered to him, the clock mechanism is set to explode within twenty-four hours, and–––. But we must not give away the ending: Petersburg is a novel of suspense. It is also a social novel, a family novel, a philosophical, political, psychological, historical novel—and even then we do not begin to exhaust the possible approaches to it. One has to go back in Russian literature at least to Crime and Punishment to find a work in which so many plots and subplots are as intricately and subtly interwoven, with no loose ends protruding. Yet Bely ranges much farther afield than does Dostoevsky. It is relatively easy to account for the main lines of Crime and Punishment, tangled though they be, whereas to do that for Petersburg would be to rewrite the novel: it is all but immune to paraphrase.

All these planes, levels, and dimensions come together in the characters of the novel, who are at the same time engaged in moving the story line ahead. Through the characters themselves—and not through any raisonneur-figure, or through any of those grand panoramic statements to which the nineteenth-century novelists were addicted—Bely creates a picture of Petersburg society. He focuses on the two extremes—the powerful and privileged (Apollon Apollonovich and his circle) and the poor and disaffected (Dudkin and the peasant Styopka). But he creates an impression of fullness and completeness by bringing in, if only fleetingly, representatives of other classes and groups, such as merchants and servants, and by constantly invoking the gray faceless masses of the metropolis. Through the characters he also introduces the intellectual and cultural fashions that held sway in Petersburg at the time: Apollon Apollonovich and his son cherish Comte and Kant respectively; Sofia Petrovna’s enthusiasm for the nonexistent “Henri Besançon” suggests that the rage for Henri Bergson and Annie Besant had infected even muddled society ladies; Dudkin’s mind is a virtual compendium of anarchist theories popular at the turn of the century, in which Nietzsche and mysticism admixed powerfully. Characters also provide the means by which Bely saturates the novel with literary allusions. For instance, Nikolai Apollonovich’s adulterous mother has the same given name as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and is also married to an unloving man with oversized ears. The encounter between Nikolai and Morkovin in the seedy restaurant, with the heavy hints at possible blood kinship, suggests the relationship between Ivan and Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Apollon Apollonovich is, among other things, a composite of two characters in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”: the lowly Akaky Akakievich and the haughty Person of Consequence (who is Akaky’s alter ego). Many of the characters also transfer universally recognizable social and psychological types into the Petersburg of 1905: Apollon Apollonovich, for one, is the quintessential bureaucrat and the quintessential anal erotic. Even the excursions into the timeless and dimensionless realm of myth and the “cosmos” are shown as the experiences of specific characters.

Such a multiplicity of functions tends to pull the characters out of themselves. Like many modern writers, Bely does not attempt anything resembling full psychological portraits. Ultimately there are no private thoughts or private actions; all are reflexes of larger realities, which in turn are experienced by all the characters. Even something as concrete as a tic or a gesture may be shared by a number of otherwise seemingly different personages. For instance, Dudkin’s favorite posture, when alone in his garret and unable to sleep, is to flatten himself against the wall with arms outstretched; Lippanchenko does the same just before he is killed by Dudkin, who then mimics the statue of Peter the Great (an important character in the novel) by straddling the corpse, as Peter does his horse. Yet it is Bely’s great achievement to make these characters seem real and memorable as individuals. He endows each with certain striking physical traits which he repeats again and again by way of imprinting them on our memories: Apollon Apollonovich has large greenish ears, a bald head, and a puny physique; Sofia Petrovna possesses luxuriant tresses and an incipient mustache; Lippanchenko is obese and has a low, narrow forehead. Nearly all the characters bear “meaningful” names as well: Apollon is the Russian for “Apollo”; Ableukhov contains the word for “ear” (ukho); Lippanchenko draws on the morpheme lip—, which can make the word for “sticky.” Each character has his own skew of temperament, which helps determine which aspects of the vast reality of the novel he will tend to see. And Bely surrounds him with an array of objects that serve as correlatives to his outlook. Apollon Apollonovich relishes the icy symmetries of the formal rooms of his mansion, which reflect his passion for the abstractions of geometry. His son lives in three very different rooms, which suggests greater temperamental complexity: the study, with its bookshelves and its bust of Kant, mirrors his yearning for systems and his penchant for abstraction (both “western” traits); the sleeping room, which is almost entirely taken up by a huge bed, objectifies and is meant to exorcise his Oedipal obsession with the “sin” of his conception; and the reception room, with its oriental motifs, gratifies the “eastern” side of his character which emerges after his mother runs off with her lover. For many of these devices Bely is heavily indebted to his great predecessors; but he has achieved a synthesis that is unmistakably personal.

Bely’s characters, then, are both general and particular, abstract and concrete, unreal and real, at one and the same time. This unity in duality is characteristic of every aspect of the novel. Consider the matter of time. The novel as a whole unfolds between September 30 and October 9, 1905. Although these dates are not specified, they can readily be established if we note the wealth of detail Bely introduces (much of it from the daily press) on current events and the vagaries of the weather. Once the bomb begins ticking, in Chapter V, we are forced to think in terms of the twenty-four-hour period within which it is set to explode. All this gives us a sense of being firmly planted in time and in space. Yet the chronology is constantly warped: characters and events from the literature and history of the past move into 1905; there are sudden shifts into a distant unspecified future time, and even into the timeless realm of myth. We come to see that time and timelessness are both “real” in this novel; the one does not exclude the other.

The same point can be made about the city itself. As Bely recreates it, it is as familiar to any Russian as London or Paris is to an Englishman or Frenchman. Through a careful and lavish specification of the peculiarities of climate, geography, and prominent architectural features, Bely manages to convey a sense of the actual physical presence of the city, making it so vivid and “real” that sometimes we almost think we are reading a gloss on Baedeker. (At the same time, we understand that Petersburg represents the modern city generally.) Yet it has a curiously elusive quality. To be sure, the great public buildings and the famous monuments are all located where they should be, and remain fixed throughout. But other external, man-made features tend to be as fluid as the waters that run through, around, and beneath the city itself: when we try to plot them on a map, we find, for instance, that the Ableukhov house occupies three very different locations, that the Likhutin house is an “impossible” composite of several others, and that the government institution headed by the senator cannot be even approximately situated, even though all three of these buildings are described in considerable detail.⁴

In fact, Bely readily acknowledges his debt to the version of Petersburg that has been shaped by Russian literature. Writers of the eighteenth century tended to see Petersburg as a magnificent monument to the power of human reason and will: it was a planned city, founded in 1703 and built on a trackless bog. Part I of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” (1833) honors this point of view; but Part II strikes a new note that came to predominate in virtually all literary treatments of Petersburg well into the twentieth century: beneath the “western” facade lay a shadowy world of intangibilities and unrealities, alien to man’s reason and apprehensible only to his unconscious being—an “eastern” world, in the Russian terminology. It was Petersburg, with its uneasy coexistence of “west” and “east,” that appealed to the Russian mind as being emblematic of the larger problem of national identity. Readers of Gogol and Dostoevsky are familiar with this double view. It characterizes Bely’s novel too. He takes all the literary myths of Petersburg, which Dostoevsky called “the most fantastic and intentional city in the world,” and brings them to culmination.

Each of the characters in Petersburg participates in the enactment and perpetuation of the myth of the city—none more vigorously and meaningfully than the Bronze Horseman. The subject of the statue, Peter the Great, was a real man and a historical figure. In his efforts to shatter and update the Russia he inherited, he was a revolutionary; yet at the same time he created the bureaucracy by which the reforms were rigidified into the self-perpetuating authority of the state. In the single-minded tyranny with which he acted, he was an “eastern” despot; but in his vision of a modern state he was “western.” As the “father” of Russia, he is the ultimate symbol of the paternal authority against which the “sons” rebel in various ways. At the same time, he has a literary dimension, as the main subject of Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman,” which is constantly invoked throughout Bely’s novel; the Horseman, in turn, is the most famous monument in Petersburg, and is in effect a symbol of the city. In the novel, Peter is alive and ever-present in all these manifestations—a point Bely reinforces not only by bringing the statue to life (Pushkin does that too), but also by tying Peter in with the all pervasive theme of generational conflict and revolution, with the literary myth of the city, and with the apocalyptic destiny he sees awaiting Russia.

The Bronze Horseman is the most perceptive character in the novel. But most of the others are intelligent enough to see that they are not self-contained, that they participate, whether wishing to or not, in the workings of a larger reality that exists independent of them. This reality is sometimes referred to in the novel as “abyss” or “void.” Occasionally a character is vouchsafed a disturbing glimpse into it, in dreams, at the moment of death, or at times of great stress which pull him out of his routines and, in the words of a recent critic, “bring him into contact with the universe [literally, ‘world-structure,’ mirozdanie] and turn him into a ‘particle’ of the universe too. There, beyond the bounds of the visible world, man falls into the powers of a ‘timeless’ stream of time, in which are grouped events and persons of not only past but also future epochs.”⁵ Such an experience is profoundly unsettling to Bely’s characters, for it threatens to undo their identities as individuals. By way of resistance, they construct a world of objects with definite shapes and functions, whether the city itself, representing Peter’s attempt at self-assertion and self-definition, or the more modest houses, apartments, and rooms that his heirs inhabit. All relish what they can touch and see—the visible, the finite, the specific—or what they can construct out of their own heads—systems, categories, propositions. But the narrator treats all such attempts with irony; they represent no more than a partial and provisional reality, and therefore serve only to perpetuate self-deception. Where, for instance, is the line really to be drawn between the natural and the man-made? Nature lives, as the many personifications in the novel indicate; but so do the objects man creates in trying to deny nature: the statue of Peter the Great gallops through the streets and speaks; the caryatid adorning Apollon Apollonovich’s government institution witnesses and muses on the events of Russian history. And the urge to make mental constructs is constantly sabotaged by the workings of “cerebral play,” that sudden, unexpected explosion of mental forces which bursts out into the world and creates new realities entirely beyond the understanding and control of the individual.

What the characters fail to see is that the whole world, natural and man-made, visible and invisible, is a living entity, composed of parts which interconnect and thereby acquire their true meaning. To isolate one or more of these parts, physically or intellectually, is to diminish and damage the whole, much as the removal of an arm or a leg from the body detracts from the beauty, the efficiency, and even the health of the entire organism. But that is precisely what the characters in Petersburg attempt to do. Gogol was Bely’s great predecessor in seeing the urge to fragment as a modern sickness. He deemed it the work of the devil. For Bely, the devil is modern urban man himself, whose obsession with the fragment is not so much an evil as a compulsion born of the fear of losing his individuality.

Language, as Bely sees it, is especially subject to the depredations of self-deception, perhaps because it is a wholly human construct. Apollon Apollonovich’s habit of calling all flowers “bluebells” regardless of their variety divorces the word from living reality and turns it into an abstraction. All the other characters indulge in the same operation, to varying degrees. As a result, verbal exchanges in Petersburg, when not merely trivial, tend to be irrelevant and fatuous. Gestures can often be more expressive of true intentions and desires. In written form, words can be just as inadequate to deeper understanding and meaningful communication—perhaps even more so than spoken words, for they are fixed and motionless, and we tend to worship them as we worship artifacts generally. Whether spoken or written, however, language as modern man uses it is yet another of the abstractions he makes in an effort to deny the vitality, energy, and change that characterize real life. The consequences are grave, in Bely’s view; for language—or, as he often calls it, “the word”—is our only means of knowing the world and ourselves. The living word, for Bely, is sound, or speech. Without it, “there is neither nature, nor the world, nor anyone cognizing them.”⁶ If modern thought and modern society are in a state of crisis, as Bely believes, then that is because language, as modern man employs it, is dying. Here his position is just the opposite of Emerson’s, who wrote: “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language” (Nature, Chapter IV).

One of Bely’s tasks as a literary artist is to convey a sense of the word as sound through the static medium of print. In Petersburg, as in several of his other works, he constantly tries to confound all our habits as visually-oriented readers for whom words are immobile, unobtrusive, and as silent as the type that encases them.

For one thing, he does violence to the accepted usages and the traditional strategies of “literary” language. He breaks his page up into small units with a profusion of dashes, dots, and new paragraphs. The result is a nervous and disjointed-looking discourse which does not flow in the majestic and seemingly effortless manner of the nineteenth-century novel. He is also addicted to catachresis: the expected word simply does not turn up in the expected place. Thus we find, to take a simple example, “thought train” (myslennyi khod) instead of the usual “train of thought” (khod myslei). Although there are comparatively few outright neologisms, Bely does devise unusual combinations of elements taken from standard Russian, particularly for abstract nouns, whose meaning is more or less clear, but which are not listed in any dictionary.

For another thing, he aims at creating a world of sound. Dialogue is prominent; in fact, Petersburg would lend itself well to adaptation for the stage or cinema (Bely himself made a play out of it in 1925). From the very beginning of the novel, we are confronted with a speaking narrator, whose voice rings in our ears throughout the novel. And we quickly become aware that this narrator also strives after certain sound effects. One of the many instances goes this way (in much abbreviated form): “I o nëm rasprostranyát’sya ne búdem. Rasprostranímsya bólee o Peterbúrge: est’ Peterbúrg íli Sankt-Peterbúrg íli Píter . . . Névskii Prospékt est’ peterbúrgskii Prospékt . . .,” and so on. (“And we shall not expatiate on it. Let us expatiate at greater length on Petersburg: there is a Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Pieter . . . Nevsky Prospect is a Petersburg Prospect . . .” (“Prologue”). If read purely for content, this strikes us as silly babble; but if we listen to it with our mind’s ear, as it were, or even better, read it aloud, we realize that the words have been chosen for the purpose of clustering certain sounds (p-b-r-k-l-s-t). Sound play—much of it far more sophisticated than this—pervades the novel. Much later, in fact, Bely even claimed that Petersburg had been built on a system of sound. “I have the impression that ‘ll’ is the smoothness of form: Apo-lll-on; ‘pp’ is the pressure created by covering surfaces (walls, the bomb); ‘kk’ is the height of insincerity: Ni-kkk-olái . . . kkk-lányalsya na, kk-a-kk la-kk, par-kk-éta-khkh (‘Nikolai . . . bowed on the varnish-like parquet floor’); ‘sss’ are reflections; ‘rr’ is the energy of the explosion (beneath the covering surfaces): prr-o-rr-ývv v brr-ed (‘a breakthrough into delirium’).”

Bely went on to say in effect that in the composition of the novel, sound was preexistent, and “content” formed around it: “Later I myself stumbled on the connection—which surprised me—between the verbal instrumentation and the story line (which came into being involuntarily).”⁷ We do not in fact know whether Bely actually created the novel in this way. But certainly sheer sound is so prominent as to constitute yet another level of reality with which we must reckon. From the very first page, we are conditioned to listen as well as look. We find it difficult to read rapidly or silently; our lips tend to move; and we pay closer attention than might otherwise be the case to the word itself and its components.

As a result, many otherwise common words take on new meanings. One handy example is shárik. Its primary dictionary meaning is “corpuscle”; and it is a “neutral” word in the sense that in ordinary contexts, no Russian stops for a moment to think of its literal meaning, “little sphere.” But in the context of this particular novel, the reader is bombarded with other words made up of the same or very similar sounds: shar (sphere), shírit’sya (expand), rasshirénie (expansion, dilatation). Typically, spheres are shown as expanding—a point made as much by the phonic similarity of the roots shar—/shir—(they are not related otherwise), as by outright statement. The ear pulls shárik into this same phonic pattern; and then we are likely to remember that the primary component is shar. But of course the dictionary meaning of “corpuscle” still remains. The result is a certain tension between the phonic and semantic elements, as is the case with many other words in this novel. Any great writer, of course, renews the language. Bely invents as well, and compels his readers to participate in the invention, as few other writers do.