Petersburg (4 page)
We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and greater numbers as they were required.
The work of these bees, constantly keeping their eye on the whole, is of varying difficulty at different stages of the process.
Their cooperation expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.
29
Yes, I think that Mandelstam is talking to Bely.
Indirectly, he is offering a precise description, in fact, of Bely’s strange invention in
Petersburg
.
For Mandelstam rejects the idea that Dante was an obscure mystic.
Instead,
he argues, Dante’s investigations into the meaning of what happens were part of his investigations into the art of composition: ‘the inner illumination of Dantean space derived from structural elements alone’.
30
The illumination was an effect of art.
Just as a third term, a sign, had emerged as the only true form of the real, in Bely’s investigations into words.
Tsvetayeva thought that Bely was a man in flight.
And now – by chance – Mandelstam projects this flight into the structure of Dante’s composition, based on the principle of ‘convertibility or transmutability’:
… just imagine an airplane (ignoring the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine.
Furthermore, in the same way, this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine.
31
The self-assembling flying machine: this fantastical metaphor seems to me to be the best description of what Bely invented in
Petersburg
: a process of metamorphosis and reversal, a multiple escape …
One must traverse the full width of a river crammed with Chinese junks moving simultaneously in various directions – this is how the meaning of poetic discourse is created.
The meaning, its itinerary, cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not be able to tell how and why we were skipping from junk to junk.
32
Adam Thirlwell, 2011
NOTES
1.
Emma Gerstein,
Moscow Memoirs
, translated and edited by John Crowfoot (London: Harvill Press, 2004), p.
58.
2.
Vladimir Nabokov,
Nikolai Gogol
(New York: New Directions, 1961), pp.
10–11.
3.
Nikolai Gogol, ‘Nevsky Prospect’, in
The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol
, edited by Leonard J.
Kent and translated by Constance Garnett, vol.
1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.
238.
4.
Marina Tsvetayeva, ‘A Captive Spirit’, in
A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose
, edited and translated by J.
Marin King (London: Virago, 1983), p.
100.
5.
ibid
., pp.
102 and 154.
6.
ibid
., pp.
151–2.
7.
Viktor Shklovsky,
Theory of Prose
, translated by Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p.
188.
8.
Nikolai Berdyaev,
Dream and Reality
, translated by Katherine Lampert (London: Godfrey Bles, 1950), p.
196.
9.
Quoted in Steven Cassedy,
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p.
48.
10.
ibid
., p.
53.
11.
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in
Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés
(Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p.
251, my translation.
12.
Ivanov-Razumnik,
Vershini
(
Summits
) (Petrograd: Kolos, 1923), p.
110: quoted in Ada Steinberg,
Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p.
93.
13.
Andrei Bely,
Masterstvo Gogolia
(
Gogol’s Craftsmanship
) (Moscow: 1934), pp.
306–7.
14.
Andrei Bely, ‘Vospominanija’ (‘Memoirs’), in
Literaturnoe nasledstvo
, nos.
27–8, p.
453.
15.
Shklovsky, p.
187.
16.
Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, in
Readings in Russian Poetics
, edited and with a preface by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press
,
2002), p.
6.
17.
ibid
., pp.
6–7.
18.
Quoted in Cassedy, p.
55.
19.
Eikhenbaum, p.
9.
20.
Roman Jakobson,
Selected Writings
, vol.
3,
Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry
, edited by Stephen Rudy (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1981), p.
750.
21.
Eikhenbaum, p.
12.
22.
ibid
., pp.
18, 19 and 20.
23.
Shklovsky, p.
171.
24.
ibid
., p.
176.
25.
Nadezhda Mandelstam,
Hope Against Hope
, translated by Max Hayward (London: Harvill Press, 1999), p.
155.
26.
Osip Mandelstam, in
The Collected Critical Prose and Letters
, edited by Jane Gary Harris, translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London: Harvill Press, 1991), p.
212.
27.
ibid
., pp.
402, 408 and 442.
28.
ibid
., pp.
439–40.
29.
ibid
., p.
409.
30.
ibid
., p.
411.
31.
ibid
., p.
414.
32.
ibid
., p.
398.
Prologue
Your excellencies, eminences, honours, citizens!
What is our Russian Empire?
Our Russian Empire is a geographical entity, which means: a part of a certain planet.
And the Russian Empire comprises: in the first place – Great, Little, White and Red Rus; in the second – the realms of Georgia, Poland, Kazan and Astrakhan; in the third, it comprises … But – et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
1
Our Russian Empire consists of many towns and cities: capital, provincial, district, downgraded;
2
and further – of the original capital city and of the mother of Russian cities.
The original capital city is Moscow; and the mother of Russian cities is Kiev.
Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Piter (which is the same) authentically belongs to the Russian Empire.
While Tsargrad,
3
Konstantinograd (or, as is said, Constantinople), belongs by right of inheritance.
4
And on it we shall not expatiate.
We shall expatiate more on Petersburg: there is Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Piter
5
(which is the same).
On the basis of the same judgements the Nevsky Prospect is a Petersburg prospect.
The Nevsky Prospect possesses a striking quality: it consists of space for the circulation of the public; numbered houses delimit it; the numeration goes in the order of the houses – and one’s search for the required house is much facilitated.
The Nevsky Prospect, like all prospects, is a public prospect; that is: a prospect for the circulation of the public (not of the air, for example); the houses that form its lateral limits are – hm … yes: for the public.
6
In the evening the Nevsky Prospect is illuminated by electricity.
While in the daytime the Nevsky Prospect needs no illumination.
The Nevsky Prospect is rectilinear (speaking between ourselves)
because it is a European prospect; and every European prospect is not simply a prospect, but (as I have already said) a European prospect, because … yes …
Because the Nevsky Prospect is a rectilinear prospect.
The Nevsky Prospect is a not unimportant prospect in this non-Russian – capital – city.
Other Russian cities are a wooden pile of wretched little cottages.
And Petersburg is strikingly different from them all.
If, however, you continue to assert a most absurd myth – the existence of a Moscow population of one and a half million – then one must admit that the capital is Moscow, for only in capitals are there populations of one and half million: while in provincial towns there are no populations of one and a half million – have not been, and will not be.
And in accordance with the absurd myth it will be seen that the capital is not Petersburg.
But if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg.
It only seems to exist.
7
Whatever the truth of the matter, Petersburg not only seems to us, but also does exist – on maps: as two little circles that sit one inside the other with a black point in the centre; and from this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it energetically declares that it exists: from there, from this point, there rushes in a torrent a swarm of the freshly printed book; impetuously from this invisible point rushes the government circular.
Chapter the First
in which the story is told of a certain worthy personage, his intellectual games and the ephemerality of existence
It was a dreadful time.
Of it fresh memory doth live.
Of it, my friends, for ye
I here begin my narrative –
Melancholy will my story be.
1
A.
Pushkin
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov came of most respected stock: he had Adam as his ancestor.
And this is not the main thing: incomparably more important here is the fact that one nobly-born ancestor was Shem, that is, the very progenitor of the Semitic, Hessitic and red-skinned peoples.
2
Here let us pass to ancestors of a less distant era.
These ancestors (so it appears) lived in the Kirghiz – Kaisak Horde,
3
from where in the reign of the Empress Anna Ioannovna
4
the senator’s great-great-grandfather Mirza Ab-Lai,
5
who received at his Christian baptism the name Andrei and the sobriquet Ukhov,
6
valiantly entered the Russian service.
Thus on this descendant from the depths of the Mongol race does the
Heraldic Guide to the Russian Empire
7
expatiate.
For the sake of brevity, Ab-Lai-Ukhov was later turned into plain Ableukhov.
This great-great-grandfather, so it is said, was the originator of the stock.
A lackey in grey with gold braid was flicking the dust off the writing desk with a feather duster; through the open door peeped a cook’s cap.
‘
Watch out, he’s up and about …’
‘He’s rubbing himself with eau-de-Cologne, he’ll be down for his coffee soon …’
‘This morning the postman said there was a little letter for the
barin
from Shpain: with a Shpanish stamp.’
‘I’ll tell you this: you’d do well to go sticking your nose into letters a bit less …’
‘So that must mean that Anna Petrovna …’
‘And that goes for “so that must mean”, too …’
‘Oh well, I was just … I was – oh, never mind …’
The cook’s head suddenly disappeared.
Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov stalked into his study.
A pencil that was lying on the table struck Apollon Apollonovich’s attention.
Apollon Apollonovich took a resolve: to impart to the pencil’s point a sharpness of form.
Swiftly he approached the writing table and snatched up … a paperweight, which for a long time he twiddled in deep reflectiveness, before he realized that it was a paperweight he was holding, not a pencil.
The absent-mindedness proceeded from the fact that he was at this moment visited by a profound thought: and at once, at this inopportune time, it unfolded into a runaway sequence of thought (Apollon Apollonovich was in a hurry to get to the
Institution
).
To the
Diary
, which was to appear in periodical publications in the year of his death, a page was added.
Apollon Apollonovich quickly noted down the sequence of thought that had unfolded: having noted down this sequence, he thought: ‘It’s time to go to work.’ And went into the dining-room to have his coffee.