LITMIR.BIZ

       FOREWORD

      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

Скачать книгу