Petersburg - Andrei Bely

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crawled under the raised collars of a schoolboy, a student, a clerk, an officer, a shady type. The shady type cast a dismal eye about him. He looked at the prospect. He circulated, without the slightest murmur, into an infinity of prospects—in a stream of others exactly like him—amidst the flight and din, listening to the voice of automobile roulades.

      And—he stumbled on the embankment,† where everything came to an end: the voice of the roulades and the shady type himself.

      From far, far away, as though farther off than they should have been, the islands† sank and cowered in fright; and the buildings cowered; it seemed that the waters would sink and that at that instant the depths, the greenish murk would surge over them. And over this greenish murk the Nikolaevsky Bridge† thundered and trembled in the fog.

      On this sullen morning the doors of a yellow house† flew open. The windows of the house gave onto the Neva. And a gold-braided lackey rushed to beckon the coachman. Gray horses bounded forward and drew up a carriage on which was depicted a coat of arms: a unicorn goring a knight.

      A jaunty police officer passing by the carriage porch gave a stupid look and snapped to attention when Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, in a gray coat and a tall black top hat, with a stony face resembling a paperweight, ran rapidly out of the entryway and still more rapidly ran onto the footboard of the carriage, drawing on a black suede glove as he ran.

      Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov cast a momentary, perplexed glance at the police officer, the carriage, the coachman, the great black bridge, the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly etched, and whence Vasilievsky Island† looked back at him in fright.

      The lackey in gray hastily slammed the carriage door. The carriage flew headlong into the fog; and the police officer who had happened by glanced over his shoulder into the dingy fog, where the carriage had flown headlong. He sighed and moved on. The lackey looked there too: at the expanse of the Neva, where the foggy, many-chimneyed distances were so wanly etched, and whence Vasilievsky Island looked back at him in fright.

      Here, at the very beginning, I must break the thread of my narrative, in order to introduce the reader to the scene of action of a certain drama.

      SQUARES, PARALLELEPIPEDS, CUBES

      There, where nothing but a foggy damp hung suspended, at first appeared the dull outline, then descended from heaven to earth the dingy, blackish gray St. Isaac’s Cathedral:† at first appeared the outline and then the full shape of the equestrian monument of Emperor Nicholas I.† At its base the shaggy hat of a Nicholas grenadier thrust out of the fog.

      The carriage† was flying toward Nevsky Prospect.

      Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was gently rocking on the satin seat cushions. He was cut off from the scum of the streets by four perpendicular walls. Thus he was isolated from people and from the red covers of the damp trashy rags on sale right there at this intersection.

      Proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves, which had been irritated both by the irregularity of his domestic life and by the futile rotation of our wheel of state.

      His tastes were distinguished by their harmonious simplicity.

      Most of all he loved the rectilineal prospect; this prospect reminded him of the flow of time between the two points of life.

      There the houses merged cubelike into a regular, five-story row. This row differed from the line of life: for many a wearer of diamond-studded decorations, as for so many other dignitaries, the middle of life’s road had proven to be the termination of life’s journey.†

      Inspiration took possession of the senator’s soul whenever the lacquered cube cut along the line of the Nevsky: there the numeration of the houses was visible. And the circulation went on. There, from there, on clear days, from far, far away, came the blinding blaze of the gold needle,† the clouds, the crimson ray of the sunset. There, from there, on foggy days—nothing, no one.

      And what was there were lines: the Neva and the islands. Probably in those distant days, when out of the mossy marshes rose high roofs and masts and spires, piercing the dank greenish fog in jags—

      —on his shadowy sails the Flying Dutchman† winged his way toward Petersburg from there, from the leaden expanses of the Baltic and German Seas,† in order here to erect, by delusion,† his misty lands and to give the name of islands to the wave of onrushing clouds.

      Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was industrial and coarse. There the many-thousand human swarm shuffled in the morning to the many-chimneyed factories. The inhabitants of the islands are reckoned among the population of the Empire; the general census has been introduced among them as well.†

      Apollon Apollonovich did not wish to think further. The islands must be crushed! Riveted with the iron of the enormous bridge, skewered by the arrows of the prospects. . . .

      While gazing dreamily into that illimitability of mists, the statesman suddenly expanded out of the black cube of the carriage in all directions and soared above it. And he wanted the carriage to fly forward, the prospects to fly to meet him—prospect after prospect, so that the entire spherical surface of the planet should be embraced, as in serpent coils,† by blackish gray cubes of houses; so that all the earth, crushed by prospects, in its lineal cosmic flight should intersect, with its rectilineal principle, unembraceable infinity; so that the network of parallel prospects, intersected by a network of prospects, should expand into the abysses of the universe in planes of squares and cubes: one square per “solid citizen,”† so that. . . .

      After the line, the figure which soothed him more than all other symmetries was the square.

      At times, for hours on end, he would lapse into an unthinking contemplation of pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, and trapezoids.

      While dwelling in the center of the black, perfect, satin-lined cube, Apollon Apollonovich revelled at length in the quadrangular walls. Apollon Apollonovich was born for solitary confinement. Only his love for the plane geometry of the state had invested him in the polyhedrality of a responsible position.

      ***

      The wet, slippery prospect was intersected by another wet prospect at a ninety-degree right angle. At the point of intersection stood a policeman.

      And exactly the same kind of houses rose up, and the same kind of gray human streams† passed by there, and the same kind of yellow-green fog hung there.

      But parallel with the rushing prospect was another rushing prospect with the same row of boxes, with the same numeration, with the same clouds.

      There is an infinity of rushing prospects with an infinity of rushing, intersecting shadows.† All of Petersburg is an infinity of the prospect raised to the nth degree.

      Beyond Petersburg, there is nothing.

      THE INHABITANTS OF THE ISLANDS STARTLE YOU

      It was the last day of September.

      On Vasilievsky Island, in the depths of the Seventeenth Line,† a house enormous and gray looked out of the fog. A dingy staircase led to the floors. There were doors and more doors. One opened.

      And a stranger with the blackest of small mustaches appeared on its threshold.

      Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small and yet not very large bundle tied up in a dirty napkin with a red border design of faded pheasants.

      The staircase was black, strewn with cucumber peels and a cabbage leaf crushed under foot. The stranger slipped on it.

      He then grasped the railing with one hand; the other hand (with the bundle) described a zigzag. The stranger wished to protect

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