Petersburg (1916)

Petersburg is an exhausting book. Not exhausting in the sense that you just want to crawl off to bed, but rather exhausting because it is full of motion; there is no rest. Things are always moving, they never stay still. Just when the reader might think there is a pause, Bely will repeat some actions, some sentences.

All this movement is accompanied by colours and sound, often smells, adding layers of depth to the narrative.
The Petersburg street in autumn penetrates your whole organism: it turns the marrow of your bones to ice and tickles your freezing spine; but as soon as you escape from it into a warm room, the Petersburg street flows in your veins like a fever. The stranger now experienced the quality of this street as he entered a grimy vestibule, densely crammed with black, blue, grey and yellow overcoats, swanky hats, lop-eared hats, dock-tailed hats, and galoshes of every description. A warm dampness enveloped him; in the air hung a milky steam: steam that smelled of the pancakes.

As the book progresses, it becomes clear that the different colours represent different people and states of mind. A character's change of colour choice often indicates a change of mind. The one constant is the green swirling mist, coming in off the marshes, hiding who knows what, enveloping the Bronze Horseman who created it all. There is a threat out there, undefined as yet, but in October 1905 Petersburg, everyone sensed it.

Just like navigating in a mist, nothing is ever clear. There is a plot on the part of radicals to kill a high government official, but who dreamed it up? Was it the person entrusted to carry out the assassination, or was it the bomb-maker, the Fugitive? Maybe it was even the Person, he who directs it all (maybe). The designated killer and the Fugitive both obsess over ten days until nothing is clear to either. The reader too is often left befuddled until the action circles around again and more is revealed and then a bit more.

This world of obsession and hallucination makes the omniscient narrator work hard; circling back, making connections, speaking up when things get too absurd. Nothing is sure until the very end, when suddenly everything is resolved.

This is a book I imagine people spend years studying, reading it over and over. Despite an excellent translation, I suspect it can only ever be fully grasped in the original Russian. This Pushkin edition did not have notes and they were sorely missed. Reading it, there was always a feeling of "If only I knew more about..."; "If only I knew more about the accepted stereotypes behind regions and family names"; "If only...". This is not to take away from the book in any way whatsoever. Rather, it is to suggest that there is always something more [Petersburg] has to offer the reader. As the quote from the New York Times Book Review on the back cover put it, this book is regarded by many as "The most important, most influential, and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the twentieth century."

This is a difficult book - at least it was for me. However, it is worth the effort and I am glad I persevered.
It meanders all over the place and time. The main plot is almost secondary to the many distractions along the way. The city itself is a primary character with many moods but mostly brooding and cold and menacing. ( )

Yana N.

Yana N.'s Reviews > Petersburg
Petersburg by Andrei Bely
Petersburg
by Andrei Bely, J.D. Elsworth (Translator)
44823137
Yana N.'s review
Oct 06, 2017 · edit

it was amazing
bookshelves: classics, fiction, russian

Amazing. I can barely find words to describe this book, not least because anything I write seems stale in comparison to Bely's prickly prose. Where to begin? Petersburg is not a novel that can be described - it is much greater than the sum of its parts, which themselves are considerable. A story about a father and a son, about a city and a swamp, about the absurdity of life. A summary? When Nikolai Apollonovich is charged with a mission to assassinate his own father by bomb, chaos ensues. And what chaos...

The plot itself takes the backseat to the unimaginably exceptional prose of this novel. The descriptions of hallucinations, of the ever-present Petersburg mists, of the tender gaze that burgeons between Apollon Apollonovich and Anna Petrovna - all of it is simply brilliant! There is such a richness of imagery, such inventive forms and metaphors, a fascinating use of recurring images and fixed expressions as in an ancient epic, a wealth of biblical allusions and style that makes one's heart pound in visceral reaction. The depth of abstract feeling that assails the characters is rendered to perfection in its intensity and complexity. The density of prose and opaqueness of certain turns of phrase do nothing to take away from that experience of perfect unity with the characters, with the city, with Bely's entire universe, which sucked me in and still won't let me out. There is even something fitting about the fact that I didn't understand everything, that certain references went over my head and that more than one or two words might have necessitated a trip to the dictionary... This is not a book to be understood, but one to be felt in the flesh. I am simply beside myself, so I'll just stop here. Maybe when I reread Petersburg one day, I will manage a more coherent review. For now, I will just bask in the wonder that was this novel. ( )

Definitely a strange book. At first glance a Laurence Stern ramble full of digressions. But the book was written, rewritten and revised many times over many years. If it is a ramble it is a very deliberate one. A very conscious adoption of a specific style carried through with great imagination and persistence. A drift from figurative to impressionism tending towards abstract in literature rather than art. Thanks to the extensive footnotes a realisation that there is much, much more to this than a casual reading gives. ( )

I've read it a couple of times now. I highly recommend it - great book. ( )