ANDREI BELY
PETERSBURG
Translated, annotated, and introduced by
ROBERT A. MAGUIRE and JOHN E. MALMSTAD
Foreword by
OLGA MATICH
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
© 1978 by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad
© 2018 by Indiana University Press, foreword
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bely, Andrey, author. | Maguire, Robert A., translator. | Malmstad, John E., translator. | Matich, Olga, writer of foreword.
Title: Petersburg / Andrei Bely ; translated, annotated, and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad ; foreword by Olga Matich.
Other titles: Peterburg. English (Maguire and Malmstad)
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017049360 (print) | LCCN 2017051414 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253035523 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780253034113 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PG3453.B84 (ebook) | LCC PG3453.B84 P513 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017049360
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CONTENTS
Foreword
Translators’ Introduction
A Note on Text and Translation
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter the First: in which an account is given of a certain worthy person, his mental games, and the ephemerality of being
Chapter the Second: in which an account is given of a certain rendezvous, fraught with consequences
Chapter the Third: in which is described how Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov makes a fool of himself and his venture
Chapter the Fourth: in which the line of the narrative is broken
Chapter the Fifth: in which an account is given of the little fellow with the wart by his nose and of the sardine tin with horrible contents
Chapter the Sixth: in which are related the events of a gray little day
Chapter the Seventh: or, the events of a gray little day go on and on
Chapter the Eighth: and last
Epilogue
Notes
ANDREI BELY’S PETERSBURG IS THE premier novel of Russian modernism. Its main character is the eponymous prerevolutionary capital of Russia in the throes of sociopolitical conflict. A true city novel, Petersburg is considered the literary highpoint of the myth of St. Petersburg as doomed city, a dying city that has been invaded by shadowy characters, including terrorists. Bely’s novel aligns the end of Petersburg with the apocalyptic presentiments of the Russian fin de siècle that spilled over into the twentieth century. Set during the 1905 revolution, a time of sociopolitical crisis, political assassinations, and labor strikes, the novel has a terrorist-cum-Oedipal plot: the assassination of a reactionary government official in which the son had agreed to participate. Terrorist bomb-throwing was not uncommon in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, with the 1904 assassination of the reactionary Minister of Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve serving as Petersburg’s subtext.1
The novel represents a nexus of modernity and modernism, characterized by verbal fragmentation, radically new image making, and contingent urban experience caused by overstimulated senses and nerves. In the now well-known essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), the German sociologist Georg Simmel described the modern urban condition as “the rapid telescoping of changing images . . . and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli”2 that confound the emotions and nervous system of city dwellers. He defines modern existence as “the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of . . . our inner life, and indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents, in the fluid elements of the soul . . . whose forms are merely forms of motion.”3 Bely’s novel certainly fits Simmel’s description, including the relationship of motion and emotion and the blurring of outer and inner worlds, as a result of which, Petersburg’s characters are unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. They inhabit a phantasmagoric dream world in flux, as if portending Walter Benjamin’s well-known 1935 description of Paris of the Second Empire. His famous statement that the “world dominated by its phantasmagorias . . . is ‘modernity’”4 resonates with Bely’s evocation of Petersburg as a sinister living organism whose streets “transform passerby into shadows.”
After the initial serialization of the novel, the influential Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in his 1914 Picasso essay that Bely “may be called a cubist in literature. Petersburg indeed reveals the same process of flattening and fragmentation of cosmic life as a Picasso painting. Word crystals are atomized in his wonderful, nightmarish verbal combinations.”5 After its publication in book form, Berdyaev wrote an expanded review of Petersburg, titled “An Astral Novel,” in which he describes its “breakdown and dissolution of all firmly established boundaries between objects. The very shapes of people are decrystallized and atomized; they lose the firm boundaries separating them from each other and from the objects of the surrounding world. . . . A man morphs into another man, an object morphs into another object, the physical plane morphs into an astral plane, the cerebral process—into an existential process.”6 Berdyaev’s observations remain essential for our understanding of the all-important visual element in Bely’s novel, which remains virtually unexplored.
The crisis of representation that characterized the more radical expressions of modernism also resulted in the recuperation of earlier artistic periods; in the case of Petersburg, Bely turned to the baroque, the style that defined some of the most spectacular architecture of the imperial capital.
***
The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, would come to rival other European capitals in architectural beauty, only to suffer a series of political cataclysms at the beginning of the twentieth century that ended with the Bolshevik Revolution