Petersburg Book

The twin spires of Time and Light stand out for me on the busy skyline of this phenomenal book. Time counts down the narrative while Light provides the special effects that rhythm the ebb and flow of the truly idiosyncratic counting down process.

Yes, 'ebb and flow' is appropriate to mention here. We expect Time to move only in one direction and always at the same pace according to the age-old rules but Bely's Time strikes right through the rule book. It doubles back, and when it's not busy reversing, it suddenly speeds up in a thunderous wave, or, even more bizarrely, slows down to a complete stop! The exclamation mark at the end of that sentence is there for more than exclamatory purposes. Bely uses exclamation marks as if they'd just been invented; sometimes they even mark pauses especially when the narrative has gone into one of its fast forward modes and the reader is at risk of collapsing from the exhaustion of keeping up. Then Bely drops an exclamation mark onto the page followed by an ellipsis or two and some blank space, and our hearts return to normal rhythm and we take time to rethink what we've just read, realising that it may only have been an hallucination on the part of a character'or even a hallucination of our own!……


…When the blank space becomes print again, we invariably find the clock has been wound back once more so that we are being shown the same scene from a different point of view, and what seemed utterly phantasmagorical a few moments before becomes just an ordinary Petersburg night with a few trees tossing about on the city's main thoroughfare, the Nevsky Prospect.
But even a regular windy night can seem bizarre when Bely gives it his Light treatment. The sky is often greenish or pewter coloured; the Nevsky Prospect is enveloped in a fiery murk; street lights are blood-red pinpoints; the roofs of houses give off a phosphorescent sheen; passersby are reduced to shadows while shadows suddenly form themselves into passersby. Alongside the oddly ticking Time, this playing around with Light leaves us uncertain about what we've just read. Does the crimson sky indicate morning or is it actually evening? Is that building really adorned with black lace or is it only the shadow of the trees? Did the statue of the famous Bronze Horseman just thunder down from its giant plinth to chase a character through the city as in Pushkin's poem of the same name? Or was it a trick of the Light'in collusion with some phantom Sound engineer?


Yes, Sound works closely with Light to make us very wary of Petersburg's grey and foggy streets. They seem to echo all the time with a ghostly 'ooo', and even when we stop reading, we think we can still hear it, ooo-ooo-ooo...

Of course the year is 1905, when 'revoloootion' was in the air, and that backdrop is partly responsible for some of the sounds we think we hear as we read, such as the whoosh of gravel thrown at a window by a mob or the clicking sound in the corner of a room that could simply be a cockroach or a mouse, but could also be something much more menacing. Then there's the constant whistle of steamboats out on the Neva, and the 'i' sound that the wind carries from across Russia: the sound of public ire, of strikes, of picket lines, of every Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, marching, marching, marching.

Footsteps rhythm the story, tatam, tam, tam!…tatatam, tam, tam! perhaps while a character thinks about the music of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades, or on a different page, a different character plucks the strings of a guitar, bam, bam, bam, strumming out what could be the line of the narrative, but then breaking off...mid-line...

The line of the narrative, if it could be traced on paper, might follow this odd pattern:

That graphic representation of a narrative arc was made by Laurence Sterne nearly 200 years before Bely wrote this book, but if I've paused to recall Sterne's Tristram Shandy, it's with a dual purpose. Both authors play around with Time in their novels, pulling it out to an extraordinary degree, and both authors also love digressions'in Sterne's novel the digressions simply amuse whereas in Bely's they heighten the suspense in a major way, and increasingly, as the pages turn. And while we're talking digressions, let me mention another author who plays with Time: Dostoyevsky, in Crime and Punishment. Coincidentally, the time span of that novel is the same as Bely's, ten days or so. Dostoyevsky makes us very aware of Time passing although he specialises not in jumping about in time but in slowing it down, recording each second of his character's ten day existence. And as I read Bely's Petersburg, I was reminded of Dostoyevsky's novel for other reasons besides the treatment of Time. Dostoyevsky's main character, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, constantly roams the Nevsky Prospect just as Bely's characters do, and Raskolnikov himself possesses traits that mirror those of Bely's two main characters, Nicolai Apollonovich Ableukhov and Alexandr Ivanovich Dudkin. Like Raskolnikov, Ableukhov's intensive course of philosophical studies has confused his mind so much that he finds himself involved in a crime, while Bely's second hero, Dudkin, suffers from hallucinations just as Raskolnikov does. Both Dudkin and Raskolnikov live in tiny cupboard-like rooms with yellowed wallpaper through which they imagine they are being spied on by malevolent eyes, and both eventually commit violent acts, one with an axe, one with a...scissors! It's also interesting that in both novels there's an agent provocateur who plays psychological games with the main characters and drives them to a state approaching delirium:
Had my panic-stricken hero been able to take a look at himself from the side at that moment, he would have been horrified; in the greenish, moonlit little cupboard of a room he would have seen himself clutching at his stomach and bawling with effort into the absolute emptiness in front of him; his head was thrown right back, and the enormous opening of his yelling mouth would have seemed to him a black abyss of non-existence; but Aleksandr Ivanovich could not jump out of himself: and he did not see himself…


But to return to the themes of Time and Light that dominated Bely's book for me, perhaps the image I will take with me from the reading experience is not Munch's Scream but the following word picture: the Nevsky Prospect is bathed in a fiery crimson glow that might be dawn or might be dusk; it is thronging with bowler hats, moustaches, noses and shoulders; noses flowed past in large numbers; the aquiline nose and the cockerel nose; the duck-like nose, the hen's nose; and so on, and so on...; the nose was turned to one side; or the nose was not at all turned; greenish, green, pale, white and red...and shoulders, shoulders, shoulders flowed past; all the shoulders formed a thick mass, as black as coal; all the shoulders formed a highly viscous and slowly flowing mass. This viscous mass snakes along the Prospect, day in, day out, while high above the city, the Bronze Horseman leaps forward, eternally...

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And now of course I'm reading Gogol's Nevsky Prospect in a volume that includes The Nose....