What the characters fail to see is that the whole world, natural and man-made, visible and invisible, is a living entity, composed of parts which interconnect and thereby acquire their true meaning. To isolate one or more of these parts, physically or intellectually, is to diminish and damage the whole, much as the removal of an arm or a leg from the body detracts from the beauty, the efficiency, and even the health of the entire organism. But that is precisely what the characters in Petersburg attempt to do. Gogol was Bely’s great predecessor in seeing the urge to fragment as a modern sickness. He deemed it the work of the devil. For Bely, the devil is modern urban man himself, whose obsession with the fragment is not so much an evil as a compulsion born of the fear of losing his individuality.
Language, as Bely sees it, is especially subject to the depredations of self-deception, perhaps because it is a wholly human construct. Apollon Apollonovich’s habit of calling all flowers “bluebells” regardless of their variety divorces the word from living reality and turns it into an abstraction. All the other characters indulge in the same operation, to varying degrees. As a result, verbal exchanges in Petersburg, when not merely trivial, tend to be irrelevant and fatuous. Gestures can often be more expressive of true intentions and desires. In written form, words can be just as inadequate to deeper understanding and meaningful communication—perhaps even more so than spoken words, for they are fixed and motionless, and we tend to worship them as we worship artifacts generally. Whether spoken or written, however, language as modern man uses it is yet another of the abstractions he makes in an effort to deny the vitality, energy, and change that characterize real life. The consequences are grave, in Bely’s view; for language—or, as he often calls it, “the word”—is our only means of knowing the world and ourselves. The living word, for Bely, is sound, or speech. Without it, “there is neither nature, nor the world, nor anyone cognizing them.”6 If modern thought and modern society are in a state of crisis, as Bely believes, then that is because language, as modern man employs it, is dying. Here his position is just the opposite of Emerson’s, who wrote: “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language” (Nature, Chapter IV).
One of Bely’s tasks as a literary artist is to convey a sense of the word as sound through the static medium of print. In Petersburg, as in several of his other works, he constantly tries to confound all our habits as visually-oriented readers for whom words are immobile, unobtrusive, and as silent as the type that encases them.
For one thing, he does violence to the accepted usages and the traditional strategies of “literary” language. He breaks his page up into small units with a profusion of dashes, dots, and new paragraphs. The result is a nervous and disjointed-looking discourse which does not flow in the majestic and seemingly effortless manner of the nineteenth-century novel. He is also addicted to catachresis: the expected word simply does not turn up in the expected place. Thus we find, to take a simple example, “thought train” (myslennyi khod) instead of the usual “train of thought” (khod myslei). Although there are comparatively few outright neologisms, Bely does devise unusual combinations of elements taken from standard Russian, particularly for abstract nouns, whose meaning is more or less clear, but which are not listed in any dictionary.
For another thing, he aims at creating a world of sound. Dialogue is prominent; in fact, Petersburg would lend itself well to adaptation for the stage or cinema (Bely himself made a play out of it in 1925). From the very beginning of the novel, we are confronted with a speaking narrator, whose voice rings in our ears throughout the novel. And we quickly become aware that this narrator also strives after certain sound effects. One of the many instances goes this way (in much abbreviated form): “I o nëm rasprostranyát’sya ne búdem. Rasprostranímsya bólee o Peterbúrge: est’ Peterbúrg íli Sankt-Peterbúrg íli Píter . . . Névskii Prospékt est’ peterbúrgskii Prospékt . . .,” and so on. (“And we shall not expatiate on it. Let us expatiate at greater length on Petersburg: there is a Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Pieter . . . Nevsky Prospect is a Petersburg Prospect . . .” (“Prologue”). If read purely for content, this strikes us as silly babble; but if we listen to it with our mind’s ear, as it were, or even better, read it aloud, we realize that the words have been chosen for the purpose of clustering certain sounds (p-b-r-k-l-s-t). Sound play—much of it far more sophisticated than this—pervades the novel. Much later, in fact, Bely even claimed that Petersburg had been built on a system of sound. “I have the impression that ‘ll’ is the smoothness of form: Apo-lll-on; ‘pp’ is the pressure created by covering surfaces (walls, the bomb); ‘kk’ is the height of insincerity: Ni-kkk-olái . . . kkk-lányalsya na, kk-a-kk la-kk, par-kk-éta-khkh (‘Nikolai . . . bowed on the varnish-like parquet floor’); ‘sss’ are reflections; ‘rr’ is the energy of the explosion (beneath the covering surfaces): prr-o-rr-ývv v brr-ed (‘a breakthrough into delirium’).”
Bely went on to say in effect that in the composition of the novel, sound was preexistent, and “content” formed around it: “Later I myself stumbled on the connection—which surprised me—between the verbal instrumentation and the story line (which came into being involuntarily).”7 We do not in fact know whether Bely actually created the novel in this way. But certainly sheer sound is so prominent as to constitute yet another level of reality with which we must reckon. From the very first page, we are conditioned to listen as well as look. We find it difficult to read rapidly or silently; our lips tend to move; and we pay closer attention than might otherwise be the case to the word itself and its components.
As a result, many otherwise common words take on new meanings. One handy example is shárik. Its primary dictionary meaning is “corpuscle”; and it is a “neutral” word in the sense that in ordinary contexts, no Russian stops for a moment to think of its literal meaning, “little sphere.” But in the context of this particular novel, the reader is bombarded with other words made up of the same or very similar sounds: shar (sphere), shírit’sya (expand), rasshirénie (expansion, dilatation). Typically, spheres are shown as expanding—a point made as much by the phonic similarity of the roots shar—/shir—(they are not related otherwise), as by outright statement. The ear pulls shárik into this same phonic pattern; and then we are likely to remember that the primary component is shar. But of course the dictionary meaning of “corpuscle” still remains. The result is a certain tension between the phonic and semantic elements, as is the case with many other words in this novel. Any great writer, of course, renews the language. Bely invents as well, and compels his readers to participate in the invention, as few other writers do.
III
How are we to approach a novel so complex and richly textured as Petersburg? No reader will get very far along without seeing that in theme, in personages, and in a whole array of specific techniques, Petersburg owes much to the tradition of the great Russian novels. At the same time, he is immediately aware that it is radically different from anything that has gone before. And in trying to account for the differences, he will to a large extent be defining not only its uniqueness, but also its special properties as a Symbolist novel. Nothing like a definitive interpretation can of course be essayed here.8 We can only hint at some strategies and attitudes of mind that a good reader is advised to take with him as he sets out on his journey through the text.
Certainly we can say that Bely expects us to be more perceptive than his characters. We must resist a natural inclination to simplify, categorize, paraphrase, abstract, and fragment, that is, to treat the reality of the novel in the same way the characters do. We will not get very far if we