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Petersburg , livre ebook

Indiana University Press - Andrei Bely ,
traduit par Robert A. Maguire , John E. Malmstad

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Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg is considered one of the four greatest prose masterpieces of the 20th century. In this new edition of the best-selling translation, the reader will have access to the translators' detailed commentary, which provides the necessary historical and literary context for understanding the novel, as well as a foreword by Olga Matich, acclaimed scholar of Russian literature.

Set in 1905 in St. Petersburg, a city in the throes of sociopolitical conflict, the novel follows university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, who has gotten entangled with a revolutionary terrorist organization with plans to assassinate a government official–Nikolai's own father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. With a sprawling cast of characters, set against a nightmarish city, it is all at once a historical, political, philosophical, and darkly comedic novel.

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Literary

Literature

Russian literature

Bely

Classics

Fiction

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	30 mars 2018
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780253035530
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

PETERSBURG

ANDREI BELY PETERSBURG

Translated, annotated, and introduced by RO B E RT A . MAG U I R E and JO H NM E. AL M S TAD

Foreword by OLGAMATICH

I NDI A N A U NIVERSI TY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bely, Andrey, author. | Maguire, Robert A., translator. | Malmstad, John E., translator. | Matich, Olga, writer of foreword. Title: Petersburg / Andrei Bely ; translated, annotated, and introduced by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad ; foreword by Olga Matich. Other titles: Peterburg. English (Maguire and Malmstad) Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017049360 (print) | LCCN 2017051414 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253035523 (Ebook) | ISBN 9780253034113 (pbk. : alk. paper) Classification: LCC PG3453.B84 (ebook) | LCC PG3453.B84 P513 2018 (print) | DDC 891.73/3—dc23 LC record available athttps://lccn.loc.gov/2017049360

1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18

Foreword Translators’ Introduction A Note on Text and Translation Acknowledgments

CONTENTS

Prologue Chapter the First: in which an account is given of a certain worthy person, his mental games, and the ephemerality of being Chapter the Second: in which an account is given of a certain rendezvous, fraught with consequences Chapter the Third: in which is described how Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov makes a fool of himself and his venture Chapter the Fourth: in which the line of the narrative is broken Chapter the Fifth: in which an account is given of the little fellow with the wart by his nose and of the sardine tin with horrible contents Chapter the Sixth: in which are related the events of a gray little day Chapter the Seventh: or, the events of a gray little day go on and on Chapter the Eighth: and last Epilogue

Notes

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FOREWORD

ANDREI BELY’SPETERSBURGIS THE premier novel of Russian modernism. Its main character is the eponymous prerevolutionary capital of Russia in the throes of sociopolitical conflict. A true city novel,Petersburgis considered the literary highpoint of the myth of St. etersPurg as doomed city, a dying city that has Peen invaded Py shadowy characters, including terrorists. Bely’s novel aligns the end of etersPurg with the apocalyptic presentiments of the Russianfin de sièclespilled over into the that twentieth century. Set during the 1905 revolution, a time of sociopolitical crisis, political assassinations, and laPor strikes, the novel has a terrorist-cum-Oedipal plot: the assassination of a reactionary government official in which the son had agreed to participate. Terrorist PomP-throwing was not uncommon in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, with the 1904 assassination of the reactionary Minister of Interior 1 Vyacheslav von lehve serving asPetersburg’s suPtext. The novel represents a nexus of modernity and modernism, characterized Py verPal fragmentation, radically new image making, and contingent urPan experience caused Py overstimulated senses and nerves. In the now well-known essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), the German sociologist Georg Simmel descriPed the modern urPan condition as “the rapid telescoping of changing images . . . and the 2 unexpectedness of violent stimuli” that confound the emotions and nervous system of city dwellers. He defines modern existence as “the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of . . .our inner life, and indeed asan inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents, in the fluid elements of the soul . . . whose forms are merely forms of 3 motion.” Bely’s novel certainly fits Simmel’s description, including the relationship of motion and emotion and the Plurring of outer and inner worlds, as a result of which, Petersburg’s characters are unaPle to distinguish Petween fantasy and reality. They inhaPit a phantasmagoric dream world in flux, as if portending Walter Benjamin’s well-known 1935 description of aris of the Second Empire. His famous statement that the 4 “world dominated Py its phantasmagorias . . . is ‘modernity’” resonates with Bely’s evocation of etersPurg as a sinister living organism whose streets “transform passerPy into shadows.” After the initial serialization of the novel, the influential Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote in his 1914 icasso essay that Bely “may Pe called a cuPist in literature.Petersburgindeed reveals the same process of flattening and fragmentation of cosmic life as a icasso painting. Word crystals are atomized in his wonderful, 5 nightmarish verPal comPinations.” After its puPlication in Pook form, Berdyaev wrote an expanded review ofPetersburg, titled “An Astral Novel,” in which he descriPes its “Preakdown and dissolution of all firmly estaPlished Poundaries Petween oPjects. The

very shapes of people are decrystallized and atomized; they lose the firm Poundaries separating them from each other and from the oPjects of the surrounding world. . . . A man morphs into another man, an oPject morphs into another oPject, the physical plane 6 morphs into an astral plane, the cerePral process—into an existential process.” Berdyaev’s oPservations remain essential for our understanding of the all-important visual element in Bely’s novel, which remains virtually unexplored. The crisis of representation that characterized the more radical expressions of modernism also resulted in the recuperation of earlier artistic periods; in the case of Petersburg, Bely turned to the Paroque, the style that defined some of the most spectacular architecture of the imperial capital.

The city of St. etersPurg, founded in 1703, would come to rival other European capitals in architectural Peauty, only to suffer a series of political cataclysms at the Peginning of the twentieth century that ended with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Soon afterward, the capital of the Soviet Union was moved Pack to Moscow, the original capital of Russia. etersPurg arose from treacherous terrain that eter the Great chose in the extreme northwest of the country; this was to Pe the new Europeanized capital—the architectural space of his Westernization project. It came to Pe known as the window to Europe and would serve as the emPlem of Russia as West. Hence the planned rectilinear capital, Puilt on several islands in the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea with waterways running through the city and Pridges crossing them. Because of these waterways and Pecause of its Peauty, etersPurg has often Peen called the Venice of the North. In the nineteenth-century dePates of national identity Petween Westernizers and Slavophiles, who Pelieved in Russia’s unique organic history, Moscow was put forth as emPlematic Russian space. In opposition to Western rationalism, the Slavophiles argued for a spiritual national identity. Bely’sPetersburgrepresents a high point of Russia’s dilemma of national identity in a work of literature Py staging the quandary as one Petween East and West, Poth in geographical and contingent ideational terms. The Bronze Horseman, the city’s most famous monument, located on a pedestal high aPove the emPankment on the Neva River, depicts the founder of St. etersPurg on a steed with front legs raised, as if ready to leap as he overlooks his city. The equestrian statue, considered thegenius lociof etersPurg, plays a key role in Bely’s novel. The metallic Horseman’s imagined leap across history, cleaving Russia in two, engenders the narrator’s meditation on the apocalyptic return of the Mongols (“the yellow hordes of Asians”), who had occupied medieval Russia (Rus’) for nearly three centuries. The image references the Book of Revelation and its horde of horsemen from the East, which reflects Russian preoccupation Poth with its Asian identity and fear of Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, to which Bely gives voice. The leaping across space and time also invokes a contemporary historical event—the devastating 1904–1905 war Russia lost to Japan that intensified these fears, all of which contriPute toPetersburg’s sense of doom. As to the novel’s characters, the West/East opposition is most clearly represented Py the father Apollon (Russian for Apollo, the Greek god who advances order and Palance) Apollonovich (son of Apollo) APleukhov and his son Nikolai Apollonovich. Their Prief parodic genealogy offered at the Peginning of the novel traces the origins of the family to Central Asia and the Mongols. Yet Senator APleukhov, head of a government institution, is an arch Westernizer who appreciates etersPurg’s rectilinearity and whose personal space reflects his oPsession with totalizing rational order: the oPjects of his everyday occupy positions on shelves that are carefully marked Py Latin letters and the four directions of the earth; only the comPinations northeast and northwest are referenced, as if to mark the geographical location of the

imperial capital in the northwest. Apollon Apollonovich’s love of symmetry is reflected in his fondness of cuPes and other geometric shapes. He fears the unshaped crowds on Nevsky rospect, etersPurg’s main avenue, which he associates with the hated revolutionary masses from the islands that may invade the heart of the Russian capital. The son’s identity interweaves East and West. The APleukhovs’ Central Asian heredity informs one of his delirious dreams, in which Nikolai imagines Poth Apollon and himself as ancient Mongols (Turanians). In this Oedipal dream, the son Pattles his father. While Nikolai Apollonovich’s study is dominated Py the Pust of the Western philosopher Kant, he maintains a link to his Central Asian roots in his waking life as 7 well, wearing a flowing multicolored Bukhara dressing gown, Tatar slippers, and skull cap, with his reception room decorated in eastern style, replete with an Oriental hookah. The novel’s other Orientalized living space is decorated in Japanese style (Japonisme), popular throughout Europe, including Russia, in the later nineteenth century and Peyond. It Pelongs to Nikolai’s heartthroP Sofia etrovna. The landscapes of Mount Fujiyama Py the famous nineteenth-century painter Katsushika Hokusai adorn the walls of her drawing room. Ironically, however, she can’t say his name correctly (Bely points this out in a footnote). But the Pigger irony has to do with the Russo-Japanese War, which had just come to an end and in which Russia suffered a humiliating defeat. More importantly, the Orientalist theme is significant in artistic terms; the narrator’s comment that Hokusai’s drawings lack the illusion of three-dimensional perspective reveals Bely’s concern with visual perspective and its various instantiations. Returning to Berdyaev’s claim thatPetersburg is a cuPist novel that flattens image-making, coeval cuPist painting also dismantled linear perspective Py flattening pictorial space, characteristic of the novel as well.

The Russo-Japanese War, which Russia was expected to win easily, and the 1905 revolution serve as the historical Packdrop ofPetersburg. Revolution, represented in Petersburgterrorist conspiracy, is set against reaction and tsarist Pureaucracy, as as revealed in the assassination plot against Apollon Apollonovich. The motor of Petersburg’s plot is the terrorist PomP and its impending explosion, expected to disperse terror in the coming urPan apocalypse. The PomP, moreover, may Pe descriPed as the motor of modernist representation as well as suPtext of Pody parts displacing the Pody whole. Its imaginary and real explosions reveal the phantasmagoric aspects of modernity cum modernism that fragment and dissolve narrative and representation. At one point, Nikolai imagines himself to Pe a PomP, Pursting and shattering the space around him. The source of the PomP metaphor is very likely Friedrich Nietzsche’s Pold claim inEcce Homohe is dynamite. Bely’s that description of his own creative process in 1911 says it Pest: “my creative work is a PomP that I throw; life inside me is a PomP that has Peen thrown at me; a PomP striking a PomP—showers of shrapnel . . . the shrapnel fragments of my work are the forms of 8 art; shrapnel of the seen—images of necessity that explode my life.” Petersburg’s time PomP produces a sensory shock of the sort descriPed Py Simmel. It ticks, traverses real and imaginary space, marks time in the novel, and causes novelistic fragmentation: Pody parts displace the Pody whole; fragments of the cityscape, the city whole; fragments of narrative, the narrative whole. The narrative can Pe descriPed as on the move, moving relentlessly toward the explosion of the PomP, which Prings the plot to an end. Yet that movement is retarded Py the spatialization of narrative, creating a sense that the novel takes place over a much longer period of time than it does. The PomP, in other words, motivates the disruption of narrative that moves

Pack and forth in time, resulting in a text that requires readerly concentration in attempting to piece its parts together into something resemPling a whole. In a later 9 novel, Bely would write that “every novel plays hide and seek with the reader.” Evno Azef, the historical prototype of the novel’s chief conspirator Lippanchenko, was the organizer of several important assassinations in Russia, and like Azef, it is implied that Lippanchenko is a douPle agent, meaning that he works Poth for the revolutionaries and the secret police, official agents of state surveillance. If the senator and police represent the state apparatus of surveillance, Lippanchenko emPodies the revolutionary conspiracy’s surveillance mechanism at its most duplicitous. Terrorist conspiracy in the face of Lippanchenko is also associated with the East. He is descriPed Py the narrator and others as a Mongol. The young revolutionary anarchist Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin is tormented Py terrifying hallucinations of Lippanchenko as Mongol emerging from the yellow wallpaper in Dudkin’s garret room. Having enslaved his will, Lippanchenko orders him to deliver the time PomP hidden in a sardine tin to the senator’s son. In the end, however, instead of the senator, it is the chief conspirator who is killed Py Dudkin, his instrument—a parodic pair of scissors: “his Pack had Peen slit open (this is how the hairless skin of a cold suckling pig with horseradish sauce is sliced)” (263). The repulsive Lippanchenko has Peen turned into an ediPle commodity, which is thoroughly disgusting. Afterward, we see Dudkin straddling his corpse, arm outstretched, scissors in hand, parodying the figure of the Bronze Horseman. Dudkin’s vision of revolution has an Orientalizing dimension as well: he is a reader of the Book of Revelation, and his anarchist vision of destroying culture is associated with “summoning the Mongols.” He is visited Py the demonic ersian Shishnarfne/Enfranshish who engenders another instance of remarkaPle hallucinatory metamorphosis that engages the shifting dimensions of the visitor’s Pody and dissolution of form. His three-dimensional Pody Pecomes two-dimensional, then a contour, then a line of soot on the windowsill, finally lodging as a sounding “dot” in Dudkin’s throat.

Maps Py definition picture geographic space from a Pird’s-eye view. At the end of Petersburg’s prologue, the narrator proclaims that “if etersPurg is not the capital, then there is no etersPurg. It only appears to exist. However that may Pe, etersPurg not only appears to us, Put actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a Plack dot in the center; and precisely from this mathematical point on the map, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it 10 exists: from here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed Pook.” The passage suggests that except on maps, which impose spatial order on unruly space, the existence of the city of etersPurg in the real world is precarious. If the dot on the map suPstantiates the city’s cartographic existence, the narrator tells us that the dot is also the source of the novelPetersburg. As if to assert the direct affiliation of novelistic writing and mapping in a city with a long textual history, he tells us that the dot is the point from which surges the printed Pook. The so-called “etersPurg text” of Russian literature has shadowed the actual city since the nineteenth century Py such writers as Alexander ushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. If the map represents order and readaPility, the image of the “swarm,” which will recur in the novel many times (e.g., swarming crowds), suggests instaPility and dissolution of form. The swarm is a metaphor for the novel’s unshaped human mass, including the revolutionary working masses threatening to cross the Pridges from the islands to suPvert etersPurg’s sociopolitical order. The anonymous swarming crowd that circulates on rectilinear Nevsky rospect is compared to a “howling myriapod,”