Petersburg. Andrei Bely
to a set of viable alternatives: east/west, animate/inanimate, revolutionary/reactionary, present/past, Christ/Satan, and so on. There are no real alternatives for Bely. Revolution and reaction are equally incompetent to deal with reality: both are constructs of the mind that end in mindless despotism; east and west are so intermingled in the Russian character that they cannot possibly be separated; there is no meaningful division between present and past, or present and future. The most useful rhetorical model for this novel is not either/or, but both/and.
Bely once remarked that “every novel is a game of hide and seek with the reader.”9 This is particularly true of Petersburg. And once we realize that the game lies in the seeking itself, that there are no firm answers or final solutions, we will have begun to grasp what Bely is aiming at. Constant uncertainty, constant tension, constant change are the normal modes here. We must bend to the will of the narrator, and allow that it is highly capricious. He ironizes and he bumbles; he lyricizes and he prattles; he plays the sophisticate, he plays the fool; he identifies himself with this or that character, only to draw back and mock all the characters, the reader, and himself. At times he appears omniscient, like a typical nineteenth-century literary narrator; at times he admits to being as baffled as anyone else. Such swings of tone, manner, and posture can occur with bewildering speed, often within a single sentence. We are kept constantly off guard, never knowing what the narrator will say next, or how he will say it. Although the novel is posited entirely in the narrator’s mind, we do not really know when it is a projection of his consciousness and when his consciousness is itself a reflection of other realities. We can never safely generalize, evaluate, or predict, if only because the narrator shows us the folly of attempting to do so. We find no anchor in the world of this novel, no ethical ballast: we never know where we ought to stand on any given question, as we nearly always do in nineteenth-century novels.
We must, then, learn to endure a sense of insecurity as we read Petersburg. Nevertheless, it does help to keep constantly in mind that the world of this novel is ultimately a closed world, in which every part bears on every other. One of the ways in which Bely makes that point is through the repetition of words, sentences, and even entire paragraphs. The reader might be well advised to make a list. Among the items he will notice—and this is a very small sampling indeed—are the Ableukhov coat of arms (a unicorn goring a knight), the great black bridge, the greenish waters of the Neva, the red domino, the rectilineal prospects, the caryatid, the mists and clouds, various tints and hues, and of course the Bronze Horseman. Many repetitions serve as tags that make situations and characters unforgettably vivid, such as the senator’s large greenish ears. Many serve as what one critic has called “compositional leitmotifs,” which “indicate and tie together important points in the narrative structure.”10 A great many, however, contain a multiplicity of meanings which arise out of the various contexts in which they appear. Each repetition brings all the other meanings into play, and creates new ones. Such words both denote and suggest. In this respect, their function is symbolic.
Let us touch briefly upon one prominent instance, which will also suggest how the process works in general. We have already mentioned shárik as a phenomenon of sound and semantics. Its component, the sphere (shar), also has a symbolic function. It strikes our attention with particular force in Chapter I (“And Catching Sight, They Dilated . . .”). Apollon Apollonovich is riding in his carriage on the Nevsky Prospect, and looking out the window. “Contemplating the flowing silhouettes, Apollon Apollonovich likened them to shining dots (tóchki). One of these dots broke loose from its orbit (orbíta) and hurtled at him with dizzying speed, taking the form of an immense crimson sphere (shar) . . . among the bowlers (kotelkí) on the corner, he caught sight of a pair of eyes (glazá) . . . they grew rabid, dilated (rasshírilis’). . . .” In one brief passage, the basic images of sphericality are set down: dot, orbit, sphere, bowler, eyes, dilate. The senator’s terrified reaction is described in related images: “His heart (sérdtse) pounded and expanded (shírilos’), while in his breast arose the sensation of a crimson sphere (shar) about to burst into pieces . . . Apollon Apollonovich, you see, suffered from dilatation (rasshirénie) of the heart.” (Stresses supplied in both passages.)
Established here is the pattern that underlies the entire novel: a sphere, or circle, that widens and brings about disintegration and death. At this point we probably do not know that we are dealing with a symbol. But as the novel unfolds, the sphere image recurs again and again, in various manifestations, in association with various characters, and as embroidery on the basic pattern. In Chapter V, for instance, it provides the material for Nikolai’s dream: “In the night, a little elastic blob would sometimes materialize before him and bounce about. . . . Bloating horribly, it would often assume the form of a spherical fat fellow. This fat fellow, having become a harassing sphere, kept on expanding, expanding, and expanding, and threatened to come crashing down upon him . . . it would burst into pieces.” (Stresses supplied.)
At the end of this same scene, Nikolai “understood that he himself was a bomb. And he burst with a boom.” This connects his fantasy with the actual bomb in the sardine tin (whose shape is sphere-like, and whose explosion is described as a series of expanding concentric circles), with the plot against his father, and through that, with what the senator sees from his carriage on the Nevsky Prospect. “Cerebral play” is also a component of the sphere symbol. It is often likened to an explosion that bursts forth from the skull and moves out in circles. At the same time, it always returns to its point of origin, only in a different form, thereby describing a kind of circle: “And one fugitive thought was the thought that the stranger really existed. The thought fled back into the senatorial brain The circle closed.” (Chapter I, “The Writing Table Stood There,” stresses supplied.) Gradually we become aware of many other items that go into the developing symbolism of the sphere, such as the “zero” into which all chronology turns in the dream-dialogue between Nikolai and his father (Chapter V), or even the play on the word “Saturn,” whose Russian pronunciation—sa-tóorn—suggests to Nikolai’s racing brain the French ça tourne, “it turns.” We come to see that the “circle,” “dots,” and “point” that are used to characterize the city of Petersburg in the Prologue belong to the same symbol system, though we are not aware of it on first encounter. The sphere or circle also underlies the behavior patterns of the characters themselves. Time and again they return compulsively to the same places, as, for example, to the Senate Square, where the Bronze Horseman stands. And we realize eventually that the structure of the novel as a whole is circular. In Chapter VIII, Anna Petrovna comes back to the Ableukhov household; the family is reunited; everything suggests that a fresh start is being made. The senator and his wife recall their honeymoon in Venice; father and son experience true reconciliation (“they retraced their steps”). In the Epilogue, Apollon Apollonovich has lapsed into the second childhood of senility; we are also told, for the first time, the names of his mother and father; Nikolai returns to Russia from Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus. In short, we find ourselves moving further and further back in time and space, only to experience other beginnings and other returns.
The ending of the novel seems ambiguous, as do the endings in many other notable works of Russian literature. But there can be no real endings for Bely. The world of his novel is a living organism, which constantly renews itself and which makes mockery of man’s efforts to cut it to his own limited horizons. As an affirmation of the life principle, it is ever-dynamic. In that sense, it stands virtually alone among the great works of the twentieth century.
NOTES
1.Strong Opinions, New York, 1973, p. 57. “Biely” is one way of transliterating the name, but we have stuck to the simpler and commoner “Bely” throughout.
2.For a fuller version of the origins of Petersburg, see “A Note on Text and Translation.”
3.“Igor Stravinsky: Obiter Dicta,” New York Review of Books, March 17, 1977, p. 31. Stravinsky made the remark in an interview in The Washington Post, December 24, 1960.
4.Cf. L. K. Dolgopolov, “Obraz