(And of course, I am not so sure of this: I’m not sure that Shklovsky was quite accurate about Bely’s intuitions about this abstraction called reality.) But in fact this didn’t mean that his vision and his novels formed a perfect whole. Because, wrote Shklovsky, ‘the particular elements constituting literary form are more likely to clash than to work in concert. The decline or decay of one device brings in its train the growth and development of another device.’23 A novel is a series of devices, true: but there is no reason why these devices will run happily in parallel. The devices invented by Bely never quite proved what he wanted them to prove.

In Shklovsky’s summary, Bely’s invention was a novel that operated on two levels. There was a rudimentary plot, and on this foundation, wrote Shklovsky,

… the author has erected metaphor leitmotivs that serve as superstructures, as high-rise buildings. These structures – let’s imagine them as buildings – are connected to each other by means of little suspension bridges. As the story moves along, it creates pretexts for the creation of new metaphorical leitmotivs which are connected, the moment they come into being, with the leitmotivs already in place.24

But this superstructure, added Shklovsky, then took over from Bely’s mysticism. The pursuit of leitmotivs and patterns distracted Bely from his esoteric aim. And so Shklovsky came to his conclusion: there was no such thing as a unified novel. And I like Shklovsky’s general conclusion: I am just not sure that he is right about why Bely’s prose is so lavishly ornamented. For the shimmer of devices, of phonemes and fictional games, in Petersburg is part of Bely’s absolute refusal of conclusions: his rickety investigation into how a rickety reality might be put together.

Words in a novel don’t function like ordinary words. A novel is a chaotic system. In this kind of system, everything is potentially meaningful. And this is deliberately exploited by Bely in his novel called Petersburg: his strange construction of phonemes and shadows. He invented a novel that was also a conspiracy – where motifs signal to each other, throughout the novel, from one part to another.

Systems

In Bely’s system, a novel, like a city, is made up of millions of minute units. Sometimes, these units blossom into motifs: sometimes, motifs dissolve into random detail.

Like, say, sardines … First, they are randomly offered by a landlord in a dive bar, and randomly refused: ‘ “No, landlord, I don’t want the sardines: they’re floating in a yellow slime” ’ (p. 279). Then it turns out that the bomb is in a sardine tin, and so sardines become a crucial unit in the plot. Yet the motif of sardines then continues, at random – in the terrorist’s bedsit: which has a ‘sink and a sardine tin that contained a scrap of Kazan soap floating in its own slime’ (p. 330). Except, this isn’t quite random: because the Russian word for soap – мыло – has the sound ы in it, a kind of English ‘ugh’, which Bely thought was symbolic of formlessness, of evil … and so the pattern continues.

The overlapping systems of Petersburg and Petersburg are a swirl of fragments, a jigsaw of surface. Information is occluded: and its genetic unit is therefore the overheard, impenetrable conversation:

‘Cra-aa-yfish … aaa … ah-ha-ha …’

‘You see, you see, you see …’

‘You’re not saying …’

‘Em-em-em …’

‘And vodka …’

‘But for goodness’ sake … But come now … But there must be something wrong …’ (p. 30)

And this is why Petersburg is a city of conspiracy. It is a melodrama of hidden details: a system that is never quite unified. Meaning might take the form of a pattern; but the pattern is a flicker: it shimmers in and out of focus. At one point, Bely interrupts himself with an abstract summary: ‘The heavy confluence of circumstances – can one thus describe the pyramid of events that had piled up during these recent days, like massif upon massif? A pyramid of massifs that shattered the soul, and precisely – a pyramid! …’ This is the form of Bely’s novel. ‘In a pyramid there is something that exceeds all the notions of man; the pyramid is a delirium of geometry …’ (pp. 448–9).

And this abstract pyramid is an accurate description of how the minutiae of his plot’s conspiracy functions. It is a miniature farce. Nikolai, this serious, sweet scholar of Kant, only found himself giving a revolutionary group a promise of help because of ‘a failure in his life; later that failure had gradually been erased’.