St Petersburg полностью

Of course, Bely brought Falconet’s statue into his novel, as well as numerous themes from Pushkin’s poem that was dedicated to it, but he removed Pushkin’s dualism, which vacillated in its evaluation of the role of Petersburg’s founder. For Bely the Bronze Horseman is a figure out of the apocalypse, still galloping through Petersburg in 1905, a horrible symbol of the vain attempts at Westernizing by the Russian Empire.

The detective plot of Bely’s novel—the hunt for an important Petersburg official by revolutionary terrorists—is merely an excuse for fantastic situations, intense descriptions, and mystical theories (at that time Bely was a fanatical adherent of Rudolf Steiner and his anthroposophic teaching). The reader is virtually engulfed by a literary storm of enormous power. Bely uses irony, absurdity, pathos, and parody; in particular, he parodies Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. He is a virtuoso at using the entire arsenal of techniques first tried by his precursors Gogol and Dostoyevsky. He also creates brilliant new effects, incomparably mixing the horrible, the funny, and the tragic with the aid of masterful linguistic tricks. Yevgeny Zamyatin rightly observed that Bely’s Petersburg has the same complicated relation to the Russian language that Ulysses has to English.

For Bely, heavily influenced by anthroposophy, Petersburg is on the border between the earthly and the cosmic on the one hand and between the West and Asia on the other. This is the novel’s main intellectual innovation. Before Bely the imperial capital had always been viewed in the framework of West versus Russia. But Bely seems to soar into space and from there to see Petersburg caught between two realities—Western and Asiatic. This is a tragic situation for him. “The West stinks of decay, and the East does not stink only because it has decayed long ago.”

Europe, Bely predicted, would inevitably die, swallowed up by Asia, and Petersburg, that loathsome example of the triumph of civilization over culture, would vanish. Russian writers before Bely, enjoying their fantasies about the destruction of their capital, expected three of the four elements to beset the city—Petersburg would perish in a flood, by burning, or by dissolving like a mirage. Bely introduces the fourth element, earth. In his novel Petersburg falls into a hole.

When inspired, Bely, opening wide his piercing blue eyes, read excerpts from his novel at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower, jumping up and practically taking off, so that his hair stood on end like a crown. The spellbound listeners, nodding in time to the hypnotically rhythmic prose, were prepared to consider the author a prophet.

But Blok—who had a love-hate relationship with Bely that was typical of the symbolists, further complicated by Bely’s infatuation with Blok’s wife—wrote after hearing the novel, “revulsion for the terrible things he sees; evil work; the approach of despair (if the world really is like that).”136

And Blok also noted in that “muddled novel with a stamp of genius” an amazing parallel with his own autobiographical verse epic. Retribution, which preoccupied Blok in those years and in which the image of Petersburg loomed large. Actually, for all their obvious differences in style, the similarity of the attitudes toward the imperial capital of the Muscovite Bely and the Petersburger Blok is astonishing.

The Slavophile symbolist doctrine, which rejected a Germanic Petersburg, was obviously stronger than direct experience even for such an independent personality as Blok. Blok’s Retribution and his drafts of it are filled with Slavophile anti-Petersburg rhetoric. For instance, Peter the Great appears in Blok’s work, as he does in Bely’s novel, as an emanation of the devil.

Tsar! Are you rising from the grave again

To chop us a new window?

Frightening: in a white night—both—

Corpse and city—are as one….

Similar symbolist clichés, the result of a mix of Slavophile and modernist-urbanist phraseology, fill Blok’s correspondence, which bristles with italics: “again that horrible anger at Petersburg boils within me, for I know that it is a lousy, rotten nucleus, where our boldness wanes and weakens … we live daily in horror, stink, and despair, in factory smoke, in the rouge of lascivious smiles, in the roar of disgusting automobiles … Petersburg is a gigantic whorehouse, I feel it. You can’t rest, learn everything there, a brief rest only where the masts creak, boats sway on the outskirts, on the islands, at the gulf, in twilight.”137