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Introduction In January 1912, Andrey Bely submitted the first half of a novel for publication in the Moscow journal Russian Thought. The novel, his second, revolves around a terrorist plot to assassinate a reactionary senator—the assassin being the senator’s own son. It was provisionally titled either The Lacquered Carriage or Evil Shadows, and Bely promised to finish it by April or May of the same year. No need, said the journal’s editor, Pyotr Struve: not only would Russian Thought refuse to publish it, but the author—admittedly a man of some talent—should be advised never to publish it anywhere. It was, according to Struve, carelessly written, pretentious, and bad to the point of monstrosity. Bely was already a prolific and inventive poet and essayist, and his first novel, The Silver Dove, had won many admirers, including Struve himself. The rejection of the manuscript was an insult that galled Bely to the end of his days, as well as a significant financial injury: during those winter days of 1912, Bely was in tight straits, subsisting primarily on loans, advances, and the charity of friends. He had been counting on the publication of his novel to ameliorate his financial situation; now he might have to shiver out the winter. But friends, writers, and then readers came to the rescue. Bely read his manuscript at literary gatherings, where the audience provided an enthusiastic response and the host, Vyacheslav Ivanov, provided a new title for the work. Petersburg, having acquired a new name, then got a publisher (Konstantin Nekrasov) and, eventually, a reputation: the greatest Russian novel of the modernist period, the most important work of Russian prose, a thing on a par with the best works of Joyce, Kafka, and Proust.1 Initial reviews were less enthusiastic. Bely “puts on airs,” for example, “disregarding the fact that the reader is judging him”; he has published a work of “sheer, agonizing tedium.”2 The negative assessments have not aged well, and with the comfort of hindsight we may be tempted to dismiss them outright. We would do better to listen to them and to ask ourselves how it is possible that the opinions of intelligent readers (as Struve indisputably was) differ so profoundly in their appraisal of this novel. If we look past the xi ultimately negative evaluations, we will see that the early critics were actually getting at the very core of the novel. They said that it lacked unity. Petersburg is “spotty and uneven, like everything else produced by its author.”3 Bely attracted this particular complaint throughout his career, not only with this single novel and not only during the second decade of the century. In 1922, no less acute a writer than Osip Mandelstam wrote that Bely “cannot sacrifice even one nuance, nor tolerate the slightest break in his capricious thought, and he blows up bridges which he is too lazy to cross. Consequently, after a momentary display of fireworks, he leaves but a pile of broken stones, a dismal picture of destruction, instead of the abundance of life, a sense of organic wholeness, and an active equilibrium .”4 This notion—that Bely’s art is a meaningless proliferation of fragments , without “organic wholeness”—has persisted. Writing in 1967, Vladimir Markov asserted that Bely’s poetry is flawed “perhaps because [he] was too much of a Proteus and lacked inner unity to his verse.”5 There is indeed a restless quality to nearly everything Bely ever wrote: he never seems comfortable within any single genre nor any single style nor system of thought (nor name: he was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev). “I have never in my life encountered a more fickle, unstable consciousness,” writes one of Bely’s close acquaintances, the philosopher Fyodor Stepun—but, seemingly by way of compensation, this very consciousness “overheard and noticed everything that went on . . . both in Russia and in Europe: not for nothing did he enthusiastically call himself a seismograph.”6 What he lacked in consistency he made up for in sensitivity, and his conversation and writings registered the faint echoes of distant cataclysms in philosophy and art. Petersburg appears to fit this restless, inconstant pattern: it is a novel of many parts, and the whole is hard to make out. It touches politics, epistemology , family life, the nature and destiny of Russia and of mankind, the nature of spirit and flesh, and most of Bely’s other notoriously numerous preoccupations . Its narrator is forever interrupting himself...

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