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123 4 “The Streetcar Prattle of Life” Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams   [. . .] amidst the flight and din, the shuddering and the droshkys, listening to the distant melodious voice of automobile roulades and the rising drone of the yellow and red streetcars (the drone that then dies again), in the constant bawling of the clamorous newspaper boys. From one infinity he ran on into another; and—he stumbled on the embankment , where everything came to an end: the melodic voice of the automobile roulade, the yellow and red streetcar and the shady type himself; here was the edge of the world, and the end of infinities. [. . .] Here, at the very beginning, I must break the thread of my narrative, in order to introduce the reader to the scene of the action of a certain drama. As a preliminary, it is necessary to correct the inaccuracy that has crept into our text; it is not the author who is to blame for this, but the authorial pen: at this time the tram did not yet run in the city: this was the year 1905.1 “Here, at the very beginning . . . the thread of [the] narrative” must be broken. While the metafictional hesitation and digression of Andrey Bely’s narrator evoke the eighteenth-century style of Laurence Sterne, they remind us too that, in the age in which he writes, the pursuit of a novel’s narrative has become a problematic task. The temporal dimension of the narrative, its thread of sequentiality, is momentarily broken (before it is barely begun) to voice the possibility of its ceding the way to the dramatic “scene of the action” (mesto deistviia), the predominantly spatial dimension. Indeed, the relationship between these two sets of narrative coordinates is no longer automatic, integral, or stable in Bely’s novel. This section of its first chapter closes with the solemn declaration of the “scene of the action”—the year 1905 and the city as a historical arena for revolutionary events. But the chatty narrator reminds us that trams did not yet run on the city’s streets in 1905. They appeared only in 1907. This recreation of the year 1905 summons the tram out of its own time and splices the commonplace vehicle into the scene of this revolutionary year. However playful this slip of the pen may be, Bely’s tram, which strays between the layers of historical and quotidian time, gives an intimation of how the city space is perceived and known through various temporal frames—and their nonidentity now works as a force to fragment the modernist novel form. But what if we were to pursue the narrative of the tram itself ? What kind of narrative- and form-producing agent is the tram? This is the question I seek to answer by following the tram through both literary works and the real territory of the city, seeing how it becomes allied to different narrative and textual practices—be it modernism’s fascination for the Bergsonian spatializing of time or the modernist crisis in novel form as it was experienced in the literary milieu of Petersburg specifically. Along the way I pause to note some of the tram’s entries into the high-cultural mythologies of Petersburg modernism, as well as into a different realm of collective knowledge: the urban folklore of the everyday, such as that collected by Viktor Shklovsky in his sketch “On Streetcar Folklore” (“O tramvainom fol’klore,” 1933). By way of some detours to the theoretical works that have informed our project as a whole, the hope is that this essay-excursion on the tram will acquaint its reader with a “city as text,” where the experience of movement is at once that of narrative and of a most ordinary practice of everyday urban life. From Dublin to Berlin to Petersburg, modernist writers found in the tram a subject with a strong form-creating impulse. In his study of the city and the language of the novel, Robert Alter finds in one passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where “[t]rams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging,” rhythmic effects in the surrounding narrative that he relates to the experience of tram travel: “One detects in the prose an element of syncopation [. . .] [O]ne may infer that syncopation attracted [ Joyce] in part because it caught the energetic stop-and-start rhythms of modern urban life. The stopping and starting are manifestly linked with the passage of trams.”2 Joyce...

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