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Overview
Thoroughly versed in Russian and European modernism, in Bely's biography and writings, and in twentieth-century literary theory, Langen constructs an original analytic scheme for reading Petersburg. Guided by Bely's fertile but challenging notions of art and philosophy, he analyzes the novel first as an object embodying intentions and essences, then as a pattern of signification and events, and finally as a dance of gestures that coordinate body and meaning, regularity and surprise, self and other, and author, novel, and reader. The terms are derived from Bely's own writings, but they are nuanced with reference to Russian and European contexts and clarified with reference to philosophy and literary theory. Langen shows how Bely invariably challenges his own concepts and patterns, thereby creating an unusually demanding and dynamic text. In finding an approach to these enriching difficulties, this book at long last shows readers a welcoming way into Bely's thought, and his masterwork, and their place in the complex world of early twentieth-century literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810122246 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2005 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and Theory |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 274 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Stony Dance
UNITY AND GESTURE IN ANDREY BELY'S PETERSBURG
By Timothy Langen
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2224-6
Chapter One Shadowy Worlds
ON JANUARY 8, 1934, Andrey Bely died. Or rather, Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev died, and Andrey Bely wrote no more. Many reminiscences written by friends and acquaintances express a curious discomfort with the notion that Bely or Bugaev had ever existed, physically. "A captive soul," Marina Tsvetaeva called him, a being stuck between worlds. "Every piece of earth under his feet turned into a tennis court, his palm into a racquet. The earth seemed to be sending him back to the place from which he had been tossed out, and that place again returned him. In short, earth and heaven played ball with him. We-watched."
Others watched, too, and came up with the same problem. In Two Years with the Symbolists, N. Valentinov attempts a physical description and is quickly stumped.
He had an interesting head, light colored hair, wondrous eyes, a charming smile, "wings" (after all, he "flew" all over Moscow), and-nothing else. Jacket, bow tie, trousers, shoes-only "exterior." Behind it, nothing at all. I could not imagine Bely naked. He was, as it were, disembodied, non-physical. I read later in his memoirs that in his first years at the University his "muscles were taut," that he took first in running and jumping. The proposition that he could have muscles seemed absurd to me.
Fyodor Stepun puts it even more bluntly, asking: "Did Bely exist at all?" It takes him more than a page to figure out what he even means by this question-bizarre and yet, in the case of Bely, somehow unavoidable. "It may be," he eventually concludes, "that the whole problem of Bely's being is actually the problem of his being, as a person. From time to time-and there were several such times-one sensed in him something extra-human, superhuman, or subhuman, more powerfully than anything human."
Well, something, someone did flicker through this world from 1880 to 1934, during which time it produced massive physical evidence of its existence in the form of poems, stories, novels, memoirs, and works of philosophy and literary criticism. Thus did Bely's spirit find inky, pulpy flesh. And one constant theme, perhaps the central theme, in all these writings is in fact the relation between spirit and flesh, intention and deed, meaning and expression-the relation, ultimately, between realms of existence.
REAL SHADOWS
Petersburg's first chapter, "in which an account is given of a certain worthy person, his mental games, and the ephemerality of being" (3), ends with a synopsis of sorts, a section entitled "You Will Never Ever Forget Him!"
In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov. We have also seen the idle thoughts of the senator in the form of the senator's house and in the form of the senator's son, who also carries his own idle thoughts in his head. Finally, we have seen another idle shadow-the stranger. This shadow arose by chance in the consciousness of Senator Ableukhov and acquired its ephemeral being there. But the consciousness of Apollon Apollonovich is a shadowy consciousness because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral being and the fruit of the author's fantasy: unnecessary, idle cerebral play ... Once his brain has playfully engendered the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really exists. He will not vanish from the Petersburg prospects as long as the senator with such thoughts exists, because thought exists too. So let our stranger be a real stranger! And let the two shadows of my stranger be real shadows! Those dark shadows will, oh yes, they will, follow on the heels of the stranger, just as the stranger himself is closely following the senator. The aged senator will, oh yes, he will, pursue you too, dear reader, in his black carriage. And henceforth you will never ever forget him! (35-36)
An odd sort of summary. Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is indeed the novel's central character, and he has a son, and a house, and idle thoughts, and has seen a stranger. So much for data. This passage could have reminded the reader that (1) the son, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, rises late, is unlucky in love, and has just received a red domino costume; (2) the "stranger" (Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin) arouses such anxiety in Senator Ableukhov that the latter assigns two members of the secret police to shadow him; (3) the double agent Lippanchenko, a fat, slimy, gaudy, unpleasant man, has met with the stranger and instructed him to deliver a letter and a bundle (containing, as we will later learn, a bomb) to Nikolai Apollonovich; and (4) the senator's wife has been living in Spain the past two and a half years.
But we get nothing of the sort-instead, a summary of the novel's contorted ontology. The author created the senator, who created his son and the stranger, and they do their own creating. The novel is full of shadows, and shadows of shadows, and more shadows. Thus, it would seem, a cascade of being: author is higher than senator, who is higher than son and stranger, who are higher than their own fantastic creations.
But they are real shadows, as the narrator insists, and they confront one another on an equal footing-confront their reader, too (who will never ever forget them). We are as shadowy as they; they, as solid as we. This passage is best read, I believe, not as an expository statement of ontological dogma (it would be a highly unsatisfying one) but as a dramatic statement of the mystery of being-ephemeral and stable, shadowy and solid, real and imaginary.
MAN AND HIS WORLDS
"Not in the struggle between the principles of good and evil did Bely see man," according to one of his foremost scholars, Leonid Dolgopolov,
but in a broader perspective-located on the border of two spheres of existence, two worlds, two "systems" of experience-the sphere of daily life and the sphere of existence. In other words, he saw [man] on the border of the empirical, materially tangible world, which is given to us in sensory experience, and the world of existence, grandiose and independent of any empirical influence, comprehensible only through categories of a universal-historical or Natur-philosophical type. Thus, a "finite" world and an "infinite" world.
The artistic embodiment of this ontology of man is, in Dolgopolov's view, perhaps Bely's greatest achievement, and it is expressed most fully in Petersburg.
This problem, the spheres of man's existence, characterizes Bely's writing from the beginning of his career to the end. As Vladimir Alexandrov explains, "At the heart of Bely's view of man was, first and foremost, the connection between man and a transcendent, spiritual, or divine realm. This vertical axis-the trunk of Bely's art and life-evolves from the Symphonies through the major novels, but always remains in the foreground of his works." Alexandrov argues that the apparent diminution of spiritual concerns in Bely's later writings reflects political pressures as literary activities in the Soviet Union became more tightly controlled. "It is clear from a number of Bely's autobiographical works (which were never published in the Soviet Union) that he remained a confirmed occultist to the end of his life."
Such concerns run from start to finish, then-but for Bely they are more important as a beginning than as an ending point. As a conclusion, the proposition that man exists in two separate realms is neither original nor particularly informative; that proposition itself cannot be counted an accomplishment. The task Bely set himself as an artist-and even as a writer of critical and theoretical articles, and as a memoirist-was to make this proposition mean something, to show how it could be understood, imagined, felt.
An early attempt:
The minutes race by. Images flash. Everything rushes about. Life's flight is great. The constellations turn-they revolve endlessly. And they fly, they fly ... These are-tears of fire-the Eternal One cried once. Sprays of tears, which blazed up in boundlessness, burn, cooling. And the chords of the constellations awaken the forgotten music of weeping in the soul.
Here, in the beginning of his 1903 story "A Luminous Fairy Tale," Bely tries to establish a foundational myth, a story that expresses the mysterious connection between corporeal beings and "the Eternal One." As the fiery tears congeal through the passage of generations, they become temporal beings who desire a reunion with, or at least a memory of, their original begetter, and so they gather tears. "There will be a day when their hearts will contain all the fiery tears-the tears of the world rocket, which blazed up before the time of times." All this in the first two pages.
This is Bely at his most starry-eyed, straining to embrace the infinite. The strain shows: there is a distinctly programmatic quality to this story, and to most of Bely's attempts at mysticism. Spectacular as they may be, Bely's images seem made to order, as if the purely abstract portion of his brain had jotted a memo to his imagination: "Man on the border of eternal and temporal. Give me something."
As Bely matured, as he trained his analytic and imaginative functions to work in tandem, and as he himself learned more, he found it increasingly convenient to incorporate other people's visions of the "two worlds" problem into his own work. Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, the unrequiting object of Nikolai Apollonovich's affection and the wife of his childhood friend Sergei Sergeyevich Likhutin, conceives an interest in spiritualism. "A magnificently bound book now lay prominently displayed on a small table in front of Sofia Petrovna: Man and His Bodies" (42). This book, by Annie Besant, lays out the basics of theosophy, a system of belief that proposes to reconcile and regularize all the world's major occult dogmas into a single, coherent mass, a "Secret Doctrine" (the title of theosophy's most celebrated book, by H. P. Blavatsky) that can unlock all doors.
Bely was intrigued by this project-intrigued but deeply skeptical. Theosophy lacked a certain rigor of methodology; it seemed to be thrown together ad hoc. The inclusion of this book on Sofia Petrovna's table serves at least three functions: (1) it provides an emblem of the hope that ideas about separate worlds or spheres of existence might one day be harmonized; (2) it provides an example of how that hope, overextended, can land in a muddle; and (3) it indirectly confirms the narrator's characterization of Sofia Petrovna, that she mixes things up (and so, predictably, enjoys books where things get mixed up). And yet mock her as he may, Bely shares Sofia Petrovna's desire to understand man and his bodies, his shadows, his realms of being.
THE DREAM OF A SPIRITUAL SCIENCE
Near the end of Petersburg's fifth chapter, Nikolai Apollonovich opens a bundle delivered to him by Dudkin, confirms that it is indeed a bomb (packed inside a sardine can), and, "in order to cut off all possibility of retreat, [he] grasped the little metal key with his fingers. Whether because his fingers trembled or whether because he felt his head spinning, he tumbled headlong into that abyss which he had wanted to escape. The little key slowly turned to one o'clock, then to two o'clock, and Nikolai Apollonovich jumped off to the side" (163). Aghast, he realizes he has set the bomb ticking. "The only thing left was to throw it into the Neva," but instead he falls asleep.
The chapter's final section, "The Last Judgment," describes his ensuing dream, which is itself a sort of luminous fairy tale. The Last Judgment is, of course, when the two orders of existence, temporal and eternal, meet once again and are reconciled. It is an appropriately cosmic title for this dream, which swirls from Tibetan lamas to Confucius to Chronos, Turanians, Saturn, and beyond.
Bely wrote this chapter of Petersburg shortly after attending a lecture by the renegade theosophist Rudolph Steiner. Anthroposophy, Steiner's new system, retained much of the imagery and even the doctrine of theosophy but claimed to ground it in a rigorous methodology. Central to anthroposophy is the claim that people can learn, through various meditative exercises, to perceive or experience occult phenomena themselves. That is to say, the claims of anthroposophy are not to be taken on faith but can, eventually, be observed directly. It is in this sense a "Spiritual Science," or-to take the title of a book Steiner published in 1909, an "Occult Science." Having mastered the technique, the practitioner "is thereby able to make himself the instrument for research in the supersensible world."
Bely and his companion Asya Turgeneva threw themselves into Steiner's teachings, leaving Russia to study with him. Petersburg records the effects of Steiner's influence in many places, but they are most identifiable in Nikolai Apollonovich's dream. The narrator describes it as "a distant astral journey, or sleep (which, let us note, is the same thing)." The motif of astral journey, the invocation of a spiral of evolution, the elements of Atlantis and Saturn, and especially the attempted synthesis with Western philosophical rigor ("Kant too was a Turanian"; 166), allude unmistakably to Steiner's teachings.
The allusion is unmistakable, but not unambiguous: Magnus Ljunggren, for example, interprets this passage as "a satirical reflection of [Bely's] attempts to realize his dream of rebirth with Steiner." In general, the role of Steiner's writings in Petersburg is not a simple thing to characterize. Bely removed several of the obviously anthroposophical passages from the 1922 version of the novel (though not Nikolai Apollonovich's dream). By that time, Asya Turgeneva had rejected Bely and dedicated herself exclusively to the anthroposophical life. Still, Bely continued to practice anthroposophical meditation to the end of his days, and the changes to the 1922 version of Petersburg should not be attributed to disillusionment, whether personal (he retained warm memories of Steiner) or theoretical. When Bely first pursued his interest in Steiner, his dismayed friends asked him why he chose to travel this esoteric path. Bely always insisted that anthroposophy was a development or culmination of things he had been thinking all along: a new vehicle for his thoughts but not a new direction for them. Bely's friends were skeptical, and understandably so, for Bely embraced anthroposophy with the zeal of a convert. But Bely's claims of consistency can be verified by reading nearly any of his pre-Steiner writings, which are replete with extravagantly mystic images, logical ratiocination, and an unflagging attempt to reconcile the two. Steiner gave him new ideas, to be sure, but not a new path, not a new shape to his thought. Bely had been searching all along for a "spiritual science," a way to understand the relation of the "measureless immensities" to the quotidian, measurable world.
THE MYSTERY OF MEANING
Steiner encourages his followers to develop their powers of spiritual perception, but he also offers a highly elaborate interpretation of the supersensible data, with complex patterns of evolution assigned to the universe and to man. In a way, these interpretations reintroduce the "separate realms" problem that Steiner had seemed to solve. Perhaps "ethereal" and "astral" experiences are directly accessible to consciousness-that is, perhaps they need not remain strictly "occult"-but the meanings of these experiences are not directly given. Those meanings must instead be explained in minute detail. The details resemble, and in many cases they recapitulate, features of others systems of occult belief: Steiner's reader swims in a sea of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Venus ... Lucifer and Ahriman ... Atlantis ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Stony Dance by Timothy Langen
Copyright © 2005 by Northwestern University Press . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Part I-ThingChapter 1Shadowy Worlds
Chapter 2 Poetic Genius
Chapter 3Throwing Together
Chapter 4Beautiful Clarity and Gray Days
Part II-Pattern
Chapter 5Grid
Chapter 6Flow
Chapter 7Outsides
Part III-Gesture
Chapter 8Dance with Meaning
Chapter 9Seven Gestures
Chapter 10Pulsations of the Elemental Body