Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and the Dynamics of Political Response

 Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and the Dynamics of Political Response Timothy Langen Near the middle of Petersburg and at the peak of its narrative tension, after Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov has read a letter demanding that he assassinate his father (the reactionary Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov ) using a bomb already in his possession, and after he has rather inexplicably started the bomb’s timing mechanism, he confronts his friend, the radical intellectual Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin. It is Dudkin who gave him the bomb in the form of a sardine can with a windup clock, wrapped in a kerchief, but without telling him what it was. Nikolai Apollonovich informs Dudkin that he will have nothing to do with the plot, but Dudkin has no idea what he is talking about. He knows nothing of the letter and assumes that the bomb has been routed to the Ableukhov house merely for safekeeping (who would search a senator’s home for a bomb?).The conversation proceeds through maddening degrees of mutual noncomprehension between the sleep-deprived Ableukhov and the feverish Dudkin until the latter finally comes to understand the outrageous intrigue in which he has been implicated. “I’m confident,” he tells Nikolai Apollonovich, “that I can disentangle the knots of these vile machinations.”1 The knots, alas, prove too tangled, and Dudkin loses his mind and murders Lippanchenko,the man who gave him the bomb.The episode serves as a parable for the hazards of explanation2 in Petersburg, a tangled novel that seems to accommodate a great number of explanations without quite suc-  timothy langen cumbing to any of them.This resistance to explanation (or at least to decisive explanation) is itself explicable in several ways: in terms of the generally modernist idiom in which Bely wrote,in terms of his peculiar philosophical skepticism, and in terms of the magical, incantatory, and precognitive powers he ascribed to language. Political novels,though,are supposed to explain.By the time Bely wrote Petersburg, Russia had more than half a century’s worth of socially and politically engaged literature—devoted to a variety of topics,and written from disparate points of view, but all committed to the explanation and judgment of various modes of social thought and action. The novel proved an enormously powerful means of exploring what a nihilist might believe and what the effects of those beliefs might be on his life,or what the motivations behind revolutionary violence are, or what sort of life a liberal might lead. They posed questions like “Who is to blame?” and “What is to be done?”3 and tried in various ways to answer those questions. Characters and narrators expound copiously, motivations and consequences are traced to distant points, and no matter how dark the theme, the reader rarely despairs of understanding . Given the decades of political violence that Russia suffered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bely would seem to have had fresh material perfectly suited to that sort of novel. However, Petersburg departs from the tradition. Its main plot concerns a political assassination, and its main characters are nearly all revolutionaries , representatives of the state, or double agents. Yet Bely does not give a coherent account of the sociopolitical views of even one of his characters (or allow them to give such an account).4 He tells us next to nothing of the views of the “party” that demands the assassination. He gives the merest hint of Nikolai Apollonovich’s state of mind when, two and a half months earlier, he proposed killing his father. That hint, moreover, suggests that the proposal had more to do with lovesick despair and personal animus than with any political theory or conviction.The plot proceeds either unbeknownst to or directly athwart the will of its nearest participants. Saturated with politics,this novel seems to make a point of explaining none of it.This essay examines some of the reasons for the lack of explicit sociopolitical theorizing in so overtly political a novel (and by an author who was not averse to theorizing), and also explores the sense in which Petersburg can be a means for thinking about what is, after all, the main vehicle of its plot: revolutionary terrorism. Political Perplexities In the middle of September 1908, just past the middle of his own life’s journey, Andrei Bely brought his friend Nikolai Valentinov to Petrovsko- andrei bely’s PETERSBURG and...