So far, the reader only knows that there is a man called Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and that in this city he is perturbed by a mysterious stranger – one of the novel’s revolutionaries. At the moment the stranger is only a ‘shadow’: he exists only in the Senator’s consciousness. But, adds Bely: ‘Apollon Apollonovich’s consciousness is a shadowy consciousness, because he too is the possessor of an ephemeral existence and is a product of the author’s fantasy: a superfluous, idle, cerebral play’ (p. 67). He is just a character. And with this moment of metafiction, Bely pauses. If he is only the inventor of illusions, then the novelist might as well abandon his novel. But, writes Bely, just because they are illusions doesn’t mean the characters aren’t real. There Ableukhov is: and there we are – reading.

Once his brain has come into play with the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists, really does exist: he will not disappear from the Petersburg prospects while a senator with such thoughts exists, because thought, too, exists.

And so let our stranger be a real live stranger! And let my stranger’s two shadows be real live shadows!

Those dark shadows will follow, they will follow on the stranger’s heels, in the same way as the stranger himself will directly follow the senator; the aged senator will pursue you, he will pursue you, too, reader, in his black carriage: and from this day forth you will never forget him! (pp. 67–8)

You only need to name something, and it is real: even if it is imaginary. It exists, now, in the consciousness of the reader. The real is produced by and produces writing. This is Bely’s artistic premise. Just as from the abstract dot of Petersburg, wrote Bely, rushes the government circular, so the real dissolves into writing – even when you sharpen your pencil: ‘the acutely sharpened little pencil fell on the paper with flocks of question marks’ (p. 483).

This infiltration and contamination of signifiers and signifieds represents the mobile process of Bely’s novel. So that a character’s childhood memory of a fever where a bouncing elastic ball became a man called Pépp Péppovich Pépp, with its bouncing consonants, drifts in a new delirium to become associated with a bomb: so that by the end of the novel the bomb has appropriated this nonsense name as its own, as if it is a character itself. Or a nonsense word enfranshish, which haunts a revolutionary in his nightmares, suddenly inverts itself to become the name of a hallucinated character: ‘ “Shishnarfne, Shishnar-fne …” ’ (p. 410).

The history of the world as a history of phonetics: that is the wild aim of Bely’s absolute novel.

Phonemes

Writing in Petrograd, in 1923, Bely’s friend Ivanov-Razumnik recounted a moment of conversational acrobatics from Bely:

‘I, for one,’ says Bely, ‘know that Petersburg stems from l-k-l-pp-pp-ll, where k embodies the sense of stuffiness and suffocation emanating from the pp-pp sounds – the oppressiveness of the walls of Ableukhov’s “yellow house” – and ll reflects the “lacquers”, “lustre” and “brilliance” contained within the pp-pp – the walls or the casing of the “bomb” (Pépp Péppovich Pépp). Pl is the embodiment of this shining prison – Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov; and k in the glitter of p with l is Nikolai Apollonovich, the Senator’s son, who is suffocating in it.’12

The phonic and metrical line of the whole novel, added Ivanov-Razumnik, was drawn in the names of the leading characters.

To invent a world, it turned out, you don’t even need a word: phonemes will do. But this wasn’t quite Bely’s invention. Once again, this is also an effect first discovered in Gogol’s Petersburg stories.

It was another revolutionary critic, Boris Eikhenbaum, who in 1919 wrote an essay, ‘How Gogol’s “Overcoat” is Made’, where he noticed that the repeated ak sound in the name of that story’s protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich Bashmachkin, was also repeated in his constant use and overuse of minute Russian words: like tak and kak. The real and the linguistic began to merge, so that Gogol’s text was ‘composed of animated locutions and verbalized emotions’. Gogol’s ak phoneme, a minute melodic unit, was just another aspect of the story’s emphasis on the overlooked, the minor, the forgotten.

But Bely’s theory of phonemes was odder. In his prose, the Gogolian method was shadowed by a complicated, esoteric theory – and it is visible in his reported conversation with Ivanov-Razumnik. The sound of a signifier, thought Bely, has its own meaning separate from the ordinary signified.

In 1922, when Bely was living briefly in Berlin, he published a poem called Glossolalia, subtitled A Poem on Sound. In it, he offered a detailed theory of what phonemes mean: k is suffocation, death and murder; sh and r are the sensations of the etheric body. Twelve years later, when Bely had returned to the Soviet Union, in his final book, Gogol’s Craftsmanship, he revised this theory. In the Soviet Union, the meanings were more prosaically revolutionary: he emphasized pl, bl and kl – as all sounds of bursting pressure. While sh represents the expansion of gases, and r represents explosion.13

In Petersburg, Bely wanted to saturate prose with repeated sounds: even the phonemes would be part of the pattern’s meaning. Bely had once rearranged the hierarchy of Russian vowel sounds: putting u at the bottom of the series and i at the top.* And as he began his novel called Petersburg, Bely would later write, he suddenly heard ‘what seemed like an “u” sound; this sound permeates the whole length and breadth of the novel …’14 The u sound is a sad lament throughout his revolutionary, anxious novel.