Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921

3. Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics

83 3 Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics   The visual metaphors, verbal tableaus, sonority, poetic rhythms, and symphonic structure of Petersburg suggest the term Gesamtkunstwerk, as does the novel’s synthetic and synesthetic approach to language, music, and the visual arts. Yet Bely scholarship has considered Petersburg almost exclusively in relation to music, most likely because symbolist aesthetics, about which Bely wrote extensively during the 1900s, professed Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s view of music as the highest art form.1 In the 1910s a new aesthetic vision—futurism— emerged in Russia, and even though Bely never affiliated himself with the futurists, Petersburg reveals remarkable affinity to the new sensibility. The only contemporary reading of Petersburg that considered its avant-garde aesthetics was by Nikolay Berdyaev, who described the novel as cubist and compared it to Picasso’s visual practice.2 Bely himself would later describe his novel as a monumental painting of which he had completedonly one corner.3 Robert Alter writes that “Petersburg is an acutely visual novel, and so its pervading sense of sudden disruption in the modern city is repeatedly translated into arresting visual imagery,” without, however, developing the claim.4 If we read Petersburg through a visual lens, we are struck by Bely’s imaginative translation into language of occult geometry and of postimpressionist antinaturalistic, and even abstract, representation. In all likelihood, critics have virtually neglected the visual aspect of Bely’s writing, despite his avant-garde—expressionist cum futurist—writerly practice that started around 1910, because he continued to 84   identify with symbolism and had little to say about the visual arts, unlike about music, and because his rare comments about avant-garde painters were often negative.5 Yet the novel reveals an affinity for coeval modernist painting in its startlingly expressive juxtapositions and metamorphic imagery, creating what Joseph Frank describes as “spatial form in modern literature.” According to Frank, modernist writers “intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.”6 He writes that they accomplish this by means of juxtaposition, movement back and forth that subverts development in time, and the creation of a palimpsest structure. If chapter 1 demonstrated Petersburg’s futurist and cubist deployment of juxtaposition and metamorphic imagery, the focus here is expressionist aesthetics. My search for Bely’s symbolist and postsymbolist counterpart in the visual arts has evinced Wassily Kandinsky, with whom Bely shared a similar mystical, as well as aesthetic, vision, writing about the arts in comparable terms as Kandinsky . While the cubists in France and cubo-futurists in Russia reconfigured the symbolist hierarchical relation of the arts, substituting painting for music, Kandinsky, like Bely, maintained a symbolist focus on music and synesthesia, especially on the relationship of color and sound. Moreover, Petersburg’s imagery resonates powerfully with coeval expressionism (which is most famously associated with Kandinsky), even more so, I would suggest, than with cubism.7 A particularly striking correspondence of Kandinsky and Bely is their recollection of one of Monet’s famous Haystacks that they saw at a French impressionist exhibit in Moscow during the 1890s.8 Kandinsky wrote his response to the painting in Reminiscences (Rückblicke) in 1913: Previously, I had known only Realistic art [. . .] suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory [. . .] the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, [. . .] exceeded all my dreams. [. . .] albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture. I had the overall impression that a tiny fragment of my fairy-tale Moscow already existed on canvas.9 Bely wrote about seeing the Monet in 1891 in his memoir On the Border of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ) only in 1930: Mother took me and mademoiselle to the French exhibit very often. [. . .] I was surprised by that which Moscow found so funny: the French impressionists (Degas, Monet, etc.). [. . .] stopping in front of the pleasing colorful spot [my emphasis], the disgraceful “haystack” that had caused such a sensation, I would Bely, Kandinsky...