The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely's Petersburg

PART I

PART I Thing No ideas but in things. —William Carlos Williams A BOOK IS a strange sort of thing: ideas, sounds, feelings, images , motions spun into words, woven into a text, unraveled letter by letter as each reader brings it back to its ephemeral state of conception.1 Our thread begins with a title, Petersburg, and then a prologue, in which we learn that “Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Pieter (which are the same) actually does belong to the Russian Empire” (1). The same? Saint Petersburg: the city of Saint Peter, founded by Russia’s great westward-looking emperor, Peter the First, in 1703. Petersburg: city of Peter (saint? monarch?), but also, if you care for etymology, Stone City. And quite a stone city it became, with broad, paved streets, extensive embankments, and massive, neoclassical buildings. Everything is grandly physical, impossible to ignore. Impossible to ignore, too, are the other physical elements and conditions : the cold, damp wind, the unruly Neva River, the giddy white nights in late June at such high latitude. Indeed, Petersburg could have done with a bit more stone, especially in the marshy ground where the city was built. Many thousands of workers had to be forced, under horrendous conditions of climate and coercion, to build this city where no city should stand. The elements exacted a heavy price initially and over time: a steep down payment in human life—merely to get the thing built—was followed by a sporadic assessment of death and misery every time the Neva flooded. One such flood provides the occasion for Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous narrative poem The Bronze Horseman . This work inaugurated a whole tradition of stories set in St. Petersburg, 3 stories based on confusion, madness, extreme abstraction, and the grinding down of human beings. Pieter: stone, but also a person’s name—and a specific person, not just any old Pyotr (saint or otherwise), but a Dutch Pieter. In other words, Peter the Great, who apprenticed as a shipbuilder in Holland (and England) and modeled his city on Amsterdam. He was great indeed, nearly seven feet tall in a time far shorter than ours, and he reveled in all things practical and physical : food, drink, war games, amateur dentistry . . . (and often several at once). Yet for all this physicality, there is something abstract, hypnotic, even spectral about his city, a quality that came out every time Bely’s predecessors Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoyevsky set a story there. Writing of Dostoyevsky, Bely’s fellow symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov asks: “Is not St. Petersburg itself— that magnificent city conjured, in the teeth of the elements, from the northern swamps—is it not, as we read in the novel A Raw Youth, a purely imaginary and contrived conception? Is not its relation to the essence of Russia like that of a mirage to reality, or a deceitful mask to the true countenance?”2 It is, as the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground puts it, “the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe.”3 Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman figures prominently in Bely’s Petersburg, both in quotations (such as the epigraph to the novel’s first chapter) and in the theme of the statue coming to life and chasing down a character. In this way Bely evokes the traditional literary portrayal of St. Petersburg as a hostile, abstract , hallucinatory entity. If anything, his Petersburg takes this notion more literally than his predecessors had, as we can see immediately in the novel’s prologue. “If Petersburg is not the capital,” says the narrator, “then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist” (2). This curious, apparently nonsensical assertion actually suggests something quite specific about this city, something that differentiates it from, say, Moscow or Kiev.4 St. Petersburg exists primarily (and, perhaps for Bely, almost exclusively) as a function: first, in order for Russia to have a major port city and a forward position against Sweden; then, since 1732, as a capital city—and a grandiose, European-style one at that. It does not “just” exist, as do Kiev (which Bely’s narrator tells us is “the mother of Russian cities”; 1) and Moscow (“the original capital city”; 1). Mothers precede us in existing; we are dependent on their existence, and not the reverse. As for the original capital city, Moscow existed before it secured this honor (it was one of several cities that could have prevailed) and continued to exist after losing it...