Andrei Bely was the pen name of Boris Bugaev, a Russian poet and novelist whose peak period came at the end of the Imperial Era, publishing through the Revolution but ultimately finding his works out of favor with the Soviet regime. His novel Petersburg, originally intended as the second part of an unfinished trilogy, appears frequently on lists of the greatest novels ever written. It appeared on The Novel 100, a book that attempted to rank the hundred greatest novels of all time, and Vladimir Nabokov named it one of the four great works of 20th century literature (along with Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, and the first half of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time).
The story revolves around a father and son who represent the past and the future of Russia. Apollon Apollonovich is a senator and head of something called the Institution, the nature of which Bely doesn’t reveal. He’s verging on retirement and seems largely consumed with work, especially since his wife ran off with another man two years before. His son Nikolai, also known as Kolenka (which confused me quite a bit), is sort of a layabout with no apparent job. He’s loosely involved with revolutionaries who are quite serious about their business – which leads one of them to hand him a ‘bundle’ that turns out to be a bomb that Nikolai is supposed to use to assassinate his own father. The bomb, which comes in a sardine tin, has a clockwork mechanism that Nikolai accidentally activates, leaving him 24 hours to dispose of it or else have it explode in his father’s house. Complicating matters further is that he’s in love with a married woman, Sofia, who becomes part of the conspiracy. There’s also the ‘red domino,’ appearing at various parties in that hooded cape popular at masquerades in the 19th century, which appears to be more than one character.
The plot is somewhat beside the point, according to just about everything I’ve since read about Petersburg, but there is some narrative greed here to keep you moving, not least to see what’s going to happen when the bomb finally goes off. Bely seems mildly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, but not to the point of supporting murder; it’s as if the book itself is advocating for a nonviolent overthrow of the Tsarist regime.
There’s no question in my mind that I missed a lot of the subtext in the book. Daniel Burt, author of The Novel 100, points out that Petersburg presaged what James Joyce did in Ulysses, both in making a city the central character in the book and in engaging in all kinds of wordplay, including puns and other jokes. Many of these probably don’t survive the translation into English, and in general I did not find the book funny in any way except maybe, if I squint a bit, the series of events that befalls Nikolai to prevent him from either fulfilling his mission or throwing the bomb in the river. I also lack the knowledge of St. Petersburg’s geography and some of the Russian literature that directly influenced Bely, notably Pushkin and other poets, although there’s an obvious parallel to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, which I have read because it was also on Burt’s list.
One literary device I did catch was the use and symbolism of the color red – the red domino, a rust-red palace, red restaurant signs, the red border on the fabric of the dangerous bundle. Red had already been the color of the communist movement for several decades by this point, and has also been associated with revolutions (such as in Les Misérables) or the military more broadly (as in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black). Bely’s novel depicts a Russia on the brink of a massive upheaval, more than he likely even realized when he first wrote the novel – he revised it substantially for the final edition – where blood would eventually flow in the streets. His use of red foreshadows the conflict to come, without seeming to take sides; neither Nikolai the revolutionary nor Apollon the tsarist bureaucrat gets any sort of approval from the author. He makes them both clowns, just in differing ways.
I usually try to offer some sort of opinions on the books I read and write up, but I won’t do so for Petersburg because I know most of what critics and other authors love about the book went over my head. I can only say that I found the plot compelling enough to get me through it, and the prose was far easier to handle than the postmodernists who’d follow him.
This is the 90th book I’ve read from Burt’s original list; I’ve read only the middle part of the Beckett trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, so I didn’t count that, but I did count Proust after I read Swann’s Way, which is a whole-ass book and I’m not reading the entire seven volumes because I’m not insane. Almost everything I have left from the original 100 is extremely long (The Man Without Qualities, Clarissa, The Dream of the Red Chamber) and/or famously difficult (Finnegan’s Wake), although there are maybe a few more I could pick off if I feel so inclined.
Next up: I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s Lies, Inc., which is definitely one of his lesser novels, mostly because it’s a padded version of a novella called The Unteleported Man. I’d recommend Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as books by Dick that cover similar ground but do so much more effectively.
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