Petersburg Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921

Pe tersb urg / Pe t er s bu r g

Petersburg/ Petersburg Novel and City, 1900–1921

Edit ed by

  

The University of Wisconsin Press

Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059 uwpress.wisc.edu 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England eurospanbookstore.com Copyright © 2010 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews. 1

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Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Matich, Olga. Petersburg/Petersburg : novel and city, 1900–1921 / Olga Matich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-299-23604-5 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-299-23603-8 (e-book) 1. Bely, Andrey, 1880–1934. Peterburg. 2. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—In literature. 3. Saint Petersburg (Russia)—History—20th century. I. Title. DK552.M38 2010 947´.21083—dc22 2010011538

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

vii ix

Introduction

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Par t O n e: Pe tersb urg , t he N ove l 1

Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance

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Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg

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Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics

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Par t Two : Pet e r sburg, t he Cit y 4

“The Streetcar Prattle of Life”: Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams

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How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse

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The Enchanted Masquerade: Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets          

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Contents

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Panoramas from Above and Street from Below: The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin

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The Button and the Barricade: Bridges in Paris and Petersburg

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28 Nevsky Prospect: The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative

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Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination

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The Fluid Margins: Flâneurs of the Karpovka River

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The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok

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Concluding Remarks

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Postscript. St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology

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Contributors Index

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Illustrations

Cover of inaugural issue of Voron Olga Rozanova, cover of Vzorval’ Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son Francesco Cabianca, Saturn Edvard Munch, The Scream Andrey Bely, Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov Cover of Shtyk Wassily Kandinsky, The Last Judgment Andrey Bely, Angel Wassily Kandinsky, Diagonal Tensions and Countertensions with a Point Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, October Idyll Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow Wassily Kandinsky, Lady in Moscow Vague Selfish Affection Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Barbershop Window Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, City Types Wassily Kandinsky, Black Spot Map of St. Petersburg’s tram network Cover of Osip Mandelshtam’s Dva tramvaia Nicholas II Masquerade ball at the home of Countess Kleinmikhel Tauride Palace and Tauride Gardens Rotating drawbridge of Trinity Bridge Alexander III Bridge Advertisement for the Singer sewing machine Russian Singer Girl vii

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Karl Bulla, photograph of woman in Russian national costume Cover of Singer Family Calendar Butchers at work at Aux Gourmets, St. Petersburg Still shot from Dziga Vertov, Kino-glaz Grenadier regiment barracks on Karpovka Embankment Dmitry Mitrokhin, On Karpovka Eric Owen Moss Architects, design for Mariinsky Theater RMJM Group, design for Gazprom Tower

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Preface

My interest in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg is longstanding. I have taught the premier novel of Russian modernism throughout my academic career, but only recently have I ventured to subject it to serious examination. The initial impetus for this work was Russian Modernism and Its International Legacy, the very ambitious and beautifully designed Web site by Scott Mahoy that is being constructed at the University of Southern California by the Labyrinth Project, which is directed by noted film and new media scholar Marsha Kinder. I was one of the members of the original team, consisting of Marsha, the art historian John Bowlt, and film scholar Yuri Tsivian, that conceptualized the multimedia digital teaching resource. Inspired by new ways of thinking about narrative and by the possibilities of the digital medium, I started an informal graduate seminar at Berkeley on the relationship of the novel Petersburg and the coeval capital of late imperial Russia. From it emerged the Web site Mapping Petersburg, which the authors of this volume created together with Web designers Chris Palmatier of the Berkeley Language Center and Irina Kuzes, an independent designer. I invite you to visit the Web site at any point while reading “Petersburg”/ Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921.1 One of the unusual aspects of the Petersburg project is not that a novel gave rise to a Web site, but that the Web site engendered the scholarly book that you are about to read. The reverse would have been the more common sequence. The printed book and electronic site while closely related can be read and used without reference to the other, although in tandem they offer a new, richer intellectual experience. Please see the introduction for the description of “Petersburg”/Petersburg and the concluding remarks for a discussion of Mapping Petersburg. We hope that the volume cum Web site will be of interest not only

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to students and scholars in the Russian field but also to readers interested in modernism and modernity as well as in the study of cities.2 The book is divided into two parts: Bely’s novel is the focus of part 1, of which I am the author; the city of St. Petersburg is the focus of part 2, which was written by current and former graduate students in Russian literature and Russian history at the University of California at Berkeley. This multiyear collaboration, including on the Web site, has been one of the most satisfying and intellectually stimulating endeavors of my academic life. I hope that the reader will find the results illuminating too, not only as scholarship and as a teaching resource but also as a potential model for working with students. Over the years we met four to five times a semester, sometimes more, reading and discussing studies of St. Petersburg from the beginning of the twentieth century as well as contemporary scholarship on new approaches to the study of cities. We also met to comment on each other’s work. Even though some of the students have gone on to teach and moved elsewhere, the intensive collaboration has continued, and even though finishing a Web site is notoriously difficult, ours is finished. The process of searching for new and interesting corners of St. Petersburg’s history and topography that had not been uncovered before has been a truly exhilarating aspect of this project. Especially rewarding were the wonderful moments of serendipity resulting from the discovery of unexpected new verbal and visual material that we came to associate with the negotiation of cities, their traversal by residents and visitors. We came to regard such moments of serendipity as resembling the Web experience. The Division of Humanities at Berkeley has made the original project possible by helping fund the construction of the Web site. I would like to single out Mark Kaiser, the associate director of the Berkeley Language Center, who provided us with the necessary equipment, and for making Chris Palmatier, the Web site’s original designer, available to the project. The authors of this volume owe a debt of gratitude to Chris for having launched the Web site. Our gratitude also goes to Irina Kuzes, who agreed to finish designing the Web site for less than her standard fee because of her interest in the subject. Irina was indefatigable in her detailed precision and in her timely completion of the site. I wish to thank my research assistants during this period, all of whom were also involved in the Petersburg project as participants in the seminar and then as authors of the Web site or book, in most instances of both: Mieka Erley, Stiliana Milkova, Cameron Wiggins, and especially Lucas Stratton and Alyson Tapp. I am grateful to Marsha Kinder for spearheading Russian Modernism, which led to Petersburg in all the forms it has taken in my scholarship and

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teaching. Finally, Gwen Walker, the editor at Wisconsin University Press, who supported the publication of this volume through its various stages, deserves our warm thanks for her thoughtful and always timely advice.  1. Mapping Petersburg (http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html) essentially covers the same time period as Russian Modernism and Its International Legacy (http://www.russian modernism.org/), which has clearly defined pedagogical goals and includes creative assignments to be used individually or in the classroom. It has such a pathway for Bely’s Petersburg, as well as pathways for the Russian visual and cinematic arts and for cultural history, some of which—those that are relevant to our Web site—can also be accessed directly from Mapping Petersburg. 2. Except in instances where another form of romanization has become common usage, we romanize the Cyrillic in Russian names, both personal and topographic, in accordance with the simplified Library of Congress transliteration system (fg, yg > y, ë > yo, ] > ya, | > yu, g > y, soft and hard signs in the middle of words > y). Unless otherwise indicated, the contributors have provided the translations from Petersburg and other Russian texts.

Petersb urg / Pet e r s bu r g

Introduction     

Peripety, or reversal of fortune, punctuates the history of Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, and of Andrey Bely’s (1880–1934) modernist novel of the same name. The city arose from treacherous terrain that Peter the Great chose in the extreme northwest of the country for his new Europeanized capital. In the prologue of Petersburg, the narrator, adding to speculation about the city’s idiosyncratic existence, proclaims that “if Petersburg is not the capital, then there is no Petersburg. It only appears to exist. However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center.”1 Bely’s novel, according to the narrator, surges from a dot on the map as if to assert the direct affiliation of novelistic writing and mapping in a city that has a long textual history. It would become known in Russian literature as the “Petersburg text,” which has shadowed the actual city since the nineteenth century. The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, rose from the formidable marshy terrain around the Gulf of Finland to rival other European capitals in grandeur and architectural beauty, only to suffer a series of cataclysmic peripeties at the beginning of the twentieth century: a renaming at the beginning of the First World War, when it became Petrograd, to suppress Petersburg’s Germanic etymology; the loss of status after the Bolshevik revolution, when the capital was moved to Moscow; and the loss of its original affiliation with the name Peter, when Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in honor of the new revolutionary myth associated with Lenin and with the city as the “cradle of revolution.” In keeping with the eschatological myth of Petersburg—and its cataclysmic 3

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demise—the city was gradually stripped of its identity. The most horrific peripety for its residents was the Leningrad Blockade during the Second World War, when the city literally starved and froze for nine hundred days.2 Yet after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city repossessed its original name and much of its external splendor. Despite the peripeties, the heart of St. Petersburg has essentially managed to maintain its eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century appearance—a combination of baroque and neoclassical architecture—even though the city’s architectural face was contested periodically. In the words of Michel de Certeau, Petersburg is the kind of city that has mastered “the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts.”3 During the period examined in “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, the city’s architectural visage was contested by style moderne (Russian art nouveau), which Nikolay Antsiferov, one of Petersburg’s leading preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century, lamented, referring to the “anti-architectural style of style moderne [as] a sickly growth on the majestic organism of the city.”4 The exemplar of this style was the House of Singer on Nevsky Prospect, Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. The building was constructed by the American sewing machine company between 1902 and 1904 on the site of an original eighteenth-century building demolished by the American company. As the firm’s headquarters in Russia, the House of Singer, a high-end office building, became an emblem of modernity and of the city’s burgeoning capitalist economy. Like the city itself, the House of Singer was renamed after the revolution—the House of Books—and became the largest bookstore in Leningrad. And like the city, it has recuperated its original name and original grandeur recently, becoming a regular stop on the city tour as a landmark of two of Petersburg’s pasts, prerevolutionary and Soviet, as well as its post-Soviet capitalist present. Tourists and residents alike can sit in the cafe on the second floor and through its bay window enjoy the largely unchanged panoramic view of the beautiful historical city. Characterizing the history of the city, peripety also marks the publication history of Petersburg, written between 1911 and 1913; the first book version of the novel appeared in 1916 (the Sirin edition).5 Although it was immediately acclaimed as a major work of Russian literature, critics did not recognize the full extent of the novel’s groundbreaking literary experiment, which would later influence such Soviet writers as Evgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pilnyak, Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovsky, Konstantin Vaginov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Andrey Platonov. At the time of Bely’s death in 1934, Zamyatin and Pasternak would proclaim him the equal of Marcel Proust and James Joyce, both of whose masterpieces appeared after Petersburg.6 Many years later, Vladimir Nabokov

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would name Petersburg as one of the four literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, alongside Ulysses, the first half of In Search of Lost Time, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.7 Bely revised and shortened the novel in 1922, during his peripatetic sojourn in Berlin, and published it there serially. This shorter version of Petersburg—with additional cuts by Soviet censors—was published twice during Stalin’s time: in 1928 and, posthumously, in 1935. Afterward, in the era of Stalinist cultural politics, which suppressed most forms of modernism, Petersburg was removed from circulation, and the 1928 edition was returned to the Russian reader only in 1978; the longer, prerevolutionary 1916 version, only in 1981. The canonic English translation (of the shorter version) by Robert Maguire and John Malmstad appeared in 1978 and is still in print.8 As a result of its suppression in the Soviet Union for more than forty years, public discussion of Petersburg only appeared abroad until the late 1970s. Despite the extensive corpus of important historical and textual criticism, the novel still awaits a more complete reading of its relation to modernism.9 Like the prerevolutionary capital, Bely’s novel is an exercise in peripety and peripatetics, the latter meaning “movement or journeys hither and thither.”10 The city novel represents a peripatetic nexus of modernity and modernism, which are characterized by fragmentation, contingent urban experience, and overstimulated senses and nerves causing psychological disorientation. Georg Simmel describes this relationship in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) as “the rapid telescoping of changing images [. . .] and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli.”11 Concerned with the emotions and nervous systems of city dwellers, he defines modernity as “the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of [. . .] our inner life, and indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents, in the fluid elements of the soul [. . .] whose forms are merely forms of motion.”12 Simmel’s terms are remarkably similar to those of Bely’s novel, in which motion characterizes narrative and the distinction of outer/ inner is demonstrably blurred, as are the consequences: the peripeties of the characters’ shattered nerves and inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Bely was familiar with the writings of the neo-Kantian sociologist, which were avidly read by the music critic and his close friend Emil Medtner, but we do not know which of Simmel’s works Bely knew.13 Petersburg ’s working classes and bomb-throwing revolutionaries, who inspired terror in Russia and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, exacerbate the experience of modernity as urban sensory shock. In the terms of the novel’s aesthetic paradigm that originated in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, they pose a Dionysian threat to the aristocratic Apollonian metropolis (the

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Apollonian principle stands for rational form and order; the Dionysian, for ecstasy and chaos). Petersburg, set during the 1905 Revolution, is represented as a phantasmagoric dreamworld in flux, as if portending Walter Benjamin’s 1935 description of Paris of the Second Empire based in part on Baudelaire’s writing. Despite the manifest intersection of modernity and modernism in Petersburg, there are no serious studies of their dialectical relationship, including in regard to the city or vice versa—of coeval St. Petersburg in relation to Bely’s novel. Nor has anyone offered a sustained inquiry into the novel’s genre, affect, and affiliation with the visual arts. “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921, which is divided into two parts, attempts to do both. Part 1 is devoted to a new reading of Petersburg as a detective novel, as an exploration in disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text, all of which are considered in regard to the city. Part 2, whose starting point is Bely’s novel, is a study in cultural geography, literary criticism, and the subjective experience of space with the purpose of illuminating the late imperial capital from new vantage points. The essays examine Petersburg’s unexplored everyday life and material, political, and literary culture through the prism of the city as text: its everyday activities, architecture, and material objects that inform narrative and the ways the city of the belle époque allows itself to be read (or not); the relationship of public and private space; and the more general affinity of urban space, modernity, and literary modernism. The essays are linked to a Web site titled Mapping Petersburg, a virtual part 3, which traces related pathways through the coeval city.14

Urba n Pha nt a sma gor i a Much has been written about Benjamin’s phantasmagoria—his metaphor of modernity originating in the magic-lantern show and urban spectacle of real and imagined images and shadowy apparitions—and about his critique of commodity fetishism as defined by Marx. Benjamin’s famous statement that the “world dominated by its phantasmagorias [. . .] is ‘modernity’”15 resonates with Bely’s evocation of the city in an eponymous 1907 essay as a sinister living organism that “has transformed the city dweller into a shadow: the shadow, however, did not suspect that it was spectral.”16 The image would travel to Petersburg in a few years—whose streets “flow in the veins like a fever.” Bely studied Marx in the mid-1900s and made references to the commodity fetish in his own writing.17 The essay figures the modern city as a harlot hurling handfuls of “diamonds, sapphires, and rubies at the sides of buildings” that flash on and off as they advertise the commodity fetish in the city’s shop windows:

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“Here is the outline of ‘Omega’ [watches], like a constellation, flickering ruby lights from the top of a five-story building.”18 Such images of Nevsky Prospect will also appear in the novel. What is most striking about this essay, however, is the affiliation of the sinister glittering city with cinema, the new visual technology that seems best able to represent modernity’s phantasmagoric spectacle of shock experience. The affiliation moreover would be reified in the 1920s when Bely himself adapted the novel to the screen, although the film was never made. As Yury Tsivian writes, Bely refers to contemporary trick films in the essay on the city, including W. R. Booth’s 1906 The “?” Motorist, whose peripetic and peripatetic plot he describes in some detail: the wild ride of an automobile through the city and its subsequent fantastic flight in which electric signboard lights morph into meteors—an image that will travel to the novel as well.19 The eponymous city in Petersburg is emblematically modern, referencing electricity, automobiles, telephone, telegraph, and (albeit anachronistic) electric tram— the grids of modernity that map city space.

S pac e a nd Time, M a ps, Po i n t o f Vi ew One of the key cultural questions regarding historical and contemporary cities is the relationship of time and space in urban cultures. In 1967 Foucault claimed that contrary to the nineteenth century’s obsession with history, [ T]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space.20

Instead of development in time, Foucault privileges spatial contiguity, multiplicity, and an ocular paradigm, foregrounding the displacement of time by space, also emphasized by his older contemporary Henri Lefebvre.21 Building on Foucault’s claim, the prominent postmodern social theorist Edward Soja emphasizes the importance of geography and the spatial imagination in the study of cities: “Geography may not yet have displaced history at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism, but there is a new animating polemic [. . . around] the interplay of history and geography, the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’

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dimensions of being in the world freed from the imposition of inherent categorical privilege,” that according to Soja have allowed us to revise “the relations between history, geography, and modernity.”22 The essential claim of this volume in this regard is that Petersburg and Bely’s novel as spatial structures can be studied productively against and in regard to each other. In this it follows Bely’s lead—that the city and novel are inextricably linked by a dot on the map, the original spatial record of a city, from whose “point swarms the printed book.” According to Shklovsky, Bely’s fiction represents a novelistic shift from plot to complex image-making—a spatial endeavor, which Shklovsky associates with one of Bely’s favorite images—the “swarm,” likening it to the “disintegration of form in a cubist painting [. . .] a series of shards” that create a meaningful whole only very gradually.23 The image, moreover, connotes an anthill or beehive, a metaphor for the novel’s unshaped human mass that subverts the sense of cartographic clarity (and linearity) proclaimed by the narrator of the prologue. In this sense the swarm portends the novel’s illegible, or unreadable, anonymous circulating crowds as it announces its key spatial concern: motion that is related both to a readable cartographic view as well as to a view that cannot be read. It is as if at the end of the prologue we descend from a bird’s-eye view of Petersburg (and of Russia) into the thickness of a bustling city, defined by the circulation of language in the form of Bely’s novel (and endless bureaucratic circulars), and into the density of the circulating anonymous crowd on Nevsky and working masses from the islands threatening to cross the bridges from the islands. Maps by definition picture geographic space from a bird’s-eye view, imposing spatial order on unruly space. Their vantage point represents a position of surveillance and control—what Foucault and then de Certeau defined as panoptic vision—as well as of exploration and conquest of new terrain. In regard to the mapping of cities, Soja writes that “every city is to some degree a panopticon, a collection of surveillance modes designed to impose and maintain a particular model of conduct and disciplined adherence on its inhabitants,” in which the centralized state has played an ever growing role.24 When used as a navigation tool at street level, maps can be said to manage the human swarm by making the city readable as they organize individual itineraries through the city by visitors and residents. In the instance of some major metropolises, Google Maps has made the relationship between the two mapping views of the city vividly palpable with actual street-level views of the city. Bely’s Petersburg reflects the panoptic view of the city, not only in abstract terms—by referencing the map and official circulars—but also in the ubiquitous presence of policemen on the streets, guarding official buildings and

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monuments, and of detectives, as well as double agents, who simultaneously enable and subvert the policing function of this modernist Petersburg text. As Robert Alter suggests in Imagined Cities, Bely has created a disjuncted urban narrative that resembles “the suspense-generating mechanism of the detective novel” set in a modern metropolis in which “there are menacing forces at work, lurking dangers, dark mysteries to be solved.”25 Spies police the human centipede—the swarm—into which the young revolutionary Alexander Dudkin disappears— to become part of the crowd described as “viscous flowing sediment.” Petersburg tells the story of a detective terrorist-cum-Oedipal plot against a high-level bureaucrat and keeper of order, appropriately named Apollon Apollonovich. Detective fiction, a product of urban space, represents authorial desire for making the labyrinthine city—which Bely’s certainly is, despite its rectilinear prospects—and its secrets readable, despite their surface impenetrability. Petersburg ’s characters literally map the novel’s topography26 as they walk, run, travel by carriage and confront each other on Petersburg’s streets, squares, and bridges, passing by its most familiar landmarks as well as its dark byways and alleys. The novel’s spatial epistemology is defined by several kinds of grids, starting with the map and the concept of perspective and order, which represent Apollonian control and surveillance. Yet the exploding bomb—the motor of the plot—and its imaginary and real aesthetic shock reify the simultaneously terrifying and fascinating aspect of modernity, defined as Dionysian, that fragments and dissolves narrative and representation, what can be described as an anarchist, or terrorist, sublime that exceeds representation. Bely’s source for the bomb metaphor is very likely Nietzsche’s bold claim in Ecce Homo that he is dynamite. If we consider the Apollonian and Dionysian opposition in spatial terms, they can be said to represent two different points of view: the first apprehended from a distance and providing a panoramic perspective; the second, a close-up defined by an experiential perspective. Panoramic views of Petersburg, with its wide straight avenues and grand squares, were inscribed into the city’s architectural face from the beginning. Any city, its built environments and inhabitants, can be seen both from a panoramic distance and from what resembles a cinematic close-up in which representation is fragmented and contours may be blurred, though distance can have a similar effect of distorting the “real.” Yet contrary to de Certeau, the close-up is readable in ways that offer new insight despite the distortion. So even though the close-up view typically provokes a subjective response—which de Certeau associates with blindness and unreadability on the part of the pedestrian walking the city—it may also be seen as an alternate modernist view of reality that the reader is challenged to

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make intelligible. The binary spatial opposition of distance/close-up, especially the dizzying shifts of visual vantage points from which Bely represents the city and its inhabitants, produces a plurality of perspectives that the reader is called upon to imagine and experience. As in modernist painting, the distance between viewer and viewed is problematized. This contests perspectivalized space, for instance by foreshortening it; it also contests the hegemony of vision, for instance by engaging the other senses too. A striking example of the latter is MerleauPonty’s famous essay on Cezanne, in which he claims that the painter tried to represent objects through the prism of all senses, not just the visual;27 along the same line, Pierre Francastel on Renoir suggests that “he draws close to the model, touches, feels it with his eye and hand.”28 The close-up in Petersburg renders a similar reading experience—one premised on the problematization of perspectivalized space and on synesthetic bodily representation, including vision, touch, taste, and smell, which Bely challenges us to feel and know. In Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, a classic study of modernity, Bely’s novel acts as a virtual reification of the title, not in its original Marxist sense (the phrase comes from The Communist Manifesto and refers to social relations under capitalism), but literally.29 Even Petersburg as a place on the map is unstable: the prologue’s dot on the map is later transformed into astral space that exists in the phantasmic “fourth dimension” not indicated— that is, seen—on maps. And Bely’s experiments with transmogrification and dissolution of form can be seen as the product of a kind of melting, images of which actually appear in the novel.

The Pe t er sburg Tex t Bely’s novel is generally considered the prerevolutionary culmination of the so-called Petersburg text in Russian literature, which is associated with some of the most important nineteenth century Russian poetry and prose fiction by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and many others. It is a virtual compendium of canonic Petersburg texts, ranging from Pushkin’s fantastic narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, which highlights the city’s bestknown monument, and novella The Queen of Spades and Gogol’s sinister Petersburg Tales to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. All of them are defined by walking, running, and riding along Petersburg streets as the characters map different locales of the city. In regard to urban space, the Petersburg text, quite predictably, was originally set in the aristocratic city center and moved gradually to the peripheries in the course of the nineteenth century, so that Crime and Punishment

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takes place only in marginal locales, including the islands, not in classical city sites.30 Charting a modernist vision of the Petersburg text, Bely represents its selfreflexive, intertextual essence in relation to the artfully constructed and majestic, yet sinister and dying, city. Bely’s Petersburg certainly corroborates the Underground Man’s claim about the northern capital: that it is “the most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world;”31 indeed, it is precisely its rational, planned character that is problematized in the novel. What Bely takes from his forebears is both the intentional and fantastic, or phantasmagoric, apocalyptic vision of the imperial city in which statues come to life to haunt its inhabitants, the devil lights the gas street lamps on Nevsky Prospect, and an impoverished young radical kills a predatory old woman. Bely, however, was not a resident of the capital, which likely contributed to its defamiliarized representation. The Petersburg poet par excellence of Bely’s generation was Alexander Blok, his poet-twin, who figures prominently in part 2 of this volume. Significantly, Blok was not only a Petersburg resident but also a peripatetic poet who strolled the city, especially its margins, for hours on end late into the night to write memorable urban poems. Vladimir Toporov’s “Petersburg and ‘the Petersburg Text’ in Russian Literature” (1984) offers the most complete scholarly articulation of the imperial city as text and its attendant mythology.32 The relationship was originally articulated by the city’s preservationists at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in Nikolay Antsiferov’s The Soul of Petersburg (1922), which emphasizes the power of genius loci (spirit of place) and the indissoluble bond of the city and its literary representation—what we would call the discourse of Petersburg. Besides authoring several important literary guidebooks to the city, Antsiferov was one of the founders of the excursion movement in the 1920s, the account of which has recently appeared in Emily Johnson’s How Petersburg Learned to Study Itself.33 The movement emerged as a response to the spread of capitalism and the city’s rapid commercial expansion, which gave rise to new architectural tastes and, in turn, to Petersburg’s preservationist concerns. Katerina Clark has aptly described them using Georg Lukács’s expression “Romantic Anticapitalism,” claiming that Bely may be considered under this rubric too,34 even though it was precisely the impulse to represent modernity that inspired his premier modernist experiment in the Russian novel. The World of Art movement of the turn of the twentieth century and its journal Mir Iskusstva were at the forefront of these concerns and their attendant retrospectivism. Its most devoted proponent was the artist Alexander Benois, who sounded the threat to the neoclassical architecture of Old Petersburg,

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whose last historical expression, according to him, was the “empire” style developed in the reign of Alexander I.35 He called on artists to represent the beauty of aristocratic Petersburg, not just its menacing and fantastic myth.36 The threat to historical Petersburg, as he and his colleagues perceived it, was the proliferation of eclectic, decorative architectural styles of the second half of the nineteenth century, especially of pseudo-Russian orientalism. Most importantly, they perceived modern bourgeois Petersburg and capitalist expansion as threatening their historicist vision of the aristocratic imperial capital.

Ci ty G uidebooks—From Above a n d Bel ow Benois also lamented the lack of good guidebooks to Petersburg in 1904: “A Russian who wanted to get to know his capital has had to fall back on the foreign Baedeker. But the Baedeker for Petersburg is not at all as well composed as the classical guidebooks to Germany and Italy by the same publisher. We still have not had our Naglers, Burckhardts, Passavants, Cavalcaselles— which Baedeker is able to use so effectively.”37 During the 1910s, the city’s preservationists Vladimir Kurbatov, Peter Stolpyansky, and Georgy Lukomsky wrote guidebooks to the imperial capital, emphasizing its neoclassical architecture and the Petersburg myth in Russian literature. Although the purpose of this volume is not to shed further light on the aristocratic Petersburg that Benois lamented, part 2, as well as the attendant Web site, can be described as a guidebook to aspects of the city’s still unexplored material culture and everyday, as well as artistic, revolutionary, and commercial life. Yet our approach to the city bears affinity to the recommendations of Antsiferov and his mentor Ivan M. Grevs, a medievalist and professor of St. Petersburg University and Bestuzhev Women’s Courses, who developed a methodology for an excursionist approach to the study of historical urban centers in Italy. He viewed historical cities as living organisms to which he applied what he calls an “anatomical” approach, “charting [their] growth, transportation arteries, and economic cells, first with the help of historic maps and then through carefully designed excursions.”38 Antsiferov, a student of Grevs, went on a memorable excursion to Italy in 1912 as a member of his seminar on Dante. The younger historian would adopt his mentor’s views in his writing about Petersburg and excursion primers, including the conceptualization of the city as a “living organism,”39 which was also Bely’s vision. Antsiferov’s city, moreover, has a soul. Whether its body is diseased, like the nineteenth-century industrial city that needs to be anatomized in order to be cured, raises a different kind of

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question, one that the physiologists of the natural school had addressed in their sketches with the idea of introducing new parts of the city into literature and also of raising the reader’s social consciousness.40 In regard to introducing new parts of the city, part 2 of this volume may be said to follow in the physiologists’ footsteps. Returning to Antsiferov, here is how he describes the initial steps of studying cities in The Soul of Petersburg: Professor I. M. Grevs recommends starting the “conquest” of a city by visiting some kind of elevated spot. [. . .] in Rome to climb Janiculum Hill or the Gardens of Monte Pincio; view Venice and Florence from the height of their wellbalanced campaniles; Paris—from Montmartre Hill, from the cupola of the basilica of Sacre Coeur. I. M. Grevs appropriately notes that perspectives from a bird’s-eye view are not very appealing aesthetically, but they offer a great deal for the study of topography. And really, everything appears flat, all irregularities are erased, before us is a barely outlined bas-relief that approximates a plan. But the spectator gets the opportunity to see the city framed by surrounding nature, and without it the image would not be complete and consequently would not be perceived as an organic whole. We will feel here the air of place which the city breathes.41

The genre of city views painted from above was directly linked to cartography, which became an independent genre in the seventeenth century; prints of these paintings were often made by mapmakers. According to Guiliana Bruno, “the bird’s eye view was a permeable space of encounters between the map and the landscape [. . .], staged as fabricated spatial observation that opened the door to narrative space.”42 Antsiferov’s claim regarding Grevs’s prescribed bird’s-eye view resembles de Certeau’s description of the panoramic perspective of the city, discovered by medieval and Renaissance painters, as offering a “voluptuous pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’”43 despite his otherwise privileging the lived space of the pedestrian, who uncovers urban locales that have been forgotten. Like other theorists, de Certeau follows Foucault’s lead by claiming that the panoramic view is an expression of panoptic vision, in the sense of space as a complex of social relations defined by power and regulation. Whether Grevs had a sense of the power that later twentieth-century theorists would assign to panoptic vision, his reference to “conquest” and mapping do suggest an awareness of the virtual control of space and human geography from a bird’s-eye vantage point; so does his perception of the totalizing view as erasing irregularities by making the city below look flat and anonymous, thereby locating the viewer in a position of power resembling de Certeau’s “voyeur-god.”44

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Grevs’s view of the city from above is also associated with the mastery of the city’s individuality: in the case of Petersburg, writes Antsiferov, it must begin from the cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, from where one will recognize the will—and power—of Peter the Great. Antsiferov’s view evokes The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Quasimodo views the city from the bell tower of the cathedral. According to Roland Barthes, it represents Hugo’s perception “that to the marvelous mitigation of altitude the panoramic vision [of Paris] added an incomparable power of intellection.” In his famous essay on the Eiffel Tower, modernity’s site of mastering the bird’s-eye view before aviation, Barthes claims that the panoramic view represents the will to readability: the viewer tries to identify the landmarks below from memory, an important aspect of any definition of place. Moreover, “the tower looks at Paris,” writes Barthes,45 just as Petersburg ’s stone caryatid, witness of the city’s history and human swarm, looks at the Russian metropolis from its elevated position; and as the Admiralty Tower would do if it had “the gift of sight,” notes Petersburg urban historian Grigory Kaganov;46 or as Vyacheslav Ivanov and Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal’s Tower, a celebrated elite intelligentsia meeting place, looked at Petersburg below in the 1900s. The bird’s-eye view of the city in Bely’s novel belongs not only to the caryatid and The Bronze Horseman—whom Antsiferov endows with an eagle’s gaze—but also to the narrator and Apollon Apollonovich: riding to work past important city landmarks, the senator looks at Petersburg from a fantastic aerial perspective, as if his carriage had taken off into the sky as in the trick film that Bely describes in “The City;” this perspective may also stem from the fascination, shared by Bely with his contemporaries, with astral flight, and, according to John Bowlt, inspired by the new technological developments in aviation.47 Predictably, Antsiferov names as the capital’s genius loci Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, who overlooks the city from his pedestal on the Neva embankment and at whose commanding presence, Antsiferov proposes, the pedestrian gazes from below on a windy autumn evening. Like Bely, Antsiferov describes The Bronze Horseman as phantasmagoric: as “fire turned into copper with sharply defined and powerful shapes” that “produce the anxious question: what next? [. . .] Victory or rupture and ruin?”48 Bely asked the very same question several years earlier. In keeping with the apocalyptic figuration of Peter’s city in the Petersburg text and the novel’s explosive, metamorphic imagery, the fiery equestrian statue, abandoning its pedestal on Senate Square, as in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman, pursues the troubled young anarchist, Alexander Dudkin, and in the end flows “into his veins in metals.” The metamorphosis of the statue and momentary fusion of the Bronze Horseman and young revolutionary reveal what Antsiferov, writing after the revolution, would call Petersburg’s tragic

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imperialism, which, he seems to imply, contained the seeds of its own destruction from the beginning: this conflicted imperialism led to revolution and the city’s demise, both lamented and aestheticized by Antsiferov.49 The Bronze Horseman, located on a huge rock on Senate Square, commands a view of the city across the Neva River, but the statue is also the object of the street-level gaze from below, not only of a distant view from across the river. In Bely’s novel the Horseman inhabits the view at ground level after abandoning his pedestal and galloping through the city and up the stairs to Dudkin’s garret. There the statue becomes the object of a surreal close-up as it melts into the young anarchist’s veins, just as Dudkin melted into the oozing crowd on Nevsky earlier. The Horseman’s fusion with his revolutionary “son” makes Peter unreadable in de Certeau’s terms, that is, after he leaves his panoptic position on the Thunder Stone, or in the terms of the opening sentence of Edgar Allan Poe’s famed “The Man of the Crowd”: “It was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.”50 Considered from the perspective of modernist poetics, however, the fusion serves as a surreal performance that challenges Bely’s readers to read it in the terms of the new aesthetics and thereby overcome the fusion’s illegibility, suggesting that illegibility is in the eye of the unpracticed reader as beholder. The same can be said of Bely’s “illegible” close-ups of the metropolis, which become readable if we penetrate the modernist images that represent the novel’s urban phantasmagoria. Following Grevs’s recommendation that a city excursion must be connected to the city’s literary achievements, Antsiferov locates Petersburg’s other genius loci in Russian literature, claiming that Pushkin created the image of the imperial city as much as did Peter. As a result, most of The Soul of Petersburg is devoted to the Petersburg text in Russian literature, with the examination of Bely’s novel taking up more pages than any other single work. In this regard too, the referencing of the novel in our essays devoted to the city follows Antsiferov’s approach. Like the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov before him—who suggested the title Petersburg to Bely—Antsiferov claims that its hero is the city itself, which according to him becomes a “supra-personal being,” one that is represented from a plurality of perspectives: historical, futurist, climatic, colorist, metamorphic, fantastic, demonic, mythical. And despite the novel’s shadowy spectral aspect, he considers it to be an excellent guidebook to the city: “it is easy to lead excursions based on Petersburg,” writes Antsiferov, which according to him also offers a “bird’s-eye view” of the city as a whole.51 As a professional guide to his beloved city in the early Soviet period, he should know whether the novel worked as guidebook. Yet the prominent scholar of Petersburg Leonid Dolgopolov would in all likelihood have disagreed with Antsiferov’s

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assertion: instead of topographic verisimilitude, Dolgopolov emphasized the novel’s inexactitudes, suggesting that Bely was concerned not with the real but with an imaginary Petersburg.52

Le ss Fa milia r Ang l es Part 2 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg focuses on the lesser known history and geography of the imperial metropolis on the eve of and right after the Bolshevik revolution. While its timeline is different, it resembles in this regard the approach of Julie Buckler’s Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape by examining the “middle ground” of the city’s life.53 Like Buckler, part 2 retrieves new, often marginal, names, places, and objects from the city’s memory that have not been accorded magical power before, introducing new constellations of urban meaning to exist side by side with the familiar magical names and locales associated with the Petersburg text. To name a few that have languished in plain view: the city margins, such as the Karpovka River or city slaughterhouse on Zabalkansky Prospect; material objects, such as the electrical tram, bomb, and Singer sewing machine; architectural sites, such as a turn-of-the-century apartment house, office building, and bridge. Their subjection to historical analysis reveals the underlying core of our project. In this regard our volume resembles contemporary studies in cultural geography, which seek new geographic places and objects to explore and which emphasize cultural questions located at the intersection of structuralism’s binary oppositions, such as high/low, above/below, or center/periphery. Soja calls such an approach “thirding-as-Othering”—his response “to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to only two alternatives. [. . .] In this critical thirding, the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively from the two opposite categories to open a new alternative.”54 Without claiming a postmodern agenda or that of hyperreality, as does Soja, this volume explores “thirdspace”—for instance, as located between the standard spatial opposites of the static panorama and mobile street view of the city; the latter is defined in the terms of peripatetic movement and a participatory perspective. Rather than figure thirdspace as postmodern, we prefer to emphasize how it is already present in and emerges from the representational practices of modernism itself, because modernism also brought opposites together as it inflected them. The most palpable instance of this was film, the newest art form of modernity, meshing panoramic and close-up views. Perhaps the difference between them

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lies in the theoretical practices and agendas of postmodernism that have chosen to promote the principle of thirdspace to methodological mainstay. Grigory Kaganov shows that the collapse of the panoramic and street-level views into one characterized some graphic figurations of Petersburg already in the second half of the eighteenth century, even though the standard perspective was to deploy only one of them. He calls the view from above “a gaze from outside” (vzgliad izvne); the second view he calls “inside gaze,” suggesting affect and a more immediate, intimate engagement with that which had caught the eye of a pedestrian closer up and was invisible from a distance. Appearing only at the end of the eighteenth century according to Kaganov, the latter prefigured the romantic and subsequent realistic sensibilities focusing, as they would in the nineteenth century, on human experience.55 The synthesis of the two perspectives in one image opened up “the inner duality of Petersburg space,”56 revealing, so to speak, the kind of spatial uncertainty, instability, and affect that would come to characterize modernism and the modernist exemplars of the Petersburg text.

Par t One: Petersb urg , t he Novel Fragmentation and disjuncture are the defining representational principles of Petersburg: body parts displace the body whole; fragments of the cityscape, the city whole; fragments of narrative, the narrative whole. The narrative can be described as being on the move, moving relentlessly toward the explosion of the ticking bomb intended for the high-ranking government bureaucrat. Yet that movement is retarded by the spatialization of narrative, which creates the sense that the novel takes place over a much longer period of time than it does. With the Russo-Japanese war and 1905 Revolution as backdrop, the peripatetic bomb—symbol of political disruption and a sinister material object producing sensory shock—ticks, traverses real and imaginary space, and causes novelistic peripety; it is swallowed, swelling in the body; intended for the father, it explodes in the mind of the son, as he imagines his father’s body splattered on the wall; and finally does explode, bringing the plot to an end. It motivates some of the peripatetic movement, back and forth, between close-ups and more distant views, as well as the spatialization of time. If the bomb is the material object that generates Petersburg’s fragmented narrative, its master trope is “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra) that engenders the novelistic metropolis and its inhabitants. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, “Petersburg is based on what Bely calls ‘the biology of shadows’ and ‘the cerebral game.’

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With Bely the city and the brain are in topological contact; [. . .] a continuum is continuously produced between visceral organic states, political states of society, and meteorological states of the world.”57 Cerebral play engenders, as I propose in the chapter “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance,” a paranoid narrative of surveillance to which everyone in the novel contributes, including the narrator. It inscribes a panoptic approach to the city and a regulatory, policing vision whose object is the terrorist conspiracy and whose purpose— though unsuccessful—is the reconstitution of order in a city under the sway of modernity’s sinister political forces. Yet “cerebral play,” whose prime mover is the shadowy city, is frequently characterized as “idle,” an epithet typically applied to the flâneur, whose idleness allows him to become a spectator in the city. It is the agent of daydreaming and stream of consciousness. In this function it lodges in the unshaped gray matter of the characters’ troubled minds and fuses mind and city. Such fusion offers another form of cohesion, one that is irrational and unsettling to the characters and readers alike. As the agent of the novel’s narrative, cerebral play can be said to be hypertextual: it simultaneously informs narrative surveillance, yet blurs all distinctions—between the real and imagined, physical and mental, body and space that the body occupies. One way to describe cerebral play’s function is to say that it is synthetic. In this regard it has the opposite effect from the bomb whose explosion produces spatial and temporal fragments. Moreover, cerebral play infects the reader, who is staged as virtual detective and who pieces the narrative fragments together to make the text readable. These menacing forces and dark mysteries inform the novel’s affect, which I explore in “Poetics of Disgust.” The essay focuses on the representation of the body as disgusting to the eye, touch, and taste—dissolving into bodily fluids, excrement, and a corpse—and as edible—the site of shocking cannibalistic desire. The body in Petersburg is Dionysian: it is torn to pieces or shown morphing into unformed shapes that threaten the Apollonian order of the city and its inhabitants and of moral and aesthetic norms. The body is grotesquely and mutably baroque, as is, I contend, the novel itself. The folding of space, movement, and time informs the novel’s will to baroque-like metamorphosis, typifying Bely’s transformational, often labyrinthine poetics.58 Characterized by movement toward and away from a viscerally, mentally, or morally aversive experience, the disgust response reinforces Petersburg ’s spatial poetics, which define its motional aspect. It resembles in this regard the representation of the city as movement between close-up and distanced perspective. What seems to interest Bely in relation to city space as well as to the affect of the city’s inhabitants is the relationship between the two perspectives and the

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ready shifts in point of view that emerge as a result of their interplay. The narrator offers an everyday metaliterary example of what he means by the spatial aspect of aversive emotion by describing what we do when stepping on a swarming anthill, one of the novel’s key self-reflexive “unreadable” images: we instinctively jump aside in shock and in disgust as we push away the experience. Critics so far have not considered the affective impact of the novel’s imagery and the aversive emotions that they engender in aesthetic and moral terms. The historicizing and narrativizing of emotions is a new field of critical inquiry; moreover, the reader’s emotional engagement with a literary text has been associated more readily with realistic fiction than with modernist writing. Instead of suggesting emotional identification, however, I argue that Petersburg challenges the reader’s emotional, moral, and aesthetic tolerance, gauging if and when the reader as spectator averts her mental gaze from the novel’s shockingly transgressive images. The test and attendant gesture of disgust premised on a close-up view and subsequent recoil can also be said to characterize the experience of modernist art, whose transgressiveness still challenges us today. The modernist high point of the Petersburg text, Bely’s novel can be called a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk that offers a synthesis of writing, poetic and prosaic, and the musical and visual arts. Petersburg’s structure has been described as musical, composed of repeated sounds, images, and whole passages of leitmotifs and of rhythmically orchestrated passages that deploy poetic meter, all of which have been widely examined in Bely scholarship. Robert Alter describes Petersburg as “an acutely visual novel,” yet its visual poetics, despite Nikolay Berdyaev’s brilliant reading of them in 1916, remain virtually unstudied.59 Comparing Bely to Picasso, Berdyaev calls him a cubist and describes the novel in terms of the breakdown and dissolution of all firmly established boundaries between objects. The very shapes of people are decrystallized and atomized, they lose the firm boundaries separating them from each other and from the objects of the surrounding world. The firmness, the limitedness, the crystallization of our fleshly world is dissolved. A man morphs into another man, an object morphs into another object, the physical plane morphs into an astral plane, the cerebral process—into an existential process.60

Instead of examining the novel’s cubist imagery noted by Berdyaev, “Andrey Bely, Wassily Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics” explores Petersburg in relation to expressionist aesthetics—as a counterpart to Kandinsky’s experiments in painting during the Munich period, which introduced a new visual language of expressive lines and abstract shapes to render the time’s apocalyptic

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anxieties. The essay also argues that Bely’s theoretical writing on art and anthroposophic experience can be aligned with Kandinsky’s vision, especially in the influential essay On the Spiritual in Art. Bely’s dematerialization of the word and perspectival shifts of the phantasmagoric city and its inhabitants that the reader must visualize and make intelligible are the focus of the chapter. In this regard his later comment about Pilnyak’s writing is telling. Bely told Shklovsky that it had the effect of a painting on him because he did not know how to view it—from a distance or close up, finding his readerly bearings only gradually.61 Bely’s response to Pilnyak’s prose (which in fact was directly influenced by Bely’s writing) and its unsettling impact resembles my reading of Petersburg and its effect on the reader. One of the most striking perspectival shifts in the novel is the visual representation of Nevsky Prospect close up and at street level, then from a great distance and back to a closer, but still panoramic, view, which I compare to three city paintings by Kandinsky. Each of the three urban perspectives in Petersburg inscribes our eye movement, as in a painting, from here to there, there, and there, and then back. The view of the city from a distance and inscription of the reader’s mental eye movement from here to there, not uncommon in the novel, reinforce the spatialization of the narrative. My three essays, then, focus on the displacements, or shifts, of urban space and its phantasmagoria as the novel’s characters negotiate the city at the nexus of external and inner, or fantastic, psychic space, which evokes Simmel’s vision of the modern metropolis. Even the mansion in which Apollon Apollonovich and his son live shifts its fashionable location on the Neva River. So we can conclude that what Bely explores are perspectival shifts of the phantasmagoric city and its residents that he represents in modernist terms—cubist and expressionist—and which the reader must visualize and make intelligible. My three essays are exercises in close reading that uncover the thickly layered meanings of Petersburg ’s multistoried metaphors that spatialize narrative. In hypertextual terms such metaphors may be described as superimposed transparencies that contribute to one of the novel’s key strategies—of simultaneity, which, as Joseph Frank suggested in his seminal essay in 1945, spatializes narrative, associating it with modernism.62 These essays are not intended polemically or conclusively, for as Maguire and Malmstad put it twenty years ago, “readings of Bely must honor his addiction to plurality and his concern with dynamism, the notion of continuous creation. [. . .] He intended that his readers should fend for themselves among a proliferation of meanings. Any reading must take account of the full range of contrasting, even contradictory elements in Petersburg.”63

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Par t Two: Pet e r sburg, t he C i t y Part 2 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg may be seen as a new historicist examination of the city: its architecture, material culture, literary, political, and quotidian life, and its economy of production and consumption. It does this from the theoretical and historical perspectives described earlier, exploring the ways urban space, material objects, and navigation of the city undergird the production of narrative. The city types that have inspired our approach are those of Benjamin’s collector, ragpicker, and Baudelairian flâneur, who seeks stimulation in crowds even though his primary inclination is to observe the city from a distance. Benjamin writes that “Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’”64 It is this kaleidoscopic view of the city that we have adopted in our virtual urban perambulations of Petersburg. The Parisian ragpicker, with whom Benjamin identifies, is “a man who has to gather the day’s refuse in the capital city. Everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed under foot, he catalogues and collects.”65 Like the ragpicker, we retrieve, collect, and historicize the marginal “historical refuse” and thereby contribute new urban entries to the Petersburg encyclopedia. The indisputable pleasure of collecting, which is often magical because of its serendipitous, chance aspect, characterizes the affect of the essays in part 2 and of the related Web site. They range from more traveled aspects of Petersburg to those that have not yet been traversed by scholarship, and in all instances they explore overlooked aspects of the Russian imperial capital. “How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse,” by Alexis Peri and Christine Evans, is devoted to one of the most famous assassinations of the late imperial period. But instead of its political consequences, the essay examines the terrorist plot through the writings of Boris Savinkov, one of the masterminds of the plot, and of Bely, emphasizing especially their representations of the city. It shows that minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve’s assassination was emblematic of the acute sense of crisis that accompanied Petersburg’s transformation into a modern metropolis characterized by sharp contradictions, impenetrability, and fragmentation—all of which raised new questions and opportunities for terrorists and writers alike. Alexander Blok, the volume’s other literary hero, is the main subject of two, if not three (see Barskova’s essay below), chapters. “The Enchanted Masquerade: Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets,” by Cameron Wiggins, radiates out from the premiere of the play in 1906 at the

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Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theater to the stage set that is Petersburg—which is examined as the backdrop of the playwright’s and actors’ relationships, masquerade balls, and late-night strolls through the city, along with its place in Blok’s poetry. Marking the mythologized end of St. Petersburg, “The Voices of Silence: The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok,” by Victoria SmolkinRothrock, closes part 2. The essay reconstructs the events through the reminiscences of contemporaries and examines their viewing of his corpse in the intimate setting of the family apartment and their participation in the public funeral procession through the city and burial at Smolensk Cemetery in 1921. Smolkin argues that the symbolic motif of silence associated with the death of Petersburg’s iconic poet, and more broadly with the symbolic death of the city itself, issued from the remarkable fact that during the funeral “no one spoke at the grave.” Ulla Hakanen’s “Panoramas from Above and the Street from Below: The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin” focuses on the different ways these two major figures of Russian modernism perceived and engaged with the urban spaces of Petersburg, including Ivanov’s famed Tower. It argues that one of the essential differences between their aesthetics and experiences of the self has to do with the ways they used the city to literally frame themselves— Ivanov, from the stable panoramic vantage point of his fifth-floor apartment, and Kuzmin, from multiple, ever changing, mostly street-level perspectives. Some of the city chapters concentrate more specifically on the city’s important landmarks. Lucas Stratton’s “The Button and the Barricade: Bridges in Paris and Petersburg” tells the story of the Trinity Bridge over the Neva River (1903) and its affiliation with the older Alexander III Bridge in Paris as a symbol of Russian-French unity and imperial power. The essay sheds light on the bridge as the will to connection and on its role as a spatial and textual metaphor of narrative mapped onto the city landscape. My essay “28 Nevsky Prospect: The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative” focuses on the House of Singer, the headquarters of the American sewing machine company in Russia, as a site of modern commercial life. It explores the figure of the seamstress as an agent of narrative in poetry and prose fiction, and it examines the company’s narrative strategies that informed Singer’s advertisement of the sewing machine to family households in Russia. Moving to the city outskirts, Mieka Erley investigates the city slaughterhouse on Obvodny Canal. In “Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination,” Erley assembles literary works, period travel guides, trade documents, and films to consider the industrialization of animal slaughter, representations of the human body, and modernist art movements in early twentieth-century

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Russia. She demonstrates that modernist artistic production was centrally concerned with the dismemberment, fragmentation, and dislocation of the body through the trope of slaughter. Although all the city chapters inscribe movement through the city, two do this more directly. Polina Barskova’s “The Fluid Margins: Flâneurs of the Karpovka River” reconstructs the experience of walking alongside the languid flow of the river, also located on the city outskirts. Barskova argues that at the turn of the twentieth century a new sense of urban intimacy emerged far from the city center, in the socially, economically, and architecturally mixed locale through which the river flows. She does this by focusing on Karpovka’s artistflâneurs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially Blok, and their literary and graphic representations of the city that blur the boundaries of time and space. Alyson Tapp’s “‘The Streetcar Prattle of Life’: Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams,” which opens part 2, follows the coming of the electric streetcar to Petersburg’s streets in 1907 and its entry into the literary imagination in the decades that follow. Pausing on some of the texts and city locations associated with the tram, the chapter acquaints the reader with the “city as text”—where the experience of movement is at once that of narrative and that of a most ordinary practice of everyday urban life. It shows that the tram can be made the bearer of a particular literary-historical narrative: Petersburg’s cultural experience of the crisis in novel form. The essays in part 2 offer what can be described as hypertextual fragments of St. Petersburg history. They examine both actual events and sites and reflect our approach to the city as existing at the intersection of time and space, with a particular emphasis on the latter. Although the timeline of the volume is 1900– 1921, the year of Blok’s death, some of the essays transgress the temporal boundaries as they move back and forward in time. The essays are linked to the Web site Mapping Petersburg, which consists of itineraries through the late imperial capital. While the book and Web site exist independently of each other, together they represent what can be called a Gesamtwerk—a synthetic study of novelistic, urban, and hypertextual narratives that offers an early twenty-first-century Petersburg text whose origin lies in the age of modernity and modernism.  1. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 2. 2. See the thematic cluster on the Leningrad Blockade in Slavic Review 69, no. 2 (2010), edited by Polina Barskova, who is one of the authors in Part 2 of this volume.

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3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 91. 4. N. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Leningrad: Leningradskii komitet literatorov. Agentstvo Lira, 1990), 27. 5. For a history of the different editions and publication history of Petersburg, see L. K. Dolgopolov, “Osnovnye redaktsii romana,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 569–83. 6. B. Pilnyak, B. Pasternak, and G. Sannikov, “Andrey Bely. Nekrolog,” in Andrey Bely: Pro et Contra, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, 2004), 851. 7. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), 57. 8. The first English translation, titled St. Petersburg, is by John Cournos (New York: Grove Press, 1959), which took many liberties with the original. There are two English translations of the Sirin edition of the novel, one by David McDuff (Harmondsworth: Grove Press, 1995), and one by John Elsworth (London: Pushkin Press, 2009). 9. The most extensive study of Petersburg is by the Russian scholar Leonid Dolgopolov (Andrey Bely i ego roman “Peterburg” [Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988]). The most recent study is by Timothy Langen, The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely’s “Petersburg” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). See also Vladmir Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 10. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Springfield, MA: MerriamWebster, 2003). The term “peripatetic” refers to the disciples and philosophy of Aristotle and reflects his practice of walking about the Lyceum in Athens while teaching. On peripatetics in Petersburg see Peter Barta, Bely, Joyce, and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 11. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 325. 12. Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, 3rd ed. (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923), 196, quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 66. 13. See Andrey Bely’s 1912 essay “Circular Movement,” in which he offers a list of the most influential philosophers in his intellectual development that includes Simmel (“Krugovoe dvizhenie,” Trudy i dni 4–5 [1912]: 67–68). For an examination of Bely’s essay in relation to Petersburg, see Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 96–144. Apparently, between 1893 and 1926 Simmel was translated into Russian more than into English (Frisby, Simmel and Since, 78), although it may very well be that Simmel’s essay on the metropolis was translated into Russian only very recently (in the contemporary cultural and philosophical journal Logos 3–4 [2002]). Simmel and Bely were both admirers of the leading Neo-Kantian Freiburg philosopher Heinrich Rickert, whose correspondence with Simmel represents an important philosophical dialogue of the time. Bely’s key essay Emblematics of Meaning (1909) was influenced by Rickert’s theory of knowledge and its exploration of the role of will and value in the definition of the truth. The essay also refers to Simmel: his view that the heteronomy of will is already present in the definition of practical reason as will (Andrey Bely, Emblematika smysla in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A.L. Kazin [ Moscow: Iskusstvo,

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1994], 1:112). Simmel and Bely appeared in the Russian edition of Logos, edited by S. I. Gessen, Emil Medtner, and F. A. Stepun and published by Medtner’s Musaget in 1910. Simmel’s essay was titled “K voprosu o metafizike smerti” (“Zur Metaphysik des Todes”) and Bely’s, “Mysl’ i iazyk” (“Thought and Language,” devoted to A. A. Potebnya and his key work, Thought and Language, 1862). Many years later in 1934, Bely would devote several pages to the enthusiasm of Medtner (one of Bely’s mentors) for Simmel’s writing (Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 306, 307, 326, 342). Among other prominent Russians at the turn of the century, Simmel influenced Peter B. Struve. The famous Russian philosopher Sergey Frank translated Simmel’s essay on Kant and Goethe, which appeared in Struve’s Russkaia mysl’ in1908 and which Bely clearly read. 14. http://petersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html. On Mapping Petersburg see “Concluding Remarks” in this volume. 15. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé [1939],” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 26. 16. Andrey Bely, “Gorod,” Arabeski, in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L. Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:324. 17. See, e.g., Bely’s 1907 and 1908 essays “Teatr i sovremennaia drama” and “Pesn’ zhizni” in Arabeski. A specific instance of Bely’s and Benjamin’s similar discussion of the bourgeois city is their view of comfort as antithetical to desirable social values. 18. Bely, “Gorod,” 322. 19. Yury Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (London: Routledge, 1994), 120. See Bely, “Gorod,” 323. 20. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 21. See especially Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1973), which does not figure in this volume, even though many of us discuss the emotional experience of lived space, but without referencing Lefebvre’s concept of “lived space,” because his ideological approach to the question is different from ours. 22. Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 115. 23. V. B. Shklovsky, Khod konia in Gamburgskii schet: Stat’i—vospominaniia. Esse, ed. A. I. Galushkin and A. P. Chudakov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 148. Shklovsky discusses Bely’s “swarm” extensively in regard to his next novel, Kotik Letaev, in “Andrey Bely,” Gamburgskii schet, in Gamburgskii schet, 227–31. Here is Bely’s disquisition on swarming in Kotik Letaev: “My first moments are—swarms; and ‘a swarm, a swarm— everything swarms’ is my first philosophy; I was swarming in swarms; I described circles—afterwards: [. . .] the circle and the sphere are the first shapes: coswarmings in a swarm” (Andrey Bely, Kotik Letaev, trans. Gerald Janecek [Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1971], 45). 24. E. W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journey to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imaginary Spaces (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 235. 25. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 92. 26. This is only partly true: the most important deviation in this regard is the shifting city locations of the Ableukhov mansion.

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27. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 9–25. 28. Pierre Francastel, “The Destruction of a Plastic Space,” in Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 394, quoted in Marin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 155n13. 29. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). Note that Sofia Petrovna in Petersburg is reading The Communist Manifesto. It is meant ironically because by then Bely had lost his enthusiasm for revolution and for Marx. 30. There is one panoramic view of the city, seen through the eyes of Raskolnikov as he crosses Nikolaevsky Bridge from Vasilievsky Island. It references only the cupola of St. Isaac’s, without naming it, and pointedly does not refer to The Bronze Horseman— the classical site in that vista. 31. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Michael R. Katz (New York: Norton, 1989), 5. 32. See V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i Peterburgskij tekst: mir, iazyk, prednaznachenie,” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003). See also Yuri Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 18 (1984): 30–45. Toporov’s essay was first published in the same issue of the journal. 33. Emily Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). For a discussion of Antsiferov, see A. M. Konechny, “N. P. Antsiferov—issledovatel’ Peterburga,” in Peterburg i guberniia: Istoriko-etnograficheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. V. Yukhneva (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 154–61; and A. M. Konechny and K. A. Kumpan, “Peterburg v zhizni i trudakh N. P. Antsiferova,” in N. P. Antsiferov, Nepostizhimyi gorod (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1991). 34. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 16. See also pp. 57–73. 35. Benois was affiliated with the Society of Friends of Old Petersburg and was the first director of the Museum of Old Petersburg established in 1907. For a discussion of the preservationist movement, see Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned. Benois famously contributed to the Petersburg text by illustrating The Bronze Horseman in 1904. 36. A. Benua, “Zhivopisnyi Peterburg,” Mir iskusstva 1 (1902): 3. 37. Review of D. D. Ivanov, Ob’iasnitel’nyi putevoditel’ po khudozhestvennym sobraniiam Peterburga, Mir iskusstva 6 (1904): 126–27. Quoted in Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned, 58. Bely makes ironic reference to the Baedeker guidebook of Petersburg in his novel some ten years later; in an allusion to the myth of Petersburg as a dying city, one of its shadowy characters claims that Karl Baedeker misleads the visitor by keeping mum about the “fact” that the capital city belongs to the world of the spirits, not of the living. 38. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned, 121. Bely describes the city as the earth’s brain and a living organism that forms a steel web around the individual (“Gorod,” 324). 39. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 9. 40. See especially the collection A Physiology of Petersburg (1845), which could be seen as a guidebook to previously unseen parts of the city.

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41. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 16. 42. Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002), 175–77. 43. De Certeau, Practice, 92. 44. Another source of our approach to the study of the late imperial city are the excursions around Petersburg for the city’s working class that Grevs pioneered after the revolution, having developed them first at the progressive Tenishev School in Petersburg. Johnson writes that “excursionism began as a campaign for pedagogical reform” at the beginning of the twentieth century, evidenced by the curriculum of the Tenishev School, which was established in 1898 (How St. Petersburg Learned, 98). Among its celebrated students were Osip Mandelshtam and Vladimir Nabokov, who famously contributed to the Petersburg text. A pioneer of the late nineteenth-century “real” school movement, which emphasized learning in situ, the school encouraged its teachers to take their students on field trips to real-life locations with the purpose of bringing the pedagogical curriculum to life. According to Johnson, there was a virtual pedagogical boom in school excursions by 1914. 45. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 1997), 175–76. 46. Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts, trans. Sidney Monas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 94. 47. John Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg 1900–1920: Art, Life and Culture of the Silver Age (New York: Vendome Press, 2008), 120–27. Cf. cosmic flight in Bely’s novel, or his comparison of spiritual flight to that of Count Zeppelin in “Teatr i sovremennaia drama” (Arabeski, 2:49). Also words fly in Bely’s writing. The narrator in Kotik Letaev claims that “imagining is knowing how to fly on words” (Bely, Kotik Letaev, 82). 48. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 19. 49. Vladislav Khodasevich writing about Petersburg of the early 1920s would say that “there are people who become more beautiful in the coffin: so it was apparently with Pushkin. Undoubtedly, so it was with Petersburg” (Khodasevich, “Disk,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 4-t., vol. 4, Nekropol’. Vospominanii. Pis’ma [ Moscow: Soglasie, 1997], 273.) 50. “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. Since the word “book” in German (das Buch) is of neuter gender, the correct pronominal form would be es (not er, as Poe has it) and the correct verb form is lässt. The Russian translation of the 1840 story appeared in Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading) as “Chelovek tolpy” in 1857; the French translation was by Baudelaire. 51. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga, 177–78. Regarding Ivanov’s role in naming the novel, see L. K. Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, 556–57. Bely’s contemporary, the Georgian poet and prose writer Grigory (Grigol) Robakidze, also wrote, in 1918, that “the real hero of the novel is Petersburg itself (this alone is something exceptional in world literature)” (Robakidze, “Andrey Bely,” in Andrey Bely, 466). 52. L. K. Dolgopolov, “Roman A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, 604–17. We can certainly identify Dudkin’s itinerary from his garret room on Vasilievsky Island across Nikolaevsky Bridge over the Neva River on the map. We see him next at the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street, where his eyes meet those of Senator Ableukhov riding to work in his carriage. Apollon Apollonovich’s drive

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from his house on the English Embankment is described in detail: he passes St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the equestrian statue of Nicholas I behind it, turning on Morskaya and from there on to Nevsky. After that his itinerary is unclear—the location of the government building where he works is not identified. As to Dudkin, Dolgopolov writes that he had two options of reaching the corner of Nevsky: along Neva’s embankment and past the Admiralty Building or along the same path taken by the senator. I would choose the latter since the narrator tells us that Dudkin was following him (Bely, Petersburg, 36). From the corner on Nevsky, he goes to a little restaurant on Millionnaya Street, which is a continuation of the Bolshaya Morskaya on the other side of Nevsky. From there his path becomes unclear, because the Ableukhov house to which Dudkin delivers the bomb has shifted to the Gagarin embankment, on the other side of the Winter Palace. The Maguire and Malmstad translation of Petersburg has a useful map of those parts of the city where the action of the novel takes place. 53. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–8. 54. Soja, Thirdspace, 5. Soja uses the term “thirdspace” to refer to changing ways of thinking about space; the term and concept have been influenced by the writing of Henri Lefebvre (The Production of Space, first published in France in 1974) and Foucault, to a lesser extent by Homi Bhaba. 55. Kaganov, Images of Space, 29–46. 56. Ibid., 49. 57. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 302. 58. For a discussion of the baroque in terms of the folding of space, movement, and time, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Deleuze considers folding, starting with the fold of fabric, a definitive aspect of the baroque. 59. Alter, Imagined Cities, 97. 60. Nikolay Berdyaev, “Astral’nyi roman (Razmyshleniia po povodu romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’),” in Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii, Sobranie sochinenii 3 (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1989), 432–33. The first version of Berdyaev’s essay titled “Pikasso” had already appeared in 1914. The comparison of Bely’s style to Picasso’s cubist practice was developed more extensively by G. Tanin (pseud. of E. Epshteyn) a few months later. For a discussion of the Tanin essay, see A. V. Lavrov, “‘Peterburg’ Andreia Belogo glazami bankovskogo sluzhashchego,” in Andrey Bely: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 173–77. 61. Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, 264. 62. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 3–62. 63. Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 144. 64. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 177. 65. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 79.

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Petersburg, the Novel

1 Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance     

The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor. It is a common saying that anything may happen behind our backs: transcendentally considered the thing has an eerie truth about it. . . . But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind.1

These are the words of the English detective writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton describing his fascination with the unknown figured as space behind our backs and its impact on those who happen to be located there. The observation was inspired by the Victorian artist G. F. Watts’s paintings of the human figure from behind. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), a metaphysical detective novel about bomb-throwing anarchists, police agents, and detectives, Syme—the man who becomes Thursday—remembers seeing Sunday, the godlike master conspirator, for the first time from his sinister back: When I first saw Sunday, [. . .] I only saw his back; and when I saw his back, I knew he was the worst man in the world. His neck and shoulders were brutal, like those of some apish god. [. . .] When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. [. . .] I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head was his face—an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure running in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as he ran. 31

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Syme concludes in his disquisition on the back that we know the world only from this perspective: “That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud” and so on. “We see everything from behind,” claims Syme, “and it looks brutal,” but if only we could locate the front of the world it will appear radiant to us.2 What makes Chesterton’s comments about the back and his representation of Sunday noteworthy for us is that Bely’s Petersburg, written a few years later, also features the back as its most prominent body part, equal in reference only to the lips.3 We remember the repulsive salmonlike lips of the double agent Lippanchenko, Apollon Apollonovich’s grotesque greenish ears, and Gogolian noses in the crowds on Nevsky and other Petersburg streets, but we probably don’t remember the backs.4 An online search of the text corroborates my claim that they are more common in Petersburg than ears and noses; noses are even located behind the back sometimes. Describing the rushing people on the streets of the city, the narrator tells us that a nose was smashed on someone’s back. In Bely’s representation of the modern city, its anonymous inhabitants and individual pedestrians traverse the city by following other pedestrians, including the relentless swarming crowds, from behind. Despite the multiple references to lips, the back carries greater meaning in the novel than any other body part, both in narrative and symbolic terms. Though there are fewer references to it, the mouth, discussed in the next chapter, is the only possible exception. There are more than 120 references to the back, not including the spine and spinal fluid, back of the head, shoulders, tail, and other semantically related lexical items.5 Fyodor Stepun’s analysis of the novel in 1934 reveals a similar readerly intuition: “Not only souls, but even bodies are taken apart: we see only heads, shoulders, noses, backs of heads, backs,” he writes, emphasizing, except for the nose, not the front of the body but its back.6 The first recorded comparison of Petersburg and The Man Who Was Thursday is by Roman Timenchik, who, according to Yury Tsivian, noted the affiliation of brain and bomb in both novels.7 As Alexander Lavrov has shown recently, Bely did read Chesterton’s novel, but he could not have done so before writing Petersburg, reading the work probably only in 1916. The Man Who Was Thursday was translated into Russian in 1914, after the publication of Petersburg in serial form, and Bely did not know English well enough to have read Chesterton’s novel in the original.8 The similarities between the two novels are indeed quite remarkable. Beside the anarchist conspiracy, police surveillance, double agency, apocalyptic sunsets, and prominence of Sunday’s back, modern London and Petersburg are represented as phantasmagoric apocalyptic cities populated by neurotics;

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men’s brains explode like bombs; law and order is contested by chaos and subversive political activity; reality has a dualistic—light and dark—visage; the body of the chief conspirator is repulsively fat and shapeless, the back of his head evoking the image of an eyeless face, as we saw in the quoted passage; and dominoes appear at masquerade balls, with the main characters generally resembling masks rather than psychological portraits and the chief conspirator in Petersburg appearing in costume at a masquerade ball. In an essay on detective fiction, Chesterton wrote that “the detective story is [. . .] a drama of masks and not of faces. [. . .] It is a masquerade ball in which everybody is disguised as somebody else.”9 Instead of direct influence, however, the similarities between Petersburg and The Man Who Was Thursday have something to do with imaginative literature’s response to the political bombings and attendant sociopolitical angst in Edwardian England and early twentieth-century Russia. A curious case in this regard was the apocalyptic terrorist novel Pale Horse (Kon’ Blednyi ) by Boris Savinkov, one of the masterminds of the assassination of the minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve, which served as the subtext of Savinkov’s as well as Bely’s novels. Savinkov, according to Bely, was one of the prototypes of Petersburg ’s young anarchist conspirator Alexander Dudkin.10 The Pale Horse, which Bely must have read, was published under the pseudonym Ropshin and serialized in the journal Russkaia mysl’ in 1909.11 Among the constants of this kind of fiction were terrorist anarchists— typically of foreign origin—spies, double agents, police, and detectives operating in a sinister—“phantasmagoric” in the terms of Walter Benjamin—modern metropolis full of intrigue. Bely’s chief conspirator Lippanchenko is described by the narrator as a Semite or a Mongol, suggesting alienness. Another wellknown example of the genre was Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent (1907), perhaps the first detective novel linked to actual political events and acts of terrorism in London. Like Petersburg, it represented characters associated with the anarchist plot as fin-de-siècle degenerates, a contemporary term for neurotics.12 And like Chesterton and Bely afterward, Conrad linked conspiracy and detection to cosmic chaos and deployed the human back in ways that are notable. According to Lavrov, Bely may have read Secret Agent after it appeared in Russian in Vestnik Evropy in 1908, shortly before he started working on Petersburg, but there is no evidence that he had.13 The detective story, an urban genre that emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, represents the dark side of the city as the space of danger with the purpose of making sense of modernity’s threat to traditional order. Chesterton writes in “A Defence of Detective of Stories” (1901) that the city in a detective

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story “is a chaos of conscious forces,” not unconscious ones. It is also a selfreflexive genre in the sense that it is about a narrative that examines itself, especially its plot, as it makes the modern city readable. Petersburg is certainly selfreflexive in more ways than one. To quote Chesterton once again on detective fiction: “Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney pots seems wildly and derisively signaling the meaning of the mystery. [. . .] there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol.”14 We could add that these characteristics also define the fiction with a terrorist plot that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and was inspired by modern urban anarchism. Even the master of the detective genre, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote a story in 1904 (“The Golden Pince-Nez,” from The Return of Sherlock Holmes) with such a plot, in which he associates anarchist activity in London with revolutionaries in Russia. It is from such a perspective that I will examine Petersburg, considering it through the prisms of double agency, police surveillance, and detection. Petersburg ’s references to Crime and Punishment, a crime novel, are a scholarly commonplace, yet Bely’s novel has not been examined in relation to the detective genre. Except for Robert Alter, it seems that no one has suggested such an approach, but Alter only refers to the relevance of the detective genre, without actually discussing Petersburg in its terms.15 Like Crime and Punishment, the story line of Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, the young revolutionary conspirator who is initially called the Stranger (we learn his name only later), contains elements of a detective story. Similarly, Petersburg abounds in policemen and detectives, but in contrast to Dostoevsky’s novel, double agency subverts their role of upholding the moral and social order, reflecting the ambivalent message of the terror and Petersburg’s subversion of the moral aspect of the detective novel. We are alerted to the detective genre in Petersburg by Dudkin, who tells Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov, to whom he delivers the bomb intended for Ableukhov’s father, that he is currently reading Conan Doyle. He also tells Nikolay that he is reading the book of Revelation, a history of Gnosticism, and the church fathers Isaac the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa. Except for Conan Doyle, the list consists of spiritual writing, suggesting that the popular Sherlock Holmes is appropriated by Bely into the spiritual sphere, on the order of Chesterton’s projection of the detective genre onto the plane of metaphysics.16 According to Abram Reytblat, Sherlock Holmes became a popular detective figure in Russia between 1902 and 1904, even though Conan Doyle’s books had appeared already in the 1890s. In 1904 the Sytin publishing house, one of Russia’s biggest publishers, brought out a collected edition of Conan Doyle as a free supplement to the popular journal Vokrug sveta (Around the World ), which

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contributed greatly to the enormous popularity of Sherlock Holmes in Russia that lasted for many years.17 Vladislav Khodasevich writes that Bely conceptualized Petersburg at the time when Russian society was rocked by the exposure of the tsarist Okhrana’s (secret police) perfidious policing of political and cultural life.18 The most unsettling event was, of course, the exposure of Evno Azef, the organizer of several important assassination plots and police spy, as a double agent in 1908. Bely writes that he served as Lippanchenko’s prototype, claiming that he was shocked to learn many years later that while he was working on Petersburg, Azef was living in Berlin—after the debacle—under the assumed name Lipchenko!19 The coincidence in names is truly astonishing. My approach to the novel, which can be described as an interrogation that places the entire narrative under surveillance, is an attempt to reread the novel in the context of the terrorist acts that both outraged Russian society and made it profoundly anxious about the uncertain state of affairs. The approach, which can be described as Foucauldian, resembles what D. A. Miller in The Novel and the Police calls an authorial “intervention [that] marks an explicit bringingunder-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative.”20 Bely does this precisely: just about everyone in Petersburg—except for the elder Ableukhov’s errant wife—spies on everybody else. Like in his other novels, suggests Khodasevich, he deploys “spies, eavesdroppers, and instigators” everywhere.21 Writing that the novel emerged out of a series of sounds and visual images, Bely claimed that he simply listened and spied on his future characters: “I didn’t invent anything; I only spied [ podgliadyval ] on the actions of the figures that appeared before me.”22 The obsession with surveillance helps explain Bely’s emphasis on the human back in Petersburg. Thinking synecdochally, as did Bely, it is an obvious object of surveillance, but Bely also makes the back a surreptitious spying vehicle. Like Gogol in the Petersburg Tales, in which body parts assume a supernatural life of their own, Bely fragments the body and endows its parts with “displaced” metonymic power. (I am using “displaced” in the Russian futurist sense of sdvig.) Among the more predictable body parts that are enlisted in the novel’s policing project are ears, which not only listen but look (in chapter 1, Apollon Apollonovich’s green ear looks at Dudkin from behind the carriage window), and eyes—the mainstay of detective fiction—which cast penetrating gazes and watch unobtrusively but are also subjects of displaced metaphors. Eyes and the gaze, real and phantasmic, inform the representation of bodies moving through urban space as rapid shifts, or displacements, of close-ups and views from a distance—for example, in the confrontation of the senator’s and

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Dudkin’s eyes on the corner of Nevsky at the beginning of the novel. Thus futurist sdvig becomes part of the novel’s detection project. But let us start with content. Petersburg abounds in anonymous policemen passing by other characters, standing on corners, and guarding public buildings and monuments. According to Khodasevich, Bely was personally obsessed by police surveillance, responding to the police in truly paranoid terms. What makes Khodasevich’s observation revealing is his comment that Bely imagined demonic conspirators located behind the backs of the police—whether it was the director of the department or a simple janitor.23 Petersburg is full of references to the policing activities of the Ministry of the Interior, with which Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the novel’s institutional vampiric ear, is affiliated; to double agents working both sides of the political conspiracy; to family members, especially father and son (Apollon and Nikolay Ableukhov) and husband and wife (Sofia and Sergey Likhutin) spying on each other by peeping into keyholes, bringing domesticity under surveillance as well; and, most importantly, to the narrator spying on his characters. In the self-reflexive discussion of his role in chapter 1, the narrator, in which he refers to himself as detective, speaks of the need to “investigate” (obsledovat’ ) the soul of the Stranger (Dudkin), whose party alias is Neulovimyi, which means “elusive” or “imperceptible”: one who cannot be caught. The narrator, like a detective, uncovers in this scene and elsewhere that which is hidden. The subsection “Our Role,” referring to the narrator’s and reader’s role (the reader is addressed directly in the subsequent subsection), begins with the following comment: “The streets of Petersburg possess one indubitable quality: they turn passersby into shadows; Petersburg’s streets, on the other hand, turn shadows into people” ( 36). So the narrative describes the streets in terms of back-and-forth reciprocal movement, which spatializes the narrative. The message is that the city is a slippery conspiratorial space in which identity is unstable, even unreadable. Transmogrification is accomplished by a process resembling cinematic double exposure or morphing, which Bely had described in his 1907 essay “The City.”24 Posing a threat to the narrative—and to the narrator, who may lose control of it at any moment—the phantasmagoric metropolis must be kept under constant surveillance. Walter Benjamin describes the Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century as a city during the “terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, [when] everybody will be in the position of having to play detective.”25 He also makes this observation in reference to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe (whose writings Bely admired), giving special attention to “The Man of the Crowd,” calling it the prototypical detective story.

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That story is set in shadowy London, in which a flâneur, idly observing the passersby from a distance through a plate-glass window, sees a man who arouses his interest and suspicion because he does not fit any of the standard city types that the narrator identifies using the principles of physiognomy, which had been popularized in the late eighteenth century by J. K. Lavater. He is compelled to follow the man of the crowd and is transformed from spectator into detective, a figure that pursues the clues, or traces, left by others. Poe’s story opens with the statement that “it was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst [es lässt] sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.”26 This is precisely what transpires: the anonymous narrator fails to read the soul of the anxious, shadowy “stranger” (the same sobriquet that Bely uses for Dudkin27), whom he follows in the labyrinths of London for twenty-four hours. The failure to read the stranger reflects the impenetrability—“unreadability” in Poe’s as well as Michel de Certeau’s terms28—of the modern man of the crowd. The narrator imagines him to be a criminal, suggesting that that the menacing urban crowds cloak criminals. This is also the underlying message of much of Petersburg: the narrator as well as the novel’s characters and readers are often at a loss as they try to interpret the conspiracies, terrorist and otherwise, that the author stages in the shadowy city, in which individuals—especially Dudkin— are swallowed up by the urban crowd, losing their individuality as they become part of its unintelligible, swarming human sediment. Especially striking in this regard is the scene in which he is absorbed by the repulsive “oozing sediment” on Nevsky Prospect, which the narrator describes in terms that prefigure Benjamin’s notion of urban shock experience: a “crawling shouting centipede,” whose utterances are “woven into one single [meaningless] phrase” that hovers over Nevsky (256).29 The message of “Our Role” is that the narrator, imitating the police, must investigate the city’s shadows (also called contours, silhouettes, shady types, etc.) by following them along city streets from behind, which evokes the novel’s spatiality, here defined as movement through the city. Tellingly, about half of the references to the back in Petersburg are to what happens behind it (za spinoi ), which helps explain the many references to backs, shoulders, and backs of heads.30 The narrator tells us that he must search public spaces before his characters enter them, straining to hear all conversation in the vicinity and interrogating them for “provocation” and “revolution.” What we may otherwise consider examples of modernist verbal experiment—the fragments of overheard speech, in which the novel abounds—become objects of suspicion and linguistic monitoring. Such intensive policing of speech contributes to the novel’s palpably paranoid narrative, which is inspired by the behavior and

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feelings of father and son, Dudkin and Lippanchenko, Likhutin and Nikolay’s love interest Sofia, police tails, and so on. In “Our Role,” the narrator discloses to the reader that he is Apollon Apollonovich’s secret agent who anticipates the senator’s desire to have the Stranger followed and investigated. The suggestion is that the narrator as the senator’s double has a complicit relationship with the perfidious secret police: Let us investigate the restaurant . . . We have merely anticipated the desire of Senator Ableukhov in the natural investigation that we have undertaken—that the agent of the secret police [okhrannoe otdelenie] would steadfastly follow in the footsteps of the stranger; the renowned senator would have also picked up the telephone receiver to pass on his thought to the proper quarters; luckily for him, he did not know where the stranger lives (but we do). We are accommodating the senator, and while the flippant agent isn’t doing anything in his department, we will be that agent. . . . What sort of agent are we, really? An agent—there is. And he doesn’t sleep, honest to God, he doesn’t sleep. (37)

After the Stranger disappears through the doors of the dingy restaurant, the narrator spies two silhouettes in the fog. He pretends to be looking into the clouds in imitation of an undercover agent, despite his having just put his role as detective into question, and lets the dark pair pass. The narrator and senator are also inextricably linked by the novel’s master trope—“cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra), which the former interrogates in a selfconscious passage at the end of the first chapter. Typically, the image is qualified as “idle,” suggesting the figure of the flâneur who, according to Benjamin, when confronted with the shadowy aspect of the modern metropolis is transformed into a detective. “Behind [the idleness of the flâneur] hides the riveted attention of an observer,” writes Benjamin, “who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight.”31 Petersburg ’s narrator may be termed a flâneurdetective whose sharp-eyed ability to surveil the city and its inhabitants turns his idleness into a useful occupation. So the cerebral play to which Bely’s narrator claims priority serves as the instigator of the phantasmagoric narrative. Yet he acknowledges that the Stranger is the product of the senator’s idle thought, a mental form of flânerie, an acknowledgment that reveals the narrator’s shadowy, or uncertain, identity too, and tells the reader that the senator is at once the product of the author’s fantasy and of his, the narrator’s, cerebral play: “Apollon Apollonovich has been spun from our brain” (56). In other words, the senator is the narrator’s double, and together in an unstable, shadowy collaboration, the two engender the novel’s plot based on surveillance: “And let the two shadowing my stranger be real shadows! These two dark

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shadows [ Lippanchenko and his side-kick Morkovin] will, indeed they will, follow on the heels of the stranger, just as the stranger follows the senator at close hand; the aged senator will, my reader, indeed he will, pursue you in his black carriage, and you will never, ever forget him!” (56). Significantly, like Lippanchenko, Morkovin is a double agent. The novelistic chase has been launched;32 the power of surveillance— linked to cerebral play and to the uncertain connection between the narrator and Apollon Apollonovich—has been established, with the reader becoming part of the shadow play, combining the activities of flânerie and detection. What we can conclude from this and the preceding passage is that the narrator also identifies with the police: he affiliates the imagination and the act of creation with the state, not only with the terrorist bomb throwing that pervades the novel. We can also conclude that instead of a single detective, the role is dispersed, which is characteristic of the anarchist spy novel such as Chesterton’s and Conrad’s. Petersburg ’s shifting spatial perspectives and planes of narration, which produce altered, frequently unreliable repetition of certain events, further disperse as well as subvert detection in the narrative. Such narration is reminiscent of representation in cubist painting, which fragments the point of view and engages the unexpected. It shatters the represented world into pieces with the purpose of reassembling them into a new creation characterized by what the futurist Kruchenykh in 1912 called sdvig. Some of the word paintings produced by Bely can be compared to an explosion of traditional representational forms, as if mimicking the effect created by the bomb, which fragments the immediate world into myriad pieces. Describing his creative process in Arabesques in 1908, Bely compares it to the action of the bomb-throwing anarchist: “My creative work is a bomb that I throw; life inside me is a bomb that has been thrown at me; a bomb striking a bomb—splashes of shards [. . .] the shards of my work are the forms of art [. . .] that explode my life.”33 Nikolay is compared to a bomb many times and tells Dudkin that he exploded like a bomb. The image serves as a figuration of the centrifugal, explosive aspect of the novelistic plot and structure. Speaking colloquially, Bely’s novel blows the mind; it blows the mind of its heroes. The bomb, an emblem of the unexpected, can be said to underwrite its disjunctive, fragmentary structure and its unexpected, explosive poetics. Caricatures of the effects of exploding bombs appeared frequently in the many satirical journals, including on their covers, that began to appear in large numbers after 1905—for example, in the journal Voron (Raven).34 Exploding bombs also appeared in avant-garde painting, especially during World War I.35 A Russian example coeval with Petersburg was Alexey Kruchenykh’s futurist

Cover of inaugural issue of Voron, a satirical journal, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)

Olga Rozanova, cover of Alexei Kruchyonykh’s book of poetry Vzorval’, 1913 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)

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book of poetry titled Vzorval’ (Explosivity, 1913), whose cover was illustrated by his wife, the Russian futurist Olga Rozanova, with an emblematic abstract representation of the futurist neologism. In the subsection “And His Face Glistened,” which follows “Our Role,” the narrator expatiates on the unexpected as figured by the adverb “suddenly,” to whose importance the reader has already been alerted, having been told earlier that “we will speak about suddenly later” (34). The standard narrative function of “suddenly” is to catch the reader unawares. Vladimir Toporov considers it one of the discursive markers of the Petersburg text, which according to him is headed toward destruction and which “suddenly” represents. Viktor Shklovsky, who claimed that Dostoevsky loved to deploy “suddenly” in his fiction, describes it as “a word about the fragmentation of life, about its uneven staircase,” whose unevenness no foot can forecast in advance.36 Shklovsky’s image of “suddenly” can be illustrated by the Bronze Horseman galloping through Petersburg streets and up the staircase to Dudkin’s garret, which appropriately is preceded by the adverb. The narrator of Petersburg describes “suddenly” as “that notorious word . . . which interrupts everything” (36). He then addresses and tells the reader that “Suddenlys” are known to you. Why then do you hide your head in your feathers like an ostrich as the fateful and inevitable “suddenly” approaches? If a stranger were to start talking to you about “suddenly,” you would probably say: “Kind Sir, excuse me, it must be that you are an inveterate decadent.” [. . .] you know . . . very well . . . the inevitable “suddenly.” [. . .] Your “suddenly” sneaks up behind your back, sometimes, however, it precedes your appearance in a room; in the first case, you are very upset: an unpleasant sensation develops in your back as if an unseen gang has shoved into your back as into an open door; you turn around and ask the hostess: “Madam, won’t you permit me to close the door; I have a certain nervous sensation: I hate sitting with my back to an open door.” [. . .] Everyone laughs. You laugh too, as if there were no “suddenly” here. Sometimes an alien “suddenly” looks at you from behind the shoulder of an interlocutor, wanting to sniff your “suddenly.” Your “suddenly” feeds on your cerebral play; it devours your vileness with pleasure, then it swells while you melt like a candle. If your thoughts are vile, having stuffed itself like a fattened, though invisible dog, “suddenly” starts to precede you everywhere [. . .] as if you had been veiled from the gaze by a black cloud invisible to the gaze: this is the shaggy “suddenly,” your loyal house sprite. (39)

Bely nominalizes “suddenly” and represents it from different spatial perspectives and invests in each one the threatening power of surveillance, as if

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“suddenly” has acquired what Foucault and Edward Soja affiliate with controlling panoptic vision (see the introduction to this volume).37 Moreover, the embodiment of a part of speech that refers to time—one of the many remarkable linguistic displacements in the novel—spatializes time by endowing it with a repulsive canine body. “That notorious word” represents the kind of selfconscious spatialization of narrative by means of multistoried metaphors that abound in Petersburg. As the novel’s reader is devoured by “suddenly,” the adverb takes over: it assumes the shape of a sniffing dog; growing fat, it precedes the reader in physical space, or it hides behind his back; in the end, it morphs into a repulsive black cloud filled with the reader’s vile thoughts. This astonishing chain of surreal metamorphoses has been engendered by the narrator and his penchant for idle cerebral play. But what do these metaphorized images have to do with the human back? Common in pulp fiction, especially detective writing, “suddenly” marks a narrative shift. There are countless instances of it in Petersburg, as there are in Crime and Punishment, in which “suddenly” appears only in its original adverbial sense. Bely’s discourse, however, suggests that the shadowy “suddenly” is dissatisfied with its humble adverbial role. When it expands beyond its grammatical boundaries, suggests the narrator, it instills readerly anxiety. An embodiment of evil, “suddenly” exists behind the back of the reader, who fears its unexpected, shocking appearance—for instance, through an open door. Of neuter gender (tvoe vdrug ) and metaphorized as a sniffing police dog trying to detect “the reader’s” scent, the shaggy “suddenly” appropriates the role of detective for a moment, catching him unawares too: it sniffs out the scent of the conspirator—be it a bomb thrower or double agent—from behind his back. In the subsequent passage, in which the narrator returns to the figure of the Stranger that the senator would like to have investigated, “suddenly” morphs into slime—a demonstrably spatial category—that penetrates behind his collar and oozes down his spine, the most sensitive part of the body. Invisible at first, the formless repulsive slime morphs into the fat and formless Lippanchenko, a double agent, who emerges from the bloblike “suddenly.” The chain of transmogrifications suggests an incongruity: the fusion of “suddenly,” a point in time, and patently spatial slime. This paradoxical fusion of time and space reflects, I would suggest, the novel’s peculiar chronotope, symbolized by the suddenness of the bomb explosion and the attendant oozing body fluids that define Petersburg ’s timeless viscous imaginary (see the next chapter). The novel typically juxtaposes sudden, unexpected action, and expansive metaphoric passages in which viscous substances bring time to a virtual standstill, or

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as the narrative claims, time enters the “fourth dimension.” This is what I have detected after carefully surveilling the novel and after considering it in regard to Foucault’s claim that the twentieth century is an epoch of space in which simultaneity and dispersal have overtaken the earlier hegemony of time.38 The chain of disgusting transformations of “suddenly” ultimately reveals the uncertainty of the world of shadows and especially of time in it, punctuated here by the instability of the temporal adverb and the novel’s penchant for spatializing time: instead of a suspense-building point in time in a detective novel, Petersburg ’s “suddenly” paradoxically retards it. Herald of the unexpected and embodiment of the novel’s panoptic surveillance mechanism at its most duplicitous and all-seeing, Lippanchenko has a surreal second face on the back of his body, thereby controlling what happens behind him. Located in the deep fold of his neck, between the back and back of his head, this face is more monstrous than the other: it is eyeless, noseless, and toothless, like the terrifying second face of the chief conspirator in The Man Who Was Thursday quoted earlier. When Dudkin visits Lippanchenko later, he is struck by the second, monstrous face, which he hadn’t noticed before, and by the fact that Lippanchenko offers him his back “mockingly,” revealing the other face. In an effort to save face, Dudkin does the same. There ensues a power play, with the two taking turns turning their backs to each other and then turning around again. This results in the representation of the palpable body from all vantage points—front and back, back and forth—and in motion, like in cubist painting. Predictably, Lippanchenko, despite his discomfort (he senses some kind of danger) wins the game, remaining omniscient, which he had been up to this point as the novel’s policing double agent, more so than his narrator or his (the narrator’s) government patron Apollon Apollonovich.39 Lippanchenko seems omniscient until his sudden demise at the hands of Dudkin, who first slits open his back and only then his belly. In fact, instead of Apollon Apollonovich, the object of Lippanchenko’s terrorist plot, it is he who is killed in the end—by the hand of his subordinate. And even though Petersburg is premised on a conspiracy of evil, represented by Lippanchenko, his murder suggests the victory of the state and of the Ableukhov family, no matter how compromised both are: the senator survives the bomb explosion and is reunited with his wife; in the epilogue, he thinks lovingly of his son and anxiously awaits his return. To return to the conspiracy, however, and its affiliation with the back of the body: in the senator’s encounter with Lippanchenko’s menacing sidekick Morkovin, whose police name is Vorovkin, an anagram of the first, the narrative represents his double agency by featuring his back. Before identifying Morkovin

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with his fixed metonymic image—“the man with a wart”—it is displaced by his back: Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov [. . .] screamed [. . .] in pursuit of the back running somewhere . [. . .] But the back didn’t listen (actually, not the back, but the ears running above the back). [. . .] There the fleetingly glimpsed back stopped, turning its head there, and recognizing the senator, ran toward him (not the back ran toward him, but its owner—the man with the wart). (187)

Besides winking knowingly at the reader, the narrator highlights the affiliation of policing and double agency with Morkovin’s shadowy backside, playfully fragmenting the body into its constituent synechdocal parts: back, eavesdropping running ears, and, in the end, the familiar wart. But it is the back—metaphorizing and spatializing the unknown and danger—that interests us the most. In this regard, Apollon Apollonovich’s fear that he is suffering from tabes dorsalis, which he associates with death, is noteworthy. Ultimately then, the back in Petersburg is linked to death, the most feared unknown, which is lurking behind the senator’s, as well as Lippanchenko’s, back; everyone’s for that matter.40 As we know from detective narratives, certain details, especially seemingly insignificant ones, are invested with enormous import, because the secret in detective fiction is located in the seemingly insignificant trifle, not in obvious places: hence Chesterton’s claim that every twist in the street, chimney stack, and brick points to the mystery. Like the detective, we seek to arrange the insignificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation. I am not suggesting that meaning in Petersburg is hidden away in trifles, such as the “back” or “suddenly,” but the novel’s literary power lies in the unexpected verbal and bodily detail subject to displacement. The reader has first to detect, then decipher, and finally relish the displaced images that continue to fascinate us today, while those of us who are interested in Bely’s visual imagination take pains to identify the comparable visual practices of the time, whether cubism, which Nikolay Berdyaev proposed in 1916, or expressionism, as I will do in chapter 3. The multifaceted representation of the back in the scene in which Dudkin has crossed Nikolaevsky Bridge after delivering the bomb to the senator’s house and right after passing The Bronze Horseman is remarkable in this regard. He returns by way of the famed statue, which was guarded by a palace grenadier.41 The experiences dragged after him like a tail flying off, but invisible to the eye; Alexander Ivanovich experienced these experiences in reverse order, his

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The phantasmagoric image of a giant emerging from Dudkin’s back suggests the figure of The Bronze Horseman, the city’s genius loci and the novel’s symbol of panoptic power. It is as if the Horseman is suddenly inside Dudkin’s body, from which he breaks out—from the back. The suggestion is that the two were momentarily one, or that the Horseman is Dudkin’s double and that the duplicity, as in the discourse on Lippanchenko and “suddenly,” takes place behind the back. The description of Dudkin’s experiences of the day and their sequence embodies time and spatializes it. Moreover, it plays with the relationship of back and tail. As in English, the colloquial “tail” means “detective” in Russian and suggests that Dudkin is under surveillance, which he is—from all sides. It includes The Bronze Horseman, the most powerful tail of all and the allseeing panoptic eye of the city, who surveils it from a bird’s-eye view on Senate Square. So cutting the tail off, which relocates the tail into its animal context, refers to Dudkin’s desire to lose his pursuer, something that he imagines doing by crushing the tail between the door and door frame in his garret (recollect the open door through which “suddenly” enters), but as the narrator tells us, he will be unsuccessful. The image prefigures the Horseman’s later pursuit of Dudkin to his garret, where the former “pours into his veins in metals” (307)— one of the novel’s many metamorphic images—which reveals that the pursuer and pursued merge into one once again. The fusion—or is it displacement?— will be parodied in the end, as Dudkin sits astride Lippanchenko’s corpse, arm outstretched in the manner of The Bronze Horseman. And if we consider the shifting spatial distance between the Horseman and Dudkin, so characteristic of modernist representation, we can conclude that it reflects Georg Simmel’s description of it in Philosophical Culture (Philosophische Kultur, 1911) as “the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of [. . .] our inner life, and indeed as an inner world, the dissolution of fixed contents in the fluid elements of the soul [. . .] whose forms are merely forms of motion.”42 We are told that Dudkin refers to his experiences that day—in reverse order, like in a palindrome, from tail to back. In this regard, the giant emerging from his back evokes the earlier figuration of “suddenly” imaged as the slime

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that took the form of Lippanchenko, who had followed the Stranger into the cheap restaurant. Among the vile thoughts that “suddenly” feeds on may very well be those that concern assassination. After all, Alexander Ivanovich, himself a notorious revolutionary, had just delivered the bomb intended for Apollon Apollonovich to his son. Yet vile thoughts affiliated with the backside of the body may also suggest same-sex desire, which, I would suggest, is the repressed underside of desire in the novel that I will discuss in the next chapter. This hidden aspect of Petersburg is for us to detect, or not, and depends on our hermeneutic approach, whether we choose to “queer” the text or not. The most enigmatic image in the passage, however, is that drawn by the locution “experiences of the day smoked like a tail” (zadymilis’ khvostom). In an earlier chapter, Dudkin looks out the window from the Ableukhov mansion and sees “a network of black smokestacks very far away spewing smoke into the sky. And the smoke fell in the shape of tails above the darkly colored waters” (85). “Tail,” which in Russian also refers to a long streak of smoke in the shape of a coil, is used here in yet another figurative sense. This particular figurative meaning informs the image “smoked like a tail,” evoking the factory smoke stacks on the islands where Dudkin lives. Visually, the related collocation stolby dymovye (literally, “smoking columns”) brings to mind the colloquial phrase khvost truboi, meaning “not to lose heart”; literally it means to keep one’s tail high like a smokestack. In the larger context of the novel, the metaphor “experiences smoked like a tail” may be read as a reference to the revolution, which is going to hurl itself across the bridge from the islands in the shape of an anonymous and formless working-class mass, threatening the narrator, Apollon Apollonovich, and, we are told, the reader. Yet the collocation may simply be read as a literal reference to the tail of The Bronze Horseman’s steed on which the monument rests; it remains an architectural conversation piece even today. Immediately following the above passage and making a shift in the spatial cum temporal perspective, the narrator depicts the Horseman galloping to the Neva and stopping in his tracks with front hoofs raised, ready to leave the pedestal at any moment, so that the image of the smoking tail can also be perceived as a foreshadowing of the Horseman’s meteoric ride across the bridge to Dudkin’s garret, where he arrives in “very green billowing smoke” (305). The affiliation of the galloping Horseman and of the billowing smoke after the bomb explosion in the Ableukhov mansion later engages the novel’s revolutionary aspect as well, which is represented by the islands’ factory smokestacks. I have produced a meticulous close reading of this seemingly insignificant yet multistoried image to show the complex chain of displacements and metamorphoses deployed in Petersburg with the purpose of exploring its hallucinatory

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image-making that virtually brings novelistic action to a halt. It does this by spatializing time through a proliferation of images with multiple layers of meaning, or as Shklovsky would have it, by substituting image-making for plot. Bely’s displaced images resemble those that Vladimir Mayakovsky and the cubo-futurists used in great profusion. It is important to remember that the novel was coeval with the first radical experiments in Russian poetry by Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak, whose use of sdvig was not unlike that of Bely. Not unlike Bely, the cubo-futurists referred to bombs in discussing their experimentation with language. Describing the intended effect of the 1910 manifesto Sadok sudei (A Trap for Judges) on the symbolists, the artist Mikhail Matyushin wrote that they hardly noticed it, “considering the bomb an ordinary party cracker,” although in an unpublished manuscript, he claimed that “the little book . . . fell like a bomb into the meeting of ‘mystics’ at Vyach[eslav] Invanov’s. The Burlyuks very piously penetrated the literary meeting at Vyach. Ivanov’s ‘sticking’ the Trap into everyone’s coats, greatcoats, into each pocket a copy of the Trap.”43 The meeting significantly took place at Ivanov’s famed Tower, which in the spirit of Roland Barthes, or Petersburg’s caryatid, looked down on the city from its hallowed bird’s-eye view. Bely’s reader, in other words, must also be a detective who sniffs out the author’s displaced images, which frequently are hiding behind the backs of words. Even though the surface conspiracy is what the narrative ostensibly surveils, I believe that Bely wants the reader to investigate and decipher the hidden verbal representational conspiracy against the traditional literary order, the same one at which Bely and the cubo-futurists threw their metaphoric bombs. Accordingly, the early disquisition on “suddenly” may be seen as instructing the reader about the author’s strategies of displacement and morphing. Yet like Poe’s narrator as spectator turned detective, we remain unsure of the meaning of the text. It is not only the modern metropolis, with its multiple sign systems and grids, that makes Bely’s city novel opaque, or unreadable in Poe’s as well as Benjamin’s terms, but also the multiple interpretive possibilities of the multilayered images that the author deploys in it: the “pictures of illusions,” as the narrator tells us, the author hangs everywhere and takes down. Petersburg in the final analysis is a text that “does not permit itself to be read,” confounding finalized detection, like Poe’s “A Man of the Crowd.” It does, however, engage our readerly detective instincts, which offer widely differing interpretations of the novel’s many clues as we follow them from behind—at street level and from a bird’s-eye view—in the manner of the narrator and his characters. But contrary to what de Certeau writes (see the introduction to this volume), the close-up, or street view, is open to interpretation instead of being

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unreadable, despite the illegibility of the urban crowd, or in Bely’s terms, of the human swarm. What I am suggesting is that we consider the interplay of the following physical and mental spatial categories in the novel: back/front, close/far, and up/down.

I

f we consider Petersburg as thematizing surveillance from a Platonic perspective, however, its representation of the back, as well as that in The Man Who Was Thursday, evokes the allegory of the cave. Like Plato, Chesterton and Bely distinguish between spiritual and material space and between a higher, transcendent reality and the prison-world of appearances. The unenlightened, according to the allegory, have no access to the higher reality; they only see its reflection figured as shadows on the cave wall. In Petersburg there are countless such descriptions of shadows on the city walls and on the walls of the city’s interior spaces. As the narrator tells us, Petersburg streets “transform passersby into shadows” that are then projected onto the walls by the lights behind them. The Platonic allegory represents the unenlightened as prisoners chained to the cave, unable to turn their heads and see the fire that burns behind them, which in spatial terms suggests that they are unable to see the fire from a readable spatial perspective. That fire represents the unknown, which lurks behind their backs. They can only see the wall in front of them, onto which the puppeteers project shadows of people and of objects from behind. Because the prisoners are not able to see the real people and objects behind them, they mistake the world of appearances for reality. They misread it! In Petersburg the allegory of the cave can be applied to all the major characters, especially Lippanchenko’s prisoner, Dudkin. The novel’s sinister puppeteer has turned Alexander Ivanovich into a shadow, a condition from which he finds no exit except through murder. Despite his search for enlightenment—by reading Nietzsche, spiritual books, and detective fiction—and his desperate effort to disentangle himself from the sinister assassination plot, Dudkin fails to escape the cave and ends up going mad. As he tells Nikolay a few days beforehand, Lippanchenko has spread-eagled him on the wall of his attic room while also haunting him in the shape of a shadow—a damp yellow spot—on its dingy wallpaper. Whether Apollon Apollonovich and Nikolay Apollonovich gain enlightenment is highly debatable, although they seem to have achieved a kind of peace in the epilogue. In any case, they have escaped the claustrophobic modern city that is under total surveillance, which is trapped in the allegorical cave that cannot be read. They find themselves instead in the desert in North Africa or the wide expanses of Russia, away from Petersburg’s claustrophobic walls and able to see themselves and others more legibly from a peaceful distance. No

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longer the object and subject of detection, the son seeks enlightenment, first in ancient Egyptian teachings and then in the ideas of the domestic philosopher Grigory Skovoroda, who has been called a Ukrainian Socrates. Time moves slowly and evenly in the epilogue, in contrast to the body of the novel, where unexpected suddenlys are juxtaposed to hallucinatory images that interrupt the narrative flow to enhance the atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety. Although shadows of people and objects projected onto flat surfaces still figure in the epilogue, the narrative seems to have let go of its earlier obsession with what happens behind the back, what Chesterton describes as “the part of man that he knows nothing of.” The same can be said about the fascination of both novelists with “the strange impression produced [by the back] on those behind.” Although death lurks in the epilogue more than in the earlier parts of the novel, its unknown qualities are no longer embodied in the back.  An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Backs, Suddenlys, and Surveillance in Andrej Belyj’s Petersburg,” in Russian Literature, Special Issue: Andrej Belyj—On the Occasion of His 125th Birthday 58, no. 1/2 (2005). 1. G. K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), 62–63. 2. G. K. Chesterton, The Annotated Thursday: G. K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, annotated by Martin Gardner (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 245–46. 3. The only critics who have noted the importance of back imagery in the novel are its English language translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad. See the notes in Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 320. 4. Here is an example of a typical nasological passage: “Noses flowed in large numbers: eagle noses, rooster noses, duck noses, chicken and so on . . . ; a nose wrenched to the side and a nose not wrenched at all: greenish, green, pale, red and white. This all streamed toward them from the street: without meaning, hurriedly, in abundance” (Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov [Moscow: Nauka, 1981], 254). Subsequent page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text. 5. There are over 120 references to lips, 101 to noses (which were made famous in Russian literature by Gogol), 98 to ears, and close to 50 to mouths. 6. Fyodor Stepun, “Pamiati Andreia Belogo,” in Vospominaniia ob Andree Belom, ed. V. M. Piskunova (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 184. 7. Quoted in Yu. G. Tsivian, Istoricheskaia retseptsiia kino: Kinematograf v Rossii, 1896– 1930 (Riga: Zinatne, 1991), 345. 8. Alexander Lavrov, “Andrey Bely mezhdu Konradom i Chestertonom,” Andrey Bely: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 189. Soon after reading The Man Who Was Thursday Bely told R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik that he intended to write a novel in the manner of Chesterton, which he never did.

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9. G. K. Chesterton, “On Detective Novels,” in Generally Speaking (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929), 6. For a discussion of the masquerade ball in Petersburg, see the essay by Cameron Wiggins in this volume. 10. Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 65. 11. The Pale Horse is an autobiographical novel about a terrorist assassination plot in Moscow. For a discussion of Bely and Savinkov, see the essay by Alexis Peri and Christine Evans in this volume. 12. For a discussion of what was called degeneration, or degeneracy, in Russian culture at the turn of the twentieth century, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 13. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely,” 182–83. Secret Agent resembles Petersburg in uncanny ways, although as I have suggested, the similarities may be the product of the genre. Conrad’s novel is set in London—a sinister metropolis with a population that resembles ants or locust (I remind the reader of the description of the crowds on Nevsky as a swarm and a human centipede). The plot consists of political conspiracy and bomb throwing; a repulsive fat man as secret agent, police detectives, and members of high society are also part of what is a family novel. Some of the secret agents are Russian, recognizable in the first place by their names. (In The Man Who Was Thursday, an anarchist cum police agent whose name is Gogol is either Russian or Polish.) The Western press widely reported the terrorist activity in Russia at the beginning of the century. In his essay on Bely, Chesterton, and Conrad, Lavrov writes that the latter’s Under Western Eyes (1911) has even more in common with Bely’s novel, which had been essentially written by then. This novel, which was translated into Russian in 1912, takes place in the circles of Russian revolutionary émigrés in Petersburg and Geneva. Among other novels inspired by the notorious Azef affair (see Alexis Peri and Christine Evans in this volume) were Mark Aldanov’s Desiataia simfoniia (The Tenth Symphony, 1930), Roman Gul’s Azef (1959, a revised version of General Bo, 1929), and Rebecca West’s The Birds Fall Down (1964). Other European novels with an anarchist terrorist plot or subplot written at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries are Emile Zola’s Germinal (Souvarine, an anarchist who advocates violence, is Russian), Henry James’s Princess Casamassima (full of descriptions of shadowy London), and Frank Harris’s The Bomb (based on the anarchist bomb explosion at the Chicago Haymarket in 1886). 14. G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, ed. Alberto Manguel (Calgary, Alberta: Bayeux Arts, 2000), 282. 15. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 92. See introduction, p. 9. 16. Bely was a fan of Conan Doyle. We read in Nachalo veka that he recognized that a certain person described his spiritualist experience in the terms of a story by Conan Doyle (Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka, ed. A. V. Lavrov [Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 70). Describing his troubled relationship with the wife of Alexander Blok, Lyubov Dmitrievna, during 1906, he refers to the role of one of Blok’s closest friends, Evgeny Ivanov, as that of Sherlock Holmes, suggesting that he served as her private detective (Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 91). 17. Abram Reytblat, “Detektivnaia literatura i russkii chitatel’ (vtoraia polovina XIX—nachalo XX vv.),” in Knizhnoe delo v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX veka,

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vol. 7 (1994), 133. During those same years, numerous books by Conan Doyle were published by such commercial publishers as V. I Gubinsky, M. V. Klyukin, and D. P. Efimov. A complete works was published by P. P. Soykin in 1909, also as a free supplement to the journal Priroda i liudi. On popular detective fiction in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, see also Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 141–53. Among Russian writers of high literature that appreciated Conan Doyle was Vasily Rozanov, who considered Sherlock Holmes a modern defender of the higher good. Rozanov compared him to the fictional knight Ammadis of Gaul, writing that Conan Doyle’s work was inspired by Don Quixote and claiming that this similarity confirms his view of the modern fictional detective as a modern-day knight (V. V. Rozanov, Opavshie list’ia. Korob vtoroi i poslednii, in O sebe i zhizni svoei [ Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990], 382). Perceptively, Rozanov comments on the relationship between Holmes and Watson as a homosexual relationship and compares both to what he called “people of lunar light” (381–83). The comparison of Holmes to Quixote was also made by Chesterton, who called the detective a member of the “knight errantry” (Hanson, City and Shore, 18). This view of the detective is not reaffirmed by Bely. 18. V. F. Khodasevich, “Andrey Bely,” in Nekropol’ (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1976), 84. In describing the origins of Petersburg, Bely writes that the novel emerged during the difficult year of 1906. He suffered a breakdown because of his frenzied love for Lyubov Dmitrievna Blok, who, as she admits in her memoirs, tormented him with her uncertainty about whether to leave Blok for him or not (see Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 69–93). Their romantic triangle serves as the biographical subtext of the love plot in Petersburg. 19. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 435–36. 20. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 35. 21. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Ableukhovy—Letaevy—Korobkiny,” in Andrey Bely: Pro et Contra, ed. A. V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, 2004), 749. 22. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 435. 23. Khodasevich, “Andrey Bely,” 84. 24. See introduction, pp. 6–7. 25. Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 21. According to Benjamin, the transformation of the flâneur into a detective does him a lot of good socially, for it legitimates his idleness. I refer to the flâneur’s idleness in conjunction with the master trope of Petersburg—cerebral play (about which later), which is typically characterized as “idle.” 26. “The Man of the Crowd,” in The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. See introduction to this volume, note 50. 27. The sociologist Georg Simmel, who studied urban types, identified one of them as the stranger, about whom he wrote an eponymous essay. Simmel writes that the stranger exists simultaneously outside and inside the community, represented by the interplay of closeness and distance. He associates the type with a lack of roots, in the sense of fixed residence, and of local affiliation, which is how the narrator describes

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Dudkin when he first appears in the novel (Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Cultural Geography Reader, ed. Timothy S. Oakes and Patricia L. Price [ London: Routledge, 2008], 312–15). 28. See introduction, pp. 9, 15. 29. For a discussion of this scene, see chapter 2, pp. 67–68. The crowd in Petersburg is described in bodily terms, by means of body fragments, i.e., synecdochically: as noses, ears, beards, moustaches, shoulders, chins, etc. 30. There are no references to the back on the order of those in Petersburg in Crime and Punishment, but it is replete with references to “suddenly”—but only in the standard adverbial sense. 31. Walter Benjamin, “The Flâneur,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 442. 32. Besides the narrator, who follows his characters from behind, Nikolay Apollonovich follows Dudkin, Sergey Likhutin follows Nikolay, and so on. 33. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” Arabeski in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L. Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:200. Bely compared himself to Ivan Kalyaev, the bomb-throwing assassin of Grand Duke Sergey, in describing his frenzied state caused by his uncertain relationship with Lyubov Dmitrievna. The chapter in which he describes this state is titled “The Mask of the Red Death,” a reference to Poe’s eponymous story (Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, 79). 34. The titles of satirical journals commonly inscribed the bomb-throwing violence that was associated with the terror and with the 1905 Revolution: Moi pulemet, Shrapnel’, Bomba, Bomby, Puli, Zarnitsy, etc. Metaphoric, naturalistic, and caricatured images of exploding bombs appeared with great frequency in these journals and in the popular press, as did photos of the aftermath of some of the more notorious bomb explosions. 35. See, e.g., G. R. W. Nevinson’s A Bursting Shell (1915), which depicted flying shrapnel, spirals of flame and smoke, and ruins, and Georg Grosz’s Explosion (1917). 36. Viktor Shklovsky, Energiia zabluzhdeniia: kniga o siuzhete (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981), 279. 37. If Vladimir Toporov views “suddenly” as marking the modality of the Petersburg text (V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i Peterbugskii tekst russkoi literatury,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 18 [1984]: 27), Yuri Lotman (writing in the same issue of Trudy po znakovym sistemam, which was devoted to the semiotics of the city) suggests that the “suddenly” of Petersburg refers to its creation all at once by the “wave of the hand of the demiurge,” making such creation utopian and unrealizable (Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” Trudy po znakovym sistemam 18 [1984]: 35). 38. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22. 39. Gul’s novel Azef deploys the human back in ways that are remarkably similar to those in Petersburg. Azef feels danger with his back; Azef, like Lippanchenko, sits with his back to the others, and like Lippanchenko, Burtsev is described as turning into a sniffing dog that resembles Bely’s “suddenly.” Savinkov, the other central character, is also described from the back. Writing about his play Azef, performed in Paris in the 1930s, Gul’ remarks that what worked particularly well in the production was the way Azef ’s back was staged in act 1 (Roman Gul, Ia unes Rossiiu, vol. 2, pt. 2). 40. Bely’s obsession with the back was already in full evidence in his Symphonies, which abound in the collocation “behind the back,” especially in the Dramatic Symphony.

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In Snowstorm Goblet, the back is used synecdochically, just like in Petersburg: The old man “ran away from the nun with his black hunched back.” A few pages later, Bely depicts the past staring from behind a woman’s head: “The back that was saddled for her attracted her: there rose from behind the back a large, as if glass, head in a wreath of silver-white and gray hair that was, so to speak, baring its teeth at her love and looked at her with a long gaze” (Kubok metelei [Moscow: Skorpion, 1908], 206). 41. The multiple references to the back in this passage come right after the subsection depicting a general strike of students and the related massive policing of Petersburg’s streets and squares. For a discussion of the Nikolavsky Bridge, see the essay by Lucas Stratton in this volume. 42. Quoted in David Frisby, Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), 66. 43. Quoted in V. N. Terekhina, “Kubofuturizm,” in Russkii futurizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika, Vospominaniia, ed. V. N. Terekhina and A. P. Zimenkov (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 6.

2 Poetics of Disgust To Eat and Die in Petersburg     

The abject and the loathsome figure prominently in Petersburg. Its poetics are characterized by a striking grotesque metamorphic imagery that reflects a sensibility inimical to stable representation. The novel dissolves form, thematized, as we know, by the terrorist bomb—the source of Petersburg ’s fragmentary structure and imagery.1 Bely’s use of modernist, including cubist, fragmentation, however, does not tell the whole story, nor does the symbolist or parodic aspect of the novel. What such approaches to Petersburg overlook is its profound psycho-visceral affect that engages the reader’s simultaneous fascination and revulsion, both stimulated especially by those images that represent dissolution of form (including unshaped biomorphic images) and by those of the dying imperial city. It is my claim here that disgust animates Bely’s novel and that it represents its organizing affect.2 Disgust is an aversive emotion that regulates transgressive experience with the purpose of enforcing social and cultural taboos. It is typically performative. The disgusting in literature tests the reader’s affective tolerance, gauging if and when the reader as imaginary spectator averts her mental gaze from an image that provokes feelings of revulsion. Engaging the interplay of close-up and distance—key spatial parameters of the modernist representation of the city—the disgusting has the function of distancing the reader from a text displaying shocking visceral detail that produces emotional recoil. Disgust is always 55

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about borders, so that its deployment in the arts can also have a liberating function by pushing the boundaries of the sensibly and aesthetically permissible, which invites the reader’s or viewer’s fascination, even delight. In challenging our senses, the loathsome and shocking can produce delight precisely because they attack the norms of “civilized moral good” and traditional aesthetic beauty. The aesthetic sensibility that comes closest to inscribing such conflicted affect is the baroque, in the generic sense, which tends to extremes and to grotesque representation. In the words of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “the grotesque is preeminently the art of disgust.”3 Perhaps the most appropriate aesthetic label that we can apply to Petersburg is “assymetrical baroque,” which Bely ascribes to Nikolay Gogol’s writing.4 Unlike the French degoût and the English disgust, which mean “repugnant to the taste,” the Russian otvrashchenie comes from a verb that signifies motion. It refers to the gesture of literally pushing something away with the purpose of calming visceral and/or moral revulsion. The emotion is associated with taste, smell, and touch, suggesting an experience close up rather than distanced. As such, it is associated with the physical properties of decay, bad smell, sliminess, and stickiness. According to Norbert Elias, disgust marks the “threshold of repugnance,” which establishes normative social, moral, and emotional behaviors that serve the “civilizing process.”5 Turning to literature and using the threshold metaphor as a springboard, I would suggest that “disgust,” especially in the Russian, spatializes the text by creating a discursive space for negotiating the reader’s aesthetic, sensual, and moral values.6 In its spatializing function, it is also a fitting emotion for describing the conflicted affect evoked by the modern city and by urban sensory shock, as described by Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. Considered from the perspective of aesthetics, disgust reveals the reader’s, or spectator’s, response to dissolution of form, one of whose primary subtexts is the body that has crossed the threshold of death—the ultimate threshold of repugnance. In the words of Winfried Menninghaus, “every book about disgust is not least a book about the rotting corpse.”7 Death transforms the body into a corpse that will eventually dissolve into formless organic ooze—proscribed by classical aesthetics—which in the end turns into waste. “The corpse, the most sickening of wastes,” writes Julia Kristeva, “is a border that encroaches upon everything” and represents the infection of life by death.8 One of the most controversial corpses in the visual arts is Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, which represents Christ’s body as the site of death and decay—utter abjection, in other words—not of sacred and prophetic speech.

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Certainly the response to that painting in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which it has an important symbolic as well as emotional function, reveals feelings of profound anxiety in its viewers that subvert their faith in the resurrection. The gaping mouth, which features prominently in the Holbein, has its origins not only in the naturalistic corpse but also in the repulsive sight of food and the idea of eating it. If the previous chapter in this volume demonstrated that the back is the body part that best embodies the narrative of surveillance and paranoia, this chapter foregrounds the mouth as the source of revulsion. The underlying meaning of disgust suggests that our refusal to ingest spoiled food has to do precisely with affirming life and thereby warding off death, as well as with the dissolution of meaning that is ultimately rooted in death. Yet “death is the ‘other side’ of birth,” writes Bakhtin.9 Death in nature produces the generative rot from which new life is born with the purpose of perpetuating the organic life cycle. For the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his follower Andrey Bely, the life cycle was a philosophical source of revulsion precisely because it perpetuates death in life. In this regard, the loathsome in death is the generative excess that originates in putrefying organic matter. It represents the economy of life: people die and produce the fodder for new birth, and it is the relationship between life and death—the recognition that opposites coexist and dissolve into each other—that is at the heart of the disgust reflex. This recognition informs baroque and modernist decadent aesthetics, which bring together the paradigmatic binary pair of opposites, life and death. Even though the disgust response has been premised on the experience of something viscerally and morally intolerable from which we typically recoil, I would propose that it also mediates its legibility: the act of distancing helps make the disgusting readable in cognitive terms and facilitates a moral, as well as a considered, aesthetic response. Such is the impact of Goya’s profoundly disturbing Saturn Devouring His Son, the cannibalistic figure that underlies Bely’s Petersburg.10 That nightmarishly grotesque painting, which represents a cannibalistic close-up, produces recoil. I would propose that the gesture of recoil also helps the viewer read—contemplate from a distance—the horrific representation. A considered, cognitive response is after all contingent on the object’s readability (just as reason defines detection in mystery fiction). Relevant to what can be described as Petersburg ’s baroque excess, or exuberance, is the painting’s horrific disfigurement of a well-proportioned nude figure; its young body stands in sharp contrast to the grotesque body of the father, especially to his gaping, devouring mouth, an important source of disgust in the visual and literary arts.

Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son (Prado Museum)

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The statue of the cannibalistic god by the Italian sculptor Francesco Cabianca (1716–17) at the Neva entrance of the Summer Garden (an important setting in Petersburg) offers a horrific baroque image that very likely inspired Bely’s representation of the mythical Chronos/Saturn, thematized as the time and will to devour the next generation. Although the sculpture lacks the extreme baroque excess of the Goya and remains unnamed in the novel, on close examination it inscribes precisely the kind of recoil that Bely self-consciously provokes. The word in Russian that best characterizes the unformed organic detritus produced by the bomb explosion and other acts of violence in Petersburg is bezobrazie. Invoked on numerous occasions in the novel, the word designates hideousness and deformity. Literally it means “without face” (bez obraza), suggesting the lack of form. Bely comments on their affiliation in his memoir On the Border of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ) in describing mysticism as an embrace by shapeless (bezóbraznymi ) and frequently disgusting (bezobráznymi ) physiological sensations.”11 Here is an example of both instances of bezobrazie in a disturbing passage from Petersburg: “Totally red half of the wall: oozing redness; the walls are wet, and therefore, sticky, sticky [. . .] to see [. . .] under one’s feet the same dark red stickiness that splashed here after the loud sound; it splashed from a hole with a scrap of torn-off skin . . . (but from which part of the body?). Look up and find above me that it is sticking to the wall . . . Brrr! . . . Lose consciousness at that point.”12 The passage, which inverts the murderous act in Goya’s and Cabianca’s Saturns, depicts the patricidal fantasy of the son of Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, the novel’s Saturn/Chronos figure. It represents the imagined sundered body of the father in the form of blood oozing down his bedroom wall with a shred of skin stuck on it. The image of blood flowing down a wall and creating a puddle is the subject of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s famed October Idyll, one of the pictures of his highly regarded urban Petersburg cycle, which refers to the 1905 Revolution (see figure on page 102). Representing reactionary political authority and Petersburg’s rational geometry, the senator has been dissolved into “bloody ooze” in the son’s and reader’s eyes. The reference to “the sticky walls” evokes Lippanchenko, from lipkii (sticky), the most menacing father figure in the novel. Instead of the beloved geometric shapes that help Apollon (Russian for “Apollo”) maintain rational order in his life, we are confronted by the transformation of his body into organic ooze. The image suggests the body’s unfinished and fluid aspect—its imaginary transformation into a corpse—which is characteristic of baroque aesthetics. The narrative engages us, together with the son, in a spatial performance of disgust. Like the son, who loses consciousness, we both avert our eyes

Francesco Cabianca, Saturn (Summer Garden) (photograph by Olga Matich)

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from the representation of shapeless viscosity, which reminds us of our own mortality and its degrading consequences, and also delight in the transgressiveness of the image. The distancing gesture, like the one we perform on seeing Goya’s Saturn, helps us read the scene and express either moral revulsion or aesthetic delight or a combination of both. We perform a zigzag, so to speak: moving toward the image, then away from it. Though different in meaning and function, structurally, or spatially, the affective zigzag may be compared to the shifts from close-up to bird’s-eye view in Bely’s modernist representation of the city of Petersburg, with the latter signifying a panoptic perspective. In the affective sense, however, the novel refers to the figure of the zigzag, a spatial image that inscribes recoil, to represent fear and/or disgust on the one hand, and the will to readability and knowledge on the other: for example, Nikolay traces a zigzag in a book to highlight an important passage. We encounter the zigzag for the first time when Dudkin slips on the stairs as he tries not to drop the mysterious bundle; attempting to make sense of the confrontation with him on the corner of Nevsky, from whom he had recoiled in fear, the senator assigns Dudkin’s movement the threatening zigzag gesture. Fear, like disgust, with which it is frequently aligned in the spectrum of aversive emotions, is typically associated with recoiling movement. It is the senator’s desire to interpret the meaning of the zigzag that initiates his investigation of the young terrorist. So the zigzag, which figures movement toward and away from something—just like the prefix ot in otvrashchenie—is intimately related to interpretation in the novel. An involuntary gesture, the zigzag, like the emotion of disgust, is transformed into one that is cognitive, revealing to us the attendant process of reading Bely and appreciating the experience. It adds an important spatial dimension to the act of interpretation, which can be likened to the act of viewing a painting, both close-up and from a distance;13 or in the terms of Michel de Certeau’s practices of everyday urban life, the street close-up is identified with unreadability, which he contrasts with the panoramic view of the city, associating it with knowledge and conquest. This is precisely what happens to the senator, who imagines seeing the city from a panoramic perspective high above the city as he rides to work: he suddenly sees the threatening gaze of Dudkin directed at him from the corner of Nevsky Prospect; the spatial perspective shifts to a close-up from which he then recoils in fear—after which he begins to try to make sense—that is, read—the terrifying experience. To return to Nikolay’s fantasy, however: instead of a moral response, the patricidal desire gives rise to feelings of loathing about his own conception; he remembers that he used to be called his father’s spawn, concluding that “man

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is slime sewn up in skin. [. . .] his [Nikolay’s] blood putrefied early. [. . .] this is probably why he evoked disgust” (332).14 The ooze of birth and the ooze of death become one in his mind as he conflates the opposition of birth and death, contemplating the beginning of the life cycle (his own conception) and its end (his father’s death) as equally viscous and disgusting.15 The attendant feeling of shame, an affective kin of disgust, has more to do with the recollection, however, than with his patricidal fantasy. The look beneath the surface of the skin at the body’s slimy interior suggests the unformed, morally and aesthetically loathsome, aspect of life that slips effortlessly into death, a look that can be aligned with aesthetically grotesque experience. Slime, located in between hard surfaces and freely moving liquids, dissolves boundaries. Yet it is very much present as a physical substance that occupies space, slowly expanding over its surface and engulfing everything along its way. In the words of Robert Rawdon Wilson, slime is “too appalling to contemplate, too compelling to ignore.”16 And even though Nikolay’s memory stimulates a cognitive response, his conclusion reveals that disgust is deeply lodged in the senses, arguably more so than any other affect, because it always originates in the body, and in psychoanalytic terms, in sexual anxiety and repression. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes slime—le visqueux—as an inbetween state, one that is amorphous and therefore aberrant, disgusting to contemplate because it represents the continuous threat of annihilation and nothingness. Sartre affiliates the slimy with feminine nature and its sticky engulfing essence, one that sucks everything into itself.17 In theoretical terms, slime— its sticky, viscous formlessness—can be associated with category slippage, as I suggest in chapter 1. It is a condition that produces not only visceral but also cognitive disgust because it dissolves meaning, as evidenced by Lippanchenko, certainly the slimiest character in the novel.18 He is slippery in more ways than one: politically, he is a double agent who works for the revolutionaries and the police; ontologically, he deprives Dudkin of meaning and faith in revolution; physically, he is disgustingly repulsive. In aesthetic terms, however, the dissolution of form and the category slippage represent Bely’s modernist challenge to traditional representation, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Bely’s most startling evocations of disgust in conjunction with death are those associated with the imaginary ingestion of food. Lippanchenko links death and food directly in the deceptively innocuous comment “I am deathly hungry” (281). They are linked by the image of a repulsive mouth whose most transgressive activity is the consumption of human flesh, as in the Goya painting and the Summer Garden sculpture. Lippanchenko, moreover, is the owner of the novel’s most repulsively grotesque body, one that is in flux—or unformed. He is

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variously a shadow, silhouette, persona (osoba), unshaped giant clod (besformennaia glyba), fatty back, and viscous organic slime—almost all of these are feminine nouns, suggesting that like Sartre, Bely affiliates the disgusting with the female sphere. Dudkin associates Lippanchenko with the letter y, describing its sound as “something dull and slimy” and coupling it with bezobrazie. The owner of a repulsive mouth, Lippanchenko is also disgustingly edible: “Lippanchenko’s lips resembled little pieces of sliced salmon—not yellowish red, but oily and yellow (you have probably eaten such salmon with bliny in a family of modest means)” (40). The reference to “you have eaten” insinuates the reader into the act of eating Lippanchenko’s lips. His edibility is quickly subverted, however, as his fatty whispering lips morph into rustling ant legs on a dug-up anthill, reinforcing the essentially unfinished quality of his body. These quick shifts that capture the unfixed aspect of Lippanchenko, contributing to his sinister presence in the novel and to the modernist spatialization of the text, reflect Bely’s representational practice—one that inscribes recoil by means of the zigzag. The reference to his fishy lips links Lippanchenko to the sinister sardine tin containing the bomb that he has prepared for the senator; in a grotesque association of eating and death, Nikolay imagines swallowing it despite his aversion to the “yellow slime teeming with sardines.”19 As we read these passages with fascination, we may experience the vomit reflex ourselves, and as we distance ourselves squeamishly from the close-up, we also begin to make sense of the images—a cognitive response, which is what Nikolay tries so hard to do throughout the novel. The question that arises in this regard is whether the readability of the image undermines its emotional impact. I would suggest that it thickens our response by locating the cognitive moral layer of the initial visceral recoil. The most startling representation of Lippanchenko’s edibility is Dudkin’s cannibalistic fantasy of Lippanchenko as a suckling pig, an image that is first articulated in Nikolay’s patricidal fantasy.20 According to Elias, “people, in the course of the civilizing process, seek to suppress in themselves every characteristic that they feel to be ‘animal.’ They likewise suppress such characteristics in their food,” removing all traces of its animal origin.21 Bely does the exact opposite in Petersburg. Undressing Lippanchenko’s fatty shoulder and back in his mind’s eye, Dudkin imagines that he could be carved as easily as the delectable dish, but the transgressive culinary fantasy is interrupted by a cockroach, located outside it, which makes him spit in disgust. The spitting gesture, which signals the threshold of inside/outside, evacuates the desire quite literally. Saliva, like

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other body fluids when they leave the body, evokes disgust, marking Dudkin’s threshold of repugnance in the scene. Next, the culinary fantasy of carving Lippanchenko produces a sense of horror in Dudkin: he visualizes his fatty neck as a noseless, eyeless face (a literal instance of bezobrazie) with a torn, toothless mouth. As in the instance of the salmon lips, the fantasy and its interruption by vermin followed by the frightening metamorphosis represent the performative zigzag function of disgust through close-up and distance: the fantasy performs Dudkin’s desire to kill and eat Lippanchenko, but the subsequent images distance him from it. The reader, whose fascination and revulsion have been engaged, participates in Dudkin’s gestural double play, and if this same reader were to extend the experience to include a close-up view of the city inhabited by Lippanchenko and Dudkin, the response would likely be similar. Such a view of the city is discussed in the next chapter, although there the representation is considered through an aesthetic visual lens. The narrative reifies the image of Lippanchenko as suckling pig in his actual slaughter by Dudkin (“this is how we slice the white hairless skin of cold suckling pig in horseradish sauce” [386]).22 He seems to have overcome the feeling of disgust, which according to William Ian Miller is an enervating emotion, resulting in the loss of energy and resolve to action. Positioning the reader directly on the threshold of repugnance, the narrative performs the slaughter as if with culinary intentions but instead merely produces a corpse. Yet the association of Lippanchenko’s flesh with a delectable dish suggests coprophagy, which ups the ante of the disgusting, despite the laughable scissors with which the murder is performed. Even the sea near Lippanchenko’s dacha participates in the murder and consumption of the body: the narrative refers to the waves running up on the sand like thin blades and “licking” it, and then running back, as if mimicking the recoiling movement of Lippanchenko’s body during the slaughter and ours in response to it. As he touches the viscous liquid that drips onto the sheet and falls abruptly on the bed, Lippanchenko realizes (on ponial ) that his back and stomach had been slit open, meaning once again that recoil facilitates readability, not only for the reader, but for him as well. The corpse as the emblem of the novel’s poetics engages its metamorphosing representational practice, which inscribes organic decomposition. The next day we see Dudkin sitting astride Lippanchenko’s corpse in a pool of blood, one arm outstretched and a cockroach crawling on his lips and through his nose, as if he were a corpse as well. The grotesque tableau suggests Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, Petersburg’s genius loci, transformed into the site of a dying and decaying city.23 Bely’s tableau figures the novel’s baroque sensibility, here represented as the invasion of the city’s emblematic statue by vermin and

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decay. The monument, a figure of classical aesthetic proportion, is turned into one of baroque excess, with the horseman transformed into a figuration of madness and physical putrefaction, both of which have invaded the city.24 Not only is the body decomposed in Petersburg, but so is the city itself, as prophesied by the Petersburg myth, and so is the Bronze Horseman, who leaves his pedestal in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and gallops to Dudkin’s garret to flow into his veins in metals. The last name of Lippanchenko’s wife is Fleisch (“meat” in German), which links the double agent and mastermind of the assassination plot to meat from yet another perspective. Smelling the delicious roast that she is cooking in the scene in which Dudkin sees Lippanchenko as a delectable dish, the latter announces to everyone that he is famished: “I am deathly hungry . . .” The comment and its context cement the attendant association of food and death, prefiguring Lippanchenko’s slaughter. How do we explain the culinary metaphor and the grotesque association of food and death that inform both Nikolay’s and Dudkin’s murderous desires and the role of Lippanchenko’s wife as cook, who, so to speak, offers up her thoroughly repulsive husband as that delectable dish? One way to consider the latter is in terms of the other male-female relationships in the novel, all of which are unsuccessful, not to say repugnant. And how do we interpret Lippanchenko’s representation variously as a dangerous animal, as raw meat, and as a delectable pork-and-salmon dish, figurations interspersed with images of insects and vermin? Suggesting the ingestion of moral and physical decay, the images remind us of our own mortality, from which we shrink away in disgust. The insects and vermin connote moral and physiological putrefaction; they herald the transformation of Lippanchenko’s body into a corpse, which will ultimately metamorphose into viscous organic matter.25 Certainly, life in Bely’s novel enacts the inexorable end of Petersburg as represented in the apocalyptic myth of the Petersburg text; Bely’s images tap into a grotesquely baroque representation of the dying city, one that stands in contrast to the traditional image of classical Apollonian beauty and restraint. Green—green mists, green faces, the germ-infested green waters of the Neva—is the color of decomposition and disease in the novel. Lippanchenko’s initial figuration in the novel is that of formless slime that gets under Dudkin’s collar and oozes down his spine (see chapter 1 of this volume). According to Bely, man is but “a little glob of slime” pursued by primordial chaos throughout history,26 suggesting that the body’s smooth exterior surface is merely a cover for oozing matter, as if to invoke the baroque sensibility of grotesque opposites: the suggestion is that the body is merely a deceptive surface

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and that man emerges from slime and returns to slime, that it erases the distinction between life and death, the most sacred cognitive, as well as existential, opposites. Next the image of Lippanchenko morphs into the adverb “suddenly,” the temporal cornerstone of baroque aesthetics premised on surprise, which I discussed in the previous chapter. The narrator’s long disquisition on “suddenly” emphasizes its animal nature, its ravenous appetite, which once again suggests devouring, and ubiquitous presence. And once again, the narrator makes “you, the reader” complicit in its loathsome activity. The nominalized adverb, which has stuffed itself with the readers’ vile cerebral play, challenges the reader to identify with his own disgusting animal nature.27 It reinforces the action grammatically, with the nominalized adverb instantiating the metamorphosis on the level of language—by means of futurist sdvig (“displacement” or “shift”), a trope that destabilizes traditional representation. The affiliation of “suddenly” with Lippanchenko refers to a moment in time—a sudden feeling of revulsion—yet one that acquires a loathsome spatial dimension. Moreover, the act of devouring associated with “suddenly” evokes the novel’s figure of Saturn/Chronos. The link between the adverb and Apollon Apollonovich as Saturn has been established in the novel a few pages earlier; the question of who will devour whom—the fathers, the sons; or vice versa—is essential to Petersburg. “Suddenly’s” narrative power, associated with Lippanchenko, and its metamorphic power of conflating time and space mark the novelistic locus of the future murderous act, about which the ticking time bomb reminds us periodically. The figuration of Lippanchenko as slime under Dudkin’s collar and as the image of dogs sniffing each other have other connotations as well. As I suggested in the previous chapter, they insinuate a same-sex relationship between the two conspirators, which Bely suppresses as loathsome and into which he insinuates unmistakably homophobic feelings.28 We learn later that the young revolutionary had participated in a loathsome “act” involving Lippanchenko in Helsingfors, which resulted in the entrapment of Dudkin in the assassination plot. Although Bely elided the meaning of the act from the final version of the novel, a draft version explains that it involved “kissing the Goat’s ass and stomping on the cross.”29 This mysterious act, referred to several times and marked by italics in a key scene, is the hidden source of Dudkin’s despair. Bely’s covert representation of same-sex desire as loathsome, or so I would suggest, engages another aspect of disgust, one that concerns sexual difference. Martha Nussbaum, who has examined the exclusionary function of disgust, focuses on the cultural and social politics of the emotion underlying racial prejudice, homophobia, and misogyny, all of which figure in Petersburg.30 Nussbaum

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argues that disgust, contrary to the belief that it is a moral sentiment, is in fact essentially “immoral” and should not only be contained but transcended.31 Needless to say, Bely, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, makes no such claims, nor does he distinguish between the affect’s philosophically existential and socially exclusionary functions. An undifferentiated disgust defines both the novel’s politics and its generalized sexual anxiety. What is striking about all sexual references in Petersburg is that they inscribe utter revulsion of the sort that a psychoanalytic reading of the novel would associate with deep-seated sexual anxiety: Nikolay, for instance, imagines his own conception in the moment when his father is performing his “conjugal duties” and experiences “familiar nausea with new power”; his father remembers these duties in very similar terms.32 Nikolay’s nausea is of the same sort that Sartre would later associate with existential angst and dissolution of meaning, which both Nikolay and Dudkin identify with sexual desire. A particularly vivid instance of the affiliation of death, food, viscosity, and sex is one of the descriptions of Nevsky Prospect in which the crowd turns into ooze, blurring all human boundaries. A variation on “What is this Russian empire of ours?,” the parodic bureaucratic opening of the prologue, the later passage opens with “What is a fish egg?” and continues with a ridiculous disquisition on the equally ridiculous question in which Dudkin turns into a grain of caviar—a fish egg—that is hurled into the sticky, oozing crowd, dissolving the boundaries among its constituent members and resulting in the crowd’s, or “human sediment’s,” unreadability: What is a grain of caviar? It is both the world and object of consumption. As an object of consumption, the grain does not represent a satisfactory whole; caviar—is that whole: an aggregate of grains of caviar. The consumer does not know caviar grains, but he does know caviar, that is, the sediment of grains spread on an open-faced sandwich that is served. This is how the body of individuals rushing onto the pavement turns into a collective organic body on Nevsky Prospect [. . .]: the sidewalks of Nevsky become a sandwich field. The same happened to the body of Dudkin, who flew here. (256)

Despite the comic parody of philosophical discourse, the disquisition in midstream introduces edibility into the image of Nevsky’s “human sediment,” offering a surreal image instead of one that can be read in familiar terms. Its subtext once again suggests cannibalism: in the narrator’s imagination, the sidewalks morph into a delectable caviar sandwich; not just a single person becomes edible, but so do all people walking on the avenue. And like Lippanchenko’s salmon lips, the metaphor once again inscribes fishy organic matter—only this

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later image assumes gluttonous proportions, suggesting a comical, though revolting, image of the end of Petersburg in an orgiastic meal, an image worthy of Rabelais’s pen and of Bakhtin’s analysis. Bely’s Petersburg is a dying city whose architectural beauty has been invaded by putrefaction. In keeping with baroque aesthetics, the image juxtaposes life and death, only to show their inexorable linkage: the fish eggs insinuate conception and death into the simultaneously comical and disgusting crowd on Nevsky. In the words of William Ian Miller, the author of The Anatomy of Disgust, “the having lived and the living unite to make up the organic world of generative rot—rank, smelling, and upsetting to the touch,” what he calls “life soup, fecundity itself. [. . .] It is “slimy, slippery, wiggling, [. . .] generating spontaneously. [. . .] Images of decay imperceptibly slide into images of fertility and out again.”33 Miller’s description would have resonated profoundly with the thinking of Solovyov and his followers, but not with Bakhtin, who writes that in the culture of laughter, death represents the necessary joyful condition for the renewal of life. The image of Nevsky as a caviar sandwich, though comical, reminds us that we are what we eat, not only in the sense of what we ingest, and not even that we ingest the disgusting, but also that we ingest ourselves. The message is that we appear in the world in the shape of a single sticky fish egg only to devour ourselves collectively. The image evokes an earlier discussion of truth and eating that parodies Pilate’s question “what is truth”; the answer is rendered by means of a pun: istina—estina (the truth is what we eat), cannibalizing the truth. The punning response is framed by people eating pork in a tavern and calling each other pigs. The message is obvious: we eat pork and we are pigs. The pun erases civilization’s desired distance between man and animal, with the closeup uncovering man’s essential nature. Bely subverts the truth by identifying it with eating, just as he degrades the human body, morphing it not only into animal flesh but also into human food and thereby transgressing society’s most sacred taboo. The result is a transgressive aesthetic challenge to the reader, especially to Bely’s contemporaries who had not yet been assaulted by violent, sexually disturbing expressionist and surreal aesthetics. Feelings of aversion have always been associated with the body’s orifices (mouth, nose, ears, genitals, and anus) and with gaping wounds as artificial orifices created violently. They have been considered dangerous openings through which the outside world—in the form of disease and moral decay— penetrates the physical and moral body and contaminates it.34 I have focused primarily on the repulsive mouth as the orifice that ingests repulsive food. But the mouth in Petersburg is also the path to the anus, the most unclean body part.

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Apollon Apollonovich, who suffers from indigestion, spends a lot of time in the toilet, the private space that links the ingestion of food with its expulsion. The narrator refers to the toilet as that “incomparable place” which the senator considers a place of refuge, locking himself in it after the bomb explosion, but not only then. Pushing the threshold of repugnance, Bely has him defecate in bed during a bout of diarrhea, described as a bathtub filled to the brim with stinking excrement that the narrator compares to watery dung and a disgusting hippopotamus splashing in it. The comically grotesque comparison of the tiny senator to a large blubbery animal suggests the gargantuan size of the excrement. The mouth and anus, however, are also linked to same-sex desire, which is the hidden subtext of desire in the novel. I have already referred to the homosexual underside of Dudkin’s relationship with Lippanchenko. His sidekick and double agent Morkovin, a man with a gaping mouth and cannibalistic desire (he brings his mouth up to Nikolay like a cannibal wanting to swallow him), places a wet kiss on Nikolay’s lips in a smelly, sleazy restaurant, to which act the latter responds with utter revulsion. What is striking about Bely’s deployment of their mouths is that they are both animal-like and that they commingle eating and sex in a disgusting way.35 Dudkin’s most powerful experience of revulsion takes place during the mysterious visit to his garret by the mysterious Shishnarfne, who reminds Dudkin of the vile act in Helsingfors: He would see himself [. . .] shouting intensely into absolute emptiness: [. . .] his head was thrown back, the huge orifice of his screaming mouth would appear to him as a black abyss. [. . .] “But then, after the act,” his mouth tore open deafeningly, and closed. Suddenly, the curtain was rent before Alexander Ivanovich’s eyes: he remembered everything clearly . . . That dream in Helsingfors [. . .] shouts were being cast out of him [. . .] and he understood: “Shishnarfne.” [. . .] It was a familiar word, which he uttered as if he were performing the act; only, this dreamily familiar word had to be turned inside out [naiznanku]. And in a fit of uncontrollable fear, he tried to yell out: “Enfranshish.” [. . .] a voice that was shouting from his throat just before that shouted threateningly: “Yes, yes, yes . . . It is me . . . I destroy irrevocably.” (298–99)

The biblical rent curtain, metaphorizing the way back into Dudkin’s troubled memory, reduplicates the image of the torn mouth that opens onto a dark abyss. He suddenly remembers that the word emanating from him during the act was “Enfranshish,” the mysterious palindrome that he recognizes as “Shishnarfne” turned inside out: naiznanku comes from iznanka, which means “wrong, seamy side,” here perhaps also suggesting the backside. Later Dudkin will tellingly refer to Shishnarfne as his iznanka. Characteristic of baroque

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poetry, palindromes, according to Paul Harris, “foreground the visual, material and corporeal aspects of verbal signification” and represent reversibility in the sense of reversing the flow of time, which “enacts the idea of transformation and metamorphosis.” Quite remarkably, this description fits the encounter between Dudkin and Shishnarfne/Enfranshish almost to a tee. In regard to the eating and cannibalistic motifs in Bely’s novel, the contemporary German palindrome poet Oskar Pastior describes irreversibility as “thematiz[ing] itself in the palindrome form by eating itself up.”36 If we return to the idea that bodily orifices are considered openings through which physical and moral dangers penetrate the body, Shishnarfne can be said to represent them. One of the meanings of shish, the first and last reversible syllable of Shishnarfne/Enfranshish, is the obscene gesture of the thumb between the index and middle fingers. He is the link to the “vile act” that Dudkin performed with Lippanchenko: the association of Dudkin’s lacerated, shouting mouth with the baroque palindrome—a case of verbal inversion—insinuates inverted desire.37 Putting the connection between them in anatomical terms, the mouth is the beginning of a tube of which the anus is the end, or as Miller writes, “the gate that protects the inviolability, the autonomy of males.”38 The association may also shed light on the image of Lippanchenko as slime oozing down Dudkin’s back. And if we then return to the representation of Dudkin’s gaping mouth during Shishnarfne’s visit once more, we should note that it also expresses an emotion greater than disgust. The heartrending shout expresses shame as well as profound existential angst,39 bringing to mind Edvard Munch’s famous protoexpressionist painting The Scream (1895). Bely described his lecture “The Tragedy of Dostoevsky’s Art” at the Religious Philosophical Society in 1910 as “a scream about my situation.”40 The same claim can be applied to his groundbreaking novel.41 Like Dudkin’s shout, Munch’s painting figures anxiety that cannot be subdued. Here is how the painter depicted the origin of The Scream: I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired, and I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fiord and the city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.42

If we place Bely’s drawing of Nikolay Apollonovich side by side especially with the black-and-white lithograph version of Munch’s The Scream (1895), we are struck by the similarity.43 Even though Nikolay’s mouth, described throughout

Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895 (copyright 2009 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen Group/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York)

Andrey Bely, Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov, 1910s (courtesy of the Andrey Bely Museum, Moscow)

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the novel as lacerated or gaping, is closed, his expressive serpentine form (his body often assumes such a shape) and the thick pen strokes that serve as the background are strikingly similar to those in the lithograph. Bely’s representation of the figure’s angst and the affect of the drawing evoke Munch’s expressionist style. I have not been able to ascertain whether Bely knew the painting or Munch’s work, which was frequently exhibited at the beginning of the century.44 In 1906 in Munich, he became acquainted with Stanislaw Przybyszewski, one of Munch’s close friends and admirers, who collaborated on the first monograph of the painter’s works (1894).45 Bely was well acquainted with Przybyszewski’s fiction and wrote an essay about him, in which he described the Polish writer’s tormented heroes roaring into chaos as well as their gaping mouths.46 Przybyszewski inscribed Munch’s Scream into the first volume of his novel Homo Sapiens, Overboard (Über Bord, which Bely knew), in which the painter Mikita depicts a sunset as “thousands of mouths [that] hurled down molten colours into space” as strips of congealed blood ranging from dark red and purple to black. “Ugly, disgusting, but superb.”47 If not the painting, then this passage could have been one of the sources of the ubiquitous shout and gaping mouth in Petersburg—for instance, when Nikolay’s tormented mouth gapes at the sunrise as it contemplates patricide, turning into a bloody red column that dances in the air and then lands on the surrounding objects in the shape of blood-red spots. The only figuration of a shouting lacerated mouth in the novel that expresses despair or pain exclusively is that of the noble caryatid, which is located high above the crowd and whose shout is prophetic. Bely transforms the muscular, bearded caryatid, which supports the edifice of state, into an oracular image as it rends its oral cavity by sounding the prophetic shout of coming destruction: The muscular arms that flew up over the stone head would straighten out at the elbows, and the chiseled sinciput would jerk wildly. The mouth would tear open in a thunderous shout, a long desperate shout—the mouth would tear, and you would say: “it is the roar of a tornado” (thousands of black caps of the city hooligans shouted like this at the pogroms); the street would be drenched in steam, like from the whistle of a locomotive; the cornice of the balcony that it tore off from the wall would jump up above the street, and dissolve into hard, loudly thundering stone. (265)

This instance of the lacerated mouth, by contrast, serves as an expression of terror-inspiring prophecy. The shout of the despairing caryatid, which from its dignified bird’s-eye view has long observed Petersburg’s immutable, ignorant,

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and unseemly human centipede below, announces physical destruction, prophesying the whirlwind of revolution and of the end of Petersburg. The mouth of Bely’s emphatically baroque caryatid also evokes the Hellenistic Laocoön, beloved by the baroque, even though Gotthold Ephraim Lessing claimed in his eponymous treatise on classical aesthetics that it expresses pain and suffering nobly and does not transgress the classical “law of beauty.” The Laocoön’s jaw is constricted, not open, according to Lessing and therefore is not disgusting.48 In the modernist context, however, there is no conflict between the expression of pain in a naturalistic vein, which we see in the Laocoön, and aesthetic beauty, or in the shout that emanates from Bely’s caryatid, which was proscribed by Lessing and classical aesthetics. The shout that dissolves rational measured speech is a typical motif of baroque cum modernist, especially expressionist, emotional excess. What made disgust the subject of representation in baroque, romantic, and modernist aesthetics is its morbidly alluring aspect. The excessive, not just the loathsome, is an important locus of aesthetic representation in Petersburg, where the motif of the lacerated and gaping mouth disfigured by pain and/or incoherent speech is aligned with the sphere of baroque terror tempered by disgust, which represents the decadent underbelly of the beautiful imperial city. Just like the novel’s Bronze Horseman, who in the end is linked to death and decay, the caryatid announces death and destruction figured in baroque terms—by means of a lacerated gaping mouth.49 So the image of the lacerated gaping mouth, in line with baroque, romantic, and modernist aesthetics, is situated in the context of the higher truth and, dare we say—the sublime, of which the disgusting functions as the underside. The mouth serves this dual purpose: it is the conduit of prophetic and philosophical language and because of its direct link to the digestive tract, the source of revulsion. What seems to connect the sublime and disgust emotionally and aesthetically is that they inspire terror: both reveal the reader’s or spectator’s attraction to and recoil from terror as well as the sphere of grotesque representation. In this regard, the affiliation of the gaping mouth and gaping abyss in Bely, which in classical Greek served as a reification of chaos from which emerged the world, may also be an emanation of the sublime. Bakhtin, however, offers a somewhat different view of the voracious gaping mouth in his study of the grotesque body. He identifies it with the grotesque face: “The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss.” The grotesque body, inseparable from the rest of the world, is a body in the act of becoming, continues Bakhtin: “it is never finished, never completed; it is continually built

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[and] created”50—shapeless and formless, in other words. This can certainly be ascribed to Bely’s figuration of Lippanchenko and the ghostly emanation of Shishnarfne, and to his poetics more generally. Like subsequent theorists of disgust, starting with Miller and Menninghaus, Bakhtin claims that the grotesque body is characterized by its “apertures and convexities” and that it expands in “copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, and defecation,” revealing the body’s constantly changing state.51 The difference is that the gaping mouth and grotesque body are positive, joyful concepts for Bakhtin, as is the gaping abyss from which emerges the world, and that he affiliates the grotesque body with the culture of laughter. References to Bakhtin notwithstanding, my reading of Petersburg has eschewed his concept of the grotesque, including the novel’s scathing dark satire, as inextricably associated with laughter. Instead I have chosen to emphasize the profoundly disturbing aspect of the novel’s affect by foregrounding the horror it evokes, which Bely links to the troubling dissolution of the boundaries between life and death, especially by means of slime. It is oozingly spatial, a dimension that laughter lacks, even though like disgust, laughter is also premised on the gesture of distancing the reader from an experience, frequently substituting mirth or a sense of irony for an emotional response.

O

ne of the conclusions that may be drawn from my discussion of Petersburg is that representation in it is utterly misanthropic. But is that really the novel’s message? Most theorists of disgust have emphasized the affect’s normative moral function, as well as its exclusionary connotations. It is undeniably protective and conservative: it polices the normative boundaries between life and death, sublime and base, man and animal, self and other, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual desire; in each pair, the disgust response validates the first item against the second.52 It protects not only from baseness, contamination, and our own mortality but also from the racial other, female danger, and same-sex Eros as the self reassures itself “about its own solidity and power,” writes Martha Nussbaum.53 She puts into question, however, the emotion’s moral viability in instances when it expresses social, political, or cultural intolerance. Most of these boundaries are under attack in Petersburg. The experience of disgust in the case of Dudkin and Nikolay Apollonovich suggests a response to their internalized moral boundaries: Dudkin feels shame and horror in regard to the act, the repressed enfranshish; Nikolay imagines killing his father many times, yet is horrified by his oedipal desire and sexual desire in general. Despite marking moral boundaries around patricide, murder, and other forms of violence, disgust does not result in the reestablishment of moral order in the novel.

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Nor is it contained or surmounted in line with Nussbaum’s call to overcome the kind of socially defined disgust that violates another’s self-definition. If we regard disgust spatially, its movement toward and away from a shocking and unsettling description reinforces Petersburg ’s spatial poetics: representation of a shocking close-up of the city, including its inhabitants and their emotional experiences, on the one hand, and what Nikolay Antsiferov in The Soul of Petersburg calls its panoramic general look from a bird’s-eye view on the other, a vista that offers different images of the city: its palaces, parks, canals, and city views of the Neva River.54 Just as the two visual perspectives of the city, in keeping with de Certeau, represent illegibility in the case of the close-up and readability in the case of the panoramic view, disgust becomes a cognitive sentiment only after we have moved away (otvratili ) our gaze from the offensive experience. The question that remains is whether Petersburg can be associated with decadence, the ambiguous aesthetic sensibility of the turn of the century. It famously aestheticized the transgression or inversion of social and artistic norms yet revealed a troubled view of sex. If we return to slime and its embodiment of the transience of life, which characterized the baroque, the formless substance symbolizes “life’s soup” from which new life is born. The self-conscious evocation of disgust in this regard reveals Bely’s own profound anxieties about sex and its consequences. If we consider the deployment of disgust in Petersburg from this perspective, we can compare it with some emendations to Freud’s theory of the life and death instincts—Eros and Thanatos, which was most certainly tinged by the decadence. According to Freud’s later writing, the theory consists of the struggle of Eros—a unifying, life-affirming principle—contra Thanatos, which represents the instinctual desire to return to an original inorganic state. Bely’s novel is about the victory of the death instinct, a decadent view, but instead of an inorganic state, it is affiliated with the dissolution of the body into oozing organic slime, which is utterly decadent. The dissolution of Lippanchenko’s body in the end takes his novelistic life full circle by returning it to the slime that oozes down Dudkin’s back at the beginning of the novel. It brings to mind Solovyov’s idea of Eros and Thanatos—partners in the selfperpetuating life cycle (the cause of death in life)—which was instrumental in forming Bely’s views. Petersburg succumbs fully to Thanatos in the decadent sense, not as the site of the beautiful corpse but of its grotesque decay. Structurally, the novel is premised on repetition at all of its levels—what in psychoanalysis is known as the compulsion to repeat, which according to Freud governs the death instinct, although I would suggest that it governs the procreative life instinct as well. Petersburg represents the end of the Ableukhov line, whose parodic genealogy,

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which repeats the generative impulse to procreate endlessly, is traced back to Adam at the beginning of the novel. Quite obviously the termination of the Ableukhov line has not abolished death, which still reigns in the epilogue, but it no longer evokes revulsion. There are no disgusting close-ups; instead we contemplate from a distance the aging and death of Nikolay’s parents, his reading of the Book of the Dead in North Africa, and his return to Russia to lead a solitary life. We could conclude that the disgusting in death has been overcome since there is no generative rot in the epilogue to reinvigorate procreative life and its representation in a family novel, of which Petersburg is a modernist parody. Like the baroque, late romanticism, and modernism, the novel intertwines horror and disgust as they degrade the beautiful imperial city—its classical order—and by extension those that live, eat, and die in it. Contrary to Petersburg’s architectural history, in which classical order triumphed over the baroque, Bely’s novel marks the return, or revenge, of decadent baroque excess. The novel dissolves traditional imagery by offering a disgusting yet stunning vision of the end of the imperial city. Baroque writing also triumphs in the novel’s epilogue, in which Nikolay is reading the eighteenth-century Ukrainian mystic Grigory Skovoroda, the most important representative of the Ukrainian baroque.55 This brings us back to the aesthetic function of disgust in the novel and its will to undifferentiated, contingent slime. In the traditional idiom of Russian symbolist criticism, disgust defies Apollonian restraint and fixity of aesthetic boundaries, revealing Petersburg ’s Dionysian exuberance, which is symbolized by the ticking bomb in the sardine tin and the slime it contains and produces. But the deployment of the disgusting by Bely in his crowning novelistic achievement confronts the reader with more than disgust. It encourages the reader to delight aesthetically in the loathsome and not avert her readerly gaze or resort to laughter. This does not mean that the reader must elide an emotional response; quite the contrary. The ultimate challenge of Petersburg is to appreciate the ways it deploys bezobrazie by pushing aesthetically the boundaries of the permissible, boundaries that lie beyond the novel’s rich musical and synesthetic structure and symbolist poetics. The challenge is to recognize that it is the loathsome that informs Bely’s unique experiment in modernist image-making: that the decomposition of form, which the loathsome in the novel produces, is the animating source of Petersburg ’s modernist will to abstract representation, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Perhaps the aesthetic challenge of Petersburg is to stand in aesthetic awe of disgust—which is related to the sublime—and contemplate the decomposing corpse as a source of abstraction in the novel. This may very well

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be Petersburg’s ultimate challenge. The suggestion may be more compelling if we consider it in terms of Baudelaire’s famed “Carrion,” a profoundly decadent poem that Bely references several times in his memoirs. It has been seen as Baudelaire’s homage to the sublime in which art—as representation—triumphs over nature.  A somewhat different version of this chapter appeared as “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg” in the cluster “Emotional Turn? Feelings in Russian History and Culture,” Slavic Review 68, no. 2 (2009). 1. Describing his creative process in Arabeski in 1908, Bely compared it to bomb throwing. See chapter 1, p. 39. Also see p. 116, n.25. 2. Discussing Petersburg and Bely’s writing in 1913, Alexander Blok writes that he feels “disgust at [the fact that Bely] sees frightful filth” in everything (“Dnevnik 1913 goda,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7, ed. Vladimir Orlov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963], 223–24). 3. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 220. 4. Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934), 8. Strikingly, Bely’s book about Gogol is written as if he were analyzing his own literary production. 5. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Blackwell, 2000), 51. 6. See the following for a theoretical discussion of the aesthetics of disgust: William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), originally published as Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999); Robert Rawdon Wilson, The Hydra’s Tale: Imagining Disgust (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002); Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 7. Menninghaus, Disgust, 1. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3–4. 9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 407. 10. The figure of Chronos/Saturn defines the relationship between father and son. Much has been written about the mythological and theosophic meaning of this god in Petersburg, yet I consider him in relation to the oral sphere. Apollon Apollonovich, the Chronos/Saturn figure in the novel, is also associated with the devouring tarantula by both Nikolay and Dudkin, and with the Gorgon Medusa. 11. Andrey Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 186–87.

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12. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 329–30. Subsequent page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text and notes. 13. See my reading of the same scene in chapter 1, where I discuss the gaze in relation to the close-up/far-off view. 14. Cf. Kafka’s expression of disgust at his own conception. In a letter he writes that the sight of the bed where he was conceived “can turn his stomach inside out,” as if he were “indissolubly connected with these repulsive things; something still clings to the feet as they try to break free, held fast as they are in the primordial slime” (Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth [ New York: Schocken, 1973], 525, quoted in Menninghaus, Disgust, 243–44). 15. “Where death is, there is also birth, change, renewal. The image of birth is no less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows the image of the departing one” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 409). 16. Wilson, The Hydra’s Tale, 66. 17. Lippanchenko is associated with the sucking gesture: like an infant he sucks in air as if it were milk from a bottle, and by extension, he sucks in his collaborators. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 772–78. 19. Cf. Bely’s representation of Mayakovsky’s expressive hyperbolic poetry: “The poem War and Peace is a hyperbole that gapes its snout at Gogol’s hyperbole, having swallowed it to grow fat from its juices and then release them into the juicy plumbing of the arteries: ‘rusty viscous liquid was oozing in the plumbing’; ‘continents hang like carcasses on bayonets’” (Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia, 312). 20. We are told earlier that Lippanchenko wanted to export Russian pigs abroad with the purpose of getting rich. In an earlier patricidal fantasy, which is accompanied by feelings of nausea, the narrator and Nikolay imagine plunging a knife into his father: “this is how a suckling pig in aspic and horseradish sauce is carved” (221), which is the first instance of this astonishing culinary figuration of death in the novel. 21. Elias, Civilizing Process,120. 22. Earlier in the novel, the narrator offers a cannibalistic image of his own: he compares Lippanchenko to a bloody, skinned carcass with a gaping snout hanging in a butcher shop (282). Like in Dudkin’s fantasy of carving Lippanchenko’s cooked body, the image of slaughter (resulting in a skinned carcass) is insinuated into the narrator’s fantasy; the narrator, like Dudkin, also subverts Lippanchenko’s edibility: the surreal carcass appropriates the power of the gaze and confronts us with its bloody meat, which has assumed the shape of a gaping snout. (Notably, elsewhere in the novel, the city’s slaughterhouse and its butchers make an episodic appearance. See Mieka Erley’s essay on the slaughterhouse in this volume.) 23. The symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius offers a similar vision of the metropolis in her 1909 poem “Petersburg,” which ends with the image of maggots feeding on the city’s backbone: “I cherv’ bolotnyi, cherv’ upornyi / Iz’’est tvoi kamennyi kostiak” [And the swamp maggot, the persistent maggot / Will eat away your stone skeleton] (Z. N. Gippius, “Peterburg,” Stikhotvoreniia, ed. A. V. Lavrov, in Novaia biblioteka poeta [St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999], 143). The Petersburg in the poem is the locus of decay, stench of corpses, and indelible red spots of blood (see chapter 3 on spots).

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24. The sculptor Falconet, whose work was influenced by the baroque, created an equestrian statue in the neoclassical style, but as Alexander Schenker writes, the representation of the horse rearing on its hind legs reflects “baroque restlessness,” as does the “fluid wave-like shape of the pedestal” (Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003], 265). 25. For a discussion of the natural cycle and the transcendence of its inexorable inscription of death in Vladimir Solovyov’s erotic utopia, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 59–61 and 74–77. 26. Quoted in Magnus Ljunggren, The Dream of Rebirth: A Study of Andrej Belyj’s Novel “Peterburg,” Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 15 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1982), 27. 27. For further discussion of “suddenly” and “cerebral play,” see chapter 1. 28. To my knowledge, the first scholar to consider the homosexual subtext of the Dudkin-Lippanchenko relationship is Magnus Ljunggren in The Dream of Rebirth. In contrast to Bely’s homophobia, there are also positive coeval representations of samesex love in Russian literature, e.g., in Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings (Kryl’ya, 1906). Bely originally wrote a negative review of the novel (“‘Kryl’ya Kuzmina,” Pereval 6 [1907]: 50–51), although he changed his opinion of it later. 29. See the commentary by S. S. Grechishkin, L. K. Dolgopolov, and A. V. Lavrov to Peterburg, 676n41. 30. E.g., it is suggested that Lippanchenko is a Jew; the representation of Sofia Petrovna can certainly be described as misogynist. 31. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity. According to Nussbaum, instead of furthering the civilizing process, disgust frequently does the opposite: it undermines the values of liberal society. While much less concerned with its illiberal function, Miller attributes a similar exclusionary function to disgust. Aurel Kolnai, the first modern thinker to consider the emotion in philosophical and theoretical terms, had already written in 1929 that in certain instances disgust “stands, one might say, in irregular service of the morally good” (Aurel Kolnai, Carolyn Korsemaeyer, and Barry Smith, On Disgust [Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2004], 81). 32. Cf. Apollon Apollonovich’s memory of his wedding night: “an expression of disgust, disdain, masked by a submissive smile. That night Apollon Apollonovich, already a state councilor, committed the vile act sanctioned by set form: he raped the young woman. The rape went on for years, and one of those nights Nikolay Apollonovich was conceived—between two different kinds of smiles, of lechery and of submission. Was it surprising then that Nikolay Apollonovich was as a result a composite of disgust, fear, and lechery?” (362). 33. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 40–41. 34. Petersburg makes reference to the pollution of the Neva by green bacilli. 35. “Nikolay Apollonovich stood in the billowing white clouds of stench from the kitchen, pale, white, and crazed, his red mouth agape, but not laughing, with a halo of very light, fog-like linen hair—a hunted animal, he bared his teeth and turned to Morkovin” (212). The gape, which is here framed by stench—of food and by association of a decaying corpse—morphs into an image of bared teeth, which reveals Nikolay’s animal nature. Before the kiss, Morkovin brings his “open oral cavity up to Nikolay Apollonovich

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like a cannibal who was going to swallow Ableukhov” (203–4). What we see are two disgusting oral cavities facing each other in a scene that is permeated by disgusting animal imagery. The most repulsive depiction of Lippanchenko’s mouth is Dudkin’s already referenced surreal fantasy: “Suddenly a fatty neck fold bulged out between the back and back of the neck in a giant smile [. . .] and the neck acquired the appearance of a face, as if a monster with a noseless, eyeless snout was sitting in the chair; and the neck fold acquired the appearance of a toothless torn mouth,” to which Dudkin’s response is one of recoil (277). The image of the torn mouth—simultaneously mouth and wound—has, as mentioned earlier, been displaced onto Lippanchenko’s fatty back. 36. Paul Harris, “Nothing: A User’s Manual,” SubStance 35, no. 2 (2006): 11–12. Harris identifies the palindrome, a self-consuming poetic figure whose action represents movement back and forth, with the Gnostic Ouroboros, the image of a snake biting its own tail, an image that appears in Petersburg early on in one of the senator’s out-of-body experiences. 37. We get our first inkling of Dudkin’s homosexual desire during his first meeting with Nikolay, when the former tells him that he has never been in love with women and that since Helsingfors, he has lusted after fetish objects: women’s body parts and parts of clothing, like stockings. He also tells Nikolay that men have been in love with him, which Ableukhov interprets to mean Lippanchenko. In other words, Dudkin represents himself as a fetishist, which at the turn of the twentieth century was affiliated with samesex desire. In his conversation with Shishnarfne, he speaks about ritual fetishism, especially in Satanist cults, suggesting once again the suppressed reference to kissing the goat’s ass and stomping on the cross. 38. Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 98–100. 39. Similar feelings are evoked by Dudkin’s morphing grotesque body in the subsequent scene in which the Bronze Horseman pours into Dudkin’s veins. Like other characters in the novel, the Bronze Horseman is a metamorphic figure that changes shape and assumes different forms. 40. Ljunggren, Dream of Rebirth, 14. Here is how Munch described the painting: “you know my picture, The Scream? I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood—I was at a breaking point,” quoted in Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 152. 41. It is a commonplace of Petersburg criticism that the image of Sofia Petrovna Likhutina and Nikolay’s romantic involvement with her is Bely’s parodic representation of his obsessive love for Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, Alexander Blok’s wife, and of their troubled relationship. 42. Vanessa Rumble, “The Scandinavian Conscience: Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Munch,” in Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression, ed. Jeffery Howe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27. In The Philosophy of Art, Schopenhauer claims that art was not able to reproduce a scream successfully; Bely proved him wrong as did Munch by using symbolist synesthesia (fusion of light, color, sound, and rhythm). 43. N. A. Kaydalova has perceptively noted that Nikolay’s head resembles Konstantin Somov’s well-known, 1907 portrait of Blok (N. A. Kaydalova, “Risunki Andreia Belogo,” in Andrey Bely: Problemy tvorchestva [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988], 599). 44. The Scream has been exhibited at Oslo’s National Gallery since 1909. Bely

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traveled to Norway twice: in 1913 to attend Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and in 1916, stopping there only briefly. 45. In 1906, Bely frequented Café Simplicissimus in Munich—a gathering place of the Secession artists, with whom Munch was affiliated. 46. Andrey Bely, “Prorok bezlichiia,” Arabeski, in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L. Kazin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994), 2:10–21. 47. Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Overboard, in Homo Sapiens: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. Thomas Seltzer (New York: Knopf, 1915), 21. Homo Sapiens was very popular in Russia. 48. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, ed. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 7–8. 49. Bely deployed this image in his writing elsewhere as well. “A large as if lacerated mouth with a protruding lip” is how he represents Vladmir Solovyov’s mouth in Arabeski (1911). Besides evoking revulsion, Solovyov’s mouth, as described by Bely, is oracular (like that of the caryatid): it gives birth to “the words of a prophet” (“O Vladimire Solovyove,” in Arabeski, 350). Bely depicts the Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyaev in similar terms, framing his philosophical discourse by the disgusting representation of a violent seizure of the oral cavity (a torn gaping mouth), a facial tic that Berdyaev suffered (Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990], 416). I remember my grandfather, who had known Berdyaev, performing the philosopher’s nervous tic at the dinner table. The rest of us would invariably watch with fascination, especially my brother and I, and then proceed to express our disgust with my grandfather’s bad table manners. “At the table? Really! How disgusting!” 50. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 317. 51. Ibid., 321. Cf. also George Bataille’s essay “Mouth,” in which the orifice is described in terms similar to Bakhtin’s but with the addition of surreal excess (George Bataille, “Mouth,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 [ Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 59–60). 52. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 625. 53. Ibid., 204. 54. Nikolay Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga (Leningrad: Agentstvo “Lira,” 1990), 176. For a discussion of Antsiferov’s approach to the city, see the introduction to this volume. 55. In all likelihood it was not the baroque aspect of Skovoroda’s writing but his Slavophile stance that attracted Bely, although the former may have had some significance too. See A. V. Lavrov, “Andrey Bely i Grigory Skovoroda,” in Andrey Bely: Razyskaniia i etiudy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 157–71.

3 Bely, Kandinsky, and Avant-Garde Aesthetics     

The visual metaphors, verbal tableaus, sonority, poetic rhythms, and symphonic structure of Petersburg suggest the term Gesamtkunstwerk, as does the novel’s synthetic and synesthetic approach to language, music, and the visual arts. Yet Bely scholarship has considered Petersburg almost exclusively in relation to music, most likely because symbolist aesthetics, about which Bely wrote extensively during the 1900s, professed Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s view of music as the highest art form.1 In the 1910s a new aesthetic vision—futurism— emerged in Russia, and even though Bely never affiliated himself with the futurists, Petersburg reveals remarkable affinity to the new sensibility. The only contemporary reading of Petersburg that considered its avant-garde aesthetics was by Nikolay Berdyaev, who described the novel as cubist and compared it to Picasso’s visual practice.2 Bely himself would later describe his novel as a monumental painting of which he had completed only one corner.3 Robert Alter writes that “Petersburg is an acutely visual novel, and so its pervading sense of sudden disruption in the modern city is repeatedly translated into arresting visual imagery,” without, however, developing the claim.4 If we read Petersburg through a visual lens, we are struck by Bely’s imaginative translation into language of occult geometry and of postimpressionist antinaturalistic, and even abstract, representation. In all likelihood, critics have virtually neglected the visual aspect of Bely’s writing, despite his avant-garde—expressionist cum futurist—writerly practice that started around 1910, because he continued to 83

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identify with symbolism and had little to say about the visual arts, unlike about music, and because his rare comments about avant-garde painters were often negative.5 Yet the novel reveals an affinity for coeval modernist painting in its startlingly expressive juxtapositions and metamorphic imagery, creating what Joseph Frank describes as “spatial form in modern literature.” According to Frank, modernist writers “intend the reader to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.”6 He writes that they accomplish this by means of juxtaposition, movement back and forth that subverts development in time, and the creation of a palimpsest structure. If chapter 1 demonstrated Petersburg ’s futurist and cubist deployment of juxtaposition and metamorphic imagery, the focus here is expressionist aesthetics. My search for Bely’s symbolist and postsymbolist counterpart in the visual arts has evinced Wassily Kandinsky, with whom Bely shared a similar mystical, as well as aesthetic, vision, writing about the arts in comparable terms as Kandinsky. While the cubists in France and cubo-futurists in Russia reconfigured the symbolist hierarchical relation of the arts, substituting painting for music, Kandinsky, like Bely, maintained a symbolist focus on music and synesthesia, especially on the relationship of color and sound. Moreover, Petersburg ’s imagery resonates powerfully with coeval expressionism (which is most famously associated with Kandinsky), even more so, I would suggest, than with cubism.7 A particularly striking correspondence of Kandinsky and Bely is their recollection of one of Monet’s famous Haystacks that they saw at a French impressionist exhibit in Moscow during the 1890s.8 Kandinsky wrote his response to the painting in Reminiscences (Rückblicke) in 1913: Previously, I had known only Realistic art [. . .] suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory [. . .] the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, [. . .] exceeded all my dreams. [. . .] albeit unconsciously, objects were discredited as an essential element within the picture. I had the overall impression that a tiny fragment of my fairy-tale Moscow already existed on canvas.9

Bely wrote about seeing the Monet in 1891 in his memoir On the Border of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ) only in 1930: Mother took me and mademoiselle to the French exhibit very often. [. . .] I was surprised by that which Moscow found so funny: the French impressionists (Degas, Monet, etc.). [. . .] stopping in front of the pleasing colorful spot [my emphasis], the disgraceful “haystack” that had caused such a sensation, I would

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get very upset that I couldn’t share mother’s and mademoiselle’s outrage; to tell the truth, I liked that the French impressionists’ colors ran into my eyes, but I concealed my impression and remembered it; [. . .] the “strangeness” seemed familiar; as if it hinted at something which I came to know earlier; and I remembered my very first experiences of consciousness on the border between my second and third year (could it be that I saw objects that way then?).10

Bely was only eleven in 1891; Kandinsky was more than ten years older. Despite the difference in age, they were both struck by the Haystack’s novelty, which left a lasting impression. Each in his own way was unsettled by the painting: the older Kandinsky was disconcerted by his ignorance—that he didn’t recognize the subject of the painting and only learned it from the catalogue; Bely, by his inability to align his response with that of the adults, although his dismay seems tongue-in-cheek. Kandinsky links the recollection directly to his future experiments in color and dissolution of the material object. Even though on first sight Bely’s response seems playful and childlike, it refers to his future concerns as well: representation of the consciousness of early childhood and the dissolution of traditional form, which, in the recollection, he affiliates with the vibrating blurring of colors. Describing himself at the turn of the third year in the same memoir, Bely writes of his extraordinarily vivid memories of a bout of scarlet fever and consequent delirium and the later realization that the fragmentary, flowing, and hallucinatory form of these memories marked the starting point of his symbolist vision and what he calls “my genealogy.”11 The reference to the turn of the third year punctuates the broader meaning of “on the border,” which he calls “scissors,” and is reinforced by the title of the memoir On the Border of Two Centuries. Bely perceived the haystack as a “spot” ( piatno), a counterpart to Kandinsky’s view of the haystack as discrediting the object and to his description of Moscow at sunset in the same memoir a few pages earlier as dissolving into “a single spot” (R 360).12 The image would later travel to his abstract paintings, including their titles: Landscape with Red Spots, Painting with a Red Spot, Three Black Spots, Painting with Three Spots. As in Kandinsky’s work, spots figure prominently in Petersburg, with at least seventy-five references. The correspondences do not end here: Kandinsky studied and worked in the sphere of economics and law before he changed professions in 1896 to go to Munich and study painting;13 Bely would study the natural sciences and mathematics, abandoning them first for philology and history and subsequently for a literary profession. Kandinsky lived in Munich with some interruptions between 1896 and 1914, when he returned to Russia for several years; Bely lived in Munich during October and November 1906, visiting his high school artist friend Vasily V. Vladimirov, who was studying painting in Munich.14 There

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Bely frequented Café Simplicissimus, a bohemian gathering place, which Kandinsky used to visit as well. Both men became interested in theosophy and anthroposophy about the same time and attended Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and read his books. Kandinsky’s copy of Theosophy, by Steiner, and issues of Lucifer-Gnosis contained many notes in the margins. Kandinsky heard his lectures first (in Berlin in 1908), even though it was Bely who became a true adept and devoted several years of his life to Steiner’s anthroposophic doctrine.15 Kandinsky had an affinity for the symbolist Blue Rose artists, as did Bely, some of whom he knew personally.16 In 1912 the German reviewer for Apollon, in which both men published, called Kandinsky the proponent of a new art, writing that he had abandoned content and nature in his search for “new forms of expression,”17 which was also Bely’s obsession while writing Petersburg. Both were inspired by Alexander Scriabin’s synesthetic experiments, but Kandinsky quickly moved on to Arnold Schönberg’s far more radical experiments in synesthesia and musical dissonance. Needless to say, Kandinsky and Bely were devotees of Wagner, who introduced the term Gesamtkunstwerk, and of Nietzsche; they had apocalyptic presentiments, like their Russian contemporaries and forebears; they viewed Isadora Duncan’s dance as an exemplar of synesthesia and new movement; and so on. Yet it appears that the two never met.18 To my knowledge, Kandinsky made no references to Bely, although he must have read Bely’s essays from the 1900s on symbolism,19 especially since he was very much influenced by the symbolist movement in the arts: he published a review of the Munich art scene in World of Art (Mir iskusstva) in 1902, the same year in which Bely published his first article on aesthetics, titled “Forms of Art” (“Formy iskusstva”), in the very same journal.20 My purpose, however, is not the question of influence but the cultural and aesthetic affinities of their theoretical writing and artistic production: the ways they represented the disintegrating and exploding cosmos; experimented with color, sound, and abstraction; and reduced naturalistic representation to points, lines, and spots.

S pl i t t ing t he At om / Bomb Ex pl o s i o n It is a commonplace of art history that the splitting of the atom informed the revolution in modernist and avant-garde aesthetics. The nuclear fission served as one of the key subtexts of contemporary painting and literature, which was typically rendered in the form of explosion, with movement emanating from the center to the peripheries. Here is what Kandinsky wrote about it in 1913:

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A scientific event removed one of the most important obstacles from my path. This was the further division of the atom. The collapse of the atom was equated, in my soul, with the disintegration of the whole world. Suddenly the stoutest walls crumbled. Everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial. I would not have been surprised had a stone dissolved into thin air before my eyes and become invisible. Science seemed destroyed. (R 364)

A student of mathematics and the natural sciences, Bely was knowledgeable about contemporary theories of physics. In the retrospective poem First Meeting (Pervoe svidanie, 1921), he offered a striking image of the splitting of the atom, describing it anachronistically as an explosion of the atomic bomb and embedding it in his own scientific studies at the university, as well as in his reading of Nietzsche:

[That playful explosions Hide Thomson’s whirlwinds, And that huge worlds Haven’t been silenced by atomic power, That thought, like dynamite, flies Courageously and quickly, That a new experiment . . . —“The world will fly!”— Said Friedrich Nietzsche while exploding . . . The world exploded in Curie’s experiments Like a bursting atomic bomb Into electronic streams Like a disembodied hecatomb.]

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As I wrote in chapter 1, Bely had already compared his writing to a bomb in 1908, referring to Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo that he is not a man but dynamite: “My creative work is a bomb that I throw; life inside me is a bomb that has been thrown at me; a bomb striking a bomb—splashes of shards, two rows of intersecting continuities; the shards of my work are the forms of art; shards of the seen—images of necessity that explode my life.”22 The bomb became an important metaphor of writing at the turn of the twentieth century, in part as a result of the highly publicized anarchist bomb throwing in the capitals of Europe, especially in Russia. In response to the bombing of the French National Assembly by Auguste Vaillant in 1893, Stéphane Mallarmé was supposed to have said: “I know of no other bomb but a book. [. . .] I do not think one can use a more effective weapon than literature.”23 The metaphor of the bomb continued into the avant-garde—in Russia in the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, for instance.24 Consider also the futurist example that I cited in chapter 1: Alexei Kruchyonykh’s book of poetry Explosivity (Vzorval’, 1913) and Olga Rozanova’s abstract representation of it on the cover (see p. 41). The bomb pervades Bely’s writing, especially Petersburg, in which, as we know, it drives the plot, subtending the novel’s disjunctive, fragmentary structure, shrapnel-like geometric imagery, synecdochal representation of the body, and the expansion of consciousness.25 As I show in chapter 1, the image of the exploding bomb as multiple radiating lines from the center was also represented in the cartoon genre in the popular press, especially in the satirical journals that mushroomed after the 1905 Revolution in response to the eased censorship (see p. 102). Another example of the image is the cover of Shtyk (Bayonet ), edited by the well-know humorist Arkady Averchenko in Kharkov (1906–7). The caption by I. F. Gorbunov from Balloonist (Vozdukhoplavatel’ ) reads: “you can’t fly from the good life” (ot khoroshei zhizni ne poletish’ ). More specifically for the comparison of Kandinsky and Bely, the bomb trope motivates Petersburg’s dissolution of form, which I discussed in relation to affect in the previous chapter. Even though Kandinsky’s writing and paintings apparently have no bomb images, he describes “painting [as] a thundering collision of different worlds [and as cosmic catastrophes] that were destined in and through conflict to create the new world called the work” (R 373). Explosion in Petersburg is steeped in the terrorist bomb throwing rampant in Russia at the beginning of the century (“bombs striking bombs, splashes of shards”), yet the novel’s larger meaning and its multiple red spots refer not only to urban violence but also to cosmic collision, so that Kandinsky’s description of painting could be said to characterize Bely’s novel just as persuasively.

Cover of Shtyk, a satirical journal, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)

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It is another commonplace that the turn of the twentieth century in Russia was associated with powerful apocalyptic presentiments. The emblematic bomb in Petersburg has been read not only in relation to urban terrorism but also to Bely’s obsession with the apocalypse in Revelation, as has Kandinsky’s move to abstraction; Revelation’s images and tableaus are after all profoundly abstract. Both of their apocalyptic expectations were inspired by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and by theosophy and anthroposophy.26 Expressing his apocalyptic presentiments, Kandinsky writes in On the Spiritual in Art, his most important theoretical essay on aesthetics, that the new art marks the “coming Epoch of the Great Spiritual.” Like Bely, he read the theosophists Mme. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Charles Leadbeater and the anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, all of whom inscribed an apocalyptic spirituality. And like Mondrian and other artists experimenting with abstraction, Kandinsky and Bely were greatly influenced in their thinking and aesthetic sensibilities by the theosophist cum anthroposophist notion of the dematerialization of matter. Among Kandinsky’s and Bely’s favorite apocalyptic images were the galloping horseman (rendered in Petersburg as the Bronze Horseman and the Asiatic horde) and angel, which they represented in manifestly similar ways: Kandinsky in a glass painting (1911); Bely in a drawing that he made in the anthroposophic commune in Dornach between 1912 and 1916 with the purpose of visualizing his spiritual meditation and communicating his experience to Steiner. Kandinsky’s angels are well known; Bely’s, which verge on abstraction, are not.27 Consider especially the similar figuration of the head of the angel: the stern face, which resembles Orthodox iconography, and the flowing hair, whose texture and movement extend to the wings. Bely’s angel is almost more abstract than Kandinsky’s, focusing as it does on swirling, spiraling motion.28 The head and hair of the angel are the source of explosive, dissolving movement in Bely’s drawing; they are the point from which the drawing’s single swirling motion emanates, evoking the famed first description of Petersburg in the novel, in which the city is described as a point on a map from which “surges and swirls the printed book.”29 The drawing depicts revelation as a single explosion that bursts from the angel’s head and then surges outward from the center, as does “cerebral play” from the head of the senator in Petersburg. Kandinsky, in comparison to whom Bely is of course a mere novice in painting, though a talented one, renders motion by means of thick black lines and different pictorial planes moving diagonally in more than one direction.

Wassily Kandinsky, The Last Judgment, 1911 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; copyright 2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

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Andrey Bely, Angel, 1910s (Rudolf Steiner Archive)

But let us return to the passage “My creative work is a bomb that I throw; [. . .] splashes of shards, [. . .] the shards of my work are the forms of art; shards of the seen—images of necessity [my emphasis] that explode my life,” and let us focus this time on the effect of the metaphoric bomb on aesthetic form. Emphasizing his role as the artistic agent, Bely compares his writing to the impact of an exploding bomb thrown both at the world and reflexively back at himself: the explosion produces what he calls images of necessity (obrazy neobkhodimosti ). It resembles Georg Simmel’s famed description of the urban metropolis as a rapidly telescoping and fluid relationship of the inner and outer worlds produced by modernity’s violent stimuli (see introduction to this volume, p. 5). The images of necessity, according to Bely, are fragments of the seen, as if to suggest that they are the products of an urgent inner voice that explodes reality. Despite the violence, Bely’s description of his aesthetic process may be viewed as an analogue to Kandinsky’s creative principle of inner or internal necessity (innere Notwendigkeit ), which he introduced in On the Spiritual in Art (1911); the first reference to it appeared in Russian in Odessa (1910): “The principle of

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internal necessity [vnutrenniaia neobkhodimost’ ],” writes Kandinsky, “is in essence the one invariable law of art.”30 In the almanac Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider ) in 1912, he added that form emerges as the product of internal necessity, affiliating it with the impulse to abstraction.31 Internal necessity, a key concept in romanticism, especially in the philosophical writing of Friedrich Schelling, would become Kandinsky’s maxim of new art. His and Bely’s aesthetic claim—that the artist who has heard its call would access his inner experience by means of external form with the purpose of representing the new spiritual reality—had apocalyptic connotations for each. Concerned with inner content—spiritual necessity—and outer form and their reconfiguration in the new arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bely and Kandinsky articulated the relationship in terms that resemble theosophical and anthroposophic thinking about the dematerialized object. The occult seems to have been a powerful irritant to Kandinsky, contributing to his turn to abstraction.32 His claim in On the Spiritual in Art that abstract forms channel the sounding inner spirit reflects a theosophical cum anthroposophic sensibility The aesthetic question regarding inner content and outer form concerned Bely while working on Petersburg (written in part during his intense engagement with anthroposophy), and he often figured the relationship in theosophic and anthroposophic terms. The narrator affiliates materialization of thought with the novel’s key trope “cerebral play” (mozgovaia igra) early on, telling us that the author has rendered it pictorially, that he has hung pictures of illusions and refuses to take them down (56); as a result they have assumed a life of their own. The trope resembles the notion of “thought forms” (representations of mental, emotional, and spiritual states of heightened consciousness) introduced by Besant and Leadbeater in their identically titled 1901 book, which influenced the visual language of early abstraction.33 They claim that thoughts vibrate (an idea that Kandinsky deploys frequently), assume visible auras, and become separate floating forms, which they illustrate in the color plates that accompany Thought-Forms; the images consist of cloudlike, abstract forms seen by clairvoyants that were drawn or painted by artists. In 1913 in a letter to IvanovRazumnik, Bely describes the characters of Petersburg as “thought forms” that had not yet reached consciousness, writing that the novel and its revolutionary setting and content were merely the “conventional dress of thought forms.” He also refers to them as “cerebral play” and suggests to Ivanov-Razumnik that a possible title of the novel could be Cerebral Play.34 In Petersburg ’s key occult scene, which I examined in the previous chapter, Bely presents instead of a dematerialized object, a dematerialized subject: the

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enigmatic Shishnarfne, who inhabits the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension is a spatial concept of infinity and unboundedness that became very popular in European mystical and occult thought at the turn of the century.35 Here is the Bely passage: A man of three dimensions leaned against a window and became merely a contour (moreover, two-dimensional); then he became a thin layer of soot [. . .]; and now this black soot, which had formed a human contour, all gray somehow, was smoldering away into ash that gleamed with moonlight; and the soot was already flying away: the contour was covered by green spots [. . .] in a word, there was no contour. Obviously, what happened here was the dissolution of matter itself; the whole material substance was transformed into a deafening sounding substance that was jabbering away—but where? It seemed to Alexander Ivanovich that it was jabbering away inside him. [. . .] “Petersburg has four, not three, dimensions [says Shishnarfne]; the fourth [. . .] is not indicated on maps at all except by a dot, since the dot is the place where the plane of being is tangential to the surface of the sphere and the immense astral cosmos; any dot of Petersburg space can eject the inhabitant of this dimension in the twinkling of an eye, so a moment ago I was among the dots on the window sill, but now I have appeared from a dot in your larynx. (P 297–98)

The dissolution of Shishnarfne’s body reflects Bely’s immersion in the occult that reveals his impulse toward abstraction: Shishnarfne’s body first morphs into a contour, a thin black, then thicker gray, line, followed by green spots, and finally into a point (tochka) of dematerialized sound that emerges from Dudkin’s larynx.36 The metamorphosis seems to evoke one of Steiner’s meditation exercises, in which the student abstains from breathing and concentrates on “a point inside the larynx, while he fills his consciousness exclusively with the image: I am. If these exercises in concentration are continued strenuously for several weeks,” writes Steiner, “something will be felt at those points upon which the consciousness has been focused: at the root of the nose, in the larynx, a stream in the hands and arms and on the whole outer surface of the body.”37 The vibrating dot of Petersburg’s fourth dimension that gets lodged in Dudkin’s larynx produces a heartrending shout, which in chapter 2 I compared to Munch’s The Scream. But in the anthroposophic context, the shout—an assertion of the “I am”—may very well have had its origin in Steiner’s meditation exercises, which Bely did assiduously. The “sounding substance” evokes not only the hallucinatory “internal necessity” of Dudkin’s terrifying interlocutor, who turns out to be inside him—or is him—but also resembles Kandinsky’s obsession with synesthesia and what Sexton Ringbom calls “the sounding cosmos.”38 Bely’s vision of inner necessity

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is unsettling, however, perhaps because Bely’s metropolis is the space of revolutionary violence, dispersing terror as an expression of the coming urban apocalypse. Yet in visual terms, his Petersburg is seen as the surge from a point, like the head of the angel in Bely’s Dornach meditational drawing, the locus from which the swirling motion in it emanates; or returning to the terror in Russia at the beginning of the century, the surge from a point resembles the representation of bomb explosions in the satirical journals. So once again, Bely’s image has multiple meanings, thereby contributing to the spatialization of narrative. The obvious difference between Bely’s and Kandinsky’s turns to abstraction has to do with the art each practices, that Petersburg renders the process of dissolution in narrative terms. Shishnarfne’s dissolution takes place in time, but by locating it in the fourth dimension, Bely collapses time and space, so that they form a continuum instead.39 Shishnarfne reinforces the spatial aspect of his dematerialization by referring to the map, which is defined by a bird’s-eye view of space, and to the already familiar description of the city as a mere dot on a map. But in contrast to the famed statement at the end of the prologue, Shishnarfne’s reference to the city’s cartographic existence is more hesitant: his Petersburg is located in the fourth dimension, which further destabilizes the existence of the great metropolis. Bely places on the verbal canvas splotches of color, thin and thick black and gray lines, and dots, which are in motion, the result of Shishnarfne’s morphing body. The dot from which Dudkin’s harrowing shout emerges is the most mobile—a “sounding substance” and a cosmic emanation. This sounding substance resembles Kandinsky’s claim that abstract shapes are the expression of an inner sound, which scholars, especially Ringbom have associated with Kandinsky’s occult sounding cosmos. Dudkin’s shout into cosmic space is the culmination of the process of dissolution in this scene, as Shishnarfne is fully dematerialized by turning into pure harrowing sound that represents the internal necessity of Dudkin’s, and Bely’s, inner discord.40 But unlike the dot in the larynx, points also expand and form spots, circles, and spheres in Petersburg 41 and may be affiliated with Kandinsky’s later claim that the point when freed from its role as punctuation mark is “able to increase its size ad infinitum and becomes the spot.”42 Writing about Petersburg in his study of Gogol many years later, Bely describes the origin of the double agent Lippanchenko (to whom Shishnarfne is directly linked) as “emerging from a yellow spot of dampness; he steps from the wallpaper, melting into the intrigues and darkness of the streets.”43 The passage that I have been looking at so closely—and the setting in which it appears—contests the question of spatial perspective, with the narrative

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conflating the distant view and the close-up; the latter is characterized most palpably by the image of the sounding substance lodged in Dudkin’s throat, which, moreover, is transformed from spatial into aural substance. The frequent indistinguishability of the close-up and distant perspectives in Petersburg is one of the features of modernist painting and its abandonment of perspectivalized space. Moreover, Bely’s dots, including the one linked to the shout, typically exist on the edge of the astral sphere—the subject of many coeval paintings by Kandinsky, as is the sounding point in his theoretical writing: “the smallest elementary form” and the source of all other forms.44 Bely describes the point in very similar terms in Petersburg: because the point does not consist of parts, it is the origin of form.45

Movement , Music, a nd C o l o r Explosion and the apocalypse inscribe motion, which Bely and Kandinsky associate with the art of the future and the figure of the horseman. Describing his youthful aesthetic “method,” which emphasized the sense of sight, Bely claims its genesis in his experience of horseback riding. He writes in his memoirs that “the eye of the rider” (vsadnik ) would take in the fleeting blurred images of the sky and fields as he rode his horse at a fast clip in the countryside and “studied the rotation of objects and the dance of reliefs,” especially at those times of day when contours were rendered indistinct.46 The whirl of blurred images (reminiscent of his description of the Monet haystack) informed his metaphors, writes Bely, revealing that his turn to expressivity and abstraction originated in actual physical experience that he self-consciously staged. The narrator in Petersburg, whose images of the city at night are defined by the moon as a phosphorescent spot, describes the apocalyptic ride of the Bronze Horseman as a whirl of blurred urban and celestial images. The terrifying motion produced by the metallic horse and rider inform the narrator’s attendant metaphors of the sky: “the cloud’s shaggy arms flew madly; foggy strands of witches’ braids flew by; and among them loomed ambivalently a spot of phosphorus” (100). Bely and Kandinsky both affiliate motion with spiritual reality, music, and color, which they bring together in synesthesia. Bely’s 1902 essay “Forms of Art” links “pure motion,” as well as the spiritual, to music and, in true symbolist fashion, calls for a synthesis of the arts in the spirit of music. Kandinsky addressed the same questions in On the Spiritual in Art, which was published only in 1911, although he wrote much of it in 1909. “Forms of Art” calls for movement

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from the lower art forms to the higher ones, which according to Bely develop in time. Bely associates this upward motion with “the abatement of representations of reality”: Motion is the fundamental feature of reality. It reigns over the images of reality. [. . .] every art form has reality as its starting point and music, pure motion, as its final point. [. . .] The essence of motion is understood through music. In music we hear the hints of future perfection. [. . .] There are no images in music. Instead we have motifs. [. . .] The causal change of images is replaced by the rhythm of different tones. [. . .] Music reveals the mysteries of motion, its essence, which rules the world. [. . .] The center of music is [. . .] in the symphony. [. . .] The depth of music and absence of external reality in it suggest the idea of the emblematic character of music which explains the character of motion.47

So music, according to Bely, erases external reality and produces pure abstract motion, the goal of art. Kandinsky described his turn to abstraction at the end of the 1900s and early 1910s in terms of the dissolution of external naturalistic form and its replacement by an inner resonance (Klang). In On the Spiritual in Art, he associates artistic representation of the spiritual with the synesthetic power of music and pure motion:48 An artist who sees [. . .] the imitation of natural appearances, [. . .] who wants to, and has to, express his own inner world—sees with envy how naturally and easily such goals can be attained in music, the least material of the arts today. Understandably, he may turn toward it and try to find the same means in his own art. Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for [. . .] abstract construction, the value placed today upon the repetition of color-tones, the way colors are set in motion. (OSA 154)

Kandinsky, moreover, had the unusual capacity to hear color, and more than likely would have noted a poet whose name was Bely, meaning “white” in Russian. His disquisition on color inscribes music as well as motion. He speaks of colors as moving toward and away from one another, producing the musically inspired synesthetic impulse to the artwork’s spiritual content and to its abstract representation. He distinguishes between those colors and combinations of color that represent “motion” and those that represent “motionlessness.” To the synesthetic concert of colors Kandinsky adumbrates the “structure of simple lines, serving the general movement repeated in the [painting’s] individual parts” (OSA 215). And like Bely, he discusses his chosen art form in the terms of symphonic music, ending the essay with a call for purposeful symphonic structure as the goal of the new painting. Borrowing the term

Wassily Kandinsky, plate 20 in Punkt und Linie zur Fläche (Point and Line to Plane ), 1926 (courtesy of the Art History and Classics Library, University of California, Berkeley)

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“composition” from music, Kandinsky, starting in 1910, named his most ambitious experiments Compositions. Ten years earlier, Bely had created a literary genre that he named “symphony,” of which he wrote four; the second, Dramatic Symphony, appeared in 1902, a year when Kandinsky published actively in Russian journals. I remind you that “Forms of Art” was published in 1902 in Mir Iskusstva, in which Kandinsky published one of his “Letters from Munich” the same year. The real challenge, however, is to find a way to talk about interart counterparts based on a comparison of a verbal and a visual text, in the instance of Bely’s Petersburg—to talk about the nexus between language and painting. Let me first suggest a rather straightforward case based on an abstract representation of intersecting lines of various kinds. The figure of Apollon Apollonovich is described at one point as a perfect intersection of gray, white, and black lines on a lithograph. Dudkin’s confused—swarming—thoughts are depicted in similar terms: as the transformation of wavy lines into zigzags, then intersecting zigzags, and finally their dissolution and formation of fragments in the shape of arabesques. In the prologue Petersburg is described in terms of lines and circles: the rectilinear Nevsky Prospect and the abstract dot on the map set in two circles. I also remind you of Bely’s comparison of his writing to splashes of shards and intersecting continuities that suggest linear and geometric shapes; or the depiction of the senator crossing Nevsky in his carriage as a lacquered cube cutting the line of the avenue like an arrow. Kandinsky’s illustrations in the later Point and Line to Plane are instructive in this regard, especially in the example below of lines and dots consisting of a large point, or circle, at the bottom and a number of intersecting straight and curved lines and zigzags. I refer you back to my discussion of the affective meaning of the zigzag in Petersburg in the previous chapter.

The Cit y Let me finally turn to the city more directly and suggest more ambitious correspondences, starting with Petersburg and keeping in mind Bely’s and Kandinsky’s concern with color, movement, apocalypse, the occult, and explosivity. That Petersburg is about urban space is a trite observation—what is striking is the novel’s phantasmagoric visual representation of the city, especially of Nevsky Prospect, already evident in Bely’s 1907 essay “The City,” in which man turns into a “cloud of smoke.”49 The most extensive description of Nevsky in Petersburg consists of a series of expressive apocalyptic tableaus of the city at night from

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three different visual angles that move back and forth between close-up and panoramic perspectives, a strategy that Bely described as belonging to painting.50 The strategy became the purview of cinematic experiment, which, as I write in the introduction, fascinated Bely.51 Movement in the tableaus of Nevsky Prospect is represented through color, light, verbs that denote motion, and shifts in perspective that produce a sense of motion. Deictic shifts from “here” to “there” (a technique that abounds in Petersburg) motivate the movement and guide the readerly gaze. They spatialize the text and hurl the viewer from one plane of representation to another. The first tableau moves from recognizable urban descriptions of signboards that flash on and off to phantasmagoric metaphoric images and unformed organic shapes. At the center is the prospect, with its shop signs and shops, whose threatening gaping oral cavities spew blood: Fiery obfuscation floods the prospect in the evening. Down the middle hang apples of electric light at regular intervals. Along the sides shines the flashing glitter of shop signs; here, here, and here the sudden flare of ruby lights; over there—emeralds. A moment later: rubies there, emeralds here, here, and here. And the walls of many houses are lit up with diamond lights: words, consisting of diamonds, “Café,” “Farce,” “Tait Diamonds,” and “Omega Watches” shine brightly. Greenish during the day, and now radiant, a shop window opens its jaws wide onto Nevsky; tens, hundreds of hellish fiery jaws everywhere; they erupt their bright white light onto the stone; vomit opaque phlegm that looks like flaming rust. And they chew up the prospect with fire. White glitter falls on the bowler hats, top hats, feathers; the white glitter will dart further, toward the middle of the prospect, pushing evening darkness away from the sidewalk: and evening phlegm will dissolve over Nevsky as glitter, forming a dim yellowish, bloody murk, a mixture of blood and dirt. (P 49)52

The tableau sets bright lights against a contrasting black sky; the dominant colors are red (fiery, hellish, bloody, rust, rubies), green, and yellow, which can be read against Bely’s color theory.53 More importantly for this study in counterparts, the red, green, and yellow move forward, as in Kandinsky’s theory of color, pushing back the black of the Petersburg night; the colors are illuminated by electric lights (flood, flare of lights, shine brightly, radiant, glitter). Motion characterizes their expressivity (open their jaws wide, erupt, vomit, chew up, hurl), as does dissolution into organic formlessness, for instance, in the last image of “dim yellowish, bloody murk, a mixture of blood and dirt”— perhaps a reference to the spots of blood and body liquids produced by a terrorist bomb, mixed with dirt, and lit by the yellow of the electric lights on the street.

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Perhaps the most expressive and best known contemporary representation of such a spot of blood is Mikhail Dobuzhinsky’s October Idyll, a silent comment on the 1905 Revolution, with a puddle of blood on the sidewalk, blood splattered on the wall, and a doll and a man’s shoe on the ground, suggesting innocent bystanders who may have been killed. The picture, which appeared in the second issue of the satirical journal Zhupel (Bugbear 1905) is one of Dobuzhinsky’s many representations of modern Petersburg. In the second tableau, Bely’s narrator pans away from the threatening close-up of the big city, with Petersburg appearing in the shape of a red spot in the dark night: “From the Finnish marshes the city will show you its locus of mad sedentariness by means of a red, red spot: and that spot can be seen silently from a distance in the darkly colored night” (P 49). In contrast to the close-up of modernity’s teeming city, the abstract view of it, motivated by the distant perspective, is silent, suggesting perhaps that the first verbal picture inscribes urban noise, produced by cars, trams, horse-drawn vehicles, and people on Nevsky.54 The spot suggests the image of an electrified metropolis seen from a distance, although according to Kandinsky’s color theory, its redness moves toward the reader as spectator. The perspective shifts once again, cinematically, and the narrative moves the reader’s eye back to the city, of which we get a new look. The terrifying red spot dissolves into a closer view: “the bright bloody glitter that terrified you from a distance would dissolve into a whitish, not very clean brightness, would turn into houses with many lights—and only in the end would it disperse into a large multitude of little lights” (49). Instead of red, the dominant color is now white, and instead of the demonic lights of Nevsky—as in Nikolay Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospect”—the city dissolves, or disintegrates (raspalsia). Whereas the initial close-up was threateningly intense, the median view suggests the city’s passive dissolution into a more familiar panoramic view, although at the end as the camera moves closer, we begin to see the lights, not those of Nevsky but of the city as a whole. Going back to the first tableau, the image of the sinister city displays modernity’s urban glitter close up also by emphasizing the role of language: “words made of diamonds: [. . .] ‘Tait Diamonds,’ ‘Omega Watches.’” The reference to Tait Diamonds enhances the prospect’s modern artifice: it was a shop midway up Nevsky that sold American rhinestones of the sort that Lippanchenko has in his tie clip (straz).55 The glitter of the words made of fake diamonds engulfs the other signs and then morphs into apocalyptic fire and ultimately into formless puddles—spots—of yellow phlegm and red blood. Language dissolves into pictorial images. The third view is white, moving from

Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, October Idyll, cover of Zhupel’, 1905 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)

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shapeless patches of color back to the source—the city’s houses at night. White is the color of Christ in Revelation, although it is muddied, as is the red of the first close-up. In Kandinsky’s terms, an admixture of black dims white, threatening to turn it into gray, the most motionless of colors.56 In between the two representations of the city is a very red spot. However we parse it, the upshot of the verbal triptych’s meaning is uncertain. The question that the triptych poses is apocalyptic: will the city that stages the end of the Petersburg text explode, or will it fall back into motionless stultifying gray, a color that is associated in the novel with the bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich? What is most important for my interpretation of the triptych is that it is unequivocally visual in the avant-garde sense: it inscribes a will to abstraction, deploying multiple perspectival planes, shapes, and postimpressionist colors that, on the one hand, bleed into each other, dissolving the material city and, on the other, stand apart as separate entities.57 Bely wrote extensively about the meaning of color, starting in 1904 in “Sacred Colors.” The book on Gogol (Masterstvo Gogolia, 1934) offers his most complete study of color, including a statistical count of Gogol’s primary colors and a comparison of Gogol’s style and his own.58 Discussing the relationship between words that designate nuances of color and abstract form, Bely claims that sometimes the original meaning of words that represent color disappears: ore-like [rudyi ] and glowing [rdianyi ] become abstract signs for expressing the image “red”; furthermore, the image-metaphor “dove-like” [kak u golubia, related to the word for light blue in Russian] is extinguished and turns into the adjective azure [ goluboi ] to express a certain spectral color; after the image, the meaning of the word as something concrete [dove-like] is extinguished and thereby a term is born: abstraction.59

The conclusion that words of color become abstractions seems particularly applicable to the description of Nevsky, in which such words as bloody, fiery, rust, ruby, emeralds, and phlegm dissolve into unshaped splotches of color and are dissociated from their original meaning. They acquire an emotional content, evoking Besant’s and Leadbeater’s similar claim in Thought-Forms, and reference the reverse—that emotions have color. Both Bely’s and Kandinsky’s color theories were influenced by the theosophical and anthroposophic color codes that had been developed in Thought-Forms and elsewhere. So what in Kandinsky’s work could be a counterpart to Bely’s description of the city, even though Kandinsky’s cityscapes are neither modern nor of Petersburg, but of Moscow? An obvious place to start is Moscow (1916), an abstract image of the city that radiates out from a yellow and green spot in intersecting

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Wassily Kandinsky, Moscow, 1916 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; copyright 2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

planes with semiabstract images of the Kremlin, churches, and tall buildings, as well as abundant bright patches of red, yellow, green, and black. The context is apocalyptic, although the emotional tone is more joyful than Bely’s: the red in the painting is produced by a sunset cum storm, not blood. Instead of offering a close reading of Moscow, however, I would like to propose a jarring counterpart, one that is conceptual in the theosophical sense, and consider Kandinsky’s earlier and atypical Lady in Moscow. My choice is determined by the painting’s combination of figurative representation and abstraction and by its very prominent black spot that stands apart, resisting the other elements in the painting.

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Wassily Kandinsky, Lady in Moscow, 1912 (Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; copyright 2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

The 1912 Lady in Moscow combines the figurative representation of a city street and of a woman with three mysterious spots of black, red, and pink. The ominous very black spot, or cloud, to which a smaller red circle surrounded by an aura is attached, suggests impending disaster; it hangs heavily in the sky, partially covering the red sun and unsettling the primitively painted Moscow scene. Kandinsky scholars have interpreted the mysterious black shape, which resembles the spherical shapes in Bely’s novel, as a theosophical image.60 In regard to Bely, it evokes his disquisition on the symbol in “Window to the Future” (1904), in which the purpose of the symbol is described as overcoming the power of the terrifying smile of the Gorgon Medusa on the shield of Perseus:

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Vague Selfish Affection, figure 9 in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms, 1905

“It may be that [. . .] rays [of light] will shatter the huge black spot, which has arisen like a phantom between us and the light.” The suggestion is that symbolism has been called upon to disperse the terrifying black spot, which represents Medusa’s gaze that turns men into stone.61 Considered in relation to theosophy, Kandinsky’s sinister black spot, which threatens the city, red sun, and large pink spot seem to invoke Besant’s and Leadbeater’s illustrations in Thought-Forms, for example, Vague Selfish Affection.62 From the perspective of Kandinsky’s color theory, black represents absolute imploding discord; pink and red, warm colors, approach the viewer and move outward.63 In his terms, then, even though the black spot is ominously immobile, it represents movement through contrast, with the warm red and pink spots signifying life-affirming motion. The latter is reinforced by the dog, jumping at something or someone hidden behind the lady, and horse-drawn carriage. Yet the painting, which is disturbing despite the warm colors and inscription of humor and everyday life, also insinuates threatening, violent images. Although the woman is holding a flower in her barely visible left hand, the image, quite startlingly, also resembles an arm that has been lobbed off,

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portending the disruption that will explode the traditional life of the city; this is reinforced by the fire tower, in the top right-hand corner, from which hang three rings signifying fire. If we read the red flower as morphing into the flesh of the woman’s arm, it introduces a grotesque element into the city scene; formally, however, the image repeats the shades and swirls of color in the abstract pink spot to the right. Black and dark blue reside mostly on the right side of the painting, and like the bloody images in Petersburg, they threaten to move toward the center. And like Bely’s narrative shifts from close-up to distant perspective and back, the painting locates several perspectival planes that evoke tension. Although the street lined with houses inscribes classical perspective, the foregrounded lady and images of the everyday, including the lapdog on the table, subvert it by moving into domestic space. The lady is surrounded by a green-blue aura—an astral body—once again suggesting Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms. The lady herself, however, resembles a female figure from a painted shop sign, which destabilizes the painting further by suggesting a close-up of something absent on the street in the background.64 Shop signs, as in Petersburg, do figure in another version of Lady in Moscow, evoking, for instance, Dobuzhinsky’s famed Barbershop Window (1906) and City Types (1908) from his Petersburg cycle, which the prominent Russian art historian Dmitry Sarabyanov, quite appropriately, considers expressionist.65 City Types contains a stylized female face and the abbreviated word kakao (cocoa); in another version of the Lady (a glass painting), the word restaurant on a shop sign appears on the city street and is separated from the image of the woman—it only implies a connection between them.66 Although my point here refers to Kandinsky’s Lady, Dobuzhinsky’s paintings may be said to inform Bely’s representation of the city in Petersburg even more.67 To anyone familiar with Kandinsky’s Munich abstractions, Lady in Moscow is strikingly different from his paintings from the late 1900s and early 1910s. So let us finally consider a Kandinsky abstract painting from this period whose title references the spot, which may be seen as the emblem of abstraction in his and Bely’s works. The Black Spot (1912), like other paintings with spot in the title, reflect Kandinsky’s experimentation with color and form—what he describes in Reminiscences as “masses, spots, and lines all piled together.” Appropriately, Kandinsky scholars have interpreted The Black Spot, painted shortly after Lady in Moscow, as its abstract counterpart.68 In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky describes black as if it were a dark spot: “an inner sound of nothingness, [. . .] a dead nothingness as if the sun had become extinct” (185). The description resembles Bely’s representation of the black spot, quoted earlier, as something that obscures spiritual light.

Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, Barbershop Window, 1906 (courtesy of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, Los Angeles)

Mikhail Dobuzhinsky, City Types, 1908 (Tretyakov Gallery)

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Wassily Kandinsky, Black Spot, 1912 (State Russian Museum; copyright 2009 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/ADAGP, Paris)

Blackness, which according to Kandinsky lacks sound unlike other colors, is dispersed on the canvas. Even though Black Spot is first and foremost an abstract painting, it still has traces of figuration, which the viewer must look for because they are obscured by abstract shapes and the liberating abstract use of colors: on the left is a walled city with towers; on the right are dim outlines of human figures; on the upper left is a barely discernible troika, which for Kandinsky symbolized the apocalypse, as did the rider.69 Like other Kandinsky abstractions from this period, the painting can be read as deploying conflict between apocalyptic destruction (black spot and threatening lines) and spiritual renewal and liberation, which are absent in Bely’s Petersburg.70

Spot s The question remains whether Kandinsky’s and Bely’s recurrent spots, blots, splotches, dots, and points can be linked to their reception of Monet’s haystack and its dissolution—into a red spot in Bely’s recollection.

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Although Kandinsky disavowed mimesis in turning to abstraction, his response to the Monet, as he described it years later, was associated with an obsessive desire to paint Moscow at the time of sunset: when the setting sun dissolves the whole city “into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s soul vibrating;” perhaps Moscow (see above) was an expression of this desire. He writes that it took him many years to give it up and to understand the fundamental difference between art and nature. Yet the verbal description of Moscow at sunset suggests Kandinsky’s impulse to abstraction, which, like Bely’s, seems to have started in the contemplation of nature; here, of the changing sky, especially when it vibrates with bright colors: Kandinsky refers to the sky at sunset as a synesthetic moment, “a shout of triumph” (R 360). Notably, Kandinsky’s nostalgic reminiscence of the Moscow sunset is followed almost immediately by his reception of Monet’s impressionist Haystack, in which he speaks of the painting discrediting the object. In contrast to the multiple shouts of despair in Petersburg, the source of the shout of triumph, according to Kandinsky, was a shout in nature, not in him, which may evoke in us Munch’s description of the source of The Scream (described in the previous chapter): that the shout in nature induced the angst-ridden painting. Kandinsky’s Reminiscences narrate his quest for an expressive abstract art: it took him a long time to understand that the internal necessity of a work of art is fundamentally different from nature’s beauty and its aims and that his angst regarding the inability to represent the city at sunset naturalistically made no sense. This realization, claims Kandinsky, “was enough to ‘comprehend’ [. . .] the possibility and existence of that art which today is called ‘abstract,’ as opposed to ‘objective’” (R 361). Yet even though he distanced himself from external nature and from the desire to represent it naturalistically, the vibrating red spot of Moscow, like the Monet, clearly left a deep impression, and discursively and indirectly he suggests it as the earliest source of his abstract experiments. Bely’s experience of the changing sky of Moscow in symbolist terms is well known: together with his young cohort, he would regularly go to the fields of Moscow’s Novodevichy Monastery at sunset in search of revelatory signs in the sky, a habit that is reflected in his first book of poetry Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri ). I have described his physical experiments with the blurred contours of nature at sunset.71 In “Why I Became a Symbolist” (1928), Bely offers a definition of the symbol that is related to a childhood experience of a red spot in nature linked to the sun, an experience that he self-consciously constructed, like the subsequent rides through the countryside on horseback. In his memoirs, he speaks of his youthful penchant for the “construction of the experience of seeing” and its insinuation into symbolist metaphors, adding that his metaphors were “the product of the gaze.”72 He remembers thinking about the red spot as

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“‘something crimson’; ‘something’ is a feeling; the crimson spot is the form of expression; the one and the other taken together is a symbol,” which, as he writes, is the creation of something else, something “third.”73 The notion that the symbol is always a dialectical third was already articulated by Bely in “Window to the Future.”74 Bely’s deceptively simple definition of the symbol in “Why I Became a Symbolist” resembles Kandinsky’s concept of internal necessity—in the sense of bringing together subjective emotional experience and form—as well as the latter’s discussion of Moscow at sunset.75 If we consider Monet’s impressionist haystacks in similar terms, which some of his contemporaries viewed as symbolic representations, they also produce something third.76 David Burliuk, writing in the Blaue Reiter, claims that Bely had said that “impressionism is a superficial form of ‘symbolism.’”77 In this regard, it is noteworthy that the symbolist Mallarmé admired Monet’s late paintings. “By the early 1890s,” writes Dee Reynolds, “it had become acceptable to link Impressionism with Symbolism,”78 although twentieth-century art historians have resisted the affiliation. So the spot is not only a visual image in Kandinsky’s and Bely’s oeuvre but also a symbol, one that Bely originates in nature but goes on to discuss in abstract terms in “Why I Became a Symbolist,” reflecting the symbolist impulse to abstraction. Going back to the Haystack once again, Kandinsky and Bely wrote about their responses to the painting retroactively as if their reception of it was symbolic of this impulse. So their impulse to abstraction ultimately had a larger philosophical and mystical dimension—the desire to render subjective experience and the “great spiritual” visually and synesthetically, not naturalistically. In Bely’s case, the impulse reached its highest point in Petersburg and its urban representation of modernity. Speaking about the affinities between Kandinsky and Bely, I have linked several concepts: symbolism, apocalyptic vision, theosophy/anthroposophy, explosion, splitting of the atom, the city, and abstraction. Although they do not form a direct continuum, I have suggested an affinity among them: that Kandinsky and Bely viewed the red spot, whose original documented source was an impressionist painting, not only pictorially but also symbolically. They were both grounded in symbolism, which was premised on the link of sensory reality (represented by verbal signs and visual images) and a supersensible abstract reality: symbols that have their origins in the sensible world necessarily point to an abstract realm. Their turn to theosophy and anthroposophy imbricated their subjective discourses in a visual language that was beyond naturalistic representation. The occult served Kandinsky and Bely both as a source of abstract images and as a catalyst for uniting external and inner experience.

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Kandinsky’s frequent reference to the vibration of the soul and vibrating colors bears the stamp of Besant and Leadbeater. Needless to say, Bely’s abstractions were timid by comparison to Kandinsky’s and always remained linked to figuration, but then so did Kandinsky’s throughout the Munich period. They both made wide use of the simplest nonrepresentational forms—dot, line, and circle. Yet one of the painterly sources of their visual language was an impressionist painting; impressionism may have been less antithetical to symbolism at the time than we today think. Both, after all, were concerned with the suggestive aspect of representation. Like the impressionists, Kandinsky and Bely were obsessed with the dissolution of the object, and in their youth, with the observation of nature and the city at certain times of day. As Bely writes regarding the visual in his early poetry, he was a plein air artist who rendered the fleeting images observed on horseback at sunset, and his metaphors were the product of ocular impressions.79 One final point regarding interart analogies as they relate to literature and painting: in making the obvious observation that Bely’s abstractions are timid by comparison to Kandinsky’s, we should also highlight Bely’s extraordinarily inventive and rich metaphors as the basis of comparison. If Kandinsky experimented with colors and the ways they inform the dissolution of form, Bely’s metamorphic images were the pigments that dissolve the sensible world of Petersburg. He suggested as much himself in the discussion of the relationship between words and color.  1. Bely wrote that the novel was born in sound, a sensation he had not experienced before (Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990]), 435. One of the few contemporary scholars who has given serious consideration to the painterly aspect of Bely’s writing is E. V. Zavadskaya, but she has focused exclusively on his poetry, the best of which according to her is characterized by visual language, what she calls zrimoe slovo, “the seen word” (E. V. Zavadskaya, “Ut pictura poesis Andreia Belogo,” in Andrey Bely: Problemy tvorchestva, ed. St. Lesnevsky and Al. Mikhaylov [ Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1988], 469). Zavadskaya writes that the paintings and drawings of Borisov-Musatov and K. Somov inhabit some of his early poems (468). The scholar who has considered both the poetry and prose of Bely in relation to the visual arts is I. V. Koretskaya, who focuses especially on expressionism. According to her, Gold in Azure (Zoloto v lazuri ), his first book of poetry, reveals the influence of the Secession and Jugendstil artists Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and T.-T. Heine (I. V. Koretskaya, “O simvolizme i simvolistakh,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv [ polilog v nachale XX veka] [ Moscow: IVI RAN, 2001], 41.) See note 6 below regarding Petersburg. The novel’s self-conscious inscription of color has been studied, among others, by the leading Bely scholar Leonid Dolgopolov, in all likelihood because Bely developed a

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color theory, which he applied in his own writing (L. K. Dolgopolov, “Printsipy i priemy izobrazheniia goroda,” in Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 617–19. 2. Nikolay Berdyaev, “Astral’nyi roman (Razmyshlenie po povodu romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg’),” in Andrey Bely: Pro et Contra, ed. A.V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Russkii Khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut, 2004), 411–18. 3. Andrey Bely, “Iz ‘Dnevnika pisatelia’ A. Belogo (Zapiski mechtatelei, 1921, no. 2– 3),” in Bely, Peterburg, 503–4. 4. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 97. 5. In 1911 (when he was beginning work on Petersburg), Bely writes in Between Two Revolutions that he was fascinated by the new movements in the arts associated with the names of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Burlyuk brothers (Bely, Mezhdu, 412–13). Writing about revolution in 1917, he associates the welcome emergence of new forms of art with futurism, cubism, and suprematism (“Revoliutsiia i kul’tura,” in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, ed. A. L. Kazin [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1994], 2:460). 6. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 787. 7. An exception to the norm in Bely criticism is I. V. Koretskaya, who considers him an expressionist. See especially her essay on Christ Has Risen (Khristos voskres, 1918), which examines Bely’s image of Christ’s physical suffering in relation to expressionist painting, starting with Matthias Grünewald’s Mockery of Christ; Grünewald was an inspiration to the Berlin expressionists (“Poema Andreia Belogo ‘Khristos voskres’: ekspressiia palitry,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv, 192). Bely had seen the painting in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich in 1906 and wrote about its powerful impact on him. Koretskaya also writes about the expressionist sensibility of Petersburg, but not with any specificity. Her main point seems to be contra Berdyaev and his cubist reading of the novel, based on the fact that Bely had expressed a negative view of cubism (“futurisms, cubisms are destroying art for us”), which I don’t consider a strong argument (Bely also expressed the opposite opinion) despite agreeing with her otherwise (I. V. Koretskaya, “O simvolizme i simvolistakh,” in Literatura v krugu iskusstv, 65–66). As in the case of the 1918 poem, Koretskaya’s emphasis is on the Dresden and Berlin expressionists, not on Kandinsky. Scholars who have discussed Bely’s writing and thinking in relation to Kandinsky are John Bowlt (“Vasilii Kandinsky: The Russian Connection,” in The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art: A Study of “On the Spiritual in Art,” ed. John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long [Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1980], esp. 8) and Peter Lasko (The Expressionist Roots of Modernism [ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003], 101–3). Although this is not the place to raise the thorny question of expressionism in Russia, let me just say that the labels “futurism” and “expressionism” were not clearly distinguished before the war, and their practitioners often commingled. So Kandinsky exhibited with the Jack of Diamonds, as did the Burlyuk brothers, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexandra Exter (whose work usually is considered futurist); several of Kandinsky’s poems from Sounds (Klänge) were included in the famed Hylaea (futurist) anthology A Slap in the Face of Public Taste in 1912 (although he would complain that they were published without his permission). The point is that the leading futurists Vladimir Mayakovsky

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(whose poetry is as expressionist as it is futurist), Velemir Khlebnikov, Alexey Kruchyonykh, and David Burlyuk (the signers of the manifesto A Slap) considered Sounds (about which more below) congenial to their avant-garde experiments. In the same way the Russians David Burlyuk and Nikolay Kulbin, who was affiliated with the futurists in those early years, were included in Kandinsky’s Blue Rider Almanac (1911); Burlyuk’s essay on Russian avant-garde art was titled “Savages.” On the subject of expressionism in Russia, see Russkii ekspressionizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika, ed. V.N. Terekhina (Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005). It is the first such anthology. 8. This correspondence has been observed by several scholars in recent years, without, however, developing it further, as I try to do in this chapter. Bely saw the Monet at the French Industrial and Art Exhibit in Moscow in 1891. The date of Kandinsky’s viewing is uncertain, variously claimed as 1891 and 1896. The annotations in the authoritative Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art suggest 1896 as the most likely date (ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo [Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982], 1:888, n.21). In a recent article, the Russian scholar Natalya Avtonomova rehearses both possibilities: 1891 and 1896 (“Vasilii Kandinsky and Claude Monet,” Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 9 [2003]: 58–59). The Monet Haystack at the 1891 exhibition also made an important impression on Alexander Benois and Pyotr Konchalovsky. Apparently, Kandinsky frequently referred to it during his Bauhaus lectures after the war, referring to the Haystack as a starting point of modern art (65). 9. Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:363. Subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation R. 10. Andrey Bely, Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989), 300. 11. Ibid., 178–84. 12. Spot can also be a synonym for stain. The adults, who according to Bely considered the Monet disgusting, clearly had stain in mind. 13. Kandinsky’s first teacher in Munich was the Slovenian artist and teacher Anton Ashbe, and then he studied under the renowned German artist Franz von Stuck. Bely writes about both in Between Two Revolutions. 14. There were many Russian artists studying and working in Munich in the 1900s. Among the best known were Alexey Jawlensky, Nina von Werefkin, Igor Grabar, and Dmitry Kardovsky. 15. Bely heard a course of lectures by Rudolf Steiner and met him personally in Cologne in 1912. For a discussion of anthroposophy in Petersburg, see Konstantin Mochulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, trans. Nora Szalovitz (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1977); and Vladimir Alexandrov, Andrey Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 16. Kandinsky was a great admirer of the symbolist paintings of Viktor BorisovMusatov, as was Bely, who wrote the essay “Rozovye girliandy” (1906) about his work after the artist’s death. Among the Blue Rose artists that Bely knew were P. Kuznetsov, M. Saryan, S. Sudeykin, N. Sapunov, N. Feofilaktov, and N. Milioti. 17. N. R., “Khudozhestvennye vesti s zapada: Germaniia,” Apollon 3, no. 9 (1912): 56. 18. I have found only one reference to Kandinsky by Bely in his published writing; it is from a later period and has no relation to the questions I discuss here. Alexander Blok, Bely’s poet-twin, however, referred to Kandinsky’s early paintings favorably in a

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review of an art exhibit in Petersburg in 1904, naming the following paintings: At the Shore (Na beregu), Poets (Poety), and Riders (Vsadniki ) (“Novoe obshchestvo khudozhnikov. Peterburg. Vystavka kartin v zalakh Akademii nauk,” in A. A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 5, ed. D. E. Maksimov and G. A. Shabelsky [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1962], 674). 19. Commentary in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art suggests—without any evidence—that Kandinsky was familiar with Bely’s poetry and prose. In the same commentary, the editors write that Kandinsky expressed his apocalyptic vision in a language reminiscent of Bely’s (96–97). 20. Kandinsky also wrote such reviews for Apollon and must have read both journals regularly, as did Bely. 21. Andrey Bely, Pervoe svidanie in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Novaia biblioteka poeta), ed. A. V. Lavrov and John Malmstad (St. Petersburg-Moscow: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo Adademicheskii proekt, 2006), 2:31–32. The translation is mine. In the poem Bely refers to Ivan M. Grevs, the medievalist and originator of the Petersburg excursionist movement, about whom I write in the introduction. 22. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” Arabeski in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2:200. 23. Quoted in Anthony Fothergill, “Reading the Secret Agent Now: The Press, the Police, the Premonition of Simulation,” in Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios, and Andrea White (London: Routledge, 2005), 150. (For the French, see Les Interviews de Mallarmé, ed. Dieter Schwarz [ Neuchâtel: Ides & Calendes, 1995], 75.) Critics responded to the impact of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon as a bomb thrown by anarchists (Patricia Leighten, Reordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897–1917 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989], 89). As to Kandinsky, he described contemporary art as “anarchist” in the Blue Rider Almanac in 1912 (“On the Question of Form,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:242). 24. See, e.g., Mayakovksy’s “Gospodin ‘narodnyi artist” (1927) and the line: “A Song, /And a verse /—Are a bomb and a Banner.” 25. In Nachalo veka, Bely describes the symbolist poet as a “bomb thrower” whose soul is dynamite (Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka, ed. A. V. Lavrov [ Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989], 45). 26. Kandinsky makes reference to Dmitry Merezhkovsky in On the Spiritual in Art. Merezhkovsky, whom Bely knew well, was influenced by Solovyov. 27. Bely’s anthroposophic drawings from Dornakh, located in the Rudolf Steiner Archive, were exhibited in the Andrey Bely Museum in Moscow in 2005. Some of them have appeared in Bely publications. 28. For a discussion of the spiral in Petersburg, see Robert Maguire and John Malmstad, “Petersburg,” in Andrey Bely: Spirit of Symbolism, ed. John E. Malmstad (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 96–144. Maguire and Malmstad write that in 1912 Bely “created a new geometric model to embody, in more or less consistent if not systematic fashion, one key idea with which he had long been contending: ‘one must create life: creation before cognition’” (98). 29. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 10. Subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation P. 30. Wassily Kandinsky, “Content and Form,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art,

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1:88. The original Russian version appeared in Salon 2. Mezhdunarodnaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka (Odessa: V. Izdebsky, 1910), 14–16. 31. Kandinsky, “On the Question of Form,” 1:239. 32. The most extensive study of the occult in Kandinsky’s work is by Sixten Ringbom, The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, published in Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A, 38, no. 2, 1970. The influential Kandinsky scholar Peg Weiss, however, has argued against the influence of the occult on Kandinsky, claiming that decorative and folk arts served as the main source of his abstract paintings. Yet in recent years as art history has shifted from a formalist approach to avant-garde painting to questions of ideology and affect, the impact of theosophy and anthroposophy on Kandinsky has become generally accepted. 33. Kandinsky owned a German translation of Thought-Forms (it was translated into German in 1908). For a discussion of the influence of the book on Kandinsky and Mondrian, see, e.g., Alex Own, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 230. Bely also read Besant and Leadbeater. Sofia Petrovna in Petersburg has a copy of Besant’s Man and His Bodies, first published in 1896; notoriously confusing names, Sofia Petrovna refers to its author as Madame Henri Besançon, a conflation of Besant and Henri Bergson, whose ideas were well known in Russia. 34. Andrey Bely to Ivanov-Razumnik, December 1913, in Bely, Peterburg, 516. “My whole novel,” writes Bely, “depicts by means of symbols of time and place the unconscious life of crippled thought forms.” 35. See Linda Henderson, “Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985, ed. Edward Weisberger (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), 219–37. 36. In the previous chapter, I examined Dudkin’s response to the apparition of Shishnarfne from a very different perspective—as an experience of self-disgust and homophobia. 37. See wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GuidEsot;lines=583-706. 38. The title of Ringbom’s book (see note 32). Besant and Leadbeater also claim the stimulation of thought forms by music. 39. “The circle,” writes Kandinsky, “is a synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms it points most clearly to the fourth dimension” (Kandinsky to Will Grohmann, in Lieber Freund: Künstler Schreiben an Will Grohmann, ed. Karl Gutbrod [Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1968], 55–56). 40. The internal necessity that forces Dudkin to come to terms with Shishnarfne resembles Kandinsky’s view of the inner world as ultimately coming forth as sound. 41. See Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” which examines the relationship between lines, circles, and spirals in the novel and links it to two coeval Bely essays: “Liniia, krug, spiral’—simvolizma” and “Krugovoe dvizhenie.” 42. Wassily Kandinsky, “Little Articles on Big Questions: On the Point, on the Line,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:424. 43. Andrey Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: OGIZ, 1934), 303. Bely’s discussion of Gogol’s impact on Petersburg is very enlightening, as is the statistical count of colors used by Gogol (303–8). Consider also Bely’s description of Gogol’s style because it seems that

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he is writing about his Petersburg: “you see [. . .] suddenly some kind of turbid spots and shadows, which don’t refer to the reflection, furrow of its [reflection of clouds] contours” (43); “Gogol was a painter [. . . of ] colorful spots and methods of combining them” (175); Gogol’s “Petersburg is a ghost-like dot, a stylization; it is a hyperbole for the sake of hyperbole; and for Gogol, it is an explosion: of the bomb in Gogol” (181). 44. Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane: A Contribution to the Analysis of Pictorial Elements, in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 2:542. 45. In another scene, a dot in the senator’s head is described as the locus from which his power emanates and expands in the shape of concentric circles. The first reference to the dot in Petersburg ends with the image of the “swarming” city novel, evoking the anonymous—swarming—crowds of the modern city that, as I suggest in the introduction, cannot be read. The epithet swarming, especially from the time of Walter Benjamin’s study of Baudelaire, has been associated with his representation of the crowds of Paris. In Bely, however, swarming is also associated with uncontrollable thoughts, suggesting that they have something in common with the crowd. 46. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47. 47. Andrey Bely, “Formy iskusstva,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, ed. L. A. Sugay (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 100–103. 48. Kandinsky figures the spiritual life “as a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. [. . .] the whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly forward and upward” (“On the Spiritual in Art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, 1:133; subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation OSA). Bely makes no references to geometry in “Formy iskusstva,” yet he was quite obsessed with geometry not only in Petersburg but also in his theoretical theosophic writing, for example, in “Emblematika smysla.” Cf. also “the ever-growing union of triangle and spiral, form and movement” in Bely’s thinking, which (movement) Maguire and Malmstad affiliate with the notion of evolution (Maguire and Malmstad, “Petersburg,” 100). 49. Andrey Bely, “Gorod,” in Kritika, estetika, teoriia simvolizma, 2:324. 50. See the introduction to this volume, note 57. 51. So we could discuss the three verbal pictures and their movement from close-up to panoramic view and back as cinematic and link Bely’s description of Nevsky to Gogol’s protocinematic descriptive strategies that move between the close-up and a distanced point of view, which Bely would consider later in his book on Gogol. 52. See the introduction to this volume, pp. 6–7, for a discussion of Bely’s 1907 essay “Gorod,” in which the modern urban street is described in very similar terms, suggesting that some of the passages traveled directly to the novel a few years later. 53. Cf. Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia, and its examination of the meaning of individual colors. 54. In his introduction to the 1909 book of poetry Pepel (Ashes), Bely describes contemporary Russia in terms of its stultifying wide expanses: Russia’s “nonobjectivity [bespredmetnost’ ] is terrifying—ghost-like visions arise” (Andrey Bely, “Vmesto predisloviia [K sborniku “Pepel],” in Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, Bol’shaia seriia poeta [ MoscowLeningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966], 544). 55. Tait Diamonds was located on the first floor of 32 Nevsky Prospect, on the corner next to the Catholic church. You can see it on the Web site Mapping Petersburg (Nevsky Prospect).

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56. Kandinsky describes gray, a mixture of black and white, as toneless (absence of sound) and motionless (“disconsolate lack of motion”). The deeper the gray, the more suffocating it becomes (“On the Spiritual in Art,” 186). He describes black as the silence of death against which all colors stand forward and sound. 57. Bely’s pictorial vision of Nevsky Prospect may also suggest Malevich’s more or less coeval cubo-futurist paintings, for instance, The Englishman from Moscow (1914), which consists of various planes, bright colors, and words, but with the difference that Bely’s vision is expressive, or expressionist, not rationalist, as was the cubist aesthetic. I claim this despite Bely’s incredulous response to Malevich’s Red Square of 1915. 58. Like Kandinsky’s, Bely’s ideas on color were influenced by Steiner, a Goethe scholar; Steiner’s disquisition on color in turn was influenced by Goethe’s. 59. Quoted in Zavadskaya, “Ut pictura poesis Andreia Belogo,” 464n4. 60. The most extensive reading of Lady in Moscow is by Ringbom, Sounding Cosmos, 94–102. 61. Andrey Bely, “Okno v budushchee,” in Arabeski, 2:133. 62. Figure 9 in Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms (London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1905), 40. The image “shows us [. . .] a cloud of affection [. . .] tinged” with selfishness (41). A full view of Thought-Forms, including fiftyeight color illustrations, is available online through Google Books. See also Mark Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 70. 63. In On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky affiliates the color red with the ringing, powerful, and harsh sound of trumpets. 64. The Lady can also be compared to a lubok figure, which had been popularized by the Russian neoprimitivists a few years earlier. Kandinsky studied and collected Russian and Bavarian broadsheets. For a different reading of the Lady, one that locates it in a particular locale in Moscow and as representing a city fire, see Valery Turchin, Kandinsky v Rossii (Moscow: Obshchestvo druzei tvorchestva V. Kandinskogo, 2005), 235. He writes that the Lady, who “is dangerous like fire,” represents a woman posing for a portrait. Turchin also claims that the painting is Chagall-like and the black and red spots are figurations of the author, Kandinsky. 65. D. V. Sarabyanov, Istoriia russkogo iskusstva kontsa XIX—nachala XX veka (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo gos. universiteta, 1993), 87. It should be noted that Dobuzhinsky also studied painting with Kandinsky’s first teacher, Anton Ashbe, in Munich. 66. See plates of two variants of Lady in Moscow in Vasily Kandinsky: A Colorful Life, ed. Helmut Friedel, trans. Hugh Beyer et al. (Cologne: DuMont, 1995), 384–85. 67. Bely seems to have specifically inscribed Dobuzhinsky’s “Barbershop Window” (without mentioning the artist) in Petersburg. In chapter 2 the stranger with the small black moustache (Dudkin), forgetting about the reason for his visit to Nikolay Apollonovich— the delivery of the bundle (with the bomb)—starts telling Nikolay that sometimes he has the desire to express his thoughts to someone (anyone), even to a “hairdresser doll exhibited in the window” (Bely, Peterburg, 52). Later Dudkin tells him that he is a fetishist, that men fall in love with him, and that he suffers from hallucinations, and when he sees Apollon Apollonovich (“a bare skull with huge ears”) and then looks back at Nikolay, he is reminded of the same “hairdresser doll: a handsome man made of wax with a timid unpleasant smile on his lips stretched to his ears” (93). Such wax figures were fixtures in hairdresser’s windows of the time. 68. Ringbom, Sounding Cosmos, 102.

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69. The dissolved images in Kandinsky could also be considered the product of the gradual dissolution of naturalistic form through time, a process that can be observed in Kandinsky’s work from the beginning of the century. 70. See Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 132–33. 71. Sunsets abound in Bely’s subsequent novel, Kotik Letaev, in which they are described as spots of bright colors. 72. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47. 73. Andrey Bely, “Pochemu ia stal simvolistom i pochemu ia ne perestal im byt’ vo vsekh fazakh moego ideinogo i khudozhestvennogo razvitiia,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie, 418–19. Notably, describing the red spot as “object” and therefore formless, Bely uses the word bezobraznoe (with the stress on the second syllable), meaning “without face or image” (bez obraza), in contrast to the same word with the stress on the third syllable, which means “ugly, shocking, or disgusting.” For a discussion of bezobrázie in Petersburg, see my chapter on disgust (chapter 2). 74. Bely, “Okno v budushchee,” 131–32. 75. Even though Bely speaks of the red spot in neutral terms here, the one in the Petersburg chapter “Wet Autumn” (quoted above) is emblematic of destruction, as are the many other red spots in the novel. 76. Commenting on the introductory essay to the exhibition of The Haystacks in 1891 by Monet’s friend Gustave Geffroy, Richard Schiff writes that “he implied that the paintings revealed symbolic content” (Shiff, “The End of Impressionism,” The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874–1886 [San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986], 65). Shiff ’s essay shows that the impressionists and symbolists overlapped in their painterly vision, and he emphasizes the subjective aspect of impressionism. 77. D. Burliuk, “The ‘Savages’ of Russia,” in The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. Henning Falkenstein (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 72. I have not been able to corroborate this statement anywhere. According to V. N. Terekhina, the Russian futurists in the years 1910 to 1914 were multiply connected with German expressionists (“Putiami russkogo ekspressionizma,” in Russkii ekspressionizm: Teoriia, Praktika, Kritika, ed. V.N. Terekhina [ Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2005], 12). 78. Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 203 79. Bely, Nachalo veka, 146–47.

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Peter sburg, the City

4 “The Streetcar Prattle of Life” Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams      

[. . .] amidst the flight and din, the shuddering and the droshkys, listening to the distant melodious voice of automobile roulades and the rising drone of the yellow and red streetcars (the drone that then dies again), in the constant bawling of the clamorous newspaper boys. From one infinity he ran on into another; and—he stumbled on the embankment, where everything came to an end: the melodic voice of the automobile roulade, the yellow and red streetcar and the shady type himself; here was the edge of the world, and the end of infinities. [. . .] Here, at the very beginning, I must break the thread of my narrative, in order to introduce the reader to the scene of the action of a certain drama. As a preliminary, it is necessary to correct the inaccuracy that has crept into our text; it is not the author who is to blame for this, but the authorial pen: at this time the tram did not yet run in the city: this was the year 1905.1

“Here, at the very beginning . . . the thread of [the] narrative” must be broken. While the metafictional hesitation and digression of Andrey Bely’s narrator evoke the eighteenth-century style of Laurence Sterne, they remind us too that, in the age in which he writes, the pursuit of a novel’s narrative has become a problematic task. The temporal dimension of the narrative, its thread of sequentiality, is

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momentarily broken (before it is barely begun) to voice the possibility of its ceding the way to the dramatic “scene of the action” (mesto deistviia), the predominantly spatial dimension. Indeed, the relationship between these two sets of narrative coordinates is no longer automatic, integral, or stable in Bely’s novel. This section of its first chapter closes with the solemn declaration of the “scene of the action”—the year 1905 and the city as a historical arena for revolutionary events. But the chatty narrator reminds us that trams did not yet run on the city’s streets in 1905. They appeared only in 1907. This recreation of the year 1905 summons the tram out of its own time and splices the commonplace vehicle into the scene of this revolutionary year. However playful this slip of the pen may be, Bely’s tram, which strays between the layers of historical and quotidian time, gives an intimation of how the city space is perceived and known through various temporal frames—and their nonidentity now works as a force to fragment the modernist novel form. But what if we were to pursue the narrative of the tram itself ? What kind of narrative- and form-producing agent is the tram? This is the question I seek to answer by following the tram through both literary works and the real territory of the city, seeing how it becomes allied to different narrative and textual practices—be it modernism’s fascination for the Bergsonian spatializing of time or the modernist crisis in novel form as it was experienced in the literary milieu of Petersburg specifically. Along the way I pause to note some of the tram’s entries into the high-cultural mythologies of Petersburg modernism, as well as into a different realm of collective knowledge: the urban folklore of the everyday, such as that collected by Viktor Shklovsky in his sketch “On Streetcar Folklore” (“O tramvainom fol’klore,” 1933). By way of some detours to the theoretical works that have informed our project as a whole, the hope is that this essay-excursion on the tram will acquaint its reader with a “city as text,” where the experience of movement is at once that of narrative and of a most ordinary practice of everyday urban life. From Dublin to Berlin to Petersburg, modernist writers found in the tram a subject with a strong form-creating impulse. In his study of the city and the language of the novel, Robert Alter finds in one passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where “[t]rams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging,” rhythmic effects in the surrounding narrative that he relates to the experience of tram travel: “One detects in the prose an element of syncopation [. . .] [O]ne may infer that syncopation attracted [ Joyce] in part because it caught the energetic stop-and-start rhythms of modern urban life. The stopping and starting are manifestly linked with the passage of trams.”2 Joyce’s attraction to the tram is

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not unique: the modernist imagination, alert and sensitive to novelty in sensory and psychological experience, is repeatedly drawn to the distinct nature of the tram’s stopping and starting movement between points in the city, to its rhythm and speed, to its metallic sounds, and to the particular relationship to the city it fosters. (I should also say here at the outset that the subject matter appears to have left its traces on my own essay, which gathers speed as it advances and, in the latter section in particular, moves more rapidly, offering its commentary and making its points with only the brevity that this rapid urban shuttling permits.) As for the collective narrative of the project undertaken by this book, Bely’s anachronistic tramvai provides a model for our mapping of the city. It initiates the accumulation of transparencies, the overlaying of maps of different pathways across a single space. The essays of this volume and accompanying Web site build a picture of urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, thickening time with the simultaneity of superimposed pasts and filling the city space with the objects, attractions, and experiences of a burgeoning urban modernity. Such a part of this life had the trams become that their sight and sounds insert themselves anachronistically into the conjured street scene of Bely’s novel, hinting at what an indelible trace the systems and structures of modernity left on the urban imagination, just as the wires and rails permanently marked the cityscape. From its beginnings, from Peter the Great’s early projects of buildings and waterways, St. Petersburg has always been an intensely mapped space. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a proliferation of maps produced by and of the city, as all the infrastructures of modernity (transport, electricity, sewage, telephone) created newly conceptualized “connected” city space, which was fixed into images by the maps of these networks. The modernist aesthetics of Bely’s Petersburg find a counterpart in the city’s experience of modernity. The novel’s geometric designs and connective tissue of motifs may belong as much to the lines drawn across the networked, mapped city as they do to the aesthetics of cubism or to the angles of Peter’s rectilinear avenues. Devoting attention to the tram’s own narrative places us in the company of Parnok, the would-be hero of Osip Mandelshtam’s 1928 prose piece, The Egyptian Stamp (Egipetskaia marka), from which the title of this essay is drawn: Parnok is intent on listening to “the streetcar prattle of life” (tramvainyi lepet zhizni ) and on hearing in it events of the utmost significance.3 We too can listen to Petersburg’s trams: first let us hear how the tram came to these streets and find in its story details that bespeak the city’s greater experience of modernity.

Map of St. Petersburg’s tram network, 1912 (courtesy of the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg)

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The Ar riva l of t he Tr a m St. Petersburg’s first tram made its journey from the Alexander Gardens in front of the Admiralty to Vasilievsky Island on September 16, 1907. This muchfêted departure was itself the end of a long journey to bring the tram to the city’s streets. The first calls to replace the horse-drawn konka with electric tramcars came in the 1890s, but wrangling in the commercial world delayed the realization of these plans. The Horse-Drawn Railway Stock Company held all the rights to municipal railbound travel and opposed the introduction of the tram in the name of defending the livelihood of coach drivers and others involved in the care and provision of horses. Economic concerns collided with anxieties about modernization, the loss of traditional professions, and the threat of automatization to human labor. An intermediary compromise in the disputed succession of the konka by the tram came in 1894 in the form of an electrified route over the frozen Neva. It was operated by a Finnish company, against whom the horse-drawn railway company tried—unsuccessfully—to bring a lawsuit. In the winter of 1894, a fare of 2 kopecks paid for the crossing from Senate Square to Vasilievsky Island. The following winter there was a route to the Petersburg Side. The journal The World Illustration (Vsemirnaia illiustratsiia) reported on the tram-on-ice in both 1894 and 1895, with a slightly differently accented approach in each year. In 1894 the new Neva crossing was likened to the roller-coaster rides that had become summer fixtures in the city’s pleasure parks in recent years, and the report gave only sufficient details of the set-up to reassure readers of its safety. The following year, however, a more detailed, explanatory description of the mechanism was forthcoming.4 The difference between these two articles is suggestive of a pattern of response to the era’s technological progress: new mechanization was initially greeted with a sensationalist pleasure in novelty—tinged with a certain fear—before giving way to more clearly defined knowledge and a rationalist grasp of the phenomenon. Likewise, innovations in material culture made for an attraction and novelty before they became necessities of everyday life. Russia’s very first tram was as much a spectacle as it was functional, transporting visitors to the site of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair in 1896. There the tram itself numbered among the exhibits on display in the city of Nizhny Novgorod turned grand exhibition space. In its earliest days, Petersburg’s first tram was also an attraction rather than a purely practical means of transport; people stood in line to buy tickets to ride for pleasure,5 just as they did for other rides on rails, such as at the Luna Park of Attractions, or for the so-called American Mountains rollercoaster ride on Mars Field.

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Extensive preparations were required in order to make way for the tram. Tram parks were built to accommodate the wagons when they were not in service. The provision and distribution of electricity demanded improvement: the main power station was located on Atamanskaya Street, by the Monastyrka River, and electricity was distributed to the tramlines by means of a system of smaller substations throughout the city. As well as the laying of rails and rigging of wires, bridges needed to be reinforced, and the sewage and drainage systems needed to be restructured, so as not to interfere with the tramline down the center of streets.6 Progress in public transportation was therefore closely linked to improvements in other aspects of the infrastructure of a modern, connected city space that supported growing consumption and mobility. The laying of tramlines down the middle of streets meant that the tree-planted central strip of some of the city’s boulevards had to be sacrificed. Such was the case with Ligovsky Prospect—but the street’s remodeling was not necessarily mourned; rather, it was greeted by many with approval, for it dispensed with an unsavory area that attracted loiterers.7 The space may have been overhauled, but the loiterers were presumably left to drift on elsewhere. The possibilities for social and physical mobility became greater as the trappings of modernity enriched the material fabric of the city, but nevertheless, a social underclass found itself ever more displaced from the life endorsed by this progress. The scenes of urban life photographed by Karl Bulla, the texts of lavish shop signs, and the advertisements for fine goods compose just one story—one inscribed, above all, on Nevsky Prospect. It was Karl Bulla, that avid documenter of urban life, who captured the ceremonious affair of the first tramline’s opening. Bestowed with the blessings of Orthodox priests and attended by smartly uniformed employees, the tram pulled away—eight years after Moscow’s first tram and over ten years after the Nizhny Novgorod Russian debut. As in so many aspects of Russian culture, belatedness was a source of anxiety: Petersburg lagged behind other great European capitals in introducing the tram to its streets. But because it was already much anticipated, the tram gained swiftly in popularity. In 1905, before the advent of the tram, the average number of journeys taken on the existing forms of public transport was 58 per citizen; by 1914, it was 140—a rise that commentators maintain was only in part accounted for by the expansion of the city limits and the shift of residential areas away from the center.8 By this time the number of passengers on Petersburg’s trams rivaled that in Berlin and Paris, but by 1913 these cities—and others in Europe and North America—also already had metro lines. As one commentary on the history of Petersburg’s public transport observes, in 1913 in a city with a population of almost two million, the tram as a

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principal means of transport was already an anachronism.9 Anachronism was an aura that would dog the tram and was discerned by Vladimir Nabokov too, who was to write in 1925, “The streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so, just as the horse-drawn konka has vanished. Already I feel it has an air of antiquity, a kind of old-fashioned charm.”10 Habitually perceived for its anachronism, the tram was also marked by bizarrely non-sequential numbering: the first route was, for unknown and inexplicable reasons, number 4. Tram No. 4 ran from the Alexander Gardens, along Konnogvardeysky Boulevard, across Nikolaevsky Bridge to Vasilievsky Island (the first itinerary, incidentally, of Dudkin in Bely’s novel), and to the intersection of Bolshoy Prospect and the Eighth Line. The tram was not initially the cheap and democratic form of transport that it came to be known as: initially there were two classes of travel—five kopecks for first class (for the “cleanly attired public”) and three kopecks for second class.11 At a time when the salary of a tram-wagon cleaner was nine rubles per month and that of a tram conductor forty-six rubles, these sums, in proportion to lower incomes, were not so small.12 The tram network grew rapidly, however, and became used by an expanding section of the city’s population: within a year there were nine routes; by 1912, fourteen, extending out of the central areas as far as Novaya Derevnya in the north, for instance; by the revolution there were twenty-three routes.13 To accommodate the growing number of passengers, the two separate classes of travel were quickly abolished, and in 1916 seats were removed to make more standing room in an attempt to deal with the fierce overcrowding.14 Shklovsky, in his characteristically wry style, observes the perils of the overfilled carriages: “It’s a real squeeze. One of my friends got his rib broken, and another one’s got pleurisy now as a result of these tramcar contusions.”15 There were other, still greater perils: misadventures and severed heads (the most famous one, of course, rolling not in Petersburg, but by Patriarchs Ponds in Moscow—in the opening chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita) became incorporated into the field of associations around the tram, to the “streetcar folklore” of which Shklovsky writes and which holds particular significance for him because his father was killed by a tram.16 As the volume of traffic—both pedestrian and vehicular—increased on the streets, the tramlines acquired a fatal notoriety. Gruesome headlines became stock-in-trade for the city’s newspapers as they announced the latest victims: “Two victims of the tram,” “The tram’s deeds,” “Girl falls under wheels.”17 So frequent were the casualties that the subject was taken up by the journal Satirikon as early as 1908 in the mock diary entry of a jaded member of the streetcar commission: “Another person cut in half ! But they will always clamber onto the rails when the tram has to go by!”18

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Tram travel spawns language that is wholly particular to the experience. Shklovsky collates some of this in his “On Streetcar Folklore,” which is a miniature, affectionately parodic anthropological-ethnographic sketch of tram travel: an activity of everyday life that possesses its own rituals, communicative conventions, and classifiable subjects. Much of the situational language to be overheard in the tramcars is related to their overcrowding: “In streetcar language there are about fifty words, divided between a small number of phrases: ‘The tramcar’s not made of rubber, you know’; ‘You’ll be needing a taxi.’”19 Such disgruntled wit was the usual limit of exchange between passengers, Shklovsky implies, but the shared knowledge of its vernacular and customs— which bespeak both familiarity with, and resignation to, this most mundane practice of everyday life—has a socially cohesive function: “Aside from the desire to get home or get to work, the tram-people are united by their folklore.”20 Along with his classification of language, Shklovsky types the passengers— already dehumanized by the cramped conditions—according to biological species and subspecies, that is, according to their preferred means of riding the vehicle: The flattened streetcar people may be classified by zoological order. For example, there is the group of people who climb onto the front platform [ ploshchadka]. There’s the group of people who ride on the rear buffer, holding on to the bracket with their right hand. [. . .] And there’s the subgroup who hang on to the platform handle [na ruchke ploshchadki ].21

Those riding on the rear buffer traveled for free; this habit, known as ezdit’ na kolbase (kolbasa is Russian for “sausage”), was an entertaining pastime for youths and took its name from the brake hose that hung down at the back of the adjoined tramcar and which members of this “subgroup” would hold on to.22

From t he St ree t int o Tex t From the introduction of wires and rails into the city to the collected idioms of tram travel, my account of the tram’s presence on Petersburg’s streets and of the experience of riding the tram has become increasingly textually oriented and textually productive. Shklovsky’s brief text suggests one way in which the

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experience of tram travel produces forms of language—those of the most commonplace, everyday kind. This potential becomes intensified in artistic works, as the image of the tram enters and proliferates in the literary imagination. In tracing the literary representation of the tram, I am most indebted to Roman Timenchik’s dense and exhilarating article of 1987, “Toward the Symbolism of the Tram in Russian Poetry.”23 Timenchik’s article is itself worthy of some brief commentary on its own status as a contribution to the tram’s textual existence. The article is notable for its brevity and density (just six pages of text, and three more of almost one hundred footnotes). The references are exhaustive, but the text is woven from quotation and allusion, moving us through the material at speed and assuming a certain degree of familiarity with the works cited. Indeed, it is precisely the familiarity of the tram—the strength of the impressions and associations it generates—that gives the humble vehicle such a vivid textual life. Timenchik deftly establishes the tram’s semiotic value, unpacking the “traditional mythological-cultural meanings” contained within this “capacious cultural symbol”: anthropomorphism, possession of the sense of sight, erotica, cosmic significance, severed heads, and more beside.24 All of the qualities he identifies are to be found concentrated in Nikolay Gumilev’s 1921 poem “The Lost Streetcar” (“Zabludivshiisia tramvai”); in some sense the article is an extended commentary on this single work, but by appealing to such a wealth of material, Timenchik concludes that the poetic image of the tram derives as much from the readers’ own experience and perception of the tram in life, as from the enduring status of “The Lost Streetcar” in the poetic canon. Gumilev’s poem is the unstated point of departure of the article, and the point to which it returns anew, completing the “tram’s turning circle” (tramvainoe kol’sto) of the piece’s unattributed epigraph. “The Lost Streetcar,” published shortly before Gumilev’s death in 1921, is, then, the paradigmatic incarnation of the tram in the Russian modernist literary imagination, and in its stanzas, the tram—this distinctly modern form of transport—moves through a space that possesses characteristically modernist dimensions. The space traversed by the streetcar is simultaneously the unfolding of associative thought and memory and of the real, mappable city.

[Too late. We had already skirted the wall, We leapt through the grove of palms,

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Across the Neva, the Nile, and the Seine We thundered across three bridges.]26

Around certain points on the route, immediate external reality coalesces with the lyrical hero’s subjectivity: as he crosses the Neva, the movement evokes other rivers from Gumilev’s own biographical experience—the Nile and the Seine—corresponding to the time he spent in Egypt and Paris (in 1907). The grove of palms might be those of the poet’s exotic travels as well as being evocative of one of the city’s familiar nicknames, the Northern Palm (Severnaia Pal’mira). Plotting the coordinates suggested by the poem, Elaine Rusinko suggests that Gumilev’s lost streetcar can be traced through Petersburg, by following the route of the No. 7 tram, which passes over Troitsky (Trinity) Bridge.27 As Rusinko demonstrates, the poem plots the dimensions of Bergsonian “duration.” The tram’s movement articulates the individual’s experience of time as an accumulation and continuous flow: the simultaneous interpenetration of successive states of consciousness; memory where the past exists always embedded in the present moment of recollection. Thus the lyrical hero’s journey through Petersburg simultaneously evokes the locations of Gumilev’s foreign travels of the past. The streetcar gives concrete realization to Bergson’s theory, which considered motion as “the living symbol of duration,” capturing time in its flow rather than as a series of discrete units.28 The tram that appears in Bely’s Petersburg—and at the beginning of this essay—can also be understood as having lost its way in a narrative temporality of similar dimensions: the conjured street scene of 1905 bears the trace of the time of writing from which it is recollected (1911–12), when the trams were already an established fixture. No travels—textual or touristic—around the northern capital are complete without taking in The Bronze Horseman, which was dubbed by Nikolay Antsiferov as the genius loci of Petersburg and which remains the symbol in which the elements of the Petersburg myth are most densely concentrated. As Gumilev’s lyrical hero moves through the expansive dimensions of the city aboard the lost tram, he encounters the metallic steed (as do, of course, Pushkin’s Evgeny and Bely’s Dudkin before him):

[And right away a sweet, familiar wind And beyond the bridge, flying toward me

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The hand of the horseman in an iron glove And the two hooves of his steed.]

There is a particular kinship between The Bronze Horseman and the tram: as the successor to the horse-drawn konka, the tram became its iron replacement (or opponent), populating the phantasmagoric city streets. The city’s traditional mythology met its new incarnation in this modern form of transportation. What is more, the construction of tramlines was an occasion to recall the mythology of the city’s origins: the laying of its rails confronted the notorious unsuitability of the marshy ground for building upon it. The project of the tramline construction is ironically elevated to the same status as the city’s foundation, a similar victory in the struggle against nature. The fictitious member of the streetcar commission grumbles in his satirical diary, “As if it wasn’t Peter the Great but us who had chosen the spot for Petersburg.”29 Gumilev’s lyrical hero is not the only one to catch a glimpse of The Bronze Horseman from the tram window. The novelty of the vision afforded by the tram is captured in the confession of one writer who gleans a view of the statue from the opposite embankment on Vasilievsky Island: “It’s strange to admit, but actually I only noticed The Bronze Horseman on the opposite bank from the streetcar.”30 The tram offered a mobile vantage point form which to survey the city. In the nineteenth century, railroad travel had made available the view of a landscape in motion, and the electric tram brought a comparable experience to the urban setting: the city’s familiar landmarks found themselves framed by the tram windows and sharing the cityscape with these new beasts.31 In this most self-reflexive of cities, whose texts display its endless fascination with its own myths, topography conspires to offer an equivalent to this selfregarding gaze: Petersburg, with its embankments facing one another across the Neva, is a city rich in viewing positions. The view across the Neva offers a serenely distanced panorama. Move along Nevsky Prospect by tram, however, and the scenes of the busy thoroughfare change more rapidly. In Nikolay Otsup’s poem of 1920, “Autumn” (“Osen’”), an autumnal tram ride affords views of the street’s buildings, notably the House of Singer at Nevsky No. 28 and the House of Vavelberg at No. 7/9. This latter building’s design, with its rows of arched windows, was apparently in part inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice—augmenting the city’s claim to be the Venice of the North and adding to its collage of imitative European design.

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[And from the flying front platform The granite House of Vavelberg Flashes at me its lakes of mirrored Glass with playing colors, Like on the glassy surface of Lake Geneva, When on its cold waters A rainbow bends its ripples.]

In the glimpse caught of the building here, its distinguishing feature is the rows of windows (reminding the lyrical hero not, alas, of Venice but, as they sparkle, of Lake Geneva). This view is almost a mirror image of the sight of the tram itself—rows of separate framed windows. As Vladimir Mayakovsky remarked: “No artist has yet invented an urban landscape like that which is reflected in the windows of a moving tram—and for free, moreover.”33 The fragmented, multiperspectival vision of successive, moving reflections in the tram windows provided a real-life counterpart to the dynamic aesthetics of cubo-futurism. The tram’s motion and the brand of visual experience it afforded appealed to and was transformed by the aesthetics of diverse poetic currents. Each in their own way, acmeists and futurists (the movements represented by Gumilev and Mayakovsky, respectively) investigated the materiality of the world (and the word). With its mobile vantage point, tram travel also yielded an analogue to cinematic vision from among the practices of everyday life. The successive framed images through the windows were like the sequence of shots on a reel of film. These similarities did not escape observers of, and participants in, urban life in other major European cities. One passenger in Berlin of the 1920s noted: “In the morning, at noon, and in the evening, this city looked at from a focal point of traffic, resembles an immense, uncontrolled film.”34 In the Russian context but away from Petersburg, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) brilliantly exploited the kinship between the kinetic energy of film and of the city. As the streets filled with the vehicles and activities of modern urban life, the city’s sound track acquired new strains. The quotation from Bely with which this essay opened, for example, contrasts the “melodic voice of automobiles” with the “rising drone” of the tram. In the first stanza of Gumilev’s “The Lost Streetcar,” the sounds of the street are transformed into the otherworldly tones of lutes and thunder:

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[I was walking along an unfamiliar street And suddenly heard a cawing of crows, The sounds of lutes and distant thunder, In front of me flew a streetcar.]

More prosaically, however, the noises of the city provide a regular accompaniment to everyday activity; the rhythms and sounds of the streets acquire the familiarity of a background that is heard but barely cognized. They create a sound track that comes to belong—with an almost imperceptible insistence— to the space projected by the sensory coordinates that give the individual a sense of home, an intimate acquaintance with place that exceeds knowledge of its mappable space. The Russian formalist scholar Boris Eikhenbaum, writing on the role of music in early cinema, noted, after Béla Balázs, that one did not notice the presence of music in film so much as its absence35—and he too heard the tram in the soundscape of Petersburg:

[ Here is my city: it’s just the same, Winter and summer, the same land, Where the tram sings Chromatic scales in the streets.]

In the autobiographical sketches that incorporate this and other of his youthful poems, which are found in his curious publication My Chronicle, Eikhenbaum describes the tramline leading onto Vasilievsky Island, along the University Embankment. The Petersburg University is a continuation of Nevsky Prospect. Its main feature is its corridor: a covered prospect leading into the depths of Vasilievsky Island. The whole island is a system of parallel and perpendicular prospects. The population lives here according to the laws of descriptive geometry. The movement of the trams also occurs according to these laws. The only exception being on the embankment, and precisely right by the university, where the rails form an unexpected and unintelligible bend. It produces a jolt, which lets even the sleeping passengers know: University.37

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He describes the corridor of the university—the long, thin Twelve Colleges building, which offers only its shortest side facing onto the street—as an extension of Nevsky Prospect. Indeed, the building is positioned at an angle that deviates little from that of the main thoroughfare on the other side of the Neva. Eikhenbaum refers to the visible, mapped street plan of Vasilievsky’s rectilinear avenues (the “lines” of the island, which Peter had originally intended as canal ways and on one of which Bely’s anarchist Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin lives), but he then notes how the route of the tram creates a special degree of familiarity with this territory: the sharp turn of the tram as it passes from the Palace Bridge onto the embankment alerts even the sleeping passengers of the destination. The tram’s movement encodes a bodily, experiential knowledge of the city. Choosing to relate this vignette to Bely’s novel, where the geometric street design also plays such a prominent role, we might find in that lurch of the tram round the bend—sudden and unintelligible—the same visceral contact between the city and brain that characterizes “cerebral play” and contrasts with the impassive geometry of the mapped, rectilinear city.

T h e Tra m a nd t he C risis of t he Novel : In Se a rc h of N a r ra t i ve Eikhenbaum published My Chronicle, the idiosyncratic pseudojournal that contains his autobiographical sketches, in 1929, marking the end of a period of painful searching through the second half of the 1920s for a scholarly and writerly occupation that would appease the “longing for acts, longing for biography” (toska po postupkam, toska po biografii ) he felt so acutely and voiced in a letter to Shklovsky in 1925.38 Eikhenbaum’s lament is closely linked to the crisis of the novel, which became a defining literary-cultural experience in PetrogradLeningrad.39 Compare his intimately expressed “longing for biography” with Osip Mandelshtam’s famous pronouncements in his 1926 essay, “The End of the Novel” (“Konets romana”): “The future development of the novel will be no less than the history of the atomization of biography as a form of personal existence; what is more, we shall witness the catastrophic collapse of biography. [. . .] Today Europeans are thrown out of their own biographies like balls out of the pockets of billiard tables. [. . .] A man devoid of biography cannot be the thematic pivot of the novel.”40 The episodes that Eikhenbaum recounts from his autobiography—his youthful wandering through the pre-revolutionary city, straying from anatomy to music to philology in search of a vocation—are overlaid with the renewed search for fulfillment and “biography” in the 1920s

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at the time of the sketches’ composition. In the age of the novel’s demise literature itself doubles the writer’s own wandering; both search for a hospitable institutional milieu: “The fact of the matter is that literature now has neither its own auditoriums or home [. . .] nor its own study. Literature leads a nomadic way of life nowadays.”41 My Chronicle allusively harnesses the power of the nineteenth-century journals (the title echoes the thick journal Sovremennik [Contemporary]) that played such a dynamic role in their century’s literary culture. As a gesture, therefore, of participating in what was perceived as the atrophied literary process of his times, the writing of My Chronicle stood for the appeasement of longing for ethically integral action and biography that neither the novel nor the social-historical milieu could provide in Eikhenbaum’s own age. Eikhenbaum follows faintly behind another hapless exile from novelistic narrative, Parnok, would-be hero of Mandelshtam’s The Egyptian Stamp—the prose work that, as is widely acknowledged, embodies the sentiments of the essay on the demise of the novel.42 In singling out a narrative of the city created by the tram, a banal background noise that is the object of nobody’s attention, we too find ourselves in the company of Parnok, who listens to the “streetcar prattle of life,” clinging to what is “unnecessary,” transforming immaterial episodes into the stuff of stories: “From childhood he had been devoted to whatever was useless, metamorphosing the streetcar prattle of life into events of consequence . . .”43 Parnok is described as a “man of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect—one of the lightest and most irresponsible streets of Petersburg. . . . Venture neither to the right nor to the left: there is bedlam, there is streetcar-less backwater. But on Kamennoostrovsky Prospect the streetcars develop an unheard of speed.”44 Stray away from the main thoroughfare, plied by trams after they have crossed over Troitsky Bridge, and risk finding yourself in the “tram-less backwaters” (bestramvainaia glush’ ). The margins beckon Parnok; he exists as a doodle in the margins of the narrator’s page. And margins are to be found everywhere: the tram tracks branch away from Nevsky Prospect but sustain arterial centers right through the city. One need not stray far from the activity around, though, to find oneself as if suddenly on the outskirts. Parnok tries to share the intimately deciphered sounds of the tram with the women he falls in love with but, alas, is met only with incomprehension. Hopelessly unsuccessful in assuming the dimensions of a novelistic hero, he is not aided by his attachment to life’s “streetcar prattle.” The tram, after all, engendered no great novel—unlike the railroad. The narrator of The Egyptian Stamp laments: “The railroad has changed the whole course, the whole structure, the whole rhythm of our prose. It has delivered it over to the senseless

Cover of Osip Mandelshtam’s book of children’s poems Dva tramvaia (Two Trams, 1925; illustrations by B. Ender) (courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)

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muttering of the French mujik out of Anna Karenina.”45 Novelistic narrative is reduced to “senseless muttering” (bessmyslennoe lopotan’e)—which one might hear as a counterpart to the “streetcar prattle” (tramvainyi lepet ). Moreover, as one critic, Omry Ronen, observes, the infamous proclamation on the state of contemporary prose that brings The Egyptian Stamp to a close may well refer allusively to one of the specifics in Eikhenbaum’s diagnosis of the crisis in genre in the 1924 essay “In Search of a Genre:” “Railroad literature (zheleznodorozhnaia literatura) has moved from the station into the city—this is symptomatic, but there is no prophetic sense in it.”46 Railroad literature (the metaphor also finds a home in Tolstoy’s novel, where Anna reads an unnamed English novel on the train) was the kind of popular novel produced in response to commercial demand and sold at railway stations to be swiftly consumed during train journeys—at the expense of those literary novels of social and psychological realism whose developed integrity of character and setting had been lost, according to Eikhenbaum and Mandelshtam. The tram plots no novel in the way that the railroad motif punctuates Anna Karenina, but (and now I take a step back from Parnok and The Egyptian Stamp) its mappable routes can show us how the city allows itself to be read, how the movement of the tram and the material of everyday life create narrative. Using a means of public transport as a metaphor, we can account for the production of narrative by movement through the city, as does Michel de Certeau, who elaborates the now widely embraced idea of the “city as text” in his Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau also seeks to ennoble a commonplace fixture of the streets: In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or train [or tram, we might add—AT ]. Stories could also take this noble name: every day they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories.47

The tramline plots a linear narrative trajectory; its route, as Timenchik notes, creates a “realistically” motivated metonymic narrative.48 But the tram also carries out work similar to the patterning done by motifs in a work of literature: on its route signboards, its own outwardly visible texts, the tram plucks names and locations out of the continuity of the city, endowing them with a heightened significance as stops along the route. They provide a shorthand way of navigating the route’s narrative, highlighting the details around which the rest of the story is constructed. As the lines extended further from the city center, the names of outlying city margins are borne into the central areas; space is condensed and made available to the city’s journeyer in its compression, just as

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the greater sense of the whole is borne in the literary work’s title or in its symbolically charged motifs. The tram’s movement combines, then, both design and chance: its iron tracks specify a predetermined route but navigate the ceaseless life of the city, allowing for infinite possibility in all that the route passes, crosses, and meets. The modern city with its increased mobility and activity becomes a near-magical arena of happenings, thanks to the laws of chance. Familiar as Petersburg may be to its inhabitants, the city streets always retain the possibility to spring the surprise of serendipitous encounter or happenstance witnessing of event. On October 3, 1918, in the Petrograd of the civil war, on board a tram going from Nevsky Prospect along Sadovaya, a chance encounter occurred between Zinaida Gippius and Alexander Blok. I’m on a tram, going along Sadovaya away from Nevsky [. . .] The tram’s full; at Sennaya people are already having to stand in the aisles. The first person who got on and stood in the aisle, right by me, suddenly said: “Hello.” You couldn’t mistake this voice for anyone else. I looked up. Blok.49

It was the last time the poets were to meet. Blok’s poem The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’ ) had just been published, and the ambiguity of its portrayal of the revolution caused personal allegiances to be redrawn. Gippius tells Blok, here, on board this form of public transport, that in the public domain there can be no further acknowledgment of their relationship: “Publicly—the bridges between us are broken. You know that. Never. . . . But personally . . . as we were before . . .”50 This episode is recorded in Gippius’ memoirs and has become well inscribed in the narratives of Russian modernism. It owes its status to a chance encounter between individuals moving through the city at large but momentarily brought into close proximity in the narrow confines of the tramcar. Blok too recorded in his diary encounters on the tram, but ones still more fleeting and anonymous, barely possessing recordable substance. One entry constructs a narrative—of the poet’s self-image read into the woman’s appearance—to fill in the scarcely discernible intimacy of a met gaze between poet and passenger. A wilting brunette on the tram. We studied one another. Eventually the look came over her face that I was waiting for and that I often evoke in women: remembrance, the burden of torments, the approach of passion, obligation (an engagement ring). She was very tired of these emotional transports [dushevnoe dvizhenie]. I flung the door wide open in front of her, and she ran off into the gray night. It was probably a long time before she looked round.51

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Tired of these “emotional transports,” the unknown lady escapes from this charged exchange of glances and steps down from the vehicle. The intimate confines and forced proximity of the tramcar produced a space for erotically charged encounters—with the archetypical Unknown Lady of modernist Petersburg letters.52 Whether it be the flashes of reflection in the rows of passing windows or the ephemeral moment of contact offered within, motion augments the role of chance in the creation of experience in and around the tram. In motion the tram affords only an acquaintanceship with surfaces—the glittering windows of the House of Vavelberg glimpsed by Otsup’s lyric hero or the unconsummated gaze of strangers in the crowd of passengers. Although Timenchik’s sources do in fact extend beyond poetry, it is interesting that this should be the genre favored by the tram—and not, one might imagine, merely because it was the foremost genre of those decades of the early twentieth century. The tram finds a ready textual counterpart in the narrow confines of the lyric: the creation of brief, self-contained moments of time corresponding to the fleeting snatches of experience. Those experiences are all too physical, as Shklovsky showed us, but transient, nonetheless, and soon to be diminished by absorption into the life of the city at large, the arena of “real” significance, and eclipsed by the point of destination, which is determined in advance for its meaning-bearing value. At stops on the route, then, a different kind of knowledge is available—the probing of depth; the opportunity to discover that behind those glittering windows of the House of Vavelberg was housed the Russian Commercial Bank, and still earlier on that site were the offices of the satirical journal Satirikon. Chance and mobility allow circumstances to conspire to produce stories in the immediacy of the present, while stasis and attention allow for the discovery of stories of the past or acquaintance with individuals who disembark from the anonymous crowd of equals aboard the tram to resume their own personal narratives—to shop for food, start work, watch a movie, or meet a lover. One more layer of narrative to be added to the superimposed transparencies that are the individual maps of our essays and online itineraries is the pathway that constituted the process of making the map itself—a happy combination of accident and assiduity in the search for and discovery of material. As Olga Matich writes in the introduction, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and his figure of the flâneur and collector have been significant points of reference for us. Collecting and the collectivity of the project have been two of its defining characteristics. Much of our pleasure in mapping Petersburg has been in collecting and assembling materials. As Benjamin reminds us, “collecting is a

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primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge.”53 Part of this collecting obviously went on in the library, but it also traced a route across present-day St. Petersburg, directing my own travels, for instance, between various institutions and individuals in the city in the summer of 2005. The search for material and the acquisition of material objects acquaints us with real physical places, drawing an itinerary of its own: “How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books?” asks Benjamin’s collector.54 The Web-based aspect of the project obviously accords a prominent place to visual materials. In our processes of collecting, we have found ourselves inserted into the role of flâneur, whether in the library or the city streets, since the project has required that we adopt the flâneur’s way of seeing, the “category of illustrative seeing,” as Benjamin describes it.55 As well as developing commentary for visual material, the project has also required that we seek visual material to accompany text—that we search for material with an eye for illustration, even finding occasionally, as Polina Barskova has on the banks of the Karpovka, an illustrator, Dmitry Mitrokhin, not just illustrations.56 The space for the display of our collection is the virtual space of the Web. While not wishing to speak for the total hegemony of the Internet as a narrative medium, it is arguably the most contemporary narrative space we possess today and the one most defining of our own culturally specific moment. In choosing the Internet to house our collection of materials on early twentieth-century Petersburg, we are performing the work of Benjamin’s consummate collector: “The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote).”57 And what is more likely to spawn an anecdote—the elevation of the mundane to the “tellable”—than a chance happening on public transport? “I remember, one evening in Leningrad in the first years after the revolution the tram stopped on Troitsky Bridge,” writes Shklovsky, who relates an incident occurring on board: a woman starts to sing, momentarily uniting the passengers on the broken-down tram in this liminal space between two of the city’s embankments.58 This is emblematic of how the principles of chance and mobility give birth to narrative, to stories that are collected by the traverser of the city’s spaces and that in the moment of their telling forge a certain bond of collectivity. Indeed, “in our space” and times, the fate of text—and of ways of apprehending lengthy text in particular—is, to some degree, in a process of flux. The Internet as a technology representative of our age has shaped narrative form.

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As attention spans supposedly dwindle and distractibility in the reading process intensifies,59 the proliferation of hypertext may well have “changed [. . .] the whole structure, the whole rhythm of our prose” in our own times (recall Mandelshtam’s formulation on the railroad). The Internet is changing and newly framing our modes of perception, adding dizzying speed to the succession of information before our eyes: now we find that rapid movement on and between the “windows” on our computer screens remakes our relationship to information and brings new forms of sensory and nervous stimulation—just as the increased speed of modern transport brought new sensations and new ways of seeing through train and streetcar windows.

H

ow to end this essay-excursion on the tram? We are in search of narrative closure. I have already stretched the chronology of our project by following the tram beyond 1921 and to the end of that decade. As Bely, Gumilev, and Nabokov have shown us, the tram is a reluctant inhabitant of a singular temporality. Contrary to Nabokov’s conviction that the tram would soon disappear—recall his 1925 pronouncement from Berlin that “the streetcar will vanish in twenty years or so”—the trams remain a fixture of Petersburg’s streets and an object of affection for many of the city’s inhabitants.60 It is, perhaps, precisely that oddity of the tram that Nabokov detected that won it such affection: the capacity to elicit nostalgia ex nihilo, as it were—to be reminiscent of the past while still a novelty itself. And the tram has indeed become a noble bearer of the city’s past and acquired a historical significance that defies its erasure from the streets: it is remembered especially for its continued service during the Leningrad Blockade. The service did stop in December 1941, during the first winter of the blockade, but was resumed on April 15, 1942. The observer of blockade life in Lidiya Ginzburg’s Notes from the Leningrad Blockade finds near-metaphysical significance in the running of the tram—it is a symbol of connectedness, of the organization of human life that exceeds any one individual, and as such is a guarantor of the city’s life and of protection against the slide into nonexistence.61 A worthy narrative agent for the city’s experience of the twentieth century, the tram celebrated its one-hundredth anniversary in 2007 and was commemorated with an exhibition in the St. Petersburg Public Library and by the newly refurbished tram museum on Vasilievsky Island, which had moving exhibits as well as conventional fixed ones. The moving exhibits included, in commemoration of the blockade, Memorial Route No. 0, which ran on April 15 along Sadovaya and Nevsky to Turgenev Square.62 So, how to conclude?

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     One must finish one’s work. I am thinking of finishing it here. One could tie up the end with a little bow, but I am certain that the old canon of the synthetic review article or lecture has died. Thoughts synthesized into artificial rows are transformed into a single roadway, into the tracks of the writer’s thought. The whole multiplicity of associations, all the countless paths that run in all directions from each thought are smoothed away. But since I am full of respect for my contemporaries and know that they must either “serve up an end” or write at the bottom that the author has died and so there will be no end—therefore may there be an ending here: ................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Upturned sleepers. Smudge pots. Sand. Stone. Trenches. “What is this? Roadworks?” “No, it’s the ‘Works of Rozanov.’ And the tram runs assuredly over the iron rails.” (on Nevsky, roadworks) I am using it for myself.63

Writing on Vasily Rozanov in 1921, Shklovsky gives an intimation of the crisis in prose form that was to pervade Russian letters in that decade and that was felt acutely and responded to variously by—among those writers mentioned in these pages—Mandelshtam, Eikhenbaum, and Ginzburg. An old form is dead, Shklovsky asserts here, and to avoid also condemning the author to obsolescence, an ending must be conferred—but a conventional ending smoothes over the associations and digressions that are part of the authorial image. Shklovsky’s remarks, as well as their syntax, suggestive of the broken, disjointed motion of the streetcar and of narrative itself, reveal the uneasy relationship between narrative form and the sense of self, or of narrative subjectivity, that emerged after modernism. This is a difficult moment of, if not quite wordlessness, then of narrative hesitation and discontinuity (captured in the image of traveling in a streetcar on rails under repair). The requirement for narrative closure poorly accommodates modernism’s no longer unified sense of the individual and his life. Shklovsky finds his solution in the works of Rozanov, another consummate compiler of nonlinear, fragmentary narratives, a collector and assembler of aphorisms and situational reflections—and in the tram, which runs over the roadworks in progress. In Rozanov and in the tram, Shklovsky discerns a new model for a form-producing impulse: a line of sense may be traced through narrative, however fragmentary, that attests to the integrity of authorial presence, but it combines with the certainty of its railbound movement a thoroughgoing openness to contingency in all that those rails cross

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and encounter. Shklovsky’s remark sketches—and locates in the modern metropolis, if you will—a commonplace analogy to Georg Lukács’s classic nexus for the production of novelistic form: the contingent world (that is, the ceaseless life of the city) and the problematic individual (that is, the dismantled, modern, self ).64 Shklovsky borrows Rozanov’s ending and the tram as an emblem of modernity for himself and thus rescues the imperiled literary form. We might also find, in the project undertaken by this volume and accompanying Web site, that the technology emblematic of our age, the Internet, performs the same work as Shklovsky’s tram: the open-ended medium of hypertext allows for a narrative work to be specified and named and simultaneously defies its closure and limitation. The story told of the city has no definitive end point; it is a work under construction.  1. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dogopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 19. From the earlier 1916 edition of the novel; the references to the tram were cut from the subsequent shorter version. 2. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 126–28. 3. Osip Mandel’shtam, Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2:65. 4. Cited in E. Shapilov, Ot konki do tramvaia: Iz istorii peterburgskogo transporta (St. Petersburg: Dzhuliia, 1994), 174. 5. D. A. Zasosov and V. I. Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga 1890–1910–kh godov: Zapiski ochevidtsev (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1999), 47. 6. G. Godes, Etot staryi tramvai (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1982), 37. 7. S. E. Glezerov, Peterburgskie tainy nachala XX veka (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2005), 100. 8. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga (from appendix of historical notes), 283. 9. Ibid. 10. Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, trans. Vladimir Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 156. 11. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 47. 12. “Tema: Tramvai,” Adresa Peterburga: zhurnal ucheta vechnykh tsennostei 11, no. 23 (2004): 12. 13. Ibid., 15. 14. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 47; “Tema: Tramvai,” 13. 15. Viktor Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” Zvezda 5 (1933): 91. 16. Viktor Shklovsky, Zhili-byli. Vospominaniia. Memuarnye zapisi (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1964), 35. 17. Sample headlines from Peterburgskii listok, April 1912. 18. Satirikon, 19 (1908): 7. 19. Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” 92.

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20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. The tramcars had open platforms at each end. 22. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 285. 23. Roman Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia v russkoi poezii,” Simvol v sisteme kul’tury. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 21 (1987): 135–43. 24. Ibid., 141. 25. Nikolay Gumilev, “Zabludivshiisia tramvai,” in Sochineniia v trekh tomakh, ed. N. A. Bogomolov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), 1:297–99. 26. Nikolay Gumilev, “The Lost Streetcar.” I borrow Elaine Rusinko’s translation from her article “Lost in Space and Time: Gumilev’s ‘Zabludiv† sijsja Tramvaj,’” Slavic and East European Journal 26, no. 4 (1982): 383–402. 27. Rusinko, “Lost in Space and Time,” 391–92. For further discussion of Trinity Bridge, see Lucas Stratton’s essay in this volume. 28. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 110. For Rusinko’s full discussion of Bergson in relation to the poem, see, in particular, 384–88. 29. Satirikon 19 (1908): 7. 30. S. Spassky, Mayakovsky i ego sputniki (1940), 54, quoted in Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 140. 31. On the new visual experience offered by the railroad in the nineteenth century, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 60–64. 32. Nikolay Otsup, “Osen’” in Tsekh poetov, vol. 1 (Berlin: Efron, 1923), 59. For information about the House of Vavelberg, see “Nevsky Prospect” on the Web site Mapping Petersburg. 33. Cited by Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 143. Mayakovsky made his own attempt to capture the vision afforded by tram travel in his Moscow poem (hence not dwelt upon in the body of this essay) “From Street to Street” (“Iz ulitsy v ulitsu,” 1913), whose images, he claims, were suggested by a Moscow streetcar ride. “Perhaps,” Edward Brown writes, “the repetition of meaningless sound in the opening lines imitates the metallic beat of wheels on rails” (Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973], 79). 34. Bernard von Brentano, Wo in Europa ist Berlin? Bilder aus den zwanziger Jahren, quoted in Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flânerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 140. 35. Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problemy kinostilistiki,” in Poetika Kino, ed. R. D. Kopylova (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskii institut istorii iskusstv, 2001), 22. 36. Boris Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izdatel’ pisatelei, 1929), 43. 37. Ibid., 32. 38. Boris Eikhenbaum to Viktor Shklovsky, July 25, 1925, cited by M. O. Chudakova, “Sotsial’naia praktika, filologicheskaia refleksiia i literatura v nauchnoi biografii Eikhenbauma i Tynianova,” Revue des Etudes Slaves 57 (1985): 27. See also Carol Any, Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially chapter 4, “The Formalist in Crisis,” 80–103. 39. On the “death of the novel” as related to the end of Petersburg, see Polina

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Barskova, “Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in Leningrad Culture (1918–1934)” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006). 40. Osip Mandelshtam, “The End of the Novel,” in Mandelstam: The Complete Critical Prose and Letters, ed. and trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (Ardis, MI: Ann Arbor, 1979), 200. 41. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, 125. 42. For further discussion of Eikhenbaum, Mandelshtam, and the crisis of the novel, see Alyson Tapp, “‘Kak byt’ pisatelem?’ Boris Eikhenbaum’s Response to the Crisis of the Novel,” Slavonica 15, no. 1 (2009): 32–47. 43. Osip Mandelshtam, The Egyptian Stamp, in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 138. Translation emended, with reference to Mandelshtam, Egipetskaia marka in Sochineniia, 2:65. 44. Mandelshtam, Egyptian Stamp, 140. 45. Ibid., 162 (2:87). 46. Boris Eikhenbaum, “V poiskakh zhanra,” in Literatura. Teoriia, Kritika, Polemika (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), 292. Connection suggested by Omry Ronen, An Approach to Mandelshtam ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 289. 47. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115. 48. Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 140. 49. Z. N. Gippius, Zhivye litsa (Prague: Plamia, 1925), 1:66–67. 50. Ibid., 68. 51. Alexander Blok, diary entry of June 13, 1917. Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7, ed. V. N. Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 261. 52. For a brief tour through the “canon of streetcar erotica,” see Timenchik, “K simvolike tramvaia,” 136. 53. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 210. 54. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 64. 55. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 419. 56. See Polina Barskova’s essay in this volume. 57. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206. 58. Shklovsky, “O tramvainom fol’klore,” 92. 59. An article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr, which appeared in The Atlantic magazine in July 2008, attracted much attention and intensified popular discussion of the effects of the hypertext medium on cognition. 60. Plans to reduce the service are frequently met with disappointment and protest by citizens. At a meeting in a campaign to save the trams of Vasilievsky Island, Svetlana Motovilova read aloud from her essay on the tram as represented in Roal’d Mandel’shtam’s 1960s poetry. Conversation with Motovilova, June 2005. The essay was printed in the journal Petersburgskii universitet (2002), http://www.spbumag.nw.ru/2002/ 18/16.html. 61. Lidiya Ginzburg, Zapiski blokadnogo cheloveka [1942–1962–1983], in Zapisnye knizhki. Vospominaniia. Esse (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2002), 617.

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62. Larisa Doktorow, “Traveling Back in Time,” St. Petersburg Times, September 14, 2007, http://petersburgcity.com/news/city/2007/09/14/trams/ (accessed January 26, 2008). 63. Viktor Shklovsky, Gamburgskii schet, ed. A. Iu. Galushkin and A. P. Chudakov (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 139. He quotes from Vasily Rozanov, Opavshie list’ia. Korob pervyi (1913). 64. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 78.

5 How Terrorists Learned to Map Plotting in Petersburg and Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse  

and

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History is terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation which is changing. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror

On 15 July 1904, an armored carriage trailed by two policemen on bicycles left St. Petersburg’s Aptekarsky Island and sped along Izmaylovsky Prospect toward the Baltic Train Station. There, the coach’s distinguished passenger, minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve (1846–1904), would catch the ten o’clock train to Petergof for his weekly audience with the tsar. As his horses trotted over Obvodny Canal, a young man dressed as a railway porter approached the coach and thrust a newspaper-covered parcel at the minister. When the smoke cleared, all that remained of this equipage was Plehve’s “mutilated corpse surrounded by fragments of his carriage”—at least this is how Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), who oversaw the attack for the Combat Organization (Boevaia Organizatsiia), the terrorist wing of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (PSR), described the scene in his 1909 memoir, Recollections of a Terrorist (Vospominaniia Terrorista).1 Plehve’s murder caused a sensation. For opponents of Russian autocracy and those who had suffered under the oppressive minister, the terrorists (boeviki ) became admired celebrities: congratulatory telegrams 149

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and donations poured into the PSR’s headquarters in Geneva, and the bombthrower, Egor Sazonov (1879–1910) was cheered as a hero.2 As the main propagandist of the attack, Savinkov was catapulted to fame, and his descriptions of the assassination, penned under the pseudonym Ropshin, were widely published throughout Europe and even appeared in a 1910 issue of The Strand Magazine alongside spy stories and the science fiction of H. G. Wells.3 Despite the celebrations, for many contemporaries the assassination brought a profound sense of foreboding. In the years preceding the 1905 Revolution, the imperial capital was beset by what was commonly referred to as an “epidemic of terrorism.”4 Although figures vary, between 1902 and 1911, 263 terrorist acts took place in Russia. Indeed, Plehve was one of three ministers of the interior to be assassinated in this period.5 Although from our present perspective Plehve’s death might seem a rather minor moment, for contemporary observers ranging from avant-garde intellectuals like Zinaida Gippius to imperial officials like Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich, Plehve’s death marked a critical juncture—“the beginning of the end”—in the mounting assault on Russian autocracy.6 In her essay in this volume, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock notes that Bely was among those fin-de-siècle intelligents who viewed Alexander Blok’s death as the end of an era; but another key turning point that Bely identified in his recollections of Blok was Plehve’s murder, which he called a great “break” (rubezh), whereby Russia crossed over into the revolutionary age.7 Perhaps it was for this reason that Bely drew extensively on Plehve’s murder in crafting the terrorist conspiracy at the center of Petersburg. Early in the novel Bely transports his reader to the ominous metropolis by describing a similar carriage. This carriage clatters along Petersburg’s English Embankment carrying a dignitary who had been known to describe himself as “a man of the school of Plehve.”8 On the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street, another young man steps out of the fog brandishing a sinister bundle. He pauses, staring furiously at the gentleman in the coach. Transfixed by this stranger’s piercing gaze, the passenger, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, covers his eyes in terror, his heart exploding in his chest. Fortunately for the senator, the Stranger, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, does not throw his bomb that day, but his eyes, “having caught sight, widened, lit up, flashed,” communicate his murderous intentions to Ableukhov.9 Bely named his fictional senator “Apollon” precisely because the sound pl resembled an explosion. The figure of Ableukhov moves through Petersburg and Petersburg like a walking time bomb.10 Bely’s Petersburg and Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist draw on similar historical events and make use of some common images and tropes to construct

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an explosive fin-de-siècle Petersburg, a city teeming with radicals and seething with revolutionary tensions. In such an environment, the death of the old regime and its figureheads appeared imminent. However, in both texts the bomb explosions seem rather anticlimactic compared to the thrilling and suspenseful period of scheming, planning, and anticipation that precedes them. It is this process of “plotting” the assassinations that concerns us in this essay, as it clearly was a chief concern in Savinkov’s retrospective accounts of political murder. Our essay examines two of Savinkov’s accounts of revolutionary terrorism: his memoir, Recollections of a Terrorist, and his novel The Pale Horse (Kon’ Bledny), which describe in great detail how the terrorists endlessly rehearsed and tirelessly revamped their plots against the minister.11 Both works take special care to enumerate the assassins’ many failed attempts before the successful attack. Interestingly, although Savinkov composed these works simultaneously, in many ways they are strikingly different. Triumphant in tone, Recollections of a Terrorist functioned as the PSR’s official history of the assassination plots against Plehve, Grand Duke Sergey, and others. Although the text is presented as a personal memoir, the party forced Savinkov, under threat of expulsion, to revise it some twelve times. Recollections of a Terrorist was published in installments between 1908 and 1912 and appeared as a complete work in the PSR’s newspaper Socialist Revolutionary (Sotsialist-Revolutsioner) in 1909. By contrast, The Pale Horse was published anonymously and was deeply influenced by members of the Petersburg intelligentsia, especially the Gippius-Merezhkovsky circle.12 It was serialized in Russkaya Mysl’ in July 1909 and appeared as a book that same year. It is a fictionalized diary detailing the assassination of Grand Duke Sergey Alexandrovich in Moscow, but a close examination of the text—including many plot details and specific episodes of dialogue—reveals that Savinkov frequently and liberally drew on the Plehve case and its geographic setting in Petersburg.13 (In most editions of the novel, the city in which it is set is concealed as N, but in some it is explicitly referred to as Moscow; in all editions the assassins move back and forth between Moscow and Petersburg so that the terrorists’ reflections on the urban experience are clearly marked by both places.) The novel/diary explores the deep recesses of the terrorist mind and directly questions the ethics and efficacy of political murder. Not surprisingly, it fascinated the symbolists but outraged many members of the PSR. Taken together, the novel/diary and the memoir demonstrate how the success of the terrorist conspiracy was embedded in the urban space of Petersburg and Moscow and was contingent upon the assassins’ ability to move skillfully through that space, order it, and render it readable. In order to plot their attacks against Plehve and the grand duke, they had to plot their pathways

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through the city, at times deliberately and slowly, at times at high speed, from different vantage points and modes of transit. The intersection between these two meanings of the verb to plot is crucial to understanding Savinkov’s works: in order to carry out the assassination, the boeviki had to learn to map a phantasmagoric, shifting urban landscape that resisted all efforts to order and control it. Over the course of their endless rehearsals and adaptations to changing circumstance, the boeviki became modernist mappers, altering their ways of moving through the city to fit the deceptive urban environment. In short, Savinkov’s works underscore how a terrorist act was largely a cartographic enterprise, which had to be carefully planned out and projected onto the city space. Despite their other literary and historical qualities, Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse are largely propagandistic texts meant to valorize the assassins’ achievements and their martyrdom for the cause. As many scholars of modern terrorism have emphasized, publicizing an attack—whether it be through media coverage or the terrorists’ claims of responsibility—was in fact more powerful (and thus more important) for creating fear, anxiety, and disorder than the attack itself. In fact, along with advances in technology and strategy, what largely distinguishes nineteenth-century professional terrorism from its earlier forms is the centrality of this rhetorical aspect, which necessitates a highly developed public sphere. From this perspective terrorism can be understood as a political performance that uses violence symbolically (more than instrumentally) to create disorder and fear. To use Carlo Pisacane’s classic formulation, it is “propaganda by deed.”14 What is so curious about Savinkov’s works, then, is that in his effort to highlight the processes of planning and carrying out an assassination, he detailed each near miss, miscalculation, and misstep for his reader to such an extent that he effectively undermined the propagandistic effect of his writings. The triumphant tone of Recollections of a Terrorist is often drowned out by Savinkov’s cries of frustration about the boeviki’s blunders. In The Pale Horse, these foibles take on an added philosophical dimension, where the assassins’ wanderings and wrong turns figure as part of the terrorists’ spiritual search for higher meaning in their actions.15 Although there has been significant scholarly attention paid to Savinkov’s discussion of the terrorist mind and the moral dilemma of terror, much less attention has been paid to the fact that he couched the assassins’ tactical, ideological, and psychological struggles in spatial terms.16 In this essay we focus on the theme of plotting, to shed light on how Savinkov’s depictions of both terrorism and his fellow terrorists are firmly rooted in the modern, even modernist, city.

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As terrorists, the boeviki sought to bring both disorder and order to Russian society. On the one hand, they were confident in their ability to improve and reshape their environment. Their aspirations to rationally and justly reorder society and their penchant for developing new technologies—whether in publishing or in explosives—indicate a certain faith in progress. On the other hand, as Savinkov suggests, the experience of plotting their attacks in such an elusive environment gave rise to the kind of crisis-thinking, radical historicity, acute self-consciousness, and self-invention that are generally associated with modernism. The Combat Organization’s approach to terrorism was at once creative and destructive, futuristic and atavistic, scientific and spiritual, and modernizing and modernist. In this way it exemplified the contradictory impulses of the modern condition, which Marshall Berman has defined as man’s utopian faith in his capacity to transform the world and his acute anxiety about disorientation and disintegration. “To be modern,” Berman explains, “is to live a life of paradox and contradiction.”17 These assassination accounts can best be understood as part of this larger story of the modernist urban experience: Savinkov’s texts explore the intersection of plotting the cityscape and plotting murder.

M a pping t he Unre a dabl e C i t y If terrorism can be understood as a highly aestheticized, symbolic act that projects its ideological or political vision onto a social or geographical space, then it has much in common with mapping. The map is an expository genre that not only describes but also conceptualizes and explains. Mapping has been integral to the development of the modern polity as a tool for surveying, navigating, and partitioning territory, as well as a style of thinking, a way of imagining self, and of exercising power.18 As geographer/cartographer Mark Monmonier has shown, “the map is a perfect symbol of the state,” an icon of political, ideological, and intellectual hegemony, “an intellectual weapon.” It follows, then, that mapping is also central to challenging or undoing those polities. Indeed, Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse are excellent narrative examples of what Monmonier calls “cartographic self-assertion” in politics.19 There was nothing easy or straightforward, however, about this selfassertion for the boeviki. By the time he was murdered, Plehve had already survived six attempts on his life. As we have mentioned, despite its exultant tone, Recollections of a Terrorist is candid about these numerous failures as well as extremely precise as to the exact configuration of bodies in the city space.

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Constantly striving to prove his cartographic skills, Savinkov attributes every failure to spatial challenges, to “poor disposition” of actors, and to reasons ranging from ignorance about Plehve’s route to imprecise positioning of the assassins to the failure to account for new street conditions. The conspirators in both texts even reconsider staging their attack in the street because of such challenges (RT 44–48, 51, 73; PH 112, 114–15, 117–18). In fact, Savinkov was much more precise in describing the layout of the city than he was in supplying temporal markers in his accounts. This careful attention to space—a focus on landmarks, precise measures, and other means of fixing points in the city landscape—was a direct response to the difficulty of reading the urban terrain where the two narratives are set: Petersburg and, for The Pale Horse, the fictionalized city of N. Along with its name, Savinkov’s narrator in The Pale Horse also disguises the names of this mysterious city’s streets, neighborhoods, and outskirts, although numerous landmarks in the skyline—the placement of spires, towers, and embankments in particular— suggest it to be some combination of Moscow and Petersburg (PH 154, 155, 157). Despite claiming to recount the assassination of Grand Duke Sergey, Savinkov’s descriptions of Petersburg and N share many of the same territorial ambiguities and thematic contours: their landscapes shift, all means for getting one’s bearings can suddenly disappear, and people and objects are not what they initially seem. In The Pale Horse, the protagonist, the terrorist known by the pseudonym “O’Brien,” is alarmed to find himself disoriented by the loss of his vision—the primary sense required for finding one’s way—in a sudden fog: Late one autumn night, I was on the embankment. The sea was sighing languidly; it crept slowly upon the beach and immersed it. There was a fog. All boundaries became obliterated in the white mist. The waves merged with the sky, the beach with the water. The wet watery mist enveloped me. I breathed in the salt moisture. I heard the noise of the water. There were no stars, not a glimpse of light. A transparent darkness surrounded me. That is how it is now. There is no visible outline, no end, no beginning. (PH 154)

Even at what ought to have been their moment of triumph, the successful assassination of Plehve, the conspirators were unable to discern what had happened. On July 15, upon hearing an explosion, Savinkov hurried toward the billowing smoke and ash. Peering at the wreckage through the haze, he was unable to decipher what had transpired. He left the scene under the delusion that the minister had survived and his friend had perished and even reported as much to his coconspirators. In fact, neither Savinkov nor Evno Fishelevich (also known as Evgeny Filipovich) Azef (who ran the Combat Organization)

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knew of Plehve’s death until they read about it in the newspapers (RT 57–59).20 Vision was not the only sense that was compromised or insufficient: on one occasion, Savinkov was unable to distinguish between the sound of a successful terrorist attack and cannon fire from that stronghold of autocratic repression, the Peter and Paul Fortress (RT 47).21 In the memoir, every failure resembles a lesson and each mishap only strengthens the conspirators’ resolve to complete their task. By giving the precise geographic and topographic information for four failed attempts—which take up many more pages than the description of their successful attack— Savinkov teaches the reader about how they corrected their mistakes. (The Pale Horse makes this point rather playfully, such as in one scene where the assassins gather after their latest failure at a dingy bar called Progress [PH 93]).22 The successful assassination of Plehve, in Savinkov’s view, resulted from minute planning—including the exact pacing between the assassins—a shrewd reading of “the appearance of the street,” and the right convergence of bodies and locations in space (RT 75–77). The terrorists’ efforts at mapping gave rise to a particularly modernist worldview characterized by transience, opacity, and paradox. Geographercartographer David Harvey has argued that the “new cartographic consciousness,” which pervaded the modernist era, emphasized personal experience and individual perception. As a result, it moved away from the Cartesian enterprise of locating a point on a grid and toward the tracking of certain processes and positioning the self in terms of space.23 Cartographers moved from graphing static bodies of a fixed distribution to plotting networks, flows, and transfers of goods, ideas, and populations over space. Such maps are fundamentally dynamic, transient, and, as Harvey explains, “malleable and variable (relative and relational).”24 In short, modernist mapping emphasizes motion. We can see a similar transformation in the assassins’ attempts to map the city for their attack. Savinkov and his coconspirators initially failed to execute their plans because they tried to graph them onto a relatively unchanging landscape. Indeed, Savinkov’s descriptions of their early attempts show how the boeviki were so focused on their objective, the destination guiding their movements, that they did not give adequate attention to various contingencies, including the dynamics of the space; to the rapidity of time and space flows; and to the constant variability of conditions. In other words, they mistakenly approached the city as though it could be plotted on a fixed map. In fact, one way to conceptualize the structures of Savinkov’s memoir and novel is as an exercise in incremental mapping, where the terrorists constantly redrafted their plans as they learned to plot patterns of movement on a living, shifting landscape. The vitality of the

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space also led Savinkov to personify the city in his accounts, as would Bely. Savinkov described N, for example, as a “breathing,” “bewitching,” and enchanted place, where spirits “hover over the swamps and cast their spells” (PH 101, 106). This move recalls Petersburg, where the city quakes and rearranges itself, the Ableukhov mansion inhabits two different locations, and the phantasmagoric, fog-shrouded streets continually cloud one’s vision. By portraying the landscape as mystifying and spectral, and mapping as a flexible and subjective process, Savinkov helped to “dispel the cartographic mystique” surrounding mapping and to present mapmaking as an artistic and impressionistic enterprise rather than as a dispassionate and scientific one.25 The opacity of the city’s landscape, as well as the obstacles it set in the terrorists’ path, was both a practical problem and a rich metaphor for the philosophical dilemmas occupying the terrorists. By reading The Pale Horse alongside The Brothers Karamazov and Demons, Lynn Patyk demonstrates how Savinkov’s novel grapples with the Dostoevskian conundrum regarding violence based on moral, political, or rational principles.26 In The Pale Horse, each failed assassination attempt gives O’Brien and Vanya more time to reconsider their motives and aspirations and thus emphasizes the moral turpitude of their work. In support of this, we contend that the modernist urban environment was essential to Savinkov’s understanding of the philosophical struggle within the terrorist mind. In our view, the opacity of the terrorist’s political vision is matched by the illegibility of the urban terrain; his confusion about the efficacy and morality of assassination is expressed by his meandering of the city’s alleyways and alcoves, and his concerns about losing his own identity are tied to his near-constant presence on the crowded streets.

Fir st Enc ount e r s As soon as Savinkov arrived in St. Petersburg and O’Brien in the town of N, the two men immediately set out on strolls to explore the city. A newcomer both to Petersburg and the Combat Organization, Savinkov walked the city’s streets hoping to meet at least one of his coconspirators, who could give him some instruction and introduce him to the local organization. With Azef as the mastermind behind the plot and his comrades as bomb throwers, Savinkov understood his role was essentially to inscribe Azef ’s vision onto the cityscape by choosing specific sites for the attack and by coordinating the assassins’ movements (RT 32–33). On his first day on the job, however, Savinkov felt completely disoriented in the city. Desperately scanning the crowd for a certain familiar

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face, he explained: “the farther I walked, the more I lost hope of finding it. I began to think that the comrade was not in St. Petersburg, that he had either been seized on the frontier or had failed to obtain a peddler’s license.” Eventually, the befuddled Savinkov was found and rescued by this coconspirator (RT 34). Perhaps in an effort to prevent O’Brien from repeating some of his mistakes, Savinkov made his alter ego a native of N. Already a seasoned assassin, O’Brien is much more successful than Savinkov on his first day, even catching a glimpse of his target, the governor. Melding seamlessly into the city environs, O’Brien boasts: “he did not notice me. I was part of the street for him. I slowly turned home. I felt happy.” O’Brien stands apart from his creator in his ease in navigating the city and tracking his target. But like Savinkov, O’Brien identifies mapping as his primary task in the plot. After this initial success, he spends the evening at his hotel “studying the plan of the town. I am mapping out the roads we must follow. I try to reconstruct his life, his daily habits. In my thoughts I am present at the receptions in his house; I take walks with him in the garden, behind the gate; I hide beside him at night, I say prayers with him as he goes to bed” (PH 27–28, 30–31). As O’Brien explains, however, his map is drawn from the thoughts and habits of his target as much as from the physiognomy of the city. From this point on, Savinkov’s and O’Brien’s daily activities consist of constantly moving through space, touring, tracking, and plotting, sometimes slowly and deliberately, sometimes at high speed. At times both The Pale Horse and Memoirs of a Terrorist read like guidebooks structured as a series of itineraries on foot or by transport. In his memoir Savinkov boasted that his network of spies canvassing the city was unprecedented in Russia’s history. “Never before had revolutionists resorted to observation in the street [. . .] The police could hardly conceive that members of our Combat Organization were running about Petersburg as cabdrivers or trading in the streets as peddlers. All the while, this systematic observation was leading inevitably to the assassination of Plehve on the street” (RT 33). Because of the shifting nature of the landscape, the assassins’ plans of attack came to center around what geographer Nigel Thrift has called “immutable mobiles,” such as strolls, carriages, and railways.27 As narrative devices, they knit the texts together and transport the reader to the world of early twentieth-century Petersburg. In this sense, they can be understood as cartographic modalities, vehicles of meaning interweaving city sites and thematic elements. Savinkov’s works privilege two main ways of viewing and experiencing these unruly urban settings: one is through the fleeting, sweeping vision of the

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city framed by the carriage window, and the second, through the freer, more intimate close-up gaze of the stroller meandering through the metropolitan maze. Below, we will look more closely at several ways that the assassins moved through the city space: as passengers peering through coach or railway windows, from atop a coach box as cabdrivers, or as humble tradesmen and genteel flâneurs walking the city.

Aboa rd t he R a ilroa d The whistles of locomotives provided a compelling soundtrack to Savinkov’s recollections and novel. Like the city streets, the railway was another overlay, or as Michel Foucault described it, a “bundle of relations” tying various points together.28 The railroad is marked by the orderliness and linearity of the tracks. The train-car window privileges an experience of the terrain that is extremely detached, sweeping and numbing for—as Michel de Certeau observed—the overwhelming interiority of the train car can cut the viewer off from reality.29 The boeviki relied heavily on the railroad for evading the police as well as for bringing new weapons and conspirators into the plot. The railway is treated very differently in Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse. In the memoir the boeviki appear quite skilled in their utilization of the rail system. On the day of the assassination they disguised themselves as railway porters, and their pathways through the city, which began at a crumbling church and ended at a bustling railway station—that “temple” of industry and progress—suggest a kind of modernization narrative in miniature.30 Indeed, bridges and train stations not only played an important part in the plot, they also symbolized the city in transition, thresholds of a new era. By contrast, in The Pale Horse the train figures as a voyeuristic and dangerous space, where various subcultures of Russian society were thrust uncomfortably into close proximity. Even that most modern of symbols, the orderly and rational railroad was not immune to the chaos and deceptions of the city, which the close quarters of the train car even intensify. Once one was aboard, there was no escape from this concentrated atmosphere or from the scrutiny of other passengers.31 The enclosed, immobilizing experience of that “traveling incarceration,” the train car, left the boeviki feeling even more vulnerable than the carriage ride. O’Brien describes one such tense environment when he travels by rail to the suburban town of X. He is trailing the governor there, who (like Plehve on his sojourns to Petergof ) was en route to his regular meeting with the tsar. On one occasion, the Irishman fears that the aristocratic lady

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with whom he is sharing his compartment is actually a police spy. He is unable to calm his suspicions and, rather than watching the governor, he ends up spending the day following her around X, making inquiries about her at the police station and even calling on her at home (PH, 62–64).32 For the terrorists the railroad’s orderliness and clean linearity were also dangerous delusions. Even more threatening than becoming cornered by police on the train was the possibility of becoming trapped in what Bely’s Dudkin calls the railroad mentality. This might be described as an exuberant (almost blind) faith in scientific planning and technology, on the one hand, and an overly rigid and linear way of thinking, on the other. Given the importance of modern technology and transit to the terrorists’ operations and weapons, engineering was a natural idiom for them. Both Savinkov and Azef fancied themselves to be “technicians of terror.” They emerge from Recollections of a Terrorist as devotees of precise planning, technological sophistication, and iron discipline.33 According to Savinkov’s depiction, Azef in particular embodied this ethos. He was an electrical engineer by profession and managed to balance his double life as a terrorist and a police informer with a position at General Electric in Russia. Compared to the more spontaneous style of his predecessor Grigory Gershuni, Azef was reputed for his mechanical mannerisms and his cool, mathematical approach to murder. His letters to his subordinates are full of technical jargon and often resemble scientific lectures.34 Compared to Azef, Savinkov was more an aesthete, but—perhaps in reverence to this scientific ideal—in Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse he plays several engineers, including O’Brien and Malinovsky. At the same time, the relationship between terrorism and engineering, and the effects of railroad mentality on the terrorists’ operations were unclear. In The Pale Horse Savinkov pairs terrorism and engineering but often in order to juxtapose them. At times terrorism represents both anarchic disorder and science, the imposition of order based on rational principles. Consumed by this apparent contradiction, the assassins O’Brien, Fyodor, and Vanya vacillate in their understanding of their mission, wondering whether they believe in socialism’s ability to perfect society—do they seek to impose a new sociopolitical order, or are they anarchists opposed to any order at all? This is one of the core conflicts that haunts the assassins in both texts. At one point, O’Brien compares his constant vacillation and tendency to return, without resolution, to the same troubling thoughts about their primary objective with a railway to nowhere: “life moves in an iron circle,” he explains (PH 73). Yet Savinkov’s two texts directly question the efficacy of the scientific approach to politics, demonstrating how, despite all of their careful planning, the

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boeviki struggled to execute their plans and maintain control over their ranks and weapons. Both the fictional and real-life boeviki, such as Alexey Pokotilov and Maximilian Shveytser, died in dynamite accidents. Moreover, almost as soon as the conspiracy was hatched, their assassins become captive to it. In The Pale Horse, O’Brien and Vanya describe themselves as prisoners of the mission, unable to resist the chase, to live outside the terrorist mode, or even to die. As Vanya explains, “It is impossible to break the chain. For me, there is no way out, no escape” (PH 50).35 Like Bely’s “sardine tin with dreadful contents,” their plot is an automatic device that cannot be disarmed. In a Nietzschean critique of modernity’s naive faith in reason, Vanya also criticizes those “supermen” who are blinded by rationality and moral righteousness to “lose sight of God” or, worse still, try to replace him. Just because the killing of the governor is rational, rationality should not replace morality as the driving force of action. He warns O’Brien that this poisonous attitude is infecting their ranks: “It’s all mathematics and reason with us. But when I stood on the little mound that night, in the midst of a swamp, waiting for death, I realized that reason is not everything, that there is something above it: but we have blinkers/blinders on our eyes, we don’t see, we don’t know” (PH 52–53). This sermon, as George calls it, once again underscores how this questioning of the railway mentality is couched in spatial terms, particularly the illegibility and unruliness of the city’s “swampy” landscape.

The Ca r ria ge “The lanterns of the carriage suddenly flashed in the darkness. I heard the glass door slam. A gray shadow appeared on the white steps. The black horses turned slowly round the entrance and drove at a slow trot . . . The governor had already reached the third gate . . . I waited” (PH 96). The carriage is the primum mobile driving both Recollections of a Terrorist and The Pale Horse, and more than any other image in Savinkov’s texts, it encapsulates the experience of terror. It was also central to Bely’s initial conception of Petersburg such that at one point he considered The Lacquered Carriage (Lakirovannaia kareta) as the novel’s title.36 These stately carriages served as ubiquitous reminders of aristocratic affluence despised by the PSR. Yet since they were being displaced by the automobile and mass forms of transit, such as the railroad or, as Alyson Tapp shows, the tram, they were also representations of the moribund imperial state. In Savinkov’s works they are moving targets fleeing haplessly about the city’s perilous streets on paths to nowhere, to political dead ends. The device of the

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carriage (kareta), as well as its more humble cousin the horse-drawn cab ( proletka), privileges a certain geographical reading of the imperial city that centers around movement and the flow of energy. The city appears as a conduit of the political, economic, and social currents pulsating though Petersburg. In other words, the carriage, or cab, presents the city as a primarily relational space characterized by flux and circulation—a skein of entangled streets, communication networks, commercial ties, and complex social interactions. The carriage and cab are also among Savinkov’s central mapping devices. Every time his conspirators hailed a cab or tracked the movements of a carriage, they charted a new course through the city and reconfigured the relationship between points. According to Recollections of a Terrorist, from 1903 to 1905 almost everyone involved in the assassination plot temporarily posed as cabbies or fares and spent their days riding about the city monitoring the minister’s movements in his carriage. It was in the guise of a cabbie that Savinkov first became acquainted with comrades Iosif Matseevsky and Egor Sazonov. Unable to separate assassin from driver, Savinkov admits that his impressions of both men were based on the appearance of their uniforms, the state of their cabs, and their skill as drivers. It was not until some months later in Kharkov that Savinkov was reintroduced to Sazonov “for the first time as he really was, not on a coach box and in a cabdriver’s cloak,” and able to form a true impression of the man. O’Brien has similar experiences in The Pale Horse and even remarks how one assassin, Heinrich, had come to resemble his horse (RT 43, 55–56; PH 39–40). In their work, the boeviki had to be skilled at both driving cabs and identifying the minister’s carriage from a good distance away. This privileged a longrange, panoramic vision of the city, where the cabbie—atop the coach box— must continually scan the horizon for certain clues. In 1903, when he arrived in Petersburg, Savinkov’s first lesson in espionage focused on identifying the style of Plehve’s carriage as well as the look of the livery and driver. The same holds for Savinkov’s memoiristic and fictional accounts of the grand duke’s murder, where the author underscored how their task was eased by the especially distinctive “white harness and green lights” of his carriage, which were “unlike any other” (RT 34–35, 102–3). The ability to identify the carriage from afar was among the essential skills necessary for attacking on the street. In Recollections of a Terrorist, Savinkov applauds his coconspirators’ convincing performances as cabbies. He fondly recalls how unsuspecting customers regularly hailed the terrorist-cabbies. Even though it helped to support the PSR financially, Savinkov regretted that this side business detracted from their espionage activities. It also brought unwanted competition to the city’s existing

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tradesmen and drivers, whose resentment and suspicion further threatened the terrorists’ tenuous position on the street. O’Brien commends his coconspirators yet is more candid about their shortcomings. For one thing, he gives more credit to the police guarding the governor, noting that they were acutely aware that the coachman was a favorite disguise for spies and that they “suspect[ed] every cabdriver.” Moreover, because they occasionally got lost, their fares could easily see through the terrorists’ disguises and report them to the police (RT 48–49; PH 39–40, 59–60).37 After all, most of the boeviki were not from Petersburg (or N) and naturally made some wrong turns as they learned to mentally map the city. The terrorists’ horse-drawn cabs and the government officials’ carriages offered distinct advantages and disadvantages to their occupants. The cabs were open to the street, which made them useful for quick escapes. One of Savinkov’s early, formative experiences as a member of the Combat Organization was of running from a spy by leapfrogging “from cab to cab and streetcar to streetcar.” At other times, O’Brien relies on Vanya’s cab to flee detectives on his trail (RT 37; PH 80–86). Yet the open cab might also endanger its occupant, who was entirely unconcealed. Although there were numerous risks in driving a cab and being spotted by the police, according to Savinkov (whose status in the organization meant that he rode more than he drove), it was far riskier and more terrifying to be a helpless passenger. The passenger has no control over the vehicle’s direction or speed, and in an open cab, he is also visible from the street. Some of Savinkov’s uneasiest and tensest experiences occur when he is riding in a coconspirator’s cab. For state officials the enclosed carriage offered only a limited view of the street through the carriage window. As Savinkov notes, this was a great advantage when the boeviki were on foot and could glimpse their carriage-bound targets without fear of being seen. Despite the protection a carriage might afford—aware of his numerous enemies, Plehve had an armored carriage made—confinement inside it heightened the occupant’s sense of vulnerability.38

Wa lking t he Cit y Perhaps because of the perils associated with carriages and trains, when Azef suggested that Savinkov use an automobile for the attack, the memoirist strongly objected in favor of moving about on foot (RT 57–58). Indeed, one of the central strategic questions that Savinkov addresses in both texts is the relative merits of surveillance by cab and by foot—for most members of the

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Combat Organization, this meant a choice between becoming a coachman or a peddler. For Savinkov, who adopted more bourgeois disguises, the choice was between riding in a cab or strolling as a man-about-town. These two ways of traversing the city provided different vantage points and sensory experiences— the cab strongly privileged vision, while the stroll also activated tactile and auditory senses. In Recollections of a Terrorist this question is raised almost immediately, for in Savinkov’s very first meeting with one of his coconspirators, the comrade suggests to him that surveillance work could be done more easily as a cabbie than in his previous disguise, as a peddler. But as we have seen, as Savinkov and O’Brien become savvier, they realize that cabbies are far more conspicuous than peddlers and so pose a greater risk to the organization. Moreover, Savinkov notes that the rather sweeping and expansive vision of the cabbie affords very different information than the more detailed and intimate view of the peddler. He complains that his cabbies are less detailed and systematic in their observations—partly because of their perspectives and partly because they are often hailed by fares and taken off course (RT 35–36, 63–64). As Savinkov became more skeptical about the carriage as an observational device, he was increasingly attracted to the guise of the peddler, a role he felt Ivan Kalyaev played with utmost skill. Savinkov marveled at Kalyaev’s exhaustive knowledge of Plehve’s coach, from the dimensions to the style of door handles, axles, and harnesses—which he felt could only be obtained from a street-level view: “With a tray slung over his shoulders and often changing his wares—cigarettes, apples, writing paper, pencils—Kalyaev wandered about the streets where he thought he would meet Plehve,” and from this he formulated his own theory of Plehve’s movements: “by certain minute indications, such as the number of policemen in the street, their outward appearance, the collection of captains and lieutenants, and the tension at the approach of the minister’s carriage, Kalyaev was able to determine unmistakably whether Plehve had already passed through a particular street or whether he was still expected” (RT 63). Interestingly, Kalyaev’s reputation as a “poet” with a great artistic sensibility and keen eye for detail as well as a tendency to be consumed by his “roles” supports viewing the city from a peddler’s perspective. By contrast, Savinkov praises Sazonov for his convincing portrayal of a cabbie and for his more calculated and disciplined approach. Sazonov’s political view was also more expansive than Kalyaev’s, extending far beyond the individual acts of terror to the PSR’s aspirations to reorganize Russian society. Although Kalyaev participated in the plot against Plehve, he did not have to throw his bomb because of Sazonov’s successful effort. Kalayev did hurl the explosive that killed the Grand Duke Sergey, and thus he is the major bomb thrower featured in The

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Pale Horse, and Sazonov in Recollections of a Terrorist. The texts associate the two assassin’s distinct ways of seeing with their personality types, which in turn shape the tone and feel of each narrative. Ultimately it was the combination of these positions and the different insights they afforded that gave the boeviki, especially their chief visionary, Savinkov, a more unified vision of the plot and so helped ensure its success. The overarching vision given in his accounts was made possible only by synthesizing these composite mappings.

Posing a s a F lâ ne u r The boeviki subverted the social hierarchy not only by attacking elite statesmen but also by appropriating their dress and manners for their conspiratorial purposes. One of their primary guises, along with cabbies and peddlers, was the bourgeois gentleman. In this disguise, Savinkov could walk the city more freely, taking advantage of locales and views available to Petersburg’s distinguished visitors. On the day of Plehve’s murder, he specifically chose to take a meandering route away from the planned spot of attack so that he could position himself perfectly in between the minister and the assassins, on the Warsaw Bridge, which crosses the Obvodny Canal at Izmaylovsky Prospect, close to the Warsaw Station. The bridge provided a beautiful spot from which to view the tableau. After the explosion this respectable man-about-town was even guided to safety by a nearby policeman. Also disguised as a gentleman, O’Brien registers in the city as a tourist, taking advantage of the expanding tourist industry in Petersburg and making extensive use of the convenient networks of train stations and hotels. In the memoir Savinkov mentions at least four Petersburg hotels that served as key outposts in the plot against Plehve (RT 34, 59, 71, 77). In fact, the minister was killed squarely in front of the Warsaw Hotel and would have been plainly visible to its guests and sightseers. The terrorists also implicated the city’s most popular promenades, including the Summer and Yusupov Gardens, Petrovsky Park, and the city zoo, in the assassinations, carrying out their meetings in these innocent, recreational surroundings in broad daylight (RT 47, 72, 78–79). In his study of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin notes, “no matter what trail the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime,”39 although Benjamin tends to discuss the flâneur more as a detective than a criminal in this scenario. Like the detective’s, the flâneur ‘s penetrating gaze studies, clarifies, and orders the urban environment. Building on this premise, Benjamin likens him to a criminologist, botanist, and geologist, who “divide[s] the Parisian

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public according to its various strata as easily as a geologist distinguishes the layers in rocks” and who unearths deeply hidden truths lurking below the surface.40 But, as Tom McDonough has pointed out, the ambiguity of Benjamin’s formulation leaves open the possibility for the flâneur to play the part of the criminal, who undermines the urban order. As both cartographers and masters of urban disorder, Savinkov and O’Brien embody this ambiguity. They simultaneously play the roles of detective and criminal, now ordering, now disordering the illusive Petersburg cityscape.41

The Lone ly Ma n in t he C r owd Whether flâneur or tourist, detective or criminal, Savinkov clearly savored the opportunity for theatrical playacting: his memoir provides an impressive résumé of his repertory of roles. Among his most developed characters was English businessman Arthur McCullough, who was in Petersburg representing a London bicycle firm. McCullough lived in the apartment on Zhukovsky Street with his “wife,” a singer played by terrorist Dora Brilliant; their chauffeur, acted by David Borishansky; a cook, performed by veteran terrorist Praskovya Ivanovskaya; and a butler played by Sazonov. When McCullough’s presence became too conspicuous and too expensive for the PSR, a more modest character, the Polish dentist Konstantin Chernetsky, replaced him (RT 59–65). Like his creator, the protagonist of The Pale Horse adopts a multitude of disguises, including George O’Brien and timber merchant Frol Titov, but his greatest role, it seems, is that of anonymity itself: “I am a stranger everywhere,” an “invisible man,” he declares, “I have no motherland, no name, no family” (PH 59, 33). Even those closest to him call him “the stranger.” This epithet is one of the most direct links between Bely’s Stranger, Dudkin, in Petersburg and Savinkov’s fiction. Both novelists drew on that stock figure of the modernist metropolis, “the lonely man in the crowd,” who moves about the city unknown and undetected, to underscore the insidious nature of urban terrorism. But unlike Savinkov, who boasts of his acting talent, O’Brien comes to regard his apparent invisibility as a great source of anxiety. After so many disguises, O’Brien mourns, “[I have] lost myself. I am a stranger to myself ” (PH 66, 94– 95, 105). He can fuse himself with the city and yet is no longer at home in it. In this way O’Brien represents an incarnation of Simmel’s “the metropolitan type,” who has lost his individuality to the systematizing, atomizing forces of modernity. By constantly shifting his position and his identity vis-à-vis the changing landscape—by mapping coordinates or “fixing every one of its parts

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into a mathematical formula”—the metropolitan type becomes “an agglomeration” of persons rather than one, autonomous subject.42 In the final pages of The Pale Horse, O’Brien has grown as weary of exploring his own psychology as he is of wandering through the maze of streets without clarity. His diary entry for 27 September brings the illegibility of the mental and physical landscapes together: “I am tired of life [. . .] The same milky fog, the same gray everyday life. The same love, the same death. Life is a like a narrow street with old low houses, flat roofs, and factory chimneys” (PH 152–53).

T he C it y a s a Hunt ing G r o u n d At no point was the scope and fluidity of the terrorists’ roles more impressive than when their systematic movement through the city was suddenly accelerated by an encounter with the okhranniki, or secret police. Such high-speed chases and chance meetings drive the momentum of Savinkov’s accounts. This type of movement is central to the cartographic process as well as to the creation of suspense in both narratives. In both the memoir and novel, Savinkov’s descriptions of such encounters, also between the terrorists and their target, are infused with the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of the chase. The actual murders seem anticlimactic and take a backseat to the thrills of scheming and brushing shoulders with the police. Savinkov relays to the reader how the street mysteriously seemed to draw the assassins into the chase. In The Pale Horse, there is a clear distinction between interior spaces—be they cafes, theaters, or the terrorists’ apartment—and the street outside. When O’Brien is inside, he retreats into his thoughts and lingers over questions of Christian martyrdom and the efficacy of terror. Once he is on the street, he quickly forgets any misgivings about the future or past regrets. He is focused only on the present chase. This is another manifestation of how the characters’ psychological struggles are graphed onto the topography of the novel. What is more, O’Brien even admits that he can no longer walk about the city without cautiously glancing over his shoulder. Unable to turn off the conspiratorial mode, he envies those passersby who could be absorbed by petty concerns. At high speeds, the terrorists’ mapping brought not only multiple viewpoints and motion through space but also rapid reversals in perspective. Savinkov’s chase scenes are distinctly multidirectional, such that the space is not configured toward one destination, and the roles of the pursuer and pursed sometimes reverse at a moment’s notice. O’Brien describes one such incident when, upon emerging from a teashop into the street: “I noticed three detectives at a

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neighboring gate. I knew them by their furtive eyes and fixed glances. I stopped at a shop window and stood without moving. I became a detective myself and watched them. I wondered whether they were on our track.” The terrorist and the detectives eye each other through the windowpane until suddenly O’Brien breaks out in a run. As the chase moves from the sidewalk to a nearby cab and finally back into the street, the roles of predator and prey change several times. There are times, as O’Brien explains, when “he was the cat and I was the mouse” and vice versa (PH 80–85). This is just one of many episodes where Savinkov likens terrorist conspiracy to hunting, a motif that augments the spatial metaphors undergirding these works. In one example O’Brien and Vanya compare themselves to hunters or explorers wading through a swamp (PH 51). This imagery allowed Savinkov to reiterate the elusive nature of the terrain, which impedes such scrutiny. At these moments the city emerges not only as a hunting ground but also as an urban wilderness, where even the most skillful tracker can become disoriented. At one point O’Brien compares his long stints on the street to a soldier hacking his way blindly through the African jungle. Reflecting back on the assassination, he is reminded of memories of hunting and fishing, such as “the time I was in the north, beyond the polar circle” at an Arctic fishing village: “There was not a tree in the place, not a bush, not even grass. There was nothing but the bare cliffs, gray sky, gray gloomy ocean. [. . .] I felt such a complete stranger to all the sights—to the sky, the sea, the cliffs, the blubber, to those somber people and their unfamiliar talk. I lost myself. I was a stranger to myself. And today,” he continues returning to the present moment, “again I felt out of touch with everything.” As he wanders among “the dull crowd” on the street he cannot regain his bearings in the space that became “dark,” misty, and “obscured” (PH 45, 94–95). What unites the cramped city with the barren Arctic lake is their ability to defy sensory perception and mastery; they cause the hapless traveler to lose his way, even his sense of self. Savinkov develops the hunting motif ’s moral and spiritual dimensions still further. After first sighting the governor, O’Brien affirms his murderous intentions by comparing the assassination to hunting a hare—if it is acceptable to kill “for amusement,” he explains, then certainly it should be acceptable to kill in order to end the suffering of the Russian people. He then recalls how the first time he went hunting he felt tremendous remorse and sorrow after shooting a hare, but once he returned home, “I forgot all about it as if it never existed.” Of course, O’Brien does not have the same casual attitude when a “pack of hare hounds,” the okhranniki, were chasing him and his companions (PH 30–31, 84). The most important chase in the novel, however, is not the triad of terrorist,

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target, and policeman but the dyad of assassin and death. Like the other chases in the novel, the race with death is also multidirectional. Filled with despair over the moral gravity—or worse still, the meaninglessness—of his actions, O’Brien longs for the peace and finality of death and bemoans the fact that death never overtakes him. For this reason neither death nor life seem real to him; “I am on the border between life and death,” he explains. Echoing this, Vanya asks, “What could be more frightening than death fleeing from you when you are calling for her?” (PH, 77, 35–36). The hint of suicide at the end of the novel reiterates the link between the psychological and physical terrains. Through suicide O’Brien finds a way both to overtake death and finally to master the urban landscape. The newfound clarity of purpose is correlated with the city’s now transparent skyline and calm waters. Unlike O’Brien, it seems that Savinkov continued to be haunted by this spectral horseman, returning to this imagery in his next novel, The Dark Horse.

In

1914, when Zinaida Gippius asked Savinkov to review Bely’s thenunfinished novel Petersburg, the terrorist-aesthete flatly refused: “I cannot say why, but I am deeply disgusted by Bely’s novel,” he wrote, “there is falsehood, and not a superficial one.”43 Literary scholars have suggested that, despite the fact that they shared many mutual friends and at times moved through the same intellectual circles, there was a great deal of hostility between Bely and Savinkov. Some critics contend that Savinkov recognized a rather unflattering portrait of himself in Bely’s Dudkin, while others have suggested that Petersburg as a whole might be read as a parody of The Pale Horse.44 Whatever their disagreements, we have suggested here that Savinkov and Bely raised a similar set of questions and themes regarding terrorism’s meaning for Russia at the turn of the century and that both authors framed these concerns spatially through the prism of the city, a landscape marked by violence, opacity, transience, and paradox. Strikingly, the terrorist gaze routinely fails to penetrate these barriers and therefore fails to order, control, and map the space. Although the period 1902–5 has often been referred to as the Combat Organization’s “heroic period,”45 a closer, comparative look at Savinkov’s works—however rhetorically charged and self-aggrandizing—suggests that this was not so, at least not without the boeviki learning a new way of “plotting” their attacks onto the city. For them each new attempt meant charting a new course through the urban maze, confronting and at times contributing to the deceptive spatiality of the city. Despite his criticisms of Petersburg, Savinkov’s works thematize falsehood and artificiality, as well as uncertainty and despair, through spatial metaphors. The web of human thought and experience resembles for him a jumbled and crowded city, marked by a tangled maze of streets (PH 152–53).

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These interconnections between political, personal, and geographical mastery cast a new light on our understanding of terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century and its bid for power. Scholars have certainly noted the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and the anonymity of modern urbanism that concealed the terrorists’ subversive activities. Less attention, however, has been paid to the centrality of mapping in understanding how the assassins situated and insinuated themselves in the urban space, to the ways in which they themselves were confounded by the very environment that aided them, and to the way their ideological and ethical struggles were often transmuted into spatial terms. Through our examination of Savinkov’s works, we have tried to bring together these various strands of urban, cartographic, and literary studies and offer a new understanding of the intersection between revolutionary terrorism and modernism in early twentieth-century Russia.  1. Boris Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista: Pochemu ia priznal sovetskuiu vlast’, ed. I. M. Pushkaryova (Moscow: Moskovskii Rabochii, 1990), 77. Subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbreviation RT. This essay does not analyze Plehve’s assassination as such but explores Savinkov’s depictions of it. A classic study of the assassination is Boris Nikolaevsky’s Aseff the Spy: Russian Terrorist and Police Stool (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934). Anna Geifman’s excellent, more recent work departs from Nikolaevsky on several interpretative and methodological points. In particular, Geifman suspects Nikolaevsky of letting his social-democratic leanings color his narrative (Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution [Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000]). 2. Richard E. Rubenstein, Comrade Valentine (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 114. 3. See “The Assassination of Plehve by One of the Assassins,” The Strand Magazine 39, no. 232 (1910): 697–708; Richard B. Spence, Boris Savinkov, Renegade on the Left (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38, 401–2. In light of popular sentiment, Plehve’s successor, D. S. Sviatopolk-Mirsky, sentenced Sazonov to just twenty years of hard labor. 4. Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 21, 249. For a very important reinterpretation of the history and historiography of Russian terrorism, of which the authors unfortunately were not aware at time of writing, see Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Unlike the present study, Verhoeven’s insightful and persuasive work focuses on the origins and early activities of Russia’s terrorists groups, primarily the People’s Will (Narodnaia volia). 5. For a range of statistics, see Dmitry Aleksenko, “From the Experience of the Intelligence Services of the Russian Empire in Combating Terrorists,” in High Impact Terrorism: Proceedings from a Russian-American Workshop, ed. Committee on Confronting Terrorism in Russia, Office for Central Europe and Eurasia Development, Security, and Cooperation, National Research Council in Cooperation with the Russian Academy of

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Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), 73, 69–70; Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill, 21; Iain Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906–1914, Studia Historica 67 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002), 73, 246. 6. The grand duke explained that both Plehve’s murder as well as the reformist attitude of his successor, Sviatopolk-Mirsky, spelled out autocracy’s demise. He is quoted in Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 132. For other examples, see V. Piskunov, ed., Vospominaniia ob Andree Belom (Moscow: Respublika, 1995), 86. 7. Andrey Bely, O Bloke: vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki, rechi, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Avtograf, 1997), 102. 8. Several of Bely’s characters, including Dudkin, Nikolay Ableukhov, and Lippanchenko, bear a striking resemblance to the real-life conspirators Savinkov, Sazonov, and Azef. Although Bely was also likely influenced by Savinkov’s accounts of the assassinations of Plehve and of Grand Duke Sergey, the link between Ableukhov and Plehve is particularly strong. At times, the narrator of Petersburg even confuses the two officials, pausing in front of a painting crowning the entryway to Ableukhov’s office to ask: “And—the portrait? That is [. . .] Who is ‘he’? The senator? Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov? But no: Vyacheslav Konstantinovich . . . But what about him, Apollon Apollonovich?” (Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978], 50, 82, 163, 636). 9. Ibid., 13–14. 10. Gerald Janeck, ed., Andrey Bely: A Critical Review (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 122. 11. Boris Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi. Vsadnik po imeni smert’ (St. Petersburg: AMFORA, 2004). Subsequent page references are noted in parentheses, preceded by the abbrevation PH. An English-language edition also exists; see Savinkov [Ropshin, pseud.], The Pale Horse, trans. Z. Vengerova (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1919). 12. On the publication history of these works, see Spence, Boris Savinkov, 92–94, 401–2. Apparently, Gippius even chose the novel’s title. See Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1971), 137. 13. The novel contains nearly identical conversations between the main terrorists, Azef, Sazonov, Savinkov, and Ivan Kalyaev, as the memoir. Also, many of the ideas and concerns, which Savinkov identifies as his own in the memoir, are attributed to different characters in the novel. Plehve and the grand duke (as well as the plots against them) were intimately connected in the minds of the boeviki, and Savinkov cited a few of their meetings and conversations to underscore how they were in cahoots politically. See Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 44, 60, 66–67, 82–83, 131–32. 14. Although scholars agree that there is no singular definition of “terrorism,” the emphasis on publicity generally is considered one of its defining features. See David J. Whittaker, Terror and Terrorism in the Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2004), 62, 91–95; and Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14–25, 41–43. On the symbolic aspects of terrorism, see Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 25, 28–30; and Richard W. Leeman, The Rhetoric of Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 15–17. For a discussion of Pisacane’s phrase, see Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed,’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in Social Protest, Violence, and

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Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 201–29. 15. Comparatively speaking, the memoirist’s description of the grand duke’s murder is marred by fewer mishaps because, as Savinkov explains, the boeviki learned a great deal from Plehve’s case. Although The Pale Horse also supposedly tells the story of the grand duke’s assassination, the novel recounts numerous failed attempts so that the spirit of the text more closely resembles the memoir’s account of Plehve’s assassination and not of the grand duke’s (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 99–101). 16. One recent example is Lynn Ellen Patyk’s excellent dissertation, which cogently analyzes the centrality of heroic martyrdom, self-invention, and Byronism to Russia’s revolutionary terrorists. She argues convincingly for The Pale Horse as a prime example of modernist life-creation. See Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged Sword of Word and Deed’: Revolutionary Terrorism and Russian Literary Culture” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2005), 100–102. 17. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 13. 18. Our thinking about how maps can function as political tools for the expression or preservation of power has been shaped by Mark Monmonier, Mapping It Out: Expository Cartography for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), x; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), ix–x; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 184, 163–64. 19. Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 88, 90, 99. 20. Neither did O’Brien. This is another detail that Savinkov took from the Plehve assassination and inserted into that of the grand duke’s. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 57–59, and Kon’ blednyi, 107–8. 21. Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 47. 22. Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi, 93; Edward H. Judge, Plehve: Repression and Reform in Imperial Russia, 1902–1904 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983), 233. 23. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 221–24. Here we refer to Réne Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), where he discusses the ideal city as geometrically unified and planned to be perfectly proportionate. 24. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 223. On “mapping flows,” see also Monmonier, Mapping It Out, 189–98. 25. Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps, 3; Harvey, Spaces of Capital, ix–x. 26. Patyk, “The Double-Edged Sword,” 207–75. 27. Nigel Thrift, “A Hyperactive World,” Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, 2nd ed., ed. Ronald John Johnston, Peter James Taylor, and Michael Watts (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 29–34, 41–42. Thrift mentions print, money, post, cartography, and telecommunications as examples of such immutable mobiles. 28. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 111–14. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 23–24. 29. De Certeau, Practice, 112.

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30. Here we have in mind Benjamin’s characterization of the railway station as a “sacred, cultic site” and the train as a cathedral in the new modern religion of progress. This theme is compellingly discussed in Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 129–31. 31. Our analysis here is informed by Gary R. Jahn, “The Image of the Railroad in Anna Karenina,” The Slavic and East European Journal 25, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 4. 32. Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi, 62–64. In some later editions of the novel, X is identified as Kremlin Palace (V. Ropshin [B. Savinkov], Kon’ blednyi [ Munich: Neimanis, 1974], 39). 33. Aileen Kelly, “Self-Censorship and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1905–1914,” Slavic Review 46, no. 2 (1987): 201. The Combat Organization devoted extensive resources to technical innovation. One way that the imperial government attempted to quell terrorist activity was by controlling the flow of materials for explosives into the country. As a result, the PSR procured supplies itself; operated secret chemical laboratories in Kharkov, Saratov, and abroad; and always kept official “party engineers” on staff (Savinkov, Vospominaniia terrorista, 42–43, 54, 94–95; Kon’ blednyi, 100–101). 34. Pis’ma Azefa: 1893–1917, ed. D. B. Pavlov and Z. I. Peregudova (Moscow: Terra, 1994), 5; Rubenstein, Comrade Valentine, 95, 120–21. 35. O’Brien echoes this sentiment, likening his state to being in an iron cage (Savinkov, Kon’ blednyi, 91). 36. See L. K. Dolgopolov “Tvorcheskaia istoriia i istoriko-literaturnoe znachenie romana A. Belogo ‘Peterburg,’” appendix to Andrey Bely, Peterburg (St. Petersburg: Kristall, 1999), 920. Bely also considered other titles such as The Admiralty Needle. 37. Also see Nikolajewsky, Aseff the Spy, 70. Bely casts doubt on the identities of carriage and cab drivers in his text. In chapter 1, e.g., we find in a grimy restaurant “an idle sweating stalwart with a coachman’s beard, a blue jacket, and blacked boots”—a description that stops short of saying that the “stalwart” is actually a coachman (see Petersburg, 17–18). In the same passage of the Russian text, Bely refers to the coachman as a syshchik, or “detective.” 38. Jahn, “Image of the Railroad,” 1. 39. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997), 41. Here, we owe an intellectual debt to Tom McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur,” October 102 (Autumn 2002): 101–5. 40. Benjamin, Baudelaire, 39. 41. McDonough, “Crimes of the Flâneur,” 101–5, 113. Judith Walkowitz similarly observed that terrorists and serial killers posed as flâneurs in nineteenth-century London. She interprets this move as part of the shift away from bourgeois domination of London, a sign of the city’s growing underbelly, which “reworked the dominant literary mappings of London” in accordance with its own sociopolitical aims (Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 11, 16–17, 25, 41). 42. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: SAGE, 1997), 176–77. 43. This letter is dated February 4, 1914, and is quoted in Patyk, “‘The DoubleEdged Sword,” 276. Patyk suggests that Savinkov’s contempt for Bely’s novel may have been the result of its depiction of the Dudkin-Lippanchenko relationship and what that might suggest about the Savinov-Azef dynamic, and of Bely’s novel “demolishing the

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heroic culture of the Russian intelligentsia” as well as the image of the terrorist as heromartyr “through parody and satire” (277). 44. See Dolgopolov, “Tvorcheskaia istoriia,” 921; Patyk, “‘The Double-Edged Sword,” 276–77; Spence, Boris Savinkov, 52; and Andrey Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 36, 65, 72. Of course, Bely also drew traits and biographical details from other real-life individuals in his characterization of Dudkin. For instance, he incorporated some elements from Grigory Gershuni’s life, including his legendary 1906 escape from Akatuy Prison in a barrel of cabbage. 45. There is a discussion of this periodization in Manfred Hildermeier, “The Terrorist Strategies of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in Russia, 1900–1914,” in Social Protest, 80–87.

6 The Enchanted Masquerade Alexander Blok’s The Puppet Show from the Stage to the Streets          

On December 30, 1906, the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theater at 39 Ofitserskaya Street was packed with an audience awaiting a scandal. The event was the premiere of Alexander Blok’s play The Puppet Show (Balaganchik), directed by avant-garde star-on-the-rise Vsevolod Meyerhold, who also played the lead role. Many years later the poet Sergey Auslender recalled the unruly curtain call in detail: “The auditorium was in an uproar as though it were a real battle. Solid, respectable citizens were ready to come to blows; whistles and roars of anger alternated with piercing howls conveying a mixture of fervor, defiance, anger, and despair.”1 The play was met with equal furor in the press; the theater critic Alexander Kugel gave the following account of the production: “Mr. Blok parodies everything and approaches everything—including stupidity— seriously. Perhaps it is because of this that what generally emerges is a serious stupidity, at which the public had every right to be angry.”2 What was it about this “fairy play,” as Blok called it, which was no more than forty minutes long, that caused such outrage? Some audience members were simply offended by the play’s incomprehensibility. One spectator recalled a cry of outrage from the audience: “No, you explain to me what on earth that was!”3 The Puppet Show is indeed a difficult play to follow. It begins with a tense exchange between Pierrot, a figure from 174

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the Italian commedia dell’arte, and a gloomy group of enshrouded mystics.4 Both parties are awaiting the arrival of the beautiful Columbine; Pierrot claims that she is his fiancée, while the mystics maintain that she is actually Death. When she finally appears, Columbine runs off with Pierrot’s rival, Harlequin. In the meantime, a small puppet theater (to which the title refers) provides the backdrop for the encounters of three pairs of lovers in masquerade costumes. Harlequin returns alone, having discovered that Columbine is made of cardboard, and attempts suicide. Finally, a character called the Author emerges, attempting to reconcile his star-crossed lovers, but just as he is about to join their hands, the scenery is pulled up to the ceiling and the lovelorn Pierrot is left alone on the stage. Others were offended for more ideological reasons. By juxtaposing the mystics’ pursuit of Death with the antics of Pierrot and Harlequin competing for a cardboard Columbine, Blok undermined the symbolist conception of the theater as a temple as well as his own exaltation of the Divine Feminine, thus alienating his literary allies. Some symbolist poets even felt that Blok had maliciously caricatured them in his depiction of the mystics; the play drove quite a wedge between Blok and Andrey Bely, who referred to it as blasphemous.5 Blok also incited anger through his playful mockery of established theatrical conventions—an actor who is injured cries out that he is bleeding cranberry juice, Harlequin jumps out of a window that is revealed to be only a paper background—and the artifice of the production is further highlighted by the presence of the small puppet theater in the middle of the stage. While there is much to say about the play’s innovative modernist aesthetic, and it has indeed been insightfully treated by many scholars, I will turn my attention instead to the production’s equally fascinating life beyond the stage: how it intertwined with the personal and textual lives of Blok and his entourage, as played out against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg. This essay traces the routes inscribed over the city by the main players in the production, not only in the act of bringing The Puppet Show to the stage but also in their transformation of the wintry capital into a larger stage for their own personal dramas. The whimsical yet anxious tones of the public theatrical performance echoed throughout the private lives of those involved in its staging, as the aesthetic of the play suffused the masked balls, soirees, triangular love affairs, and midnight strolls of the artists. In bringing the public aspect of the masquerade into their private lives, which were then displayed in the public realm of the city, Blok and his fellow artists reinterpreted and reinscribed the open-air tradition of the puppet theater within the masquerade-infused culture of early twentieth-century Petersburg.

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Moving beyond this conception of the city as stage, the city for Blok was an impetus to textual production, much as it was for Bely and many others before him. For Blok, a poet no less sensitive to the importance of urban space, it was the city’s landmarks and ambiance during these winter strolls that formed the basis for his 1907 collection of poetry The Snow Mask (Snezhnaia maska). Tracing Blok’s navigation of the city, both in his life and his art of this period, allows us to pinpoint his specific aesthetic within the context of the Petersburg text and the tradition of the urban poet, as he creatively engaged with the ever-present oppositions of real and illusory, public and private. The Puppet Show, which Blok adapted from his poem of the same name, made its way to the stage amid a crossing of paths of some of the most prominent artists of the period.6 It began when the celebrated actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya decided to seek new directions for her theater, both figuratively and literally. She signed on the accomplished actor Vsevolod Meyerhold as the new director and moved her troupe from their existing theater in the Passazh Building on Nevsky Prospect to a new location at 39 Ofitserskaya Street (not far from Blok’s last apartment). While renovations were underway, Komissarzhevskaya hosted several gatherings at the Latvian Musical Society at 30 Angliysky Prospect, which was around the corner from the new theater, in order to introduce the troupe to the artists and poets of St. Petersburg.7 The first meeting was held on October 14, 1906, and those attending included Blok, Fyodor Sologub, Sergey Gorodetsky, Georgy Chulkov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal, and Mikhail Kuzmin, as well as artists Leon Bakst, Sergey Sudeykin, Konstantin Somov, and Nikolay Sapunov.8 Kuzmin would write the music for the play, and Sapunov create the sets. For entertainment, Komissarzhevskaya sang, and several poets, including Blok, read their work by candlelight as the guests sipped mulled wine. It was at this soiree that Blok met the actress Natalya Volokhova, with whom he fell in love during the winter of 1906–7. She became an integral cast member both of The Puppet Show and of Blok’s private drama. Volokhova recalls their meeting: Alexander Alexandrovich [Blok] was immediately surrounded by a large group of young people. He was bombarded with questions, beset with sandwiches, tea, cakes, wine. He stood looking a little overcome by such an enthusiastic reception, smiling meekly and shifting from one foot to the other. Alexander Alexandrovich was dressed in a long black frock coat, which I think he was wearing for the first time, and was obviously feeling very much the hero of the occasion: pleased, but a little embarrassed too. Of course, there were requests

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to recite [. . .] Alexander Alexandrovich recited well, with a sense of music, in a rather hollow voice, with dignity, even solemnity.9

The performative aspect of these evenings, which were centered on poetic or musical recitals, continued throughout the season, but it also extended beyond these performances in the literal sense of the word. Blok, the well-known public figure of the solemn poet in a frock coat, was just as much in costume as an actor in a play. Shortly thereafter, in November 1906, Komissarzhevskaya’s new theater opened its doors, and by December, rehearsals were underway for The Puppet Show. Blok was present at almost all of them, often behind the curtain or in the dressing rooms backstage. He developed a close friendship with three actresses: Volokhova, Evgeniya Munt, and Valentina Verigina. During these rehearsals and visits to the theater in December, Blok’s infatuation with Volokhova became public. Verigina recalls: Blok called in on us in our dressing room as was now his habit. When the break came to an end, we saw him to the head of the stairs, and Volokhova remained standing at the top to watch him go. Suddenly Blok turned and took a few indecisive paces toward her, then stepped back again, and, finally, putting his foot on the first stair, said shyly and solemnly that he had just understood the meaning of his forebodings, his confusion of the last months. “I have just seen it in your eyes; I have just this moment realized that it is they and they alone which bring me to this theater.”10

The dressing room and the threshold of the stairway thus became for Blok spaces not only of physical but also of emotional transformation. This dramatic affair (since Blok was already married to Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva) illustrates the echo of the intense romantic turmoil of the play in the lives of those who participated in its production. Blok’s was not the only affair to take shape around the theater. As the preparations for The Puppet Show continued, Kuzmin fell in love just as dramatically, almost at first sight, with the artist Sudeykin, whom he met through his work with the theater. In his poem “At the Theater” (“V teatre,” written November 1906–January 1907), Kuzmin memorialized the same fateful staircase and the interior of the theater: Entrances, hallways, dressing rooms, The soaring staircase, half-darkened;

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Conversations, stubborn arguments, Immodest curtains on the doors. [. . .] Long hours of waiting, Gossip with the little actresses, Wandering through the dressing rooms, the foyer, Or in the workshop, or behind the curtains. You come completely unexpectedly, Loudly clicking along the corridor— Oh, how much meaning is given To that walk, smile, gaze! How sweet it is to be among all those kissed. With a seemingly heartless greeting, To hear with a fettered heart Those dear indifferent words. How I love the dampened walls Of the auditorium, The broadcloths on stage gone gray, The sting of jealousy!11

Kuzmin’s poem highlights the liminal spaces of the theater, which reflect the fluid boundaries in the relationships of those who spent time there. These thresholds, such as the stairway and the curtain, indicate the movement between public and private space, and for Kuzmin and Blok, between the concealment and revelation of love. As this poem suggests, Kuzmin’s relationship was as problematic as Blok’s, both of them uncannily similar to the troubled romance in The Puppet Show; the poet learned just a few days before the premiere of the play that Sudeykin was engaged to Olga Glebova. Beyond these ill-fated romances that echoed the thematics of the play, its aesthetic of masks and double identities was recreated in a more literal way in the lives of those who staged it: in the masquerade ball held on the night of the premiere. During the intermission of the play, the actresses passed out invitations to the party from “the paper ladies,” who had purportedly just arrived by balloon from the moon; the invitees were the cast and all those involved with the play’s production, as well as other poets and artists who had been part of this inner circle since Komissarzhevskaya’s receptions in the fall (Verigina, 324). The ball, held at the home of the actress Vera Ivanova, was a continuation of the emotionally fraught masquerade of lovers in Blok’s play. Transforming the apartment into their own private dressing room, the actresses gave the

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men masks to wear, and the ladies dressed in ball gowns made of colorful crepe paper. Some wore tiaras or carried swords, like those of the lovers in the play. Volokhova even recalls putting makeup on Blok as they were all getting into costume, and Blok describes this in the poem “They Are Reading Verses” (“Oni chitaiut stikhi”) in The Snow Mask, a title that again highlights the importance of masks for Blok: She penciled in my red brows, Looked down and said: “I didn’t know: You could also be beautiful, You dark knight, you!”12

The fairy-tale figure of the knight, who made an appearance in the costume of one of the masquerading lovers in The Puppet Show, was also a fixture in the poems of The Snow Mask. Beyond the knight’s charming archaism, the masks, costumes, and focus on role-playing suggest a major concern of the symbolist poets: the fluidity between reality and illusion, the distance between the real and ideal. This tension is at the center of The Puppet Show, and it also appears in Blok’s earlier poetry, which often stressed masks and the idea of removing the veil to discover what lay beneath it, both figuratively and, in the case of his famous poem “The Stranger” (“Neznakomka”), literally. Fittingly, this tension was also borne out in Blok’s private life. As his relationship with Volokhova progressed, it seemed that he was placing a metaphysical veil over her real existence; she was increasingly frustrated with his treatment of her as an ideal female figure rather than as a real woman (Verigina, 330). Her comment to him on the distinction between fantasy and reality was memorialized in “They Are Reading Verses”: How strange were the speeches of the masks! Did you understand them? God knows! You know for certain: in books there are fairytales, But in life—there is only prose. (Blok, 245)

Despite Volokhova’s objection to the privileging of the poetic over the prosaic, the ideal over the real, Verigina recalls Blok himself as being somehow more symbolic than concrete at the party: “In the half-darkness among the masks, in the midst of the circular dance of the paper ladies, Blok seemed unreal, like some kind of symbol” (Verigina, 325). For the poet and his entourage, both ensconced in the transformative space of the masquerade, the masks were not

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only a means of taking on another identity but also a continual means of passing into another reality, reaching beyond the physical into the metaphysical. While Volokhova found Blok’s poetic transformation of her to be suffocating and preferred the “prose of life” to his fairy tales, there was also prose generated from the events of the season in a literal sense. We have already seen these evenings recorded in several memoirs, but the excitement of the masquerade ball was also recorded by Kuzmin in his story “The Cardboard House” (“Kartonnyi domik,” 1907): The women [. . .] had all agreed to wear multicolored costumes of a single design, made out of fine paper, held together by delicate little colored ribbons, and half-masks; they were mysterious, fresh and young in the light of the colored lanterns. They danced, whirled about, sat down on the floor, sang, drank the wine which gleamed red in long wine-glasses, making merry somehow gently and noiselessly in the half-lit room.13

Just as Blok recreated the ball in his poetry, so too did Kuzmin in his story which details the experiences of several thinly disguised participants in the festivities. It is not insignificant that the dresses, both at the ball and in the story, were made of thin and flimsy paper, echoing the cardboard of the play’s Columbine (as did Kuzmin’s title) and highlighting the blurred boundaries between reality and illusion, permanent and ephemeral, material and symbolic. While the costumes looked beautiful, they would disintegrate as surely as a snowflake would melt. The maskers at the party carried on the illusion by playfully dispensing with the usual formal address, instead speaking to one another using the informal ty and creating the impression of real relationships that, beyond the merry revelry and poetic significance with which they were invested, would prove to be nothing more than cardboard and crepe paper. As with Columbine and her lovers, when the weight of the symbolic was placed upon real human relationships, they could not help but fold under the pressure. At the masquerade ball, however, this inevitability was not yet realized by the participants. Carrying the stage with them into the ballroom, they unwittingly recreated the troubled love triangle of The Puppet Show. Blok abandoned his wife for Volokhova, while his wife began an affair with the poet Georgy Chulkov. In an explicit act of symbolic role-playing, Lyubov silently removed her necklace and placed it on Volokhova’s neck, as a sign of the actress’s assumption of the role of the poet’s muse.14 Blok’s collection The Snow Mask was indeed dedicated to Volokhova. He wrote the following inscription in her copy: “To the tall woman in black with the winged eyes, enamored of the lights and darkness of my snowy city” (Volokhova, 373).

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These artists were not the only ones for whom the masquerade ball held a great significance, however. Masquerades were a large part of the social life of turn-of-the-century Petersburg, and they had laid their roots in the imperial capital much earlier, in the coronation festivities of tsars and tsarinas spanning from Peter I to Nicholas II, as traced by Richard S. Wortman in the seminal study Scenarios of Power. But the masquerade was also an event in and of itself, independent of a coronation; the imperial masquerade ball held at the Hermitage Theater in the Winter Palace in 1903 is a prime example. The court came dressed in elaborate seventeenth-century attire, with Nicholas II himself dressed as Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich and Alexandra as his wife Maria Miloslavskaya. The lavish gathering, held twice in the span of a week, included dancing and a performance of Pushkin’s historical drama Boris Godunov, thus creating a dual space of performance, as both audience and actors donned costumes and played roles.15 And yet the impulse to masquerade extended beyond the imperial court. Costume balls were also very popular as a form of entertainment for those of a lower status in the early twentieth century; they were frequently held at theaters geared toward a more common audience. During the run of The Puppet Show, lowbrow theaters, such as the Apollo and the Nevsky Farce, held masquerade balls stretching until three or four in the morning for small entrance fees. The allure of the masquerade thus permeated the imagination of the population of Petersburg, from the imperial court to the working class, allowing all to participate in the play of masks, costumes, and dual identities. Just as Blok and his friends from the theater were not the only ones to participate in masquerades, they were also not the only ones to write about them. In fact, one can hardly consider them without recalling another figure in a masquerade costume, who is also caught in a tempestuous love triangle: Nikolay Apollonovich in Bely’s Petersburg. While Nikolay’s reasons for donning his red domino are different from those among Blok’s circle, his experience is nonetheless remarkably similar to theirs. The masquerade begins early in the novel, as Nikolay excitedly opens a box from the tailor: He cut the string with great fuss. He lifted the top and took out of the box: a half-mask with a black lace beard, and after the mask, a luxuriant bright red domino with folds that rustled. Soon he was standing before the mirror, all satiny and red, holding the miniature half-mask over his face. The black lace of the beard fell away and back onto his shoulders, forming a fantastic wing on each side, right and left. After this masquerade, Nikolay Apollonovich, an extremely satisfied expression on his face, first put the red domino and then the black half-mask back in the box.16

Nicholas II in costume for the 1903 Imperial Masquerade Ball at the Winter Palace (Al’bom kostiumirovannogo bala v Zimnern dvortse v fevrale 1903g. [1904] )

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Guests at a masquerade ball at the home of Countess Kleinmikhel in December 1913 (Stolitsa i usad’ba)

While Nikolay has yet to present himself in public, it is significant that the very act of putting on the costume constitutes a masquerade for him. Gazing at himself in the mirror provides an instantaneous doubling effect: his room has become a dressing room, a space of transformation. Of course the costume is not merely for Nikolay’s amusement but is an integral part of his incognito pursuit of Sofia Likhutina, the frivolous wife of the stolid Sergey Likhutin. Notably, this literary love triangle is not unrelated to Blok; it was inspired by the very real crisis that occurred when Bely fell in love with Blok’s wife. The denouement of this affair, Lyubov’s refusal of Bely, took place only a short time before Blok began working on The Puppet Show. Both Blok’s play and Bely’s novel abound with costumes and shifting identities: The Puppet Show with its masked lovers, and Petersburg with characters that seem to alternate costumes rather than remove them. Before we see Nikolay in his red domino, we have already seen him in another costume, his robe: “A dressing gown began to appear on Nikolay Apollonovich. Tartar slippers were introduced. A skullcap made its appearance. Thus was a brilliant student transformed into an Oriental” (Bely, 27). Aside from this Eastern-inspired costume, Nikolay’s face is repeatedly described as resembling an ancient mask, even when he is wearing neither of his costumes (30, 43). The same patterns holds

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true for Sofia, who, when not donning her Madame Pompadour costume for the ball, can be found in a Japanese kimono, a feminine version of Nikolay’s khalat. Both characters bring the masquerade into their daily lives by wearing their costumes not only within the space of the ball but also in their homes and in Nikolay’s case, in his movement through the city. As with Blok and his companions, the costume ball in Bely’s novel is a transgressive event, one that Sofia’s husband has forbidden her to attend. As the ball begins, the costumes of the masqueraders fill the room: “buffoonharlequins, señoritas, and oriental ladies flashed their eyes from behind velvet masks. [. . .] A red domino kept rushing around, searching for someone, extending his black mask, below which rustled a thick fan of lace” (47). Only in this costume could Nikolay pursue Sofia, and only in her costume could she respond to his attentions while remaining innocent of wrongdoing. It is significant that amid this carnivalesque scene we again see the harlequins, commedia dell’arte figures, which further link this masquerade to the figures in Blok’s play and indicate the modernist fascination with the Italian theatrical tradition. Bely’s ball is also a conduit to an otherworldly experience. Sofia sees a double version of her husband there, and she is later accompanied by what seems to be a third version of him, dressed in a white domino, uttering several cryptic phrases and then disappearing (111, 118–20). This doubling, or tripling, is in fact quadrupling, since we later find out that Sergey Likhutin has been at home during the ball. Nikolay’s experience of the real being replaced by the ephemeral is reminiscent of Blok’s masquerade: “he marveled, as one marvels in a dream: at the emergence of a reflection into the real world. He himself looked at everything that existed as wavering reflections; as for the reflections, they took him merely for a ghost who had emerged from the other world” (109). Blok became some kind of symbol at his masquerade, and Nikolay becomes not a man but a ghost among costumed reflections of actual people. The costume, and the mask specifically, has yet another vital function in Bely’s novel: it is intertwined with cerebral play, the generative source of the narrative. As cerebral play creates “thought images, which at once became incarnate in this spectral world” of Apollon Apollonovich’s mind, it also creates the narrative of the novel itself as a product of the “author’s fantasy” (20, 35). Our narrator reveals to us that “cerebral play is only a mask. Under way beneath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us” (35). The mask hides the mysterious elements that spin the tale of the novel, creating events that we can never be sure actually happened, worlds the existence of which we cannot verify.

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The narrative impetus of the mask for cerebral play is paralleled in a more literal sense as Nikolay gallivants around the streets and bridges of the city, inspiring a flood of newspaper reports, the accuracy of which even the narrator cannot certify: “Daily Chronicle.” October 1. According to the eyewitness account of a doctor’s assistant, Miss N.N., we report on a puzzling event. On the evening of October 1, Miss N.N. was walking by the Chernyshev Bridge. There, by the bridge, she noticed a strange spectacle: on the bridge over the canal a red domino was dancing. The face of the domino was covered by a black mask. October 2. According to eyewitness accounts of the schoolteacher Miss M.M., we inform our respected readers of a puzzling event. The teacher Miss M.M. was giving her morning lesson. The school windows looked out on the street. Suddenly outside the window a pillar of dust began swirling. The teacher and her lively young charges rushed to the window. Imagine the confusion of the class and the schoolmistress, when a red domino, from the midst of the dust it had raised, glued a black mask to the window. Classes were suspended in the O.O. School. (37–38)

The domino creates what is literally identified as a spectacle, as Nikolay dances on bridges or stirs up clouds of dust before the children watching him from their school’s windows. Even the initials of the eyewitnesses, always double letters, reflect the dual identity of Nikolay, as the domino transforms his character. These public spectacles confirm that Nikolay has taken his private masquerade, which began as he looked into the mirror in his room and continued with his appearance at the ball, into the public space of the city itself, turning its bridges and streets into a stage for his costumed performances. Still, we must mark one important distinction between Blok’s and Bely’s masquerades. As these alarmist newspaper accounts suggest, there is undoubtedly a more sinister underpinning to Nikolay’s public masquerade; the costume not only allows him to clandestinely communicate with Sofia but also provides a mask for his identity and involvement with the revolutionary circle to which he has promised allegiance. Indeed, the terror inspired by the figure of the red domino has much to do with the tense political undercurrents felt throughout the city on the eve of the 1905 revolution.17 In Blok’s case the public masquerading was much more light-hearted but no less tied to a specific space: the cityscape of bridges, canals, and snowy streets. Given the captivating winter landscape of St. Petersburg, it seems only fitting that Blok spent much of his time with Volokhova during their affair walking in the city. The actress describes these walks in her memoirs:

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Blok’s city, although filled with recognizable landmarks, functions here as a conduit into another realm, that of his poetic imagination. Against this backdrop Blok and Volokhova, even without their costumes, played the roles of the masked lovers from The Puppet Show, recreating the play’s blurred boundaries between reality and illusion (not incidentally, Volokhova lived a few houses away from the Komissarzhevsky Theater, at 45 Ofitserskaya Street). The city itself was transformed into text; the concreteness of the streets and bridges, hidden under a “costume” of snow, became an ethereal “world of poetry” for Blok and his lover. This public performative aspect of their interaction, however, was already inscribed into the subject matter of The Puppet Show and into the city of Petersburg itself. The title of the play refers literally to a balagan, an open-air puppet booth that was often part of public festivals in Petersburg. Popular as early as the eighteenth century, they often took commedia dell’arte figures as their subject matter and actually traveled throughout the city on wagons, transforming city space into performative space. The audiences were just as mobile, crowding around the booths and mingling among other attractions, such as ice hills and merry-go-rounds.18 Even the name for these festivals, narodnoe gulianie (from the verb guliat’, “to stroll”) , literally “popular revels,” reflects the centrality of movement and of outdoor space. These public carnivals, held at Christmas and Easter, were put on at the very Mars Field through which Blok and Volokhova walked, a modern-day Pierrot with his half-real and half-illusory Columbine.19 Although the city fairs were banned in 1896 due to concerns about crowd congestion, there is a sense in which Blok and Volokhova reinterpreted and reinscribed the commedia dell’arte tradition into the urban space through their strolls, with the city as both their stage and their audience.20 Their romance was as inseparable from the city as the balagan performances were from public urban space. Even after the carnivals had been dismantled,

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the antics of Pierrot and Harlequin could be taken in on street corners where itinerant puppeteers set up their booths.21 These performances, while disdained by the cultural elite in the nineteenth century, drew audiences of both upper and lower classes, and by the early twentieth century, the carnivalesque subject matter had become a source of inspiration for the modernists of Blok’s circle. Their inclusion of the artistically unsophisticated balagan into their work is a key illustration of the unification of high and low that they embraced. Alongside these outdoor “performances,” The Puppet Show continued its run at the theater during the winter months, and the evening gatherings of Blok and the other artists went on in various spaces throughout the city. They met at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s famed Tower near the Tauride Gardens; at the popular restaurant Vienna on the corner of Malaya Morskaya and Gorokhovaya Streets; or at the apartments of the Bloks on the Petersburg Side, or the Meyerholds, at 18 Alekseevskaya Street, close to the theater. Their gatherings often featured poetry recitals and discussions of literature.22 For some participants, however, the travel to and from these places was just as artistically important as the meetings themselves. Verigina remembers one such occasion as representative of their significance as a whole: Blok, Auslender, Meyerhold, and Gorodetsky escorted four ladies—Volokhova, Ivanova, Munt, and me (we lived in the neighborhood of Ofitserskaya) [. . .] It was quiet and snowy. We walked through the spectral city, across the canals, along the fantastic bridges of the Venice of the North, and probably ourselves appeared as specters walking about in the Venetian bautta masks of the past. Our life at that time also existed on some unreal plane—as if in a game. After The Puppet Show and the Evening of the Paper Ladies, the masks made our meetings marvelous, and we didn’t leave the magical circle for two winter seasons, until we finally parted. (Verigina, 331)

Verigina hits upon a theme here that roots the public performance of their winter masquerade within the very history of the city itself. When it was founded by Peter the Great in 1703, Petersburg was planned with canals in imitation of Amsterdam. Although many of them had to be filled in due to their unsuitability for Russia’s climate, the city became known as the Venice of the North for its many canals and bridges, and this is an essential part of the city’s mythos. As Verigina suggests, Petersburg’s association with its Italian counterpart also makes it an ideal location for the unfolding of its own carnivalesque masquerade. Indeed, Yury Lotman argues that theatricalized space has been part of the city since its inception; he posits that Petersburg is divided into stage and wings (stsenicheskoe i zakulisnoe), with the audience perpetually present.23 The Venetian aspect of the

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city, along with its naturally theatrical space, continued to mark it almost as a stage set even after the revolution; Akhmatova stated that as late as 1920, her fellow poet Mandelshtam saw the city as “half-Venice, half-theater.”24 Verigina’s “bautta masks of the past” indicate one other particularity of the city: that it is a space that allows for multiple temporalities. We find evidence of this in Bely’s novel and in the aesthetic that inspired it. In her treatment of the masquerade ball in Petersburg, Colleen McQuillen identifies a palpable connection between eighteenth-century Venice and early twentieth-century Petersburg, one that was already manifested in the symbolist predilection for masks, which created a space for acts of transgression against the normal strictures of social life.25 The eighteenth-century Venetian carnival that Verigina references was a lengthy affair, beginning at Shrovetide and stretching on, with short intervals, for six months. It was a very public celebration, which was centered on the open spaces of the Piazza and the Piazzetta San Marco. In his study of daily life in eighteenth-century Venice (during which the carnival was at its peak), Maurice Andrieux describes the significance of the same bautta mask to which Verigina refers: The mask or bautta was not, as elsewhere, a simple affair covering mouth and eyes. In Venice it was a sort of enfolding cape or mantle with a black hood over the head and shoulders, the whole surmounted by a little tricorne hat. The actual mask part is described as being “closely modelled on the white mask of classical times, its beaked outline altering the face into that of some strange bird cut in chalk.” Perfect for its purpose, the bautta became almost a uniform for Carnival. From Doge to kitchenmaid, everybody wore it, man, woman and child of every age and station. Servant-girls went masked to market, mothers carried babies in masks in their arms, the lawyer wore a mask to plead in court.26

This type of mask and costume, so similar to the ones worn by the masked lovers in Blok’s play and by Nikolay Apollonovich, was less a disguise for a particular event than a new identity taken on over a long period of time, an identity in which one carried out the normal duties of life, including traversing the city in fulfilling daily routines. But as Verigina’s comment clarifies, the costumes of Blok and his circle were not always literal and physical; they were worn in spirit, changing the masquerader’s self-conception. As such, they brought about two transformations: those who wore them became carnivalgoers with new identities, and the wintry city through which they strolled became not present-day Petersburg but Venice of the past. Beyond serving as a space for the masquerade, the city held still another level of significance for Blok: as a source of inspiration and subject matter for his poetry. This trend is notable throughout his career but particularly so in the

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collection The Snow Mask. On one occasion, walking the actresses home from an evening at Sologub’s on Vasilievsky Island, Blok explained the source of the knight in the poem, “Shadows on the Wall” (“Teni na stene”): We crossed the Neva [. . . and] began to talk about The Snow Mask, about the knight with dark chains on his steel hands. “I will show him to you; he is on the Winter Palace. I used to gaze at him when I went to the university,” said Alexander Alexandrovich. (Verigina, 332)

As abstract as some of Blok’s images were, in many cases they were tied to specific experiences or locations in the city. Blok took these concrete images and transformed them into the symbolic figures of his work, giving them new life in his verses. Other than this knight and the occasional mention of a bridge, however, there are not many explicitly identified landmarks of the city in The Snow Mask, although the entirety of the action described in the collection takes place in Petersburg. Blok depicts the city less as a concrete entity than as an ethereal wintry aura in which his romance and his poetry take shape. It is almost as if he has thrown a symbolic snow-woven veil over the city, perhaps the very snow mask to which the title of the collection refers. There is also a sense in which Blok actually uses his experience of the city as a material from which to weave his verses. This is the metaphor that Blok uses in the poem “Patterns of Snow” (“Snezhnaia viaz’”): A snowy mist whirled up. The snowdrifts lay all around. Yes. I don’t know you. You are captive to the pattern of my verses. And, I weave and spin the snowy threads, The secretly intertwining pattern. You are not the first to give yourself to me On this dark bridge (Blok, 212)

It is on the bridge with Volokhova that Blok finds the raw material for his verses; he weaves them out of the very snowflakes that whirl around them. But what kind of city is it that forms Blok’s poetry? Both Blok’s explanation of the knight image and his nonspecific references to Volokhova suggest that his city is a veiled one. The spaces in the poems are known only to those who participated in these scenes; to all the rest, the coordinates of the city remain unclear. Thus, Blok’s intimate version of his city remains concealed or, we might say,

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underneath a mask. It is not quite the Petersburg we have come to associate with the iconic Petersburg text, including such easily identifiable monuments as The Bronze Horseman or the Haymarket Square, or even the Petersburg of Petersburg, with its menacing islands, familiar bridges, and rectilinear prospects. Nonetheless, there is clearly something in Blok’s city of the otherworldly, the metaphysical realm of reality that Vladimir Toporov marks as a constant in depictions of the city.27 We see this entry into another realm more explicitly in another poem from The Snow Mask, “Overtaken by the Blizzard” (“Nastignutyi metel’iu”): The snowdrift sang. And the needles of snow pricked. And my soul turned to ice. You overtook me. You threw your head back high. You said: “Look, look, So you will not forget That which you love.” And you pointed to the distant lines of the city, To the fields snowy and blue, To the pointless cold. And the raised hammer of snowy whirlwinds Threw us into the abyss, where sparks ran about, Where timid snowflakes whirled . . . (Blok, 217)

Blok’s city, with its distant lines and snowy fields, is a concrete one, and yet it exists on the same plane as the “raised hammer of snowy whirlwinds,” which throws Blok and Volokhova into an “abyss.” This landscape has two facets: the real and the symbolic. Just as the masks at Blok’s ball created a second symbolic identity for those who wore them, so the snowy mask covering the city contains the symbolic world of Blok’s poetry within itself. Almost all of the poetry in The Snow Mask reflects this conception of the city as a liminal space, a point of entry to another plane. Not surprisingly, Verigina recalls that there was something in the physical act of strolling through this half-mystical space that seemed to overtake the significance of the play itself: How often we wandered through the streets of the snowy city [. . .] All of the theatrical events that seemed so important in their time have grown dim in my

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memory. Acting at the theater, which I loved so much, now seems to me far less exciting and bright than that game of masks in Blok’s circle. It is true that even at that time I did not look upon our meetings, gatherings, and strolls as mere entertainment. There is no doubt that others too felt the significance and creative value of it all, yet nonetheless we did not realize that the charms of Blok’s poetry almost deprived us all of our real existence, turning us into Venetian masqueraders of the north. (Verigina, 331)

Blok and his entourage, as they assumed roles somewhere between that of the fin-de-siècle flâneur and of the Venetian carnival masker, took their performance from the small stage of the theater to the larger stage of the city itself, and thus they found that walking through the city was a creative act in and of itself. In this regard, Blok in particular calls to mind the quintessential urban poet Charles Baudelaire as described by Walter Benjamin: “at certain times Baudelaire thought his flânerie was endowed with the same dignity as the exertion of his poetic powers.”28 Blok’s enchanting Petersburg in The Snow Mask functions on a much more symbolic level than Baudelaire’s gritty Paris, but the two poets share the understanding of strolling through the city as a means of creative production. Having examined the texts inspired by this wintry masquerade, including poetry, fiction, and memoirs, let us consider this final means of textual production that Verigina’s quote suggests: walking the city itself. Particularly apropos here is Michel de Certeau’s description of walking through urban space as a speech act, an instance of enunciation on the part of the walker, who chooses his path the way that he chooses his language and makes an individual assertion through the routes that he traces through space.29 In Blok’s case we can be sure that this peripatetic act of walking through the city was a means of making the public cityscape his own private dwelling place, a poetic means of reshaping the concrete into the abstract. By way of conclusion, let us sound the echoes of The Puppet Show and the events that surrounded it. Blok took as a theme for his play the balagan, which was already embedded in the world of urban theatrical performance, and brought it back into the private realm as he recreated its masquerade-like performativity in his own personal life. He then publicly memorialized both his theatricalized relationships and his city, the backdrop that made the masquerade possible, in The Snow Mask. Blurring the boundaries between public and private, stage and city, mask and true identity, the enchanted winter of 1906–7 was a crystallization of Blok’s symbolist aesthetic. Blok’s city, like his exalted muse, is a perfect expression of his fascination with these dualities, suspended between the images of the real and the ideal.

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 1. Sergey Auslender, “Moi portrety. Meyerkhold,” Teatr i muzyka 1–2 (1923): 427– 28. Translated by Edward Braun and published in Braun’s The Theater of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979), 72. 2. A. Kugel, “Teatral’nye zametki,” Teatr i iskusstvo 1 (1907): 18. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3. Cited in Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, Progulki po serebrianomu veku: doma i sud’by (St. Petersburg: Litera, 2005), 112. 4. For an excellent treatment of the modernist fascination with the figures of the commedia dell’arte, see J. Douglas Clayton, Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell’arte/ Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theater and Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 5. Andrey Bely, “Tsvetnik Or” (review of The Puppet Show), Vesy 6 (1907): 67. 6. The Puppet Show emerged from a poem of the same name, written in July 1905. It was another poet, Georgy Chulkov, who asked Blok to transform the poem into a drama, which was then published in the symbolist almanac Torches (Fakely). Although Blok was not enthusiastic about the adaptation at first, he quickly stumbled upon a seemingly frenzied inspiration and finished the play in less than three weeks. The text was published in April 1906, eight months before the play was staged. 7. When the renovations were completed, the theater’s interior also bespoke its innovative aesthetic. Osip Mandelshtam recalls the theater’s stark appearance: “To begin with, she [Komissarzhevskaya] discarded all theatrical trumpery: the heat of candles, the red flower beds of the orchestra seats, the satin nests of the loges. A wooden amphitheater, white walls, gray hangings—clean as a yacht and bare as a Lutheran church” (Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time, trans. Clarence Brown [ New York: Penguin, 1965], 111). 8. Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok, vol. 1, The Distant Thunder: 1880–1908 (New York: Oxford, 1979), 259. 9. Natalya Volokhova, “Zemlia v snegu,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 4 (1961): 372. Subsequent references to Volokhova’s memoirs will appear in the body of the text. 10. Valentina Verigina, “Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke,” Uchenye zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii 4 (1961): 315. Subsequent references to Verigina’s memoirs will appear in the body of the text. 11. Mikhail Kuzmin, “V teatre,” in Stikhotvoreniia, ed. N. A. Bogomolov, Novaia biblioteka poeta (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agentstvo Akademicheskii proekt, 1996), xx. 12. Alexander Blok, “Oni chitaiut stikhi,” Snezhnaia maska, in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 2, ed. Vladmir Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 244. Subsequent references to Blok’s poetry will appear in the body of the text. Also see Volokhova, “Zemlia v snegu,” 374. 13. Mikhail Kuzmin, Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. and trans. Michael Green (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1980), 157. Kuzmin also wrote a poem entitled “Kartonnyi domik” (“The Cardboard House”) and included it in the cycle Prervannaia povest’ (An Interrupted Tale). Mikhail Kuzmin, Sobranie stikhov I, ed. John Malmstad and Vladimir Markov (Munich: W. Fink, 1977), 38.

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14. Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 271. 15. Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2, From Alexander II to the Abdication of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 377. A lavish commemorative album of the event was published by the empress in 1904. 16. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 29. Subsequent references to Bely’s novel will appear in the body of the text. 17. Blok’s play was also not without its ties to the political context that surrounded it; some viewers saw the figure of Columbine as the Russian Constitution that failed to materialize in the Revolution of 1905 (Braun, Theater of Meyerhold, 73). On the theatrical aspect of the political situation in 1905, see Christine Evans and Alexis Peri’s essay in this volume, as well as Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 18. Murray Frame, School for Citizens: Theater and Civil Society in Imperial Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 86. 19. E. Anthony Swift, Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 20. 20. Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 195. 21. Swift, Popular Theater, 25. 22. For a study of Ivanov’s Tower, see Ulla Hakanen’s article in this collection, as well as her itinerary in Mapping Petersburg. On the significance of the restaurant Vienna as a gathering place for writers, see McReynolds, Russia at Play, 206. 23. Yury Lotman, “Simvolika Peterburga i problemy semiotiki goroda,” in Izbrannye stat’i II (Tallinn: Aleksandra, 1992), 16–18. 24. Cited in V. N. Toporov, Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003), 35. 25. Colleen McQuillen, “The Dionysian Roots of Symbolist Masquerade Balls in Petersburg and Poem without a Hero,” Ulbandus 8 (2004): 106–18. 26. Maurice Andrieux, Daily Life in Venice in the Time of Casanova, trans. Mary Fitton (New York: Praeger, 1972), 120. Venetian carnival-goers also sometimes dressed as figures from the commedia dell’arte, a detail that creates yet one more parallel between the two masquerades. On the carnivalesque in The Puppet Show, see Timothy C. Westphalen, “The Carnival-Grotesque and Blok’s The Puppet Show,” Slavic Review 52, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 49–66. 27. Toporov, Peterburgskii, 30, 46. 28. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. H. Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 124. For further treatment of Blok’s flânerie, see Polina Barskova’s article in this collection. 29. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97–98.

7 Panoramas from Above and Street from Below The Petersburg of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin          

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of profound social change for Petersburg. The site of Russian imperial power was being transformed into a modern metropolis. The destruction of old social structures, accelerating industrialization, the development of a modern consumer culture, and the growth of new residential areas built according to the latest architectural fashions all shaped its urban space. The practices through which people experienced the city changed too. In classical studies of the city and of modernity, such as the works of Georg Simmel 194

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and Walter Benjamin, vision holds a central place, both as a mode of perception (to see) and as part of the process of creating the self in relation to others (to be seen).3 Walking is a practice related to both. The idle vagabond, or flâneur, has been the symbol of the modern city, but other ways of walking and seeing existed alongside him, ranging from Sunday strolls in parks with family members to cruising in the sites of the nascent homosexual subculture. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, who considers urban space and its everyday practices as a system similar to language, describes the relationship of city inhabitants to this language as tactical: they are confined to the rules of its system but can apply them in a creative manner to serve their own specific needs. One of the everyday practices that de Certeau presents as functioning in this way is walking. Just like speech or writing, walking, too, has its style and rhetoric—the turns and detours one makes affirm, suspect, test, transgress, or respect the rules. This makes us not simply consumers of readymade spaces but their producers, too, and allows the city-dweller to make the urban space his or her own. Walking, then, is a spatial acting-out of place; the walker transforms the spatial signifiers into something else, actualizing in them the potential for constructing identity.4 De Certeau juxtaposes everyday practices like walking to the panoramic view, which “makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text.” According to him, this panorama-city is a theoretical simulacrum, belonging to “the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions.”5 In Bely’s Petersburg such vision belongs to Apollon Apollonovich, who prefers to see Petersburg as squares, parallelepipeds, and cubes and wants to control the crowd of shadows from the islands threatening it. However, as I will show in this essay, panoramic vision can also be affective, and reading the panorama-city can mobilize different stylistic and rhetoric choices that in turn contribute to the creation of the self. In this essay I focus on two Russian modernist writers, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Kuzmin, and consider how each appropriated the urban space of Petersburg through his daily practices and individual vision of the city. Drawing on their diaries, I explore their typical modes of perception and urban movement and map their personal “topographies,” or descriptions of place— which takes us to the neighborhood of the Tauride Gardens, in whose vicinity both Ivanov and Kuzmin lived from 1905. Despite their spiritual affinity, the ways the two writers experienced the city differed in accordance with their respective worldviews, including their aesthetic ideas. Two distinct visions of the city emerge from the private writings of Ivanov and Kuzmin: panoramas and close-ups, reflecting their differing social

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orientations. The famous apartment of Ivanov, the Tower, functions for him as a base, from which he orients himself toward unity and the sublime. Kuzmin, on the other hand, does not have a home of his own; he lives and spends time as a visitor in the homes of relatives and friends, and much of his movement in the city is motivated by his homosexual orientation. He has an eye for the details of city life, which he records in his diary, including the city’s profane elements. Petersburg has certainly produced a rich tradition of writers who selfidentify with the city space and associate their creative lives with the city.6 What I will focus on here are the daily practices of living in this city and the ways in which Ivanov and Kuzmin framed themselves by the city in their diaries—the kinds of “settings” these author-protagonists created for themselves.7 Although Petersburg is an important locus in both of their biographies, neither writer, strictly speaking, numbers among the canonical authors of what is called the Petersburg text of Russian literature. Mikhail Kuzmin kept a diary almost continuously from 1905 until 1934, conscientiously adhering, especially in the beginning, to the imperative to write every day. It was Kuzmin’s example that inspired Ivanov to begin writing daily once again, but as previously in his life, he succeeded in doing so only sporadically. For Kuzmin the diary was an important tool of self-creation, including the creation of his public image. He read excerpts from it aloud to friends or allowed them to read it themselves, so that soon his diary acquired notoriety in symbolist circles. One of the greatest admirers of Kuzmin’s diary was Ivanov himself, praising it in his own diary as a work of art and lecture édifiante: But first and foremost, the diary is an artistic reflection of life, of life that flows somewhere according to its concealed tides, whimsical and extraordinary, in the contrast it creates between the pleasure of the object of perception and of the experiencing subject—the diary is a reflection, which sometimes creates astonishingly clear reliefs. And besides, the author of the diary knows the secret of a pleasing style, which by now has almost been lost. (Ivanov, 2:750)

Kuzmin, too, noted the significance of the event: “It was extremely important for me, and for some reason I think it was for the Ivanovs, too. Whatever happens next, the ice has been broken.”8 In other words, his diary played an important role in bringing the two poets closer to each other.

Ne ig hbor s a t Tavric he s kaya In the summer of 1905, Vyacheslav Ivanov and his wife, Lidiya ZinovievaAnnibal, also a writer, settled in St. Petersburg after living in Europe for many

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years. “We realized that now it is time to be here,” explained ZinovievaAnnibal to a memoirist.9 The couple rented an apartment on the mansard floor of a recently completed apartment house on 25 Tavricheskaya (Tauride) Street, the discovery of which they subsequently mythologized: seeing a “for rent” sign on one of the buildings in the neighborhood of the Tauride Palace, Zinovieva-Annibal ascended to the top floor and recognized the round room from a dream she had had while they still lived in Geneva.10 On August 29, 1905, Ivanov wrote to Valery Bryusov in Moscow: We live (the two of us, me and Lidiya Dmitrievna) at the top of a round tower above the Tauride Gardens and its swan lake. Behind the park, behind the Neva, lie the fantastic contours of the whole of St. Petersburg, all the way till the distant forests on the horizon. At twilight, the time I am writing to you, the cannons are shooting a warning about the rise of the waters of the Neva, and the wind from the sea is whirling the yellow leaves in the park and groaning and knocking on my tower.11

Soon the apartment became known as the Tower (Bashnia), the site of the famous Wednesday gatherings, which practically all the members of the early twentieth-century cultural elite visited, regardless of their political and artistic affiliations. The most contemporary and pressing questions of art and philosophy were debated here, and sometimes the artists and philosophers climbed to the roof of the building to recite poetry, many of which would become future literary classics. In the early 1910s Andrey Bely stayed there while working on Petersburg, reading it to Ivanov as the work progressed. Ivanov was enraptured by it, and it was he who convinced Bely that “Petersburg is the only possible title, which would honor this text, the protagonist of which is no less than the Bronze Horseman.”12 On the very same day that Ivanov wrote to Bryusov, only a few blocks away in another new apartment building, Mikhail Kuzmin was writing a letter to an old friend, Georgy Chicherin. Kuzmin had just returned to Petersburg from his travels in the Russian provinces and settled in his sister’s apartment: You know my address: the corner of Suvorovskaya (Suvorov) and Tavricheskaya Streets, house 34, apartment 10; it is terribly light here, high up, a view of the sky over rooftops, of the Okhta, close by are the Tauride Gardens, the building is new and huge, stained-glass windows on the staircase, electricity, telephone, bathrooms, panel doors. The room is on the street side. All in all, 7 rooms in the apartment. (Kuzmin, 496n36)

What is striking about these two passages are the different “keys” in which they portray the experience of urban space. Ivanov looks at the city from a

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distance; seen from his tower, the city appears as a panorama in which concrete details are blended into the “fantastic contours” of the landscape, with the window functioning as a frame for a Romantic landscape painting. The cannons’ warnings of flooding are real, but at the same time they evoke a key element of Petersburg mythology, as if Ivanov had moved right into the space of the Petersburg text.13 As I will show, the city itself is not of great importance for Ivanov. Echoing his symbolist ideology, he distances himself from the streets—from the everyday and the masses—and represents the city as mystical space and artifact, like the panorama that opens from his window. Kuzmin is also an admirer of Petersburg panoramas, but at the same time he is very sensitive to the phenomena of the modern city and its diverse life. He is concerned with the warmth and comfort of home; the letter to Chicherin lists features of modern domestic space: light, stained-glass windows (possibly in the new style moderne), modern conveniences like electricity, telephone, and bathrooms. Yet because of frequent financial problems, as well as his search for a partner, Kuzmin’s life was very mobile, resulting in close-ups of portions and facets of the city, as we see in his diaries. He exploits the many faces of the metropolis in his search for identity, so that through him we are able to map the emergence of new urban subcultures. In the everyday practices of walking, dressing, and eating he makes the city his own. For Kuzmin the daily navigation of the city, including visits to the Tauride Gardens, is an integral part of self-creation, with the urban landscape playing an important role, while for Ivanov, walking has the function of an introspective stroll, and his depictions lack a sense of the times or of the contemporary city.

St rolling St . Pe t er sbu r g In Russian cultural history, the practice of strolling is closely associated with Petersburg. The critic Vissarion Belinsky noted in his essay “Petersburg and Moscow,” originally published in Physiology of Petersburg (1845), that of the two Russian capitals, Petersburg was the space for walking and public life.14 According to him, Moscow—where Ivanov was born—is more home-oriented, “the city of patriarchal family life,” whose narrow streets are empty by ten in the evening.15 In Petersburg, the site of well-developed institutions that support a lifestyle both public and anonymous, the streets are still crowded at midnight: “Petersburg loves the street, strolling, theater, café, music pavilions, in short, all public institutions.”16 Whereas in Moscow people take a horse-drawn cab, in

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Petersburg they walk, which is healthy, but most importantly, “it is comfortable to walk in Petersburg: there are no hills or slopes, everything is flat and even, sidewalks are paved with flagstone, some even with granite—wide, even, and any time of year clean as a floor.”17 Alongside gulian’e, an older tradition of popular outdoor fêtes, progulka, the stroll, gained greater popularity in the early nineteenth century, as the upper classes followed the example of Alexander I, who took daily public walks. Around noon Nevsky Prospect was taken over by idle wanderers, whereas those who spent the day working appeared in the evening.18 The visibility of popular forms of walking increased toward the end of the century, as more and more leisure activities expanded into public spaces; and parks, which previously had been restricted to the aristocracy, were now transformed into commercial facilities that attracted the growing middle classes.19 From the 1830s, strolling gained popularity as a means of producing knowledge about the city and its population.20 Beside structuring and being prescribed by guidebooks, the “leisurely discursive practice” of the stroll was also a widely used strategy in fictional texts, in which, instead of defining the temporal sequence of narrative through a fixed point of view, the flow of the text came to be informed by the observer’s movement.21 Such activity of reading the texture of the city and transforming it into text became the narrative principle at the basis of modern flânerie. The flâneur sees the modern city in scenes and images, perceiving them as readable texts, or “documents.” The task a Baudelairean flâneur presents himself is the transformation of this texture of images into an artistic text; he is an “author who turns his everyday perceptions into literary description.”22

The Ta uride Ga rd en s In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler interrogates the traditional textual and imaginary “maps” of the capital of Russia. She notes that the seeming uniformity of the image of Petersburg in Russian literature—the strong dualism of palaces and slums—has been produced by neglecting its eclectic physical character: the sociocultural “middle” between the rich and poor and the literary forms related to it.23 She argues that such a polarized image of the city is a kind of “panorama” in which the local, eclectic, and transitional have been lost.24 Between the sites rich in literary connotations lie “gray areas,” which have not been illuminated unless we turn to documentary genres or widen the body of fictional works that we place under scrutiny.25

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One such area that has received surprisingly little attention in literature on Petersburg—not even by Buckler—is the Tauride Gardens, located, so to speak, under Ivanov’s and Kuzmin’s windows. In the Petersburg text it has remained on the sidelines, eclipsed by the Summer Gardens, which are more central, both geographically and in literary terms. The Tauride Gardens, the kind of sociocultural “middle” that Buckler discusses, serve as a boundary zone between different social groups: on one side of the park is the wealthier Liteiny district; on the other, spreads Peski, a neighborhood for the poor. For a contemporary cultural geographer, the Tauride Gardens of the turn of the twentieth century are of interest precisely because they form the kind of heterogeneous urban space where cultural battles between members of different social groups took place. The history of the gardens begins as part of the imperial history of St. Petersburg. An English park with ponds, canals, bridges, gazebos, artificial hills, and grottos, it was created in the 1780s by Catherine the Great’s favorite, Prince Grigory Potyomkin, to surround his palace, and for decades it was reserved for the use of members of the court only. It was opened to the public— to “the respectable public, for strolling”26—in the 1860s, a decade characterized in Russia by the restructuring of social hierarchies. Gradually the social connotations of the park changed. The 1874 guidebook Peterburg ves’ na ladoni (All of Petersburg on Your Palm) noted that although the greatest days of the park were over, it still remained one of the best in Petersburg in size and upkeep. The guidebook lamented, however, that because of the park’s remoteness from the center, it did not attract many visitors—mostly just residents from the nearby modest quarters of Peski.27 Others worried that the once miraculous park was being transformed into “an ordinary city garden with kiosks and dusty alleys” and that its new uses compromised its aesthetically pleasing appearance.28 In 1887 the journalist V. O. Mikhnevich complained that the “once favorite refuge for the environs’ elegiac poets and the Office of Public Order’s hopelessly enamored bureaucrats has recently acquired ill fame and in the eyes of the moral authorities brought disrepute to all of Peski.” He claimed that the restaurant that had opened some years earlier corrupted the place: The gardens attract all the wild, bacchanalian, and slothful elements of the local population. There reigns the so-called striutsky [base, worthless, contemptible person]—a peculiar creature of urban zoology, partly a man of culture, who had become acquainted with the taste of cognac and finest Madeira and learned how to use a handkerchief (if he has one in his pocket), and partly a total Papuan, who at the moment of drinking becomes rude, barbarous, and

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shameless. [. . .] This rabble nests in legions on the outskirts of Petersburg, including Peski, supporting the sales in local drinking establishments, and taking a breath of fresh air in the Tauride Gardens. Representatives of the fairer sex, similar in character, accompany them, sip and exchange caresses with the “striutskys” of the Tauride Gardens. Only on Sundays there swarm different, naive, merchant families of Peski in their common old Sunday best, cut in the fifties’ style and smelling like camphor, and with the imperturbability of pagan idols, they clap their fatigued eyes on the drunken stupidity and disgracefulness around them. . . . For them it is entertaining!”29

But as we will see, such unconventional conduct and mixture of social classes made for a captivating experience for some members of the artistic bohemia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the park was a popular locale for strolls for all social classes. It was divided into three parts: the immediate vicinity of the palace, which was closed to the public; alongside Potyomkin Street, an area providing entertainment for an entrance fee; and the rest of the park, which was open to everyone. In 1898 a stage was built in the park and in the summer the Guardianship of Public Sobriety arranged different programs there, ranging from jugglers and acrobats to musical concerts, including military bands. In winter the hills became sledding slopes, and ponds became skating rinks; skating was especially popular at the turn of the century, and one memoirist writes that the Empress Maria Fyodorovna and other members of the imperial family used to skate on the frozen ponds of the Tauride.30 The

View of the Tauride Palace and the Tauride Gardens behind it (Niva, 1907); on the left one can see the recently built 25 Tauride Street, rising over the neighborhood. (courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland)

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Tauride Palace was a meeting place of the high arts as well as the new consumer culture, housing both art and trade exhibitions. In 1906 the palace became the site of the first representative political body of Russia, the State Duma, which assembled there until the February revolution of 1917—so the Tauride saw its share of revolutionary activities. In May 1906 strollers were surprised by the leaflets urging them to join the struggle against the tsarist regime; in December the park was the scene of the attempted assassination of the former Moscow governor.31 Images, even caricatures, of the Tauride Gardens and Tauride Palace often appeared in newspapers of this time.

Ivan ov : Solit ude in “ Fa nt a st ic Pet r o b a g d a d ” In Ivanov’s diary, Petersburg appears as both a land- and soundscape that enter the apartment just as he described in the letter to Bryusov. Depictions of the surroundings typically appear at the beginning of his diary entries as introductions to other concerns: the whereabouts of the members of his household, abstract ideological questions, or his current writings. Summer days in the city. How nice it is in the Tower. Everything is well organized, it is a cool and silent oasis up high, above the Tauride Gardens with their green pond and silver stretches. Proofreading in Latin, philological elucubrations, mythology. My semicircular window to the left of grandfather’s ancient bureau open to the evening, I sit behind it, my back to Lidiya’s smaller mahogany bureau, with roses in front of her portrait—my window turns into a magical aperture into the world of green, blue, and violet blotches, rippling behind the luminous river and the phantasmal seas, the distant clouds and the crimson chimeras of the sunset. The musical whistles of steamships and squeals of sirens. [. . .] In my soul, I feel orphaned. (Ivanov, 2:773)32

For Ivanov the Tower is a refuge, whose height both protects him and allows him to admire the city from a distance. The city turns into an art object—a painting framed by the window, magically coming to life both in the movement of its pointillist surface and in the changing colors of the seasons. The location of Ivanov’s apartment on the top floor coincided well with the symbolists’ distrust of the mundane and their aspiration toward the heavenly and divine. The round towerlike structure at the corner of the building also nurtured the idea of retreat to an “ivory tower.”33 These connotations are confirmed by Ivanov in his diary: he reiterates the idea of vertical distance by locating himself high up and referring to the surrounding areas as “down there” (Ivanov, 2:746). In the private realm of the diary, he represents himself as

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separated from the daily life of the city and its people, on occasion descending to them as part of his mission as symbolist poet.34 Through vertical distance from ground level, Ivanov articulates the sense of his separateness from the people—the idea of the tragic but necessary split between the poet and crowd, which he formulated in his essay “The Poet and the Mob” (“Poet i chern’,” 1904).35 Although he feels connected with people ideologically, on the practical level he is unable to connect with them. Instead of merging into the crowd, he looks for his other half among the people, echoing Platonic ideas: “I walk and see nothing. People are staring at me. Am I cheerful or desperate? Everything is somehow strangely revealed in people. All people are my doubles, but where is the one, where is he?” (Ivanov, 2:754). Ivanov was not a modern urban dweller and remained rather indifferent to the bustling city around him. As one memoirist notes, he “was a stay-at-home who only seldom visited his friends.”36 Usually people visited him: his diary is filled with lists of the comings and goings of visitors (people asking for an “audience,” as the inhabitants of the Tower started to call them). In their memoirs contemporaries describe how Ivanov surrounded himself with Roman and Dionysian paintings, statues, and wallpaper, creating a home space that was independent of time and geography.37 In this regard he bears some resemblance to the modern “collector,” who according to Benjamin is a “true resident of the interior” and “delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better—a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.”38 The window giving onto the city was yet another painting in his collection. The Tower was the center of Ivanov’s world, a place demarcated as his own and a base from which he could compose and manage his relations with the outside.39 Yet the panorama opening from Ivanov’s windows was in fact a product of modernity. As de Certeau notes, “the desire to see the city [from above] preceded the means of satisfying it.”40 This is especially true in flat Petersburg, where there are no natural formations one might ascend to gain a view of the city from above. A view from the sixth floor still had an aura of novelty from the perspective of the turn-of-the-century city dweller.41 The building at Tavricheskaya Street was one of the first multistory apartment buildings in the neighborhood, which in 1905 still consisted mainly of wooden houses surrounded by outbuildings and kitchen gardens.42 It is no surprise, then, that Ivanov and his visitors were overwhelmed by the experience of viewing the city from above, when occasionally after the Wednesday gatherings they ascended to the roof of the Tower to recite poetry.

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The classic panorama associated with Petersburg is the one seen from the embankments of the Neva rather than from the bird’s-eye view. As Vladimir Mikhnevich writes in the 1874 guidebook Peterburg ves’ na ladoni: “The best view of St. Petersburg opens from the embankments of the Neva. [. . .] But one should bear in mind that this remarkable view does not strike us as an example of natural beauty, but as the creation of man’s hands. [. . .] The wide splendid Neva plays here the kind of role a mirror has for all the miracles of work and art.”43 Ivanov, too, would walk with Zinovieva-Annibal along the embankments, where he enjoyed the panoramic views, as well as taking “strolls on a yacht,” that is, short cruises on the Neva. In Ivanov’s case we can think of his peripatetics truly as the practice of walking while engaging in philosophical discourse. Just as the landscapes from his window serve as a way of entering other thoughts he records in his diary, so the walks along the embankments and in the Tauride and Summer Gardens function as a setting for more important things: plans for the future, or later, for occult experiences. In 1909 the deceased Lidiya appeared to him in the Tauride Gardens, where they used to stroll together, as well as in the cemetery where her grave is located. After these “physical” encounters, she also “wrote” in Ivanov’s diary. Both the physical space and the space of the diary become part of the realm of the mystical for him. Free of time and geography, Ivanov’s apartment was also a space for indulging his interest in the exotic, including Oriental, culture, which influenced his experience of the city at large. The culmination of his fascination for the Orient, which Ivanov shared with many of his contemporaries, was the creation of the so-called Hafiz Society, at whose meetings heady drinks stimulated discussions and expressions of love. “Petersburg we called Petrobagdad then; it was fantastic—an era of Eros,” Ivanov later wrote (Ivanov, 2:754).44

Ku zm i n: A Pa int e r of Mode r n S t r eet L i fe Kuzmin, too, was an admirer of Petersburg panoramas, but his world was much less stable, and the panoramas, too, could prove to be perishable: “The Neva seen from my window, when looked at through binoculars, turns out to be a gray steel roof which, naturally, deprived the landscape of some of its poetry, but the forests and beach are there for sure” (Kuzmin, 36–37). In the diary, scenery and changes in weather have the rhetorical function of recording Kuzmin’s moods. The panoramas are not always sublime; often they create a sense of loss and decay, which remind him of places, people, and books from

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his past, evoking a “dreamy grief, a feeling not completely without pleasure” (35). The guiding principle of his vision and the main rhetorical device of his comments is parallelism, a kind of “logic of sameness”—urban scenes remind him of people and places he has seen and especially of books he has read. The panorama generates a feeling of “here” as waiting and longing, whereas “there” would afford gratification. Besides admiring the landscape, Kuzmin had the habit of looking into windows (smotret’ v okna), both from home and when on the move in the city. In fact, Kuzmin is a peeper who stands at his window observing his neighbors, for which he can use the binoculars he keeps available on his window sill. His gaze scans the panorama in search of the detail on which it can focus: “Got up late. [. . .] Arranged some things at home, slept, had tea, looked into windows outside and in the courtyard, where in the opposite apartment Alexey was fixing something; he is beautiful, that Alexey” (153). This practice of scanning a scene and focusing on some detail is also typical of Kuzmin’s poetry, so it is no surprise that he later became a great admirer of cinema. It also shows not only how windows open onto static panoramic landscapes but also how such views can be transformed into more detailed close-ups. Writing on Kuzmin’s Petersburg, Vladimir Toporov notes how the relationship between city and home, landscape and interior, becomes “osmotic” in his prose. The street penetrates the house and vice versa: windows, rooms, and people are looked at from the outside.45 This is also the case with Kuzmin’s diary: sights and sounds penetrate through the windows and doors and even through walls. If Ivanov’s window was a painting, for Kuzmin the window is a permeable surface, and he himself plays an active role in the reception of the images. The boundaries between private and public are fluid, which also frequently creates erotic anticipation. Kuzmin’s principal mode of perception, however, is street-level observation. Especially in the first years (between 1905 and 1907), the Kuzmin of his diary resembles the figure of the flâneur. With his eye for detail and his emotional sensibility—the basis of his creative writing—the modern city with its constant flow of stimuli offers him a perfect setting. His experience of the city is intense; he is both urban observer and participant, which the practice of daily writing nourishes.46 Although Kuzmin originally planned to “live in an ivory tower, as disciplined as possible, in graceful solitude,” his days were filled with visits, walks, strolls, and journeys to different parts of the city (Kuzmin, 31). Often the strolls recorded in his diary take us to less-described Petersburg locations, such as the Tauride Gardens and the Mariinsky Market, and introduce socially marginal

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figures, such as shop attendants, hooligans, and homosexuals. Kuzmin was a “painter of modern life” whose practice of daily writing enabled him to provide detailed observations and turned the diary into a kind of ethnography.47 The movement in the city by foot, horse-drawn tram, or horse cab facilitated, possibly even led Kuzmin to, certain types of observations and sets of questions. As he wrote retrospectively in 1934, being on the move was both an existential condition for him and an epistemological principle: “New places. Despite all my inclination to stay at home, and my conservatism, I adore new places, but not so much new places as new perspectives, point de vue. To ride on a horse or now drive a car, when one can make a stop every minute, appears to me as one of the main pleasures of existence. Even better is to go on foot.”48 Kuzmin’s relationship to people was characterized by the pursuit of closeness. To articulate it, he used the same architectural characteristics of buildings that in Ivanov’s case manifested distance: “The Kuzmins have a nice apartment, the windows are low (how nice it is when windows are on the first floor, or the ground floor if it is a bel étage, not separated from the people—there one can never face such melancholy as from sixth-floor windows, made abstract by height, abandoned through elevation, with a view of the distance)” (Kuzmin, 219).49 In Kuzmin’s diary, people are the city. This sets him apart from Petersburg preservationists like Alexander Benois, whose works he otherwise admired.50 Kuzmin appreciated domestic space, its warmth and amenities (he regularly notes the warmth of the homes and shops he visits, as well as their coziness, uiut ), but for company he often needed to go out into the city. When observing the crowd, he notes familiar or pleasant faces; he transforms both the instability and anonymity of urban life to his benefit; he enjoys surprises and unexpected events, describing, for instance, how he mistook a stranger on the street for a friend but did not become disconcerted by the mistake and continued to follow the stranger—just for fun. He enjoyed it when things turned out to be other than he had first thought, when familiar categories did not apply. The positive value of the unexpected is related to Kuzmin’s understanding of love: serendipity is eroticized because a relationship with someone he already knows cannot turn into love: “To fall in love is possible only at first sight, not gradually, and it is possible to combine acquaintance and love only if one has gotten acquainted when almost already enamored” (Kuzmin, 150). In anonymous encounters, he could attain moments of casual intimacy: the proximity of the barber’s body when he got a haircut or the beauty of a floor-polisher. Kuzmin preferred shops and other businesses where he had seen beautiful attendants and would get excited about a visit to a new bathhouse, where he would be served by a banshchik (bathouse attendant) previously unknown to him. As Sara

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Ahmed has pointed out, sexual orientation, like many other metaphors used to express sexual love (inclination, deviant, pervert, invert, tendency, drive, queer, etc.) is a spatial term. It points to the way one is placed in relation to objects and toward which objects one is directed: “sexual desire orientates the subject toward some others (and by implication not other others) by establishing a line or direction.”51 This is much the case for Kuzmin—homosexual desire oriented his movements in the city, as well as guided his perceptions. The city was an erotic space for him: he experienced even the violence on the streets during the Revolution of 1905 ambivalently, as both terrifying and tempting. In general, Kuzmin was not a chronicler of great political events, remaining indifferent to the Revolution of 1905 for a long time, that is, until the atmosphere of the streets captivated him: “Strikes and pogroms create some kind of cheerfully catastrophic atmosphere in the city and for the life in the streets, there’s something hysterical in the air” (Kuzmin, 65). He felt irritated by the intelligentsia who “look out from windows with binoculars at their own doormen thinking they are the hooligans”; in his diary he criticized the aristocracy for its false identification with the people (59, 63–64).52 He found beauty in, and was aroused by, the potency that the unrest evoked. Both the strength of the masses and that of the authorities on the streets controlling them received admiring comments in Kuzmin’s diary. One special group that fascinated Kuzmin were the hooligans, a new social category debated actively in the press at the time.53 At the beginning of the century, the boulevard press reported an increasing number of public disturbances on the streets of big cities. Kuzmin was often witness to such rowdy behavior and recorded these events in his diary. He first treated hooligans as political protestors, but soon they became transformed into objects of desire; he even asked his shop-assistant friends to introduce him to some. John Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov connect this with “his own sense of alienation from the dominant culture,” which he had not yet completely overcome, but there was clearly something erotic in his interest in these young men too.54 After one boisterous evening in the Tauride Gardens, Kuzmin himself became the target of hooligan violence. He had invited some street musicians to join him in a cab ride on Nevsky, when a group of eight attacked them: “There was nowhere to run. I’ve never experienced such a bitter and fervent feeling as when my nose and temple were smashed and bleeding” (Kuzmin, 165). Beside his desire to see and meet people, Kuzmin was also concerned about how he himself was perceived—as Malmstad and Bogomolov note, he was “always keenly aware of costume as a means of proclaiming difference and indifference to reigning tastes and moral proscriptions.”55 In 1905 Kuzmin was still

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in his “Russian phase,” whose external signs were a beard and poddyovka, a Russian long coat. At that time, his favorite places in Petersburg were its narrow streets of merchant shops and markets, like Mariinsky, which was part of the Apraksin Yard market. At the turn of the century, Mariinsky’s hotel restaurant was known for its Russian dishes, music, and waitresses in national costumes: it was a popular locale among provincial merchants visiting the city on business.56 As well as the trappings of his outward appearance, Kuzmin used the surrounding city to help create his self-identity. In Petersburg, the symbol of the West in Russia, he chose to spend time in its “rustic” parts, like the quarters of the Mariinsky Market and the small merchant shops around Zagorodny Prospect. Here he spent time in icon shops and taverns with friends, many of whom were shop assistants and peasant migrants.57

“ Where Do I Find a St yl e t o De sc ribe This St roll . . .” At the beginning of 1906, Kuzmin’s life started to change. He entered the artistic circles of Petersburg and started to frequent the Ivanovs’ Tower. His outward appearance also changed; from a seminarian he transformed into a dandy.58 Instead of to the provincial parts of the city, his movements were now directed toward the apartments of his new friends. The relatively small (originally only three-room) apartment on the mansard floor where the Ivanovs lived was in fact typical housing for the lower middle class and bohemia. But most of Kuzmin’s new friends lived in bourgeois apartments.59 Instead of small taverns, Kuzmin started to visit restaurants like Vienna, which had became famous as a meeting place for members of the cultural elite.60 In the Summer Garden and especially the Tauride, Kuzmin was drawn to the homosexual company he found there. At the end of the nineteenth century, a homosexual subculture began to emerge in big cities across Europe, with known cruising areas in city parks and streets, bathhouses, and favored restaurants. As Dan Healey notes, in Petersburg, too, the group “developed its own geographies of sexualized streetscapes, its rituals of contact and socialization, its signals and gestures, and its own fraternal language.”61 One of the most important cruising strips was the Tauride Gardens, which Kuzmin and some other members of the cultural intelligentsia visited, often on their way to the Ivanovs.62 They amused themselves with plans to publish a map of the homosexual subculture, or “pays du tendre,” as they called it, accompanied by a poem “voyage du pays du tendre au pays chaud ” (“journey from

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the land of tenderness to the land of heat,” i.e., from the park to the bathhouse) (Kuzmin, 173). It was never realized, but in Kuzmin’s diary we find some fragments of this alternative map of the park and the city. The cruising in Tauride followed a certain route, which could be repeated several times during one evening; different parts of the park, as well as members of the subculture, had nicknames.63 Kuzmin calls visits to the Tauride escapades, escapes from the norms and language of the majority; other homosexuals he refers to as gramotnye (literate ones).64 When, after one of the Wednesday gatherings, the participants ascended to the roof of the Tower, Kuzmin commented on the view: “marvelous, like Babylon” (Kuzmin, 137). Besides referring to the beauty and greatness of the city, the remark evokes the legend of the Tower of Babel and casts Kuzmin’s strolls in the Tauride Gardens as an experience of multiple languages and communities. He scanned the crowd in the park with the purpose of finding out who were members of the same group and speakers of the same “language.” Kuzmin by then was comfortable with his sexual identity, but cruising in the Tauride Gardens was a delicate balancing act between being recognized by one’s own kind yet not revealing the difference too openly: We stopped by at the Tauride; lots of people, but very few literate ones [. . . Pavlik] tried to prove in every possible way that to walk hand in hand in the Tauride is inappropriate, that people will point at us, that he does not want to make a show, that elsewhere he can walk even embracing another, but hand in hand in the Tauride—that’s not done. (185)

The passage reveals the different perceptions of same-sex desire by the men themselves: Kuzmin, an active participant of the subculture, differed from Pavlik, who did not want to be identified by his sexual orientation. Homosexual cruising blurred the boundaries between private and public as previously hidden spheres of life became visible. The spread of the private into the public, as well as the existence of a group with its own “language,” was seen by the authorities and members of mainstream society as a threat to the prevalent order and caused indignation.65 Another—published—attempt to “map” homosexual Petersburg was V. P. Ruadze’s 1908 exposé K sudu . . ! Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg (To the Court . . ! Homosexual Petersburg), which imitates the genre of the guidebook and takes the reader to the city’s cruising sites and hideouts. Ruadze was a criminal reporter and an author of several books on notorious court cases at the beginning of the century, and most of K sudu. .! is devoted to exposing the “vices” practiced in private apartments. Yet the book also proves that homosexual subculture was a visible part of turn-of-the-century Petersburg.66 For many the park offered the possibility of legitimate admiration

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of young male bodies. The skating rink, tennis court, and other sports facilities were precisely such locales; skating rinks especially had the reputation of places for homosexual encounters at the turn of the century.67 Ivanov’s homosexual experiment with the young poet Sergey Gorodetsky never affected his experience of the city and of the Tauride Gardens; it remained confined within the Ivanov apartment and the metaphysical life there— as part of his utopian thinking influenced by classical philosophy.68 Kuzmin was ready to transgress class boundaries in search for companionship, and many of his friends were clearly attracted by the “corrupt” aspect of his lifestyle and diary: pimps, hustlers, hooligans, taverns, fights, and other nonconformist street behavior. For many of the readers of Kuzmin’s diary, it opened a window onto the underworld they dared not visit in person.69

The way Ivanov and Kuzmin each experienced the city is directly related to their life practices and their aesthetic and ideological principles. Ivanov’s base in the Tower coincides with his orientation toward the divine and the transcendental. In his poetry Petersburg appears as a mythical and intertextual space, in the tradition of the canonic Petersburg text: as phantasmal Palmyra, the city of misery and mist, where the Bronze Horseman stumbles on dead bodies.70 In his life practices, Ivanov was more oriented toward home and concerned with the creation of a utopian family: he and Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal attempted to create a triangular relationship, first with the poet Sergey Gorodetsky and, after that had failed, with Margarita Sabashnikova, a painter and the wife of poet Maximilian Voloshin. For them the expansion of a double union into triangular love represented a step toward communalism. After Lidiya’s death Ivanov formed a relationship with Vera Shvarsalon, her daughter from a previous marriage, in whom he believed Lidiya’s spirit lived.71 It was the scandal of Vera’s pregnancy that made the family leave Petersburg in 1912. They returned to Russia after a year in Europe but settled this time in Moscow—again in a top-floor apartment with a view over the city. After the October Revolution they had to move to another apartment because their building was no longer heated. The new apartment was in a basement, suggesting that the loss of status was accompanied by the loss of the panoramic, or (one could say) panoptic, view. In the cycle titled “Songs of the Times of Troubles” (“Pesni smutnogo vremeni,” 1918), Ivanov writes: “In the basement, with a candle / I sit on guard / of a quietening house” (Ivanov, 4:72). Although similar expressions of loneliness appear in his Petersburg writings, the image that this citation evokes stands in striking contrast to the depictions of the Tower, such as in Bely’s witty memoirs, according to which “Ivanov was hanging over the Duma, like a singing spider, collecting black flies, striking a blow on decadent salons.”72

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For Kuzmin, walking was not only a routine but had great symbolic value: his routes, manners, and company were all part of identity building. Typically his poetry, in contrast to Ivanov’s, focused on concrete details. Kuzmin provides an interesting representation of perspective in his story “High Window” (“Vysokoe okno,” 1912–13). Although no place-names are given, the discussion of panoramic and street-level views is clearly based on the view of the Tauride Gardens from the Tower, where Kuzmin had been living.73 The protagonist of the story is a small boy who overhears adults say that his father’s lofty ideas are the product of the beautiful view opening from the windows of the sixth-floor apartment. The boy becomes enchanted by the view from his window of the horse-guard parade (whose barracks were next to the Tauride Gardens). When seen from a distance, the soldiers and horses have no limbs, instead they form a seductive golden snake, slithering to the rhythm of the music. The next time the boy sees a horse guard is from a window of a basement shop; all he sees are dirty boots, which evoke in him fear of violence and cruelty. He is left confused about which of these perspectives offers the correct picture, until he actually meets a guardsman whose answer to his questions can be read as a formulation of an aesthetic principle: “That’s what happens if you make your impressions about things from the attic or from the basement. You should approach the thing directly and close up—then you will recognize it.”74 For Kuzmin, the ideal is the real encounter: proximity and experience through sensation, for which one must go out into the street, leaving behind the mediating framed view of the window, which punctuates the experience instead of leaving it open-ended—and available to further plot development.  I want to thank Olga Matich and all the “mappers” for the truly stimulating experience of working with them while I was at Berkeley and for their generous comments on my work. Early drafts of this essay were presented in a research seminar at the University of Helsinki, and I am grateful for the comments I received there. I want to thank also Kirsti Ekonen, Maija Könönen, and Gennady Obatnin for their help throughout the project. 1. Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v 4 tomakh, vol. 2, ed. D. V. Ivanov and O. Deschartes (Brussels: Foyer Oriental Chrétien, 1971–87), 259. Subsequent page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text, cited by volume and page. 2. Mikhail Kuzmin, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 22. 3. On modernity’s emphasis on the visual, see Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 97–101. 5. Ibid., 92–93. See also the introduction to this volume.

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6. See Anna Lisa Crone and Jessica Day, My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2004). 7. In prerevolutionary Russia diary-writing flourished, and especially for symbolists, the diary was an important tool for self-creation. On diaries of cultural figures of this period, see N. A. Bogomolov, “Dnevniki v russkoi kul’ture nachala XX veka,” in Tynianovskii sbornik: Chetvertye Tynianovskie chteniia, ed. M.O. Chudakova (Riga: Zinatne, 1990), 148–58. On the symbolist and near-symbolist practice of “life creation,” the aesthetic organization of behavior, see Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 8. M. Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1905–1907, ed. N. A. Bogomolov and S. V. Shumikhin (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 2000), 171. Subsequent page references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text. 9. S. V. Trotsky, “Vospominaniia,” ed. A. V. Lavrov, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 10 (1994): 49. Trotsky imbues this comment with an occult mystical worldview according to which the center of spiritual forces had moved from India to Russia, where great events would now take place and lead all of humanity into a new era. 10. Olga Deschartes, “Vvedenie” (Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:88). 11. “V. I. Ivanov V. Ya. Bryusovu 29.8.1905,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo 85 (1976): 479. 12. Ivanov in his laudatory review of Petersburg “Vdokhnovenie uzhasa,” in Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 4:621. See also Lidiya Ivanova, Vospominaniia. Kniga ob otse, ed. John Malmstad (Moscow: RIK “Kul’tura,” 1992), 35; and Andrey Bely, Nachalo veka (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1933), 326–27. In Mapping Petersburg, my itinerary “The Tower—Housing Modernity and Modernism” describes the bohemian interiors and daily life of the Ivanov apartment. See also Andrey Shishkin, “Simposion na peterburgskoi bashne v 1905–1906 gg,” in Russkie piry, ed. D. S. Likhachev, Al’manakh Kanun 3 (St. Petersburg: RAN IRLI, 1998), 273–352. 13. Peterburgskie vedomosti reported the following day that on “August 29, after midday, cannon fire was again warning the capital about the water that had started to rise” and continued with descriptions of the trouble the flood caused in the city, especially for the inhabitants of the islands (208, [August 30, 1905], 3). 14. V. G. Belinsky, “Peterburg i Moskva,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk SSSR, 1955), 385–413. See also Stiven Lovell (Stephen Lovell), “Dosug v Rossii: ‘svobodnoe’ vremia i ego ispol’zovanie,” Antropologicheskii forum 2 (2005): 136–73. 15. Belinsky, “Peterburg i Moskva,” 389–90. 16. Ibid., 398. 17. Ibid., 399. 18. Lovell, “Dosug v Rossii,” 157–60. 19. In 1896 the growing urban population forced the government to ban fairs in the city centers because of congestion (Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 195). 20. Lovell, “Dosug v Rossii,” 158. 21. Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 89–108. For the relationship between movement in the city and production of knowledge, see Polina Barskova on the “physiology of Petersburg” tradition and Evgeny Grebyonka in this volume.

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22. Gleber, Art of Taking a Walk, 52–53. 23. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 1–26. 24. Ibid., 84–85. 25. Ibid., 3, 25. 26. N. F. Khomutetsky, Peterburg—Leningrad: Istoriko-arkhitekturnyi ocherk (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1958), 72. 27. V. Mikhnevich, ed., Peterburg ves’ na ladoni (St. Petersburg: Izdanie knigoprodavtsa K. N. Plotnikova, 1874), 118–19. 28. I. A. Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” Istoriia Peterburga 4, no. 14 (2003): 21. 29. V. O. Mikhnevich, “Peterburgskie sady i ikh etnografiia,” in Iazvy Peterburga: Sbornik gazetnogo fol’klora kontsa XIX—nachala XX vv., ed. L. Ya. Lurye (Leningrad, 1990), 17–18, quoted in Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 22. 30. P. Grabbe, Okna na Nevu (St. Petersburg, 1995), quoted in Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 23; D. A. Zasosov and V. I. Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga 1890–1910-kh godov: Zapiski ochevidtsev (St. Petersburg: Lenizadt, 1999), 35, 278. 31. Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 23. For revolutionary activities in Petersburg, see Alexis Peri and Christine Evans in this volume. 32. This note is dated June 25, 1909; such expressions of loneliness became especially prevalent after the death of Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal. 33. The image of a tower appears on the cover of Ivanov’s book Po zvezdam (To the Stars, 1909). Its designer, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, tells of a caricature he drew of Ivanov, in which he used the idea of a tower reaching the heavenly heights: “He was tall and meager and all the time somehow aiming forward. Moreover, he had a habit of raising himself on tiptoe when talking with someone. Once I drew him in this pose, as if he were on the edge of the Tower and ‘taking off ’ to the stars with small wings on his heels—but I only showed this awfully malignant caricature to my friend Syunnerberg; after all, I was afraid Vyacheslav Ivanovich would be offended” (M. Dobuzhinsky, Vospominaniia [New York: Put’ zhizni, 1976], 376). 34. “And just as we went then to the people with tidings of joy from Kormchie Zvezdy, so we now go with tidings of joy of the Great Bell and testament of the Flame” (Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:771). 35. “[ T]he solitude of an artist is a basic fact in the latest history of ideas” (Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1:711). 36. Konstantin Erberg (K. A. Syunnerberg), “Vospominaniia,” ed. S. S. Grechishkin and A. V. Lavrov, Ezhegodnik rukopisnogo otdela Pushkinskogo doma na 1977 god (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979), 128. 37. See the caricature in Bely’s memoirs: “it’s like a small museum, or a preserve; when you enter it, you forget which country and era you are in; everything becomes crooked; the day becomes night and night becomes day” (Bely, Nachalo veka, 321), or G. A. Tots, “‘Zarevo bol’shogo goroda . . .’ Stranitsy iz vospominanii,” Literaturnoe obozrenie 11 (1988): 110–11. 38. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century. Exposé [of 1939],” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 19. 39. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 36. 40. Ibid., 92.

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41. One place from which to admire panoramic views of the city was the cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, whose 562 steps one could climb for 1 ruble for 1–5 persons and 20 kopeks for each additional person. See Stiliana Milkova’s itinerary on Baedeker’s and Otto Keller’s guidebooks to Petersburg in Mapping Petersburg. 42. Alexander Kobak and Dmitry Severyukhin, “‘Bashnia’ na Tavricheskoy (biografiia doma),” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo 1 (1987): 35. Vera Shvarsalon, Lidiya’s daughter from a previous marriage, remembers her first arrival at the Tower in 1907, after her mother’s death: “The view from Mom’s room—the one she had described [in letters], so marvelous, to the river and further to its other side and even to the beautiful palazzo behind . . . [illegible] down by the Neva, beyond Okhta—was largely ruined by the big building erected on Tverskaya Street” (Nikolay Bogomolov, “Zagor’e,” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 25 [2008], http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/25/bogomolov25.shtml). 43. Mikhnevich, Peterburg ves’ na ladoni, 67. It is worth remembering that Petersburg’s genius loci according to Antsiferov is The Bronze Horseman (N. Antsiferov, Dusha Peterburga [ Leningrad: Leningradskii komitet literatorov, Agenstvo LIRA, 1990], 15, 20). 44. Ivanov also dated his poem “Palatka Gafiza” as “March 8, 1906, in Petrobagdad” (Sobranie sochinenii, 2:738). On the Hafiz Society, see Nikolay Bogomolov, “Peterburgskie gafizity,” in Mikhail Kuzmin: Stat’i i materialy (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1995), 67–98. 45. V. N. Toporov, “K ‘Peterburgskomu’ lokusu Kuzmina,” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury: Izbrannye trudy (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo-SPB, 2003), 553. 46. As John Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov note, it was the diary that “allowed him to become a spectator of his life and that of others and thus allowed distance from both” ( John E. Malmstad and Nikolay Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin: A Life in Art [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 122). 47. Cf. Baudelaire, who notes in regard to painting that the velocity of modern life favors, even requires certain “quick” genres: “but there is in the trivial things of life, in the daily changing of external things, a speed of movement that imposes upon the artist an equal speed of execution [. . .] pastel, etching, aquatint have provided their successive quotas to this vast dictionary of modern life in libraries, in art collector’s portfolios and in the humblest shop windows” (Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972], 393–94). 48. M. Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1934 goda, ed. Gleb Morev (St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh, 1998), 94. 49. Kuzmin writes here about the apartment of his relatives. 50. Cf., “Benois and his confreres tended to focus almost exclusively on art and architecture in their discussions of the past. They might occasionally recount a titillating anecdote about the imperial family or describe a picturesque scene, but, for the most part, historical events and the spectacle of daily life in the capital interested them relatively little” (Emily D. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006], 46). 51. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 69–70. I thank Lucas Stratton for pointing out Ahmed’s book to me. 52. The reference to binoculars could be an instance of self-irony, or alternatively, it could relate to his family, whose excitement about the 1905 Revolution he did not

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share. Eventually Kuzmin himself joined the Union of Russian People (Soiuz russkogo naroda), a reactionary anti-Semitic organization that carried out pogroms and that represented genuine Russia for Kuzmin (Malmstad and Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin, 89–91). 53. On the rise of hooliganism, see Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 54. Malmstad and Bogomolov, Mikhail Kuzmin, 85. 55. Ibid., 121. 56. Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 125. 57. In 1900, 63 percent of the population of St. Petersburg belonged to the peasant class, the vast majority of whom had only recently migrated to the city and who still preserved elements of the traditional lifestyle (S. A. Smith, “Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St. Petersburg,” Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. Barbara Evans Clements, Rebecca Friedman, and Dan Healey [Basingtoke, England: Palgrave, 2002], 95). On same-sex eros in patriarchal urban environments, e.g., workshops and bathhouses, see Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 22–29. 58. Interestingly, Kuzmin in a preface to the Russian edition of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et de George Brummell parallels religious rituals and fashion: “the difference between the two is just that the first concerns practices in church and is sanctified by centuries, whereas the latter is related to dress and is consecrated only by decades, if not just minutes—but their essence is the same” (Mikhail Kuzmin, Mikhail Kuzmin: Proza i esseistika v trekh tomakh, vol. 3, Esseistika. Kritika [ Moscow: Agraf, 2000], 493). 59. Walter Nouvel, with whom Kuzmin lived for a short period in the summer of 1906, worked in the Ministry of the Imperial Court and lived on Galernaya Street, an area popular among higher state officials. Konstantin Somov lived with his family in a spacious apartment in the nearby area of Kolomna. 60. Although it does not mention Kuzmin, the jubilee album for the tenth anniversary of Vienna is an excellent evocation of the restaurant’s bohemian atmosphere, as well as of its day-to-day operation (Desiatiletie restorana “Vena.” Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi sbornik [St. Petersburg: 1913]). On restaurants of different categories in turn-of-thecentury Petersburg, see also Zasosov and Pyzin, Iz zhizni Peterburga, 122–26. 61. Healey, Homosexual Desire, 29–30. 62. Other areas included the Passage, certain parts of Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka Embankment, the Zoological Gardens, Summer Gardens, Konnogvardeysky Boulevard, and Alexander Gardens. See Healey, Homosexual Desire, 29–44; V. P. Ruadze, K sudu . . ! Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg (St. Petersburg, 1908); and V. V. Bersen’ev and A. R. Markov, “Politsiia i gei: Epizod iz zhizni epokhi Aleksandra III,” in Aleksei Markov, Chto znachit byt’ studentom: Raboty 1995–2002 godov (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005), 184–209. 63. A nickname for one of the park locations was “pearl necklace”; bathhouse attendants were called les nayades, and soldiers, les vivandières (Kuzmin, Dnevnik 1905–1907, 167, 173, 179). 64. Note that in Kuzmin’s diary the language of love and eroticism is French. See Lucas Stratton’s itinerary regarding the symbolic value of things French in early twentieth-century Russian culture in Mapping Petersburg.

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65. Bersen’ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 191. 66. Cf. the critique of the myth of invisibility in George Chauncy, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 3. A contemporary work based on the myth of invisibility and of homosexual Petersburg is K. K. Rotikov, Drugoi Peterburg (St. Petersburg: Liga Plius, 1998). 67. Bersen’ev and Markov, “Politsiia i gei,” 194. On the sports facilities see also Ponomaryov, “Tavrichesky sad,” 23. 68. See Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” in Paperno and Delaney, Creating Life, 24–50. 69. According to Kuzmin, Ivanov asked Kuzmin to take him to the park and show him his lover but then “took fright of the crowd and of Nouvel” (Dnevnik 1905–1907, 180). Despite Kuzmin’s usually quite negative attitude toward Lidiya Zinovieva-Annibal, he seemed to have felt an unusual closeness with her while strolling in the Tauride Gardens because she was eager to join him in his “underworld” escapades (157–58). 70. See, e.g., the poems “In the Tower” (“Na bashne”) and “Bronze Horseman” (“Mednyi vsadnik”). 71. On philosophical models for family life in symbolist circles see Matich, “Symbolist Meaning of Love.” Recall also Belinsky’s notions of Moscow as “the city of patriarchal family life” and Petersburg as the city that loves the street and strolling. Kuzmin, although from Yaroslavl, seemed to be more of a “Petersburg type” in this regard. 72. Bely, Nachalo veka, 313. 73. Mikhail Kuzmin, Pokoinitsa v dome: Chetvertaia kniga rasskazov (St. Petersburg: Izdanie M. Semenova, 1914). I disagree with V. N. Toporov, who situates this story on Vasilievsky Island, where Kuzmin spent his childhood (Toporov, “K ‘Peterburgskomu’ lokusu Kuzmina,” 553). In 1907 Kuzmin lived for some time in the same building as the Ivanovs, at the Zvantseva sisters’ apartment one floor below. He lived with the Ivanovs in the summer of 1908 and from July 1909 until 1912. The title story of the collection, published in 1913 in Russkaia mysl’, was based on the story of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vera Shvarsalon and finalized the break between Kuzmin and the Ivanovs. 74. Kuzmin, Pokoinitsa v dome, 172.

8 The Button and the Barricade Bridges in Paris and Petersburg        

During the opening ceremonies of the Trinity Bridge (Troitsky most) in St. Petersburg,1 P. I. Lelyanov, then mayor of the Russian capital, eagerly presented Nicholas II with an electric button capable of engaging the newly finished edifice’s drawbridge apparatus.2 According to the illustrated weekly journal Niva, this presentation occurred on May 16, 1903, when the inauguration of this somewhat belatedly constructed bridge coincided with St. Petersburg’s bicentennial celebrations. Despite photographic evidence of the button, we can assume neither that its real functionality—if it did work—reached beyond the scope of the ceremony nor that during the ceremony it alone engaged the drawbridge mechanism. We can, however, investigate how the button radiates meaning as a marker of modernity, of tsarist power, and of a new way for the negotiation of various narratives through Petersburg. By narrative I mean not only the representation or recounting of movement through the city but also the imposition of control over that movement.3 In this context I interpret the button as a symbol of the grander “narrative” of power that maintains the legitimacy and continuity of the Romanovs’ reign. The button itself could be understood as a point of narrative relaying, a transition linking a sole digit of the Russian sovereign to the activation of an electronic system, even if only in a virtual sense. The activation of the drawbridge would have embodied the rapidity and instantaneity of 217

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modern time; the concentration—or perhaps more precisely, the reduction— of manpower to a single, simple movement of a minor appendage would have suggested technological innovation that resembled the kind of electronic advancement characteristic of our time. Increasingly, electric energy and the motorized systems that it propelled began to supplant and to trivialize the necessity of sheer human strength, especially the collective human force that would otherwise have been indispensable to elevate the movable section of a bridge.4 The button could also be seen as reifying the absolute power of the tsar administering his will to separate the bridge as an act of technological agency, thus compressing and blurring the distinctions between the expression of human will (in word or, in this case, in action), the desired outcome of the will, and its subsequent achievement. In this sense, the modern narrative of technology affords a sort of demiurgic expediency to the human body wielding the button. By serving as the first to press the button, the tsar conflates his autonomous will with the application of modern technology. This gesture celebrates the Trinity Bridge and the city of St. Petersburg as much as it implies the modernization of state authority, which seems to be transformed from the heavy-handed implementation of control into the gentle, momentous (but no less commanding or effective) posing of the finger upon the button.5 In this essay I will consider the Alexander III Bridge in Paris and the Trinity Bridge in St. Petersburg as loci of political legitimacy and authority, symbolic and real, and as places from which emerge narratives that may redirect or arrest larger scenarios of social order and imperial power. The two bridges shed light on the bridge as a spatial and textual metaphor of narrative continuity, in this instance between royal relatives (the Romanovs), between nations (France and Russia), and between rulers (Alexander III and Nicholas II as well as the tsar and the French president). In this light the two bridges instantiate the power and longevity of the state, especially of Russian imperial might mapped upon the cityscapes of Paris and St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. Registering trends in turn-of-the-century urban design and technological advancement, the bridge became a metaphor for new systems of meaning (aesthetic, economic, and most importantly for this essay, mythical, political, familial, and social) grafted onto the urban infrastructure. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger submits that the bridge refashions our perception of space by serving as a point of reference, as a location. Heidegger suggests that by uniting two riverbanks, “[t]he bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other.” He writes that “the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge. [. . .] By this site are determined the localities and ways by which a

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Illustration of Trinity Bridge’s rotating drawbridge section (Le Génie Civil, 1905)

space is provided for.”6 In other words, the bridge lends a material marker to the abstract “placelessness” of natural space. It maps space by insisting on the difference between two sides of a river as much as it insists on connecting the two. Yet the bridge hardly seems to represent only practical aims: as a symbol of marriage, brotherhood, diplomacy, or otherwise, it inherits and maps its own multiple meanings and diverse metaphors. The bridge may be of purely utilitarian worth or—in the case of the Alexander III Bridge in Paris and the Trinity Bridge in St. Petersburg—it may mean a medium for movement as well as a monument and memorial. Literature takes up the underlying indeterminateness of the bridge and often exploits and exacerbates it by disclosing its inlaid narrative potential as a vital link between story lines and also as a node of potential narrative peripety. In this sense the bridge’s importance with respect to narrative entails transition or mediation: the bridge acts as a medium and springboard for the subsequent unfolding, stalling, or redirecting of narrative movement. After Nicholas II pressed the button and the elevated section of the bridge fully descended, the celebration of the St. Petersburg bicentennial proceeded over to the Petersburg Side of the Neva River, where the royal family entered a pavilion honoring the deceased Tsar Alexander III.7 Outside such ceremonial semiotics, the ascent and descent of the drawbridge section of the Trinity Bridge enabled a number of narrative developments, some of which were relevant to the urban economy.8 Vessels flowing unimpeded through the bridge’s hoisted gate served as

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indices of the progress of commercial and military endeavors. For that matter, a crucial function of any urban bridge is its facilitation of other narratives of intracity travel, be they pedestrian or vehicular, such as the tram crossing Trinity Bridge.9 As a maritime city of islands, St. Petersburg relied on bridges and the indispensable mechanism of the drawbridge in order to maintain the successful alternation of traffic across the bridge and along the Neva below.10 Such modes of movement promoted the social, economic, and political continuity of the city. In some cases, however, the bridge advanced narratives of disintegration, for it could facilitate the movement of revolutionaries and bomb-throwing terrorists through the city, as it did in Andrey Bely’s Petersburg. Literal and figurative bridge-building in and between Russia and France flourished between 1892 and 1903. In 1892 Alexander III established a new political entente between the two countries in the event of war with Germany or Italy. This agreement patched up weary diplomatic ties that had lingered during the eighty years following Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. Nicholas II, following his father’s example, pursued a stronger relationship with France as the new century approached, especially in the face of English imperial intention. On October 7, 1896, Nicholas, along with the empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, was present for the ground-laying ceremonies of the Pont Alexandre III in Paris. This structure was conceived both to commemorate newfound diplomatic ties with Russia—and their promulgators—and to greet the century as one of the centerpieces at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.11 Not long after the Alexander III Bridge completed its steel-clad leap across the Seine, the Troitsky most, designed by the French company Batignolles, was ceremoniously opened above the Neva’s murky currents in 1903.12 With its clusters of ornate tri-globed lamps, the bridge reflects the modernist aesthetics of the time and bears remarkable resemblance to the Pont Mirabeau, another bridge completed in Paris in 1897 and designed by Jean Résal and Amédée Alby, the chief architects of the Alexander III Bridge. The French president Félix Faure was present in St. Petersburg for the laying of the first stone of Trinity Bridge on August 12, 1897. Trinity Bridge served as evidence of Russia’s aesthetic affinities for French design, especially in modern urban space. Aesthetic predilection followed upon state alliances: the political rapprochement with France impacted the maps of Paris and Petersburg so much that the two capitals became the hosts of structures and toponyms symbolic of the Franco-Russian alliance.13 Trinity Bridge, like its precursor in Paris, honored and embodied the union of the two countries; unlike the Alexander III Bridge, a monumental emblem of political bond building between nations, the Trinity Bridge memorialized the twenty-fifth anniversary of Maria Fyodorovna’s marriage to the late Tsar

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The Alexander III Bridge as illustrated in a Russian journal (Stroitel’, 1899)

Alexander III.14 By dint of its designation, the Alexander III Bridge symbolized the majesty of one individual’s political might and will to cooperation. Thus in the case of the Parisian structure, urban architecture anticipated a new century of diplomatic solidarity initiated by the late tsar and evoked the bridge’s political resonance. In Petersburg the bridge, although modern and forward looking in design, was meant to invoke a solemn recollection of the past and to inscribe upon the urban map not just a metaphor of diplomatic and aesthetic zeal but also a monument to two individuals’ spiritual intimacy. The Trinity Bridge also accrued religious significance thanks to the eponymous monastery to which it led. Trinity Bridge’s significance as a spiritual symbol and the Alexander III

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Bridge’s geopolitical suggestiveness show how the external features of urban space as represented by a bridge may aspire to chronicle—to instantiate in space—matrimonial and diplomatic alignment via tangible constructions. Joining nations meant splicing the myths and histories of two countries. When José-Maria de Hérédia composed alexandrines to Alexander on the occasion of the initial stonelaying ceremony for the Alexander III Bridge on October 7, 1896, he took to the rhetoric of the ode to realize the task.15 Hérédia had already achieved renown as a stringer of sonnets and as an impeccable practitioner of the Parnassian aesthetic, but on this occasion he departed from the antiquity and Renaissance motifs of his recently published Trophées (1893) in order to intone both deference to the tsar and confidence in a firm diplomatic future between France and Russia. The ode rigorously adhered to a blend of classical and neoclassical French conventions of prosody. It is declaimed, just as classical usage would demand. Hérédia’s exaltation of the tsar and his insistence on formal precision demonstrated the ideological import of neoclassical genres as the most appropriate oratorical expression of an imperial state’s affairs. In the wake of such a poetic dissident as Rimbaud, who mangled the alexandrine and extolled the Paris Commune of 1871, the odic genre stood out as an anachronistic vestige of a bygone nonrepublican France. Hérédia merged the odic form with a content oriented toward the evolution of the Russian state, the tsar, and his posterity and diplomatic legacy, using the alexandrine as Pierre de Ronsard would have preferred: he engaged its semiotic worth as a meter germane to the establishment of textual monuments and verse-invested mythmaking.16 If Hérédia’s alexandrine magnified the bridge’s symbolic meaning, one could note that in the Russian tradition Alexander Pushkin composed his celebrated “Exegi Monumentum” (1836) in a Russian variant of the same meter.17 Pushkin—whose first name is not insignificant in this matter—boasted that the scale of his literary achievement had eclipsed even the imposing city sight in Palace Square that is the Alexandrian Column, which was designed by Frenchman Auguste de Montferrand and itself a symbol of military might.18 In the analogy between Hérédia and Pushkin, we glimpse an intriguing coincidence, and in the case of Pushkin even competition, between metrical form and the monumental cityscape. Hérédia opted for the alexandrine and the ode in an attempt to access not only a laudatory register but also to instill the moment with the poignancy of Russia’s mythical, as well as European (not to imply an equivalency of these two words), grandeur. The poet tapped into Petersburg’s legendary past in the ode’s closing lines by way of a pun:

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Come! May the future forever impose upon you The glorious surname of your ancestor Peter, Noble emperor, you will pose the great stone, Firm granite where Peace shall reign!19

Hérédia evokes Peter the Great, the figurative progenitor of Russia’s would-be European urban offspring, as a metonym of the bridge, as the initial “stone” in the bridge of diplomacy between Europe and Russia. Biblical connotations accompany this secular act, since pierre (stone) is a homonym of the proper noun Pierre, the French for the Russian Pyotr or the English Peter.20 Petersburg’s mythic beginning, also imagined as a conception—an idea borne out into space— symbolizes Russia’s European birth, and this past emerges as a reenactment of Petersburg’s inception myth on the streets of Paris.21 Along the banks of the Seine, Nicholas II consummates, as it were, his father’s diplomatic aspirations while also recreating, within the capital of French civilization and culture, the mythical stonelaying of Peter the Great’s namesake city, though both the tsar’s name and his polis refer originally to St. Peter the Apostle. Moreover, Hérédia’s deictic and proleptic reference to “this bridge” conflates the idea of the bridge with its future completion and its material reality and imbues a single stone with enormous and guaranteed creative potential.22 Hérédia’s wholesale acceptance of the myth of Petersburg’s beginning provides the fodder for an odic embellishment of that very act, allowing him to transfer it to the present celebration and to cast Peter’s resuscitated deed into the context of transnational ceremony. Since the poem erects the mythic bridge before it has been built, this textual monument effectively underscores the interrelation between “poetic architecture” and the salient urban structures that it aestheticizes—and “surmounts,” in the case of Pushkin’s proud assertion. Positioned as a thematic cusp of Hérédia’s poem, the bridge fulfills a twofold role both within the ode and on the metatextual level. As metaphor, its rhetorical function is to represent the Romanov family’s continuity, not only in the sense of a resilient and legitimate bloodline but also in its inherited obligation to secure the well-being of the Russian state within and beyond its borders. Hérédia uses words infused with religious sentiment to exalt the sanctity of genealogical continuity and of diplomacy as a fraternal bond between rulers, while also lending great deference to the paternal.23 Through his praise of “father figures” like Peter the Great and especially Alexander III, Hérédia historicizes and authenticates Nicholas II’s inherited duty to preserve ties with France and, as a performance of his family’s legacy, to place the bridge’s first stone. It

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is not surprising that after the completion of the Alexander III Bridge in 1900, the Avenue Nicolas II, which led to the bridge during the world’s fair, was described in a Russian architectural journal “as the main artery” by which the eager fairgoers reached the Place de la Concorde.24 Hérédia’s ode fleshed out the bloodlines of history, myth, and imperial power inscribed onto Parisian city space just as the intersection of real city linkages, as in the above example, reified royal genealogy through the nomenclature of streets.

B ely ’s M yt hic Bridge a nd t he Ba r r i c a d e In the endnotes to their translation of Petersburg, John Malmstad and Robert Maguire comment on the Petersburg Bridge, known today as Trinity Bridge, with a curious suggestion. The translators underscore the importance of this particular bridge in Petersburg while also tempering their comparison of city and text by suggesting that “Bely often seems to have a ‘mythic’ bridge in mind, not any real one.”25 What this could mean and what Bely’s text could purport regarding the “mythic” bridge will be the focus of attention for the remainder of this essay.26 We might begin to understand what such a bridge may be by first bringing to the fore a number of mythical rivers in Petersburg. As a point of departure we might view the bridge as an emblem of resistance—of recalcitrant human volition—with respect to the river.27 Different types of mythological rivers figure in Bely’s Petersburg. Within the novel’s opening pages the narrator evokes the “waters of Lethe” that flow beneath Petersburg’s “black and gray bridges” (24).28 It is not the only river of Hades mentioned in the novel: in chapter 7 the narrator evokes the Cocytus, the river of lamentation and a tributary of the Acheron (river of sorrow), as well as the Styx, the river of hate that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. Here Apollon Apollonovich is in his senatorial office (uchrezhdenie). This is where he imagines himself abducted by the grim ferryman Charon, just as the goddess Persephone was abducted by Pluto, the ruler of Hades (myths can be metaphors of other myths in Bely’s text!). Apollon Apollonovich is cast into the abyss, the Greeks’ mythic abyss tellingly named Tartar, and engulfed by the careening “waves” of paperwork, which the text images as the fiery currents of the Phlegethon—indeed, the river of fire in the Underworld (333). This passage conflates the Greeks’ mythical representation of hell with the oppressive tedium of the bureaucrat’s everyday life. Bely’s remetaphorization of the already-metaphorized waterways of Greek mythology transports us back to the very heart of the metropolis, where the

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streets do flood and the bureaucracy overflows with documents; we sway from the mythic realm of the dead to the bureaucracy at the center of Petersburg.29 This is all to suggest that we cannot understand the meaning of the bridge without considering the mythical value ascribed to the waterway that it obviates, a mythical value in which the bridge also participates. The famed lexicographer Vladimir Dal’ remarked that in Russian fairy tales Kalinov bridge (Kalinov most) often figures as a pathway across a swamp.30 In Slavic mythology—in the epic tales of the byliny—Kalinov bridge hovers above the foul waters of the river Smorodinka, a fiery river comparable to the Greek Phlegethon.31 This is where we may begin to understand the “mythic bridge” of Petersburg, drawing parallels between the swampy, bacilli-infested waters of the Neva and the Smorodinka, as well as between the Neva and the rivers of Hades. In the byliny, Kalinov bridge can represent an intermediary or liminal space upon which the forces of good and evil encounter one another or the meeting ground for the world of the living and that of the dead. In folklore the valiant knight (vitiaz’ ), or bogatyr’, battles an evil spirit (nechistaia sila) on Kalinov bridge. In both instances the imagined bridge provides a place of encounter for other abstracted, often absolute and oppositional, forces. In Petersburg, Trinity Bridge becomes the sight of a sinister and sensational nocturnal spectacle: Only in one place untouched by chaos, where during the day Trinity Bridge is unfurled, enormous diamondlike nests grew hazy above a sparkling swarm of ringed, luminous snakes; and curling up and uncurling, the snakes dashed outward in scintillant succession, and then, having dived downward, ascended to the surface looking like stellar strings. Nikolay Apollonovich stared [zagliadelsia] at the strings. (122)

A place marker of civilization by day, the bridge at night dissolves into resplendent, spiraling and uncurling serpentine clusters of light. This dazzling, luminescent snake makes for an unsettling and stunning image. From the snake, a creature so devilishly suggestive, radiates an almost celestial light. In the end the swampy Neva mirrors not the stars but the serpentine lights’ starlike reflection. Heaven and earth seem to change places, and this phantasmagoric inversion occurs across a structure whose materiality has receded into a sinister darkness. Light suffuses the vitreous water in such a way that it becomes an attribute of the river as much as of the bridge and, by analogy, of the sky; instead of opposing one another, the illuminated bridge and the river act together in mesmerizing concert. Once night renders the bridge materially indistinct, it becomes scaffolding for the splicing of disparate modernist metaphors and optical

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illusions, albeit ones forcefully distracting, bearing their own disconcerting claims to materiality. As noted in the introduction to this volume, swarming serves as Bely’s descriptor of his creative output—the novel—in its inceptive state. Swarming suggests unrestrained creative pulsation and the emergence of new visual forms, which paradoxically emanate from the static, but electrified and visually misleading, medium of the bridge. By day the bridge constitutes an ostensible index of civilization and a node of networked space over the unstable river waters. Oftentimes in Petersburg the narrator or the characters find their gaze riveted on the bridge as though by an irresistible ocular inertia (in the previous passage Nikolay Apollonovich could not help but stare at the structure’s mesmerizing lights). B. M. Kirikov offers a modern-day description of the view from Trinity Bridge: “[i]t is here that with especial force one may get a sense of the spatial expanse and the precise organization of perspectives essential to the city.”32 The view from the bridge evokes a sense of the strict structural regularity of Petersburg and the strength of this impression leads us to wonder whether the city itself is so structured, or whether its precise geometry imposes organization upon our eyes. The bridge does provide a different platform for viewing urban space than does the street and offers a different perspective than the vista from above.33 From the vantage point of the bridge, unsolid elements—air and water—become all the more perceptible. These elemental forces contrast with the bridge’s “cast-iron” rigidity (as in chugunnyi most ), although despite its weighty materiality, the bridge seems already precariously poised at the “edge of the earth” (55). Mention of the bridge often entails a reference to water (“greenish bacilli-infested water”) and to wind (“cold wind of the near-Neva”),34 elements unstable and suggestive of an underlying volatility of material integrity.35 Nikolay Apollonovich has contemplated suicide on Trinity Bridge: a plunge into the abyss of the Neva underscores the proximity of life and death provided by the structure, as well as the possibility of committing the body to the domain of liquid, amorphous elements. Here are his words: “O, grand bridge glowing with electricity! O, green waters teeming with bacilli! I recall one fateful moment; on a September night I leaned across your damp railings; and in a flash; my body would have fled into the fog. . . .” (55, 214). This utterance suggests an analogy between the deep waters of the Neva and Petersburg’s ubiquitous fog that is capable of engulfing and extracting the body from view, an act tantamount to doing away with life in general. A mythical bridge therefore proves to be a rich concept, one that is irreducible to a single meaning or opposition. A bridge draws its mythical connotation from the potent idea of a collision, merger, or reconciliation of opposites:

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all bridges imply a fantasy of enjoining. The drawbridge, however, instantiates a heightened anxiety of connection—one might even say that it belies a fear that the bridge-myth of connection could come true. Armed with a drawbridge— a contraption far too prosaic to appear in the stuff of folklore and epic tales— the modern bridge takes on a new valency connoting toggled connections and control. We could imagine the drawbridge as something akin to a surreal door, hinged between city space on the one side and the river depths on the other. Thus we could also view the bridge as a locus where seemingly united or whole entities fall apart, disintegrate, or just disappear. We might recall here the gripping scene in Sergey Eisenstein’s film October, where the horse, teetering on the edge of the drawbridge, eventually plummets into the Neva’s engulfing current.36 The drawbridge, like a door, casts into relief stark contrasts, exposing the gaping abyss of nature as the only alternative to life in the city at the other end of the bridge. In the throes of fear-driven contemplation of Petersburg, Apollon Apollonovich imagines the city’s bridges as grafted upon its many disparate islands and as the sole guarantees of stability and immobility, inhibiting the islands from floating away: “Apollon Apollonovich did not want to think anymore: restless islands—crush them, crush them! Fetter them to the earth with the iron of an enormous bridge and pierce through them with arrowed avenues in all directions. . . .” (21). In his attempt to assign meaning to the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the other bridge across the Neva that figures prominently in Bely’s novel, Apollon Apollonovich confronts the alarming imperative of civilization’s triumph over nature. The interjection “[c]rush them!” refers to Petersburg’s islands and to the lower classes who reside on them—those swarming masses who may instigate revolution. Moreover, this injunction is not the direct utterance of Apollon but rather a discursive “stamp” reflective of the impulses associated with Petersburg’s inception and, therefore, with the civilizing endeavors of Peter the Great. Bridges would seem to restrict the islands, to take charge of their imagined volatility by clasping them together and controlling them. Here the construction of lines of communication between the islands signifies the process of civilization: the bridge forces the natural environment—its isolated and isolating islands—to adhere to an unbroken “syntax” of human connectedness. This violence inflicted upon the islands impresses a social urgency of integration between disparate individuals and classes so much that the revolt of the proletariat can and does become likened to an elemental force or stikhiia in its own right: Don’t let the crowd of slippery shadows in from the islands! Be afraid of island dwellers! They have the right to settle freely in the empire: that is probably why

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Malmstad and Maguire write in their commentary to the novel that “[t]he bridges across the Neva can be drawn to allow ships to pass or, in case of civil emergencies, to control the flow of people from one part of the city to another.”38 For us especially, this minor detail regarding the relation between the bridge and the control of criminal activity intimates the moment of contact between the novel’s plot and the city’s specificity. Moreover, the police’s negligence to raise the drawbridge and thereby cancel the possibility of narrative movement through space further demonstrates how, in Petersburg, narrative authority lies in the hands (or even the finger, as we already know on a more symbolic level, given the bridge button’s virtuality) of the authorities. The trajectory through the city by upstart revolutionary Alexander Dudkin, who lives on Vasilievsky Island, would not be possible without the benefit of bridges. It is telling that he must cross the Nikolaevsky Bridge in order to reach the Ableukhov residence and deliver the bomb to Nikolay Apollonovich, who had been enlisted in the revolutionary party’s (botched) parricide plot. Nikolay’s genealogical contiguity with Apollon Apollonovich, which allows for constant spatial proximity with his father, makes him well suited to carry out the party’s destructive designs. And since the Ableukhov home serves as an allegory of both paternal and state authority—Apollon Apollonovich is, after all, a senator and head of a government institution—we witness how the bridge creates proximities of power by extending state authority from the imperial center and into the proletarian islands. Dudkin, who abhors the Russian capital, remarks how “from the bridge Petersburg lunges this way with its avenue arrows” (24, 32). Inclusion of the bridge into a visual slice of the cityscape can activate associations with the bridge’s ambiguity—its symbolic and unstable duality as both borderland and solid structure upon which entities collide. “Behind himself Alexander Ivanovich left the bridge with its diamondlike sparkles. Further, beyond the bridge . . . that very same mysterious Horseman raised his bronze laurel wreath above the Neva” (98–99). The view of The Bronze Horseman that Dudkin encounters on his way back to Vasilievsky Island is reminiscent of postcard scenes and serves as a tacit index of urban architecture’s ubiquity, its preexistence to the viewing subject, and its impact as such on the subject’s psyche.39 The bridge, with its ambiguous charge, contributes to

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this impact and might act in part as a symbolic pretext to the lyrical digression on the conflicted duality of Russia that follows in the text. Yet the focus on the statue of Peter, which is menacing to Dudkin, leads us to wonder who really is doing the viewing, the young revolutionary or the Bronze Horseman, a symbol of imperial might. Considering the revolutionary plot against the senator, who embodies state authority and parental power, it implies an impingement upon state structure as well as upon the family, which works as a metaphor of the state. In this sense, the fantastical animation of the Bronze Horseman, who will dash across Nikolaevsky Bridge on his way to Dudkin’s apartment later in the novel, represents a hallucinated rebuke to Dudkin’s spatial encroachment on the senator-father and an assertion of stately might against Dudkin’s impulse to disorder. The Bronze Horseman’s only utterances to Dudkin imply both the familial structure of subjugation to the state and the cardinal continuity of dynastic succession. The Horseman exclaims, “Greetings, my son!” and then “Petro Primo Catharina Secunda.”40 With this, the Bronze Horseman begins to melt, flowing into Dudkin in a molten stream of metal. An emblem of power and paternal linkage, the bridge then refers to more than itself. This referential indeterminacy of the bridge in the text enhances its mythic, abstract status while also foregrounding the volatility of spatially and mentally mapped referents.41 In Petersburg, in which topography is famously fluid, it proves difficult to identify the true referent behind Bely’s “Petersburg” or “cast-iron” bridge (Peterburgskii most, chugunnyi most ). L. K. Dolgopolov has noted the ambiguity of the designation but submits that contextual clues lead us to identify the “Great Petersburg bridge” (Bolshoy Peterburgsky most ) with Nikolaevsky Bridge.42 Malmstad and Maguire, however, think otherwise, citing the fact that Trinity Bridge joined the administrative side of the capital with the Petersburg Side—the original island on which the city was founded—and for that reason was often referred to as Peterburgsky most.43 The bridge, which serves as a node of movement from one point to another, can be said to embody or encase the motion of metaphor. We have invested the bridge as a conduit for urban traffic, and this perspective characterizes the bridge in its more stable, utilitarian function. But what happens when a surge of social unrest—Bely’s “black shadows”—halts that very movement?44 After all, the drawbridge on Trinity Bridge serves as a hinge—a door of sorts—between central and peripheral Petersburg, and in tow with these categories, the drawbridge mediates islands housing the powerful and the oppressed, the privileged and the socially subordinate. The bridge can act as a space of subversion or peripety, in the idiom of our project. Its strategic significance derives from its role as a buttress for movement,

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a support and a link to other possible routes, along with its potential as a temporary “staging” ground for the obstruction or cessation of the very movement it facilitates. Once outfitted with a barricade, the bridge calls attention to its own weighty materiality, its capacity to stifle the city, and its underlying social, political, and economic import. Describing the social unrest during the dwindling days of the Russian empire in The Last Days of Imperial Power (Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti ), Alexander Blok inevitably focuses on the bridge. The following passage refers to the insurrections that erupted February 27, 1917, a crucial date for the royal family: Around one o’clock in the morning at the palace, news was received about General Ivanov’s assignment. General Komarov, who was in charge of the palace, asked Khabalov not to occupy the palace; Zankevich contested and the question would have remained unresolved if the grand prince Mikhail Alexandrovich, who did not manage to make it to Gatchina, had not stopped by at that minute and disagreed with Komarov. At a meeting, the grand prince, Khabalov, and Zankevich selected the Peter and Paul Fortress [as a place of strategic defense], but the commandant’s aide Baron Stal, who had been called to the telephone, announced that armored cars and weapons stood on Trinity Square, while on Trinity Bridge there were barricades.45

Here the concentrated energies of political upheaval and social revolt dislodge the authorities’ plans to establish a defensive outpost at the Peter and Paul Fortress, which was situated on Hare Island. On a more general level, the revolutionaries’ efforts counteract the movement of bodies and goods across the structure. I submit that such human-led reconfiguration of bridge space may undermine its semiotic value as a monumental assertion of the tsar’s authority. By obstructing and fragmenting bridge space, the resurgent parties suggestively wreak havoc on symbols with which the bridge is fraught: the tsar’s “electrified” will as well as the embedded meaning of matrimonial and dynastic endurance. The barricade embodies an active attempt to undo the imperial expediency—and the royal family’s exclusive control over narratives of city, country, and society—associated with the bridge and its button that triggered the ceremonial joining of the fashionable city center with the “derelict” Petersburg Side, a zone of “urban limbo” at the turn of the twentieth century.46 As the embodiment of modern architecture, technology, and “modernized” imperial might, the bridge would assert a type of imperial narrative control over the island were it not for the barricade and those behind it—the marginalized masses—who aim to breach historical and political stability. Here I would like to return to Paul Valéry’s analogy between modern mechanics and the smooth functioning of a social mechanism. In the imperial city, the bridge is rendered

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as a crucial node in the swift—albeit gruesome—deployment of state might. In Sergey Eisenstein’s film October, produced in 1927 in honor of the decennial celebration of the revolution, the drawbridge-raising scene further illustrates this point, for it shows how a drawbridge can reify and maintain social division.

Speaking of the Paris Commune of 1871, which for the Soviet regime came to represent a principal model of the proletariat’s fervor to remedy social inequity through revolt, Walter Benjamin contends that “[t]he burning of Paris was a fitting conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction.”47 Burning buildings in Paris during the Commune meant protecting barricades for the recalcitrant working class just as the meaning of Haussmannian boulevards, before the Commune, could be interpreted as facilitating social stability and the economic prosperity of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, although in a very different light, the barricade upon Trinity Bridge provides a response to the narrative of power with which it was imbued during the Petersburg bicentennial celebrations.48 It may be said to highlight Michel de Certeau’s contention that the bridge, “[a]s the transgression of the limit . . . represents a departure, an attack on a state . . . the ‘betrayal’ of an order.”49 My analysis begins with a bridge having a button that reinforces the state and ends with a bridge having a barricade that resists it. It charts the overlay of meaning onto the bridge through technology, authority, and textual representation, an overlay that comes to a halt when the raw reality of the barricade disconcerts the bridge’s insistence on unity and its proneness to multiple layers of abstract meaning. Modernist texts, such as Bely’s Petersburg, take up the question of the city and, inevitably, the questions of social cohesion and communication with which it is coextensive. Subtending the city/text dynamic, so important to our project, is an implicit relationship between the author and his urban dwelling, one that reveals the impact textual mappings may exert upon the capital city. Paris’s Baron Haussmann and Petersburg ’s Andrey Bely both recognized the “destructive” nature of their artistic enterprises: Benjamin notes that Haussmann attributed the title “destructive artist” (artiste démolisseur) to himself,50 and Bely famously stated in an article entitled “Art” that “my creative work is a bomb” (tvorchestvo moe—bomba).51 By placing these two figures in parallel we are able to consider how the reconstruction of a cityscape (in Paris) or revolutionary fervor against the city as a structure of aristocratic hegemony in a text (Petersburg) finds at its core a similar irritation between society and city and the adhesive, legitimating myths of power that would bind the two. Bely’s literary intoning of burgeoning social revolution and his generic and formal dismantling of literary models—that is, the proverbial death of the novel—register

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Petersburg’s social reconfiguration through ideas, sounds, and aesthetic forms and not through the literal remaking of the cityscape. One further intriguing contrast between the symbolist writer and the urban architect lies in Haussmann’s battle against the barricade and Bely’s depiction of a revolution (as metaphor would suggest) against not only the bridge as a symbol of Petersburg’s inception and the imperial idea of the bridge button but also against the buttonlike cartographic dot denoting the imperial capital’s preeminence on the map.  1. The architecture historian B. M. Kirikov calls Trinity Bridge “tsar-bridge,” likening it to an avenue and noting that with its 23.5-meter width and slightly more than 580-meter length, it reigned as the largest bridge across the Neva for over sixty years, from 1903 until the completion of the Alexander Nevsky Bridge in 1965 (B. M. Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburga kontsa XIX—nachala XX veka: Eklektika, Modern, Neoklassitsism [St. Petersburg: Kolo, 2006], 243). For a detailed account of the architectural features and the construction of Trinity Bridge, see “Frantsuzskii most Petersburga” in Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburga. It is also worth noting that the original drawbridge mechanism featured a rotating section, not an ascending (bascule) one. See Anzhelika Likhacheva, “Troitsky most,” http://www.opeterburge.ru/bridge_380.html. 2. The illustrated weekly journal Niva makes mention of the button in the article “Nedelia Petra v Peterburge,” published at the time of the bicentennial festivities (Niva 21, vol. 34 [St. Petersburg: 1903], 422). Other sources express skepticism regarding the very existence of a button. French and Russian engineering journals focus attention on the electric drawbridge apparatus but do not allude to any button. In Iz zhizni Peterburga 1890–1910-kh godov (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 1999), the authors D. A. Zasosov and V. I. Pyzin do not confirm the button’s existence, noting that only newspapers feature it in their accounts of the ceremony. It seems likely that if the button did exist, it functioned symbolically as a sign of modernity rather than as the principal means for lowering and raising the drawbridge. In this paper I will speculate as to the button’s symbolic narrative meaning; I am therefore more interested in the button as an abstraction rather than as a confirmable material fact. 3. Andrey Bely’s novel Petersburg represents movement through the city. The critical lens I construct here will consider this form of “narrative” within the parameters of narrative control. 4. See “An Electric Drawbridge,” Science 13, no. 325 (April 26, 1889): 312–13: “[o]ne of the latest applications of the electric motor which has excited much interest . . . is that of the turning of drawbridges” and “it is not until recently that the motor for this purpose has supplanted steam, and the slow, laborious method of the long lever worked by three men” (312). These words serve as a preamble to a technical discussion concerning a newly constructed electric drawbridge in Connecticut. According to the author, applying electricity to the drawbridge apparatus meant reducing traffic delays and the need for manpower: with electricity it took only two minutes and one man to supervise

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the lowering and raising of the drawbridge, while without electricity three men needed six minutes to perform the same tasks—a holdup far too costly and tedious. Comparatively, the Trinity Bridge drawbridge mechanism completed one rotation in three and a half minutes (“Le Pont Troïtsky à Saint-Pétersbourg: Commande électrique de la partie tournante,” Le Génie civil 46.12, no. 1180 [1905]: 196). 5. Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1997). Citing the French poet Paul Valéry, Benjamin evokes “the smooth functioning of the social mechanism” while drawing an implicit parallel between the functioning of society and of modern machinery—an idea to which I will return in my conclusion. Here it is noteworthy that the proliferation of quick, hand-activated sequences constitutes a key to the experience of modern life: “The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps” (131). Benjamin also underscores “the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like” (132). I thank Ulla Hakanen for this reference. 6. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 105. The essay was originally written in 1951. 7. “‘Nedelia Petra’ v S.-Peterburge,” 422. 8. Following the construction of the bridge and its coextensive granite neoclassical embankment, the Petersburg Side underwent rapid development and remains, as Kirikov notes, a haven of buildings exemplary of the Russian style moderne (referring to the Russian take on Art Nouveau) and neoclassical styles (Arkhitektura Peterburga, 259). Similarly, after the Liteyny Bridge was finished in 1879, it facilitated the industrial development of the Vyborg side (ibid., 244–45). 9. See Alyson Tapp’s “‘The Streetcar Prattle of Life’: Reading and Riding St. Petersburg’s Trams” in this volume. 10. A. Dmitriev, “Mostovye sooruzheniia zagranitsei,” Stroitel’ (1901): 801–74. In this extensive article published in an architectural journal, Dmitriev surveys the results of various bridge-building competitions in Europe, America, Russia, and Australia. Because such competitions aimed to garner advancements in engineering, Dmitriev lends particular attention to drawbridge designs, affirming that “various constructions of the drawbridge section . . . bear[s] an almost decisive meaning for Petersburg bridges” (804). 11. Just as Trinity Bridge functions as a crucial “narrative” node in the St. Petersburg bicentennial ceremonies, the Alexander III Bridge “serves as a connecting link between the Champs-Elysées Exhibition and the Esplanade des Invalides” at the World’s Fair (Stroitel’ 17–18 [1899]: 663; see also Karl Baedeker, Paris and Its Environs with Routes from London to Paris, 14th ed. [ Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900]). This edition of Baedeker’s Paris guide opens with maps and a preamble regarding the “International Exhibition,” mentioning an itinerary along the Avenue Nicolas II and across the Pont Alexandre III. 12. The Trinity Bridge embodies the graceful elegance of a steel, granite, and castiron design. Batignolles was one of several French companies that achieved particular renown for its metal structures at the turn of the twentieth century and had already built bridges in Russia by 1855. A vigorous exportation campaign beginning in 1880 led to the

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construction of a number of bridges outside of France, including, of course, Trinity Bridge (Anne Burnel, La Société de construction des Batignolles de 1914–1939 : Histoire d’un déclin [Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1995], 40). 13. A. N. Chesnokova, Inostrantsy i ikh potomki v Peterburge: nemtsy, frantsuzy, britantsy: 1703–1917: istoriko-kraevedcheckii ocherk (St. Petersburg: Satis, 2003), 204.The France-Russia Friendship Monument was erected in honor of French President Emile Loubet’s visit to Russia in 1902. Loubet was present for the opening ceremonies of this monument, which portrays a personified encounter between France and Russia. The president’s visit also prompted the renaming of the Gagarin Embankment (Gagarinskaya naberezhnaia)—where the French embassy was located—to the French Embankment (Frantsuzskaya naberezhnaia), an appellation that, however, did not take hold. In Paris at the time of the World’s Fair, the Avenue Nicolas II (now the Avenue Winston Churchill) directed eager attendees toward the bridge. Kirikov enumerates a number of other toponymic additions to Paris in the wake of renewed relations with Russia (Arkhitektura Peterburga, 247). 14. “Nedelia Petra v Peterburge,” 426. 15. As early as the twelfth century this twelve-syllable verse came to denote a panegyric to Alexander the Great ( Jean-Michel Gouvard, La versification [Paris: PUF, 1999], 135). Hérédia’s “Salute to the Emperor” does not resemble the poet’s other works, which consist primarily of meticulous sonnets on antiquity, historical figures, mythology, and nature. This long odic tribute does not even appear in the two-volume collection of his oeuvre; only a lapidary pair of tercets—and not mere excerpts from the “Salute” at that—are to be found in the section “Verses of Homage and of Circumstance.” Not representative of Hérédia’s works, the “Salute” constitutes a performance of the classical ode with its basic oratorical structure and civic import; thus it embodies the generic criteria of homage. Hérédia channels the “language of the Gods” (la langue des Dieux) in order to initiate the ode, reiterating the royal family’s deified status by praising the Tsarina’s “divine tenderness” (divine douceur), and in this way he couples oratorical style with the cult hymn commonly encountered in the invocation of a deity. One might conclude that by “language” Hérédia refers not only to the French tongue but also to the ode as a proper idiom of converse with such dignified subjects. 16. Ibid., 135–36. As Gouvard notes, citing Ronsard’s 1565 treatise on French poetry, the alexandrine was thought to suit best the solemnity and celebratory pathos of heroic feats. 17. For more on the semantic relevance of meter and the alexandrine in representations of monuments real and textual, see Michael Wachtel, The Development of Russian Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 254–55. Wachtel remarks that Pushkin uses a modified Russian alexandrine. 18. The Alexandrian Column represents a very different time in Franco-Russian relations, namely, it harks back to Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of Alexander I’s army. It suffices to cite the first stanza of Pushkin’s poem to see how his verse targets city space and symbolism as a rival to literary greatness: “Ia pamniatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi, / . . . / . . . / Voznessia vyshe on glavoiu nepokornoi / Alexandriiskogo stolpa” [ I erected a monument to myself made not with hands / . . . / . . . / With its unruly head it ascended higher / Than the Alexander Column] (Alexander Pushkin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v desiati tomakh, vol. 3 [Moscow: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1957], 373).

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19. “Viens! . . . Puisse l’avenir t’imposer à jamais / Le surnom glorieux de ton ancêtre Pierre, / Noble empereur, qui vas sceller la grande pierre, / Granit inébranlable où siégera la Paix!” ( José-Maria de Hérédia, “‘Salut à l’empereur’: stances dites par M. Paul Mounet de la Comédie-française à la cérémonie de la pose de la première pierre du pont Alexandre III, devant Leurs Majestés impériales de Russie” [Paris: A. Lemerre, 1896]). 20. The biblical intertext I have in mind is Matthew 16:18, in which Christ speaks: “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” 21. Regarding the textual foundations of the so-called Petersburg myth, see V. N. Toporov, “Peterburg i peterburgskij tekst: mir, iazyk, prednaznachenie,” in Peterburgskii tekst russkoi literatury (St. Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 2003). Apropos Peter’s presence in Paris, it is no myth that in the midst of the Northern Wars with Sweden the Russian emperor traveled to Paris in 1717 in order to assert his status as the ruler of a militarily ascendant Russia and to solidify an alliance with the French state ( Jean Béranger, “Pierre le Grand,” in Dictionnaire du Grand Siècle, ed. François Bluche [Paris: Fayard, 1990], 1203). 22. Jean-Louis Meunier, “Circonstances et architecture ou du monosyllable dans le Salut à l’Empereur de José-Maria de Hérédia,” Bulletin des Etudes parnassiennes 2–2 (1981). Meunier mentions the constant demonstrative associated with pont but does not expand upon this feature (27). He also notes how the pun on pierre playfully implies Nicholas II’s ancestral provenance from “stone” (28). 23. The poet, recalling the war of 1812 in the fifth stanza, dismisses enmity between the French and the Russians by citing their struggle as a necessary and anticipatory precursor to diplomatic ties and by describing the war as though the combating parties were participating in a blood-brother ritual: “Et sur le ciel, au loin, ce Dôme éblouissant, / Garde encore des héros de l’époque lointaine / Où Russes et Français en un tournoi sans haine, / Prévoyant l’avenir, mêlaient déjà leur sang” [And far away in the sky this dazzling Dome / Still protects the heroes of that distant time / When Russians and Frenchmen, in hateless competition / Anticipated the future, already mingling their blood]. The metonymic dome in these lines refers to the Invalides, the military museum and site of Napoleon Bonaparte’s tomb, which is located on the left bank just beyond the Alexander III Bridge. With further regard to inheritance and to the continuity of the state and family lines, see also the last four stanzas of the poem: “Car Alexandre, avec l’Empire t’a légué / l’honneur d’avoir conquis l’amour d’un people libre!” [For Alexander with his Empire has bequeathed you / the honor of having conquered the love of a free people!]; “Tsar, écoute aujourd’hui la Russie et la France / Bénir, avec le tien, le saint nom paternal.” [Tsar, listen today to Russia and France / Blessing, along with yours, the sacred paternal name.]; “Achève donc son oeuvre. Héritier de sa gloire, / De ta loyale main prends l’outil vierge encore” [Finish his work, then. Beneficiary of his glory, / With your loyal hand take up the virgin instrument] (Hérédia, “‘Salut à l’empereur’”). 24. Stroitel’ 17–18 (1899): 662. 25. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1978), 319. If not otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations of Bely’s text are taken from Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), with page citations noted in the text. All translations are my own.

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26. I suggest we understand “mythic” to mean “imaginary” or “abstract” here without neglecting to consider how folk mythology may inform both the imaginary and the abstract. 27. Georg Simmel writes that “the bridge symbolizes the extension of our volitional sphere over space” (“Bridge and Door,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach [ London: Routledge, 1997], 66). 28. In Greek mythology the Lethe flows through the Underworld, and it symbolizes forgetfulness of the earthly life left behind by those who have reached Hades. 29. According to Greek mythology, all the rivers of Hades met at the center of the Underworld, where they formed a great marsh; Petersburg’s central and primary waterway, the Neva, bears a hydronym that derives from the Finnish for “swamp” or “marsh.” Maguire and Malmstad make note of this in their translation of Petersburg (346). 30. Vladimir Dal’, “Kalina,” in Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (Moscow: M. O. Vol’f, 1905), 191. 31. The river’s name most likely derives from the Old Church Slavonic word smrad, meaning “stench.” 32. Kirikov, Arkhitektura Peterburga, 243. 33. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), especially 91–93. De Certeau contrasts traversing city space at street level with taking a panoramic view of the city, understanding each metaphorically as operations similar to writing and to reading, respectively. In keeping with the problem of vantage points, I would submit that the bridge allows us to embrace a unique vision of city space. To stand on the bridge entails a view unlike that of the typical street-level perspective, and to stand is not “to write” in de Certeau’s parlance, nor does this view correspond to the all-encompassing, panoramic vision of the reader. 34. The passages from which I draw these recurring epithets can be found on pages 56, 126, 184, 214, and 331 of the Nauka edition. 35. On this particular aspect of experiencing modernity, see Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 36. October: Ten Days That Shook the World, DVD, dir. Sergey Eisenstein et al. (Mosfilm Studios, 1927; Riegelsville, PA: Corinth Films, 1998). 37. Bely modified this passage for the 1922 edition of Petersburg, and here is Maguire and Malmstad’s translation of it: “As for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people, oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! Black and damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dismantled . . . Too late . . . And the shadows thronged across the bridge. And the dark shadow of the stranger. Rhythmically swinging in his hand was a not exactly small, yet not very large bundle” (13). In the 1916 edition of the text Bely explicitly identifies the space of Petersburg as imperial, thereby highlighting the tension between the populace and the powerful. 38. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 305. 39. St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a typical postcard emblem of Petersburg, also figures in this perspective. 40. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 214.

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41. Apollon Apollonovich’s residence evinces an analogous ambiguity of location since, as L. K. Dolgopolov notes, the senator’s residence in Petersburg is located both at the English and the Gagarin embankments on the Neva, occupying different sides of Admiralty Island (L. K. Dolgopolov, “Roman A. Belogo Peterburg,” in Bely, Peterburg, 610–11). 42. L. K. Dolgopolov, “Tekstologicheskie printsipy izdaniia,” in Bely, Peterburg, 632n11. 43. Bely, Petersburg, trans. Maguire and Malmstad, 319. 44. David Frisby, “Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” in Tracing Modernity: Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City, ed. Mari Hvattum and Christian Hermansen (New York: Routledge, 2004), 271–90. In this article Frisby aptly refers to the impoverished masses as “the dark side of modernity,” a description tied to Baudelaire’s thematic treatment of the “sickly population” (279). One might also read in Bely’s words a reformulation of the epithet temnyi narod (the dark people), itself referring to the uneducated populace, even riffraff, of Russian society. 45. Alexander Blok, “Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti,” in Sobranie sochinenii v 8 tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1962), 242. 46. Here, I am co-opting a term from Polina Barskova’s essay “The Fluid Margins: Flâneurs of the Karpovka River,” in this volume. 47. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” trans. Quintin Hoare, in Charles Baudelaire, 176. 48. Paris underwent extensive remodeling at the hands of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the 1860s; Petersburg did not incur a similar grand-scale renovation of city space, although structures like the Trinity Bridge bear the mark of the relationship between society and city space (Maguire and Malmstad’s note on the drawbridge proves as much). Walter Benjamin writes of Haussmann’s reforms as a bourgeoissponsored reconfiguration of the capital aimed at thwarting revolution. If motives of social control and the perpetuation of bourgeois ideals underlie the baron’s modifications (“strategic beautification,” in the idiom of the time), then one might conclude that the Russian authorities, besides appreciating the aesthetic and economic merits of Trinity Bridge, saw in it a proper addition to impose upon the matrix of mapped imperial space. See Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 175. 49. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 128, my emphasis. 50. Benjamin, “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 174. 51. Andrey Bely, “Iskusstvo,” in Simvolizm kak miroponimanie (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 241.

9 28 Nevsky Prospect The Sewing Machine, the Seamstress, and Narrative     

Since the eighteenth century, two spires have pierced the sky of Petersburg and punctuated its skyline. They belong to the Admiralty Building, which is at the bottom of Nevsky Prospect and located on the right side of the Neva River, and to the Peter and Paul Cathedral on the left side. Andrey Bely in Petersburg calls these spires needles, although the residents of the city refer only to the Admiralty spire as a needle. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the globe held up by two women soaring over the cupola of the House of Singer on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Catherine Canal introduced into the city skyline another architectural high point that was neither a house of worship nor a government building.1 It was affiliated with commerce and the growing role of foreign investment in the Russian economy. The needle advertised by Singer— the sharp instrument of the modern sewing machine—was not metaphoric but real. Instead of the sublime vertical trajectory of the spires, this needle had a very practical function, whose purpose in the words of a contemporary journalist was to liberate the tired fingers of the hardworking seamstress and bring to an end the “sad song of the needle.”2

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House of Singer The House of Singer at 28 Nevsky Prospect, headquarters of the Singer Manufacturing Company in Russia, was located on prime real estate across from the majestic neoclassical Kazan Cathedral. The two buildings, including their cupolas, offered a striking juxtaposition of neoclassical and modern architecture, but some considered the proximity of the Singer building to the cathedral unseemly. Its eclectic and art nouveau architecture became the source of controversy among the city’s preservationists, even though Nicholas II approved the project on May 16, 1902. The well-known architect Pavel Syuzor designed the House of Singer, using plate glass extensively, especially in the cupola, globe, and internal atriums. Built between 1902 and 1904, after the demolition of the eighteenth-century house that stood on the site, it became the country’s first modern office building. As the city’s main architectural emblem of modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century, it had steel girders, completely fireproof floors and ceilings, two interior downspouts, and a unique heating system that kept the roof gutters clear of ice and snow during the winter—all new features in Petersburg construction.3 Singer purchased the real estate from its original owner for more than one million rubles, and legend has it that the company intended to build the first high-rise in Petersburg, approximately at the time when it was planning to build its forty-story office tower in New York, which become New York’s tallest building. The company, however, was not familiar with Petersburg regulations limiting the height of buildings (except churches) to 23.5 meters, the height of the Winter Palace and residence of the tsar.4 The way the company was able to get around the restrictions was by placing a 2.8-meter translucent cupola topped by a large glass globe over the House of Singer’s seven stories (six plus mansard floor), making it the tallest building on Nevsky Prospect, which it is still today. “The huge house of Singer on Nevsky across from the Kazan Cathedral has almost taken off its scaffolding,” wrote Sergey R. Mintslov in his diary on November 8, 1903. “It is made of iron and stone. The builders have overdone the gold to let us know that they have money, but that’s fine. All in all, Petersburg is smartening up. It’s time to exchange our gloomy boxes called houses for something more comfortable and beautiful!”5 The construction of the building— lavish outside and inside—cost 1.5 million rubles. The House of Singer opened its doors on December 12, 1904, with a special art exhibit which featured its

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machine embroideries, including the Russian empire’s national costumes.6 The exhibit was organized by the Red Cross as a charitable event the proceeds of which would go to the sick and wounded soldiers in the Far East. The purpose of the building was not only to house the Singer offices, showrooms, storage areas, and actual workspaces for seamstresses but also to lease office space to high-end foreign and Russian banks and businesses in Petersburg. The 1913 address book Ves’ Peterburg (All Petersburg), the equivalent of today’s phone book with both “white” and “yellow” pages and other important information for the urban dweller, lists several American companies as having offices in the building.7 The top floor, which was covered by a modern glass atrium, was the location of Singer’s corporate headquarters in Russia, which managed the company’s extensive Russian market.8 Although there are no known descriptions of the city vista from the top floor like those we have from the famed Ivanov Tower on Tavricheskaya, the large windows of the corporate offices offered the company’s senior officials a majestic panoramic view of the city below. In the words of Michel de Certeau, the panoramic view would have given Singer’s high officials not only the “voluptuous pleasure” of “seeing the whole, of looking down on” the city, but also a sense of the company’s panoptic conquest of the Russian market, a point reinforced by the women lifting the globe into the Petersburg sky.9 A large sculpture of the American eagle by Artemy Ober, located on the corner of the building at the intersection of Nevsky and Catherine Canal, symbolized American economic power. The glass globe over the glass cupola represented the multinational scope of the company, whose largest foreign market at the beginning of the twentieth century was Russia.10 The name of the company in large Cyrillic letters on the equatorial strip that girdled the illuminated globe served as an emblem of the global reach of the Singer sewing machine and the importance of foreign investment in the Russian economy. One of the standard Singer advertisements featured the Colossus of Rhodes rising high above the city below and pointing to the Singer machine in the sky, its vertical trajectory symbolizing the company’s panoptic commercial vision. Like the direction of the gaze of the women straining to lift the globe over the House of Singer, the Colossus is looking up, as if to impart a sublime meaning to the sewing machine, an expression of what we could call a “commercial sublime.”11 As one of the city’s well-known landmarks, the House of Singer was represented not only on postcards, but also in paintings and literary texts. In contrast to the panoramic view, as well as the symbolic sublime gaze upward, the view of the city from the street is relational, or partial, not absolute; it is defined by

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movement through the city on foot or transport, unlike the static perspective of the birds-eye view. As Alyson Tapp shows, one of the ways at the beginning of the century that the view at street level—typically framed and therefore limited—was represented is through the window of a tram or another moving vehicle. An example of such a perspective is Nikolay Otsup’s nostalgic poem “Autumn” (“Osen’,” 1920), written after he emigrated, in which the poet reminisces about an autumn tram ride down Nevsky and captures its sites through the tram window. One of the framed images is of the House of Singer:

[Tell us, House of Singer with your globe Transparent in the arms of women Above the glass and iron of the roof, Do you love late autumn?]

Tellingly, the persona’s gaze is directed not at the building at street level but up toward the globe embraced by the women, as seen from below from a moving vehicle. The same is true of Nikolay Zabolotsky’s representation of the “winged” globe straining to lift the name of Singer into the sky, which the poet views from the vantage point of an automobile:

[There Nevsky shines and is melancholy [. . . ] As if embraced by frenzy, Through fog, melancholy, and benzene, The winged globe straining above the tower Lifted up the name of “Singer.”]

Like Otsup’s, Zabolotsky’s image in “Evening Bar,” written in 1926 when the Singer name was no longer on the globe, is retrospective and nostalgic: the building had been renamed House of Books (Dom knigi) in 1919.14 And like Otsup’s, his gaze inscribes a trajectory of looking up to that which is no more.

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History and memory aside, the two ways of viewing the city—bird’s-eye view and street level—discussed by de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, of which he gives clear preference to the street level, suggest the relationship of part and whole, one of the key interests of modernism. If we consider the gesture associated with the needle, seamstress, and sewing machine, it can be said to bring parts together with the purpose of constructing a new whole, a gesture that is aligned in opposition to fragmenting modernity, which in the case of Petersburg’s revolutionary modernity symbolizes a break with the past. But before considering the narrative implications of sewing in literary and visual texts, let us look at the narrative strategies of Singer’s advertisement campaign that successfully introduced the first mass-marketed modern material objects into Russian domestic space.

S inger’s M a rket ing St ra t eg i es The Singer sewing machine entered the everyday life of Russian women with a bang at the beginning of the twentieth century. It became a woman’s machine associated with waged and unwaged female labor. A large part of Singer’s success was the introduction of credit, or purchase on the installment plan, which made its sewing machines (the cheapest cost 25 rubles) accessible to many Russian households, urban and even rural.15 Advertisements, such as the one promoting the sewing machine in the Russian village whose caption reads: “the most valuable dowry of a village bride is a sewing machine made by Singer,” reflected the machine’s penetration into the Russian village. The only object of modernity in the ad is the Singer, a gift from the bride’s father, suggesting that modernity can coexist seamlessly with the traditional life of a village household, that the new will build on the old. The martial, bronze female figures that decorated the facade of the House of Singer and that held spindles with a metal thread reaching from them down to the Singer sewing machine below represented progress, linking tradition and modernity.16 The narrative of Singer’s advertisements typically incorporated traditional cultural emblems as part of the company’s international marketing strategies of introducing an unfamiliar modern object and making it familiar, as in the example of the Colossus of Rhodes advertising the modern sewing machine. Ads directed at specific national markets typically used familiar national, or ethnic, images, which sometimes presented curiously conflicted narratives of modernity. What could be more incongruous, for instance, than introducing the figure of Don Quixote into a Spanish Singer ad?17 Yet Singer

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Advertisement for the Singer sewing machine from Singer Family Calendar, 1916 (courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland)

did precisely that, having the errant knight fight giant sewing machines instead of windmills. The company used mostly female images to appeal to the growing female market. The Singer “S” Girl trademark inscribed local specificity to attract women everywhere, framing the alien machine by something familiar and placating their fears regarding a rapidly changing world. The classical Russian S-Girl, the emblematic Singer advertisement in Russia whose trademark image appeared in all Russian Singer ads, large and small, did precisely that. The woman sitting at the sewing machine wears decorative, premodern Russian dress, which does not lend itself to modernity and the industrial age. Yet the colorful kitschy figure, suggesting the interplay of modernity and tradition, emphasizes the national identity of the seamstress with the purpose of appealing to a wide range of Russian women: if an old-fashioned woman can use the new invention, then so can any Russian woman. In the words of the Niva journalist, the “full-bodied ‘beauty’” in national dress is a symbol of “Russia at the sewing machine, confident of her coming economic prosperity.”18 But what can we say about the archly posed photograph by the famed Russian photographer Karl Bulla of a real woman wearing the upper-class anachronistic costume and sitting at a Singer machine as a reification of the Russian

Russian Singer Girl (Ves’ Peterburg, 1913)

Photograph by Karl Bulla of a woman in Russian national costume at a Singer sewing machine, date unknown (courtesy of the Central State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, St. Petersburg)

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S-Girl?19 The image seems quite ludicrous, perhaps because it is a photograph and not the kind of self-conscious folksy kitsch that characterizes the trademark figure. The costume, especially the beaded headdress (kokoshnik ) is heavy, requiring the woman to hold her head erect. The effect, though most probably unintentional, seems parodic, and one wonders if it ever was used as a marketing tool. If anything, this seamstress would be capable only of decorative needlework, as represented by the embroidered cloth she supposedly sews on the machine using the Singer’s new embroidery attachment. Upper-class women had worn such costumes to masquerade balls since the eighteenth century, when premodern dress was historicized as a result of the introduction of Western dress by Peter the Great.20 In other words, the narrative fusing modernity and tradition was tricky: if misplaced, as in Bulla’s photograph, it could easily end up mocking the working seamstress or the woman who sewed for her family. While seamstresses and housewives probably liked nostalgic Russian kitsch, their lives obviously were very far removed from women of the leisure classes who attended costume balls. In the radical scheme of things, moreover, Bulla’s seamstress, as well as the S-Girl, in no way referenced the nineteenth-century seamstresses, whether hopelessly downtrodden or politically awakened by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (Chto delat’? ), nor is she related to the female textile workers, who made up about half of the textile labor force in the Russian capital at the turn of the twentieth century.21 Singer’s domestic marketing tools included calendars that promoted the family and its dependence on the sewing machine, aligning the sewing machine with traditional domestic values. A 1916 Russian calendar of this sort featured a kitschy image of a middle-class family on the cover, in which the Singer, as in the village ad, is the only modern object in a cozy room occupied by a pictureperfect middle-class family: family happiness frames the sewing machine, located in the center, even though it has no immediate function in the picture and seems simply to be part of the decor. But that is precisely the point: the Singer informs the narrative of bourgeois domesticity as leisurely and joyful, in contrast to the traditional nineteenth-century images of female toil.22 In 1905 the popular journal Niva published a rhapsodic promotional article on the benefits of the sewing machine, describing it variously as a “friend of the house,” a piece of “cultured furniture,” a unique “artistic” tool, and a “technological miracle” in the service of the garment industry. The reader is told that its needle will pierce not only cloth but also cardboard, leather, wood, and even lead. Beside advertising its power to conserve human energy and facilitate productivity, the anonymous journalist distinguishes between the sewing machine’s “prosaic” (practical) and “poetic” (artistic) functions. “The painterly

Cover of Singer Family Calendar, 1916 (courtesy of the Slavonic Library, National Library of Finland)

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power of the needle,” a reference to the Singer machine’s ability to embroider, accomplishes the latter. As evidence, the author cites the opening exhibit in the House of Singer that displayed and sold embroidered costumes and copies of famous paintings from the Dresden Gallery, Louvre, and Hermitage. Visitors could not believe, he claims, that the paintings were embroidered, not painted—moreover by a sewing machine (!). The journalist caps the rhapsodic description of the Singer by adding a musical note: instead of the sad song of the needle, with which the article begins, he refers to the ubiquitous joyful song of whirring sewing machines that suggest a pastoral idyll, not a scene of laboring seamstresses. The journalist’s enthusiasm can be said to reify the etymology of rhapsody, which comes from the Greek rhaptein and oide, combining the verb to stitch and the noun song. And in regard to Singer’s conquest of the world, the suggestion of the Niva article is that the sewing machine is a kind of technological Gesamtkunstwerk, which can do virtually anything. The Singer marketing campaign was premised on the idea of the sewing machine as a multipurpose object that makes sewing pleasurable. Often the ads framed it as an object of beauty that decorates interior spaces or as an instrument for producing objects of aesthetic beauty, distancing the machine from the industrial sweatshop that labor reformers struggled against and from the kind of backbreaking domesticity depicted in socially conscious nineteenthcentury literature.23

T h e Ninet e ent h-C ent ur y S ea m s t r es s a s Lit era r y Ima ge According to an old Russian saying, the village survives by the needle and harrow (igloi da boronoi derevnia stoit ), making the woman who sews the female bulwark of village life. Sewing became the emblematic lower-class female profession in nineteenth-century literature, whose practitioner was the object of economic and sexual exploitation. The toiling seamstress was the subject of Thomas Hood’s progressive poem “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), which became very popular in Russia after its translation by the radical journalist and poet Mikhail Mikhaylov was published in The Contemporary (Sovremennik) in 1860. The poem represented the never-ending work of the seamstress, who in the words of Hood sings the song of the shirt while “plying her needle and thread.”24 The nineteenth-century literary seamstress was typically represented as a fallen woman whose life ends badly. Dostoevsky described such a seamstress cum fallen woman in his first novel, Poor Folk (Bednye liudi ). At the beginning of

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the twentieth century, the conflation was parodied by Bely in Petersburg when the double agent Morkovin spins the tall tale that he is the illegitimate son of Apollon Apollonovich, the novel’s high-ranking bureaucrat, and a seamstress. But already in the 1860s, the iconic radical novelist Chernyshevsky famously revised her image in What Is to Be Done?, a text that influenced the Russian intelligentsia for many decades thereafter: its feminist heroine, Vera Pavlovna, organizes a female sewing cooperative in which each seamstress assumes agency by taking personal control of her economic and private life and so revises the image of the profession. The sewing cooperative serves as the site of the redemption of Russian literature’s emblematic fallen woman, Nastya Kryukova, who abandons prostitution to become a seamstress. It is based on socialist principles—all seamstresses share equally in the profit—and respect for female labor. Because of the collective’s successful operation, Vera Pavlovna creates a network of dressmaking shops all over Petersburg, linking the city—and its map—to the novel’s plot of female emancipation. The name of the upscale shop on Nevsky Prospect is Au Bon Travail, Magasin des Nouveautés (the first part is a reference to socialist principles of labor; the second is the name of the forerunner of the Parisian department store).25 Sewing becomes an emblematic activity, one that is conspiratorially linked to the novel’s revolutionary subtext, with Vera Pavlovna becoming the agent of a revolutionary feminist narrative.26 According to Fred Carstensen, sewing machines were most likely first seen in Russia somewhere between 1859 and 1861, which explains why there are no references to them in What Is to Be Done? (1863), whose seamstresses still sew by hand. By 1867 Petersburg newspapers were advertising the sewing machine and Singer’s retail store on Nevsky Prospect.27 As a symbol of modernity and female emancipation among radical Russian youth of the second half of the nineteenth century, the sewing machine, which Karl Marx called “the decisively revolutionary machine,”28 became affiliated with the emergence of the new woman. Although intended ironically by Ivan Turgenev in the novel Smoke (Dym, 1867), a radical feminist proclaims that “all women should acquire sewing machines and establish collectives; this way they will earn their own bread and become independent,”29 reflecting on the symbolic capital of the sewing machine and its presence in Russian material culture of the second half of the 1860s.

The Se a mst ress a nd N a r r a t i ve Text and textile are etymologically linked; they come from the Latin verb texere, meaning “to weave.” The traditional female activities of weaving, spinning,

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and sewing are the source of figurative language that describes the production of narrative. Barbara Clayton writes that Greek “poets saw themselves as ‘weavers’ of words, ‘sewing’ them together.”30 Thread imagery entered the metaphoric language referencing storytelling and narrative very long ago: collocations such as “thread of the story,” “red thread,” “broken thread,” and “loose thread” have become familiar metaphors of making and unmaking stories. Perhaps the original affiliation of weaving and storytelling comes from Homer’s Odyssey, in which Penelope, the weaver of the poem’s narrative, weaves, unravels, and reweaves a shroud for her husband’s father as she faithfully awaits Odysseus’s return. Her weaving can be said to contain spatially Homer’s peripetic and peripatetic narrative—terms that I discuss in the introduction— and thus forms the Odyssey’s chronotope as it frames the tale of her husband’s travels. The association of time and female agency goes back to the Greek Moirae and Roman Parcae, the goddesses of fate, who spin destiny’s peripeties of each individual. They are present at birth, marking the beginning of the thread of life, which they spin and then cut at life’s end: the first Fate spins the thread, the second one measures it, and the third one cuts. In Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines, J. Hillis Miller asks an unexpected and provocative question regarding the erotic and bodily origin of narrative and its association with sewing: whether “the womb [is] a typewriter or a sewing machine.”31 Miller describes Ariadne’s thread, the one she gives to the mythical hero Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth—an instance of fateful peripety and peripatetic movement—as a “line that traces out the corridors of a labyrinth that is already a kind of writing.”32 Narrative thread implies narrative linearity, but when lost or broken it suggests either the infelicity of the storyteller or a narrative defined by multiple threads, or strands, that form a labyrinth; and in the case of modernist writing, it can indicate the unraveling of traditional narrative texture and textuality. Most recently, thread has become a hypertext term that characterizes the structure of the Web, reinforcing its affiliation with weaving. Susan Lang, for example, describes the Web as consisting of “components usually called ‘threads’ or lines which intersect with each other” to form hypertext narratives, which is precisely what the Web site accompanying this volume attempts to do.33 Discussing the production of narrative, de Certeau distinguishes between instruments, or tools, that cut, tear, and remove and those that assemble, sew together, and articulate.34 The work of the seamstress, who sews either by hand or with the aid of a sewing machine, is directly related to joining disconnected parts. She stitches together pieces of cloth with the purpose of fabricating a meaningful whole. Although the activity of the seamstress in literature and

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everyday culture is gendered, and consequently menial, it underlies both sequential narrative as well as one defined by its interruption and the tangling of plot. Like Penelope and Ariadne, the seamstress performs her task in time while putting together parts that are patently spatial, suggesting a chronotope of sorts. The work of the modern seamstress at the sewing machine is related to modernity’s acceleration of time, as we saw in the Singer advertisements. If we assign her a symbolic role, she performs as either the silent or whirring motor of the plot. Threaded sewing needles, whether in a simple needle or in a sewing machine, bring together the disparate parts in a new way, creating a new whole, different from the original pieces of fabric. They fabricate a text, so to speak. This is precisely what Marcel Proust suggests in Time Regained, the last volume of In Search of Lost Time: the narrator, as he thinks about time, compares writing to dressmaking: for at every moment the metaphor uppermost in my mind changed as I began to represent to myself more clearly and in a more material shape the task upon which I was about to embark—I thought that at my big deal table, under the eyes of Françoise, who like all unpretentious people who live at close quarters with us would have a certain insight into the nature of my labours [. . .] I should work beside her and in a way almost as she worked herself [. . .] pinning here and there an extra page, I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.35

Instead of Proust’s better-known metaphor of the cathedral-novel36—a narrative constructed like a cathedral—in Time Regained he tries on a dress-novel for size, one that is symbolically sewn together from swatches of cloth, and associates it with what women have always done in their everyday lives. The image implies that as novelist-dressmaker he is constructing a more modest narrative than the one he has described as a cathedral, yet he is suggesting that the former is just as laborious, intricate, and beautiful as the more masculine and sublime cathedral. A few pages earlier, the same narrator describes life as perpetually weaving “fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web” of narrative;37 he also offers the metaphor “mysterious threads” that life breaks. Bely’s Petersburg, a labyrinthine novel, frequently refers to the metaphor of the narrative thread, which has its origin in the ball of thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus to find his way out of the labyrinth. In Petersburg, it functions as a novelistic reference to self-reflexivity and to reading, but instead of finding

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the narrative thread, the reader is expected to lose it, of which the narrator gives fair warning early on by telling us: “I have to break my narrative thread;”38 or at the end of chapter 1: “the author, having hung his pictures of illusions, should take them down quickly, breaking the narrative thread if only with this sentence,” but the narrator tells the reader, playfully, that the author will not provide such a sentence because he has every right to break the thread of his story.39 Using the metaphor of weaving a few sentences later, the narrator claims that the person of Apollon Apollonovich had been woven from the narrator’s brain (sotkan iz nashego mozga); “The Thread of His Being Once Again Has Been Found,” the title of the opening subchapter of chapter 6, metaphorizes the image as a mental function, referring to the terrorist Dudkin’s efforts to find Ariadne’s thread, so to speak, to his private labyrinth, so that he can collect himself after a fitful night of hallucinatory visions. The references to narrative thread in Petersburg serve as commentary on the novel’s fragmentary structure and imagery literally reinforced by the verb to tear; the novel abounds in bodies, hearts, souls, mouths, consciousness, lives, time, emotions, sensations, walls, clothing, clouds that are described as torn. The underlying cause of this rending is of course the ticking bomb, the fragmenting instrument of the novel’s plot and imagery that reflects Petersburg ’s historical context of terrorist bomb throwing, war, and revolution. The novelistic bomb and its rending power defines the altercation between Nikolay Ableukhov and his former friend Sergey Likhutin in one of the lessstudied peripeties of the novel, in which the latter literally rips the frockcoat of the former and produces a realized metaphor. Although Nikolay assumes, and the reader with him, that the action is motivated by his inappropriate pursuit of Sergey’s wife, Sofia Petrovna, the husband tells him that it is the bomb with which Nikolay is supposed to kill his father. Tellingly, Sergey’s gesture of ripping the coat is preceded by his having “interrupted [literally, ‘torn off ’ ] the narrative.” The interruption is compared to typesetting that has been accidentally disassembled, reassembled, and read—a reference to the letter in which Nikolay is ordered to blow up his father and which Sergey surreptitiously read (Sofia Petrovna was supposed to deliver the letter to Nikolay). So writing, reading, and sewing are self-consciously linked in the images of the narrative tear and the tear of the coat: Sergey repeatedly offers to stitch the coat, and the appearance of an actual needle and thread in the scene mark his efforts to make things right again. In a larger sense, the torn narrative and the torn coat refer to the breakdown of the Ableukhov and Likhutin families, and the sewing needle symbolizes a fantasy of restoration that Nikolay, however, rejects, as he limps away with his torn coat trailing behind him.

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What I am suggesting here is that beside the reigning metaphor of the bomb that produces narrative shards and distorted images,40 Bely also insinuates the metaphor of stitching, that is, of making things whole again. If we consider the bomb in relation to the modernist obsession with the relationship of parts and whole, it functions as the source of novelistic fragmentation, whereas stitching brings parts together with the purpose of constructing a new whole, a gesture that is aligned with the traditional role of the seamstress, in opposition to fragmenting modernity. And if the bomb can be said to be successful in deploying modernist fragmentation in the novel, the metaphor of stitching lacks the power of recuperating the whole: here, in the case of Nikolay and the Likhutins, of resolving the tension of their romantic triangle—or stopping the bomb explosion in the first place. The failure of sewing as agency is already reflected in the activities of the episodic dressmakers and tailors in the novel, who make costumes and masks that contribute to Petersburg’s narrative of deception, conspiracy, and death.41 Bely’s older contemporary and mentor who very likely used the thread metaphor more than the other symbolists was the poet Zinaida Gippius. Coincidentally, she was also mistress of the needle: “something which had perhaps once been a pink silk petticoat kept her busy for hours,” writes Temira Pachmuss, describing the fine needlework of her last years. “She cut little holes out of it, which she then patched carefully with some material that she had found somewhere else. It was not possible to say what had originally belonged there and what was newly sewn.”42 If considered in relation to the act of writing, the description suggests the creation of a new text from an old one. In a letter to Zinaida Vengerova in 1897, Gippius transforms texts into a metaphoric textile, imagining a dress made from their correspondence: “Your letter is lying on top of mine. Its gray color combines with my red so beautifully, even though a bit stridently. I will make myself such a double symbolic dress.”43 The image reflects on an intimate relationship that the writerseamstress will, metaphorically speaking, sew and then wear. Gippius writes in her intimate diary around the same time that she could only write letters to those with whom she feels a corporeal bond, calling it a “corporeal thread” (telesnaia nit’ ).44 She frequently describes human ties in her poetry and private letters as threads that must be torn or as new ones that will bind people in new spiritual ways.45 Her poetry abounds in threads of spider webs, rain, whirlwind, sun, electricity, wings, temple curtain, life, time, threads that form knots and tangled knots—images that often take on metaphysical meaning. The poem “Electricity,” for instance, describes the positive and negative electrical currents as threads that when woven together will produce light, which the

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poet associates with resurrection, that is, with the transcendence of a life divided by strife and absence of community. Like in so many of her poems that inscribe metaphoric threads, “Electricity” addresses the creation of a new community that is premised on her symbolist project of transcending the material world by means of divine logos.46 What is striking about Gippius’s use of the female domain of weaving and sewing is that she wrote poetry in a male voice.47 In this regard “The Seamstress” (“Shveia”), which demonstrates the relationship between the everyday activity of sewing—its solitary backbreaking work—and its symbolic meaning, is unusual because of its patently female voice:48

[Already the third day I don’t speak with anyone . . . But my thoughts are greedy and mean. My back hurts; wherever I look— Are light blue spots. The church bell droned, it stopped; I am still alone with myself. The hot scarlet silk rustles and bends Under the clumsy needle.

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On all phenomena there rests a seal. As if one has merged with the other. Accepting one—I try to guess The other, the one that is hidden. And this silk seems like Fire to me. And already not fire—but Blood. And blood is only a sign of that which In our poor language—we call Love. Love is but a sound . . . But at this late hour I won’t reveal that which comes later. No, not fire, not blood . . . but merely satin Rustles under the timid needle.]

The act of sewing and the rustling sound of red silk under the needle of the seamstress are transformed first into fire, then blood that the poet-seamstress associates with love, which in turn has the potential of divine union and escape from the everyday.50 But the poet refuses to disclose what has been revealed to her; the poetic correspondence of the activity of the seamstress and epiphany achieved by means of language, despite its limitations (nash bednyi iazyk), lasts only for a moment and is quickly dispersed: the seamstress is unable to break out of this world and the activity of sewing returns to its everyday meaning, and like in Bely’s novel, does not produce order or resolution. Some of the Russian terms for writing poetry have stitching as a subtext. The noun stroka, meaning “line of verse,” is etymologically related to the verb strochit’ (stitch), but it also means “line of stitches.” Marina Tsvetaeva uses the double meaning of stroka, calling herself a day seamstress of lines (Strok podennaia shveia) and fusing the figures of poet and seamstress.51 The diminutive strochka, which means “stitch” as well as “line of stitches,” is the more common word for “line of verse,” but the verb strochit’, whose primary meaning is “to stitch,” also has the metaphoric meaning of “scribbling” in Russian, or writing in an ironic sense: Apollon Apollonovich in the epilogue of Petersburg strochit memuary (writes memoirs); the expression strochit’ stikhi is a reference to writing verse routinely or without much skill: Gippius’s Kak my voinam pisali i chto oni nam otvechali (How We Wrote to the Soldiers and What They Answered Us), a volume of invented correspondence, in verse and prose, between uneducated men at the front during the First World War and semi-educated women back home, may be seen as a self-conscious instance of strochit’ stikhi.52 The volume references the patriotic narrative of women sewing for soldiers, an important public occupation of socially conscious women during the

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Russo-Japanese War and the First World War that enacted women’s traditional role. (The former serves as the political background of Petersburg.) Photographs of upper-class women sitting at sewing machines, making clothing, supplies, and bandages for Russian soldiers at the front, appeared frequently in the press, for example, in the high-end journal Stolitsa i usad’ba whose offices were located in the House of Singer. One of these collective sewing events during the First World War took place there under the auspices of the empress. The House of Singer was in fact contracted to produce military uniforms, despite rumors that it was a site of German spying activity.53 In contrast to performing the genteel activity of needlework, the upperclass woman sitting at a sewing machine participates, even if only emblematically, in the larger social collective by supporting the nation at war. As in the volume Gippius published, these charitable gatherings foregrounded the traditional domestic and healing function of female agency and offered a striking contrast to the violent narrative of war, which disperses and mutilates the body: “while 22,000-kilo weapons sowed death and destruction everywhere, sending death-dealing projectiles into the peaceful sky, thousands of Singer machines with the help of their steel muscles help people sew military coats, underwear, boots, tents, duffle bags, bandages,” writes the same Niva journalist who promoted the wonders of the Singer sewing machine. “Whole trains of army and hospital equipment [made by women] have been delivered and continue to be delivered to the theater of war.”54 Referring to the Russo-Japanese War, the women, like Penelopes, instead of sowing destruction, await the warriors’ safe return home as they sew for the soldiers with the purpose of clothing them and keeping them warm.

How to end this essay, in which I have attempted to weave into a single text the different historical strands and swatches of stories of seamstresses and the Singer sewing machine? Since ancient times, the chronotope of real and metaphoric weaving, spinning, and sewing has linked the female domain to the creation of narrative and still informs the way we speak about it. Penelope weaves the shroud not only with the purpose of constructing but also of unraveling it, performing the kind of double gesture that informs modernist writing. Despite the modernism of Bely’s Petersburg, or of Gippius’s failure as seamstress of transcendence, I have taken pains not to break the thread of my narrative without, however, aiming at the construction of a clearly articulated line of argument. Instead, quite self-consciously mimicking weaving and dressmaking, I have tried to tell the story of the needle and of modernity by producing a text that speaks for itself, one that creates meaning through juxtaposition and accretion—a text

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that demonstrates the origins of narrative in material culture, the female domain, and the everyday. Circling back to the beginning of this essay—to the House of Singer on Nevsky Prospect and its fate after the revolution, it seems uncanny that it became the biggest bookstore in Petrograd and then Leningrad, and that in 1919, the House of Singer was renamed House of Books (Dom Knigi) and also became the location of the city’s state publishing headquarters.55 Although a serendipitous occurrence, the renaming evokes the symbolic affiliation of sewing and writing, yet this symbolic affiliation was put in question at the beginning of the twenty-first century—after the fall of the Soviet Union. Just as the House of Singer, the bookstore was subjected to the peripeties of renaming and peripatetic relocation, so that the building, which was in great disrepair, could be restored to its prerevolutionary condition and name. Doubtful of the return of the bookstore to the luxuriously refurbished House of Singer, which indeed has been restored to its original appearance both outside and inside, the citizens of post-Soviet St. Petersburg expressed their rightful concerns widely and loudly. After an extensive and fierce press campaign, the House of Books did return to the building in 2006, to restore not only the symbolic link of sewing and writing but also the location of the largest bookstore in the city.  1. There used to be two sculptural ensembles of three women bearing a globe located on both sides of the riverside entrance of the Admiralty, which may have served as the prototype of the globe on the House of Singer. 2. “O znachenii shveinoi mashiny v domashnem obikhode i promyshlennosti,” Niva 36 (1905): 706. 3. Fred V. Carstensen, American Enterprise in Foreign Markets: Studies of Singer and International Harvester in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 49. 4. “Dom kompanii Zinger v S-Peterburge,” Zodchii 39 (September 24, 1906): 391. See also M. S. Burenina, Progulki po Nevskomu prospektu (St. Petersburg: Litera, 2002), 77– 78. The ruling was originally issued by Nicholas I in 1844. Burenina writes that in October 1917 the Bolsheviks held a meeting at the House of Singer to plan armed insurrection. 5. S. R. Mintslov, Peterburg v 1903–1910 godakh (Riga, 1931), 105. Mintslov was an author, book collector, and owner of one of Petersburg’s private lending libraries. 6. Carstensen, American Enterprise, 49. 7. Ves’ Peterburg (1913) lists the Society of the United Steel Companies of America, Crucible Steel Company of America, the shippers Gerhard and Hey, as well as the American Consulate in St. Petersburg. The Russian-English Bank, St. Petersburg Commercial Bank, which occupied parts of the first two floors, Bank of Zakhary Zhdanov, and The Brothers Dzhamgarov Bank were located in House of Singer at various times. The

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1913 issue of Ves’ Peterburg also listed the following: Finnish Bureau of I. I. Stremts, a finance company; Felzer and Co. Machine Factory (Association of Riga); Commercial House of B. B. Von Rören and Company, a patent company; the Russian Book Association Kul’tura; and the Gold Mining Society of S. F. Ovsyannikov and Company. The building also housed offices of such smaller establishments as the Renaissance Association, which specialized in rejuvenating beauty products. In 1916 the offices of AllRussian Supply and Demand, a finance company, and of the General Society of Life Insurance and Insurance of Life Earnings were in the House of Singer. 8. Advertisements in Petersburg newspapers in 1905 claimed that there were twelve hundred Singer retail stores in Russia (Carstensen, American Enterprise, 50; “O znachenii,” Niva, 708). In 1902 the company built a factory in Podolsk, twenty-six miles south of Moscow, which began operation in 1902 and became the third largest producer of Singer sewing machines in the world. 9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 92. 10. In 1912 Singer was the seventh largest firm in the world (Andrew Godley, “Selling the Sewing Machine around the World: Singer’s International Marketing Strategies, 1850–1920,” Enterprise and Society 7, no. 2 [2006]: 267). By 1914, 4 percent of the Russian population, equaling 15–20 percent of households, owned a sewing machine (278). 11. Another example is the Italian poster advertising the Singer, in which the conquest of Mount Everest is defined by the S-Girl at the sewing machine located at the very top, toward which the mountain climber gestures ecstatically. For images of Singer advertisements, including this one, see my Singer Sewing Machine itinerary on our Web site, Mapping Petersburg. The itinerary explores the Singer sewing machine in Russia from four perspectives: Singer Advertisements in Russia, Seamstress and Narrative, Singer Sewing Machine Conquers Nature, and Architecture. 12. Nikolay Otsup, “Osen’,” in Tsekh poetov, vol. 1 (Berlin: Efron, 1923), 59 13. Nikolay Zabolotsky, “Vechernii bar,” in Izbrannoe, vol. 1 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1972), 38. 14. Singer’s Russian assets were confiscated by the Soviet state. 15. The introduction of credit was the subtext of the saying “run from Singer” (begat’ ot Zingera), i.e., avoid installment payments to the Singer Company. Another marketing strategy—at least in Petersburg—was the use of live advertisements in the show windows of Singer shops, in which a seamstress would sit at a sewing machine and sew. 16. The Estonian sculptor Amandus G. Adamson designed the six bronze, Valkyrie-like female figures (three of which have the sewing machines), as well as the women holding up the globe on the House of Singer. 17. See the Don Quixote ad on the Singer Sewing Machine itinerary: “Singer Sewing Machine Conquers Nature.” 18. “O znachenii,” Niva, 708. 19. Bulla’s 1912 photograph of the House of Singer became the building’s classical photographic representation. 20. The glossy upper-class journal Stolitsa i usadba, whose offices were located in the House of Singer, featured photographs of such lavish balls. 21. In 1896–97, the textile workers’ strikes in the capital played an important role in forcing the government to reduce the length of the workday to eleven and a half hours

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and make Sundays an obligatory holiday (Allan K. Widman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963], 23–24, 73–78). 22. The same 1916 calendar also contained an article on the recent exploration of Antarctica, with photos of men sewing tents and other equipment using the Singer. Here sewing is gendered as male: exploration of distant lands was the purview of men. You can see these images on the Web site in the Singer Sewing Machine itinerary. 23. Among the most striking examples of turning the sewing machine into an aesthetic object is an ad by the New Home Sewing Machine Company in which a young woman dressed in evening finery sees a freestanding sewing machine in the mirror instead of herself ! 24. According to J. C. Reid, the Russian version of the poem apparently inspired Mussorgsky’s scherzino “The Seamstress” (“Shveia,” 1871) ( J. C. Reid, Thomas Hood [ London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963]), 263). What Is to Be Done? ends with Hood’s poem “Stanzas,” which celebrates revolutionary change. 25. The name of the shop suggests the fusion of socialist principles and bourgeois consumerism, which previous students of Chernyshevsky seem not to have noted, paying attention only to the shop’s socialist reference. See, e.g., Chto delat’, ed. S. A. Reyser (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 855 n150. 26. The publication of What Is to Be Done? produced radical propaganda among seamstresses working in dressmaking establishments and led to attempts to organize sewing cooperatives. See e.g., Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 111, 118, 120. 27. Carstensen, American Enterprise, 27–28. 28. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1921), 516. 29. I. S. Turgenev, Dym (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1961), 19. 30. Barbara Clayton, A Penelopean Poetics: Reweaving the Feminine in Homer’s Poetics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 25. Clayton offers a compelling rereading of the Odyssey through the figure of Penelope, arguing that she is the primary weaver of narrative. 31. Joseph Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 7. 32. Ibid., 10. 33. Susan Lang, “Converging (or Colliding) Traditions: Integrating Hypertext into Literary Studies,” in Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed. Philip G. Cohen (New York: Routledge, 1997), 295. 34. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 147. 35. Marcel Proust, Time Regained in In Search of Lost Time, trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright, vol. 6 (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 508–9. 36. In a letter to his friend Jean de Gaigneron, Proust writes about his architectural conception of Remembrance of Things Past as a cathedral (Diane R. Leonard, “Ruskin and the Cathedral of Lost Souls,” in The Cambridge Companion to Proust, ed. Richard Bates [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2001], 52–53). 37. Proust, Time Regained, 504.

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38. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 19. 39. Ibid., 56 40. On the imagery produced by the bomb and Bely’s description of himself as a bomb, see part 1 of this volume, p. 39. 41. See Cameron Wiggins’s discussion in this volume of the masked ball in Petersburg. 42. Temira Pachmuss, Zinaida Hippius: An Intellectual Profile (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 399. 43. Zinaida Gippius to Zinaida Vengerova, April 8, 1897, f. 39, op. 2, ed. khr. 542, Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. 44. Zinaida Gippius, Contes d’Amour, in Dnevniki, ed. A.N. Nikolyukin (Moscow: NPK “Intelvak,” 1999), 1:53. 45. See, e.g., Zinaida Gippius to Ekaterina Diaghileva, August 11, 1905, f. 102, ed. khr. 118, Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. 46. For a discussion of Gippius’s religious consciousness, see Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 162–211. 47. The affiliation of women poets with the female activity of sewing, weaving, and embroidering was frequently used to deprecate their poetry. A striking instance of such condescension was Nikolay Gumilev’s comment regarding the invitation to his wife, Anna Akhmatova, to read her poetry at Vyacheslav Ivanov and Lidiya ZinovieveAnnibal’s Tower. Gumilev was supposed to have said that besides writing poetry, his “wife also embroiders splendidly” (Georgy Ivanov, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh [Moscow: Soglasie, 1994], 3:56). 48. Vladislav Khodasevich wrote a poem titled “Seamstress” (“Shveia”) in 1917, using a female voice, as would Fyodor Sologub (“Shveia,” 1923). 49. Zinaida Gippius, “Shveia,” in Stikhotvoreniia, Novaia biblioteka poeta, ed. A.V. Lavrov (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe Izd. Akademicheskii proekt, 1999), 119–20. The translation that follows is mine. 50. Marina Tsvetaeva in the 1924 “Poem of the End” (“Poema kontsa”), which is about the end of a passionate erotic relationship, describes love as a seam (shov), and its violent end as the ripping of the seam that creates scars. The Russian for scar is rubets, a word that also means “seam.” 51. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Dnei spolzaiushchie slizni” (“Crawling Slugs of Days”), Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, ed. A. Sumerkin, vol. 3 (New York: Russica, 1983), 134. 52. The metaphor of stitching verse is reinforced by the women sending the soldiers clothing and tobacco pouches that they make. Even though Gippius is listed as the compiler of the collection, she in fact authored the poems and letters herself, writing them in a patently substandard Russian. Signaling the playful hoax, the Petrograd street addresses of the women are either on Sergievskaya Street, where Gippius lived at the time, or in the immediate vicinity. Whether the volume, which to my knowledge has not been studied, was an inventive patriotic action proselytizing the practice of writing to the soldiers at the front, or one of making money remains unclear, although my assumption is that it was the latter. The print run of the volume, called a gift book (kniga-podarok), was twelve hundred copies, which—interestingly—was more than any of her other books.

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53. The Singer Company in Russia was accused of serving as a front for German spies during the First World War as part of the official policy of investigating foreign citizens and especially their commercial enterprises, apparently with the purpose of expropriation. The Singer case was apparently the largest and most contentious instance of such activity. According to Eric Lohr, the charges had no basis. Contrary to popular belief, the company was American, not German, and most of its employees were ethnic Russians (Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003], 79–82). 54. “O znachenii,” Niva, 707. 55. The government publisher Lenizdat, the publisher Academia, and the editorial offices of the journals Kniga i revoliutsiia, Leningrad, Zvezda, and Literaturnaia ucheba occupied the top floors of the building during the 1920s and 1930s.

10 Meat in Russia’s Modernist Imagination        

There is no visible trace today of the old slaughterhouse at the edge of Petersburg’s Enclosure Canal (Obvodny Canal), and modern-day pedestrians strolling along Moskovsky Prospect would little suspect that the sidewalks under their feet were once cow paths leading to the slaughterhouse that were paved over in the 1930s.1 Yet, in the very early years of the century, the ugly underbelly of Petersburg’s meat industry was laid bare for inquisitive tourists of urban space, though they would have to venture to what were then the margins of the city to experience it. In the City Public Administration’s official 1903 Travel Guide of St. Petersburg (Putevoditel’ po S.-Peterburgu), the city’s stockyard and its surroundings merited mention alongside the more conventional and celebrated sights of the imperial capital. In one suggested excursion, for example, the tourist was directed to the Meat Museum, which had been built on the premises of the stockyard in 1890 and where information on new hygienic techniques in animal slaughter and rendering could be perused.2 The stockyards seemed to hold a fascination as well for Russian artists of the early twentieth century, who were modernist flâneurs of their own sort: writer Isaac Babel, for one, roamed about the city slaughterhouse in 1918 to report on the booming horsemeat industry during the lean years of Russia’s Civil War.3 Slaughter in Russia’s belle époque was a public spectacle; for the Petersburg administration,

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which was proud of its enlightened governance, an excursion through the municipal stockyard was, specifically, a spectacle of progress. In time, however, the modernist and revolutionary imaginations would seize on the excesses and failures of science, industry, and government, and meat would become the stuff of revolution. To begin this discussion of meat in the modernist imagination, we will first consider how the production of meat allegorizes the processing of workers in Russia’s urban centers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Raw materials and human labor were being drawn into Russia’s larger cities to feed new industries and growing populations, and in the imagination of writers and artists in Russia and the early Soviet Union, meat became a favored metaphor for the modern, working body. Metaphors were the stock in trade of the aesthetic economy—to be exchanged, consumed, processed, and repackaged. However, this metaphor in the aesthetic economy of the day did not only reproduce the actual economy of meat. The metaphor re-grew its flesh, as self-consciously demonstrated by Russian filmmakers, cutting gelatin-emulsified film stock. As Dziga Vertov might say, they put the skin back on the metaphor. In this essay, I will consider the material history of meat and its aesthetic digestion. I will discuss how the cow made its way to the dinner table in fin-desiècle Petersburg, how the worker’s body was incorporated into the economic machinery of the city, and, eventually, how all of this raw organic material was rendered by the creative processes of Russia’s writers and artists in the early twentieth century. Aside from its consummate material reality, which is one of the chief interests of this volume, slaughter functions as an immensely powerful symbol for the early decades of the twentieth century (1900–1930)—an age in which workers’ bodies were being segmented and incorporated into social and economic bodies: corporations in the burgeoning capitalism of the imperial age and collectives in the Soviet age. Like other common objects and processes, meat and slaughter figure in our linguistic and semiotic imagination and lard the common stock of rhetorical devices, metaphors, and idioms that are the tokens of our linguistic exchange. Meat has particular resonance in the Russian modernist imagination. The history of meat in the early decades of the twentieth century in Russia—its production, consumption, and representation—has something to tell us about Russia’s unique modernity: the mythopoesis of revolution, the worker’s body in Russia’s industrialization, and modernist literary and visual production.

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Butchers at work at Aux Gourmets, St. Petersburg, 1905 (courtesy of the Central State Archive of Film and Photo Documents, St. Petersburg)

Ur ban Indust r y: Proc essing t he Bo dy More than three-quarters of the beef cattle that made their way into Petersburg around the turn of the century were shipped by rail to Nikolaevsky Station (known as Moscow Station since 1924), which was located at the eastern end of Petersburg’s celebrated Nevsky Prospect, far from the royal palaces that hugged the banks of the Neva River on the western end of that boulevard.4 In the early hours of the morning, a stream of cattle, newly arrived by rail, would pour through Petersburg’s main thoroughfares to the margins of the city, driven by herders carrying staves and crooks to the stockyard abutting the slaughterhouse at the southern industrial belt of the Enclosure Canal. A meat diet in Russia was historically associated with an elite lifestyle, nonmanual labor, and an abandonment of traditional religious values and rituals. Vegetarian diets had long been the norm among the rural Russian peasantry, and not for economic reasons alone: the pious among them, if they observed all fasts, would keep to meat-free meals approximately 180 days out of the year.5 Anxiety concerning the availability, price, and politics of meat became an urban bourgeois fixation. The 1912 trade book, The Meat Question (Miasnoi vopros), warned of the growing unrest throughout Europe’s cities over the rising cost of

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meat: “The capital and major cities are literally groaning under the weight of the high prices of meat; they are searching, though unsuccessfully, for any possible measure of lowering its price, but meat just gets more and more expensive. The consumption of horsemeat in Petersburg and Moscow has significantly increased. This is the best evidence of how the ‘meat crisis’ has already stolen into Russia, so rich in cattle-raising.”6 The “crisis” was a luxury of the upwardly mobile class, given the limits that factory wages set on regular meat consumption at this time. Just as Petersburg’s urbanites required meat, so did the economic machinery of the city demand raw materials and, above all, labor.7 In the slaughterhouse itself, trade knowledge was passed down from older workers to new recruits, who would work their way up through the ranks, taking on new tasks as they gained experience and responsibility: the zavodnyi led the animal into its stall, the storonshchik skinned the animal, the nutrenshchik cleaned the inside of the carcass after slaughter, and the bashkol, the senior-most employee, was in charge of wielding the lethal knife. To compensate him for the most fraught work in the slaughterhouse and for taking society’s moral burden on himself, the bashkol had the perk, in addition to his wages, of carrying home the ears and nose of the bull to his family. (Elena Molokhovets, in her wildly popular cookbook, Gift to Young Housewives [Podarok molodym khoziaikam], offers helpful suggestions for using all parts of the animal; turning by-products into meat-jellies, sausages, and other treats.8) Over the course of his working life, an employee of the preindustrial slaughterhouse would have progressed through the hierarchy and experienced each stage of the process of slaughter. Once the animal had been slaughtered, the carcasses and the better cuts of meat were distributed to the 1,020 meat shops in Petersburg to be sold on site or at the many outdoor markets around the city. Butchers would cleave the carcass into two equal parts down the middle then divide each side of beef into twenty cuts, graded one through five for quality. As Anatoly Bakhtiarov notes in The Belly of Petersburg (Briukho Peterburga), only “savages” eat meat fresh from slaughter; rather, meat was set aside for a few days until the process of spoilage had just begun, when it was considered at the height of flavor. Customers would, finally, purchase meat at outdoor markets or place orders with their local butcher, who would make deliveries to their home. From the field to the dinner table, a single cow would have been handled by dozens of workers: from farmers, herders, and brokers to inspectors, slaughtermen, and butchers.9 Although the teleology of meat points to the dinner table, the “afterlife” of the cow continued on the industrial plane. A host of products, many of them manufactured using age-old techniques, sprang from the body of the bull.

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Blood was an extremely useful by-product. The cattle slaughtered each year in Petersburg yielded approximately 8 million pounds of blood,10 and most of this was sent to Piper and Company, the blood processing plant adjacent to the slaughterhouse.11 Albumin, a protein found in blood, was extracted for calico dyes, and a certain amount of blood was sold to hospitals, where it was given as a tonic for anemia. These anemic patients (mostly women and children) would be given a cup of warm calf ’s blood to drink as part of their treatment. Although the Eastern Orthodox Church forbade the consumption of blood (along with other Levitical prohibitions against idols, fornication, and things strangled), animal blood was nonetheless added to many consumer health tonics, such as Gematogen (found in a candy-bar-like form in Russian pharmacies to this day). The use of blood in these products was not advertised, offering some evidence that the taboo against imbibing blood, even for medical purposes, was potent. The hooves, horns, bones, skin, and other by-products of the animal were transferred from the slaughterhouse to Albumin Street, a site of small industry behind Nikolaevsky Station, where they would be sterilized, boiled, separated, and otherwise processed. From here, they were distributed to craftsmen, artisans, and factories across the city for further refining. This single animal—the cow—sustained an astonishing number of industries and workers: leather, perfumes, tallow, creams, tonics, gelatin, glue, and paint additives were just a few of the products that were produced from animal rendering. Bear in mind that the premodern chemistry of consumer goods was based on raw organic substances such as these—mineral, vegetable, and, especially, animal matter. In the end the industrial processing of the living, or once-living, body as raw material was a synecdoche for the entire economic activity of the city: living bodies were the very substance of the city’s industrial and economic life. But, now, to connect the metabolism of the city with the modernist imagination, we must travel from the margins of culture, the ugly underbelly of Petersburg’s meat industry, to the center—the commonplaces of Russian culture in the early decades of the twentieth century.

From Re a lism t o M ode r n i s m : T h e Re ndering of t he Ar t i s t i c Wo r k In art, blood is not bloody. Viktor Shklovsky

Although modernism’s boundaries are contested, the artistic trend is most often characterized by its reflection upon, and advancement of, assaults on

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classical, unified narratives of self and society. Modernism’s tools are simultaneity, juxtaposition, fragmentation, and montage, each reflecting in art a facet of the violent experience of modernity—not least, of working modernity. David Bradshaw writes that “one figure for the destructive effects of both military and industrial technology is the dismemberment and fragmentation of the human body.” He identifies an environment in which this assault on the body takes place: the slaughterhouse in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)—“a war zone in which both animals and humans are shredded.”12 The slaughterhouse was indeed an exemplary site of modern industrial exploitation, of fears concerning the working body, and of capitalist materialism. All of this was perceived as part of a larger and very modern assault on “whole” men. In his history of the preindustrial slaughterhouse, Anatoly Bakhtiarov describes the very sale of cattle as a hallowed occasion that was conducted in reverent whispers: “Despite there being hundreds of butchers and dealers, silence reigns among them and you would think that some sort of holy event was taking place.”13 These skilled slaughtermen observed fasts in the strictest manner, lived communally, slept in a single room, and ate from a common table, not unlike a monkish order.14 In this nearly monastic environment, slaughter was a sacred event whose rituals preserved the dignity of both animal and worker, linking the process to a primal human rite. Although roughly contemporaneous with Bakhtiarov’s account, Vladimir Korolenko’s “Factory of Death” (“Fabrika smerti”) is set in a fully industrialized slaughterhouse: Swift and Armour in Chicago. In this text, the desacralization and industrialization of animal slaughter is troped as butchery of the worker. “Factory of Death” was written in 1895—more than a decade before the publication of Sinclair’s The Jungle, which had considerable influence in Russia (it was translated into Russian the same year that it debuted in the United States, 1906). Korolenko’s “hero of the stockyard” is a man reverting to an animal state, robbed of higher consciousness by the demands of industrial efficiency, physically and psychically resembling the animal whose body he is employed to process: Here are the principal heroes of the stockyard . . . Not far from the hoist, nearly naked, slippery all over, white-bodied and indifferent, stands a man with a narrow knife in his hand. When the animal rolls by him, he makes a habitual movement downward. A squeal, the death rattle, a wave of crimson blood from the cut . . . and the pulley goes forward along the track and another animal inexorably moves toward the half-naked man . . . The entire work of the man consists in only this one downward motion of the knife. From five to ten seconds for each life, six lives per minute, thirty-six per hour, three hundred and sixty in ten hours, and in the slaughterhouse, they

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The correlation between the number of hours in the workday and the number of deaths in the slaughterhouse is more than one of simple cause and effect: it metaphorizes the processing of the worker himself in the city’s economic system and his complicity in cannibalistic digestion. As his critique shades into the moral realm, Korolenko likens the act of slaughter to murder, for the efficiency ratio in the Swift and Armour slaughterhouse is one “life” every five to ten seconds. As if reverting to a state of savagery, the worker in the slaughterhouse is consistently described as “naked” or “half-naked” and judged to be the “most undeveloped” and dullest of all workers. Korolenko’s critique is at once moral, economic, and political: the Swift and Armour workers, engaged in slaughtering animals, have themselves become bestial. They fail to join unions and develop political consciousness, they are exploited by an indifferent capitalist system, and their work morally compromises them. It is not a great leap for Korolenko, who was deeply interested in the question of blood libel,16 to make two conceptual transfers from meat to murder and murder to cannibalism, the latter a common trope in critiques of capitalism. As Korolenko continues, he confides the fear that his body too might be processed by the mindless worker and his practiced hands: With some horror, I looked at this master of death . . . He, striking the next victim in the throat, still found time in the interval to nudge me with his elbow and quickly hold up his hand. I hurriedly pulled out a coin and thrust it into his hand. And then I suddenly thought, “What for?” . . . I unwillingly realized that if by mistake my leg were to get caught in the rope and I were to roll toward him on the track, he just might not stop that habitual movement of his practiced hand.17

Korolenko contends that what was once reverential and ritualized, as described in Bakhtiarov’s account, is but mindless repetition in the industrial slaughterhouse. His offer of a tip has the character of a bribe for his life, given that the worker’s amputated hand has been sutured to an alien, industrial will, at whose behest it performs habitual movements isolated from individual moral considerations. Korolenko implies that the savage industrial worker is liable to be indifferent to whether it is a cow or a man under his knife, for he himself has been butchered into parts that he no longer controls. Such men cannot emerge

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whole from the slaughterhouse or the factory: they are merely pieces of men— hands, arms, muscles—performing algorithmic movements that engage a single part of the body in an endlessly repetitive motion. Korolenko’s account sounds an early warning about the human implications of industrialization and fears of the mechanization of the body. Twenty years later, modernist artists, concerned with the same issues now fully developed in Russian society would transform those modern fears by aesthetic means. The crucial link between the nineteenth century’s civic-minded realism, which is demonstrated in Korolenko’s text, and the formal experimentation of later modernist art, is Lev Tolstoy, whose artistic production, while ostensibly oriented toward realism and moral didacticism, makes the body a site of protomodernist estrangement and fragmentation. Working on a diatribe of artistic “idols” in What Is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?) and having already written extensively on the perils of carnal passion, Tolstoy would complete his own elaboration of the threefold Levitical injunction against “idols, fornication, and blood” with “First Step” (“Pervaia stupen’”), a vegetarian tract with a notoriously graphic description of animal slaughter. “First Step,” published in 1892, is among Tolstoy’s later prose works, and it demonstrates modernist tendencies in both its subject—the slaughterhouse, an exemplary site of modern fears concerning the body—and its approach: a fragmenting literary process that Tolstoy also uses to treat human (and animal) consciousness. In “First Step” Tolstoy gives an astonishingly detailed description of the slaughter of several animals that stretches for several pages. A brief excerpt demonstrates Tolstoy’s tone and style: The first animal of his next lot was not an ox, but a bull—a fine, well-bred creature, black, with white spots on its legs, young, muscular, full of energy. He was dragged forward, but he lowered his head and resisted sturdily. Then the butcher who followed behind seized the tail, like an engine-driver [mashinist] grasping the handle of a whistle, twisted it, the gristle crackled, and the bull rushed forward, upsetting the men who held the rope. Then it stopped, looking sideways with its black eyes, the whites of which had filled with blood.18

Tolstoy’s anthropomorphization of the bull secures the affiliation between animal slaughter and murder. Furthermore, the butcher is described as a “machinist tugging on a whistle.” The word machinist specifically refers to a driver of steam engines, Tolstoy’s favorite symbol of modernity. As Olga Matich notes, Tolstoy’s description of slaughter also has a “displaced sexual subtext” that is crucial to a larger theme of dismemberment in his work.19 Fornication, the consumption of meat, murder, and fragmentation are closely affiliated in the

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poetics of disgust. Matich’s reading of Tolstoy emphasizes his fetishization of body parts—whether they belong to the soldier in The Sevastopol Stories, the adulteress in Anna Karenina, or the animal and worker in “First Step.” Beyond the thematics of Tolstoy’s interest in dismemberment are the mechanisms within his prose that dissect processes, appearances, and perceptions. In short, this very fetishization of parts informs not only the themes of Tolstoy’s work but also his narrative form and marks his position on the cusp between realism and modernism. In the following passage, Tolstoy attempts to elicit moral outrage from his readers by evoking sensory disgust. Ultimately, however, his strategy is checked by his own aesthetic fascination: That day about a hundred head of cattle were slaughtered. I was on the point of entering one of the chambers, but stopped short at the door. I stopped both because the chamber was crowded with carcasses which were being moved about, and also because blood was flowing on the floor and dripping from above. All the butchers present were besmeared with blood, and had I entered I, too, should certainly have been covered with it. One suspended carcass was being taken down, another was being moved toward the door, a third, a slaughtered ox, was lying with its white legs raised, while a butcher with a strong hand was ripping up its tight-stretched hide.20

“In art, blood is not bloody,” writes Viktor Shklovsky, an astute interpreter of Tolstoy, in Theory of Prose. “It just rhymes with ‘flood.’ It is material either for a structure of sound or for a structure of images. For this reason, art is pitiless, or rather without pity, apart from those cases where the feeling of sympathy forms the material for the artistic structure. But even in that case, we must consider it from the point of view of composition. Similarly, if we want to understand how a certain machine works, we examine its drive belt first. That is, we consider this detail from the standpoint of a machinist and not, for instance, from the standpoint of a vegetarian.”21 Formalists, like Shklovsky, warn us not to be distracted by the thematics, like Tolstoy’s in “First Step,” but rather to look at their function in the textual “machine”; “blood” is merely a formal effect, without affect—part of an overarching “structure of images” that drives a work. Reading “First Step,” one has the impression that Tolstoy does make art from his description of the slaughterhouse in spite of both his moral outrage and his late-career disgust for the “idols” of art. Tolstoy’s control over the lockstep mechanism of diegetic violence and narrative production propels his text away from its ostensible moral strategy; slaughter becomes aestheticized: pleasurable to both reader and writer. As Matich argues, the disgust evoked by slaughter is

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morally ambivalent but aesthetically unequivocal. Tolstoy may have set out to expose the immorality of real slaughter, but instead he left his reader with a taste for the artistic slaughter.

Fr om Hig h Mode r nism t o Revo l u t i o n In Petersburg, the canonical Russian modernist novel about revolution, Andrey Bely, like Tolstoy, demonstrates the implicit links between the industrial age and the fragmentation of bodies, whether it is accomplished through violence or through art. As Olga Matich discusses in “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg,” the murder of the revolutionary Lippanchenko demonstrates Petersburg ’s fixation on slaughter, although the guiding image here is not of the cow, but of the pig. The novel also concerns a would-be revolutionary’s involvement in a plot to assassinate his father, a prominent government official, with a bomb. That assassination never comes off, though it is graphically imagined by the characters—one dramatic vision, for example, consisting of human skin “sticking” to the wall.22 Bely’s revolutionaries, however, accomplish their real destruction through the narrative rather than the bomb. Here slaughter is made modernist by dint of its transition from theme to aesthetic process, that is, the montage of events that reflect the structure of modern life in the novel. Much of Petersburg’s fragmented narrative is concerned with the explosion of the human form and consciousness, an act which is associated with revolution and modernity. In a tavern scene, a certain slaughterman (literally, “bull killer”; bykoboets), Anofriev of the Petersburg city slaughterhouse, makes an incidental appearance while a popular musical number of the day plays in the background: “Slaughterman Anofriev!” “Your honor!” “Slaughterman of the city slaughterhouse . . . Have a seat . . .” “Waiter!” “Yes, what can I do for you?” “Waiter: put on ‘The Negro’s Dream’ . . .” And the pipes of the machine mooed in greeting to the slaughterman, like a bull under the knife of a bull-slaughterer.23

The narrator’s confusion of humans, steer, and machines is not confined to musical instruments, however. Bely creates a montage of human and animal organs in the following scene, as Nikolay Apollonovich discusses blood ties with a shady police agent over a dinner of “kidneys with madeira”:

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Here Petersburg ’s theme of the revolutionary overthrow of paternalistic government is affiliated with meat, as the “ties of blood” become literalized (and parodied) through a plate of kidneys, internal organs that filter blood. Like the “slaughterhouse wail” of the musical machine in the background, the menu echoes the obsession with meat and dismemberment in the novel’s fevered imagination. In the section “I Destroy Irrevocably” (“Ia gubliu bez vozvrata”), the description of a modern musical machine (a gramophone, one speculates) repeats, nearly verbatim, the preceding description of the tavern’s soundscape: “The animal wail of machines could be heard: the cry of a gigantic bull whose throat is being cut at the slaughterhouse: tambourines—bursting, bursting, bursting.”25 For the sound-conscious Bely, the music of modernity is a vocalization of the animal in the slaughterhouse. In Between Two Revolutions (Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii ), Bely situates this subchapter in the context of his musings about how the “horrors of capitalism” were the “mechanical result of a social construction.”26 Whether or not we trust the author’s ex post facto positioning of his work, Bely’s “horrors of capitalism” are uniquely packaged in the text as this gramophone abattoir. Urbanization and industrialization are modernism’s fellow travelers, and Petersburg attempts to come to terms with their effects on the body through literary fragmentation, a prophylactic, immunizing response to modern psychic assaults. Walter Benjamin cites shock as a defining feature of modernity, offering it as the experience of the worker and flâneur alike in the industrial-age city: “The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to the isolated ‘experiences’ of the worker at his machine.”27 Shock, then, is a register of the spatial, temporal, and psychic displacements associated with modernity; of the demands upon our attention, our bodies, and our senses that prevent us from attaining integrated perceptions. Likewise, modern industrial processes dissolve work into algorithms, sequestering the worker from other

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phases of production and preventing him or her from ever having the satisfaction of completion. In this extrapolation of corporeal dismemberment, the modern body and its agency are fragmented and reintegrated into a different sort of economic unit and “social body”: under capitalism, the worker is enfolded into the basic unit of business, the corporation, and later, under socialism, into the collective. As industrialization and modernity deprived the subject of its wholeness and integrity, rendering the body, time, and labor and leisure processes alike into fragmented or disjointed units, so too did they advertise their power to restore wholeness, often by way of the social body and its commercial culture. Tim Armstrong writes that “modernity . . . brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the body in relation to technology; it offers the body as lack at the same time as it offers technological compensation. Increasingly, that compensation is offered as a part of capitalism’s fantasy of the complete body: in the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery and cinema; all prosthetic in the sense that they promise the perfection of the body.”28 Armstrong notes that all of these products offer the illusion of wholeness to a fragmented self. In the processing of organic materials into synthetic ones, society was transforming the human body on another plane: cosmetics, fashion, health tonics, and even cinema with its gelatin-emulsified film stocks—all made from animal by-products—transformed the human body in our perception. Our entry into the fragmenting, dismembering, and synthesizing realm of modernity was inexorably tied to slaughter, as Soviet writers of the 1920s would observe.

T h e Spec t a c le of Sla ug ht er : S ovi et L i fe In a short piece, “About Horses” (“O loshadiakh”), for the New Life (Novaia zhizn’ ), Isaac Babel discusses the slaughter of horses for meat in 1918 Petrograd as the city struggled in the throes of starvation. He reports that 500–600 horses were slaughtered per day, up from a mere 30–40 in prior years: Now first-class work horses, three-year-olds, four-year-olds are all going together under the knife. Everyone is selling—cabbies, draymen, private owners, and local peasants. The process of “dehorseification” is going on with frightening speed, and this is before spring, before the work season. Moving steam power is disappearing catastrophically. The same thing is happening with living power—which we so need. Will anything at all remain?29

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Babel’s chief fear seems to be for the decline of the work force—horsepower is literally disappearing from the city. But the subtext of city history nuances the symbolism: all of Petrograd’s fit men were being swallowed into the Red Guard in this first year of Russia’s Civil War. The two faces of slaughter— animal and human, literal and metaphorical—are implied in Babel’s vision of the City Slaughterhouse. As “About Horses” closes, Babel conveys the moral desperation of a Russian butcher in a tavern near the City Slaughterhouse: “What can you do? Before only the Tatars ate horse meat, but now everyone does, even gentlemen.” Just as the authors of The Meat Question had observed in 1910, when Russians did consume horsemeat, the act was a major disruption in Russia’s deep cultural traditions around meat production and slaughter, even a trespass against the sanctity of life. In Babel’s “On Horses,” the profanity of butchering and consuming workhorses recalled the wasteful fratricide of Russia’s Civil War. Babel’s violent prose heralded a new phase of modernism in Russian literature. Konarmiia (Red Cavalry), a cycle of stories drawn from the author’s experiences with the Budyonny campaign, inaugurated a decade of such cycles and other fragmented genres. Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Yury Olesha were just a few of the writers of the 1920s and early 1930s who eschewed traditional narratives and experimented with more fractured forms. It is no coincidence that many of these writers also turned explicitly to the theme of slaughter in their writings—a commentary on the effects of modernity and a metacommentary on the techniques of modernism. Modernism in Russia never stabilized as a unified movement, interrupted as it was by the 1917 Revolution. Its tools and ideas, however, were taken up by various aesthetic movements in the early decades of the twentieth century, all of which offered fresh perspectives on the human body: biomechanics treated theater as a laboratory of human physiology; constructivism treated the body as raw material to be cut, manipulated, and re-formed; cubism attempted to capture subjects through multiple points of view, exceeding the bounds of singular, fixed spatial perspective. Because modernist art turned on the fragmentation and realignment of representations of the world and human body, its tools were not incompatible with early Soviet art’s self-stated mission of forming the new man. The Soviet body was material to be manipulated at will: its form, limits, and appetites were all being radically reassessed and reshaped. Mayakovsky’s 1926 essay, “Hog Butcher of the World” (“Svinoboi mira”; the title refers to Carl Sandberg’s Chicago—“hog butcher for the world”30) is a Soviet answer to Korolenko’s “Factory of Death.” Mayakovsky argues that Chicago is America’s true capital, the center of the proletarian movement:

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Chicago (despite the contradictions of official guides) is the capital of the United States . . . It is the true capital, the true heart of industry and profit, and also the heart of the battle of the American proletariat. This heart appears to be a truly bloody heart, for the chief beating of the life of the city is the knacker’s yard, the slaughterhouse . . . A machine lifts live squealing pigs onto a hook, having hooked their feet, and hurls them in an uninterrupted line—they crawl head-over-heels past an Irishman or a Negro, who cuts the pig’s throat with a knife. “Each one slaughters a few thousand pigs a day,” bragged the slaughterhouse guide.31

Mayakovsky’s description of the slaughterhouse closely resembles Korolenko’s and Tolstoy’s before him, despite its superficial attempt to valorize this most stigmatized of industries. Mayakovsky fails to uncouple the horrors of the capitalist slaughterhouse from industrial labor itself, and, as in Tolstoy’s “First Step,” his appeal to physical disgust detracts from the political dimension of his narrative. Mayakovsky describes a flowing “sea of blood,” animal cries that resound the world over, and the acrid “stench” of animal urine and feces. These latter grotesque products of animal digestion imply the larger processes of industrial and economic digestion practiced upon them, suggesting that, whatever Mayakovsky’s political message may be, the slaughterhouse can never be other than a site of disgust and exploitation. Meanwhile, Yury Olesha offers a detailed account of the by-products of slaughter in his novel Envy (Zavist’ ). Andrey Babichev, a hero of Rabelaisian tastes and Rubenesque proportions, works as a manager for the state foodindustry. Babichev’s young assistant, Kovalerov, edits the following report on the uses of animal by-products: “And so, blood collected during slaughter may be processed either for food, in the production of sausage, or for the manufacture of light or dark albumin, glue, buttons, paint, fertilizers, and feed for cattle, birds, and fish. Raw lard from every type of cattle and fatty organic offal—for the preparation of edible oils: lard, margarine, artificial butter, and industrial oils: stearine, glycerine, and lubricating oils. Sheep heads and feet can, with the aid of electrical spiral drills, automatic-action cleaning machines, gas-operated lathes, slicing machines, and scalding vats, be processed into food products, bone oil, and various items from sterilized wool and bones.”32

Olesha’s technical report on Soviet industry’s complete processing of organic life metaphorizes the rendering of the new Soviet man. The report also fails to convince his reader of the glory of the grand projects of industry, instead suggesting that Soviet man is merely rendered by the machine of the state.

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Ten years after his reportage on the horses of Petrograd, Babel would again observe the spectacle of horse slaughter during collectivization. In the story “Kolyvushka,” Babel tells the story of a peasant who prefers to slaughter his pregnant mare—referred to as his “daughter”—rather than surrender her to the state.33 If scarcity drove the slaughter of animals in “On Horses,” then it is a grotesque surfeit that motivates the butchery in “Kolyvushka.” Peasants in Russia are reported to have slaughtered nearly half of all livestock during collectivization (1928–33).34 Along with Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, Andrey Platonov treated this historical moment in bizarre episodes of vicarious self-destruction. In the short novel The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan), Platonov describes the grotesque village scene in which peasants slaughter and devour their animals: . . . the earth was black, because the warm blood of cows and sheep had come out from under the fence outside . . . Having liquidated the last breathing, living inventory, the peasants began to eat the beef and even called all the servants to feast; the beef in a short time had been eaten like Communion—nobody wanted to eat, but the flesh of their own slaughtered had to be hidden in their bodies and kept from being collectivized. Some calculating peasants had long been bloated from eating the meat and went about heavily, like moving barns; others vomited endlessly, but they could not part with their cattle and destroyed it to the very bones, figuring it was no use to their stomachs. Those who had managed ahead of time to eat their livestock, or had let it go into the custody of the collective farm, now lay in an empty coffin and lived in it, as in a tight courtyard, feeling an enclosed peace.35

Platonov’s peasants experience a grotesque, materialist “Communion” with their animals, devouring them before settling into their graves. Platonov’s work frequently features animals cum humans and vice versa, as he blurs the line between human and animal bodies. The exemplary Soviet worker in The Foundation Pit, Misha, is never described as anything other than a bear, testing the limits of the metaphor and realistic representation with it. No longer are humans and animals merely analogized, they merge in chimerical literary figurations that are neither metaphorical nor realistic. In a later story, “The Cow” (“Korova”), Platonov backs away from his radical metaphorization, focusing instead on the organic connection between the human and the animal. The nameless cow of the title begins to grieve after her calf is sold for slaughter and finally commits suicide on the train tracks adjoining the family field. Vasya, the young boy whose family owned the cow, writes a eulogy for his school essay:

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“We had a cow. When she lived, my mother, father, and I drank milk from her. Then she had a son of her own—a calf, and he also drank milk from her, we were three and he made a fourth, but there was enough for all. The cow still plowed and carried loads. Then her son was sold for meat. The cow started to mourn and soon died from a train. And she was also eaten, because she was beef. The cow gave us everything: milk, her son, meat, leather, insides, and bones, she was good-hearted. I remember our cow and will never forget her.”36

Beyond the obvious literary nod to Anna Karenina’s death under the wheels of a train, the classic nineteenth-century symbol of modernity, the story has a stubborn materialism that speaks to the fate of the human body in the Soviet state: it carries loads, it gives away its sons, it is worked to death and then devoured by the state. Platonov’s cow resembles his struggling, laboring human characters, although she is described as unable to comfort herself with words or consciousness or some other distraction, “as a person could do.” Yet, in fact, none of Platonov’s pitiful human characters ever manage to comfort or distract themselves, nor do they ever attain the “humanity”—definitively Soviet—to which they aspire. For Platonov’s workers as for the nameless cow, the body, so long as language and consciousness fail, remains meat.

From Sla ug ht er t o Mo n t a ge: Mode r nism C ome s o f A ge As the historian of photography Beaumont Newhall writes, “the perfection of gelatin emulsion not only led to the conquest, analysis, and synthesis of action, but it brought about standardization of materials and the scientific investigation of the photographic process.”37 It was not lost on early Soviet filmmakers that the principle material of film emulsion was gelatin—a slaughterhouse byproduct obtained from the bones, skin, and sinews of cattle. In addition to integrating footage of the slaughter of cows into their films, filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Sergey Eisenstein were conspicuous advancers of the art of montage, consciously affiliating modernism’s tools of dislocation, juxtaposition, and montage with slaughter in their work. In his manifesto “Cine-Eye” (“Kino-glaz”), Dziga Vertov deploys the trope of slaughter, declaring that his new Soviet man is culled from the best cuts: “I take the strongest and most agile hands from one man, the fastest and best proportioned legs from another, the most handsome and expressive head from a third and through montage I create a new, perfect man.”38 In the same essay,

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Still shot from Dziga Vertov’s Kino-glaz, 1924

Vertov writes in his antigrammatical fashion: “the intestines [of cinema] are tumbling out. The entrails of experience from the stomach of cinema disemboweled.”39 Vertov literally transfers this disembowelment to the screen in his film Cine-Eye (Kino-glaz, 1924), using footage of the slaughter of a bull to demonstrate the possibilities of the new film medium. “We give the bull back his entrails,” and “We dress the bull in its skin,” claim the intertitles before we see the footage of the slaughter run backward.40 Human and animal subjects alike present raw material to Vertov’s camera to be manipulated, cut, and reorganized at will, spatially and temporally. Eisenstein put slaughter to a rather different use in his 1925 film Strike (Stachka). In a dialectical montage sequence, he inserts “documentary,” nondiegetic footage of the slaughter of a bull into a scene in which workers and their families confront an armed police force. Eisenstein’s nondiegetically linked ideas are intended to produce meaning through their collision, inducing shock and manipulating viewers on a physiological level. Richard Stites notes of the period that “in all these Constructivist and Taylorist art movements, one discerns, as in futurism and related genres, the desire for speed, efficiency, angularity, and ‘industrialness’ . . . as psychic weapons leveled against the body, the mental and the social lyricism and pastoral grace that the new generation associated with utter weakness, pallid gentility, and sloth.”41 Eisenstein’s dialectical

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montage could indeed be considered a weapon against classical bodies and classical narratives, subjecting viewers and actors to physiological experimentation and film texts to the butchery of montage.

Meat in t he Revolut iona r y I m a g i n a t i o n : A Post sc ript Although this essay has been primarily concerned with the relationship between material culture and the themes and techniques of modernist aesthetics, the role of meat in the mythopoesis of the Russian Revolution deserves some attention, for in the revolutionary imagination, meat became both a symbol and a cause of revolution, offering a strange case of the materialization of rhetoric. Spoiled meat reputedly incited the men of the Potemkin to mutiny in 1905, an event that Soviet filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein mythologized in his film The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin), released in 1926, a year after Strike. The Lena Goldfields Massacre of 1912, another watershed moment in revolutionary history, was also said to have been spurred by the sale of spoiled horse meat at a company shop in an isolated Siberian mining town on the banks of the Lena River. And Aleksey Ivanovich Putilov, a chief shareholder in the Lena Goldfields Company, had his own role in fanning the flames of Russia’s revolutionary imagination: his RussoAsian Bank oversaw the refurbishment and modernization of the struggling Putilov munitions factory in Petersburg. The once nearly insolvent company, torn by labor disputes in its prerevolutionary years, was propped up by government munitions contracts for Russia’s enormously unpopular involvement in World War I, which called young men to the front to serve as pushechnoe miaso— “cannon meat.” All of this suggests rich material for an embodied history of revolution, the aims of which temporarily coincided with the avant-garde art, literature, and cinema of the 1920s and early 1930s.

Just as Petersburg’s pedestrians are unaware that the sidewalks beneath their feet were once trod by cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse, so too are modern literary travelers unable to behold the soil beneath the historical city’s cultural thoroughfares without a guide. The Internet allows today’s traveler to excavate various layers of narrative, to carve up hyperspace, and like Bely’s narrator, to reassemble and render meaning at will. Moreover, the contemporary experience of hyperspace is akin to that of Benjamin’s worker and flâneur. As we sit at our own “machines,” endlessly distracted by the sensory experience of hyperspace, we are subject to our own modern variety of psychic shock. The

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recent explosion of digital-map-based media and “topographical narratives,” if our genre may be so termed, is perhaps attributable to the digital map’s suturing of psychic and physical space; a buffering against the shock of physical dislocation that one often feels surfing the Web. The addresses of our digital map in Mapping Petersburg are not merely hypertext protocols, they are indices of physical space, lived history, and material culture. In the Web site that accompanies this essay, “Anatomizing Modernity,” I have tried to encourage the user to reimagine the historical space of the city—to visualize relationships between spaces in the city that are not physically contiguous but nonetheless linked conceptually and narratively. Hyperspace environments allow us to understand real environments in just such new ways, holding layers of history and competing narratives of the past in simultaneous suspension. I hope that the user of the Web-based map will feel empowered in much the way that modernists were in creating their narratives through montage and juxtaposition, finding new ways to link physical and conceptual spaces. In this essay, I have tried to demonstrate that the single trope of slaughter seemed to capture the fears within Russian society in the early twentieth century—capitalist exploitation and the shocks of industrialization, war, collectivization, and revolution—and that this trope was translated, powerfully, into an aesthetic tool. Modernist art, literature, and cinema offered new means of reflecting upon modern assaults on the body by enacting their own aesthetic violence against form. Not only was modernist literary, cinematic, and artistic production concerned with the themes of dismemberment, fragmentation, and dislocation of the body, but it also made the processes of slaughter its own through fragmentation, mechanization, shock, and montage. What began as Tolstoy’s literary anatomies and dissections would later become part of an artistic mode that culminated in modernism’s use of the fragment and montage. This violation of form was the chief means by which modernists—revolutionaries, constructivists, and montageurs alike—disassembled and processed their environment, rendering by each juxtaposition of cuts a higher aesthetic unity.  The title and the exposition of this paper owe much to Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s essay “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 1. V. A Vityazeva and B. M. Kirikov, eds., Leningrad: Putevoditel’ (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1986), 287. 2. Putevoditel’ po S.-Peterburgu (Leningrad: IKAR, 1991), 123. 3. Isaac Babel, “O loshadiakh,” Novaia zhizn’, March 16, 1918. 4. Anatoly Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga (St. Petersburg: Fert, 1994), 20.

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5. R. E. F Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 260–74. 6. Elly Bogdanov, Miasnoi vopros v Rossii i sovremennoe polozhenie skoto- i miasopromyshlennosti v Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Komiteta Moskovskoi promyshlennosti i miasnoi birzhi, 1912), 3. 7. Petersburg scholar Anatoly Bakhtiarov estimates in his labor-oriented description of the meat industry at the turn of the century, Briukho Peterburga (The Belly of Petersburg), that 150,000 Caucasian bulls were shipped into Petersburg each year. For a city whose population was approaching one and a half million (between 1900 and 1910), this amounted to approximately one cow for every ten inhabitants per year. See also St.-Petersburg: A Sketch with a Plan and Index (St. Petersburg: Gorodskaia uprava, 1914), 23. 8. Podarok molodym khoziaikam went through twenty editions between 1861 and 1917. 9. Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga, 20, 42–44. 10. Ibid., 44. 11. Ibid., 28. 12. David Bradshaw, A Concise Companion to Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 168. 13. Bakhtiarov, Briukho Peterburga, 23, 26. 14. Such communal living arrangements were not unusual, even for married workers. 15. Vladimir Korolenko, “Fabrika smerti,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1954), 152. 16. Korolenko and many prominent intellectuals responded with outrage to the Beilis affair of 1913, in which a Jew was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. It was widely believed that Jews consumed the blood of Christian children during Passover rituals. For more on the Beilis case, see Jews on Trial, ed. Robert A. Garber ( Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2004). 17. Korolenko, “Fabrika smerti,” 153. 18. Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” in Essays and Letters, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: G. Richards, 1903), 88. 19. Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin-de-Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 36–46. 20. Tolstoy, “The First Step,” 86–87. Tolstoy’s prose here recalls Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne” (“Carrion”), a poetic description of the putrefying corpse of a cow. The two works, in very different ways, push the limits of aesthetic pleasure. 21. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 159. In the original Russian, the rhyme is krov’ and liubov’ (blood and love). 22. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, ed. L. K. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 329–30. For further reading, see Olga Matich’s “Poetics of Disgust: To Eat and Die in Petersburg” in this volume. 23. Bely, Peterburg, 43. 24. Ibid., 208. 25. Ibid., 212. 26. Bely, Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 282.

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27. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 73. 28. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 29. Babel, “O loshadiakh.” Within months of publishing Babel’s story, Maksim Gorky’s newspaper Novaia zhizn’ (New Life) would be shut down by the censorship office for peddling, in Lenin’s words, “intelligentsia pessimism.” 30. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” in Chicago Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 3. 31. Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Svinoboi mira,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1958), 354–55. 32. Yury Olesha, Zavist’ in Izbrannoe (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1974), 29. 33. Isaac Babel, “Kolyvushka,” in Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow: Vremia, 2006), 160. See also Carol Avins, “Isaac Babel’s Tales of Collectivization: Rites of Transition in the New Soviet Village,” Slavic Review 64, no. 3 (2005): 560–79. 34. V. P. Danilov, ed., Ocherki istorii kollektivizatsii (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1963), 45. According to Danilov, 42.6 percent of all cattle, 47 percent of all horses, and 65.1 percent of all sheep in the country were slaughtered by peasants between 1928 and 1933. 35. Andrey Platonov, Kotlovan: Tekst, Materialy tvorcheskoi istorii (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2000), 86. 36. Andrey Platonov, “Korova,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978), 359. 37. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1939 to the Present Day (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 91. 38. Dziga Vertov, “Cine-Eye: A Revolution,” in The Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 93. 39. Ibid., 90. 40. Dziga Vertov, Kino-glaz [videorecording], production of the Film Office of Goskino; film organized by Dziga Vertov (New York: Kino on Video, c. 1999). Translation here of Russian intertitles by Yuri Tsivian in Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Gemona, Udine: Le Giornate del cinema muto, 2004), 12. 41. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 161.

11 The Fluid Margins Flâneurs of the Karpovka River          

Following t he F low in S ea rc h of Urba n Mea ni n g Scholarship about Petersburg’s modernity and the life of the city usually focuses on the chronotopes of the center, and the reader steeped in this tradition might be somewhat puzzled by my essay’s attention to a river—and to the relatively marginal Karpovka River at that—as a pathway into modern Petersburg. This reader might ask, Why a river? Why the Karpovka? The decision to concentrate on this small river on the outskirts of Petersburg as a way of charting urban modernity was prompted, unexpectedly, by Charles Baudelaire. In his essay “On the Heroism of Modern Life” (1846), Baudelaire defines the city of modernité through the concept of fluidity. Evoking “the spectacle of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences— criminals and kept women—that drift about in the underworlds of a great city,” Baudelaire declares that contemporary life “is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. [. . .] The marvelous,” he writes, “envelops and soaks us like an atmosphere, but we don’t see it.”1 A half century later, the modernists of Petersburg echoed Baudelaire’s image of “floating” urban sensation, but they developed the image in negative terms. Andrey Bely and Alexander Blok perceived the main avenues of the imperial capital to be choked by flow that evoked feelings of disgust. The 283

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Baudelairian notion of floating (existences flottantes), with its potential to tempt and inspire the city dweller, is perceived by them as teeming and swarming (kishenie, medlenno tekushchaia gushcha) that confines the individual within the claustrophobic limitations of the crowd.2 In Petersburg Bely depicts the “viscous and slowly flowing sediment” of Nevsky, whose “damp space poured together a myria-distinction of voices into a myria-distinction of words. All the words jumbled and again wove into a sentence; and the sentence seemed meaningless. It hung above the Nevsky, a black haze of phantasmata.”3 For Bely, floating Nevsky Prospect threatens to subvert urban distinctions. It creates a deceptive unit of syntax: ordered, yet meaningless.4 Such urban texture does not envelop; rather, it lures the citizen with the promise of meaning then disorients and enslaves him. In his notebooks Blok writes similarly and squeamishly about the “strindbergovshchina of Petersburg in May: peculiar swarming of streets (the most disgusting being Nevsky and Karavannaya).”5 The pejorative noun strindbergovshchina here refers to the cult of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, whose plays some believed contributed to moral decline and degeneration. In his use of the term, Blok condemns the questionable mores of the fashionable crowd. The contrast between such intensely polemical descriptions of Petersburg and Baudelaire’s enthusiastic image of the “floating existences” of the modern city raises the question whether one might find any forms of symbolic floating in the text of fin-de-siècle Petersburg that would “envelop and soak” the painter of modern life rather than repel him. This challenge points in the direction of the city’s rivers—for where, if not on a river bank, could a city dweller experience the literal and symbolic powers of urban flow at once? The Karpovka, which runs across the northern part of the city known as the Petrograd Side, envelops a locale in which the antithetical extremes of urban society have long met and mixed.6 Those who strolled along the banks of the Karpovka at the turn of twentieth century encountered decrepit slums, modernist buildings of the new bourgeoisie, aristocratic mansions, and the impressive facades of industrial giants—all mingling in surprising proximity. Here, on the margins of the city, far from the censorship of the central avenues, a new concept of city life was emerging. According to Blok, an observant flâneur of the Karpovka and its vicinities, the “real” life of modern Petersburg was taking place right there at Bolshoy and Kamennoostrovsky avenues, which cross the Karpovka on the Petersburg/Petrograd Side, and in the multitude of tiny streets and alleys that run between the avenues and “weave” them together into a peculiar web: “Real manifestations of life accidentally enter the street (hooligans, breaking streetlamps and beating each other up, drunk in a streetcar, wife and husband on

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Bolshoy Avenue).” Later, Blok calls Bolshoy “the main avenue of today’s Petersburg—since Nevsky lost its meaning.”7 Blok’s observation is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s admiration of the way in which the underworld of Paris broke into the open in the process of the poet’s observational flânerie: “criminals and kept women” became the subjects of Baudelaire’s urban poetry in the same way that hooligans and prostitutes came to signify “real” life for Blok.8 We see Blok opposing the strindbergovshchina of Nevsky to the brutal authenticity of Bolshoy.9 In more general terms, Blok criticizes the strindbergovshchina of Nevsky as a disease of redundant literariness. The “real” life of Bolshoy attracts him as a yet unpolished and unnarrativized tabula rasa on which he can write his modern text. In this context, Bolshoy becomes a transitional space, similar to those that, according to T. J. Clark, attracted impressionist painters for their quality of being “edgy, ill-fitting, or otherwise unfinished.”10 In opposition to Bely’s diagnosis of Nevsky Prospect as an urban zone of exhausted meaning, Blok’s Bolshoy promises to discover and define new meanings of and for urban modernity by putting intimate, secret personal life (e.g., that of delinquency and marriage) right out on the public street located on the margins of the city. In order to define the meaning of flânerie along the banks of the Karpovka, my essay often falls back on one of the key theoretical figures of our project— the poet-flâneur, as defined by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project. According to Benjamin, his prototype was Baudelaire, who formulated modernity as a culturally crucial spaciotemporal realm that is inalienable from the life of the metropolis. While Adrian Wanner claims that Blok, the main focus of this essay, was “reticent about his relationship to the French poet” and that his reaction to Baudelaire was opaque,11 it is nonetheless helpful to assess Blok’s flânerie through the lens of Benjamin’s construction of Baudelaire’s experience. Benjamin’s understanding of flânerie as a practice aimed at blurring borders between exterior and interior is reinforced in this essay by Gaston Bachelard’s elaborations on the nature and contradictions of spatial intimacy. Applying Benjamin’s and Bachelard’s astute readings of Baudelaire’s flânerie to the practice of flânerie along Petersburg’s Karpovka River, my essay concentrates on three symptomatic texts in the history of the district: Evgeny Grebyonka’s physiological sketch “Petersburg Side” (“Petersburgskaya Storona,” 1844), which examines the site in the throes of the energetic nineteenthcentury boom of Petersburg’s financial and social glamour; Blok’s poems and diary entries from the first decade of the twentieth century, a time of selfproclaimed and, paradoxically, inspirational crisis of culture and the arts in Petersburg; and art works by Dmitry Mitrokhin from 1927, in which the insistent

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depiction of the backwaters of the Karpovka at the end of the 1920s became a metaphor for the marginalizing of Petersburg modernism in Soviet art. Tracing the relationships between these works elucidates how Karpovka flânerie and its representations, which from their very beginning were a quest for the marginal, acquired additional layers of meaning during the modernist epoch in Russia.

Mode r nit y under Constr u c t i o n : A P hy si olog ist ’s Tour of t he Pet er s bu r g S i de Insofar as walking along the banks of the Karpovka entails walking through the thick of the Petersburg/Petrograd Side, a semiotic analysis of the cultural topography of this area seems to be in order. Once conceived as a place for the rich and noble, the Petersburg Side had lost its social prestige by the mid-nineteenth century and became a semiotically opaque zone of multiple divisions and oppositions: social, cultural, architectural.12 This polyphony of meanings, at once contradicting and echoing each other, was registered by Evgeny Grebyonka (1812–48) in “Petersburg Side,” a sketch that was incorporated by Nikolay Nekrasov into his important anthology Physiology of Petersburg (1845). For Grebyonka, the Petersburg Side in 1844, isolated from both the city center’s aggressive glamour (Nevsky Prospect) and its aggressive poverty (Haymarket [Sennaya] Square), became an urban space sui generis—not only of impoverishment but, importantly, a locus of the past opposed to modernity: If you are rich, if you live in the center of the city, if you float over the polished carriage-way of Nevsky and Morskaya avenues, if your eyes are used to the brightness of gaslights and splendor of the luxurious stores [. . .] I recommend that you take a walk to the Petersburg [Side], the poorest part of our city, have a look at the long narrow streets, many of which are not paved, with wooden buildings—the further one gets from Bolshoy Avenue, the quieter, gloomier, poorer it is. [. . .] Petersburg Side once was the best part of the city [. . .] but later, cut off from the center by the river, lying close to the Northern swamps, it started to decline and became a refuge for the poor. [. . .] Some poor clerk puts together his modest capital and moves to the Petersburg Side to end his days here: that’s how most of the Petersburg Side was built.13

The isolated nature of this area acquires a rather mythologized mode of characterization in Grebyonka’s text, and even toponyms here border on fairy-tale style, so that “servants of the nobility feel as if abroad on the Petersburg [Side],

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in a different part of the world” (91). Elsewhere, Grebyonka muses about street names: “What kinds of streets are these! Turn off the main avenue and you’ll encounter streets with diverse and incomprehensible names: Plutalova Street [Straying Street], Teryaeva [ Losing Street], Dun’ka’s Alley, and even a street that has a name and patronymic: Andrey Petrovich” (72). For Grebyonka, the Petersburg Side is a locale of strangeness, which he visits as a tourist would visit a foreign country. The area apophatically highlights the center of Petersburg, of which it is a negative reflection. So drastically removed from the temporality of the rest of modern Petersburg in the making is the Petersburg Side in Grebyonka’s narrative that he uses a retrospectivist style to write about it. The literary program of realism fiercely announced by the authors of Physiology of Petersburg seems to turn back for a moment to the description of ruins, giving way in Grebyonka’s essay to the inalienable topos of romanticism: “Some swindler built some time ago a wooden shopping mall (Gostiny Dvor) at Maly Avenue. This building still exists, black and dilapidated. [. . .] Everything in it is dead, black, windows and doors are terribly dark, like eye sockets in a dead skull” (85). The ruin as a rhetorical device might be interpreted as a temporal palimpsest: the past here peeps through the present, disturbingly. In a way the whole of Grebyonka’s Petersburg Side functions as a ruin—it serves as a refuge from and reminder of the past, both melancholic and ironic. This area of “antimodernity” prohibits flânerie, the main method by which the modern metropolis studies itself. Grebyonka admits with some disappointment, “You won’t meet inhabitants of the Petersburg Side in the streets, they don’t walk. [. . .] There are no taverns here either” (75). The flâneur has to arrive here from the outside, from the center of the city—as Grebyonka actually does, hence the lack of intimacy between the observer and this site. The writer does not see the area as his own urban past, but as the other: old-fashioned, patriarchal, peculiar, and peculiarly inviting. And still, although the writer presents a rather clear-cut image of the Petersburg Side as opposed to the splendor of Nevsky, his depiction cannot be called homogenous. He allows for exceptions and corrections to his scheme. Grebyonka explains that he depicts the “majority of the inhabitants of Petersburg Side that create its local color,” yet admits that “there is also the clean and beautiful Kamennoostrovsky Avenue, [. . .] where patriarchal life is vanishing” (77). He complicates his notion of the irregular social distribution in the area (the backwardness of the streets and fashionable splendor of the avenues) by noting that the geographically and temporally isolated Petersburg Side was chosen by many dachniki (summer residents) because it was “close to the islands,

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and first and foremost, not far from the city” (75). The remark affirms the image of the Petersburg Side as an urban limbo of sorts, a zone of transition, a connective tissue between the aristocratic luxury and leisure of the islands (Krestovsky and Elagin) and the industrial expansion and density of the city per se. According to Grebyonka, the culturally complex and conflicted Petersburg Side, with its “incredible and melancholic eclectics” (75), is an alternative zone of urban modernity: on the whole, it belongs to the past and resists the present, yet is traversed by areas of modernity—Kamennoostrovsky and Bolshoy avenues—and serves as a polysemantic buffer between the two zones of urban intensity and prestige: the center and its environs. Grebyonka treats the Petersburg Side with awe and anxiety, as a limbo that at once problematizes and enforces the meanings of the more developed urban areas. His perspective of the bemused “foreigner” is drastically different from the passeistic belatedness of the area. By contrast, our next city dweller, Blok, is le promeneur solitaire, a figure who does not simply observe the area as a tourist but lives there and expresses himself through it.

Co n tra dic t ions of Int ima te F l â n er i e: A l exande r Blok, Le Promeneur Solitaire The next fifty years did not drastically change the status of the Petersburg Side. The polarities, however, diverged even further: while the tiny back streets continued to drown in dirt, poverty, and delinquency, “beautiful” Kamennoostrovsky turned into Petersburg’s main hothouse of modernity and art nouveau. From 1896 to 1917, fifty-six new stone buildings were erected along the main avenues of the Petersburg Side, forty-two of them residential. Real estate prices went up drastically: in 1885, a square sazhen (2,134 meters) cost 7 rubles; by 1914, it cost 320. The area was becoming less and less isolated from the rest of the city. The first streetcars began running along Kamennoostrovsky on March 25, 1908. In summer a steamship would take people to the botanical garden near the Karpovka. Three new bridges over the Karpovka appeared during the period 1904–14.14 Grebyonka’s frustration with the absence of a thriving restaurant life was allayed as well: the Petersburg restaurateur Dominique, famous for his celebrated pirozhki, opened a coffee house on Kamennoostrovsky; taverns, with their less elegant red signboards, emerged near Kamennoostrovsky Bridge. Symptomatically, while Kamennoostrovsky was acquiring the status of Petersburg’s fashionable Champs-Élysées, in the backyards of the avenue one

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could see wastelands and even vegetable gardens with cabbage. Osip Mandelshtam reflected on this contrast in The Egyptian Stamp: the novel’s hero Parnok was a man of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect—one of the lightest and most irresponsible streets of Petersburg. In 1917, after the February days, this street became still lighter with its steam laundries, its Georgian shops, where even cocoa was still to be bought. . . . Venture neither to the right nor to the left: there is bedlam, there is streetcar-less backwater. But on Kamennoostrovsky the streetcars develop an unheard-of speed. Kamennoostrovsky: a feather-brained young man with starch in his only two stone shirts and a sea-breeze in his streetcarfilled head. It is a young dandy out of work, carrying its houses under its arm like an idle fop returning with his airy bundle from the laundress.15

Mandelshtam wrote about belle époque Kamennoostrovsky Avenue retrospectively in 1926–27, close to the time when Benjamin was conceptualizing Baudelaire’s urban legacy. Mandelshtam’s metaphor bridges the city and its lonely flâneur, as the prospect itself turns into a “young dandy out of work” with the knowledge and sentimentality of hindsight: during the Soviet 1920s, the dandy of the belle époque lost his status, and the avenue lost its celebrated name to become the Avenue of the Red Dawns. The poetry and marginalia (diaries and notebooks) of Blok reveal the way one city dweller experienced the immediate meaning of the area at the turn of the century. The poet, whose stepfather, F. F. Piottukh, served in the Grenadier [Life Guards] Regiment, spent his youth (1889–1907) in the regiment barracks on the Karpovka Embankment. After their marriage, Blok and his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, eventually moved to an apartment of their own (41 Galernaya Street), but the Karpovka Embankment held its attraction for Blok throughout his life: in 1910 the poet returned to the Petersburg Side (9 Malaya Monetnaya Street), where he could easily revisit the places of his youth during walks. Thanks to Blok’s friend the poet Sergey Gorodetsky, we have a description of young Blok’s room at the Grenadier Regiment barracks: “His was a long and narrow room with an antique couch, where Fyodor Dostoevsky liked to sit during his visits to the Mendeelev family. An impeccably organized writing table, a bookshelf with a hyacinth on it. On the wall there are portraits of Isadora Duncan, Mona Lisa, and Nesterov’s Madonna. . . . Blok’s room was like nobody else’s.”16 From his house Blok would walk daily along the embankment of the Karpovka to school at the Vvedenskaya Gymnasium (37 Bolshoy Prospect) and, later, to Petersburg University on Vasilievsky Island. During these walks, Blok

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Grenadier regiment barracks on Karpovka Embankment, 2007 (photograph by Polina Barskova)

came to “own” the Karpovka: he became the solitary flâneur of its deserted embankment. The poet’s close friend Vladimir Pyast recounts a journey to visit Blok at the barracks: I get off the horse-drawn cab by Samsonyevsky Bridge, because the cabby will not go as far as the Grenadier Regiment barracks. Then, finally, I find another one and move through the darkness along the absolutely deserted embankment. Neither the cabby nor I know where on this embankment the barracks are to be found. Suddenly, we see a lonely passerby. I ask my cabby to stop so that I can ask this passerby for directions. But I have to interrupt my question immediately, exclaiming: “Alexander Alexandrovich! Is it you? Good evening . . .” While still riding in my cab, I was imagining Blok during his daily walks along this empty embankment.17

This memorable image of Blok walking along the “empty” embankment is curiously evocative of the original title of Baudelaire’s Spleen of Paris, which was Le Promeneur solitaire.18 Pyast depicts Blok as the only inhabitant of the Karpovka Embankment, thus marking the embankment as the poet’s private space. Importantly, it is precisely such a close, even intimate, relationship with the city

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that Benjamin sees as key to Baudelaire’s flânerie: “On the Ile Saint-Louis, Baudelaire felt at home everywhere; he was as perfectly at his ease in the street or in the quays as he would have been in his own room. To go out into the Island was in no way to quit his domain. Thus, one met him in slippers, bareheaded, and dressed in the tunic that served as his work clothes” (243). Benjamin perceives such behavior to be one of the main achievements of flânerie: the blurring of the clear-cut divisions between private and public space, between “inside” and “outside” within the city. He writes of the flâneur: “The city splits for him into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (417). Benjamin continues: “What matters, therefore, is neither spatiality per se, nor plasticity per se but only relation and interfusion. There is but one indivisible space. The integuments separating inside from outside fall away” (423). Daring, even disturbing combinations and separations of these two states, inside and outside, can be found in many poems of Blok’s Gorod (City) cycle. In October 1906, for example, Blok wrote two poems (“Rear Windows” and “October”) about the desire to grasp outside urban reality from the inside. The deceptive and hallucinatory sensation of the possibility of transcending boundaries leads the lyrical narrator to the ultimate act of revolt against the division between inside and outside: in “October,” the hero jumps through the window to achieve a new experience of reality: I opened my window . . . How dull Is the capital in October [. . .] Here, here, in front of my eyes, The star floats and lures, It swings in my window [. . .] Now real life will swing And I’ll acquire wings! . . . I perceived, perceived my might, And with a shriek . . .—I am flying!19

The notion of the “real,” unmediated, and rather bleak life in “October” echoes Blok’s descriptions of Bolshoy street life, and in both instances, the sensation of “real life” is evoked by the radical blurring of public and private, interior and exterior. Like Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, we might say that Blok “strives toward elasticity” of the poetic subject’s perception of the “horrible inside-outside.” For the poet, Bachelard writes, “outside and inside are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”20 Sometimes this hostility, the envy of the inside for the outside (or

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vice versa), acquires radical forms for Blok, who implies in a controversial statement about Gesya Gelfman, one of the assassins of Alexander II, that oppression of the inside might lead to terror: “Who would dare to accuse Gesya or some other miserable Jewess who sits in her filthy attic, observing the weather outside from her window [. . .] and goes to the Catherine Canal Embankment to throw a bomb at a brilliant, desperate, exhausted by his rule, grand and passionate man?”21 In this sentimental and idiosyncratic statement, Blok sees the terrorist’s hostility as a product of the conflict between inside and outside that leads to the transgressive desire to lash out at the socially powerful. One way that he transcends such hostility is by reinventing his walking practice as a time machine of sorts, capable of relocating the subject directly from the indefinite terror of presentness into the consoling past. Blok seems to internalize Bachelard’s sense of “the exterior [as] an old intimacy lost in the shadow of memory”22 as he retrospectively turns the Karpovka into the locus of his young love for his wife. In 1911, when the idyllic phase of their relationship had been left far behind due to mutual disappointments and infidelities, Blok wrote in his journal: “Pyast visited me this morning. We strolled by the Botanical Garden (by the barracks and memories). [. . .] The charm of the twilight sky, many airplanes above, the foreignness [zagranitsa] of the Karpovka neighborhood, the sadness of memories by the botanical garden and by the barracks, our windows—with Lyuba.”23 Walking the river becomes for the poet a way to reactivate his memory, to reenter the seemingly unreachable, encapsulated space behind the windows of his young love. Karpovka, paradoxically, turns into the “interior” space of Blok’s memorializing homage. The designation of the outskirts of the city as a locus that is both agent and object of the memorializing gaze is similar to the strategy chosen by Baudelaire in his untitled fragment “Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville . . .”: I have not forgotten our white cottage, Small but peaceful, near the city, Its plaster Pomona, its old Venus, Hiding their bare limbs in a stunted grove. In the evening streamed down the radiant sun, That great eye which stares from the inquisitive sky. From behind the window that scattered its bright rays It seemed to gaze upon our long, quiet dinners, Spreading wide its candle-like reflections On the frugal table-cloth and the serge curtains.24

Both poets revisit their younger—allegedly more innocent—selves at the outskirts of their cities.25 Both desire to peep into their pasts that hide from the

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nostalgic gaze behind the windows. These pasts differ essentially from the temptations of the present by this very impulse: to hide and to be discrete and unattainable to a voyeur. Blok’s old, no longer attainable, love for Lyuba is not unlike Baudelaire’s “old Venus, hiding [. . .] bare limbs in a stunted grove.” The poets experience their past to be as remote from their present as the quiet oases of Neuilly-sur-Seine (where Baudelaire spent his youth) and of the Karpovka Embankment are remote from the crowds of the center of Paris and Petersburg. The nostalgic homage to the “old Venus” along the Karpovka is markedly different from the other intimate strolls taken by Blok on the Petersburg Side, many of which are marked by transgressive eroticism. For Blok, who once wrote “There is still enough women and wine. [. . .] Petersburg is the most terrifying, evocative, and invigorating of all the European cities,” knowledge of his city was often carnal and had many facets.26 One reflection of Blok’s erotic flânerie can be seen in the description of the enclosed, claustrophobic alleys around the Karpovka in the 1904 poem “Illusion” (“Obman”): In the empty back alley the waters of Spring Run and mumble. The girl is laughing: The red dwarf won’t let her pass [. . .] The reflection lures and scares the girl, A lonely streetlight blinked from afar. The red sun hid behind the building. Laughter. Splashes. Water drops. Burning smell of factories.27

Another instance is found in “Islands” (“Na ostrovakh,”1909), which describes the open space of Elagin Island: And again: the columns covered with snow, Elagin Bridge and two lights. And the voice of the woman in love, And the sand is crackling, and the horse is snorting [. . .] With the regularity of a geometrician I figure out every time, without any words: Bridges, chapel, harshness of the wind, Empty low islands.28

While the first poem shows enclosed urban space through the claustrophobic image of transgressive sexuality, the second gives the sensation of the vastness and openness of the islands by describing the love game in an open carriage that speeds through the empty islands and over frozen bridges linking them.

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Blok’s return to the memories of the Karpovka saves the poet from both sensual agoraphobia and claustrophobia,29 and his special reconstruction of the past protects him from the temptations and perils of the present. Blok’s roles within the space of the outskirts of Petersburg are many: he observes the “real life” of the streets, mediates it in his writing, and participates in it, even cocreates it, through contacts with the female flâneurs—the numerous street walkers who frequented that part of the city and Blok’s female acquaintances whom he would bring to the islands.

Bl o k a nd t he “ Tra nspa rent ” H o u s es of t he K a r povka “On the surface of being, in that region where being wants to be both visible and hidden,” writes Bachelard, “the movements of opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted, and so charged with hesitation, that we could conclude on the following formula: man is a half-open being.”30 Blok was a half-open being who lived during an epoch that strived for new openness. In the observant and poignant memoirs of the artist Vladimir Milashevsky, we read about a poetry reading in 1913 at which Pyast was reciting his friend’s poetry. Though Blok was standing next to the stage, nobody noticed him with his reddish hair and sunburned face. The crowd desired the Alexander Blok from the thousands of postcards, writes Milashevsky: “That picture on the photograph was overexposed [ perederzhannaia]! Black curls, sensual lips, half-closed eyelids: the demon from our opera expectations!”31 Hiding behind an “opera” mask might have been a real ordeal for a poet living during the reign of an aesthetics of peeping, as Milashevsky wittily described the era. To illustrate what he meant, he evoked the male practice of climbing to the upper floor of the horse-drawn tram in the hope of catching a glimpse of the intimate life of the residents: “Usually one would see dull poor apartments with some old lady knitting her sock. [. . .] But sometimes your gaze meets a young woman who decided to undress right at the moment when your coach was passing by her window.”32 The epoch’s obsessive desire to transgress boundaries between private and public, together with Blok’s quest to transcend and connect the “interior” and “exterior” of his city, inspired the main conceptual strategy of my Karpovka pathway on the Mapping Petersburg Web site. Blok’s experience of the Karpovka area, immediate and retrospective, put his “half-open being” into contact with a “half-open,” hybrid space. Following my pathway, the virtual traveler as city dweller can see through the walls of the houses on the Karpovka Embankment,

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thus going beyond the surface. This device of seeing through the walls corresponds to the realities of Blok’s life. For example, walking by the house of Maria Savina, which was designed by M. F. Geisler, the important art nouveau Petersburg architect, Blok could easily see or imagine the prima donna of the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater and the main rival of Blok’s close friend and muse Vera Komissarzhevskaya, a remarkable innovator of the modernist theater. Stopping by the small pink house next to Savina’s whimsical mansion, Blok could think of the many poets and artists he knew who resided there at the beginning of the century: poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, artist and musician Mikhail Matyushin, poet, and artist Elena Guro. Anastasia Vyaltseva, the famous singer of Russian gypsy songs, a genre that influenced Blok’s poetry, also lived on the Karpovka Embankment. Hence, Blok’s walks by the river inspired a panoramic yet penetrating vision of the artistic life of Petersburg of the time. The poet turns into a flâneur-collector whose method is “receiving things into [his] space” and allowing them “to step into his life.”33 One of the richest historical and cultural locales along the Karpovka River was the furniture factory of Fyodor Fyodorovich Meltser (1886–1918), a prominent brick building on the corner of Kamennoostrovsky Avenue and the Karpovka Embankment. For the purposes of my essay and pathway this factory building serves as a telling example of the inside/outside correlation in the relationship between the Karpovka flâneur and the buildings of the river embankment. The building from the outside was an important landmark (perhaps watermark would be a more precise term here). It marked the crossing of two aspects of the Petersburg Side: the energetic flow of Kamennoostrovsky Avenue, with its fashionable crowd, and the languid flow of the Karpovka, along whose embankment a flâneur would look for refuge from the onslaught of glamour. The building, one of Petersburg’s leading furniture factories, was erected in 1884 by V. V. Shaub, a Petersburg architect who was an important exponent of style moderne. After 1904 it was co-owned by the brothers Fyodor and Robert Meltser. It employed approximately two hundred workers, whose products contributed to the Pan-Russian and World expositions. Among Meltser clients were several leading families, including the Romanov royal family, the manufacturers Nobels, and the artistic clan of Alexander Benois, as well as the famous ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya. Robert Meltser was a patron of the important artist of the Petersburg avant-garde Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who lived in the Meltser family residence adjacent to the factory. The Meltser factory serves as the embodiment of several layers of urban life: it gives the Karpovka Embankment an element of industrial outskirts (rabochaia okraina), a topographic entity that Julie Buckler aptly distinguishes from

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the elegant and fashionable “environs” (okrestnosti ) of the islands. By “industrial outskirts,” we are to understand “marginal industrial areas [. . .] in their relationship to the outmost border of the city and thus to near-exclusion, even though the palace-parks actually lie at a greater physical distance from the center.”34 For Blok, the Meltser factory and the factories of the Vyborg Side, which he would have seen from his windows in the barracks, were the “factory layer” of that part of the city. Both Bely and Blok experienced ambivalent feelings of repulsion and attraction toward this “layer”: it “lured and scared” them at the same time. Bely exclaims in Petersburg: “The inhabitants of the islands startle you. [. . .] And as for us, here’s what we’ll say: oh, Russian people! Don’t let the crowd of shadows in from the islands! [. . .] Black and damp bridges are already thrown across the waters of Lethe. If only they could be dismantled.”35 (It is not clear whether the narrator’s “you” is self-inclusive.) For Gorodetsky, Blok’s early poetry is inseparably linked to the “spirit of the outskirts”: “The whole second cycle of the poems of the Beautiful Lady, which builds an antithesis to the original image of the Lady, belongs to the factory outskirts. The huge building of the barracks on the Karpovka and Nevka rivers is surrounded on all sides by factories and workers. The closest wooden bridge gives two views— one of the spectacular city, another of the factories.”36 In addition to serving as an emblem of Karpovka’s “factory text,” Meltser furniture should be read as an intrinsic part of the material culture of Petersburg modernism. This factory provided inhabitants of modernist Petersburg with the “stage sets” for their lifestyles. The Meltser factory screen in Japanese style shown on my Karpovka virtual pathway37 brings to mind the interior room of Bely’s Sofia Likhutina, the whimsical, frivolous, and fashionable heroine of Petersburg: “Ah, Sofia Petrovna! [. . .] On the walls were Japanese fans, lace, tiny pendants, and bows, and on the lamps from satin shades fluttered wings of cotton fabric like tropical butterflies. [. . .] Sofia Petrovna Likhutina had hung small Japanese landscapes, all of them depicting a view of Mt. Fujiyama. The landscapes had no perspectives. And the rooms, jam-packed with divans, armchairs, sofas, fans, and live chrysanthemums, had no perspective either.”38 This congeniality of taste and style has special meaning, because Sofia Petrovna’s prototype was Lyubov Dmitrievna—Blok’s wife, who had been the object of Bely’s passion, reminding us how densely interwoven were the threads of the Petersburg modernist milieu. The very location of the Meltser factory symbolizes the eclectic character of Petersburg modernity: the factory “layer” at this point assails and, using Bely’s phrase, “startles” fashionable Kamennoostrovsky. And if we imagine looking

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behind the surface of the factory’s brick walls, we discover other ways in which the factory interacted with Petersburg’s modernist world: the factory owner was a renowned patron of the arts, the factory’s products were popular among the glitterati of the contemporary art scene, and these products even penetrated works of modernist literature. Such discoveries reveal the interconnections of Petersburg modernism and its web of links to the banks of the Karpovka.

E pilog ue : The K a r povka a s Vi g n et t e, o r th e Paint e r of Mode r n Life o n t he Ou t s ki r t s of Hist or y Yet another trajectory of creative flânerie along the Karpovka River comments on the postrevolutionary fata of Petersburg modernism and helps to draw together connections over time. Our protagonist here is the celebrated etcher Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin (1883–1973). His fate, like that of many Russian artists who managed to adjust to the vortexlike twentieth century, was ruled by contradictory vectors. The accent here is on Mitrokhin’s fascination with the Karpovka River in the late 1920s. Mitrokhin belonged to the younger generation of the World of Art group, whose epoch and milieu defined the artist’s understanding of “his modernity.” It is significant that he coined this personal idiom in an article about Constantin Guys, the protagonist and muse of Baudelaire’s seminal article “The Painter of Modern Life.” “Whatever [the artist] chooses to depict is so amazing and striking in its mastery,” writes Mitrokhin, “that Charles Baudelaire, the artist’s friend, in admiration, defined Guys in the essay as the most powerful depicter of his modernity.”39 For Baudelaire, the choice of Guys, not a major artist by any system of ranking, was a sign of Baudelaire’s interest in the fleeting and changing artistic phenomena that accorded with his understanding of modernity. The historian of art and fashion Valerie Steel comments: “Baudelaire repeatedly took the tone of art critic who has provocatively chosen to emphasize not the great paintings of the past but the work of admittedly lesser artists, [. . .] which was, however, valuable for its portrayal of modern life. One of the reasons Baudelaire praised Guys so strongly was because he regarded him as being simultaneously a dandy, a flâneur, and an artist—a participant, an observer, and a creator of the world of fashion.”40 Mitrokhin’s interest in the meaning of Guys’s works and Baudelaire’s reading of them was lasting and symptomatic: already in the late 1920s, interest in

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the seemingly minor French artist would become an important thread uniting a marginal aesthetic group in Leningrad, including Mitrokhin, Mikhail Kuzmin, Yury Yurkun, Olga Arbenina-Gildenbrandt, and others. Here, Guys’s fleeting urban impressions were interpreted as the opposite of ideological densification, the thickening “sediment” of Soviet Leningrad.41 Aesthetic figures and preoccupations with the marginal attracted Mitrokhin. Together with his peers Konstantin Somov, Lev Bakst, Alexander Benois, Alexander Golovin, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Evgeny Lansere, Sergey Chekhonin, and Nikolay Feofilaktov, Mitrokhin revolutionized Russian book art. But even in this rather specific, if not marginal, area of the arts, he found a more specialized niche of his own. Kuzmin, whose books Mitrokhin illustrated lovingly, writes: “Mitrokhin’s power lies in end-pieces, covers, ex-libris, illuminations, flyleaves, all kinds of vignettes, where graphic art inseparably borders on the book material per se.”42 There, literally on the margins of texts by Vasily Rozanov and Konstantin Balmont, Marina Tsvetaeva and Kuzmin, and Ovid and Longus, Mitrokhin created a delicate world derived from fairy-tale imagery and inspired by the ornamental shapes of nature. “Mitrokhin is a fairytale-teller!” Kuzmin exclaimed. “The lyrical content of nature, sometimes not even nature as such, but its ornamental lines—this is what attracts Mitrokhin the most.”43 His penchant for the ornamental lines of nature was related, according to another critic of Mitrokhin, to certain limitations of his gift: allegedly, he preferred landscapes to the depiction of people; erotic subjects in his depiction lacked passion.44 In this context, Mitrokhin’s illustrations for Longus’s bucolic novel Daphnis and Chloe were uniquely adequate to his gift: the tone of the novel’s erotica is muffled and submerged in the world of nature, with young lovers existing as if alone in the rarified sweetness of the natural world. After the 1917 October Revolution, Mitrokhin, who held a high curatorial position in the Russian Museum, began to look feverishly for more ideologically appropriate subjects. In 1920 he illustrated Kuzmin’s translation of H. De Régnier’s “Seven Amorous Portraits”; the long poem “In China” by Nikolay Gumilev (who would be executed by the new regime only a year later); and a brochure, “The Second Congress of the Communist International.” Even more politically correct subjects began to appear in his work later. Yet there was one important exception at the end of the 1920s, when Mitrokhin created a series of sketches of the back streets of the Petersburg Side, with special attention to the banks of the Karpovka River.45 In his letters from the time, Mitrokhin complained about his marginal position in the new cultural process:

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D. I. Mitrokhin, On Karpovka, 1939 (Yuri Rusakov, Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin, 1966)

They’ve just opened a “World of Art” exhibition here. This attempt is fruitless and joyless. The reaction to the opening—complete silence and indifference. (1924) I am sending many of my sketches to the exhibition of polygraphy in Moscow. But what if nobody needs them there! (1927) Haven’t you heard any rumors about the exhibition of my sketches? I am afraid—it’s not likely to happen this year, since nobody is interested in it. (1927)46

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In this context, his interest in the “out of the way place” (zakholust’ie) of the Karpovka acquires new meaning. In describing his sketching process, Mitrokhin writes that he “began making the landscape sketches in the streets. There are many beautiful, godforsaken places on the Karpovka. [. . .] I’d like to make whole series of drawings!” (1923)47 Mitrokhin’s devoted biographer Yury Rusakov muses: The center of the former capital did not attract him much: his seemingly strange predilection can probably be explained by the fact that living on the Petrograd Side and continually strolling amid its scenery, Mitrokhin learned to love the place, with its quite individual character. Thanks to the frenetic construction at the start of the twentieth century, interrupted by World War I and the events of the 1917 Revolution, the Petrograd Side was, at the time, a straggling, architecturally disorganized conglomeration of large houses with blank fireproof end walls, interspersed, here and there, by plots of wasteland with mighty, old trees still growing in them, endless fences, and small wooden houses that kept standing by a sort of miracle. This setting, unique to this part of the former capital, charmed Mitrokhin by the pathetic contrast between the surviving patches of countryside and the great city suddenly stopped in its stride.48

Mitrokhin’s position within the World of Art group was literally on the margin of the book, but within the cultural process of the historical moment, he was at the very center, participating in dozens of exhibitions, publications, and other exciting projects. New Soviet aesthetic sensibilities pushed Mitrokhin to the edge; he needed a topographical locale that could adequately reflect this position. The Karpovka was perfect. On the one hand, the river was connected to the acme of Petersburg modernism, and it embodied Mitrokhin’s nostalgia for the epoch, when Blok, Matyushin, Kuzmin, Mayakovsky, Vyaltseva, and others would stroll along its banks—an epoch when the river was understood as a whimsical and incomplete vignette in contrast to the overwritten urban text of the center. On the other hand, the Karpovka came to signify for Mitrokhin the desolation and emptiness that surrounded the practitioners of Petersburg modernism at the end of the 1920s. In less politicized terms, the charms of the Karpovka, seen before as a seductive pastoral virgin, were very attractive to the artist of Daphnis and Chloe. For Mitrokhin, as for Blok before him, the Karpovka was a bucolic locale of longing that was associated with the desire to freeze time. For Blok, it was the place where he and Lyuba would forever be young together; for Mitrokhin, it was where his artist friends would be flâneurs, where they would create and debate, not yet stifled by the new century. To borrow Mitrokhin’s praise of Guys, the Karpovka was a place of “their modernity”—intimate, self-contradictory,

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“enveloping,” “soaking,” and inspiring. The quest for new urban meaning along the banks of the Karpovka River became an intimate urban practice aimed at blurring both the temporal boundaries between past and present and the spatial ones between interior and exterior. By means of such strolls, an artist could construe the Karpovka Embankment as a time capsule, where otherwise unreachable areas of memory were conserved, remaining exempt from the noise of time. Juxtaposed to the swarming communality and lack of meaning of the more central urban areas, which Petersburg modernists perceived as repulsive and overwritten, the marginal Karpovka might be seen as a locale with the potential for flexible meaning: walks along its embankment assisted in healing the rupture between the personal past and present. All three creators considered here saw the Karpovka and its neighborhoods as a refuge from the perils of the center (both topographical and cultural). This threatening influence was expressed as aggressively isolating social difference in the case of Grebyonka, as lacking meaning and authenticity in the case of Blok, and as negation of Petersburg’s past by the Leningrad present in the case of Mitrokhin. Designed as two mutually enriching components, this essay and the virtual pathway49 aim to remap the experience of creative walking alongside Karpovka’s unhurried flow: for the artists, the river not only functioned as inspiration and as a model cityscape, it also embodied the continuous flow of personal modernity, with its specific network of memories and associations differentiated from the pressures of the homogenizing, and at times frightening, flow of the central avenues. Such a reconstruction of part of the city’s connective tissue includes the protagonists’ vision of the past as well as its inscription into the disruptive dynamics of urban modernity.  1. Charles Baudelaire, “Heroism of Modern Life,” in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Chavet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 104–7. 2. Bely’s “rhyming” notion of a “viscous and slowly flowing sediment” (tekushchaia gushcha) is pervasive in the text; for example, in the chapter “The Last Judgment” (Sirin edition of Petersburg), the participle flowing is repeated four times in relation to Nikolay Ableukhov’s intense expectation of the terrorist bomb explosion. In such a context, flowing turns into a sort of eschatological limitation, rather than evoking the Baudelarian idea of free and limitless movement/sensation. This kind of flowing is closer to Benjamin’s later reconceptualization of Baudelaire’s crowd. Graeme Gilloch writes: “In Benjamin’s later writings on Baudelaire and Paris, an increasing emphasis is given to the dehumanizing tendencies at work in the crowd: toward conformity, uniformity, anonymity and passivity. The metropolitan crowd emerges in a new light: namely as a

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threatening, undifferentiated mass. . . . The dreaming collectivity has become the nightmare of the mob” (Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City [Cambridge: Polity, 1996], 146–48). 3. Andrey Bely, Petersburg, trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 178, 179. 4. On the grammar of a city-text, see Julie Buckler’s introduction of Vitruvian urban “syntax” into the text of Petersburg eclecticism (Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005], 41). 5. Alexander Blok, Zapisnye knizhki, 1901–1920 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965), 298. Unless otherwise noted, translations are mine. 6. I refer to the Side as “Petersburg” when describing events before 1914 and as “Petrograd” when describing events after 1914, the year the city changed its name. 7. Alexander Blok, Dnevnik, in Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1963), 131. 8. Vladimir Milashevsky describes Bolshoy Avenue as a locale known for prostitution in his Petersburg Side “travelogue” titled “Togda, v Peterburge, v Petrograde”: “Bolshoy Avenue. Here one meets mysterious girls ‘whom no one knows,’ so covered with makeup that one can’t distinguish their actual facial features. . . . All of them wear a boa of feathers as some kind of uniform” (Milashevsky, Vchera, pozavchera . . . Vospominaniia khudozhnika [Moscow: Kniga, 1989], 23). Curiously, the prostitutes in this episode imitate their famous colleague from Blok’s poem “The Lady Whom No One Knows” (“Neznakomka”). 9. Blok insistently studied and described the lower depths of Petersburg through flânerie: “The evening strolls (that I took up again after a long break) to the gloomy locales, bleak windows with curtains. . . . The girl walks breathing heavily: it must be tuberculosis. This world is terrifying”(Zapisnye knizhki, 114). 10. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984), 146. 11. Adrian Wanner, Baudelaire in Russia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 192. 12. On the early history of the northern islands of Petersburg, see V. A. Vityazeva, Nevskie ostrova: Elagin, Krestovsky, Kamenny (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986). 13. Evgeny Grebyonka, “Petersburgskaya storona,” in Fiziologiia Peterburga, ed. Nikolay Nekrasov (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), 72–73. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text. 14. Antonina Kalyuzhnaya, Petersburgskaya storona (Petersburg: Ostrov, 2007), 185. 15. Osip Mandelshtam, “Egyptian Stamp,” in The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 140. 16. Sergey Gorodetsky, “Iz vospominanii ob Aleksandre Bloke,” in Ia luchshei doli ne iskal: Sud’ba Aleksandra Bloka v pis’makh, dnevnikakh, vospominaniiakh, ed. P. Enisherlov (Moscow: Pravda, 1988), 176. 17. Vladimir Pyast, “Vospominaniia o Bloke,” in Ia luchshei, 184. 18. Benjamin reports that “the title originally planned for Les Fleurs du mal was Les Limbes [Limbo] . . . , and for Le Spleen de Paris it was Le Promeneur solitaire” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge,

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MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999], 235). Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text. 19. Blok, “V oktiabre,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:193. 20. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 217. 21. Blok, Dnevnik, 73. 22. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 182. 23. Ibid., 81. The phrase zagranitsa na Karpovke needs explanation: it both echoes Grebyonka’s observation of the “otherness” of this area and connotes the new architectural realities of the belle époque Petrograd Side, with its westernized shapes. In 1902, the architect V. S. Karpovich wrote: “The architectural firm of Shaub reigns on the Petersburg Side, giving birth to Germanic culture. For example, the ‘House of Gorbov’ (10 Mira Street) is decorated in a modernized Germanic style with multiple baroque shapes and artistic features” (quoted in Kalyuzhnaya, Petersburgskaya storona, 124). We observe here an interesting semiotic shift and complication: zagranitsa now relates both to social topography and to architecture. 24. Charles Baudelaire, Piece 99, Fleurs du Mal, 1861 ed., trans. William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954), 94. 25. Before their marriage, Blok and Mendeleeva rented a room for their meetings at 10 Serpukhovskaya Street. Though the purpose of their meetings was not the consummation of their love but rather a discursive union, they could not stand the idea that others would treat them as clandestine lovers (A. Aleksandrov, Blok v Peterburge-Petrograde [Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1987], 73). 26. Blok, Dnevnik, 72. 27. Blok, “Obman,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 2:146. 28. Blok, “Na ostrovakh,” in Sobranie sochinenii, 3:20. 29. Blok’s diary abounds in descriptions of his erotic flânerie of the most poignant kind such as in this instance: “The woman acrobat exits—I implore her to go with me. We are flying, and the night is yawning. I cannot control myself. The whole night she covers her mouth with her hand. I tear her lace and her silk, in my crude hands and in her sharp heels some force and some mystery lie hidden. I spend hours with her: painfully and fruitlessly. After that she disappears into the alley” (Zapisnye knizhki, 77). For a Benjaminian analysis of Baudelaire’s and Blok’s poetic methods of erotic flânerie, see Gerald Pirog, “Melancholy Illuminations: Mourning Becomes Blok’s Stranger,” Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature 50 (2001): 103–23. 30. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 222. 31. Milashevsky, Vchera, pozavchera . . . , 81. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206. Because of Blok’s penchant for urban mediation, he has become a protagonist of some of the essays in this volume: besides the essay on his play The Puppet Show, those about the tram and especially about Blok’s death and funeral. 34. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 158. 35. Bely, Petersburg, 12–13. For a discussion of bridges in Petersburg, see Luke Stratton’s essay in this volume. 36. Gorodetsky, “Iz vospominanii,” 176.

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37. See my Karpovka itinerary in Mapping Petersburg. 38. Bely, Petersburg, 39. 39. Dmitry Mitrokhin, “K. Guys,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine: Stat’i, pis’ma, vospominaniia (Moscow: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1986), 38. The ambiguous use of the pronoun “his” in this passage allows the reader to understand that Mitrokhin is ascribing “his modernity” either to Baudelaire or to Guys. 40. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Paris: Berg Publishers, 1998), 90. 41. Olga Gildenbrandt-Arbenina, Devochka, katiashchaia serso (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2007), 83. 42. Mikhail Kuzmin, “D. I. Mitrokhin,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 351. 43. Ibid. 44. Vsevolod Voinov, “D. I. Mitrokhin,” in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 354. 45. Mitrokhin was not the only Leningrad artist of the time attracted to the subject of topographic and social margins. See, e.g., N. I. Dormidontov, Okraina Leningrada. Muzykanty (1928); S. A. Pavlov, Letniaia noch’ za Narvskoi zastavoi (1923); and Vasileostrovskii peizazh (1923). Published on CD-Rom Tri Veka Peterburga (Saint Petersburg, 2004). 46. Dmitry Mitrokhin, Pis’ma, in Kniga o Mitrokhine, 151. 47. Ibid., 140. 48. Yury Rusakov, Dmitry Isidorovich Mitrokhin (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1966), 90. 49. See my Karpovka itinerary in Mapping Petersburg.

12 The Voices of Silence The Death and Funeral of Alexander Blok            -   

The summer of 1921 in Petrograd was marked by death: the slow decline and death of Alexander Blok on August 7, 1921; the arrest (on August 3) and execution (on August 24) of the poet Nikolay Gumilev by the Cheka (secret police); and the suicide of the author and translator Anastasia Chebotarevskaya, wife of writer Fyodor Sologub, who drowned herself in the Neva on September 23 in despair over the vacillation of the authorities in issuing them emigration visas. Together these deaths—characterized both by slow decline and sudden violence—formed the central trope in the myth of the dying Petersburg. Several decades later, the writer Nina Berberova, a then relatively unknown figure, described the period as “a black page in Russian poetry”—an end of an era, through whose peripeties one lived with an “extraordinary intensity” as if “at the edge of an abyss.”1 For many, Blok’s funeral was the last time they would be together. Later, many emigrated; some perished, victims of political persecution; and others were transformed into the new Soviet intelligentsia. As Petrograd experienced the transition from revolution and civil war to the social reconstruction and political consolidation of the New Economic Policy in the spring of 1921, the literary intelligentsia tried to make sense of this cultural and historical threshold. Blok’s funeral provided an opportunity to express the anxiety of the time through the communal rituals and narratives of death. In the public imagination, the Petersburg of 1921—“that Petersburg, where we buried 305

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Blok and where we could not bury Gumilev”2—became the threshold between the death of old Petersburg and the birth of the new Soviet Petrograd. Rites of passage order space and time, demarcate the sacred from the profane, and create a counterpoint to the banality of the everyday. The symbolic construction of a culture is revealed against the background of death. As the literary scholar Alan Friedman notes, “Artifacts of death—rituals of dying and funeral, graveyards and tombs, wills and death certificates, the corpse itself— are as much communal constructs, dramatic and narrative performance, as are the texts that contain them.”3 This essay and the accompanying Web itinerary reconstruct the death and funeral of Alexander Blok. They are developed around key moments that structure the reminiscences of his contemporaries: learning about Blok’s death; viewing the corpse in the intimate setting of his apartment; taking part in the funeral procession that moved from Blok’s home on 57 Ofitserskaya Street to Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island; and finally, the burial, remarkable for the fact that “no one spoke at the grave.”4 Indeed, silence is intimately connected to both the poet and the city and becomes the dominant motif associated with Blok’s death and with the year 1921. This silence is expressed through allusions to the silence of the press about Blok’s death, the silence of the emaciated city, the transformation of Blok’s dead body, and perhaps most prominently, the silence of the funeral itself. The function and meaning of ritual silence provides an illuminating contrast against the background noises of early twentieth-century Petersburg: the streetcar’s prattle and the rhythmic sewing of the Singer sewing machine, the chaotic sound of the slaughterhouse and the explosion of a terrorist’s bomb.5

Living in a Dying C i t y: T h e Ar t of Life a nd t he Li fe o f A r t Blok died in the summer of 1921, in the aftermath of the Civil War—a period of political crisis and economic scarcity that famously transformed both the topographical and the textual identity of the city. After the Bolshevik revolution, the industrial capital of Russia was emptied of industry and people; it had been looted, vandalized, and disrupted by frequent strikes.6 News of the nationwide famine, which had reached epidemic proportions, dominated the press, and in the winter, as Petrograd froze because of an unprecedented fuel crisis, the city’s inhabitants burned picture frames, furniture, and books to stay warm.7 By the spring, the Civil War had come to a conclusion, and the inauguration of the

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New Economic Policy began to transform the material conditions and everyday life of the city’s inhabitants: small private restaurants and businesses began to open, and signs advertising commercial goods began to appear on the streets. Indeed, as NEP began to change the political, economic, and cultural climate of Petrograd, the Civil War years crystallized into the central trope of the myth of Petersburg and its death. As Polina Barskova suggests, the real experience of crisis merged with the eschatological Petersburg text to produce new narratives concerned with the spectacle of the agonizing, slow death of old Petersburg.8 Indeed, important works of the preservationist movement, like Nikolay Antsiferov’s The Soul of Petersburg and Erikh Gollerbakh’s City of Muses, described the physical state of the post–Civil War city as “‘graveyards’ inhospitable to new life.”9 Those connected to literary life often fared better than the majority of the population. In a world of scarcity—where shortages of food, firewood, and even paper were common—the intelligentsia, through the patronage of Maksim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and other influential cultural figures, had access to occasionally heated living space and food rations through the newly established cultural institutions—the House of Arts, the House of Writers, and the House of Scholars. Despite difficult material conditions, and perhaps because of them, some described literary life in Civil War Petrograd as having retained an apocalyptic vitality.10 Olga Forsh noted in Ship of Fools (Sumasshedshii korabl’ ), her fictionalized memoir of life in the House of Arts, that Petersburg cultural life resembled grapevines that flourish on the edge of a volcano: Everyone lived in that house as if on the edge of death. The generals approached from all fronts, and hunger began to approach the limits [of the bearable]. People invented snares for crows, and thankfully in the book The Brest Negotiations people read that there was a precedent, and that the German military men had already eaten crows. Because of the feelings of instability and tension, regular weekdays no longer existed, and life itself came to be not this or that gathering of facts but only the art of surviving these facts. Not the customary norms in the relationship between labor and leisure time, not the necessity of wearing these or other masks, called for by the circumstance or by the hierarchy of the intelligentsia values to which one had become accustomed [—none of this existed any longer]. Alongside this, it was indeed in these years that, just as the richest grapes flourished on the edge of a volcano, people flourished in their own best colors. Everyone was a hero. Everyone was a creator. Some created new norms of sociability, some—books, some—entire schools, some—boots from the coarse cloth of a card table.11

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Despite his cultural stature, Blok’s circumstances and health had deteriorated significantly during the Civil War period. A new domestic arrangement exacerbated the long-existing tension between Blok’s mother and his wife; his health gradually declined and in the spring of 1921 took a sharp turn for the worse. 12 The poet’s last public performances—in Petrograd on April 25 and in Moscow in early May—which he was compelled to give for financial reasons, became part of the spectacle of his slow death. Members of the audience remarked on the macabre, funereal atmosphere: Evgeny Zamyatin described Blok’s Petrograd reading as his “wake.” In Moscow the young poet Mikhail Struve announced to the audience that Blok was already dead, and Blok, backstage, famously remarked to Korney Chukovsky that Struve was right. Vladimir Mayakovsky, who attended Blok’s reading in Moscow, tied his demise to his final public performance: “I listened to him in May in Moscow: in the halfempty hall, silent as a cemetery, he quietly and sadly read lines about gypsy singing, about love, about the beautiful lady—there was no way forward. Only death. And it came.”13 Indeed, in the public imagination, Blok’s literary death not only preceded his biological death but actually made it inevitable. After June, Blok spent most of his time in his apartment in alternating stages of rage and delirium.14 Contributing to the diffuse mythology that developed around Blok’s slow, agonizing death was the fact that its specific cause was uncertain—some blamed heart problems, depression, or venereal disease, while others attributed his death to material deprivation. Many cited transcendent forces: Blok had suffocated in postrevolutionary conditions; he had become deaf to the music of History. Superimposed over material and biological explanations was a mythohistorical meaning. As Vladislav Khodasevich wrote in Necropolis, Isn’t it strange: Blok was dying for several months, in front of everyone’s eyes, the doctors treated him—and no one named or could name his illness. It began with a pain in the legs. Then some spoke of a weakness of the heart. Before dying he suffered immensely. But what did he die of ? Unknown. He died somehow “in general,” because he was sick completely, because he could no longer live. He died of death.15

In a cultural context that had, for most of Blok’s public career, conflated his private person with his public persona, his death inevitably became a historical and literary fact,16 an essential component of the mythologized and eulogized demise of Petersburg. Ekaterina Yudina suggests that, in the 1920s, the Petersburg myth evolved. The city was no longer revered for the neoclassicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead both those who emigrated and

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those who remained created “an idealized St. Petersburg of their dreams” into which they could escape from the reality of Leningrad.17 Blok became the iconic poet-martyr of this new “old Petersburg,” the latest incarnation of the city’s mythology.

“ This C a nnot Be Forgi ven . . .” Blok died on a hot August Sunday. Despite his ambivalence towards traditional religion, his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, insisted on a Russian Orthodox service: the body was laid out on a table in the home of the deceased for three days, and visitors attended the nightly services.18 The funeral took place on the fourth day, August 10, 1921—Blok’s coffin was carried six kilometers in a procession from the poet’s home to Smolensk Cemetery and buried after a final service for the dead. Samuil Alyansky, Blok’s close friend and founder of the symbolist publishing house Alkonost, made most of the arrangements for the funeral.19 The young poet Evgeniya Knipovich, who had become a close friend of the family in the last years of Blok’s life, helped him.20 Yury Annenkov recalled that the Soviet press was conspicuously silent: “How did the official press respond to the death of Alexander Blok? The following notice appeared in Pravda August 9, 1921: ‘Yesterday morning the poet Alexander Blok passed away.’ That’s all. And not a word more.”21 Small posters pasted on the walls of the House of Arts, House of Scholars, House of Writers, the Bolshoy Drama Theater, and the publishing houses World Literature and Alkonost announced Blok’s death.22 By the time permission was received for Blok’s funeral on August 9, it was too late to place an announcement in the newspapers; Alyansky recruited university students to post a thousand fliers that informed the public that Blok’s body would be buried at Smolensk Cemetery on Wednesday, August 10, at ten o’clock in the morning.23 Yet even before the posters appeared on the streets of Petrograd, news of the death had reached many close friends, spread through the city by those few who—often by chance—happened upon the news. Andrey Bely received notice of Blok’s death from the writer R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, with whom he was staying at the time in Tsarskoe Selo.24 Ivanov-Razumnik had come from a presentation on Goethe at Volfila,25 where Forsh, who had visited Blok after hearing of the return of Blok’s mother from the countryside, delivered the news. The conference was suspended in deference to the poet’s memory. In his diary, Bely, Blok’s poet-twin, wrote that Blok’s death signaled the end of an era in his own life:

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Discussing the proper way to commemorate the death, Bely and IvanovRazumnik juxtaposed silence to the bureaucratic Soviet language that, with the Bolshevik revolution, had come to permeate everyday life: Quietly, quietly we remembered A. A. [Alexander Alexandrovich] yesterday. R. V. [Razumnik Vasilievich] said: “Yes, this was indeed a real human being: is it possible that we will now honor his memory with ‘evenings,’ ‘conferences’?” Me: “I can’t imagine it: I, at least, cannot publicly speak vulgarities along the lines of “we have lost a great Russian poet” and so forth. For me Blok is something so intimate and delicate that I cannot come out with posthumous speeches and articles about him.27

Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik aligned silence with the intimate reaction of the family, and language with public discourse. Their own silence became a testament to their intimacy with Blok, as opposed to the public co-optation of his memory through speeches and committees: “Indeed: the mother, the brothers, the wife of the ‘great one’ do not jump onto the stage, but quietly cry at the coffin, quietly remember the deceased: for me and R. V., Blok is too close to create for him a wake of words . . .”28 Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik decided that, in speaking about Blok, they must avoid the “vulgarity” of politicized Soviet speeches and that their life’s work would be to preserve his memory. Their aversion to Soviet bureaucratic commemorations is echoed by a number of contemporaries, who likewise juxtapose private silence to the public language that threatens to contaminate Blok and his memory. The literary and art historian Vladimir Weidle called for silence as the most human reaction to the death and condemned the word industry that emerged to commemorate Blok: “Blok died. Let us wait a little, let us be silent. But no, like wound-up mechanisms, we already build our schemas. When a person dies, let us become mere human beings for just a little bit. But no, we hurry to use our professional

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skills. We have not yet begun to feel, but we already write . . .”29 The immediate reaction to Blok’s death is expressed in the juxtaposition of the private and public, the authentic and the corrupt, language and silence. Despite their initial reactions, even Bely and Ivanov-Razumnik were not able to hold onto their silence for long. On August 28, 1921, they called the eighty-third meeting of Volfila and dedicated it to Blok’s memory. IvanovRazumnik declared that, though perhaps their first impulse to refrain from public memorialization was correct, they felt compelled to reclaim Blok from frenzied co-optation: No sooner had Blok died than from the left and from the right—or, more correctly: from the right and from the right—emerged various accidental voices wanting to make a symbol of Blok—not even a symbol, but some kind of regiment flag. We firmly believe that Blok is the symbol of the entire epoch, and a symbol of himself only; and to those literary and political parties that want to count him in their ranks, it is necessary from the very beginning to say—hands off !30

This dichotomy was often developed into a trope of the “two Bloks”: the authentic, private person and the public persona. Zamyatin—who, between 1918 and 1921, had met Blok almost daily at cultural committee meetings—described the incongruence of Blok’s person and persona, an incongruence that both disguised the authentic Blok and made him inaccessible to the public: A knock at the door—and Blok is in the room. His knightly face—and a funny, flat American cap. And from the cap—a thought: there are two Bloks—one authentic, and the other—affixed to the authentic one like a flat American cap. His face—tired, darkened by some kind of fierce wind, is expressionless.31

Zamyatin used the image of Blok’s corrupted public persona in order to more broadly condemn the intelligentsia’s participation in the bureaucratization of everyday life in the first years of Soviet power. His scathing description of literary life in postrevolutionary Petrograd—a life filled with unending committee meetings to discuss unrealizable projects (such as Gorky’s enterprise, World Literature, which Zamyatin mockingly referred to as an attempt to build a “tower of Babel”)—underscored his hostility and sense of alienation. Blok’s death became a testament to the fate of “Petersburg” within Petrograd, which, like the poet in his last years, had grown empty, impoverished, emaciated, silent: “Petersburg—cleared out, empty; stores have been boarded up;

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houses have been taken apart for firewood; the brick skeletons of stoves. Ragged cuffs; raised collars; jerseys; knitted sweaters; and inside the sweater— Blok. Feverish attempts to overcome poverty and some kind of new, momentary, precarious undertaking, some kind of new committees—from committee to committee . . .”32 In the same ironic tone, Annenkov recollected how bureaucratic commitments pulled him away from Blok’s funeral to another committee: “It was awfully windy . . . and in this cold, autumn Petersburg wind, life dragged us onward: in the twilight of the same day I was already ‘meeting’ in some kind of commission ‘on the affairs of the arts.’”33 In this atmosphere of emptiness, decay and death, the futility of “committees,” which, for Zamyatin, are only “feverish attempts to overcome poverty,” becomes all the more apparent.34 Zamyatin’s depiction of Petrograd life reveals the disorientation and estrangement that many felt as they tried to navigate through state channels. His description of the bureaucratic chaos involved in securing Blok’s visa so that he could leave the country for treatment at a Finnish sanatorium, as well as Gorky’s futile attempts to use his position to help, unveils the bureaucratic web that tied people to one another in often invisible ways. As it turned out, Blok’s fate was intimately connected with the fate of Sologub and Chebotarevskaya, who were also waiting for exit visas. When Lunacharsky found out that the Politburo planned to issue visas to them and not to Blok, he sent a “hysterical” letter chastising the committee for their decision: “Comrades, what are you doing? I asked for both Blok and Sologub, but you are letting out only Sologub, while Blok, the poet of the Revolution, our pride—there was even an article about him in the Times—[you are not].”35 The result of this intervention was truly macabre: the Politburo reversed its decision, issuing Blok a visa that, because of his critical condition, he was no longer able to use and holding back Sologub and Chebotarevskaya.36 Ultimately, Zamyatin provided the most explicit and impassioned condemnation of the bureaucratized way of life and the intelligentsia’s ambivalent relationship with the Soviet state by making both complicit in Blok’s death. When, on the morning of August 7, Alyansky called Zamyatin with news of Blok’s death, Zamyatin called Gorky to express his indignation and sense of responsibility: “I remember: horror, pain, rage—at everything, at everyone, at myself. It’s we who are to blame—all of us. We wrote, we spoke—but we should have screamed, we should have pounded with our fists—so that we could save Blok. I remember, I couldn’t contain myself and called Gorky.—Blok died. We cannot be forgiven for this.”37

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“Tha t Whic h Is Alrea dy No t Bl o k”: The Se r vic es for t h e D ea d on Ofit se r skaya St r eet For the last twelve years of his life, Blok had lived in the Kolomna region of Petersburg, a part of the city that had often been characterized as a liminal zone between the center of Petersburg and its periphery.38 Blok had mythologized this quiet part of the city in his poetry, and many who came to his apartment for the services associated it with the poet himself, often taking note of a neighborhood street lamp or pharmacy that had been immortalized in his verse. Klara Arsenyeva, a young poet, recollected: In those days, his magic for us was tied with the fantastical of that northern city. We often wandered down Ofitserskaya. Once, in the evening, walking past his windows, we saw him leaning on the wall, reading, through the translucent curtain. His shadow fell on the door and seemed very tall. Across from our apartment was a pharmacy. It always seemed to us that it was that same one: Night, street, lamp, pharmacy [Noch’, ulitsa, fonar’, apteka].39

Even those who knew Blok intimately described him as an almost material part of the city. Indeed, the writer Chukovsky, who, like Zamyatin, had seen Blok almost daily at the many meetings and committees of Civil War Petrograd—began his own recollections with an allusion to the poet’s material connection to the city: Each time, as I leaf through his collected poetry, I am overcome by various minute, old-mannish [. . .] everyday memories about him. Reading, for example, his famous lines: Night, street, lamp, pharmacy—I recall a Petersburg pharmacy, owned by the pharmacist Vipnikov, on Ofitserskaya Street, not far from the Pryazhka Embankment. Alexander Alexandrovich walked or rode past this pharmacy every day, probably even several times each day. It was on his way home and is referred to twice in his poem “Dances of Death” [“Pliaski smerti”].40

For many Blok was coupled with Petersburg, and the estrangement highlighted during his final trip to Moscow confirmed the poet’s intimacy with the former Russian capital: “Blok is all made of the Neva, the fog of the white nights, the Bronze Horseman. Florid, physical, mercantile Moscow is alien to him, just as he is alien to Moscow. His readings in Moscow—in May of 1921—made this evident.”41 The sense of estrangement that enveloped Blok in his final days was

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tied not only to the geographic space of Moscow, but also to the historical trajectory of postrevolutionary Russia. Antsiferov, a member of the excursionist and preservationist movements and “the most influential figure in early-twentieth-century St. Petersburg studies,”42 considered Blok to be the poet closest to the “city of double existence” that combined the prosaic and the fantastical, the ordered and the chaotic, the corporeal and the ghostly.43 In an essay on Petersburg in Blok’s poetry, Antsiferov writes that, despite the fact that none of Blok’s poems is wholly devoted to the city, no other poet has afforded it such importance of place: “A. Blok had experienced his city. The hours of the changing years, the snowy winter nights, the pale sunrises, were all familiar to him. All parts of the city—its harbor, outskirts, houses, the avenues through which the city is entered—found an echo in his poetry, and assumed a new life in his art.”44 Over the course of Blok’s life, the city had become an essential part of his poetry, and of course the poet, with his famous endless walks through Petersburg, was inscribed into the city’s streets.45 On the evenings of August 8 and 9, Blok’s friends, and even some strangers, who visited 57 Ofitserskaya for the services for the dead, came to see Blok’s body for the last time and to take part in the communal ritual of mourning the icon of the Silver Age. By nine o’clock, the line stretched along Ofitserskaya, as people ascended the “narrow staircase” and, placing flowers on the coffin, moved along, making room for others.46 Maria Beketova, Blok’s aunt and first biographer, described the heat in the apartment, the open windows, and the constant flow of people bringing flowers with which “the body of the poet was covered.”47 Artists sketched the corpse of the deceased, photographs were taken, and a plaster mask was made of Blok’s face and hands.48 The philharmonic choir sang quietly.49 Like others, Bely made his way down Ofitserskaya, past young women with flowers in the courtyard of Blok’s apartment. Upon entering the apartment, Bely, emotionally unable to place flowers on the body on the dining-room table, retreated into a corner of the room. He noted Anna Akhmatova’s presence— her dark clothing and “distressed” appearance.50 The academician Wilhelm Zorgenfrey described her “quiet weeping” as part of the overall silence of the apartment.51 Indeed, Forsh wrote that this silence became the wake’s most memorable element—a silence “unplanned, and suddenly decided upon,” a silence she likens to Blok’s silent poetry.52 Perhaps most notably, those who attended the services described the appearance of Blok’s corpse, which death had transformed to the point of unrecognizability. Interestingly, contemporaries converge in their unwillingness to

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aestheticize Blok’s dead body. For Bely, for instance, this transformation severs the connection between the living and the dead: I walked up to bid farewell to that, which is already not Blok; this “something”— has changed: wax fingers, a dark face, slightly overgrown with a beard (it seems that he had not shaved this last week); he is lying there—in a frock coat; his face—has changed: dark-yellow, stern, mournful, aged; in one word—“not Blok” . . . I understood that Blok—was not there, that he was within us. And I walked away.53

Bely’s alienation from Blok’s corpse is echoed by others: Alyansky noted quite simply that “the face of the deceased had in the course of the illness changed so much that in the coffin it was impossible to recognize him,”54 yet Forsh wrote that while it is likely that Blok resembled “all deceased,” she was struck by the appearance of his face—the “narrow nostrils and the unclosed mouth, torn by unheard screams.”55 The poet Sergey Bernshteyn observed that “in the coffin he did not look like his portraits, his face expressed only a deep apathy, an absolute emptiness of the soul.”56 Zorgenfrey remarked on the anonymity of Blok’s corpse and underscored the sense of estrangement evident in Bely’s account: A. A. was lying in the attire of the dead with an emaciated, pale-yellowish face; above the lips and along the cheeks grew short, dark hairs; the eyes had sunk deeply; the straight nose became pointed and grew a protuberance; the body, dressed in a dark suit, straightened and dried out. In death his look of greatness had wasted away, and he had taken on the image of suffering and decay, typical of any dead person.57

For Zorgenfrey, Blok’s pale-yellowish face, sunken eyes, and pronounced nose made the poet assume an anonymity “common to any dead man.”58 The postmortem transformation changed not only Blok’s face but his entire body: he noted the lightness of Blok’s corpse as he lifted it into the coffin—a lightness “incommensurate” with the deceased’s height and frame. Indeed, for Zorgenfrey, this served as evidence that “death clearly indicated its triumph over the beauty of life.”59 Descriptions of estrangement from Blok’s dead body were frequently used to emphasize a sense of estrangement from old Petersburg culture, the landscape of the city, and everyday life. This grotesque transformation of Blok’s corpse often underscored the grotesque course of Russian history. Lev Trotsky, the revolution’s most prominent ideologist, explained that “of course, Blok was not one of us, but he reached towards us. And in doing so, he broke down.”60 If the revolution was the most profound force transforming Russia, Blok became

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the revolution’s most poetic casualty. Indeed, the “breaking down” of Blok’s initial enthusiasm for the revolution became the narrative of his death. As the literary scholar Galina Rylkova observes, If in the eyes of the Bolsheviks and their supporters Blok’s death was caused by his inability to transform himself into a new artist, then in the eyes of their opponents Blok was seen as one of the first victims of such a transformation. “He was wasting away in front of our eyes,” reported an anonymous correspondent to his compatriots abroad, “and it was becoming more and more difficult to recognize him. I am sending you the picture of the deceased on his deathbed. You can see for yourselves that, positively, not one feature of that charming image that everybody who had a chance to know him remembers so well remained unaltered. [Blok’s death] is symptomatic of the regime, in which we are all suffocating.”61

Many described Blok’s illness, as well as his literary silence after 1918, as his growing deaf to the “music” of History: in this sense, the mystery of his illness came to signify the symbolic degeneration of his life force.62 The death of the poet’s physical body—its slow decline and grotesque postmortem transformation into an unrecognizable corpse—came to represent the effects of the revolution on a particular vision of Russia’s past and present. Blok’s body became the body of the intelligentsia writ large, his suffering transferred onto the bodies of the living, becoming the expression of their own martyrdom.

Init ia t ion int o a Dying Wo r l d : T h e Nar ra t ive of a n Unknown Yo u n g Wo m a n While some focused their descriptions on the intimate atmosphere in the Blok apartment during the services for the dead, others experienced this day on the streets of Petrograd. The young Berberova, removed from the inner circle, narrated this day as a journey from the periphery to the center of Petersburg cultural life. Her memoirs differ in tone from most of the recollections of the older generation; while for many of the older participants, Blok’s death marked the death of an age, for those of the younger generation, like Berberova, taking part in the ritual of Blok’s death brought them into the dying world of Petersburg culture and the myth of the dying city. Berberova, in 1921 still an unknown young woman, portrayed Blok’s death as her rite of initiation into literary life. She learned of Blok’s death at the Writer’s House on Basseynaya Street while trying to learn more about Gumilev’s arrest; like many others, she came

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across the announcement posted on the wall: “I was seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly and sharply orphaned. The end is near . . . We will remain alone . . . The end is coming. We are lost . . . Tears spurted out of my eyes.”63 She recounted her astonishment at coming across a flower shop on the way to the service: Slowly I walked down Liteyny, turned at Simeonovsky and the Fontanka. On the corner of Simeonovsky and the quay I stopped by a florist. Indeed, I remember my astonishment that in Petersburg there was a florist open. Eatinghouses and second-hand shops had been started; there was something like a hardware shop on Vladimirsky and a hairdresser in the second courtyard of a building on Troitsky. But the flower shop, it seemed to me, had not been there on Tuesday when I passed by with Gumilev; now it was open and there were flowers in it. I went in. I don’t remember if I had ever entered a flower shop before, perhaps this was the first time. Petersburg florists were once among my childhood fairy-tale places. Paris florists . . . New York florists . . . All have their character. I had a little money. I bought four long-stemmed lilies. There was no wrapping paper in the store, and I carried the lilies to the Pryazhka [embankment] unwrapped. And I thought: Passers-by guess where I am going and to whom I am bringing flowers, they read the announcements stuck on the street corners, they already know the news, and will follow me; a subdued crowd we will arrive—the whole city—at Blok’s house.64

Berberova described her miraculous procurement of flowers on the empty streets of Petrograd, turning them into a talisman that allowed her to cast herself in a special role. In her account, her flowers were the only flowers at the services—a fact contradicted by a number of accounts, which more often note the overabundance of young women with flowers. Yet the flowers are not only meant to highlight the economy of scarcity but also become the vehicle through which Berberova is initiated into Blok’s mythologized death. The allegory of initiation is developed further in her description of arriving in Kolomna: Somewhere on the corner of Kazanskaya I took a tram and when I got off at the very end of Ofitserskaya Street, I realized that I had never in my life been here and I did not know this neighborhood at all. The river Pryazhka, the green shores, factories, one-storey houses, grass on the streets, and for some reason not a soul. A ghostly, quiet part of Petersburg, where there is a smell of the Baltic Sea—or does it only seem so to me?65

The description, likely influenced by literary accounts of Kolomna, creates an atmosphere of silence and emptiness that surrounded Blok’s death. Like others,

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Berberova noted his changed appearance, although her image of the living Blok came not from personal experience but from the postcards of him reproduced by the thousands and cherished by young women in early twentiethcentury Russia: He no longer resembles the portraits I keep in books, nor that live man who once read on a stage: To the marshy, deserted meadows [Bolotistym, pustynnym lugom] . . . The hair has become dark and thin, the cheeks emaciated, the eyes have sunk. The face is overgrown with a dark and thin beard, the nose has become sharper and more prominent. Nothing remains, nothing. An “unknown corpse” lies there. The hands are bound, the feet too, the chin presses into the chest.66

Berberova’s depiction of the dead body is remarkably consistent with earlier accounts, and it is likely that her narrative was colored by existing descriptions. Yet unlike the poet’s close friends, she portrayed his death as both a rupture and beginning. Despite remarking on the strangeness of the corpse, she continued her description of the service in a lively tone, noting the “sun play[ing] on the window” and the “green sloping shore of the Pryazhka.” The funeral became a threshold that Berberova crossed to the inner circle: “Nadezhda Pavlovich enters (a week ago she had flashed by me at the House of Arts), then Pyast comes, and someone else. I see them entering, I know only a few; only about two months later would I identify them all.”67 Indeed, Berberova, in her mythical narrative, descended into the netherworld and, having partaken in the ritual of death and initiation, emerged reborn into literary life.

“A nd S i l e nt ly t he Ea r t h Swa llowed H i m U p ”: The Funera l On August 10, 1921, a day remarkably clear and blindingly bright, Petersburg buried Alexander Blok. A white coffin bearing the poet’s body was carried out of his apartment on Ofitserskaya Street, down the dark, winding staircase, through the courtyard, past the arcs of the gates, and out to the embankment of the Pryazhka River. A crowd waited outside. Several hundred people had come to bid farewell to the poetic voice of old Petersburg. In the crowd one could notice the many faces of old Petersburg: Akhmatova, Bely, Forsh, Zorgenfrey, Viktor Shklovsky, Marietta Shaginyan, Mikhail Kuzmin, Evgeny Ivanov, Vladimir Pyast, Vladimir Gippius, Akim Volynsky, and Viktor Zhirmunsky; artists Annenkov, Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, and Lev Bruni;

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composer Arthur Lurye; the entire troupe of the Bolshoy Theater and opera singer I. V. Ershov. “Everyone was there,” wrote Kuzmin. “It would be faster to count those absent.”68 Yet while some noted the many persons present at the event, others described the “emptiness” of the funeral—the diminished ranks of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia—despite the actual number of people in the procession: “By the gateway out in the street, a crowd was waiting . . . All that remained of literary Petersburg,” wrote Zamyatin. “And only there did it become evident: how few remained.”69 The procession moved down Ofitserskaya and Alekseevskaya, past Litovsky Castle (the prison destroyed in the postrevolutionary chaos), the Mariinsky Theater, and toward the Nikolaevsky Bridge, one of the important urban sites of Bely’s Petersburg. Once over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the procession moved along the embankment of the Neva until it reached the Sixteenth Line, then along the deserted streets of the Vasilievsky Island toward Smolensk Cemetery.70 Blok’s body was carried in an open coffin, while the lid was carried separately: “The coffin was carried in a straight and comradely manner, and the body of the poet, decorated with flowers, was visible to everyone.”71 The pallbearers—Bely, Pyast, Vladimir Gippius, Evgeny Ivanov, Zamyatin, and Zorgenfrey—carried the coffin the entire six kilometers to the cemetery, and, as the procession moved along, passers-by joined the crowd.72 The empty horse-drawn carriage trailed behind. The poet’s wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, and his former lover, the actress Lyubov Alexandrovna Delmas, supported Blok’s mother, Alexandra Andreevna Piottukh. Photographers followed the procession, “dealing unceremoniously with the crowd and giving some sort of impertinent orders.”73 They arrived at Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island. To the right of the cemetery entrance, at the tiny Church of the Resurrection, the choir of the Mariinsky Theater sang Rachmaninov’s mass and the Tchaikovsky liturgy during the final service for the dead.74 Anonymous young women, weeping, brought flowers to the coffin and kissed Blok’s hand.75 After the service, Blok’s white coffin was carried along the tiny, overgrown paths to the Beketov family plot, which had been chosen as his final resting place.76 The grave was marked by a simple, unpainted wooden cross. No one spoke. Bely, grabbing on to a birch tree, “looked at the grave with large, widened, almost rectangular, eyes.”77 It is on this note of silence falling over Blok, Blok’s poetry, and Petersburg that Zamyatin eloquently concluded his narrative: “And finally—underneath the sun, along the narrow tree-lined paths—we carry that foreign, heavy something that is left of Blok. And silently—in the same way that Blok was silent in these years—silently the earth swallows Blok up.”78

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Death rituals traditionally contain the regenerative seeds of life, providing a passage through the danger of liminality, bridging the past with the future.79 With this in mind, Blok’s funeral is peculiar in two ways: first, the participants consistently used silence as a mode of expression; and second, in the unstable transition between War Communism and NEP, the use of ritual silence emphasized the finality of rupture over regeneration and continuity. In August 1921 Petersburg/Petrograd experienced the death of Alexander Blok and the subsequent death of Nikolay Gumilev as “a single eschatological symbol.”80 Both fell victim to the new Soviet order—Gumilev was executed on August 24, while Blok, in the words of Nadezhda Pavlovich, “suffocated” in the “deathly silence of approaching NEP.”81 With Blok’s funeral, a silence fell over the city. “Then all quieted down. For two weeks we lived in complete underground silence. We spoke in whispers. I went to the Muruzi House, to the Writer’s House, to the House of Arts. Everywhere there was silence, waiting, uncertainty. The 24th of August arrived.”82 Khodasevich, who, like many, learned shortly after hearing about Gumilev’s arrest that Blok was dying, remarked that the deaths of the two poets became intertwined. “Macabre letters arrived from Petersburg, passing over [these deaths] with half-hints, silences,” wrote Khodasevich. “When I returned to the city, people had not yet recovered.”83 In the imagination of the city’s inhabitants, the summer of 1921 became an uncrossable threshold, the death of an entire epoch of Russian culture: That August was not only “like a yellow flame, like smoke” (Akhmatova), that August was a boundary line. An age had begun with the “Ode on the Taking of Khotin” (1739), and had ended with August 1921; all that came afterwards (for still a few years) was only a continuation of this August: the departure of Bely and Remizov abroad, the departure of Gorky, the mass exile of the intelligentsia in the summer of 1922, the beginning of planned repressions, the destruction of two generations—I am speaking of a two-hundred-year period of Russian literature. I am not saying that it had all ended, but that an age of it had.84

With Blok, wrote Shklovsky, “an epoch in the life of the Russian intelligentsia” came to a close. “The nonbelievers buried him who believed [. . .] The last faith was lost [. . .] By next winter, a stable way of life already existed.”85 Shklovsky portrays Blok’s funeral as the last spectacle of an epoch not destined for a future in the new Soviet state, a view supported by Konstantin Fedin, a member of the ascending Soviet literary establishment:

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strangely, it felt that with Blok, the former epoch had gone, that epoch which, having lived until the revolution, took a step into its sphere, as if showing where to go, and fell exhausted by the strain of its long journey. It became obvious that from there no one will take such a step now, or if they repeat it, then it won’t contain the bravery and sadness regarding the truth of the future exhibited by Alexander Blok. Many understood that now the highest poetic hopes are being transferred to the future.86

Like others, Fedin cast the poet’s death, and 1921 more generally, as a historical turning point that finalized a rupture with the past and cemented the impossibility of return. Blok’s life, as Shklovsky portrayed it, had a trajectory of flight that, under the force of gravity, ultimately returned back to earth: “He was dying, returning to the past.”87 Indeed, in the recollections of contemporaries, Blok’s death often became the closing act of their own life narratives. Within the extraordinary political and cultural context of 1921, the meaning of Blok’s death extended beyond the boundaries of the individual, as if to reify the legendary words “Petersburg will be empty,” that were associated with the birth of the city. Starting with Khodasevich’s noting the mysterious biological causes of his death (“he died of death”) and Zamyatin’s description of Blok’s corpse as “not a portrait of the dead Blok, but a portrait of death in general,” his death was portrayed as a final event, a rupture in time, and became the funeral of an epoch. Paradoxically, considering the enormous amount of writing about it, the poet’s actual death was shrouded in silence—it was a dead death. What died with Blok on August 7, 1921, what was buried with him three days later at Smolensk Cemetery on the margins of Petrograd, was a Petersburg without a future. The silence, perhaps appropriately, mourned the death of a world in which Blok was possible.  1. Nina Berberova, Alexander Blok: A Life, trans. Robyn Marsack (New York: George Braziller, 1996), 144–45. 2. V. Weidle, “Peterburgskaia poetika,” in N. Gumilev, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Viktor Kamkin, 1968), xxxvi. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Russian in this chapter are mine. 3. Alan Warren Friedman, Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. On commemorative rituals, see Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25. 4. Viktor Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922, trans. Richard Shelton (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004), 241–42. I translated nad mogiloi as “at the grave” instead of the literal “over the grave.”

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5. On silence in ritual, see Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Adam Jaworski (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997). 6. In March 1921 the Kronstadt uprising exacerbated an already desperate situation. After the revolt, which happened during the Tenth Party Congress, the Soviet government adopted the New Economic Policy (Mary McAuley, Bread and Justice: State and Society 1917–1922 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 23, 42–43, 412). 7. Ekaterina Yudina, “‘Looking Back in Extreme Anguish’: St. Petersburg in the Autobiographic and Collective Memory of the 1920s,” in Moscow and Petersburg: The City in Russian Culture, ed. Ian K. Lilly (Nottingham, England: Astra Press, 2002), 91–101. 8. Polina Barskova, “Enchanted by the Spectacle of Death: Forms of the End in Leningrad Culture (1917–1934),” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006). 9. Emily Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006), 204. 10. Barry Scherr, “Notes on Literary Life in Petrograd, 1918–1922: A Tale of Three Houses,” Slavic Review 36, no. 2 ( June 1977): 256. 11. Olga Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’ (Washington, DC: Interlanguage Literary Associates, 1964), 91. 12. In March 1920, after the death of Blok’s stepfather in January, the poet and his wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, were forced to move into the apartment of Blok’s mother, Alexandra Andreevna Kublitskaya-Piottukh. Blok had moved to 57 Ofitserskaya in June 1912 and spent the last nine years of his life in this building, first in apartment 21 on the fourth floor and then, after 1920, in apartment 23 on the second. 13. This incident is recorded in numerous memoirs by those who were present at the reading and by those who only heard of it later. See the memoirs of Korney Chukovsky and Samuil Alyansky (who accompanied Blok on his Moscow trip), as well as the recollections of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Mayakovsky (who attended Blok’s readings in Moscow). See Chukovsky, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. Vladimir Orlov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980), 219; Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” in Alexander Blok, 458; Pasternak, “Liudi i polozheniia,” in Alexander Blok, 470; Mayakovsky, “Umer Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok, 180. 14. Very few people saw Blok in the last months of his life. The most interesting and reliable firsthand accounts are by Alyansky and Nadezhda Pavlovich. Needless to say, Blok’s wife, Lyubov Dmitrievna, provides the most intimate account of Blok’s last days. 15. Vladislav Khodasevich, “Gumilev i Blok,” in Nekropol’: Vospominaniia. Literatura i vlast’. Pis’ma B. A. Sadovskomu, ed. A. Sil’vanovich and M. Shatin (Moscow: Sovpadenie, 1996), 136. 16. See Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13. Boym references Roman Jakobson’s formulation that the death of the poet turns into a literary fact that “prohibits clear boundaries between literature and life, revealing the uncanny ‘literariness’ of life and the transgressive vitality of texts. The death of the poet is the ultimate act of ‘defamiliarization’ that unearths complexities and contradictions of any seemingly coherent poetic, ideological or critical system” (13). 17. Yudina, “‘Looking Back,’” 96. 18. Avril Pyman, The Life of Alexander Blok: The Release of Harmony, 1908–1921, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 378.

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19. Samuil Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” in Alexander Blok, 458. 20. E. Knipovich, Ob Aleksandre Bloke: vospominaniia, dnevniki, kommentarii (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1987). 21. Yury Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech: tsikl tragedii (Leningrad: Isskustvo, 1991), 85. 22. Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 378. 23. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 324–25. 24. Andrey Bely, O Bloke, ed. A. V. Lavrov (Moscow: Avtograf, 1997), 570. 25. Vol’naia filosofskaia assotsiatsiia (the Free Philosophical Association), of which Blok was one of the founders. 26. Bely, O Bloke, 447–48. 27. Ibid., 449. 28. Ibid. 29. V. Weidle, “O Bloke,” in Pamiati Aleksandra Bloka, ed. Andrey Bely, R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik, and A. Z. Shteinberg (Tomsk: Izd. Vodolei, 1996). 30. Ibid., 54. 31. Evgeny Zamyatin, Ia boius’ (Moscow: Nasledie, 1999), 149. 32. Ibid., 117. 33. Annenkov, Dnevnik, 86. 34. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 117. 35. Cited in David Bethea, Khodasevich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 199. 36. Ibid. 37. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123. 38. Julie Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 142. 39. Klara Solomonovna Arsenyeva, “O Bloke,” in Alexander Blok, 453. 40. Korney Chukovsky, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok , 219. 41. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 121. 42. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned, 97. 43. Nikolay Antsiferov, “Nepostizhimyi gorod,” in O Bloke: sbornik literaturnoissledovatel’skoi assotsiatsii Ts.D.R.P., ed. E.F. Nikitina (Moscow: Nikitinskie subbotniki, 1929), 296–97. 44. Ibid., 307. 45. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 121. Polina Barskova’s essay in this volume describes Blok as Petersburg’s “flâneur par excellence” and indeed uses his famous walks as a way to access “a panoramic vision of the artistic life of Petersburg of the time.” 46. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 324–25. 47. M. A. Beketova, Vospominaniia ob Aleksandre Bloke (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1990), 200–201. “Not only friends and acquaintances arrived, but even absolutely extraneous people [postoronnie liudi]. [. . .] the singer Ershov, who was living in the same house as the Bloks, and other neighbors. Marietta Shaginyan was one of the first to bring flowers, which she placed at the body of the deceased. [. . .] Soon the body of the poet was covered with flowers. The weather was hot, all the windows were open. The Bolshoy Dramatic Theater took upon itself the decoration of the coffin, sent to the deceased by the state. [. . .] Among those present was the actor Monakhov, to whom so recently the deceased poet sent his regards. The literary people arrived, and Volfila with IvanovRazumnik at the head. Everyone was deeply shaken by this early, tragic death” (201).

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48. Attention to Petrograd’s economy of scarcity figures prominently in Shklovsky’s Zhili byli, where he describes the bureaucratic obstacles he encountered procuring the plaster for Blok’s death mask (Viktor Shklovsky, Zhili-byli: vospominaniia, memuarnye zapisi, povesti o vremeni: s kontsa xix v. po 1964 g. [Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1966]). 49. Vladimir Orlov, Zdravstvuite, Alexander Blok (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1984), 412–15. 50. Bely, O Bloke, 449–50. 51. Akhmatova emerged in August of 1921 as the mythical “widow”—many observed that she was not only the widow of Gumilev (to whom she was no longer married), but that she was also the widow of Blok (with whom, despite rumors, she never had a romantic relationship). 52. Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’, 150–52. In Forsh’s fictionalized memoir, the poet Gaetan represents Blok. 53. Bely, O Bloke, 449. 54. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 325. 55. Forsh, Sumasshedshii korabl’, 152. 56. Sergey Bernshteyn, Alexander Blok, 359. Bernshteyn made sound recordings of Blok reading his poetry shortly before his death. 57. Wilhelm Zorgenfrey, “Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (Po pamiati za piatnadtsat’ let: 1906–1921),” Alexander Blok: Pro et Contra: Lichnost’ i tvorchestvo Aleksandra Bloka v kritike i memuarakh sovremennikov, ed. N. Yu. Gryakalova (St. Petersburg: RKhGI, 2004), 473–98. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Lev Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strumsky (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), 125. 61. Galina Rylkova, “Literature and Revolution: The Case of Alexander Blok,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 628. 62. Viktor Erlich, Modernism and Revolution: Russian Literature in Transition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 26. 63. Nina Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Phillip Radley (New York: Knopf, 1992), 123. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 123–24. 66. Ibid., 124. 67. Ibid. 68. Mikhail Kuzmin, “Dnevniki M. Kuzmina,” in Alexander Blok: Novye materialy i issledovaniia, vol. 2, ed. I. S. Zilbershteyn and L. M. Rozenblum, Literaturnoe Nasledstvo 92 (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 164. Indeed, many noted the absence of Gorky, who was in Moscow. 69. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123. 70. Olga Bondareva, “Put’ k khramu (pokhorony Aleksandra Bloka),” in Nasledniki velikogo goroda: Fragmenty dokladov uchashchikhsia Sankt Petersburga na gorodskikh istorikokraevedcheskikh chteniakh 1998 goda (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii gorodskoi dvorets tvorchestva iunykh, 1998), 86–90. Each street on Vasilievsky Island consists of two sides, odd and even, each of which was called a line. In Bely’s Petersburg, Dudkin’s garret room

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is on the Seventeenth Line, on the street down which Blok’s funeral procession moved toward Smolensk Cemetery. In the novel, Dudkin’s path from the Seventeenth Line on Vasilievsky Island, over the Nikolaevsky Bridge, and to Nevsky Prospect is described in detail. As we consider famous Petersburg itineraries, there is an interesting convergence between Blok’s funeral procession and Dudkin’s fictional path in Bely’s Petersburg. The question naturally arises whether Bely recollected this convergence during the procession. 71. Beketova, Vospominaniia, 200–201. 72. Alyansky, “Vstrechi s Blokom,” 325. 73. Beketova, Vospominaniia, 200–201. 74. Orlov, Zdravstvuite, 414; Pyman, Life of Alexander Blok, 378. 75. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123. 76. This spot, as it turned out, was not to be Blok’s final resting place, as, twentythree years later, in 1944, his remains, along with the remains of his wife, mother, and Beketov grandparents were moved to the Literatorskie mostki of Volkovo Cemetery. Blok’s black granite monument became part of the Soviet literary necropolis. 77. Shklovsky, Zhili byli, 158–59. 78. Zamyatin, Ia boius’, 123. 79. See Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Arnold van Gennep, Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 80. Boris Gasparov, “Introduction,” Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, ed. Boris Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes, and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 13–14. 81. Nadezhda Pavlovich, “Iz vospominanii ob Aleksandre Bloke,” in Alexander Blok, 400. 82. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 125–26. 83. Khodasevich, “Gumilev i Blok,” 138–39. 84. Berberova, Italics Are Mine, 125–26. In 1923 Bely returned to the Soviet Union from his stay in Germany. 85. Shklovsky, Sentimental Journey, 241–42. 86. Konstantin Fedin, “Alexander Blok,” in Alexander Blok, 418. 87. Shklovsky, Zhili byli, 158–59.

Concluding Remarks     

If the reader has not yet perused the Web site titled Mapping Petersburg, we invite the reader to do so. The Web site is quite literally a virtual part 3 of “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City 1900–1921, even though the two exist as wholes unto themselves.1 What we understood from the inception of this project is that modernism, its narrative and representational practices, contained the seeds of hypertextuality. Just as the collapse of binaries had already been observed in modernist aesthetics, the contemporary Web experience may be compared to the sensory psychic shock associated with the modern city, which Bely aligns with the “swarming” Russian metropolis of 1905. We call this experience surfing the Web, as we become part of the anonymous World Wide Web after learning how to navigate its initially shocking alienating space, an experience that may be compared to the way residents and visitors learn how to navigate metropolitan cities. The explosion of digital map-based media and related mapping narratives, of which our Web site is an example, helps mediate physical and virtual space and thereby makes the physical familiar. The desire to suture physical urban space and the way it was experienced at the beginning of the twentieth century was already the focus of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote about the contingent relationship of proximity and distance not only in spatial but also affective terms. The coeval literary and visual arts did something similar. They represented the fusion of physical and psychic space by using fragmented and spatialized narrative and imagery. Such an approach to the novel typifies Bely’s Petersburg.

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If hypertext is defined by a nonlinear network of links, a new form of interconnectedness premised on a disjunctive structure, then Bely’s novel, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, to which Petersburg has been compared, qualifies as one of the starting points of hypertext. The claim that “if Joyce were writing today, he would have chosen hypertext” is a commonplace of contemporary criticism: “And not only was “Ulysses” before its time in literary terms,” writes Karlin Lillington; “it is also, extravagantly, the über-hypertext.”2 A hypertext version of Joyce’s novel resides on the Web, as do the Sirin edition of Petersburg in Russian and the Maguire and Malmstad English translation (Limited View on Google Books).3 Working with Bely’s novel online is a very different experience from reading it in book form, opening it up to innumerable research possibilities determined by the individual user. We can compare our approach to Petersburg to the multiple ways of viewing the city through the hypertext practice of overlaying city maps on specific experiences of city life. Such suture structures Mapping Petersburg, featuring a 1907 historical map with ten interactive itineraries through the Russian capital that explore its burgeoning modernity and literary modernism. Mimicking Bely’s narrator, we can rightfully claim that our city essays emerge from the digital dots on the Web site map, that from it emerges part 2 of the printed book “Petersburg”/Petersburg: Novel and City. We can also claim that just as the two Petersburgs, fictional and physical, exist in relation to each other in the volume, so too do its essays relate to the hypertextual Web site. In any case, the inscription of early twentieth-century Petersburg in the space of the Web offers the reader the next best thing to an intimate encounter with the late imperial Russian capital. The spatial focus of the essays, beside an urban concern, reflects their origin in hypertext narrative: hypertext, a spatial medium, can be entered from different locations, like a city, which in the words of Gilles Deleuze “is defined by entries and exits.”4 Unlike most verbal narratives that develop in time, requiring the reader to enter at the beginning, hypertext narrative has multiple entry points that are determined by the user. In this regard and in regard to modernism, its structure can be said to resemble avant-garde collage, which consists of multiple objects and texts revealing the relational aspect of juxtaposition, the staple of cyberspace. The spatiality of hypertext and its multiple entry points produce a multiplicity of perspectives and immediacy of experience, which in Mapping Petersburg offers the virtual experience of navigating a historical city and putting its sites in contact with each other. This a printed text cannot do, nor can it offer the kind of rapid participatory attractions and montage of images, sounds, and texts that characterizes the Web.

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The Web creates networks, or grids, like those that define cities—for instance the network of tramlines—to overcome distance, so we can say that our Web site is a kind of matrix of Petersburg’s proximities and contiguities. The itineraries bring together distant parts of the city by linking them through a variety of narrative frames that tell a variety of stories about the ever moving and mutable historical city. Narratives can be divided into those that have definitive endings and those that don’t. The former, which characterize traditional texts that anticipate closure, provide the anticipated pleasure of that closure. Using the tram analogy, we take the tram with the purpose of traveling to a particular stop that brings us to the city location we intend to go to or explore as visitors. This kind of goal-oriented navigation is of course possible on the Web, but the real pleasure of hypertext is associated with the unexpected and with the random. If we continue with the tram analogy, the hypertext experience can be compared to the random street scenes, signboards, and anonymous pedestrians we see through the tram window. One of these fleeting images may very well pique our curiosity, causing us to forego the original destination, at least for a time; we get off at an unplanned stop to see the scene close up and quite unexpectedly enter a different narrative from the one we initially envisioned. Walter Benjamin calls such exploration “straying,” losing oneself in the city, which he identifies with experiencing its signboards and streets, passers-by, roofs, and kiosks. Such a city experience resembles surfing the Web. Hypertext privileges thinking fragmentally, a hallmark of the twentieth century from the beginning, and whose latest iteration is the Web. It gives preference to random contingencies, temporary connections of fragments, rather than to wholes and fixed structures. This is precisely what our itineraries through Petersburg of the beginning of the twentieth century offer through interactivity and intersection. Like Walter Benjamin of The Arcades Project, an inspirational starting point for our project, we have collected, reproduced, and juxtaposed fragments of maps, written texts, visual images, and sound with the purpose of creating itineraries through Petersburg that explore the city in unexpected new ways. As we take the virtual-tram itinerary (“Tramvai”), we may want to stop on Nevsky Prospect or at Trinity Bridge (“The French in St. Petersburg”) across the Neva River. Or if we took the tram to the city periphery, perhaps quite unintentionally, we may want to explore the sites of the Karpovka River; if we find ourselves on the outskirts of Petersburg’s slaughterhouse (“Anatomizing Modernity”), we may want to pursue the slaughtered cow to the various sites where its parts end up; or if we want to find out something about apartment houses and office buildings in Petersburg of the time, we will visit the Tower House of Singer. Learning that Alexander Blok liked to stroll the

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Karpovka locales, we may want to attend his funeral or his play The Puppet Show (“The Enchanted Masquerade”). As we navigate the virtual prerevolutionary capital and unexpectedly come upon the remains of the carriage of the Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, we most likely stop to learn more (“Visions of Terror”). Or if we want to learn about the tourist’s experience of Petersburg, we may want to open the postcards itinerary.5 The relationship between the book on Petersburg and the accompanying Web site serves as an illustration of the differences between print and hypertext scholarship, with the former typically offering a teleological narrative, a finished product, whose meaning is defined by its line of argument and the conclusions it draws and by the conventions of the profession. Authorial agency is clearly defined in such a narrative. Hypertext narrative, by contrast, disperses agency and liberates the author from the anxiety of producing a finished product—an experience with which all of us are also familiar. Hypertext feeds the authorial desire of not letting go of the text. It resembles a draft that offers the author the power of endlessly enhancing it, instead of having to suppress this desire—to repeat: hypertext defies closure. Typically collaborative, it offers the possibility of including new authors—in our case, new Petersburg itineraries that were added over time. As to the user, it gives the user greater authority by placing her inside the text, offering the possibility of determining narrative progression— not once, but over and over again. In other words, just as the desire of the original authors of hypertext is defined by unfinalizability, so is the desire of the users who, so to speak, create their own hypertext narratives. Each Petersburg itinerary exists simultaneously on a historical city map and as hypertext pages consisting of fragments of historical experiences and texts, with hyperlinks in between, which include stops on the other itineraries. Exploring them mimics the paradigmatic hypertext path of browsing the Web, which George Landow claims in his pioneering study Hypertext cannot be reproduced a second time.6 All Web users are familiar with this experience as they try to retrace a hypertext path to no avail. The interactive experience of Mapping Petersburg can be said to simulate the open-ended exploration of any real city—whether on foot or by motor, with or without map in hand—in contrast to navigating it in accordance with a well-worn or predetermined path. Mapping has become a hypertext term, and the mapping of cities served as an original hypertext paradigm, famously reflected in the Aspen Movie Map, the first hypermedia system developed at MIT in 1978, which simulated a drive through the ski resort in the Rockies on a computer screen.7 There are numerous Web guides to Petersburg, mostly in Russian and mostly focusing on standard tourist sites. The beautifully designed Alexander

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Palace Time Machine is devoted to the history of the Romanov royal family and their residences.8 The most extensive and authoritative guide to the city is the Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia, launched by Alexander Kobak, the highly respected historian of Petersburg, in conjunction with the city’s tercentenary in 2003.9 Both are extraordinarily rich resources that are essentially linear in structure. Our volume cum Web site makes a contribution to the history of Petersburg by representing perspectival fragments of the city’s material life and marginal corners without, however, neglecting its high culture. As such it offers a unique teaching resource to humanists and social scientists not only in the Russian field but also in urban studies.  1. Mapping Petersburg, http://stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/index.html. 2. Karlin Lillington, “Ulysses in Net-town,” http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/ 1998/06/16feature.html. 3. Andrey Bely, Peterburg, http://www.lib.ru/POEZIQ/BELYJ/peterburg.txt. 4. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 313. In describing the city, Deleuze calls it “the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits which create it and which it creates” (313). 5. Here is the list of city itineraries on the Web site in the order they are listed on the opening page: “Tramvai” (Alyson Tapp); “Karpovka” (Polina Barskova); “Anatomizing Modernity” (Mieka Erley); “Nevsky Prospect” (Olga Matich); “The Funeral of Alexander Blok” (Victoria Smolkin); “Postcards from Petersburg” (Stiliana Milkova); “Visions of Terror” (Alexis Peri and Christine Evans); “The French in St. Petersburg” (Lucas Stratton); “The Tower” (Ulla Hakanen); “An Enchanted Masquerade” (Cameron Wiggins); “The Singer Sewing Machine” (Olga Matich). 6. George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992). 7. Jacob Nielsen, Multimedia and Hypertext (San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, 1994), 40. 8. Alexander Palace Time Machine, http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/. 9. Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia (English version), http://www.encspb.ru/en/.

Postscript St. Petersburg: New Architecture and Old Mythology          In spite of reason, contrary to the elements. A. Griboedov, Woe from Wit

Over the course of St. Petersburg’s relatively short but dramatic biography, real facts and practical problems have often become intertwined with questions of myth. Providing rich material for poets and artists and depending little on reality, the mythology has had a long life of its own. Now, after three hundred years, it lives on, sometimes inspiring architects to make provocative decisions. Here we will examine two projects presented at international competitions in St. Petersburg at the onset of the twenty-first century, both of which are connected to the “basic myth” of Petersburg’s history: the well-known myth of how the city’s founder, Tsar Peter, defied the elemental forces, both natural and human.

De fying t he Elemen t s In his attempts to build a new city in the delta of the Neva River, the tsar encountered two principal opponents: the river itself and the habits of his subjects. Strictly speaking, the Neva is not a river but rather a long and narrow strait extending from Lake Ladoga to the Gulf of Finland in the Baltic Sea. The 332

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strait emerged 2,500 to 3,100 years ago, making it a quite recent event in terms of geological time.1 Hence the Neva has no valley, and its water flows flush against its banks. An air of catastrophe has always hovered over the Neva: having no valley, the river would immediately spill over whenever the water rose in the Gulf of Finland, which would occur during a strong western wind.2 The city’s history began with one such catastrophe. In May 1703, under the tsar’s order, a Russian military brigade began to erect an earthen fortress on a small, low island in the delta, but in August the water rose and washed away the settlers and all that they had managed to build. But let us give the Neva its due: at first it behaved with a degree of modesty in regard to the inexperienced Russians. The water level rose “all of ” seven feet. Subsequently, however, the Neva did not hesitate to rise to the level of eleven, even fourteen feet. During the most frightening flood we know, the water rose to twenty-five feet and flooded the surrounding area for many miles. That happened in 1691, when Peter was nineteen years old. He had already ruled the country on his own for two years and had most likely heard from foreigners that the waters around the Neva delta had destroyed all the Finnish and Russian villages and Swedish villas. Ten years before the beginning of the Northern War between Russia and Sweden, the Neva used the same means once again to warn everyone that it alone, and not the king of Sweden or the Russian tsar, controlled the delta. This forewarning was meaningful inasmuch as the war, having exhausted both countries, was primarily fought for the Neva region, which belonged to Sweden. At the price of twenty years of effort, Tsar Peter achieved his main goal: he conquered the region, but there was nothing he could do with the Neva. It flooded whenever it wanted and caused great damage to the city the tsar was building in the Neva delta. Peter ordered that the ground level be raised, using soil amassed from the digging of canals, but there was not enough soil. Lore links his death with the flood at the end of 1724, when he caught a severe cold while trying to help the city dwellers. One hundred years later, after the extremely destructive flood of 1824, an elevated stone dam across the Gulf of Finland was planned to protect the city from the Baltic Sea and the Neva’s onslaughts once and for all. However, it was just as impossible to build such a barrier in the 1820s as it would be seventy years later “due to its great cost and unlikelihood of its expected usefulness,” as the City Duma put it in an 1898 decision.3 That which the imperial capital could not accomplish, the Soviet government tried to accomplish in 1981, earmarking state funds for a gigantic dam of about fourteen miles. The

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construction dragged on for twenty-five years and is nearing completion only now. During that time a 490-foot model of the dam was built in a laboratory. The tests run against this model have shown that the dam would not be able to save the city from catastrophic floods like those of 1824 and 1924. The old formulation about the “unlikelihood of [the dam’s] expected usefulness” remains in force. Yet Peter the Great lives on in the memory of his descendents as the hero of a myth, as the conqueror of the wild natural elements. When Catherine II decided to erect a monument to him, the invited sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet insisted that the equestrian statue be elevated upon a rock, “serving as a pedestal for him—an emblem of the difficulties he has overcome.”4 From that time on The Bronze Horseman has remained above the water even during the severest floods, the symbol of a city that the Neva can no longer destroy, even though that elemental force has not surrendered. In 1909, during the first restoration of the monument, four hundred gallons of water were discovered and pumped out from inside the statue. Apertures were drilled through the belly and the legs of the horse so that water would not accumulate in it. Now water could freely flow through The Bronze Horseman, as though mocking its conqueror. In the middle of the 1930s, microscopic cracks and apertures in the bronze were filled. But by the middle of the 1970s, there were again so many cracks that they threatened the monument’s stability. They had to be filled once more. But let us briefly consider how the old Petersburg myth becomes apparent in the city’s newest architecture. In 2001 the federal government conducted an international competition for the construction of the Mariinsky Theater’s second building. The American investors who won the competition invited the eminent Californian architect Eric Owen Moss to take on the project. The first version of the project, which was not accepted, was an utterly unusual design consisting of two separate parts: a simple rectangular box (new audience space, second stage, and ancillary facilities) that extended deep into the block; the second part, which overlooked the street, provided a view of the square on which the current theater is located. This second part consisted of a large glass body that was very oddly and irregularly shaped. The architect himself stated that this structure symbolized the elemental force of water, which he considered the “main theme” of St. Petersburg. For this reason the glass body (the vestibule, foyer, and other public spaces) resembled three enormous transparent bags stacked on top of one another. “It’s like bags of water,” said the architect. Presently in Holland, similar plastic bags—filled with water—are being made to serve as dams to protect the land from the sea. So this unusual architecture, or

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Eric Owen Moss Architects, second version of design for Mariinsky Theater, 2003 (courtesy of Eric Owen Moss Architects)

sculpture, was to symbolize the defeat of the dangerous water element that had previously loomed over the city. In 2003 Eric Owen Moss proposed a second version. This time the glass body no longer consisted of separate bags inertly lying in front of the boxlike building. Instead it resembled a clear elastic film protruding on various sides. It seemed that the film could barely hold up against the fierce pressure of some living force that tried to break out of the building onto the street, that it was only a bit longer and the film would burst. Instead of a victory over the elemental forces, the design represented a struggle that was still in full swing with its outcome uncertain. Incidentally, one hundred years ago the artists of the World of Art group, along with symbolist poets, had proposed precisely such an interpretation of the mythical conflict with the elements. Despite Moss’s brilliant design and the expressive, dramatic quality of his project—which had left a very strong impression on all—the second version was also rejected by the city authorities and architectural community. Could this not have been due to the fact that this design did not reflect the traditional myth of victory over the force of nature?

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      “ In Spit e of Re a son,” o r t he Huma n Ele me nt a l Fo rc e

It is known that from 1703 to 1718 between twenty and thirty-five thousand workers from all parts of the country were brought to expedite the construction of St. Petersburg.5 Roughly every fifth worker would die of disease, either during the long journey—which was hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, by foot—or while working in harsh conditions.6 In order to create a stable population, Peter drove just as many people into the city—members of the gentry, merchants, artisans from other cities—though not always with success.7 The Kingdom of Moscow (not yet the Russian empire) had to pay such a “human tax” for its new capital. Properly speaking, Peter had decided to build a city here not in 1703 but in 1712, with the intention to build it on an island. He did not care much for the disorderly, medieval-like town that spontaneously emerged along the sides of the Neva before 1712. For that reason he first selected a location far from the delta, on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, and began to build a new capital according to his own, strictly regulated project (the town of Kronstadt is located there now). But in a few years, the tsar rethought his project and in 1716 began once again—also according to a regulated project—to build a capital on another island, Vasilievsky, right in the delta. He commanded those who had started to build their homes in other places to relocate to Vasilievsky. Of course those who had endured work and great expenses to settle the previous areas did not want to resettle and resisted passively; the tsar waged a veritable war with them, sending military detachments to lift the roofs from their homes, but even this method did not drive the whole population onto Vasilievsky. Apparently many could not tolerate such a life and fled, so to curtail such flights from the city, the tsar meted out harsh punishment for the parents, wives, and children of all of those who fled.8 As a result, at the turn of the 1710s and into the early 1720s, Peter was forced to abandon both his beloved idea of the island-capital and the slavish labor its construction entailed. Those lands in the delta that were more built up were declared the territory of the capital city. Among them the Admiralty Side especially stood out, facing, as it did, the rest of Russia. In essence then, the tsar suffered a great defeat in a war with his own people. Peter’s heirs maintained his strategy for the compulsory settlement of the new capital. In 1728, during the reign of his grandson Peter II, the court moved back to Moscow; once again in 1732, however, it returned to the Neva under Empress Anna Ioannovna. Almost the entire population of Petersburg had fled

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during the course of those years; the city became deserted to such an extent that wolves wandered the streets by night. People had to be forced into the capital once again, with measures so harsh that the people’s former hate of Petersburg only grew stronger. In the heat and the wind of the summers of 1736 and 1737, the city dwellers (especially from the lower classes of the population) set fire to their own city, first and foremost the Admiralty Side, so that this more populous part of the city was almost completely destroyed by fire. Here the myth devoted to the tsar’s victory over the human elemental force falls silent. A small but influential circle of Peter’s educated proponents formulated and disseminated this myth during the tsar’s lifetime and beyond, a legend that included the image of Peter as the almost divine creator of a new perfect people. Such was man created anew: The wise do not lose hold of Peter’s decrees By which we have suddenly become a new people already.9

In the meantime everything burned down by the “old people” had to be rebuilt. Before the fires, this territory was built without a unifying plan. Only now, after the fires, was it possible for Peter’s heirs to do what he had not been able to do: to plan in an organized way this prominent section of the capital. The 1730s postfire plan of Field Marshal Burchard Christoph von Munnich and architect Peter Eropkin turned out to be a masterpiece of baroque urbanism and exists to this day. If Peter could see it, he would be ecstatic: a distinct artistic order has fully replaced the untamable elemental force of chaotic overgrowth that he could not tolerate. Built at the behest of Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, the Winter Palace (1754–61), the tallest and most exquisite secular building in the capital, became the crowning achievement of Petersburg’s postfire Baroque. After that time, to build anything taller than the Winter Palace was considered inadmissible. In 1844 Nicholas I institutionalized the prohibition that no building in the capital could be higher than seventy-seven feet (the height of the Winter Palace’s cornice) by legislating it; it was even suggested that buildings be restricted to seventy feet so that the palace would have no rivals.10 Only churches remained exempt from the restriction. Soon afterward, in conjunction with the laying of railroads, Petersburg’s industrial development was underway, and land values began to increase rapidly. The seventy-seven-foot prohibition forced entrepreneurs to build very dense city blocks. Consequently, at the outset of the twentieth century, the entire city ended up uniform in height, and its even skyline reproduced the Neva delta’s flat landscape. This triumph of artifice was achieved “in spite of reason” and

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found itself in sharp conflict with land values in the capital. Hence it was in the early 1910s that the first ideas to build skyscrapers in downtown St. Petersburg came to the fore (the first cautious attempt was made by the Singer Sewing Machine Company on Nevsky Prospect a few years earlier).11 By the same token, the human elemental force—but this time in its economic guise—strove to remove all prohibitions, but the First World War and subsequent political upheavals proved great setbacks, and the question of tall buildings fell by the wayside for a long time. During the Soviet period the seventy-seven-foot prohibition concerning the historical city center was merely an aesthetic pretense. Only in the 1970s were there new violations, which were linked to a commercial approach, specifically in the case of multistory hotels. Today, with the return to a market economy, there have been more and more such infringements, most of which are economically determined. In other words, they manifest a human elemental force: the desire to extract maximum of profit from very expensive land. The city government introduced new zoning regulations in the 1990s for the first time: the closer the new building is to the historic city, the greater the restriction to its rising above the surrounding rooftops. How has this aspiration to break through all aesthetic restraints manifested itself in Petersburg’s newest architecture? The Gazprom Tower project has become the most flagrant violation of all the high-rise restrictions. Midway into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the powerful and extremely rich state-owned oil company Gazprom decided to house its headquarters in St. Petersburg. A plot of land at the confluence of the Okhta and Neva rivers, across from the renowned masterpiece of eighteenth-century baroque the Smolny Monastery (whose architect was Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the builder of the Winter Palace), was selected. In 2006 an international architectural competition for the design of the building complex was announced. According to Gazprom’s wishes, a tower rising to nearly one-thousand feet was supposed to serve as the main part of this complex, although city zoning law forbade building anything higher than 157 feet there. Under pressure from Gazprom, the jury selected the design by RMJM Architects, a British group that had proposed a 1,030-foot tower. A show of protest was expressed by three internationally famous architects who resigned from the jury: Kisho Kurokawa, Sir Norman Forster, and Rafael Vinoli. According to Vinoly, all three were absolutely against “inappropriate high-rise construction at the junction of the Neva and Okhta rivers, in the immediate proximity of the historic city center.”12 The jury’s selection provoked a storm of protest in the city, not only in the mass media but also in the streets. Various social groups conducted street

RMJM Group, competition version of design for Gazprom Tower, 2006 (drawing by Grigory Kaganov)

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demonstrations, demanding that the jury’s decision be annulled and that Gazprom not be allowed into the city.13 It is not difficult to understand the city dwellers’ indignation: they had grown accustomed to holding the even skyline of St. Petersburg in high esteem. The Dutch also protest the construction of skyscrapers out of love for their flat landscape and traditional low-rising houses. UNESCO has safeguarded Petersburg’s historical center for some time now, and it has also protested and demanded that such a tall tower not undergo construction on the Okhta. But there is another side to this story. No matter how one feels about the tower, it serves as a sort of retribution for the regime of artifice that has reigned in the city since 1844. The ban on constructing anything higher than seventy-seven feet can be compared to the ancient Chinese custom of foot-binding, which inhibits normal growth. The foot, completely distorted by the binding, was thought especially beautiful—it is also, if you will, a victory over the human elemental force, achieved “in spite of reason.” The uniform height of all buildings in old Petersburg was considered and continues to be considered especially beautiful in precisely the same way. Those who are not devoted to this (intrinsically baroque) type of beauty may regret the fact that the First World War interfered with the construction of the not-very-tall art nouveau and neoclassical revival skyscrapers in the city center. The Neva delta’s cityscape would have ended up different, as well as more diverse and tolerant, in the long run, and the current invasion of the market-economy forces [stikhiia] would not seem as sudden and as shattering as it does now. Translated by      1. G. A. Isachenko, “Okno v Evropu”: istoriia i landshafty (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg University Press, 1998), 24. At that time Ladoga’s waters flooded the ancient valleys of the local Izhora and Tosna rivers, creating a watershed between them. 2. The earliest written accounts of great floods are dated to 1060, with subsequent floods noted in 1300, 1541, 1555, and 1594. See http://www.semiotic.ru/d/his/flood. 3. Ibid. 4. E.-M. Falconet to I. I. Betskoy, http://walkspb.ru/pam/medn_vsad.html. 5. E. V. Anisimov, Iunyi Grad. Peterburg vremen Petra Velikogo (St. Petersburg: Dmitry Bulanin Publishers, 2003), 108–9. 6. Ibid. Evgeny Anisimov estimates that the number of people who worked to build St. Petersburg (in total for a period of fifteen years) was approximately five hundred thousand; among them, one hundred thousand people died. 7. In 1712, according to Felix Lurye, the tsar demanded that twenty-five thousand gentry families be sent to Petersburg, but in two years he settled on a quarter of that

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amount (F. M. Lurye, Peterburg—istoriia kul’tury v tablitsakh, 1 [St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek. Diamant Publishers, 2000], 16, 18). Clearly, the tsar’s initial demand had not been fulfilled. 8. Ibid., 14. 9. A. D. Kantemir, Sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1956), 75. This “Satire II, on the Envy and Pride of Ill-Mannered Noblemen” (“Satira II, Na zavist’ i gordost’ dvorian zlonravnykh”) was written at the end of 1729, when the court had returned to Moscow and the gentry could once again live at their old estates and forget about St. Petersburg. 10. Manifest in this law was a belated triumph of baroque regularity, which had suppressed the spontaneous growth of the cityscape. Nicholas I’s personal control over all architectural projects in the capital demonstrates the same aspiration. 11. See the essay on the Singer sewing machine in this volume. 12. From interview with Raphael Vinoli, Kommersant-Daily 3 (3579), January, 17, 2007 (www.koomersant.ru). See also Kisho Kurokawa’s interview with the Rosbalt Information Agency on December, 27, 2006 (www.rosbalt.ru/2006/12/27/280582.html). In the end, only one architect remained on the jury, with the other seven jurors being either high city government officials or Gazprom representatives. 13. For more information on public protests against the Gazprom Tower, see http:// saint-petersburg.ru/ m/ 20300/ stroitelstvo_gazprom-siti_w_peterburge ._za_i_1.html; and http://www/metbashne/ru/page-refer.html; http://grani.ru/ Culture/m.127073.html.

Contributors

          is assistant professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She received a BA from St. Petersburg State University and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly publications include articles on Nabokov, the Bakhtin brothers, early Soviet film, and the aestheticization of historical trauma. She has also authored seven books of poetry in Russian and has published her first book of poetry in translation in 2010 (This Lamentable City). Currently she is working on a book about the Siege of Leningrad titled “Petersburg Besieged: Culture of the Aesthetic Opposition.”          is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is completing a dissertation on Russia’s literary and cultural relationship with Central Asia. Her scholarly interests include documentary film, ethnography, and the rhetoric of science in literature.

            received her PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled “From Truth to Time: Soviet Central Television, 1957–1985,” explores the production and content of Soviet Central Television during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Her research interests include the relationship between mass media and political and cultural change, and the place of uncertainty, risk, and game-playing in Soviet culture and everyday life.           is a PhD candidate in Russian literature in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation concerns depictions of male same-sex love in Russian literature and articles include “In Defense of Difference: Homosexualities East and West” (Europe-Evropa: Cross-cultural Dialogues, 2010).         is professor of Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (2005), of which an expanded version was published in Russian (>nlpfucoh^] qplmf]: .l`lc ncifafleklc olek^kfc f fin de siècle ` 1looff, 2008). She is currently 343

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Contrib utors

working on the interwar Russian emigration and on the representations of clouds in literature and the visual arts.

  is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Minds Under Siege: Rethinking the Soviet Experience inside the Leningrad Blockade, 1941–1945.” The dissertation is based on 120 diaries kept by Leningraders during the siege and explores the effects of the Blockade on established personal, ideological, and historical narratives in Soviet society.          is a PhD candidate in Russian literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent a year in Moscow conducting research on French and Russian symbolist poetry under the auspices of the Fulbright program. He is writing a dissertation on pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary avant-garde poetry.               -     is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “‘A Sacred Space Is Never Empty’: Soviet Atheism, 1954–1985,” examines the Soviet secularization project. Her scholarly interests include the study of religion, everyday life, ritual culture, and the history of Soviet social sciences.

        is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation titled “From the Elegy to the End of the Novel: Literary Experiences of Emotion.” Her scholarly interests lie in Russian literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the history and form of the novel. She has published articles on Anna Karenina and on the Formalist scholar Boris Eikhenbaum.

             is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing her dissertation, titled “The Drama in Disguise: Dramatic Modes of Narration and Textual Structure in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.”

Index

abstraction, 19, 77, 83; and Bely, 88, 90–113; and Kandinsky, 85–88, 90–99, 103–7, 110–13; and theosophy, 86, 90–94, 105 Adamson, Amandus G., 258n16 aesthetics: avant-garde, 83–113; baroque, 18, 28n58, 56, 59, 64–65, 68, 70, 74, 77, 80n24, 82n55, 337–38, 340, 341n10; constructivism, 274, 278, 280; cubism, 8, 19– 20, 28, 39, 44, 55, 84, 119n57, 125, 274; expressionism, 19–20, 45, 68, 70, 73–74, 83–84, 107, 113n1, 114n7, 119n57, 120n76; futurism (cubo-futurism), 35–36, 42, 48, 88, 119n57, 120n77, 134, 278; impressionism, 84–85, 111–13, 120n76; modernism (see modernism);neoprimitivism,119n64; realism, 84, 266–70; and spatial form, 20, 84; and splitting the atom, 86–89; suprematism, 114n5; surrealism, 15, 43–44, 67–68, 79n22; symbolism, 77, 81n42, 83– 86, 96, 111–13, 120n76, 179, 254 affect, 18, 19, 21, 195, 327; disgust, 18, 55–78, 269–71, 275, 283 Akhmatova, Anna, 188, 260n47, 314, 318, 320, 324n51 Aldanov, Mark, 51n13 Alexander I, 12, 199, 234n18 Alter, Robert, 9, 19, 34, 83, 124 Alyansky, Samuil, 309, 312, 315 animals: humans as, 22, 46, 63, 65–69; slaughter, 262–79. See also eating Anisimov, Evgeny, 340n6 Anna Ioannovna (Romanov), 336

Annenkov, Yury, 309, 312, 318 Antsiferov, Nikolay, 4, 11–15, 132, 314; The Soul of Petersburg (Dusha Peterburga), 11, 15, 76, 307 apocalypse, 11, 19–20, 112; and the city, 32, 95, 99, 103; horsemen, 90, 96, 110; Last Judgment, 91; and Petersburg myth, 65, 103; and Revelation, 34, 90, 103 architecture, 4, 12, 303n23, 334–40; apartment house, 203, 206, 295; art nouveau/style moderne, 4, 198, 233n8, 295; bridge, 220, 232n1, 233n8n10; office building, 133, 239 Armstrong, Tim, 273 Arsenyeva, Klara, 313 Ashbe, Anton, 115n13, 119n65 Auslender, Sergey, 174, 187 Averchenko, Arkady, 88 Azef, Evno, 35, 51n13, 14, 156, 159, 162, 170n8, 170n13, 172–73n43 Bachelard, Gaston, 285, 291–92, 294 Bakst, Leon, 176, 298 Barskova, Polina, 307 Barthes, Roland, 14, 48 Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 27n50, 78, 214n47, 237n44, 281n20, 283–85, 289, 290–93, 297, 303n29, 304n39; Benjamin on, 21, 118n45, 164, 191, 285, 289–91, 301n2, 302n18 Beketova, Maria, 314, 323n47 Belinsky, Vissarion (Physiology of Petersburg ), 198–99, 216n71

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Bely, Andrey: biography, 81n44, 85–86, 115n15, 175, 183, 197; on Blok’s funeral, 309–11, 315, 319; and color theory, 100, 103 Bely, Andrey, drawings: Angel, 90, 92, 116n27; Nikolay Apollonovich Ableukhov, 70–73, 72 Bely, Andrey, works: Arabesques, 39; “Art” (Iskusstvo), 88, 231; Beginning of the Century (Nachalo veka), 96, 111, 116n25, 210, 213n37; Between Two Revolutions (Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii), 25n13, 51n16, 52n18, 53n33, 113n1, 114n5, 115n13, 272; Christ Has Risen (Khristos voskres), 114n7; “Circular Movement” (Krugovoe dvizhenie), 24n13, 117n41; “The City” (Gorod), 6, 14, 36, 99, 118n52; Dramatic Symphony, 53n40, 99; Emblematics of Meaning (Emblematika smysla), 24n13; First Meeting (Pervoe svidanie), 87; “Forms of Art” (Formy iskusstva),” 86, 96–97, 99, 118n48; Gogol’s Craft (Masterstvo Gogolia), 56, 78n4, 79n19, 95, 103, 117–18n43; Kotik Letaev, 25n23, 27n47, 120n71; On the Border of Two Centuries (Na rubezhe dvukh stoletii ), 59, 84–84; Pepel, 118n54; Petersburg (see Petersburg); Snowstorm Goblet (Kubok metelei ), 54n40; “Why I Became a Symbolist” (Pochemu ia stal simvolistom), 111–12 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 25n17, 36–37, 172n30, 195, 231, 233n5, 237n47, 272, 329; on Baudelaire, 21, 118n45, 164, 191, 285, 289–91, 301n2, 302n18; the collector, 21, 141–42, 203; the flâneur, 21, 38, 52n25, 164–65, 28. See also flâneur/flânerie Benois, Alexander, 11–12, 26n35, 115n8, 206, 214n50, 295, 298, 318 Berberova, Nina, 305, 316–18 Berdyaev, Nikolay, 19, 28n60, 45, 82n49, 83, 114n7 Berman, Marshall, 10, 153 Bernshteyn, Sergey, 315, 324n56 Besant, Annie, and Charles Leadbeater, 90, 113, 117n38; Thought-Forms, 93, 103, 117n33; Vague Selfish Affection, 106, 106–7 Blok, Alexander, 11, 21–23, 81n43, 140, 174–93, 284–96, 300; and Baudelaire, 285, 290– 92, 303n29; and Bely, 51n16, 78n2, 150, 175, 183, 283; death and funeral of, 22, 305–25 Blok, Alexander, works: City cycle, 291; “Illusion” (Obman), 293; “Islands” (Na ostrovakh), 293; The Last Days of Imperial Power

I nd ex

(Poslednie dni imperatorskoi vlasti ), 230; The Puppet Show (Balaganchik ), 174–81, 183, 186– 87; The Snow Mask (Snezhnaia maska), 176, 179–80, 189–91; “The Stranger” (Neznakomka), 179; The Twelve (Dvenadtsat’ ), 140 Blok, Lyubov Dmitrievna (Mendeleeva), 51n16, 52n18, 81n41, 177, 180, 183, 289, 292, 293, 296, 303n25, 308, 309, 319, 322n12, 325n76 body, 17–18, 22–23, 50n5, 62, 65, 74–75; anus, 68–69; back (tail, spine), 31–50, 53nn39– 40, 54n41, 63; corpse, 56, 59, 64, 77, 315– 16; ears, 32, 35, 45, 68; excrement, 18, 69; eyes, 35–36; face, 33, 44, 64, 74; lips/ mouth, 32, 57, 63, 68–70, 73–74, 80n35, 82n49; nose, 32, 50n4, 68; and slaughter, 263–71 Böcklin, Arnold, 113n1 Bogomolov, Nikolay. See Malmstad, John bomb, 39, 48, 53n34, 88, 95, 116n23, 118n43, 150–51, 271; as Bely’s metaphor for creativity, 39, 88, 91, 231; in Petersburg, 32, 34, 39, 66, 77, 86–88, 90, 151; as trope (producer of form and narrative), 9, 17– 18, 43, 55, 59, 252–53. See also terrorism Booth, W. R. (The “?” Motorist ), 7 Borisov-Musatov, Victor, 113n1, 115n16 Bowlt, John, 14, 114n7 Boym, Svetlana, 322n16 Brilliant, Dora, 165 Bruno, Giuliana, 13 Bryusov, Valery, 197 Buckler, Julie, 16, 199–200, 295, 302n4 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 4, 129 Bulla, Karl, 128, 243, 245, 258n19 Burlyuk, David, 48, 114n5, 114n7 Carstensen, Fred, 249 Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life, 4, 139, 158, 231; and production of narrative, 139, 191, 195, 236n33, 250; and unreadability, 15, 37, 48, 61, 76, 195; and vision (close-up/bird’s eye), 8–9, 13, 48, 61, 76, 195, 203, 240, 242 Cezanne, Paul, 10 Chebotarevskaya, Anastasia, 305, 312 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay (What Is to Be Done? ), 246, 249, 259nn24–25 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 31–34, 39, 45, 50, 52n17; “A Defense of Detective Stories,”

In d ex

33–34; “On Detective Novels,” 33; The Man Who Was Thursday, 31–33, 44, 49, 50n8, 51n13 Chicherin, Georgy, Kuzmin’s letter to, 197–98 Chukovsky, Korney, 308, 313 Chulkov, Georgy, 176, 180, 192n6 cinema/cinematic vision, 7, 16, 36, 99–101, 118n51, 134–35, 205, 273, 277–78, 279, 280 city: and affect, 17–19, 55–56, 61, 327; and the crowd (swarm), 8–9, 19, 21, 25n23, 37, 49, 51n13, 53n29, 67, 99, 118n45, 165–68, 203, 206, 226–27, 272, 284, 301n2, 327; dying city, 11, 37n26, 65, 68, 306–7, 316; labyrinthine, 9, 37; London, 32–34, 37, 51n13, 172n41 (see also Poe, Edgar Allen); and phantasmagoria, 6–7, 11, 15, 20, 32–33, 36, 99–100, 152, 154–56, 225; as text, 6, 11, 139, 195, 231 (see also Certeau, Michel de); Venice, 13, 133, 187–88. See also maps and mapping; modernity; Paris; perspective; Petersburg; Petersburg Clark, Katarina, 11, 205n17 Clark, T. J., 285 Clayton, Barbara, 250, 259n30 commercial life: advertisement and marketing (signboards), 6–7, 100–101, 107, 128, 273, 307; and homosexual subculture, 206, 208; restaurants, 187, 193n22, 200, 208, 215n60, 288; shops, 6–7, 214n47, 249, 265, 289, 317; Singer sewing machine marketing campaign, 240, 242–48, 258n8, 258n15 Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, 33, 39, 51n13 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 28n58, 328, 331n4 Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav, 119n65, 213n33, 298; Barbershop Window, 107, 108, 119n67; City Types, 107, 109; October Idyll, 59, 101, 102 Dolgopolov, Leonid, 15–16, 28n52, 113n1, 229, 237n41 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 10, 11, 42, 57, 289; Crime and Punishment, 10–11, 26n30, 34, 43, 53n30; Poor Folk, 248 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (Sherlock Holmes), 34– 35, 51n16, 52n17 Duncan, Isadora, 86, 289 eating: and cannibalism, 18, 57, 59, 63, 67–70, 79n22, 80n35, 268; and meat, 262–79

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Eikhenbaum, Boris, 135–39 Elias, Norbert, 56, 63 Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna), 337 Eropkin, Peter, 337 everyday life and domestic sphere: and homosexual subculture, 206, 208; and production/consumption of meat, 262–64; and sewing, 242, 246, 250–51; and the tram, 129–30, 139–41. See also Certeau, Michel de; commercial life Exter, Alexandra, 114n7 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 14, 80n24, 334 female sphere: and disgust, 63; and domestic/ industrial labor, 242–45; and feminism, 249; and the seamstress, 248–51, 254–56, 260n47 flâneur/flânerie, 18, 38, 52n25, 141, 287; and Baudelaire, 21, 191, 285, 290–91, 297; and Blok, 284, 288–95, 302n9, 303n29; and detective/criminal, 38–39, 52n25, 164–65, 172n41; and shock, 272, 279 Forsh, Olga, 307, 309, 314–15, 318, 324n52 Foucault, Michel, 7, 8, 13, 28n54, 35, 43, 44, 158 Frank, Joseph, 20, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 76 Friedman, Alan, 306 gaze, 15, 17, 35, 79n22, 100, 133, 240–41, 292. See also panoptic vision; perspective; Petersburg Gazprom, 338, 339, 340, 341n12 Gelfman, Gesya, 292 geometry, 18n48, 125, 135–36, 171n23, 195, 226, 293 Gershuni, Grigory, 159, 173n44 Ginzburg, Lidiya, 143 Gippius, Vladimir, 318–19 Gippius, Zinaida, 79n23, 140, 150, 168, 170n12, 253, 256, 260n52; “Electricity” (Elektrichestvo), 253–54; How We Wrote the Soldiers and What They Answered Us (Kak my voinam pisali i chto oni nam otvechali ), 255; “The Seamstress” (Shveia), 254 Glebova-Sudeykina, Olga, 178 Gogol, Nikolay, 10, 32, 35, 50n5, 56, 78n4, 79n19, 101, 103, 117n43, 118n51 Gollerbakh, Erikh, 307 Gorky, Maksim, 282n29, 307, 312, 320, 324n68 Gorodetsky, Sergey, 176, 187, 210, 289, 296

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Grabar, Igor, 115n14 Grebyonka, Evgeny, 285–88, 303n23 Grevs, Ivan, 12–15, 27n44, 116n21 Grünewald, Matthias, 114n7 guidebooks, 12–16, 157, 199, 214n41; All of Petersburg on Your Palm (Ves’ Peterburg na ladoni ), 200, 204; Guide to Petersburg (Putevoditel’ po Peterburgu), 262; imitation of in To the Courts . . . ! Homosexual Petersburg (K sudu . . . ! Gomoseksual’nyi Peterburg), 209; Karl Baedeker, 12, 26n37, 233n11 Gul, Roman, 51n13, 53n39 Gumilev, Nikolay, 260n47, 298, 205–6, 316– 17, 320, 324n51; “The Lost Streetcar” (Zabludivshiisia tramvai), 131–34, 143 Guys, Constantin, 297–98, 300 Harvey, David, 155 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 231–32, 237n48 Heidegger, Martin, 218, 233 Heine, T.-T., 113n1 Hérédia, José-Maria de, 222–24, 234n15, 235n19, 235n23 Homer (Odyssey), 250 homosexual desire: and city subculture, 206– 9; and Petersburg, 47, 66, 69, 75, 81n37 Hood, Thomas, 248, 259n24 Hugo, Victor (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 14 hypertextuality, 18, 20, 23, 143, 145, 250, 279– 80, 327–30. See also Web sites industrial life: and city infrastructure, 125, 128; and factories, 258n7, 279, 293, 295–97; in Petersburg (on the “Islands”), 47; and slaughterhouse, 264–66 Ivanov, Evgeny, 318–19 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 15, 22, 176, 194–98, 202– 4, 210, 318; and The Tower (apartment building), 14, 48, 187, 196–97, 202, 260n47 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, works: “The Poet and the Mob” (Poet i chern’), 203; To the Stars (Po zvezdam), 213n33 Ivanova, Vera, 178, 187 Ivanov-Razumnik, G. V., 50n8, 93, 309–11, 323n47 James, Henry, 51n13 Jawlensky, Alexey, 115n14 Johnson, Emily D., 11, 27n44, 214n50 Joyce, James, 4, 124, 328

I nd ex

Kafka, Franz, 5, 79n14 Kaganov, Grigory, 14, 17 Kalyaev, Ivan, 53n33, 163, 170n13 Kandinsky,Wassily,19–20,84–120;andcolor theory, 101, 103, 106, 119n56; and internal (inner) necessity, 91, 111–12; and nature, 111; and spots, 85, 95, 104–7, 110, 110–11; and synesthesia, 86, 96–97 Kandinsky, Wassily, paintings: Black Spot, 107, 110; Diagonal Tensions and Countertensions with a Point, 98; Lady in Moscow, 104–7, 105; The Last Judgment, 91; Moscow, 103–4, 104, 111 Kandinsky, Wassily, writings: Blue Rider, 91, 115n7, 116n23; “Content and Form,” 91; “On the Question of Form,” 91, 116n23; “On the Spiritual in Art,” 20, 90–91, 96–97, 107, 118n48; “Reminiscences,” 84, 87–88, 107, 111 Kardovsky, Dmitry, 115n14 Khlebnikov, Velemir, 114n7 Khodasevich, Vladislav, 27n49, 35–36, 260n48, 308, 320 Kobak, Alexander, 331 Kolnai, Aurel, 80n31 Komissarzhevskaya, Vera, 176–78, 192n7, 295 Konchalovsky, Pyotr, 115n8 Koretskaya, I. V., 113n1, 114n7 Korolenko, Vladimir, 267–69, 274, 281n16 Kruchyonykh, Alexei, 41, 88, 115n7 Kublitskaya-Piottukh, Anna Andreevna (Blok’s mother), 308, 309, 319, 322n12 Kugel, Alexander, 174 Kulbin, Nikolay, 115n7 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 22, 80n28, 176–78, 180, 194– 98, 204–11, 298, 300, 318–19; “At the Theatre” (V teatre), 177; “The Cardboard House” (Kartonnyi domik), 180; “High Window” (Vyskoe okno), 211 Landow, George, 330 Lang, Susan, 250 language: grammar: and “suddenly” (Petersburg), 42–48, 50, 53n339, 66; and homosexual subculture, 209; and sewing, 248– 50, 255; and urban experience, 124, 130; and walking (see Certeau, Michel de). See also narrative; tropes Lavrov, Alexander, 32–33, 51n13, 82n55 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 25n21, 28n54

In d ex

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (Laocoön), 74 Lillington, Karlin, 328 Ljunggren, Magnus, 80n28 Lukács, Georg, 11, 145 Lukomsky, Georgy, 12 Lurye, Arthur, 319 Lurye, Felix, 340n7 Maguire, Robert, and John Malmstad, 5, 20, 24n13, 28, 50n3, 116n28, 118n48, 224, 228–29, 236n29, 328 Malevich, Kazimir, 119n57 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 88, 112 Malmstad, John, and Nikolai Bogomolov, 207, 214n46, 215n52. See also Maguire, Robert Mandelshtam, Osip, 27n44, 138, 144, 188; The Egyptian Stamp (Egipetskaia marka), 125, 137– 39, 143, 289; “The End of the Novel” 136; The Noise of Time (Shum vremeni ), 192n7 maps and mapping, 3, 7–10, 12–13, 27–28n52, 94–95, 131, 136, 139, 141, 195, 198–99, 219; and digital maps, 280, 327–28; and homosexual subculture, 208–9; and Mapping Petersburg (Web site), 125, 141, 279–80, 301, 327–31; and terrorist plotting, 151–57, 161–69, 171n18 Marx, Karl, 6, 26n29, 249 masquerade/masks, 22, 33, 175, 178–85, 182– 83, 187–91, 246 material culture, 6–7, 21; as byproducts of the bull, 266; furniture, 296; sewing machine (Singer), 22, 238–40, 242–51, 256, 258n8, 258nn10–11, 258n16, 259n23; tram, 127– 33. See also commercial life; industrial life Matich, Olga, 216n71, 260n46, 269–71 Matyushin, Mikhail, 48, 295, 300 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 48, 79n19, 88, 114n5, 114n7, 134, 146n33, 274–75, 295, 300, 308, 322n13 McDonough, Tom, 165 Medtner, Emil, 5, 25n13 Meltser, Fyodor, 295–96 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 116n26 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10, 149 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 174, 176, 187 Mikhaylov, Mikhail, 248 Milashevsky, Vladimir, 294 Miller, D. A., 35 Miller, J. Hillis, 250 Miller, William Ian, 64, 68, 70, 75, 80n31

349

Mintslov, Sergey, R., 239, 257n5 Mitrokhin, Dmitry, 142, 285–86, 297–301, 299, 304n39 modernism, 3–120 passim; and aesthetics, 10, 19–20, 37, 62, 77, 83–113 passim, 256, 266– 79 (see also aesthetics; perspective); and dissolution of form, 5, 10, 15, 19, 46, 55– 57, 83–133 passim; and modernity, 5, 11, 125, 262–79; and postmodernism, 16–17, 327; and selfhood, 144, 153, 155; and splitting the atom, 86–88 modernity: and “anti-modernity,” 287–88, 301; and mastery of vision, 14 (see also panoptic vision); and mechanization/built infrastructure, 7, 125, 127–28, 158, 217–18, 239, 242–48, 263–66; and political terrorism, 18, 149–69; and shock, 5–7, 9, 17, 37, 27, 278–80, 327; and time, 217–18, 251, 273. See also city; commercial life; industrial life modes of transport, 157, 160, 220; automobile, 7, 123, 160, 241; carriage/horse-drawn cab, 35, 39, 99, 149–50, 158, 160–63, 172n37; railroad, 158–59; tram/streetcar, 123–44, 172n30, 241, 288–89, 294, 317, 329. See also strolling/walking Mondrian, Piet, 90, 117n33 Monet, Claude (The Haystack), 84, 96, 110–12, 115n8, 115n12, 120n76 Monmonier, Mark, 153 Montferrand, Auguste de, 222 Moss, Eric Owen, 334–35, 335 Munch, Edvard (The Scream), 70, 71, 73, 81n40, 81n42, 82n45, 111 Munnich, Burchard Christof von, 337 Munt, Evgeniya, 177, 187 music, 83–84; and abstract art/motion, 95–97, 117n38; and sounds of modern city, 123– 24, 135, 202, 248, 271–72; and synesthesia, 84, 86, 87. See also Petersburg: and music Mussorgsky, Modest, 259n24 myth (Greek), 224, 250. See also Petersburg: and Petersburg myth/text Nabokov, Vladimir, 4–5, 27n44, 129, 143 narrative, 6, 137, 139, 141–44, 217–19, 230, 267, 270–71; fragmented, 9, 17–18, 39, 42, 124, 144, 252–53, 269, 271, 274, 327, 329–31; and motion (walking/transport), 125, 139, 157, 199; omniscient, 35–39, 44; and sewing, 242, 250–52, 256; spatialization of,

350

narrative (continued ) 17–18, 20, 36–37, 39, 43–44, 49, 55–56, 61, 76, 84, 124, 139, 167, 195, 218, 250–51, 327–28. See also hypertextuality; Petersburg; time Newhall, Beaumont, 277 Nicholas I, 28, 257n4, 337, 341n10 Nicholas II, 181–82, 182, 217–20, 223, 235n22, 239 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 83, 86–87; Birth of Tragedy, 5; Ecce Homo, 9, 88 novel: crisis/end of, 23, 136, 136–37, 139, 144– 45, 231; detective novel, 9, 33–34, 45, 48; family novel, 77; spatialization of, 8–9, 17–18, 20, 36–37, 39, 43–44, 49, 55–56, 61, 76, 84; urban narrative, 9–11. See also Petersburg Nussbaum, Martha, 66–67, 75–76, 80n31 Ober, Artemy, 240 occult, 69–70, 83, 91, 94, 204; and astral body, 93, 107; and inner sound, 91, 95, 107; and sounding cosmos/substance, 94–95, 117n32; and theosophy/anthroposophy, 86, 90–91, 106, 112, 117n32 Olesha, Yury, 274–75 Otsup, Nikolay, 133, 241 Pachmuss, Temira, 170n12, 253 painting, 8, 10, 19, 39, 56–57, 83–113. See also Bely, Andrey; Cezanne, Paul; Kandinsky, Wassily; Munch, Edvard; Picasso, Pablo; Rozanova, Olga panoptic vision, 8, 13, 18, 43–44, 195, 240; and The Bronze Horseman, 15, 46. See also Petersburg: and surveillance/detection Paris, 6, 13, 36, 118n45, 128, 132, 191, 218–21, 224, 234, 237, 293; Alexander III Bridge, 22, 218–22, 224, 233n12, 235n23; Eiffel Tower, 14 Pasternak, Boris, 4, 48, 322n13 Patyk, Lynn Ellen, 156, 171n16, 172n43 perspective: aerial/bird’s eye view, 8, 13–15, 46, 48, 73, 242; and affect (disgust), 55, 57, 61, 63–64, 76; and movement, 133– 34, 157–58, 161; panorama, 4, 9, 13–14, 16, 22, 26n30, 100, 133, 161, 195–99, 203–5, 210–11, 214n41, 236n33, 240; street level, 8, 15, 17, 20, 22, 48, 205, 211, 241–42; and (un)readability, 15,

I nd ex

48–49, 57, 61, 76, 195. See also panoptic vision; Petersburg Peter II, 336 Peter the Great, 3, 14, 125, 181, 223, 227, 246, 332–34, 336 Petersburg, 3–20, 31–120 passim, 123–24, 156, 160, 165, 168, 170n8, 172n43, 238, 251– 53, 255, 271–72, 284, 296, 301n2, 324n70; alternative titles for, 93, 160, 172n36, 197; bomb in (see bomb); The Bronze Horseman in, 46–47, 64–65, 90, 96, 228; cerebral play in (see tropes); and Chesterton, 32, 34, 49, 50n8; as detective novel, 9, 33– 34, 45; and disgust, 55–78; and double agency, 39, 44–45; and geometry, 59, 83, 88, 99, 116n28, 117n39n41, 118n48, 125, 136; as Gesamtkunstwerk, 19, 83; homosexual desire in, 47, 66, 69, 75, 81n37; and metamorphosis (see tropes); and music, 19, 77, 83–84, 271–72; and narrative, 5, 9, 17–18, 20, 22, 35–37, 39, 42–43, 48, 50, 95, 123–24, 253 (see also time); and painting, 39, 44, 83–113; and perspective (close-up/distance, aerial/street-level), 14, 18, 20, 48–49, 61, 63–64, 76, 95–96, 100–101, 107, 118n51; and phantasmagoria, 6, 10, 15, 20, 46, 99–100, 156, 225, 284; and the reader, 18, 39, 43, 45, 48, 61, 63, 74; spatial epistemology of, 17, 20, 36, 39, 43–44, 46, 48–49, 56, 63, 76, 95, 100–101, 107, 327; and spots, 73, 85, 94– 95, 100, 101, 118n41; and “suddenly” (see language); and surveillance/detection, 36, 38–39, 42–49; synecdoche in (see body); terrorist conspiracy in, 18, 35–36, 150–51; tropes in (see tropes); unreadability in, 15, 36–37, 48–49, 67 Petersburg: and floods, 198, 212n13, 333–34, 340n2; and Petersburg myth/text, 3, 10– 12, 14, 16–17, 19, 23, 42, 53n37, 65, 103, 132, 176, 187, 190, 196, 198, 200, 210, 307– 8, 332–40 Petersburg, buildings: Admiralty, 14, 28n52, 127, 238, 257; House of Books, 4, 41, 257; House of Singer, 4, 22, 133, 238–42, 248, 256–57, 257n4, 257n7, 258n20; Kazan Cathedral, 239; Komissarzhevsky Theater, 22, 174, 177, 186; Mariinsky Theater, 319, 334, 335; slaughterhouse, 16, 22, 79n22, 262–66; St. Isaac’s Cathedral, 14,

In d ex

26n30, 28n52, 65, 214n41; Winter Palace, 181, 189, 239, 337–38 Petersburg, bridges: Chernyshev Bridge, 185; Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, 288; Liteyny Bridge, 233n8; Nikolaevsky Bridge, 26n30, 27n52, 45, 129, 227–29, 319; Palace (Dvortsovy) Bridge, 136; Troitsky (Trinity) Bridge, 22, 132, 142, 217–32, 232n1, 232n4; Warsaw Bridge, 164 Petersburg, canals: Catherine, 238, 240, 292; Obvodny, 22, 149, 164, 262, 264 Petersburg, locales: Admiralty Side, 336–37; Bronze Horseman, 14–15, 26n30, 45–47, 64, 132–33, 228, 334; Mars Field, 127, 186; Peski, 200–201; Petersburg/Petrograd Side, 127, 187, 219, 229–30, 233n8, 284–89, 293, 295, 298, 300, 303n23; PetersburgUniversity,135–36,289;Senate Square, 14–15, 46, 127; Smolensk Cemetery, 22, 306, 309, 319; Summer Garden, 59, 60, 200, 204, 208; Tauride Gardens, 195, 197, 199–202, 201, 204, 208–9;VasilievskyIsland,26n30,52n27, 127, 129, 133, 135–36, 189, 216n73, 228, 289, 306, 319, 324n70, 336 Petersburg, rivers: Karpovka, 16, 23, 283–301, 290, 299; Monastyrka, 128; Neva, 15, 20, 22, 65, 76, 80n34, 127, 132–33, 197, 204, 225–26, 228, 236n29, 296, 313, 319, 332–33, 337–38, 340; Okhta, 197, 338, 340; Pryazhka, 313, 317–18 Petersburg, streets: Bolshoy Prospect, 129, 289; Kamennoostrovsky Prospect, 137, 284, 287–89, 295–96; Nevsky Prospect, 4, 7–8, 11, 20, 27n52, 37, 67–68, 99–101, 119n57, 133–36, 140, 144, 199, 215n62, 238–39, 241, 249, 284–86, 331n5; Ofitserskaya Street, 174, 176, 186–87, 313–14, 317–19, 322n12; Tavricheskaya Street, 197, 203 Picasso, Pablo, 19, 28n60, 83, 116n23 Pilnyak, Boris, 4, 20, 274 Piottukh, F. F., 289 Pisacane, Carlo, 152 Plato, 49 Platonov, Andrey, 4, 276–77 Plehve, Vyacheslav von, 21, 33, 149–51, 153– 55, 157–58, 161–64, 169n1, 169n3, 170n6, 170n8, 170n13, 171n15, 171n20, 330 Poe, Edgar Allan (“The Man of the Crowd”), 15, 27n49, 36–37, 48, 53n33

351

Potyomkin, Grigory, 200 Proust, Marcel, 4–5, 251, 259n36 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 73 Pushkin, Alexander, 10, 15, 27n49, 222–23, 234n18; Boris Godunov, 181; Bronze Horseman (Mednyi vsadnik ), 10, 14, 26n35 Pyast, Vladimir, 290–91, 318–19 Rabelais, François, 68, 79n15 Rastrelli, Francesco Bartolomeo, 338 revolution: of 1905, 6, 17, 53n34, 59, 88, 101, 124, 156, 185, 193n17, 207, 214n52; of 1917, 3, 15, 114n5, 140, 202, 274, 279–80, 300, 305–6, 315–16 Reynolds, Dee, 112 Reytblat, Abram, 34 Rickert, Heinrich, 24 Rimbaud, Arthur, 222 Ringbom, Sexton, 94–94, 119n59 Robakidze, Grigory (Grigol), 27n51 Rozanov, Vasily, 52n17, 144–45, 298 Rozanova, Olga, 41, 42, 88 Rylkova, Galina, 316 Sabashnikova, Margarita, 210 Sapunov, Nikolay, 115n16, 176 Sarabyanov, Dmitry, 107 Savina, Maria, 295 Savinkov, Boris, 21, 33, 53n39, 149–73 Sazonov, Egor, 150, 160, 163–65, 169n3, 170n8 Schelling, Friedrich, 91 Schenker, Alexander M., 80n24 Schönberg, Arnold, 86 Scriabin, Alexander, 86 seamstress and sewing, 22, 248–51, 254–56. See also female sphere; language; material culture; narrative secret police (Okhrana), 35, 38, 166–67; double agent, 9, 33, 35–36, 39, 43–44, 62, 69, 95, 159 sewing machine (Singer). See material culture Shaginyan, Marietta, 318, 323n47 Shklovsky, Viktor, 4, 8, 20, 25n23, 42, 48, 124, 129–30, 136, 142, 144–45, 270, 318, 320– 21, 324n48 Sholokhov, Mikhail, 276 Shvarsalon, Vera, 210, 214n42, 216n73 Simmel, Georg, 5, 20, 24n13, 46, 52n27, 56, 91, 194–95, 236n27, 327; correspondence with Heinrich Rickert, 24n13

352

Skovoroda, Grigory, 50, 77, 82n55 Soja, Edward, 7–8, 16, 28n54, 43 Sologub, Fyodor, 176, 260n48, 305, 312 Somov, Konstantin, 81n43, 113n1, 176, 215n59, 298, 318 space: chronotope, 43, 250–51, 256, 283; and contiguity, 7; framing, 133–34, 241; and modernist aesthetics (see narrative; novel; perspective; Petersburg); private (apartment), 69, 178, 191, 197–98, 202– 5, 209, 290–91, 294. See also city; maps and mapping; time Steel, Valerie, 297 Steiner, Rudolf, 82n44, 86, 90, 94, 115n15, 119n58 Stepun, Fyodor, 25n13, 32 Stites, Richard, 278 strolling/walking, 156–58, 163, 176, 186, 190– 91, 195, 198–99, 204–5, 208–9, 211, 283– 301. See also flâneur/flânerie Struve, Mikhail, 308 Stuck, Franz von, 113n1, 115n13 Sudeykin, Sergey, 115n16, 176–78 surveillance, 156–57, 161–66. See also panoptic vision; Petersburg Syuzor, Pavel, 239 Tatlin, Vladimir, 114n7 terrorism: in Chicago, 51n13; in London, 33– 34; in Russia (Petersburg), 5, 31, 33–35, 88, 95, 149–73, 292 time, 7, 19, 23, 42–44, 50, 70, 97, 123–24, 217– 18, 250–51; frozen/retrospective, 287, 292, 300–301; simultaneity, 7, 20, 44, 125, 132, 188, 267, 280; and spatialization, 17–18, 43–44, 46–48, 66, 84, 95, 124, 132, 155 Timenchik, Roman, 32, 131, 139, 141 Tolstoy, Lev, 269, 275, 280, 281n20; Anna Karenina, 139, 270, 277; “First Step” (Pervaia stupen’), 269, 271; “Sevastopol Stories,” 270; What Is Art?, 269 tropes: bomb (see bomb); bridge, 217–32; cerebral play, 17–18, 38–39, 42–43, 52n25, 66, 90–91, 93, 136, 184–85; displacement (sdvig), 35–36, 39, 47–48, 66; metamorphosis, 47, 55, 64, 67, 70, 81n39, 94, 101; palindrome/anagram, 46, 69–70; sewing, 242, 250–52, 256; slaughter, 262–79; swarm, 8–9, 19, 25n23, 37, 99, 118n45,

I nd ex

226–27, 284, 327; synecdoche (back) (see body); tram, 139–40 Tsivian, Yuri, 7, 32 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 255, 260n50, 298 Turchin, Valery, 119n64 Turgenev, Ivan (Smoke), 249 Vaginov, Konstantin, 4 Vaillant, Auguste, 88 Valéry, Paul, 230, 233n5 Vengerova, Zinaida, 253 Verigina, Valentina, 177–79, 187–91 Vertov, Dziga, 134, 277, 278 Vision. See cinema/cinematic vision; gaze; panoptic vision; perspective; Petersburg; surveillance Vladimirov, Vasily V., 85 Volokhova, Natalya, 176, 179–80, 185–87, 189 Voloshin, Maximilian, 210 Vyaltseva, Anastasia, 295, 300 Wagner, Richard, 86 Wanner, Adrian, 285 war: Civil War, 140, 262, 274, 305–8, 313; First World War, 3, 39, 255–56, 261n53, 279, 300, 338, 340; Russo-Japanese War, 17, 256; Second World War (Leningrad Blockade), 4, 143 Web sites: Alexander Palace Time Machine, 330– 31; Mapping Petersburg, xi, 23, 118n55, 125, 142, 145, 146n32, 193n22, 212n12, 214n41, 215n64, 250, 258n11, 259n22, 280, 294, 304n37, 327–31, 331n5; Saint Petersburg Encyclopedia, 331 Weiss, Peg, 117n32 Wells, H. G., 150 Werefkin, Nina von, 115n14 West, Rebecca, 51n13 World of Art (group), 11, 297, 299–300, 335 Yudina, Ekaterina, 308 Zabolotsky, Nikolay, 241 Zamyatin, Evgeny, 4, 308, 311–12, 319, 321 Zinovieva-Annibal, Lidiya, 176, 196–97, 204, 210, 213n32, 216n69 Zola, Emile, 51n13 Zorgenfrey, Wilhelm, 314–15, 318–19