Petersburg’s architecture is essentially baroque and neoclassicist. The city’s and characters’ recurring transmutations in Petersburg are typically rendered by means of images that we may call modernist baroque, or neobaroque, characterized by excess, grotesque imagery, motion, irregularity, and dissolution of form. Among such examples are the Nevsky crowd mutating into slimy, oozing fish eggs, with the sidewalk becoming a caviar sandwich, and “suddenly” oozing down Dudkin’s back. The phantasmagoric transformation of the Bronze Horseman is perhaps Petersburg’s most extravagant metamorphosis, one that is baroque in contrast to the original classicist equestrian sculpture. This pertains especially to its entering Dudkin’s body in metals, a horrific image of transmutation. Contrary to the Russian imperial city’s architectural history, in which classicist order triumphed over the baroque, Bely’s novel marks baroque’s triumphant return.
Turning once again to Berdyaev, the philosopher describes Petersburg as a cubo-futurist novel (cubo-futurism is the term for Russian cubism). Futurism in literature emerged as a reaction against symbolism in the early 1910s, which coincided with the writing of Petersburg. More than earlier literary movements, futurism aligned language with visual representation. Bely, according to Berdyaev, combined “cubism and futurism with a genuine and unmediated symbolism.” He even claims that Bely is the only important futurist in Russian literature.
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If Petersburg represents radical literary innovation, it also references some of the best-known works of Russian literature that inform the “Petersburg text,” created, so to speak, by the city itself.22 The novel may be described as a virtual compendium of the self-referential Petersburg text cum myth, ranging from Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman and novella The Queen of Spades, to Gogol’s sinister Petersburg Tales, to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and so on. All of them are defined by walking, running, and riding on Petersburg’s shadowy streets, with the characters mapping different locales of the city. Regarding urban space, the Petersburg text predictably was originally set in the aristocratic city center and moved gradually to the peripheries in the course of the nineteenth century, so that Crime and Punishment takes place only in marginal locales, including the islands, not classical city sites. Bely’s novel includes both.
Petersburg certainly corroborates the claim by Dostoevsky’s Underground Man that the imperial capital is “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world.”23 Indeed, its rational, planned character is both represented and problematized in Bely’s city novel. What Bely takes from his forebears is the intentional, fantastic, and apocalyptic vision of Petersburg in which statues come to life to haunt its inhabitants (The Bronze Horseman); the devil lights the gas street lamps on Nevsky Prospect (Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect”); and an impoverished young man with radical ideas kills a predatory old woman (Crime and Punishment).
Gogol’s other imagery travels to Petersburg as well, for instance, the anonymous crowd in “Nevsky Prospect.” Gogol was also Bely’s predecessor in fragmenting the human body, such as the separation of the nose from the face of its owner: in “The Nose” from Petersburg Tales, the nose of a civil servant assumes a life of its own. Bely’s posthumously published Gogol’s Artistry (1935), one of the most insightful studies of Gogol, devotes twenty pages to his influence on Bely. As an example, he references Lippanchenko’s face creeping out of a yellow spot on the wallpaper in Dudkin’s garret. Gogol’s Artistry, moreover, is Bely’s most complete study of color.
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Written between 1911 and 1913, Petersburg was first serialized in 1913–1914, then published in book form in 1916. Bely revised it while living in Berlin, producing a much shorter version of the novel in 1922.24 It appeared in the Soviet Union in 1928 with additional cuts by censors, then posthumously in 1935. The novel’s treatment of subject matter and modernist form became unacceptable in the Stalinist era, dominated by socialist realism, which relegated Petersburg to oblivion. As a result, discussion of Petersburg in Soviet literary criticism could only appear abroad until the late 1970s: the censored short version was first republished in the Soviet Union in 1978 (coinciding with the Maguire and Malmstad English translation), the original 1916 novel, in 1981.
The Maguire and Malmstad translation you are about to read is of the Berlin edition. Its translators consider it the better and definitive version of the novel, with which I would agree. Their reasons include the shorter edition’s tighter structure, “terseness, compactness of exposition, and brevity” (xxiv), as well as reduction of superfluous repetition and of the anthroposophical dimension, all of which are true. Yet the longer version is easier to follow because its narrative is less fragmented and elliptical. The reader of the later edition must work harder in piecing the narrative together. As I suggested, she should become a detective with the purpose of uncovering that which is hidden.
The original longer version has been translated into English three times: by John Cournos in 1959, David McDuff in 1995, and John Elsworth in 2009. Maguire and Malmstad’s translation, however, remains the best English-language translation of either version of Petersburg. Why? It offers the most accurate stylistic rendition of Bely’s striking modernist style, notoriously difficult to translate. The reviewer of the translation in The New York Review of Books wrote in 1978 that it captures “Bely’s idiosyncratic language and the rhythm of his prose, and, without doing violence to English, conveys not only the literal meaning of the Russian but also its echoes and implications.” Maguire and Malmstad themselves write that even though Petersburg’s sound plays and rhythms are “impossible to render ‘literally,’” they have attempted to render them by means of suggestion, “sometimes even creating instances of sound play where none exists at precisely that point in the Russian text.”
The reader has made the right choice in selecting this translation of Petersburg also because it is the only one with commentary regarding Bely’s complex novel and its literary and historical contexts. Although the reader may choose not to use it, the excellent appendix will help you with the difficult passages and thereby increase readerly comprehension and pleasure. For all these reasons, it is Maguire and Malmstad’s version that remains the translation universally used in teaching the novel.
Olga Matich
NOTES
1.See “Visions of Terror” on the interactive website Mapping Petersburg: http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/
2.Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 325.
3.Quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 66.
4.Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé <of 1939>,” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 26.
5.N. A. Berdyaev, “Pikasso” in Sud’ba Rossii. Krizis iskusstva (Moscow: Kanon+, 2004), 275.
6.Nikolai Berdyaev, “Astral’nyi roman (Razmyshleniia po povodu romana A. Belogo “Peterburg”), in Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii, vol. 3 of Sobranie