Books
The most abstract city
Alex de Jonge
Petersburg Andrei Bely Trans. by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Harvester £7.50) Boris Bugaev (Bely was a pen-name) initially intended Petersburg as a sequal to The Silver Dove, his exploration of the heart of Russian peasant darkness and sectarianism, but it rapidly overtook his intentions to become a complement as opposed to a sequal. He worked on it for a number of years and created a series of different versions, the journal edition of 1911, a book edition, 1912, and a fundamentally re-worked and condensed edition published in Berlin in 1922. There were two subsequent Soviet editions, both preZhdanov, which underwent a certain toning down. It has not been published in Soviet Russia since.
The book has a deservedly high reputation. Nabokov, a reliable guide for once, ranks it with Ulysses, The Metamorphosis and the first half of A la recherche as his 'greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose'. It is hard to quarrel with the assessment. In Petersburg Bely did things with Russian prose and narrative technique which had simply not been done before, and which made a great impression on early Soviet writers such as Yuri Olesha, not always to their advantage, incidentally. Now, as anyone who has had to listen to Russian-speakers plugging Pushkin must know to his exasperation, you cannot possibly appreciate the glories of Evgeny Onegin in translation. Bely in translation is not quite such a dead loss, far from it, but there is one, crucial, side to his work which has to be written off. A poet before, and after, he was a novelist, he often found his inspiration forming around patterns of sound, which came to embody themes, situations, moods. His prose tends to be a highly orchestrated and harmonious exploration of a series of verbal textures which are thematically significant, and not just some kind of exercise in word music. Thus he says that the initial inspiration of his novel was the sound 'oo', as in revo/yutsiya, which 'travels through the entire distance of the novel', and which he associates with 'the motif of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades depicting the Winter Canal . . . and immediately there burst out before me the picture of the Neva, with the bank of the Winter Canal; the dim moonlit bluish silver night and the square of the black carriage with the red lamp . . . ' Well, on the whole that kind of thing has to be taken on trust when you read him in English. You also miss the remarkable contortions which he inflicts upon the Russian language, which still manage to work, never to feel like distortion for distortion's sake.
The 'experimental' narrative technique is perfectly accessible, however. Bely avoids a smooth flow, instead he writes abruptly, a series of jerky, enigmatic, though ultimately comprehensible episodes which manage to keep considerable narrative thrust going, although, at least in this version, the book is often a choppy read.
It is essentially a novel of 'fathers and sons' set in the autumn of 1905, describing the tension between a senior minister of state, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a tiny neat man with large green ears, a blend of the reactionary Procurator of the Holy Synod Pobedonostsev, Mr Karenin and Bely's own father, and his son Nikolay, who is loosely involved with some terrorists, conceals a bomb on their behalf, and is then ordered to use it on his own father. For much of the book he is in two minds. The events are set against the unrest and strikes that break out in the capital in the autumn of-that year, The tone of the narrative is generally apocalyptic and surrealistic. Bely is, prophetically, obsessed by the notion that the yellow peril is about to overwhelm Mother Russia, and the book contains various images of sinister yellow men speeding through the capital in closed cars. 'His great fear (he was of course a contemporary of Sax Rohmer) was that Russia would collapse into 'Mongolism'.
The actual plot is incidental to an elabo-. rate mythic account of Russia on the brink of chaos, and, above all of Petersburg itself, the book's true hero. Where characters are essentially grotesques, portrayed in a sty lised almost programmatic manner, Petersburg, Dostoevsky's 'most abstract city', gets the full treatment. Bely ack nowledges its abstract quality, a mathemat ical construct set in the middle of an empty Finnish swamp and also, time and again, picks out its salient features: the Admiralty Needle, the spire of St Peter and St Paul, the canals and of course the Nevsky Prospekt.
Peter the Great features, as the bronze horseman who actually visits one of the characters in a magnificent elaboration of Pushkin, and also as a Dutch seaman, in which role he molds mysteriously into the figure of the Flying Dutchman. The city in autumn is usually portrayed clothed in a greenish fog, and there has never been a more effective realisation of its undoubted if inhospitable poetry and beauty.
Of course no one can write about the Palmyra of the North without sensing Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky behind them; Bely's book refers constantly to all three. The novel is as much the reworking of some of the central topoi of Russian literature as it is an immediate study of the city in revolution. In this respect it not only looks back, but also forward to the magnificent Petersburg poetry of Akhmatova and Mandelstam. Moreover, the best thing to be said about these literary references is that they never feel contrived or forced or fey; they are simply inevitable, granted the nature of the subject, and supremely well done into the bargain.
Petersburg has long been a favourite book. Yet by the time I had finished this translation I began to have real doubts. Was it really all that good? It was easy enough to see what it was trying to do, but there was a strong sense that it actually had not worked, that it was clumsy, choppy, lifeless and anything but a masterpiece of the twentieth century. It was only when I had another look at the original that I realised that the fault was with the translation.
It is monstrously hard to translate, and these two professors of Russian at Columbia have, on the face of it, done a find job. They have coped magnificently with the punning and word play which Bely relies on so heavily. They have also provided some sixty pages of notes that explain and fill out the background. True, there is too much almost irrelevant information supplied with a certain deadly waggishness which, I suspect, seeks to emulate Nabokov's commentaries to Evgeny Onegin: yet another aspect of the unhappy Nabokov legacy which has done so much damage to otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent American scholars trying to imitate the inimitable.
The real trouble lies elsewhere. Firstly there is a tendency to play fast and loose with the text: where Bely makes alterations between 1916 and 1922 which they cannot understand they dismiss them as inexplicable and go back to the earlier version. More serious is the fact that, on this showing, and I tread carefully here, their grasp of Russian seems less than total. They sometimes appear to misunderstand the original, for example they write: 'Have you been drinking?' Yes and other erotic feelings have appeared also'. I know that drink is lovely but is it sexy? The reply should read: 'Yes, and what's more I've started to have erotic feelings too', which is different.
But much more serious, they can't really write English. Time and again their renderings simply track the contraction of the original Russian in a clumsy and literal way which reads, please forgive me, like a second-year unseen. The result is that on virtually every page I looked at there was, let's say, considerable room for improvement, ranging from correction, to sheer speeding up. Over the full run of 293 pages this does take a lot of the edge off the book, giving it a somewhat gravid feel. The work remains eminently worth reading, but sadly in its present state the translation is likely to make anyone who goes in for that preposterous kind of critical language conclude that, 'In the final analysis it just doesn't quite stand up'.
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