SECOND READING 46

Petersburg,by Andrei Bely (1916)

AN EXTREMELY nervous son is expected to assassinate his father. It has been carefully planned, well about as carefully as a group of somewhat haphazard radicals can manage.

Meanwhile, the targeted father, an elderly high-ranking official, has his own problems; his health is not good and his wife who “now and then used to play Chopin (never Schumann)” has run off to Spain - all very embarrassing. Yet the old man, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, although discreetly concerned with his son’s distraction, continues to attend to his duties and share his bad jokes.

In the streets outside, a great city shaped by history and the omniscient presence of its creator, Peter the Great, emerges from the fog and the darkness to shimmer and seduce with its wealth of stories.

Petersburg is a daring, flamboyant experience. Set over several days in 1905 the fast moving, witty narrative reflects the atmosphere of revolution which the poet Bely, one of the central figures of Russian symbolism, appeared to place in a religious rather than political context. Pushkin’s spirit prides over the action with Bely offering homage to the master throughout.

Pushkin’s long poem, The Bronze Horseman provides the sub text, while Bely also bows to Dostoyevsky, albeit humorously, particularly in the quasi-philosophical exchanges between the aspiring, slightly crazy revolutionaries.

As for Tolstoy, old Apollon, in common with Karenin, is a bureaucrat; he too has large ears and he also has an unfaithful wife named Anna. Bely celebrates the Russian literary tradition with a wealth of references and allusions. Published four years after Bely’s debut The Silver Dove, the first modern Russian novel, Petersburg is many things; an imaginative, sophisticated, original and ground-breaking second novel. Most importantly, it also bides a stylish farewell to Tsarist Russia.

Central to the novel is the prevailing issue of Russian identity and the mood of change: Petersburg is the stage yet the novel is also about a country. “Those were foggy days, strange days. Noxious October marched on with frozen gait. It hung out dank mists in the south. October blew off the golden woodland whisper, and that whisper fell to earth . . . Now the ploughmen had ceased to scratch at their lands, and abandoning their harrows and wooden ploughs, they assembled in small clusters in their huts. They talked and argued . . . thus it was in the villages . . . Thus it was in the towns as well . . . Everyone feared something, hoped for something, poured into the streets, gathered in crowds.”

Not surprisingly, Apollon Apollonovich representing the old order “had a fear of space.”

Petersburg soon becomes more than a stage, it is a major character “Petersburg streets possess one indubitable quality: they transform passerby (sic) into shadows. This we have seen in the case of the mysterious stranger.”

Bely brilliantly exploits the near hallucinatory quality of the light illuminating this eastern city built on a vast marsh. The myth of the city adds an additional life force to the story. While Nikolai Apollonovich, the terrified assassin agonises, mainly in his bedroom, over his gruesome task, a homemade bomb is passed around in a sardine can, fancy dress costumes and reported sightings of a large domino, add to the confusion. The text is arranged in eight long chapters which are in turn written in snappy, short sequences.

Petersburg took everyone by surprise, including the censors who were ready with their red pens. Bely was forced to make cuts. Although initially written between 1913 and 1914, and then reworked for publication in 1916, the definitive version was not published until 1922, the same year as Ulysses. The first of the big city novels, Petersburg remains exciting and mercurial, standing between the extraordinary 19th century Russian literary achievement and the arrival of modernism.

• This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon