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PART II Pattern The chief criteria of beauty are order and symmetry and determinate bounds. —Aristotle JUST WHAT DID Bely create, when he wrote Petersburg? He did not make the paper, mix the ink, or bind the covers. He did not invent the themes of illusion, parricide, and transcendence. He borrowed the genre of the novel and (for the most part) the words with which he filled it. The habits, appearances, and thoughts of Petersburg’s characters often come from other books. Much as Bely might have aspired to the mystery of divine creation , the human artist never really creates ex nihilo. In Petersburg, Bely created a pattern, a unique distribution of elements already in existence. It is a highly distinctive pattern, with discursive chapter titles, dramatic section headings, and a dizzying array of verbal styles. The tone modulates between irony and sympathy, skepticism and mystery, logic and nonsense. Even the physical layout of the book is patterned , with varying levels of indentation mimicking levels of existence, consciousness , or history. The critic Ivanov-Razumnik developed an interpretation of Petersburg based on another kind of pattern: the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. That is to say, he tried to apply the categories of poetic meter to this novel, and his finding was that the first (1913–14/1916) version was anapestic; the second, thoroughly revised by Bely and published in Berlin in 1922, was amphibrachic.1 This interpretation is not as far-fetched as it may sound: Bely himself spoke of “rhythmic prose” and thought that the difference between 67 poetry and prose was essentially a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. Everything can be patterned. Patterns seem to dominate the visual, conceptual, and aural world of Petersburg. Bely constantly draws our attention to the parquet floor of the Ableukhov residence, the wallpaper in Dudkin’s apartment, the faded design on the napkin that holds the bomb. Images, phrases, and ideas are often motivated not by logic or expository necessity but by the use of leitmotifs, which give the book something like the compositional unity of a piece of music.2 Word sounds often form a kind of chant: List’ia trogalis’ s mesta; sukhimi krugami kruzhilis’ vokrug poly shineli (“Leaves stirred from the spot; they circled in dry circles circling the skirts of the greatcoat”).3 It may be that the unity of Petersburg is the unity of a pattern, rather than the unity (as we have seen, for Bely it was a hazy unity) of the physical thing. Indeed, Bely was often drawn to the idea that unity itself, as well as thought, essence, and existence, is best understood in terms of pattern. This style of thought, which acquired the name “structuralism,” came to dominate much of the art and thought of the Western world for the first half (at least) of the twentieth century. The rudiments of structural thought arose much, much earlier. They are especially evident in Heraclitus. Joints are and are not part of the body. They cooperate through opposition, and make a harmony of separate forces. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars; distinct particulars occur in wholeness.4 This is a structural sort of comment: there are physical things (arms, legs, etc.), and then there are “things” that undeniably exist but are better understood in terms of pattern (in this case, patterns of motion, opposites that cooperate in the motion of a joint). An elbow that didn’t bend would strike Heraclitus as a paradox or as no elbow at all. What changed in the very late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was the pervasiveness of the concept of “structure,” its use in describing almost any phenomenon imaginable. Soon language, literature, psychology, and even atomic physics were being described in terms of relations among elements , while the elements themselves took on secondary significance. Bely and his fellow symbolists might have been expected to disagree fundamentally with this trend of thought, insofar as they posited the existence of a higher, more essentially “real” world. As we have seen, Bely conceived of this higher world in vivid, thinglike images, especially in his youth. His interest in patterns was also present early on, as one can see in the literary experiments he called “symphonies.” These were an attempt to apply (however loosely) the patterns of musical composition to literature, and Bely makes the patterns especially easy to see. With the exception of the second, or “draThe Stony Dance 68 [3.144.187.103] Project MUSE...

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