Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

11. The Fluid Margins: Fl

283 11 The Fluid Margins Flâneurs of the Karpovka River   Following the Flow in Search of Urban Meaning Scholarship about Petersburg’s modernity and the life of the city usually focuses on the chronotopes of the center, and the reader steeped in this tradition might be somewhat puzzled by my essay’s attention to a river—and to the relatively marginal Karpovka River at that—as a pathway into modern Petersburg . This reader might ask, Why a river? Why the Karpovka? The decision to concentrate on this small river on the outskirts of Petersburg as a way of charting urban modernity was prompted, unexpectedly, by Charles Baudelaire. In his essay “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (1846), Baudelaire defines the city of modernité through the concept of fluidity. Evoking “the spectacle of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences— criminals and kept women—that drift about in the underworlds of a great city,” Baudelaire declares that contemporary life “is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. [. . .] The marvelous,” he writes, “envelops and soaks us like an atmosphere, but we don’t see it.”1 A half century later, the modernists of Petersburg echoed Baudelaire’s image of “floating” urban sensation, but they developed the image in negative terms. Andrey Bely and Alexander Blok perceived the main avenues of the imperial capital to be choked by flow that evoked feelings of disgust. The Baudelairian notion of floating (existences flottantes), with its potential to tempt and inspire the city dweller, is perceived by them as teeming and swarming (kishenie, medlenno tekushchaia gushcha) that confines the individual within the claustrophobic limitations of the crowd.2 In Petersburg Bely depicts the “viscous and slowly flowing sediment” of Nevsky, whose “damp space poured together a myria-distinction of voices into a myria-distinction of words. All the words jumbled and again wove into a sentence; and the sentence seemed meaningless . It hung above the Nevsky, a black haze of phantasmata.”3 For Bely, floating Nevsky Prospect threatens to subvert urban distinctions. It creates a deceptive unit of syntax: ordered, yet meaningless.4 Such urban texture does not envelop; rather, it lures the citizen with the promise of meaning then disorients and enslaves him. In his notebooks Blok writes similarly and squeamishly about the “strindbergovshchina of Petersburg in May: peculiar swarming of streets (the most disgusting being Nevsky and Karavannaya).”5 The pejorative noun strindbergovshchina here refers to the cult of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg , whose plays some believed contributed to moral decline and degeneration . In his use of the term, Blok condemns the questionable mores of the fashionable crowd. The contrast between such intensely polemical descriptions of Petersburg and Baudelaire’s enthusiastic image of the “floating existences” of the modern city raises the question whether one might find any forms of symbolic floating in the text of fin-de-siècle Petersburg that would “envelop and soak” the painter of modern life rather than repel him. This challenge points in the direction of the city’s rivers—for where, if not on a river bank, could a city dweller experience the literal and symbolic powers of urban flow at once? The Karpovka , which runs across the northern part of the city known as the Petrograd Side, envelops a locale in which the antithetical extremes of urban society have long met and mixed.6 Those who strolled along the banks of the Karpovka at the turn of twentieth century encountered decrepit slums, modernist buildings of the new bourgeoisie, aristocratic mansions, and the impressive facades of industrial giants—all mingling in surprising proximity. Here, on the margins of the city, far from the censorship of the central avenues, a new concept of city life was emerging. According to Blok, an observant flâneur of the Karpovka and its vicinities, the “real” life of modern Petersburg was taking place right there at Bolshoy and Kamennoostrovsky avenues, which cross the Karpovka on the Petersburg /Petrograd Side, and in the multitude of tiny streets and alleys that run between the avenues and “weave” them together into a peculiar web: “Real manifestations of life accidentally enter the street (hooligans, breaking streetlamps and beating each other up, drunk in a streetcar, wife and husband on 284   Bolshoy Avenue).” Later, Blok calls Bolshoy “the main avenue of today’s Petersburg—since Nevsky lost its meaning.”7 Blok’s observation is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s admiration of the way...