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Authors: Andrei Bely

Tags: #Fiction, #Classics, #General

Petersburg (2 page)

BOOK: Petersburg
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There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity.
All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.
While beyond Petersburg there is – nothing.
(
p. 19
)

And so the real investigation of this novel cannot be into the contours of a plot.
The plot recedes in the infinity of the city.
The real plot is the movement of Bely’s sentences.
Or, in other words, the plot is simply a pretext for Bely to investigate how language might determine what we habitually, and mistakenly, think of as the real.

Reality

According to
Petersburg
, reality is multi-levelled: like an infinite car park.
Yes, this novel is set within the perspective of the infinite; and so its style flickers between the almost-mystic and the almost-materialist – so that this is how a man is described, standing in a candlelit room:

Lippanchenko stopped in the middle of the dark room with the candle in his hand; the shadowy shoals stopped together with him; the enormous shadowy fat man, Lippanchenko’s soul, hung head down from the ceiling … (
p. 531
)

There is the world of sensation, true: but behind this is everything else.
‘ “… one must admit that we do not live in a visible world …”,’ a hallucination tells a character.
‘ “The tragedy of our situation is that we are, like it or not, in an invisible world …” ’ (
p. 408
).
And so the visible world can suddenly dissolve, within a sentence, into another world entirely – ‘a world of figures, contours, shimmerings, strange physical sensations’ (
p. 181
).

‘Like a race of people divided into those with long heads and those with short heads,’ commented the revolutionary critic Viktor Shklovsky, in the city that was now Leningrad, writing on Bely, ‘the Symbolist
movement was split down the middle by an old controversy.
Essentially, it involved the following question: Was Symbolism merely an aesthetic method or was it something more?’: ‘All of his life, Bely championed the second alternative (i.e., that Symbolism is much more than just art).’
7

But I’m not quite sure that Shklovsky is accurate.
Because it’s true that in his frenetic and haphazard career Bely took up with the Symbolists, and then with the spiritualists, and even the anthroposophists.
He was into Kant, and Schopenhauer, and Rudolf Steiner.
But this list is only a list of crazes.
It indicates a roving interest in flight, in emigration from the ordinary categories: not a sustained mystical vision.
The philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, who was a genuine mystic, was one of Bely’s mentors.
And Berdyayev had his doubts about the thoroughness of Bely’s thinking.
‘Bely knew very little,’ wrote Berdyayev, ‘and what he knew was confused and incoherent.’
8

Rather than the detail of the temporary visible world, Bely preferred its more permanent abstractions: the Cube, the Sphere and the Swarm.
With these categories, he described the fluid transitions of reality.
But there’s no need to be a mystic to believe that reality is fluid.
Even the most empirical of philosophers has been unable to prove that an objective world exists.
Our knowledge of reality is never direct.
There is an idealism hidden in every realism.
And this fluidity of the material world is what Bely loved exploring.
*

If a sardine tin can also be a bomb, for instance, then all objects are revealed as potentially ambiguous.
Their solidity evaporates: ‘ “they’re what they are – and yet different …” ’ This is one effect in
Petersburg
of the panic of a revolutionary conspiracy.
Another conspirator tries to offer a rational explanation: this slippage in reality is only a ‘pseudo-hallucination’: ‘ “a kind of symbolic sensation that does not correspond to the stimulus of a sensation” ’ (
pp. 359
,
360
).

And I think: but this is really a description of language!
That is the coded subject, after all, of Bely’s novel.
Language is what creates a symbolic
sensation that doesn’t correspond to an actual sensation.
Language is what constitutes the disturbing fragility of the real.

In an essay of 1909 called ‘The Magic of Words’, Bely wrote that the ‘original victory of consciousness lies in the creation of sound symbols.
For in sound there is recreated a new world within whose boundaries I feel myself to be the creator of reality.’
9
The new reality of language is Bely’s constant subject.
For he was expert at dissolving the binary oppositions of ordinary philosophy.
Everyone knows, say, that a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified: an outer form and an inner content.
Only Bely would think that in constructing a sign he might ‘surmount two worlds’ – the inner and the outer.
‘Neither of these worlds is real.
But the THIRD world exists.’
10

This extra world of the sign is what is investigated in
Petersburg
– and I mean investigation.
This novel is a system of parallel investigations into the minute moments where words materialize as a version of reality.

Words

In Paris, twenty years earlier, in his text called ‘Crise de vers’, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé had outlined the inverted reality that language could produce:

I say: a flower!
and, beyond the oblivion to which my voice consigns any outline, being something other than the known calyxes, musically rises an idea itself and sweet, the one absent from every bouquet.
11

And Bely knew about this philosophy of the poetic word.
But a novel offered more complicated demonstrations.
And so in Petersburg he closed the first chapter of
Petersburg
with a small essay in literary theory.
So far, the reader only knows that there is a man called Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and that in this city he is perturbed by a mysterious stranger – one of the novel’s revolutionaries.
At the moment the stranger is only a ‘shadow’: he exists only in the Senator’s consciousness.
But, adds Bely: ‘Apollon Apollonovich’s consciousness is a shadowy consciousness, because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral existence and is a product of the author’s fantasy: a superfluous, idle, cerebral play’ (
p. 67
).
He is just a character.
And with this moment of metafiction, Bely pauses.
If he is only the inventor of illusions, then the novelist
might as well abandon his novel.
But, writes Bely, just because they are illusions doesn’t mean the characters aren’t real.
There Ableukhov is: and there we are – reading.

Once his brain has come into play with the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really does exist: he will not disappear from the Petersburg prospects while a senator with such thoughts exists, because thought, too, exists.
And so let our stranger be a real live stranger!
And let my stranger’s two shadows be real live shadows!
Those dark shadows will follow, they will follow on the stranger’s heels, in the same way as the stranger himself will directly follow the senator; the aged senator will pursue you, he will pursue you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forth you will never forget him!
(
pp. 67

8
)

You only need to name something, and it is real: even if it is imaginary.
It exists, now, in the consciousness of the reader.
The real is produced by and produces writing.
This is Bely’s artistic premise.
Just as from the abstract dot of Petersburg, wrote Bely, rushes the government circular, so the real dissolves into writing – even when you sharpen your pencil: ‘the acutely sharpened little pencil fell on the paper with flocks of question marks’ (
p. 483
).

This infiltration and contamination of signifiers and signifieds represents the mobile process of Bely’s novel.
So that a character’s childhood memory of a fever where a bouncing elastic ball became a man called Pépp Péppovich Pépp, with its bouncing consonants, drifts in a new delirium to become associated with a bomb: so that by the end of the novel the bomb has appropriated this nonsense name as its own, as if it is a character itself.
Or a nonsense word
enfranshish
, which haunts a revolutionary in his nightmares, suddenly inverts itself to become the name of a hallucinated character: ‘ “Shishnarfne, Shish-nar-fne …” ’ (
p. 410
).

The history of the world as a history of phonetics: that is the wild aim of Bely’s absolute novel.

Phonemes

Writing in Petrograd, in 1923, Bely’s friend Ivanov-Razumnik recounted a moment of conversational acrobatics from Bely:

‘I, for one,’ says Bely, ‘know that
Petersburg
stems from l-k-l-pp-pp-ll, where
k
embodies the sense of stuffiness and suffocation emanating from the
pp-pp
sounds – the oppressiveness of the walls of Ableukhov’s “yellow house” – and
ll
reflects the “lacquers”, “lustre” and “brilliance” contained within the
pp-pp
– the walls or the casing of the “bomb” (Pépp Péppovich Pépp).
Pl
is the embodiment of this shining prison – Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and
k
in the glitter of
p
with
l
is Nikolai Apollonovich, the Senator’s son, who is suffocating in it.’
12

The phonic and metrical line of the whole novel, added Ivanov-Razumnik, was drawn in the names of the leading characters.

To invent a world, it turned out, you don’t even need a word: phonemes will do.
But this wasn’t quite Bely’s invention.
Once again, this is also an effect first discovered in Gogol’s Petersburg stories.

It was another revolutionary critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1919 wrote an essay, ‘How Gogol’s “Overcoat” is Made’, where he noticed that the repeated
ak
sound in the name of that story’s protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich Bashmachkin, was also repeated in his constant use and overuse of minute Russian words: like
tak
and
kak
.
The real and the linguistic began to merge, so that Gogol’s text was ‘composed of animated locutions and verbalized emotions’.
Gogol’s
ak
phoneme, a minute melodic unit, was just another aspect of the story’s emphasis on the overlooked, the minor, the forgotten.

But Bely’s theory of phonemes was odder.
In his prose, the Gogolian method was shadowed by a complicated, esoteric theory – and it is visible in his reported conversation with Ivanov-Razumnik.
The sound of a signifier, thought Bely, has its own meaning separate from the ordinary signified.

In 1922, when Bely was living briefly in Berlin, he published a poem called
Glossolalia
, subtitled
A Poem on Sound
.
In it, he offered a detailed theory of what phonemes mean:
k
is suffocation, death and murder;
sh
and
r
are the sensations of the etheric body.
Twelve years later, when Bely had returned to the Soviet Union, in his final book,
Gogol’s Craftsmanship
, he revised this theory.
In the Soviet Union, the meanings were more prosaically revolutionary: he emphasized
pl
,
bl
and
kl
– as all sounds of bursting pressure.
While
sh
represents the expansion of gases, and
r
represents explosion.
13

In
Petersburg
, Bely wanted to saturate prose with repeated sounds: even the phonemes would be part of the pattern’s meaning.
Bely had once rearranged the hierarchy of Russian vowel sounds: putting
u
at the bottom of the series and
i
at the top.
*
And as he began his novel called
Petersburg
, Bely would later write, he suddenly heard ‘what seemed like an “u” sound; this sound permeates the whole length and breadth of the novel …’
14
The
u
sound is a sad lament throughout his revolutionary, anxious novel.
It is there implicitly: in the constant choice of words with the stress on
u
; or the exploitation of the fact that Russian nouns and adjectives in the accusative case include that
u
sound, necessarily.
But he also states it, explicitly – in his descriptions of Petersburg at night: ‘have you ever gone out at night, penetrated into the god-forsaken suburban vacant lots, in order to listen to the nagging, angry note on “oo”?
Oooooo-ooo: thus did space resound …’ (
p. 97
).
The
u
sound is the sound of impending revolution: of catastrophe.
It is a concealed prophecy.

And of course: this theory that a phoneme is meaningful, Bely’s habit, as Shklovsky put it, ‘of using every word as a springboard for the infinite …’
15
– this habit is craziness.

Signs

I am not the first person to notice this.

In Petersburg, between 1914 and 1916, when Bely was writing
Petersburg
, a group of linguists and literary critics, including Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and Roman Jakobson, founded the avant-garde group Opojaz – a jazzy Russian acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language.
This was their official name, but their real name – the name they became known by in the various battles of the avant-garde – was the Formalists.
In Petersburg, of course, at that time, the ruling avant-garde was Bely and the theory of Symbolism.
And so, remembered Eikhenbaum in a retrospective essay in 1927 called ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, the first argument they picked in the formation of their avant-garde was with the Symbolists: ‘in order to wrest poetics from their hands …’
16

BOOK: Petersburg
10.82Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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