Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

Introduction

Introduction   Peripety, or reversal of fortune, punctuates the history of Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, and of Andrey Bely’s (1880–1934) modernist novel of the same name. The city arose from treacherous terrain that Peter the Great chose in the extreme northwest of the country for his new Europeanized capital. In the prologue of Petersburg, the narrator, adding to speculation about the city’s idiosyncratic existence, proclaims that “if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist. However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center.”1 Bely’s novel, according to the narrator, surges from a dot on the map as if to assert the direct affiliation of novelistic writing and mapping in a city that has a long textual history. It would become known in Russian literature as the “Petersburg text,” which has shadowed the actual city since the nineteenth century. The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, rose from the formidable marshy terrain around the Gulf of Finland to rival other European capitals in grandeur and architectural beauty, only to suffer a series of cataclysmic peripeties at the beginning of the twentieth century: a renaming at the beginning of the First World War, when it became Petrograd, to suppress Petersburg’s Germanic etymology ; the loss of status after the Bolshevik revolution, when the capital was moved to Moscow; and the loss of its original affiliation with the name Peter, when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in honor of the new revolutionary myth associated with Lenin and with the city as the “cradle of revolution.” In keeping with the eschatological myth of Petersburg—and its cataclysmic 3 demise—the city was gradually stripped of its identity. The most horrific peripety for its residents was the Leningrad Blockade during the Second World War, when the city literally starved and froze for nine hundred days.2 Yet after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city repossessed its original name and much of its external splendor. Despite the peripeties, the heart of St. Petersburg has essentially managed to maintain its eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century appearance—a combination of baroque and neoclassical architecture—even though the city’s architectural face was contested periodically. In the words of Michel de Certeau , Petersburg is the kind of city that has mastered “the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.”3 During the period examined in “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, the city’s architectural visage was contested by style moderne (Russian art nouveau), which Nikolay Antsiferov, one of Petersburg’s leading preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century, lamented, referring to the “anti-architectural style of style moderne [as] a sickly growth on the majestic organism of the city.”4 The exemplar of this style was the House of Singer on Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The building was constructed by the American sewing machine company between 1902 and 1904 on the site of an original eighteenth-century building demolished by the American company. As the firm’s headquarters in Russia, the House of Singer, a high-end office building, became an emblem of modernity and of the city’s burgeoning capitalist economy. Like the city itself, the House of Singer was renamed after the revolution—the House of Books—and became the largest bookstore in Leningrad. And like the city, it has recuperated its original name and original grandeur recently, becoming a regular stop on the city tour as a landmark of two of Petersburg’s pasts, prerevolutionary and Soviet, as well as its post-Soviet capitalist present. Tourists and residents alike can sit in the cafe on the second floor and through its bay window enjoy the largely unchanged panoramic view of the beautiful historical city. Characterizing the history of the city, peripety also marks the publication history of Petersburg, written between 1911 and 1913; the first book version of the novel appeared in 1916 (the Sirin edition).5 Although it was immediately acclaimed as a major work of Russian literature, critics did not recognize the full extent of the novel’s groundbreaking literary experiment, which would later in- fluence such Soviet writers as Evgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Pasternak , Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrey Platonov. At the time...