Андрей Белый: автобиографизм и биографические практики - Коллектив авторов

Where Puškin quite obviously was secretly alluding to the 1825 Decembrist revolt, Belyj’s intent was to portray the «October Revolution» of 1905. Both works center on abortive protests in a weather-whipped, Janus-faced city – a dream of empire built on corpses. The Neva seethes and the revolutionary islands are in ferment. Where Puškin had shown how the two revolts mirrored each other by allowing his portrayal of the dual mutiny of Evgenij and the river to contaminate memories of the 1824 flood and the 1825 demonstration on Senate Square, Belyj focuses on terrorism to develop this dual theme.

In Puškin’s poem Evgenij’s revolt ends with him standing before Falconet’s statue of the city founder and miracle worker, shaking his fist and shouting menacingly «Užo tebe!» after which he panics and flees: «I vdrug stremglav bežat’ pustilsja». He thinks he has aroused the statue’s wrath and that it comes to life: «I on po ploščadi pustoj / Bežit i slyšit za soboj – / Kak budto groma grochotan’e.» Wherever he runs through the moonlit night he hears: «Za nim povsjudu Vsadnik Mednyj / S tjaželym topotom skakal».[663] He goes mad with fear and is eventually found dead.

This flight from the oppressor is developed and deepened in «Peterburg»; it climaxes in chapter six, where the bomb thrower Aleksandr Dudkin assumes Evgenij’s role. The epigraph to the chapter, of course, is taken from the two just-quoted lines in Puškin’s poem describing the «chase», Evgenij’s dash through the streets of St. Petersburg strikes the keynote for Belyj’s entire novel.

Belyj’s avenging horseman appears to be split between the ossified Senator Apollon Ableuchov and the statue. Already in the first chapter we see the senator keeping a watch on his subjects as he rides through the city in his carriage. The approaching revolution frightens him, and he wishes he could bind and shackle and freeze every living being to ice. Peter sits astride his horse and bides his time (although we catch occasional glimpses of him in other guises in the taverns of the city). Dudkin, who has arrived from the islands with the bomb that is to ignite the revolt wrapped in a bundle, has dramatic encounters with them both – first the senator in his onrushing carriage in chapter one, and then the statue at the end of chapter two.

As the revolutionary stands before Peter he seems for a moment to have supernatural insights. Belyj echoes the questions Puškin addresses to the statue: «Kuda ty skačeš’, gordyj kon’ / I gde opustiš’ ty kopyta? / O moščnyj vlastelin sud’by! / Ne tak li ty nad samoj bezdnoj / Na vysote, uzdoj železnoj / Rossiju podnjal na dyby?».[664] These six central lines expand to a page and a half in the novel. Whither is Russia bound as she totters on the abyss? Several alternatives are mentioned. Perhaps, as in the famous vision in Dostoevskij’s «Podrostok», rider and horse will vanish out of history into the clouds?[665] Or will they plunge to the bottom of the river? The horse can hardly stay reared much longer. An historical collapse is in the offing that promises destruction and bloody cataclysms – something on the order of a new Tartar Yoke.[666]

The subchapter in which Dudkin has his vision is entitled «Begstvo». There is no such «flight» in the text, however. As Belyj worked on the passage he apparently deleted Dudkin’s terrified dash to escape the statue and its visions but neglected to change the title.[667]

Long before this, toward the end of the first chapter, the narrator steps into the novel and in a direct apostrophe to the phantasmal city makes common cause with the tormented subject of the Empire:

«Peterburg, Peterburg!

Osaždajas’ tumanom, i menja ty presledoval prazdnoju mozgovoju igroj: ty – mučitel’ žestokoserdyj; ty – nepokornyj prizrak; ty, byvalo, goda na menja napadal; begal ja na tvoich užasnych prospektach i s razbega vzletal na čugunnyj tot most, načinavšijsja s kraja zemnogo, čtob vesti v beskrajnjuju dal’; za Nevoj, v potusvetnoj, zelenoj tam dali – povosstali prizraki ostrovov i domov, obol’ščaja tščetnoj nadeždoju, čto tot kraj est’ dejstvitel’nost’ i čto on – ne vojuščaja beskrajnost’, kotoraja vygonjaet na peterburgskuju ulicu blednyj dym oblakov».[668]

Thus here the narrator seems to be re-experiencing Evgenij’s flight. This city is a cruel chimera that haunts its inhabitants with nocturnal visions and drives them insane.

In chapter six, once again in the moonlit night, the statue charges out into the streets on its way to Dudkin, raising a terrible din as it goes. Belyj orchestrates this passage with Puškin’s onomatopoeia, especially variations on «grom» and «grochot», as the horseman thunders his way up the stairs to the bomb thrower’s lonely garret. There in a downright apocalyptic experience, Dudkin falls at his feet and addresses him as «Master». Having realized the destructive essence of the revolution, he is now forgiven. He chooses to make common cause with the city’s founder, who seems to grow into Russia’s historical Destiny. The horseman pours his boiling bronze into Dudkin’s veins and gives him the strength to murder Lippančenko, the instigator of the terror, in the following, penultimate chapter. His will to revolt is broken. As he sits astride the bloody corpse of the terrorist leader, like Evgenij, he appears to have completely lost his mind.[669]

«Peterburg» has two heroes – the potential parricide Nikolaj Ableuchov on the mainland side, and Dudkin from the islands. Nikolaj’s attempted assassination comes to nothing, and he falls ill with typhoid fever but survives – by emigrating. In the epilogue he resurrects in a different guise far from the diseased city. Dudkin, however, perishes. Because he remains in Petersburg, he can only follow Evgenij’s example. Russia gives birth to madness. The deeper meaning of the epigraph from Puškin to chapter four – «Ne daj mne Bog sojti s uma…»[670] – becomes apparent in the middle of the novel – insanity is ever lurking in the tsar’s capital as both a threat and mental liberation.

2

Belyj’s novel has an autobiographical background. As is clear from his memoirs, his narrator’s apostrophe is close to what he himself experienced in Petersburg in the wake of 1905 – a summary of the failure of Symbolism in which the Symbolists are disguised as terrorists. It is as though Belyj himself stepped into «Mednyj vsadnik» as he worked on Peterburg. His recurrent metaphors of flight from a Russia ensnared in the toils of evil in the period during which he conceived and completed the novel in 1910–1913 suggest an identification with Evgenij’s panicky attempt to escape.

In November 1910 Belyj delivered a lecture at the Religious-Philosophical Society in Moscow entitled «Tragedija tvorčestva u Dostoevskogo» that was both his commentary on the crisis of Symbolism and the starting point for his novel. In his talk he interprets Dostoevskij’s works in the light of the aspiration of the great Russian writers in general to integrate art and life. By way of introduction he comments on Lev Tolstoj’s flight just a few days before from Jasnaja Poljana in an attempt to finally bring his life and ideas into harmony. By this act Tolstoj seemed to be pointing to a resolution of the creative conflict that had overpowered Dostoevskij.[671]

Belyj explains that Dostoevskij rushed into death in the middle of his work on «Brat’ja Karamazovy». The Karamazov essence had frightened him, and he «ubegaet v užase».[672] Thus it was as though at the end of his life he had been transformed into an anxiety-ridden Evgenij fleeing from his oppressor. In Belyj’s view this was Symbolism’s own problem as well in the national dimension. What the movement needed was to break away from the Russian morass and seek a new way of life.

Only a few weeks later, in December 1910, Belyj took flight himself in what his memoirs repeatedly describe as «begstvo».[673] Accompanied by Asja Turgeneva, he set off for foreign cultures: Tunisia, Egypt, and Palestine. The trip climaxed in his experiences in March 1911 at the foot of the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza outside Cairo. Here the emerging idea behind the novel acquired further contours, for the massive piles of stone he encountered were later incorporated into the cityscape of «Peterburg».

The mighty Sphinx and its shifting expressions seemed to take on certain features of the Bronze Horseman. In «Egipet», an article written later that year just before he began working on «Peterburg»,[674] Belyj summarized his impressions, noting that the Sphinx made him feel the proximity of «terror» and «provocation» – the emerging theme of the novel. Like Dudkin, he was able to look into the cosmic dimension and sense how from its very beginning down through evolution, humanity had fled in terror: «My ubegali ot prarodimogo užasa i togda, kogda byli komočkami slizi; dalee ubegali my, stavši podobiem červej, a kogda my stali obez’janami, bezdna legla meždu nami i prarodimym».[675] Here we have the embryo not only of the cosmic ascent of the Bronze Horseman in «Peterburg», but also of Belyj’s next novel «Kotik Letaev», where he draws autobiographical parallels between the formation of his early consciousness and the evolution of the species.

As he worked on the novel Belyj avoided Moscow. In letters to Blok he described how he «fled» from urban civilization; on one occasion, for example, he writes: «Raz v nedelju prichoditsja imet’ delo s gorodom; ugorelye, čerez den’, my brosaemsja v begstvo». This particular letter, in which he also comments on the progress of the novel, clearly has points of contact with Dudkin’s catastrophic vision.[676] Eventually, in April 1912, Belyj and his partner «fled» Russia for the second time,[677] now toward a meeting in May with what would soon become Anthroposophy and, as is reflected in Nikolaj Ableuchov’s suggested rebirth in the epilogue of the novel, a new life that Belyj hoped would dawn for the entire nation.

Tellingly, early in Belyj’s memoir phase, when some of what he wrote about the recently deceased Blok actually alluded to himself, he portrayed the latter’s crisis around 1912 as a flight from an avenging Horseman. He is referring here to «Vozmezdie», Blok’s epic poem spanning three generations, which he was writing at the same time Belyj was working on «Peterburg». Belyj explicitly comments on how features of Peter’s statue in Puškin’s poem merge with the mysterious horseman who destroys the sorcerer in the final scene of Gogol’s story «Strašnaja mest’».[678]

Thus it appears that at this fateful moment in Russian history just before the First World War Belyj attributed deep national and personal significance to Evgenij’s flight through the streets in «Mednyj vsadnik». The first Swedish translation of «Peterburg» (1969) features on its cover Aleksandr Benois’s famous portrayal of this central scene. It is in fact an excellent summary of the keynote theme of the novel.

Claudia Criveller (Padua, Italy). The Beast as an Element of Autobiographical Representation. «The Baptized Chinaman»: An Interpretative Hypothesis