How to read Petersburg - The color red was emblematic of...

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913/1916/1922/etc.), a great novel.  In the old days I would have chipped at it for a week or more.  It is complex, is it ever.  Long ago, I read the old Grove Press edition, but this time I wanted to dig in more, so I read the Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad translation (Indiana University Press, 1978), where a text shorter than three hundred pages has eighty pages of introduction and notes.

Good notes.  Fascinating notes.  But is this the way to read a novel?  Well, sometimes yes, sometimes no.

The Grove Press book is incomplete, notoriously error-ridden, and should be retired.  But there have been two subsequent translations, subsequent to Maguire and Malmstad, both less annotated. The reader in the “sometimes no” mood should read one of those, I guess.

But I will not lie, as I usually do – this novel is pretty hard, even aside from the unfamiliarity of the history or society or geography.  Maybe they are familiar to you!  They are interesting.  Still, a map, at least, will help.  Maguire and Malmstad include a fine map.

Petersburg is a father and son fight.  The father is about to rise to the highest rank of the ministry, while the son, a law student, is tangled in revolutionary politics.  He has even agreed to carry a time bomb to kill someone.  “Someone” turns out to be his father! The last third of the novel has a ticking time bomb plot.  It is tense.

Yet in practice the novel is non-melodramatic, more of a dream or even a move towards abstraction.  Bely constructs a complex pattern of colors, motifs, and references that create an object of great beauty for anyone who finds this sort of thing beautiful.  It is not so much that this sunrise is itself beautiful – maybe it is:

The lace [the silhouetted cityscape] metamorphosed into morning Petersburg.  There stood the five-storied houses, the color of sand.  The rust red palace was bedawned. (140, end of “Chapter the Fourth”)

It is the color scheme, recurring in many shades, Bely turning his city into art.  Greens, yellows, reds.  Mirrors, so many mirrors.  An uncanny statue motif, from the caryatids holding up every important building to the prominent sculpted Russians who occasionally come to life, populates the city even when it seems empty:

The Summer Garden lay somber.

The statues each stood hidden beneath boards.  The boards looked like coffins standing on end.  The coffins lined the paths.  Both nymphs and satyrs had taken shelter in them, so that the tooth of time might not gnaw them away with frost.  Time sharpens its teeth for everything – it devours body and soul and stone.  (97, beginning of “Chapter the Fourth, in which the line of the narrative is broken”)

That last sentence shows the narrator is his moralizing mode.  Hard to tell how much of that is parody.

Today’s bout [of heart trouble] had been brought on by the appearance of the red domino.  The color red was emblematic of the chaos that was leading Russia to its doom. (112)

A previous reader of my copy has penciled “Come on” in the margin.  He thinks that is too blunt, I guess.  I fear it is a trap.  Maybe I will figure it out the next time I read Petersburg.

For more on the translations, please see Michael Katz’s short, exasperated review of them in The Slavic and Eastern European Journal (2010).  He thinks the book’s readers need notes, and lots of them.

The Best Books of 1913 - Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare / On, on upward thro' the golden air!

This was a strange year for anniversaries.  It is usually the births and deaths of writers that are commemorated, but this year I noticed a lot of attention to books – two books, I mean, Pride and Prejudice and Swann’s Way (for that matter, the Gettysburg Address fits the pattern).  Perhaps this tells us something about what these books have become, how their meaning has expanded beyond their texts.  Austen and Proust both have industries around them.

Proust, or Swann’s Way, or at least the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way, deserves the honor of Best Book of 1913, I think, so I have no complaint about the attention it receives.  It is one of the great novels of the century.  Yet there is something arbitrary to its celebrity.  At least one more of the century’s greats was published in the same year, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, a novel that is innovative like Proust’s book but has a tense thriller plot, including terrorists and a ticking time bomb.  Yet it is a cult novel in English.  I have no idea why.  It is not like English readers have been averse to Russian novels.

If you polled readers or critics fifty years ago, asking them which novel would get the most attention at its centennial, Swann’s Way or D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, I wonder if Lawrence would not top the poll.  How he has fallen.  Or how Proust has risen.  Some of both.  Sons and Lovers is doing all right for itself.

Perhaps a French reader can let me know if Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes has gotten much centennial celebration in France, where it is as well-known as, I don’t know, its titular cousin The Great Gatsby.  In English, another cult book.

I am never sure if I should do a Best of 191X post.  For the 19th century, I have read more of the books I am mentioning, so I know what the books are, not just how they are known.  In 1913, I see Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I have not read (nor have I read the Lawrence novel).  I just started the Cather, out of a sense of shame.

1913 was a deeply interesting year for poetry.  It produced a crop of first or second books by major poets, a number of which may well not be major books themselves – see above, haven’t read them – but remind me how quickly poetry was changing.  Maybe not as quickly as painting, but close.  D. H. Lawrence, again, Georg Trakl, Osip Mandelstam, Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, Guilliame Apollinaire’s Alcool, William Carlos Williams.

Subscribers to the hot new magazine Poetry would read Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees” alongside (more or less) Ezra Pound’s  “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition     of these faces     in the crowd   :
Petals     on a wet, black     bough    .

(for those who do not know it, that’s the entire poem) and Vachel Lindsay’s rather different “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”:

Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free.
Loons with trumpets blowed a blare, blare, blare
On, on upward thro' the golden air!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

You’re supposed to sing this, accompanied by bass drum and banjos.  Pound and Lindsay support Kilmer’s argument, since neither poem is as lovely as a tree, although they have other virtues.  There is another line from the Lindsay poem that I was tempted to use as my title: “But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.”  That was the poetry of 1913.  And the music.  And the painting.  And some of the novels, too.

Giorgio de Chirico’s The Transformed Dream, picked almost at random from a superb year of paintings, can be seen free of charge at the Saint Louis Art Museum.  How interesting, André Breton owned it for a long time.