Читать книгу Petersburg - Andrei Bely - Страница 9

“MY GREATEST MASTERPIECES OF TWENTIETH century prose,” Vladimir Nabokov has said, “are, in this order: Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.”¹ He puts the matter provocatively and puts it well. The order of ranking might be open to dispute; the presence of Petersburg on any list of this kind is not.

What entitles this novel to a place in such eminent company? Certainly it invites admiration as a skillful and effective piece of workmanship. But more than that is involved, as it must be for any truly significant work of art. Petersburg is firmly rooted in Russian soil, yet it speaks in a voice that is powerful and original, and that carries across national boundaries to the hearing of us all.

At the heart of Petersburg lies a question that has agitated Russians for generations: the national identity. Perhaps only the Germans and the Americans, among modern western peoples, have been so obsessed with finding out who they are, and so given to questioning their own reality and authenticity. The Russian version has been shaped as much by geography as anything else. As a nation straddling Europe and Asia, Russians have sought to define a vision of themselves that would amount to more than merely a sum of “western” and “eastern” traits. This in turn has provided a context in which the great writers have explored the individual’s quest for identity and meaning with an intensity and earnestness that seem quintessentially Russian. Petersburg represents the culmination of this tradition.

At the same time, the problem has had larger dimensions. For Russians also conceive of “west” and “east” in ways that mark the human experience generally. “West” stands for reason, order, symmetry; “east” for the irrational, the impalpable, the intuitive. At given times one may outweigh the other in society at large or in the individual consciousness; or the two may even coexist more or less harmoniously. But in the twentieth century, as Bely clearly sees, these two principles, inside Russia and out, have more often been in open conflict, with neither gaining preponderance. We have developed a characteristically “modern” terminology to express our reaction to this conflict: anxiety, apprehension, alienation, isolation. These also describe the moods that move Bely’s great novel from beginning to end.

When writers of our century have not explored the consequences of this conflict on the battlefield or in the concentration camp, they have often turned to the city. Here Joyce’s Ulysses is, of course, the most distinguished instance. Critics have sometimes compared Bely’s novel to it, although the two are fundamentally different. Among works with urban settings, Petersburg is virtually unique in that the city is not merely the arena of the action, but itself becomes the main character, as rich both in experience and in meaning as any of the human characters in other great novels. (Significantly, Joyce did not name his novel Dublin.) And Bely creates this character by defining a unique vision and devising a unique language through which to explore it. The result is one of the most inventive works of literature ever written.

Despite its power, complexity, and freshness, Petersburg remains relatively unknown and unappreciated, both in its native land and abroad. The reasons for this are different on each side of the border.

Bely was born in Moscow in 1880, as Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev. He began to publish in 1902, while still a student at the university, adopting the pseudonym Andrei Bely (“Andrew White”) to spare his prominent father the embarrassment of public association with the still-scandalous Symbolists, whose camp he immediately joined. Throughout his relatively brief career (he died in 1934) he was a poet, an essayist, and a theoretician of literature and culture. He was also a prolific novelist: besides Petersburg, he wrote The Silver Dove (1909), Kotik Letaev (1922), and, in the 1920s and 1930s, a series of novels with the generic title Moscow. His earliest efforts in prose fiction were four short works he designated as “symphonies.” They departed from the nineteenth-century narrative tradition by cultivating a “musical” structure and diction that reflected, among other things, Symbolism’s attempt to eradicate the boundaries among the various arts. In 1909 he tried his hand at a more conventional kind of novel, The Silver Dove (Serebryanyi golub’). Its hero, Daryalsky, is a young intellectual of occidental bent who has grown tired of the life of the mind and has gone to seek a new truth, largely mystical and non-western, among peasants belonging to a sect called the Doves. He encounters only frustration and ultimately death at the hands of the sectarians, who represent the darkest side of the “dark folk,” as the peasantry is sometimes called in Russia. Petersburg was first intended as a continuation of this novel; but in the writing, it developed into something far different.²

It first appeared in book form in 1916, and was immediately recognized as a work of major literary importance. Yet so radically did it depart from the great tradition of the Russian novel that no one quite knew how to approach it. It became one of those works that are routinely praised without being understood or read. Before it could be subjected to proper study, the Bolsheviks came to power, and with them, a view of the nature and purposes of literature that was fundamentally hostile to the entire modernist outlook. To be sure, Bely’s 1922 revision of the novel was twice reprinted in Soviet Russia (with major cuts by the censors); but with the growing demand that literature must conform to the standards of Socialist Realism, Petersburg was pronounced “decadent” and therefore inimical to the interests of the “new” reader. It was consigned to virtual oblivion, along with all of Bely’s oeuvre, as indeed were most of the achievements of that brilliant generation of writers, painters, and composers who came to prominence before 1917. The result led Igor Stravinsky, as late as 1960, to remark of music in Russia: “It was new just before the Soviets.”³ The same could be said of every other form of art.

The passage of time and the easing of official strictures in the two decades since Stalin’s death have conferred a measure of acceptability (if not always respectability) on many of the important Symbolists. A carefully controlled and highly selective “reclaiming” of the Russian past is under way. In 1966, a collection of Bely’s verses and long poems (Stikhotvoreniya i poemy) was published. And a new critical edition of Petersburg has been prepared. But publication has been delayed indefinitely, for reasons that are not entirely clear. As of this writing, the novel has not been reprinted in its native land for more than forty years.

In many ways the reception of Bely’s work in the west has followed a parallel course. Our far more open societies have shown themselves curiously prone to ape the Soviets by allowing political criteria to determine what belongs in the canon of “interesting” Russian literature and what does not. Attention focuses on “acceptable” writers like Leonid Leonov or Valentin Kataev for the picture they supposedly provide of Soviet life, and conversely, on writers who are completely unacceptable, like Solzhenitsyn and the Pasternak of Doctor Zhivago, for their exposure of gross defects in the moral fabric of their country. Those writers of real talent whom the Soviets have simply neglected tend to suffer the same fate here. Isaac Babel and Yury Olesha are significant cases in point. Both ran afoul of the official ideologues. For two decades their writings were not republished. Even their names all but disappeared from public mention. And western translators and critics took almost no interest in them either. It was only after their “rehabilitation” in the mid-1950s and the publication of new editions of their work that their “significance” was rediscovered abroad. A similar pattern can be traced for the Symbolists. For decades the Soviets treated them as a minor aberration and refused to reissue their works (Alexander Blok being the notable exception); they were known to only a handful of connoisseurs in the west. As they were slowly restored to a modicum of favor during the 1950s, they began to attract notice outside Russia. One of the first signs was a new translation of Fyodor Sologub’s famous novel The Petty Demon in 1962, some five years after it had been republished in the provincial Soviet town of Kemerovo (and had cost its editors their jobs). By now translators are opening up the Symbolist period as a whole, and it is finally becoming the target of considerable scholarly endeavor as well.

In the case of Andrei Bely, we are for once ahead of the Soviets in the strictly chronological sense. His major works have been reprinted in the Russian language outside the Soviet Union. Kotik Letaev and The Silver Dove can now be read in English. A German version of Petersburg appeared in 1919, and another in 1959; an Italian translation came out in 1961, a French in 1967, an English in 1959. Yet the familiar pattern holds. Nearly all this activity is of very recent vintage, too recent for the scholarly industry to have started full-scale production, though it is gearing itself up. For English readers, a major obstacle to the appreciation of Petersburg has been that 1959 version, which bears only incidental resemblance to the original. Apart from gross misreadings, it makes numerous cuts, which eliminate, among other things, virtually the entire persona of the narrator, whose presence is essential to any real understanding of what Bely is up to. The translator, John Cournos, deserves our respect as a pioneer, but his work conveys little of the intricacy and subtlety of the original. It is also devoid of annotation, and therefore supplies none of the cultural context which Bely, like any writer, takes for granted in his audience and which by and large is unfamiliar to western readers. Even the great nineteenth-century Russian “realist” classics still strike most foreigners as exotic. How much truer that is of Petersburg, with its cultivation of the grotesque and its invocation of an epoch of Russian cultural and political history which, though not so remote in time, is still little known to the English-speaking world. One of the reasons why Joyce, Kafka, and Proust—to take just the writers mentioned above by Nabokov—have achieved such enormous popularity is that an elaborate critical and scholarly literature has grown up to elucidate the texture, the feel, and the facts of the times and places in which their works are set.

The present translation aims at removing these impediments to a deeper understanding and appreciation of one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. We offer here the first full version of the definitive 1922 text of the novel, along with the kind of annotation we deem essential for anyone who wishes to get below the surface.