With the publication of Petersburg, Professor Bugaev's tentatively rebellious son produced a masterpiece of European Modernism. It is itself the story of a tentatively rebellious son, but also an intentionally difficult read; a figure for the opaque politics and chaotic transformations of turn-of-the-century Russia; a drama with a Dostoevskian sense of tightly compacted time; a half-mocking, half-reverential homage to Russian literature; and a pathos-laden inquiry into the silent tensions of the nuclear family. To complicate matters for the new reader, the intensely autobiographical quality of Andrei Belyi's most enduring works—Petersburg, Kotik Letaev, the early Symphonies, and “First Encounter”—force one to learn what Belyi read, what literary and philosophical schools he followed, and where his intellectual crushes lay (Vladimir Solov΄ev and Rudolf Steiner were the most important). Pioneering essay collections from the beginning of Belyi studies in the US include the still-relevant Andrey Bely: A Critical Review (1975), edited by Gerald Janecek, and John Malmstad's Andrei Bely: Spirit of Symbolism (1987). But these are addressed to Belyi initiates. Leonid Livak, editor of the volume under review, charged his assembled scholars with making Petersburg legible to an audience of new readers.
With its notoriously vexed publication history, exacerbated by the author's hasty and inattentive revisions, Petersburg presents more textological problems than any work of Russian Modernism. In his introductory essay Livak surveys Belyi's life from 1911 to 1928, the years of composition and revision, and explores the themes that obsessed his artistic generation—urbanism, in particular, and the Asianism (“aziatchina”) that preceded the Russo-Japanese War but acquired new vigor after the conflict. John Elsworth, the most recent translator of Petersburg, follows with a chapter on the difficulties of rendering the acoustic dimension of the novel—a reminder to readers with no Russian that this facet of Petersburg is the one most dimmed by translation. We should hedge with reservations, though, Elsworth's principle that a translated work must sound as if it belongs to the culture of the target language, for Petersburg does and did sound strange to Russians. But the translation he has produced justifies itself.
Most artists of the time shared a working knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henri Bergson, and Theosophy, and in the section “Intellectual Context” we can witness the seemingly diverse experimental art forms of Modernism merging into a single intellectual “clade.” Lynn Patyk's chapter on terrorism and provocation is followed by contributions from Maria Carlson on occultism, Edith Clowes on Russian Nietzscheanism, and Timothy Langen on Neo-Kantianism. Hilary Fink, Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, Henrietta Mondry, and David Bethea conclude the section with essays on Bergson, Freud, racial theory, and the Apocalypse, respectively. One might question whether Wermuth-Atkinson's piece on Petersburg’s Freudianism fits the conceptual frame of the volume. The Modernist world was fascinated by father-son conflict, and in this regard Sigmund Freud, Belyi, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce belong to the same club, with no one having priority. But where one might have expected an essay on the Zeitgeist that produced Freud and Belyi, Wermuth-Atkinson instead gives a faithfully Freudian reading of the novel. By contrast, Patyk's fidelity to the volume's intent produces an enormously resonant historical essay on the popular reach of terrorism. “Terrorism entered into the very fabric of Russian society, as children played pranks on police by outfitting watermelons as bombs” (46). From the chapter titles alone, readers of Livak's collection will gather that Belyi was not only a writer of brilliance but an intellectual magpie and follower of fads. As an Anthroposophy acolyte, Belyi pursued Rudolf Steiner to Switzerland, where the clumsy genius wrote Kotik Letaev but also managed to hit himself with a hammer while building his guru's temple. Carlson gives readers her aptly named “crash course” on Anthroposophy and occultism in Russia, staying well above conceptual obscurities but canvasing the doctrines for ideas which the reader needs in order to make sense of Petersburg. Carlson wisely singles out the theosophical concept of “thought-forms” as a driving principle in the novel, guiding both its plot and figural language. Langen performs a similar service with Neo-Kantianism, successfully distilling the unwieldy -isms of Belyi's era into their germane attributes. He appropriately cautions the reader that Belyi's view of the movement fluctuated. Bethea, finally, goes well past the obvious—that the novel's imagery is apocalyptic—to enlighten the reader on structure: “Each chapter…proceeds toward and ends with a narrative “bang” that closes one circle of action while adumbrating the explosion that will end the story at large” (143). His most succinct conclusion: that “Belyi's novel can be read as…a dialogue with the Revelation of John mediated by Solovyov's thought” (140).
Since its publication, criticism of Petersburg has tended to focus on either text-intrinsic features or those themes, like disguises or paranoia, that recur in Belyi's other works. For this reason, the scholars contributing to “The Aesthetic Context” part of Livak's volume are faced with the task of covering well-plowed terrain. Steven Cassedy's lively contribution (“Goodness, there's a sort of musical organization to this text!” [166]) reaches beyond acoustic analysis to look at the larger Gesamtkunstwerk ambitions of Modernism. He intentionally leaves unanswered the obvious question—are we expected to experience the novel as music? For Cassedy, Belyi's novel refuses facile reading, and challenges its audience “to ask fundamental questions about the art form they [are] experiencing….Passivity is no longer an option” (168–69). At times Violeta Sotirova's essay on consciousness is impaired by mistaken generalizations, such as: “The modernist novel does away with the controlling narrator” (206). Her misunderstanding of the term “free indirect discourse” leads her to make claims about internal monologues in Petersburg which apply equally to War and Peace. Taras Koznarsky's comparatist chapter on urbanism situates Belyi's masterwork in relation to other city novels, particularly Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it uses Joyce as a foil to produce real insight: for all the narrator's invasions into the consciousness of his characters, the Dublin of Ulysses remains an eminently stable place, resistant to deformation. Not so the Petersburg of Petersburg, where cerebral play, history, and Russian literature itself continuously warp the presentation of the city. Colleen McQuillen's rich essay takes Modernism's obsession with theatricality in two directions, showing that garments—not just masquerade outfits—can generally be read in the novel in the light of costume design, and that the age's conflation of life and art led not only to personal myth-making but to the transformation of these fictions into theatrical parody. In a wicked spoof, Petersburg replaces Sofia—“Divine Wisdom”—on its stage by the vacuous Sofia Likhutina. Olga Matich writes on Modernist painting and symbolic language, and astutely baptizes Belyi's novel as “baroque.” “The novel's temporality, labyrinthine spatiality, and grotesque bodies evoke Baroque metamorphosis” (199). Matich also remarks Belyi's more obvious debt to Cubism and observes that he shared an aesthetic with a fellow anthroposophist, Vasilii Kandinskii. This is a case of working-in-parallel.
Slavists will note that many of the volume's contributors have already written impressive monographs or their essay's subject. Ease with their topic has given Livak's authors the luxury of re-thinking their own work. Livak's introduction ranks as one of the single best gateways to Belyi that our field has. And finally, readers will be gratified by his “Annotated Synopsis,” a coda to the volume that summarizes the action of Petersburg section by section and renders a service to Belyi novices that will be secretly appreciated by seasoned scholars.
