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Chapter One Shadowy Worlds ON JANUARY 8, 1934, Andrey Bely died. Or rather, Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev died, and Andrey Bely wrote no more. Many reminiscences written by friends and acquaintances express a curious discomfort with the notion that Bely or Bugaev had ever existed, physically. “A captive soul,” Marina Tsvetaeva called him, a being stuck between worlds. “Every piece of earth under his feet turned into a tennis court, his palm into a racquet. The earth seemed to be sending him back to the place from which he had been tossed out, and that place again returned him. In short, earth and heaven played ball with him. We—watched.”1 Others watched, too, and came up with the same problem. In Two Years with the Symbolists, N. Valentinov attempts a physical description and is quickly stumped. He had an interesting head, light colored hair, wondrous eyes, a charming smile, “wings” (after all, he “flew” all over Moscow), and—nothing else. Jacket, bow tie, trousers, shoes—only “exterior.” Behind it, nothing at all. I could not imagine Bely naked. He was, as it were, disembodied, non-physical. I read later in his memoirs that in his first years at the University his “muscles were taut,” that he took first in running and jumping. The proposition that he could have muscles seemed absurd to me.2 Fyodor Stepun puts it even more bluntly, asking: “Did Bely exist at all?” It takes him more than a page to figure out what he even means by this question —bizarre and yet, in the case of Bely, somehow unavoidable. “It may be,” he eventually concludes, “that the whole problem of Bely’s being is actually the problem of his being, as a person. From time to time—and there were several such times—one sensed in him something extra-human, superhuman, or subhuman, more powerfully than anything human.”3 Well, something, someone did flicker through this world from 1880 to 1934, during which time it produced massive physical evidence of its existence in the form of poems, stories, novels, memoirs, and works of philosophy 7 and literary criticism. Thus did Bely’s spirit find inky, pulpy flesh. And one constant theme, perhaps the central theme, in all these writings is in fact the relation between spirit and flesh, intention and deed, meaning and expression —the relation, ultimately, between realms of existence. REAL SHADOWS Petersburg’s first chapter, “in which an account is given of a certain worthy person, his mental games, and the ephemerality of being” (3), ends with a synopsis of sorts, a section entitled “You Will Never Ever Forget Him!” In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov. We have also seen the idle thoughts of the senator in the form of the senator’s house and in the form of the senator’s son, who also carries his own idle thoughts in his head. Finally, we have seen another idle shadow—the stranger. This shadow arose by chance in the consciousness of Senator Ableukhov and acquired its ephemeral being there. But the consciousness of Apollon Apollonovich is a shadowy consciousness because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral being and the fruit of the author’s fantasy: unnecessary, idle cerebral play . . . Once his brain has playfully engendered the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really exists. He will not vanish from the Petersburg prospects as long as the senator with such thoughts exists, because thought exists too. So let our stranger be a real stranger! And let the two shadows of my stranger be real shadows! Those dark shadows will, oh yes, they will, follow on the heels of the stranger, just as the stranger himself is closely following the senator. The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage. And henceforth you will never ever forget him! (35–36) An odd sort of summary. Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is indeed the novel’s central character, and he has a son, and a house, and idle thoughts, and has seen a stranger. So much for data. This passage could have reminded the reader that (1) the son, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, rises late, is unlucky in love, and has just received a red domino costume; (2) the “stranger” (Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin) arouses such anxiety in Senator Ableukhov that the latter assigns two members of the secret police to shadow him; (3) the double agent Lippanchenko, a fat, slimy, gaudy, unpleasant man, has met with the...

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