It is there implicitly: in the constant choice of words with the stress on u; or the exploitation of the fact that Russian nouns and adjectives in the accusative case include that u sound, necessarily. But he also states it, explicitly – in his descriptions of Petersburg at night: ‘have you ever gone out at night, penetrated into the god-forsaken suburban vacant lots, in order to listen to the nagging, angry note on “oo”? Oooooo-ooo: thus did space resound …’ (p. 97). The u sound is the sound of impending revolution: of catastrophe. It is a concealed prophecy.

And of course: this theory that a phoneme is meaningful, Bely’s habit, as Shklovsky put it, ‘of using every word as a springboard for the infinite …’15 – this habit is craziness.

Signs

I am not the first person to notice this.

In Petersburg, between 1914 and 1916, when Bely was writing Petersburg, a group of linguists and literary critics, including Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and Roman Jakobson, founded the avant-garde group Opojaz – a jazzy Russian acronym for the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. This was their official name, but their real name – the name they became known by in the various battles of the avant-garde – was the Formalists. In Petersburg, of course, at that time, the ruling avant-garde was Bely and the theory of Symbolism. And so, remembered Eikhenbaum in a retrospective essay in 1927 called ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, the first argument they picked in the formation of their avant-garde was with the Symbolists: ‘in order to wrest poetics from their hands …’16

The Symbolists still believed that words were agents of esoteric inquiry. This was why they so adored their sound-effects, their phonemes. Whereas the ‘basic motto uniting the original group of Formalists was the emancipation of the poetic word from philosophical and religious biases to which the Symbolists had increasingly fallen prey …’17 Their allies in this fight were the Futurist poets, who included Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And what they loved were the Futurists’ exuberant experiments with nonsense: which they called, in their mania for definitions, transrational language: or, zaum. With their poems in invented languages, even the possible language of birds, the Futurists in their cabaret performances discovered the autonomy of a word when used in poetry. Or, as Khlebnikov put it, in his essay ‘About Contemporary Poetry’: ‘the principle of sound lives a self-spun life, while the portion of reason named by the word remains in shadow …’18

This self-spun life of sound – so gorgeous! – meant that language in poetry was pure event: a linguistic sign was a delirious airborne shimmer. And in the buoyancy of Futurist poetry the Formalist critics found a proof that language in literature was not a form of access to any higher reality. In this ‘trend toward a “transrational language” (zaumnyj jazyk)’, wrote Eikhenbaum, it was possible to define the poetic sign: not as a route to the mysteries, but a total playfulness: ‘the utmost baring of autonomous value’.19 Or, as Roman Jakobson put it many years later, in 1933, in his essay ‘What is Poetry?’ – poetry was when ‘the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named …’20

Bely’s orchestrations of sound, like his other formal tricks, were always subordinate to the work’s content. The meaning of words had billowed out acoustically with the phonemes. The Symbolists, argued Shklovsky and his friends, had thought that form and content in literature were inextricably linked. Whereas the truth was that a novel or a poem was a rickety machine: there was nothing special about its linguistic elements: the interest was in the outlandish ways these elements were combined. A poem, or a novel, was just a system. And so, wrote Eikhenbaum, in departing from the Symbolist view, ‘the Formalists simultaneously freed themselves from the traditional correlation of “form-content” and from the conception of form as an outer cover or as a vessel into which a liquid (the content) is poured’.21

The problem with the ordinary ways in which novels had been read was that they had always been viewed as a poem: and a poem, according to Bely’s theory, was an expanded sign, whose form and content minutely overlapped. Whereas, argued the Formalists, a novel is too long for this kind of hopeful analysis. It absolutely disproves the ordinary ideas of form and content. A novel is a system that is constantly patching itself up.

And yet the strange thing, I want to add, the lovely thing is that Bely’s novel called Petersburg was nevertheless – against all Bely’s obvious intent – one of the most intricate places where this new way of reading could be proved.

Novels

Writing in Leningrad, as he remembered the minutiae of that city’s avant-gardes, Eikhenbaum went on to describe how the sidestep of the ordinary terms like form and content had led to new ways of analysing the machinations of novels: especially in ‘the distinction between the elements of a work’s construction and the elements comprising the material it uses (the story stuff, the choice of motifs, of protagonists, of themes, etc.)’. A novel was really a series of structural devices, ‘subordinating everything else as motivation’. But no novel fully integrated these devices: the fit was never absolute. This is why, according to Eikhenbaum, Shklovsky’s emblematic novels were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy. Both novels were zanily broken-down: there was no true fit between these novels’ devices and their motivation. In Quixote, this was not deliberate: it was just the result of Cervantes’s delighted mania for interpolating more and more material. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne ‘deliberately tears away motivation and bares its construction’.22 But the effect was the same: a novel was a rickety construction.

And it was with this idea in mind that Shklovsky, in his own book Theory of Prose, went on to consider the prose of Andrei Bely’s novels.

Bely, wrote Shklovsky, was a mystic. He believed in the multi-level reality.