The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Although these three works belong to different stylistic traditions, intriguing comparisons can be made. Each novel disorients and disrupts the flow of the narrative, to achieve the “estrangement” and displacement so important to the texture of post-Realist prose. Bely’s Symbolist novel Petersburg is a productive starting point, for it combines arcane theories of cognition with a hallucinating Dionysian subconscious. For Bely, the very act of naming creates a primary aural reality, a “third world” of sound that enables the poet to access previously non-existent realms.10 Complicating these ambitions in Petersburg, however, is the narrator’s deflating, endearing irony, which unexpectedly humanizes the plot at crucial moments and turns it into something approaching comedy – a signature technique of the Gogol–Dostoevsky line. The plot of Petersburg can even be seen as a variant on the political conspiracies of Demons (a novel that at one point obsessed Bely) with a nod to the parricide in The Brothers Karamazov. The time is the revolutionary year 1905. The philosophy student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov has made a rash promise to a splinter terrorist group to assassinate his own father, Apollon Apollonovich, a senator of high rank. Horrified when he is actually summoned to plant a bomb in his father’s house, the son tries to decline, but he is compromised by a double agent. So the son sets the mechanism; the bomb, hidden in a sardine tin, starts to tick.

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Apollon Apollonovich wanders in to his son’s study and removes the curious tin to his own room. The son is frantic. At the end of the novel the bomb explodes, but no one is killed.

This anticlimax with the sardine tin is emblematic. Every time one of the novel’s heroes entertains a “creative disguise” or a show of power, something goes wrong: ordinary suspenders flash forth from under a red domino costume; the targeted senator retires from his ministry in humiliated confusion and is reconciled with his unfaithful wife precisely when his death is supposed to be a meaningful political statement; and in a subplot, a minor officer tries to hang himself in disgrace but the plaster cracks, the ceiling falls in, the noose won’t hold. Apocalypse and strong closure are everywhere prepared for during these agitated revolutionary days, but they default to more shabby, compassionate, everyday outcomes. The result is a strange landscape: Bely’s “third world” of transformative word-symbols almost peaks at several points but then unceremoniously peters out. In this aspect, the events of the novel recall Chekhov’s The Duel, where the bumbling intervention of some well-meaning comic figure deflates the word-games poised to kill the antagonists.

This pulsation between tragedy and farce, and between a rational and an intuitive response to the world, is essential to the novel’s rhythm. Bely held that the excellence of an artwork was proportional to its kinship with music. Music is structured emotional flow; the “world of appearances” (that is, palpable, fixed form) is always a constraint on that flow, on our free experiencing through time.11 The author-poet, who works in a medium located halfway between the poles of architecture and music, must balance the claims of space and time. The scenes in Petersburg are chopped and short. Scraps of dialogue appear without a framing context, with ellipses and free-standing punctuation that suggest more an intonation than a communication. Against the unstoppable ticking of the bomb, verbal symbols float and then suddenly disrupt. In a conspiracy novel where double agents, drunkenness, hallucination, and concealed threats play so potent a role, such disruption inevitably has demonic overtones. But the process is also potentially divine, and the apocalypse barely averted cannot be reduced to mere idle cerebral play.

Zamyatin wrote his Modernist novel not under the aegis of Symbolism but under the star of Einstein’s relativity. Zamyatin too is in the Gogol– Dostoevskian tradition of storytelling, in which fictional characters go out of their mind together with portions of the narration containing them. The concern that so occupied Bely, however – the transfiguration of the self through verbal art – is different in Zamyatin. The son of an Orthodox priest, Zam-yatin made rich use of biblical subtexts in We – ranging from Adam and Eve’s

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