Petersburg (91 page)
5
credit bill:
i.e.
a banknote.
6
Potapenko:
Ignaty Nikolayevich Potapenko (1856–1928), a
belle-lettriste
and playwright who was popular in the Russia of the 1880s and 1890s.
In 1905 he produced a play called
The New Life.
7
Shemakha:
a city in Azerbaijan.
8
Young Persian:
this group does not seem to have existed as such.
Bely invents it on the model of ‘Young Turks’, to denote the supporters of constitutional reform in Persia.
9
In fear of God and in faith proceed:
words proclaimed by the deacon during the Orthodox liturgy.
10
if one had raised their lids:
a reference to Gogol’s story ‘Viy’, and the monster’s long eyelids.
11
Some girls:
these verses, like the ones that follow it, are entirely Bely’s own creation – they are modelled on the Russian
chastushka,
a relatively modern form of humorous folk song.
12
in a Helsingfors coffee house:
the images of Dudkin’s hallucination stem partly from the real-life mental illness of Bely’s friend and acquaintance S.M.
Solovyov in 1911.
On 26 November 1911 Bely wrote to Blok: ‘… all that you write to me in veiled hints is
more than familiar: the yellow fascination
: succumb to it and – the motor car, the Tartars, the Japanese visitors, and also – Finland, or “
something
” that is in Finland, also – Helsingfors, Azev, the revolution – it is all the same gamut of emotions … What happened to Seryozha has affected me dreadfully,
for two weeks I have suffered with Seryozha: for one of the ideas that now persecutes him is the face of an Oriental.’
13
Apachés:
Paris thugs and hooligans who took part in street demonstrations.
14
St Basil the Great’s prayer, the admonitory one, to devils:
what is intended here is an allusion to the ‘Prayer of Exorcism for those Suffering from Devils’ in the Russian Orthodox
Trebnik,
or ‘Prayer Book’.
There appears, however, to be a confusion with the subtitle of Vladimir Solovyov’s poem of 1898, ‘An Admonitory Word to Sea Devils’ (
Das Ewig-Weibliche
).
15
Dr Inozemtsev’s drops:
an opium-based infusion used as a painkiller in the treatment of intestinal diseases, and proposed by the Russian physician F.I.
Inozemtsev (1802–69) as a treatment for cholera.
16
Enfranshish
:
a number of explanations have been offered for the wordplay surrounding this verbal hallucination, which gives rise to the ‘Persian’ name Shishnarfne, in particular that it is derived from the French words ‘
En franchise
’ written on the containers of a brand of insect (‘Persian’) powder sold in Russia before 1917.
There is also an obvious connection with the Russian word
shish,
meaning fig (as in not a fig), or nose (as in
pokazat’ shish,
to pull a long nose).
Bely himself compared the Enfranshish episode with Gogol’s story ‘The Portrait’, in which a sinister figure leaps out of a portrait in order to put an end to the hero, Chartkov.
17
Yevgeny’s fate:
Yevgeny is the hero of Pushkin’s
The Bronze Horseman.
18
Petro Primo Catharina Secunda:
the Latin inscription on the Finnish granite base of the Bronze Horseman statue.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
1
Weary am I, friend:
the epigraph is taken from Pushkin’s poem ‘It’s time, my friend, it’s time!
The heart asks peace’ (
Pora, moi drug, pora! pokoya serdtse prosit,
1834).
The first line has been altered by Bely.
2
Gaurisankars:
Gaurisankar is a Himalayan mountain situated near Mount Everest.
Until 1913 it was erroneously believed to be the same mountain as Everest, and therefore the highest in the chain.
3
Nokkert:
the real name of Bely’s governess from 1886 to 1887.
4
Acathistus:
in the Orthodox Church, a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and the Saints, performed by the congregation standing up.
5
Section marks:
the typographical sign ¶ – in Russian, its name is
paragraf,
or paragraph.
6
Konshin:
Aleksei Vladimirovich Konshin, director of the Russian State Bank; his signature was reproduced on Russian banknotes.
7
vint:
a card game.
8
the order of St Andrew:
the highest order of the Russian Empire, established in 1698.
9
the Cabinet of Curiosities:
Kunstkamera
– the first Russian public museum, founded by Peter the Great.
In 1718, Peter issued a ukase commanding that all human and animal ‘monsters’ were to be sent to the museum.
10
Do not te-e-e-mpt me:
‘Do not tempt me without need’ (
Ne iskushai menya bez nuzhdy
), the romance by Glinka, an 1825 setting of Baratynsky’s poem ‘Dissuasion’ (
Razuverenie,
1821).
11
the man was sitting astride the corpse:
Dudkin sits astride the dead Lippanchenko in an obvious and grotesque parody of the Bronze Horseman.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
1
The past moves by before me:
the epigraph is taken from Pushkin’s tragedy
Boris Godunov
(1825) (VII, 17), Pimen’s monologue.
The last line has been changed slightly by Bely.
2
the Protection in Winter:
the Orthodox Feast of the Protection (
Pokrov
) is on 1 October; the Nativity of the Mother of God is from 7 to 12 September; ‘St Nicholas in Winter’ (
Nikolai zimniy
) is the day of the decease of St Nicholas the Miracle Worker, 6 December.
3
khalda
:
the Russian word for ‘a brazen hussy’.
4
Mantalini:
the name of a frivolous and sentimental character in Charles
Dickens’s novel
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839).
Bely was very fond of Dickens’s work, which he read often.
‘Mindalini’ has overtones of ‘almonds’, being derived from the Russian word
mindal
’.
EPILOGUE
1
The February sun is on the wane:
Bely lived in Tunisia during January and February 1911.
2
gandurah:
one of Bely’s own definitions of this word reads: ‘The gandurah is an Arabian coloured shirt that comes down to below the knees; the Arabs wear it under a cloak.’
3
chechia:
‘a round Tunisian fez with a very long tassel’.
4
Zaghouan:
a Tunisian mountain range.
5
the museum at Bulaq:
a museum of Egyptian antiquities, opened in 1858, and situated in Bulaq, a port of Cairo.
6
The ‘Book of the Dead’:
a collection of 150 spells meant to be recited by a dead man to protect himself from injury in the world beyond.
7
Manetho:
Manetho of Sebennytos, an Egyptian scholar and priest who lived around 400
BC
and wrote a description of the Egyptian royal houses.
8
the piles of Gizeh:
the pyramids outside Cairo.
9
Duauf:
Duauf, or Dauphsekrut, an Egyptian king of the Middle Kingdom (20–18 centuries
BC
) whose letter to his son (‘The Instruction of Duauf’) is a celebrated work of ancient Egyptian literature.
10
Skovoroda:
Grigory Skovoroda, the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher and poet (1722–94), a Neoplatonist and moralist.
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First published in Russian 1916
This translation published in Penguin Books 1995
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2011
Translation and Notes copyright © David McDuff, 1995
Introduction copyright © Adam Thirlwell, 2011
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and author of the introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196879-7
*
The city, after all, had been founded as St Petersburg, but it was known as Petersburg, or even Piter: from 1914 it would be Petrograd, and from 1924 it would be Leningrad, until eventually, in 1991, it would become St Petersburg again.
*
Just as Lenin loved denying it.
In 1909, the exiled Lenin published his strange work of philosophy:
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
.
In it, he wanted to prove a total positivism, the absolute objectivity of the world: ‘The “naïve realism” of any healthy person who has not been an inmate of a lunatic asylum or a pupil of the idealist philosophers consists in the view that things, the environment, the world, exist
independently
of our sensation, of our consciousness, of our
self
and of man in general.’ The mad italics are Lenin’s.
*
With this dislike of the sound
u
, Bely was again echoing Mallarmé’s ‘Crise de vers’: ‘what disappointment, faced with the perversity that confers on
jour
as on
nuit
, contradictorily, here obscure tones, there clear.’
*
Pushkin.