WyattGwyon
07-29-2012, 04:32 PM
Petersburg, by Andrei Bely. (654pp.) This is a spoiler-free review of the original and longer version as translated by John Elsworth and published in 2009 by Pushkin Press.
Petersburg, Andrei Bely’s best-known novel, is difficult to pigeon-hole. Except for a brief flash-forward epilogue, its events unfold over a ten-day period in the early autumn of 1905, not long before that year’s ineffectual revolution culminated in the Manifesto of 30 October (17 October in the Russian calendar). Its characters are men and women “of uncertain status,” shadowy revolutionaries and anarchists, and the aristocratic government functionaries whose wayward offspring are drawn into their web. Unsurprisingly therefore, it puts one in mind of novels like Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and, especially, Dostoyevsky’s Devils. Indeed, the highest ranking government official we meet, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov (henceforth AAA), in his obsessive-compulsive behavior, domestic disarray and ultimate inability to handle stress, recalls Lembke, his provincial counterpart in Devils. But Petersburg’s debt to Dostoyevsky is superficial —else, one presumes, Nabokov would not have ranked it as “one of the four most important works of twentieth-century literature.” Instead of Dostoyevsky’s standard ploy of a naïve chronicler within the frame of the novel, Petersburg is told throughout from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator of prodigious poetic gifts.
And poetry is at the very heart of Petersburg, from the level of individual lines to its broader structure. Its eight massive chapters are subdivided into numerous short vignettes and dramatic scenes, each with its own title. These sub-chapters often unfold like lyric poems. Each has its own refrain, usually quoted in the title, which may be anywhere from a line fragment to a short paragraph in length. Commonly, the refrain returns to close a section. Some sections have multiple refrains and some treat them as subjects for variation. Now, one might expect this fusion of poetic and narrative structure to be problematic; My initial reactions to some of the longer repetitions included wondering if my eye had strayed back to an earlier passage and thinking I had discovered a gross misprint. But after adjusting to the rhythm of the book, I began to embrace the technique and to increasingly admire the ingenuity with which poetry and narrative were fused—to see that what might have become a distracting fetish was, in fact, a flexible and ingenious technique with multifarious narrative functions. Some refrains, for example, are merely atmospheric, capturing a state of nature—gloom or mist, the play of light on rooftops, or so on—that infuses the experience of a character throughout a scene. The repetition in these cases reflects the characters’ continual perceptual awareness of these phenomena as well as the rhythms with which they reoccur to consciousness as attention shifts focus or wanders. Other refrains function variously as Idees fixes, expressions of obsessive fears (like AAA’s recurring quasi-hallucination of a mustachioed bomber outside his carriage), or incantations. In most cases, however, I came to find deep psychological truth in the repetitions and to realize that my initial bemused reactions were just the residue of ingrained habits and narrative conventions.
Examples of Bely’s descriptive genius and singular vision are ubiquitous; I’ll cite just two. Like Dostoyevsky’s Devils, the revolutionaries in Petersburg become more absorbed in infighting and personal enmity than in any sort of principled action. One such scene ends in violence, at night in a small room by murky candlelight. Most of the violent imagery in the scene is performed by a “huge, fat shadow-man, emerging from under ______’s feet” who begins “to dance around with fretful movements,” or springs from his head and hangs from the ceiling, while the act of violence itself is disorienting in its calm and in the victim’s startled and frozen contemplation of its new sensations; Thus the play of shadows overshadows the fatal stroke. Elsewhere Bely develops with hallucinatory power the extended metaphor of a paper war conducted at “the certain establishment” where AAA is the obsessive-compulsive field-marshal.
The narrative dimension of the novel is equally well developed, though those expecting a novel of political intrigue are apt to find the pacing slow. Two of the main characters who figure prominently in the beginning, AAA and his son, the student Nikolai, are drawn with cold detachment—more like inanimate objects than persons. They believe each other to be scoundrels. AAA is a husk of his former self because two years earlier his wife had abandoned him for an Italian singer. Nikolai is tormented with unrequited love for Sofia Petrovna, who is married to an army officer named Likhutin. Sofia holds a sort of salon frequented by riff raff and revolutionaries, entertaining in a kimono and decorating with paintings of Mount Fuji, which is significant given that Russia is at that time enmired in a disastrous war with Japan. In his despair, Nikolai acts out and pledges his service to a revolutionary cabal represented at first by his contact, Alexander Ivanovich Dubkin. A bomb enters the scene. It is left ominously ticking for nearly two hundred pages. One character, in a hybrid allusion to Pushkin’s "Bronze Horseman" and the short play Stone Guest, is visited in his garret by a “bronze guest,” the dismounted figure of Peter the Great. There is attempted suicide, patricidal conspiracy, madness, murder, betrayal, riots in the street suppressed by Cossacks—but in the end the strongest through-line proves, unexpectedly, to be that of an understated and deeply insightful domestic drama.
There are flaws perhaps. The trappings of theosophy, which too obviously originate in the mind of the narrator, seem dated and quaint—like the credulous flirtation with Freudian psychology one finds in some Hitchcock films. And in the beginning the narrator threatens nudgery. After describing the workings of Petersburg’s electric trams on one page and then pointing out two pages later that they did not exist in 1905, the narrator tells us not to blame him; The mistake was not his but his pen’s. This had me worried but was, thankfully, an isolated tic. And there is a strange and likewise isolated spoiler concerning the later affairs of a major character from his first novel, The Silver Dove. The flaws are trivial to me; I have always thought perfection is overrated and a cheap aspiration.
It took me several weeks to read Petersburg. In the early stages it is easy to get lost in a lyrical-poetic trance, savoring individual scenes. The last third of the book I devoured in a single day. I am not in a position to judge the quality of the translation. But whoever is responsible for the final product and in whatever measure, the Elsworth translation of Petersburg is some of the most beautiful and imaginative English prose I have read in recent memory
Petersburg, Andrei Bely’s best-known novel, is difficult to pigeon-hole. Except for a brief flash-forward epilogue, its events unfold over a ten-day period in the early autumn of 1905, not long before that year’s ineffectual revolution culminated in the Manifesto of 30 October (17 October in the Russian calendar). Its characters are men and women “of uncertain status,” shadowy revolutionaries and anarchists, and the aristocratic government functionaries whose wayward offspring are drawn into their web. Unsurprisingly therefore, it puts one in mind of novels like Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and, especially, Dostoyevsky’s Devils. Indeed, the highest ranking government official we meet, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov (henceforth AAA), in his obsessive-compulsive behavior, domestic disarray and ultimate inability to handle stress, recalls Lembke, his provincial counterpart in Devils. But Petersburg’s debt to Dostoyevsky is superficial —else, one presumes, Nabokov would not have ranked it as “one of the four most important works of twentieth-century literature.” Instead of Dostoyevsky’s standard ploy of a naïve chronicler within the frame of the novel, Petersburg is told throughout from the perspective of an omniscient third-person narrator of prodigious poetic gifts.
And poetry is at the very heart of Petersburg, from the level of individual lines to its broader structure. Its eight massive chapters are subdivided into numerous short vignettes and dramatic scenes, each with its own title. These sub-chapters often unfold like lyric poems. Each has its own refrain, usually quoted in the title, which may be anywhere from a line fragment to a short paragraph in length. Commonly, the refrain returns to close a section. Some sections have multiple refrains and some treat them as subjects for variation. Now, one might expect this fusion of poetic and narrative structure to be problematic; My initial reactions to some of the longer repetitions included wondering if my eye had strayed back to an earlier passage and thinking I had discovered a gross misprint. But after adjusting to the rhythm of the book, I began to embrace the technique and to increasingly admire the ingenuity with which poetry and narrative were fused—to see that what might have become a distracting fetish was, in fact, a flexible and ingenious technique with multifarious narrative functions. Some refrains, for example, are merely atmospheric, capturing a state of nature—gloom or mist, the play of light on rooftops, or so on—that infuses the experience of a character throughout a scene. The repetition in these cases reflects the characters’ continual perceptual awareness of these phenomena as well as the rhythms with which they reoccur to consciousness as attention shifts focus or wanders. Other refrains function variously as Idees fixes, expressions of obsessive fears (like AAA’s recurring quasi-hallucination of a mustachioed bomber outside his carriage), or incantations. In most cases, however, I came to find deep psychological truth in the repetitions and to realize that my initial bemused reactions were just the residue of ingrained habits and narrative conventions.
Examples of Bely’s descriptive genius and singular vision are ubiquitous; I’ll cite just two. Like Dostoyevsky’s Devils, the revolutionaries in Petersburg become more absorbed in infighting and personal enmity than in any sort of principled action. One such scene ends in violence, at night in a small room by murky candlelight. Most of the violent imagery in the scene is performed by a “huge, fat shadow-man, emerging from under ______’s feet” who begins “to dance around with fretful movements,” or springs from his head and hangs from the ceiling, while the act of violence itself is disorienting in its calm and in the victim’s startled and frozen contemplation of its new sensations; Thus the play of shadows overshadows the fatal stroke. Elsewhere Bely develops with hallucinatory power the extended metaphor of a paper war conducted at “the certain establishment” where AAA is the obsessive-compulsive field-marshal.
The narrative dimension of the novel is equally well developed, though those expecting a novel of political intrigue are apt to find the pacing slow. Two of the main characters who figure prominently in the beginning, AAA and his son, the student Nikolai, are drawn with cold detachment—more like inanimate objects than persons. They believe each other to be scoundrels. AAA is a husk of his former self because two years earlier his wife had abandoned him for an Italian singer. Nikolai is tormented with unrequited love for Sofia Petrovna, who is married to an army officer named Likhutin. Sofia holds a sort of salon frequented by riff raff and revolutionaries, entertaining in a kimono and decorating with paintings of Mount Fuji, which is significant given that Russia is at that time enmired in a disastrous war with Japan. In his despair, Nikolai acts out and pledges his service to a revolutionary cabal represented at first by his contact, Alexander Ivanovich Dubkin. A bomb enters the scene. It is left ominously ticking for nearly two hundred pages. One character, in a hybrid allusion to Pushkin’s "Bronze Horseman" and the short play Stone Guest, is visited in his garret by a “bronze guest,” the dismounted figure of Peter the Great. There is attempted suicide, patricidal conspiracy, madness, murder, betrayal, riots in the street suppressed by Cossacks—but in the end the strongest through-line proves, unexpectedly, to be that of an understated and deeply insightful domestic drama.
There are flaws perhaps. The trappings of theosophy, which too obviously originate in the mind of the narrator, seem dated and quaint—like the credulous flirtation with Freudian psychology one finds in some Hitchcock films. And in the beginning the narrator threatens nudgery. After describing the workings of Petersburg’s electric trams on one page and then pointing out two pages later that they did not exist in 1905, the narrator tells us not to blame him; The mistake was not his but his pen’s. This had me worried but was, thankfully, an isolated tic. And there is a strange and likewise isolated spoiler concerning the later affairs of a major character from his first novel, The Silver Dove. The flaws are trivial to me; I have always thought perfection is overrated and a cheap aspiration.
It took me several weeks to read Petersburg. In the early stages it is easy to get lost in a lyrical-poetic trance, savoring individual scenes. The last third of the book I devoured in a single day. I am not in a position to judge the quality of the translation. But whoever is responsible for the final product and in whatever measure, the Elsworth translation of Petersburg is some of the most beautiful and imaginative English prose I have read in recent memory