The passage of time and the easing of official strictures in the two decades since Stalin’s death have conferred a measure of acceptability (if not always respectability) on many of the important Symbolists. A carefully controlled and highly selective “reclaiming” of the Russian past is under way. In 1966, a collection of Bely’s verses and long poems (Stikhotvoreniya i poemy) was published. And a new critical edition of Petersburg has been prepared. But publication has been delayed indefinitely, for reasons that are not entirely clear. As of this writing, the novel has not been reprinted in its native land for more than forty years.
In many ways the reception of Bely’s work in the west has followed a parallel course. Our far more open societies have shown themselves curiously prone to ape the Soviets by allowing political criteria to determine what belongs in the canon of “interesting” Russian literature and what does not. Attention focuses on “acceptable” writers like Leonid Leonov or Valentin Kataev for the picture they supposedly provide of Soviet life, and conversely, on writers who are completely unacceptable, like Solzhenitsyn and the Pasternak of Doctor Zhivago, for their exposure of gross defects in the moral fabric of their country. Those writers of real talent whom the Soviets have simply neglected tend to suffer the same fate here. Isaac Babel and Yury Olesha are significant cases in point. Both ran afoul of the official ideologues. For two decades their writings were not republished. Even their names all but disappeared from public mention. And western translators and critics took almost no interest in them either. It was only after their “rehabilitation” in the mid-1950s and the publication of new editions of their work that their “significance” was rediscovered abroad. A similar pattern can be traced for the Symbolists. For decades the Soviets treated them as a minor aberration and refused to reissue their works (Alexander Blok being the notable exception); they were known to only a handful of connoisseurs in the west. As they were slowly restored to a modicum of favor during the 1950s, they began to attract notice outside Russia. One of the first signs was a new translation of Fyodor Sologub’s famous novel The Petty Demon in 1962, some five years after it had been republished in the provincial Soviet town of Kemerovo (and had cost its editors their jobs). By now translators are opening up the Symbolist period as a whole, and it is finally becoming the target of considerable scholarly endeavor as well.
In the case of Andrei Bely, we are for once ahead of the Soviets in the strictly chronological sense. His major works have been reprinted in the Russian language outside the Soviet Union. Kotik Letaev and The Silver Dove can now be read in English. A German version of Petersburg appeared in 1919, and another in 1959; an Italian translation came out in 1961, a French in 1967, an English in 1959. Yet the familiar pattern holds. Nearly all this activity is of very recent vintage, too recent for the scholarly industry to have started full-scale production, though it is gearing itself up. For English readers, a major obstacle to the appreciation of Petersburg has been that 1959 version, which bears only incidental resemblance to the original. Apart from gross misreadings, it makes numerous cuts, which eliminate, among other things, virtually the entire persona of the narrator, whose presence is essential to any real understanding of what Bely is up to. The translator, John Cournos, deserves our respect as a pioneer, but his work conveys little of the intricacy and subtlety of the original. It is also devoid of annotation, and therefore supplies none of the cultural context which Bely, like any writer, takes for granted in his audience and which by and large is unfamiliar to western readers. Even the great nineteenth-century Russian “realist” classics still strike most foreigners as exotic. How much truer that is of Petersburg, with its cultivation of the grotesque and its invocation of an epoch of Russian cultural and political history which, though not so remote in time, is still little known to the English-speaking world. One of the reasons why Joyce, Kafka, and Proust—to take just the writers mentioned above by Nabokov—have achieved such enormous popularity is that an elaborate critical and scholarly literature has grown up to elucidate the texture, the feel, and the facts of the times and places in which their works are set.
The present translation aims at removing these impediments to a deeper understanding and appreciation of one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature. We offer here the first full version of the definitive 1922 text of the novel, along with the kind of annotation we deem essential for anyone who wishes to get below the surface.
II
Petersburg paints a vivid picture of the capital of the world’s largest land empire during the autumn of 1905. Russian culture was then at its most brilliant and innovative. Literature, music, theater, and ballet were beginning to win fame throughout the world. But the society from which they sprang seemed shaky. Japan had just proved victorious in a war that Russia was supposed to have won easily. Political agitation and social unrest were on the rise. Outright revolution was being preached and prepared; and from January 1905 on, the country was shaken by a series of mutinies, uprisings, assassinations, and strikes. There was a widespread feeling among those who witnessed such events that the old values were no longer adequate to the new realities, and that Russia teetered on the edge of some dreadful catastrophe. This ominous feeling, with the attendant moods of anxiety, apprehension, and disorientation, permeates Bely’s Petersburg from the first page to the last.
Appropriately enough, conspiracy and terror are the forces that move the novel. The story looks like simplicity itself. Nikolai Apollonovich, an impressionable university student, has gotten entangled with a revolutionary terrorist organization, which plans to assassinate a high government official with a time bomb. The twist is that the official is Nikolai’s father, Apollon Apollonovich, and that Nikolai himself is entrusted with planting the bomb. It is duly delivered to him, the clock mechanism is set to explode within twenty-four hours, and–––. But we must not give away the ending: Petersburg is a novel of suspense. It is also a social novel, a family novel, a philosophical, political, psychological, historical novel—and even then we do not begin to exhaust the possible approaches to it. One has to go back in Russian literature at least to Crime and Punishment to find a work in which so many plots and subplots are as intricately and subtly interwoven, with no loose ends protruding. Yet Bely ranges much farther afield than does Dostoevsky. It is relatively easy to account for the main lines of Crime and Punishment, tangled though they be, whereas to do that for Petersburg would be to rewrite the novel: it is all but immune to paraphrase.
All these planes, levels, and dimensions come together in the characters of the novel, who are at the same time engaged in moving the story line ahead. Through the characters themselves—and not through any raisonneur-figure, or through any of those grand panoramic statements to which the nineteenth-century novelists were addicted—Bely creates a picture of Petersburg society. He focuses on the two extremes—the powerful and privileged (Apollon Apollonovich and his circle) and the poor and disaffected (Dudkin and the peasant Styopka). But he creates an impression of fullness and completeness by bringing in, if only fleetingly, representatives of other classes and groups, such as merchants and servants, and by constantly invoking the gray faceless masses of the metropolis. Through the characters he also introduces the intellectual and cultural fashions that held sway in Petersburg at the time: Apollon Apollonovich and his son cherish Comte and Kant respectively; Sofia Petrovna’s enthusiasm for the nonexistent “Henri Besançon” suggests that the rage for Henri Bergson and Annie Besant had infected even muddled society ladies; Dudkin’s mind is a virtual compendium of anarchist theories popular at the turn of the century, in which Nietzsche and mysticism admixed powerfully. Characters also provide the means by which Bely saturates the novel with literary allusions. For instance, Nikolai Apollonovich’s adulterous mother has the same given name as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and is also married to an unloving man with oversized ears. The encounter between