Petersburg (novel)

Petersburg at the beginning of the first Russian revolution . A secret terrorist organization led by a certain Lippanchenko in October 1905 requires Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov to fulfill his once-given word and commit a terrorist act against his own father, a prominent dignitary of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Nikolai Apollonovich, who made a fatal promise in moments of despair after the refusal of her beloved woman (Sofya Petrovna Likhutina), hesitates and is in no hurry to fulfill it. On the one hand, he hates his father and disdains his undoubted resemblance to him, but on the other hand, deep down he loves and pities him. One of the terrorists, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, must hand over to Nicholas Apollonovich a bundle with a sardine bomb and a letter with instructions.

A box of Dudkin (an alcoholic held captive by hallucinations) is handed over as intended, and the letter falls into Likhutina’s hands. Out of a desire to annoy the admirer and scare him, she passes the letter, considering him someone’s cruel joke. Unexpectedly for Sofya Petrovna, Ableukhov takes the note quite seriously. The secret police agent associated with Lippanchenko threatens him with prison if he does not fulfill his promise. Nevertheless, the next day Ableukhov finds Dudkin and, accusing the party of inhumanity, refuses patricide. However, it turns out that he does not know about the impending terrorist attack. Alexander Ivanovich is convinced that a mistake has crept in and gives the floor to settle everything.

Dudkin comes to Lippanchenko and retells the incident. Lippanchenko unexpectedly accuses his “colleague” of a lack of revolutionary fervor. He claims that Ableukhov reported on his comrades and now deserves this cruel test. Dudkin suddenly realizes that all this is a lie, and Lippanchenko himself is a provocateur. The next night, after severe hallucinations, in which he concludes an agreement with a representative of the other world and receives a blessing from the Bronze Horseman , Dudkin stabs Lippanchenko with scissors and sits on his corpse in the pose of the rider Falconet.

Meanwhile, Apollon Apollonovich absentmindedly takes the "sardinica of terrible content" to his room. The explosion of a box in a senatorial house happens by chance and does not reach the goal. Nevertheless, the relationship between father and son, who had just begun to improve after the return from Spain of the wife of Apollon Apollonovich (who had once fled abroad with her lover), is hopelessly ruined. The former senator is horrified by the failed father-killer, whom he raised.

The Ableukhov couple leave the capital and go to live out their days in the village. Nikolai Apollonovich leaves for Egypt, and then visits the countries of the Middle East. He returns to Russia only after the death of his parents, having survived a spiritual revolution and having been reborn for a new life, he casts Kant and reads the works of Skovoroda .

The plot of the novel is based on autobiographical motives (passion for Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok, conflict with Blok , red dominoes ). Numerous literary texts are played out - from Dostoevsky 's Demons to Edgar Poe 's Mask of the Red Death . The image of St. Petersburg continues the descriptions of the city of Gogol and Dostoevsky; the Bronze Horseman descending at night from his pedestal is introduced as a key character. ^[3] Subsequently, Bely associated the birth of the novel with a visit to Egypt and climbing the Great Pyramid:

The consequence of the “pyramidal disease” is some kind of change in the organs of perception; life was colored by a new tonality, as if I had ascended to the pockmarked steps - alone; He came down to another; and the new attitude to life with which I descended from the barren summit soon appeared in my works; the life that I saw colorfully, as if faded; compare the colors of the novel “ Silver Pigeon ” with the instantly begun “Petersburg”, and you will be struck by the dark gray, blackish, or completely colorless lines of “Petersburg”; the sensation of the Sphinx and the pyramids accompanies my novel Petersburg.

The ideology is based on the teachings of the “ Easterners ” ( Esper Ukhtomsky , Vladimir Solovyov ), who saw in Russia a natural extension of the Mongolian steppe . ^[4] Just as the “Silver Dove” depicts the East without the West, in “Petersburg” Bely, by his own admission, sought to show the doomed island of Western rationalism in the East (in Russia). The Tsar’s capital is beautiful with the beauty of a dying person ^[5] , hence the apocalyptic motives scattered throughout the novel: a premonition of war, migration of peoples, revolution.

In line with the teachings of the Russian Symbolists, the eternal opposition of the Apollonic forces (Apollon Apollonovich and other dignitaries) and the Dionysian forces (Lippanchenko and revolutionaries) acts as an internal source of action in the novel. ^{[6] The} consonance of the names of Apollon Apollonovich and Lippanchenko is not accidental, as the author himself pointed out in Gogol’s Mastery:

But I myself later came across a connection that surprised me between verbal instrumentation and a plot (involuntarily implemented); the sound leitmotif of both the senator and the senator’s son is identical to the consonants building their names, patronymics and last name: “Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov”: pll-pll-bl accompanies the senator; "Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov": cl-pl-bl ; everything related to the Ableukhovs is full of sounds of pl-bl and c . The keynote of the provocateur is inscribed in the surname “Lippanchenko”: his BOB back pll (Ableukhova); The sound of ppp is emphasized, like the growth of shells in the delirium of the senator, - Lippanchenko, the ball, emits a pepp-peppa sound : “Pepp Peppovich Pepp will expand, expand, expand; and Pepp Peppovich Pepp will burst: everything will burst. "

The inner kinship of the senator and Lippanchenko is that both of them are dry dogmas, trying to subordinate the will of their (spiritual and physical) sons - Nikolai Apollonovich and Dudkin - to ready-made schemes; in both cases, with potentially fatal consequences for themselves. Nikolai Apollonovich, seeing the Dionysian beginnings in himself, wears oriental attire and justifies the murder of his father by the need to exterminate Western abstraction, but in a dream both Ableukhov is their ancestor - the “ Turanian ”: the Kantian son in the guise of his father, and the Kontian father in the guise of his son ( it is he who gives destructive commands to Nikolai Apollonovich). ^[7] This confirms the internal community of the Ableukhovs (in the coordinates of Solovyov's “pan-Mongolism”): their ancestor is Kyrgyz Ablai, who left for Russia in the 18th century.

The conflict between fathers and children, central for the novel, is highlighted by numerous references to Saturn (swallowed children), Kronos (scattered his father), Peter the Great (broke with his ancestors and destroyed his only son). The emblem of the Ableukhovs is presented as an emblem of this conflict: a unicorn piercing a knight . In the role of a unicorn and a knight, a killer and a victim, alternately father and son Ableukhov, Dudkin and Lippanchenko. In a sense, they are all doubles of each other.

The Olga Forsh art and memoir book Crazy Ship (1930) includes a lecture on Petersburg as a “novel of results,” which draws a line under the Petersburg period of Russian literature and history. The authorship of this lecture in the book is attributed to Sokhatom ( Evgeny Zamyatin was deduced under this name):

Bely ingeniously guessed the moment for summing up the results of a two-century-old historical being - Petersburg - and a synthetic image - a Russian intellectual. So it was necessary for the assignment. And the task is to submit to the annals of the world the outdated historical being Petersburg and the intellectual who inhabited it. We have poor reading skills, if it were not for Ableukhov to become a household name, like Pechorin. The latter, synthesized by Andrei Bely before his death, is a Russian intellectual - in addition to this, Eugene, struck by the arm of the Bronze Horseman.

Structure

The structure is divided into chapters, a prologue , an epilogue and the word “end” parodies the conventions of the classic novel - just as the irrational world of the poor is hidden behind the brilliant facade of St. Petersburg of the era of classicism . As if torn from the text at random, the titles of the chapters are sent to the “ Brothers Karamazov ”. Non-standard punctuation and typography (receptions coming from Stern ) reveal the dynamics of the story.

Rhythm

The novel is written in rhythmic or ornamental prose . “In the study by Ivanov-Razumnik , the anapestic structure, full of pauses, of the first edition of Petersburg and the amphibrachical structure of the verbal fabric of the second edition was noted in connection with the change in the author’s attitude to the plot of the novel,” wrote Bely in Gogol’s Mastery. "Anapaest springs" in the novel by Belyi was also noted by Nabokov; in " Gift " he spoiled "cabbage hexameters " of the author of "Petersburg".

Color painting

The emotional state of the characters is conveyed by the color dynamics of the city landscape , written in the technique of literary pointillism . White associated certain emotions with flowers: for example, pink for him symbolizes hope, red - a herald of the end of the world. ^[8] The novel is dominated by dull shades of monochrome gamut, mostly dark and blurry. ^{[9] The} urban landscape is almost noir , with a predominance of rain and fog. A crowd of people flowing along bridges and avenues breaks up into separate parts of the body and eggs.

The theosophical teaching , which Bely was interested in during the years of writing the novel, postulates that consciousness gives rise to matter . The brain products are objectified in the “astral” plane and gain independent existence along with the ability to influence physical reality. In the novel, this teaching is refracted in the narrator’s reasoning that the senator’s yellow mansion and black carriage were born in his mind and “forgot”: the senator is compared with Zeus , and the house with Athena Pallas who was born from his head. ^[10] The creative process for the narrator is an “idle brain game,” a demonic game in the sense that it is not directed toward a higher goal and is valuable in itself:

The brain game is just a mask; under this mask, an invasion of the brain of unknown forces takes place.

The narrator's figure poses a problem to the interpreters of the novel because of its polyphony. The prologue begins in a fantastic manner reminiscent of Gogol, and ends on a note of high rhetoric. Similar stylistic shifts hint at the existence of several storytellers . Unlike the novels of the 19th century, Bely’s narrator is not omniscient; he continually intervenes in the story and, teasing the reader, "breaks his thread." He belongs to those narrators who hate the reader; Bely himself likened his books to bombs, which he throws at readers.

In one of the articles, Bely called the universe of his novel "the illusory Mayan world." The narrator himself periodically draws the attention of the reader to the illusory nature of what is happening. Thoughts do not belong to the characters, but are inspired by them from the outside or “descend” (in the case of Nikolai Apollonovich - under the guise of birds). Dudkin is inspired by the destructive plans of the “Mongol,” whose face appears at night on the wall in his attic room. ^[11] For Nikolai Apollonovich, the sardine box (where the bomb is ticking) thinks, or “Pepp Peppovich Pepp” is a spherical figure from his childhood nightmares .

The revolution, life, 1905, etc., entered the plot by accident, involuntarily, or rather, not revolution (I do not touch it), but a provocation ; and again, this provocation is only a shadow projection of some other kind of provocation, a mental provocation, the embryos of which many of us have been imperceptibly for many years, until the sudden development of some kind of mental illness (not clinical) leading to bankruptcy; my whole novel depicts in symbols of place and time the subconscious life of mutilated mental forms; if we could illuminate with a spotlight, suddenly, directly beneath the ordinary consciousness, a layer of spiritual life, much would be revealed there for us unexpected, beautiful; more ugly would be revealed; a boil of, so to speak, undigested experiences would be revealed; and it would appear to us in the paintings of the grotesque. My “Petersburg” is essentially an instantly recorded life of the subconscious of people divorced from their spontaneity by consciousness; whoever consciously does not get accustomed to the world of spontaneity, that consciousness will burst in the spontaneous, somehow protruding from the shores of consciousness; the true location of the novel is the soul of a person not given in the novel, overworked by brain work; and the characters are mental forms that, so to speak, have not reached the threshold of consciousness. And everyday life, Petersburg, a provocation with a revolution taking place somewhere against the backdrop of a novel is only a conditional garment of these mental forms. One could call the novel “The Brain Game”.

- From a letter to Ivanov-Razumnik , 1913

• In his thoughts on the novel Petersburg, N. A. Berdyaev wrote about the author that “over time, his genius will be recognized, ill, incapable of creating perfect creations, but striking with his new sense of life and his former musical form”. [one]
• Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote: “In the second novel, Tsarist Petersburg is shown by Bely as a city already doomed to death, but still beautiful with its dying, ghostly beauty. In this book, the best of everything written by Bely, Petersburg for the first time after Gogol and Dostoevsky found his real artist. ” [2]
• V.V. Nabokov considered Petersburg a " wonderful flight of imagination " and the best novel of the 20th century (inaccessible link) after Ulysses.
• Bely's obituary , signed among others by Pasternak , stated that "James Joyce is a student of Andrei Bely." [3]
• MA Chekhov considered one of his best roles to be the role of Senator Ableukhov in the production of “The Senator's Death” (a play written by A. Bely based on the novel) as the second Moscow Art Theater in 1925.
• In his book on Foucault , the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze called Petersburg a “ great novel ”.

Издание

• Белый, Андрей. Петербург: роман в восьми главах с прологом и эпилогом / изд. подгот. Л. К. Долгополов. - SPb. : Наука, 2004. — 699 с. — ( Литературные памятники ). — ISBN 5-02-026981-6 .

Исследования

• Долгополов Л. К. Андрей Белый и его роман «Петербург». — Л. : Советский писатель, Ленингр. отд-ние, 1988. — 416 с. - 30,000 copies.
• Молодяков В. Э. Как издавался «Петербург» А. Белого (По документам из архива Л. К. Долгополова) // Литературный факт. — 2017. — № 5 . — С. 373—415 . — DOI : 10.22455/2541-8297-2017-5-373-415 .