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PART III Gesture If I say of a piece of Schubert’s that it is melancholy, that is like giving it a face. . . . I could instead use gestures or dancing. In fact, if we want to be exact, we do use a gesture or a facial expression. —Ludwig Wittgenstein IF THE NEVA RIVER is a pattern of flow into the Baltic Sea, then what about when the sea swells and the river backs up and floods the city? If the public circulates via the prospects, what about when they surge onto Nevsky Prospect in a general strike? What about when the “wheels of state” are displaced by other revolutions? Such moments overwhelm the ability of pattern to turn motion into stasis. These are real events, surprises, “suddenlys .” They are, I would like to say, gestures. One of these floods provides the occasion for Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, the foundational Petersburg story and the single most important source-text for Bely’s Petersburg. Pushkin’s story concerns a poor clerk, Evgeny, whose modest dreams of domestic bliss are drowned (with, as he fears, his fiancée) in the flood. Floods are a predictable consequence of St. Petersburg’s location, and so the enraged Evgeny blames the city’s founder, rather than the elements, for the devastation. Desperate and demented, he tries to face down Falconet’s famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great. “Just you wait,” he says, and then the statue comes to life and pursues him to his doom. It is a gesture of defiance that seals Evgeny’s doom, just as the founding of St. Petersburg was a gesture in defiance of both nature and Sweden, and the floods are a gesture in defiance of the city and its inscribed utopian pro111 gram of regulating nature. The Bronze Horseman is a “poem of motion,”1 according to Paul Call, which does not merely mean that it depicts motion. Rather, the poem communicates through a sort of motion that is both physical and semantic. Though he does not put it this way, Call is arguing that The Bronze Horseman is fundamentally made up not of things, ideas, patterns, or even words, but of gestures. Bely was notoriously unable to sit still while talking. He punctuated his words with leaps, twirls, and complex rhythms drummed by his fingers. His effusive gestures made quite an impression on those meeting Bely for the first time, as witness Vladislav Khodasevich: It was only in the autumn of 1904 that I, a newly fledged student, received a written invitation from Bryusov. Taking off my coat in the entry I heard the host’s voice, “It is very likely that for every question there are not one but several true answers, perhaps—eight. Insisting on one truth, we run the risk of ignoring the seven others.” This idea greatly moved one of the guests, a handsome , blue-eyed university student with fluffy blond hair. When I came into the study, this student was careening about the room with a flying, dancing gait and talking, in rapt excitement, going from a deep bass to the most delicate alto; now almost crouching, now rising on tiptoe. This was Andrei Bely.2 For Bely, meaning and motion were inseparable. It is no surprise, then, that Bely pays close attention to the gestures of his characters. On the verge of an uncomfortable conversation between Nikolai Apollonovich and his father, “A froglike expression flitted across the grinning face of the respectful, loving son. Not a trace of the Greek mask remained . A cascade of smiles, grimaces, and civilities began to gush forth before the darting gaze of the dear distrait papa” (78). The primary channel of communication between father and son is, it seems, these gestures—some revealing, some deceptive—while neither father nor son seems to care particularly about the words that pass between them. The characters themselves are finely attuned to gestures. Sofia Petrovna , for example, notices something dangerous in her husband’s demeanor when the subject of Nikolai Apollonovich comes up. “In agitation he began to pace the tiny little room, his fingers clenched in a fist, raising his fist each time he made a sharp turn. Whenever he lost control of himself, this gesture appeared . And Sofia Petrovna plainly sensed what the gesture meant, and she grew a little frightened at the silence which accompanied the gesture” (88). When she asks him what is wrong, he can only...

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