Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

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ANDREI BELY

Petersburg

A Novel in Eight Chapters

With a Prologue
and an Epilogue

Translated by

DAVID MCDUFF

and with an Introduction by

ADAM THIRLWELL

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Contents

Introduction

PETERSBURG

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CHAPTER THE SECOND

CHAPTER THE THIRD

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

EPILOGUE

Notes

PENGUIN image CLASSICS

PETERSBURG

ANDREI BELY was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev: a novelist, poet and critic, he became a leading figure amongst Russian Symbolist writers. Born in Moscow in 1880 he studied mathematics, zoology and philosophy at Moscow University, simultaneously interesting himself in art and mysticism. He began to publish in 1902 while still a student, adopting his pseudonym to spare his father, an eminent professor of mathematics, the embarrassment of public association with the still scandalous Symbolists. In 1914 he joined a Rudolf Steiner anthroposophical community in Switzerland. Returning to Russia in 1916 he welcomed the Revolution, but with the increasing restrictions placed upon artistic expression he became disillusioned. After making a forlorn attempt to revive the Symbolist aesthetic through the journal Zapiski mechtateley, he emigrated again in 1921. Bely returned to Russia in 1923 and was left relatively undisturbed during his last years. His work continued to be published in small editions but was largely ignored; nevertheless the influence of his style and ideas upon other Soviet writers was considerable. On his death in 1934, Evgeny Zamyatin wrote of him: ‘Mathematics, poetry, anthroposophy, fox-trot – these are some of the sharpest angles that make up the fantastic image of Andrei Bely … [he is] a writer’s writer.’

His first prose works were four short pieces which he designated ‘symphonies’. In 1909 he published a more conventional novel, The Silver Dove; other works include Kotik Letayev (1922) and a series of novels, published during the 1920s and 1930s, under the generic title Moscow. Petersburg was first published in book form in 1916 and was immediately recognized as a work of major literary importance.

DAVID MCDUFF was born in 1945 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandanavian work; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; Complete Poems of Edith Södergran; and No I’m Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. He has translated a number of twentieth-century Russian prose works for Penguin Classics. These include Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The House of the Dead, Poor Folk and Other Stories and Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories; Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories and The Sebastapol Sketches; and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He has also translated Babel’s Collected Stories for Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.

ADAM THIRLWELL was born in 1978. He has written two novels: Politics and The Escape. In 2003 he was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Miss Herbert, an essay on international novels, was published in 2007 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. His work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in London.

Introduction

First-time readers should be aware that details of the plot are revealed in this Introduction.

SIGNS NAMES WORDS NOVELS SYSTEMS!

Moscow

The novelist Andrei Bely died of a stroke, in the Moscow of Soviet Communism, in 1934. He was fifty-four. He had been born in the same city: when it was the Moscow of Tsarist Autocracy. It was the ordinary sad story of History. But the more detailed story of his death is even sadder.

His book of memoirs, Between Two Revolutions, had just appeared, with a preface by Lev Kamenev in which all of Bely’s literary activities were termed a ‘tragi-farce’ acted out ‘on the sidelines of history’. Bely bought up all the copies of the book he could find and tore out the preface. He continued visiting the book shops until he suffered the fatal stroke.1

The sidelines of history!

Bely’s epilogue took place in 1934. But this epilogue was also Kamenev’s. It’s true that, with Stalin and Trotsky, Kamenev had once been at the centre of history – the pure Communist impresario. But then the machinations of politics had begun.