Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 13

A NOTE ON TEXT AND TRANSLATION

BELY PUBLISHED HIS FIRST NOVEL, The Silver Dove, in 1909. He intended to follow it with two others. All would make a trilogy, to be entitled East or West (Vostok ili zapad).¹ But he put writing aside in favor of a trip to Italy, North Africa, and the Near East, for which he set out in 1910 on an advance from the Musaget Publishing House. After returning to Russia in the spring of the following year, he found himself unable to work. Not only had he now no clear idea of just how to proceed with the sequel to The Silver Dove, but he also lacked the peace of mind essential to concentrating on a major project: with the advance used up, he was forced to find lodgings with one indulgent acquaintance after another, and to make ends meet by churning out journalistic pieces.

By this time, Valery Bryusov had become the literary editor of Russian Thought (Russkaya mysl’), a leading semi-popular journal. He was a prolific and proficient writer himself, though not of the first rank, and an indefatigable literary entrepreneur as well. In the mid-1890s he had been responsible, almost single-handedly, for launching the Russian Symbolist movement, which Bely joined a few years later. Both writers had worked together on The Balance (Vesy, the most important of the Symbolist journals, which had closed down in 1909), and, along with Alexander Blok and Vyacheslav Ivanov, were considered the mainstays of Symbolism. Now Bely, impoverished and dispirited, turned to Bryusov with the proposal that he should write reviews and articles for Russian Thought. Bryusov gave cautious consent, and also asked him for a new novel. Heartened, Bely made the first sketches in July of 1911, and set to work in earnest that October. He continued to refer to his manuscript as “the second part of The Silver Dove” with the working title of “The Lacquered Carriage.” (Other possibilities, all ultimately important themes in Petersburg, were “The Admiralty Needle,” “Evil Shadows,” “The Red Domino,” and “Wayfarers.”) But he already realized that what now engaged his attention was not and could not be a continuation of his earlier novel.

After three months of intensive work, he submitted his manuscript to Russian Thought in January of 1912. To his astonishment and dismay, the general editor, P. B. Struve, refused to accept it, and declined to pay the 1000-rouble advance that he had been expecting. Struve had never agreed to publish the novel sight unseen, as Bely seemed to believe; and when he did see it, he was indignant, deeming it “pretentiously and carelessly” written, “immature,” and replete with “nonsense.” Bely felt betrayed, and his predicament generated considerable sympathy in literary circles. Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Ivanov read the manuscript, and insisted that the only title it could possibly bear was Petersburg, inasmuch as the city was the real hero. It was then accepted for publication by the firm of K. F. Nekrasov in the provincial town of Yaroslavl, and much of it was actually set in type; but fresh problems arose, and it was simply abandoned. Finally, the prestigious Petersburg house of Sirin, which specialized in the work of Russia’s leading modernist writers, took the manuscript, which by then had been completely reworked, and published it between 1913 and 1914 in installments in its literary miscellany (also called Sirin), and then in book form in 1916.

Bely was obviously dissatisfied with this first complete edition, for he began tinkering with it almost immediately. Throughout the years of revolution and civil war in Russia, he could find no one interested in committing the results to print. In 1921 he emigrated temporarily to Berlin; there he found a willing publisher and resumed revisions. Working more by massive cutting than by actual rewriting, he subjected the text to such changes that the result was virtually a new novel, which appeared in 1922.

Bely’s enthusiasm for revision could get out of hand. Haste and carelessness left their mark: sometimes he failed to adjust the punctuation to conform to the demands of the new text; sometimes he excised just that word or phrase which would make his meaning (or at least its direction) clear to the reader. Linguistic intuition often enables us to fill in the ellipses created by radical cutting, but at times we must consult the 1916 edition. In such cases, we have not hesitated to add (always noting where) a word or two from that earlier text by way of clarification. Gone are some vivid scenes which any reader of the “Sirin” version can only regret, such as the political rally, which is talked about but not actually shown in any detail in the “Berlin” text.

All in all, however, the 1922 version is far stronger than its predecessor. Indeed, Bely thought of it as “merely a return to my basic conception.” He regarded the “Sirin” text of 1916 as “a rough draft, which fate (the pressure of meeting a deadline) did not allow to be worked up into fair copy; in the rough draft, terseness, brevity, and compactness of exposition (this was how the author of Petersburg had originally envisaged it) had been turned into a hazy ornateness.”² Certainly the “Berlin” text does in large measure restore those qualities. Bely threw out masses of superfluous detail, numerous repetitions, many grating inconsistencies, and certain sections whose only purpose was the settling of old scores with literary enemies. He also muted the anthroposophical element, which had figured so prominently in the first edition. The reader of the “Berlin” text has to work far harder than his predecessor at discovering the meaning of the world into which he is plunged. But Bely expects us to be zealous, and the clues to understanding are there if we are sufficiently attentive. Certainly the tighter structure and the faster pace heighten the sense of mystery and puzzlement, and make the novel a more effective vehicle for a story of plots and intrigues in a world that is never quite tangible.

The Berlin edition of 1922 was reprinted in Soviet Russia in 1928, with minor changes made by Bely himself and major changes that were unquestionably the work of the censors. That same version came out again in 1935, a year after the author’s death. Since then, the novel has gone through three reprintings abroad in Russian: one of the 1916 version, and two of the 1928/1935 version. None of the texts have been reissued in Russia since 1935 (in fact, the “Berlin” text has never been reprinted anywhere at any time).

What follows is the first complete translation of the definitive 1922 text. One hesitates to use the word “definitive” when speaking of any work by Bely, given his habit of incessant revision in quest of perfection. But the 1922 text does represent the last version of the novel that Bely himself created before censorship intervened; and that fact has determined our choice of it as the text that merits translation.

The peculiarities of Bely’s style that we have noted in the Introduction pose formidable problems for the translator. Shifted grammatical categories, assaults on conventional syntax, quirky (some would say “impossible”) combinations of words, sudden compressions and ellipses, manipulations of sounds and semantics—in these and many other ways Bely creates a highly idiosyncratic verbal texture, which offers constant surprises to Russian readers, delighting the adventuresome and horrifying the conservative. We have attempted to convey some sense of this texture in our translation, at least in the spirit if not always in the letter. This means that we have eschewed “smooth” English as consciously and deliberately as Bely did “smooth” Russian. Everywhere we have resisted any urge to paraphrase or to inflict other “normalizations” on his style.

Our translation is literal in the sense that we have tried to find the most appropriate equivalent for a given word and have stuck to it throughout, bearing in mind the vital importance of repetition as one of Bely’s principal devices. In another sense, no translation of Petersburg, or of any other Symbolist novel, can be “literal,” for words as Symbolists use them do not have fixed meanings but instead take on a variety of meanings in the context of a work as whole. All we can hope is that our equivalents will do the same within the English context we have created. Naturally, the sound play and the rhythm of Bely’s prose are impossible to render “literally.” Occasionally there are happy coincidences between Russian and English. By and large, however, we have had to content ourselves with suggestion, sometimes even creating instances of sound play where none exist at precisely that point in the Russian text. Thus, our “jumpy Japanese ju-jitsu teacher,” or our “trashy humor rags—whose bloody covers in those days were spawned with staggering swiftness on prospects swarming with people” are alliterative where the original is not. But we hereby honor the principle of alliteration that saturates the novel and creates many passages for which no ready English equivalent could be found. As for the verse passages: they are an important part of the verbal texture of the novel. We therefore decided that simple prose paraphrases would not do.

Bely claimed that the individualism of writers could be seen in their favorite punctuation marks. “The period is Pushkin’s mark; the semicolon is Tolstoy’s; the colon is mine; the dash is the mark beloved by the modernists.”³ In fact, Petersburg does abound in colons and dashes. They serve to break up sentences and create an effect of jerkiness or choppiness. We reproduced these punctuation marks faithfully in our first version, and discovered that the profusion proved disorienting and even baffling to a number of English readers, whereas they are not especially outlandish to the Russian eye. So we eliminated most of them, and substituted short sentences and phrases, which suggest something of the effect Bely intended. (Also, the dash in Russian often substitutes, in “normal” style as well as in Bely’s, for the verb “to be,” whereas it can rarely do that in English.) On the other hand, Bely’s system of paragraphing is not confusing to English sensibilities, and we have observed it scrupulously, even when the paragraphs are extremely brief (sometimes the result of overenthusiastic cutting of the 1916 version), or radically indented by way of setting off what Bely regards as key sections.

A dagger (^†) in the text indicates the presence of a corresponding note in the back of the book. Bely’s own footnotes, of which there are only two in the entire novel, are marked with an asterisk.

R.A.M.

J.E.M.

NOTES

1.The following account of the origins of Petersburg (including Bely’s experiences with Russian Thought) is based largely on L. K. Dolgopolov, “Andrei Belyi v rabote nad ‘Peterburgom’ (Epizod iz istorii sozdaniya romana),” Russkaya literatura, No. 1, 1972, pp. 157–167. The complex course of Bely’s revisions or plans for a new edition of Petersburg between 1917 and 1922 is described by his widow, Klavdiya Nikolaevna Bugaeva (with A. Petrovsky) in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Vol. 27–28, Moscow, 1937, pp. 600–603. These changes are discussed in detail in two essays on the novel by Ivanov-Razumnik, in Vershiny. A. Blok. A. Belyi, Petrograd, 1923. He is the only critic to have seen all the texts, both printed and in manuscript, and to have published his comparisons of them. He argues that the changes create a more positive image of the city and of the revolution in the 1922 version. We cannot agree.

2.“In Place of a Foreword” (“Vmesto predisloviya”) to the 1935 edition of Petersburg.

3.Introduction to Posle razluki, Berlin, 1922, p. 11.