7.Bukhara is a city in Uzbekistan.
8.Andrei Bely, “Iskusstvo,” in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma (Moskow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 200.
9.Andrei Bely, Zapiski chudaka (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 63.
10.Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 2.
11.See “Andrey Bely: Petersburg” on the website Mapping Petersburg. The Petersburg itinerary also offers images of the city’s landmarks mentioned in the novel.
12.E. W. Soja, Third Space: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imaginary Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 235.
13.Bely, Petersburg, 20.
14.Walter Benjamin, “The Flâneur,” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 442.
15.See examples of thought forms on Mapping Petersburg (Andrey Bely: Petersburg).
16.Andrei Bely, Letter to Ivanov-Razumnik (Dec. 1913) in Andrei Bely, Peterburg (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 516.
17.See some of Bely’s drawing on “Andrey Bely: Petersburg,” Mapping Petersburg.
18.See Olga Matich, “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg,” Petersburg / Petersburg: Novel and City, ed. Olga Matich (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 55–82.
19.Andrei Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A.V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 435.
20.Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 97.
21.For a discussion of Petersburg and visuality, see Olga Matich, “Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics,” Petersburg / Petersburg: Novel and City, 83–120.
22.Vladimir Toporov’s “Petersburg and ‘The Petersburg Text’ in Russian Literature” offers a complete scholarly articulation of the imperial city as text and its attendant mythology. See V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i Peterburgskii tekst: mir, iazyk, prednaznachenie” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003).
23.Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Michael R. Katz (New York: Norton, 1989), 5.
24.Bely lived in Berlin between 1921 and 1923, when he returned to the Soviet Union.
“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