Lost Classic – Petersburg, by Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg was written amid the great cultural tensions and transformations of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Published in 1913, it is set during the run up to the ill-fated, but hugely significant, revolution of 1905. The result is a masterpiece that manages to capture the intricacies of the human condition alongside grand, vivid, and evocative descriptions of the epic setting of the city of Saint Petersburg, as Bely guides his reader through the personal dramas confronted by a set of characters within the Russian urban aristocracy and the momentous events unfolding around them.

Each of Bely’s characters faces their own personal crisis as the narrative unfolds, from the young Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, a radicalised young intellectual who is overcome by the sense of a coming apocalypse; to Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, a revolutionary terrorist whose idealism becomes lost amidst a crisis of faith in his mission and his worsening psychological neuroses.

Written in the quirky, fluent, and provocative symbolist style of Bely, Petersburg manages to capture the essence not only of the city after which it is named, but also of the era in which it is set. Its characters are by turns powerfully abstract and penetratingly humane, their anxieties and neuroses providing us with a hugely revealing insight into the paradoxes of the age of the Russian fin de siècle. It takes its reader on an adventure through the soul of a society in upheaval, from the rapid industrialisation uprooting peasants from the countryside and swelling the mechanised metropolis to the waves of religious re-awakening sweeping through Russian elites.

Ultimately, the characters are written into the stunning backdrop of the living, breathing city of Petersburg itself, a city that is presented in evocative detail, from the glory of the Peter and Paul fortress in the morning sunshine to the dark smoggy clouds of the new industrial factories. At the same time, it also works on a microscopic level, describing intimate spaces and hidden worlds within the city, such as Nikolai’s study or the closed, dank quarters in which Dudkin awaits in hiding from the authorities.

All the while, the relentless march of Russian history looms in the background – great crowds begin to assemble across the city as the 1905 revolution and the drumrolls of destiny come to meet Bely’s characters. As the characters play out their personal tragedies, a national crisis looms in the background. Bely writes of “that sound”, one “resounding quietly in the cities, in the forests, and in the fields, in the suburban expanses of Moscow, Petersburg, Saratov. Did you hear that October song of 1905? That song was heard before; it will not be heard again…”

Although often compared to a key work by a near contemporary, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Bely’s novel is more abstractly philosophical in its exploration of human nature and the nature of reality. It is also, arguably, more radically experimental in its literary qualities, unsurprisingly so for a novel written in a revolutionary cultural climate. Anyone fond of the magical realism of Cristina García or Salman Rushdie will enjoy the combination of dreamlike surrealism, penetrating streams of consciousness and detailed personal vignettes.

Bely’s Russian adventure has tremendous relevance for our own contemporary cultural moment. Just as Bely and his fellow symbolists sought to find meaning in a world of political crisis, cultural iconoclasm, and deep pessimism about the direction of history, so we also find old certainties and orthodoxies under fire from forces seemingly beyond our control.

Believing that they were living through an age of decadence foretold by Friedrich Nietzsche, Bely and the Symbolists were seekers for something spiritual in a materialistic world. Dmitri Merezhovsky, the father of Russian symbolism, and an important influence upon Bely himself, in a lecture of 1892 which announced the arrival of symbolism upon the Russian literary scene, declared of his age that, “never before have people felt with their hearts the necessity of believing and understood with their reason the impossibility of believing.”

No better is this twin crisis of faith and reason captured than in the transformation of the novel’s main character, Nikolai, in a moment of intense spiritual catastrophe. While walking through the heart of Petersburg, next to the River Neva, Nikolai experiences a “revelation”. I quote John Elsworth’s wonderful translation:

“It was like a revelation that I was growing…into infinity, overcoming space…the view over the Neva, and – the spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral: everything was growing, expanding; and the growth was coming to an end…and in that which was coming to an end, in that end, that completion – it seemed to me there was another beginning: the beyond, or something…I don’t have any organ that can make sense of this meaning beyond meaning, so to speak; in the place of sense organs I just had a feeling of – ‘zero’; I had a sensation of something that wasn’t zero and wasn’t one, but something less than one.”

This crisis ultimately leads Nikolai to embark upon a spiritual journey, abandoning the rationalism of the “Western” Immanuel Kant and embracing the organic religious mysticism of the Russian Gregory Skovoroda.

Bely lived the same contradictions that he wrote into his characters – in 1913, while he was publishing Petersburg as a serial novel, he was also spending time with a colony of mystics and Buddhists in Basel, Switzerland. When he returned to Russia, however, he came to embrace the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 not as a materialistic moment, as several of its atheistic architects did, but as a great “revolution of the spirit”, a great rising of Christ to transform the world. Nothing better captures these personal conflicts and paradoxes than the title of Bely’s memoirs, written under the Soviets – On the Boundary of Two Centuries.

The question for us today, as for Bely and his contemporaries, is whether we are living through an end of an era, or witnessing the birth of something new. Are we facing an end of an epoch, a fin de siècle, or simply living in a transition between an old world and a new one yet to take shape?

For those who take the time to travel through Bely’s masterfully-crafted and beautifully depicted tale, there will be no shortage of profound spiritual questions. For those who ruminate upon its themes, it will not only provide reflections upon human frailty, but also on the dark and torturous corners of the human mind. A book born within a society in crisis, it is also one of the most beautiful contemplations of the nature of crisis itself as well as its many human faces.

Bely’s fin de siècle was an apocalypse in the true sense of the word – a great unveiling of things that had previously been hidden, a moment of pure clarity as one order comes crashing down and another rises to take its place. Bely’s life and writings are testament to a paradoxical truth: that it is only possible to capture the essence of an age when it is in its twilight, and it is only possible to find the soul of an epoch once it is dying.