Nikolai, the poor schmuck, was unhappy in love: and now he was over the girl: but the promise remained. It ‘continued to live in the collective consciousness of a certain rash and hasty circle, at the same time as the sense of life’s bitterness under the influence of the failure had been erased; Nikolai Apollonovich himself would undoubtedly have classed his promise among promises of a humorous nature’ (p. 92). Humorous! This is how politics is depicted in Petersburg: it is shadowy; it is uncertain; its ideology is tremulous. And of course, Bely was right. You only have to think of the sad epilogue of Bely and Kamenev. It is so difficult, finding the seriousness of history, and politics. It is so much easier to see the structure of farce.

But there is another way of interpreting invisible patterns. This could be a form of pure poetry, true – or it could be a form of revolutionary politics. But it could also be a form of the mystical. This is the final investigation of Bely’s network of details. A revolution overlaps with the mystical in the idea of conspiracy – a hidden network of controlling details, a code present on the surface that is only legible to illuminati. But then, in Petersburg there had always been a connection between the theory of hidden meaning and the theory of revolution. They were both theories of the real, and they both derived from the abstract principles of Hegel – and his diagram of the progress of the Spirit.

And I think of another émigré from Petersburg, Alexandre Kojève – whose seminars on Hegel in Paris in the 1940s were attended by Raymond Queneau; and were admired by Saul Bellow … But no: the story of those seminars is part of another story, another confluence of circumstances; and I don’t want – not now – to write the secret history of the art of the novel.

Koktebel

The year before Bely died, in 1933, the poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda went to Koktebel, in the Crimea, on the shores of the Black Sea, for a vacation at the Writers’ Union rest home. Andrei Bely and his wife were there at the same time. In Nadezhda Mandelstam’s autobiography, she records how Bely and Mandelstam ‘enjoyed talking with each other. M. was writing his “Conversation About Dante” at the time and read it out to Bely. Their talk was animated, and Bely kept referring to his study of Gogol, which he had not yet finished.’25

A decade earlier, it was very different. In the 1920 s, Mandelstam loved attacking Bely and the Symbolists. Mandelstam had grown up in Petersburg; he had been taught by one of Bely’s Symbolist friends. And so in the ordinary way, from within his own avant-garde, he had attacked the older avant-garde – ‘the glorious traditions of the literary epoch when a waiter reflected in the double mirrors of the restaurant in the Hotel Prague was regarded as a mystical phenomenon, as a double …’26

But now, everything was different.

In Koktebel, Mandelstam was writing his ‘Conversation About Dante’. It is called a conversation. But no one else is mentioned in the text. And I think that the real person to whom this conversation is addressed is Bely. For Mandelstam is writing about Dante’s Commedia: but really he is continuing the investigations of his former city of Petersburg – the constant probing of how to turn language into art. The Commedia, writes Mandelstam, is ‘a power flow, known now in its totality as a “composition”, now in its particularity as a “metaphor”, now in its indirectness as a “simile”…’ With this idea of a power flow, Mandelstam rejects all ideas of form and content: ‘form is squeezed out of the content-conception which, as it were, envelops the form.’ Instead, writing is pure performance: ‘Poetic material does not have a voice. It does not paint with bright colours, nor does it explain itself in words. It is devoid of form just as it is devoid of content for the simple reason that it exists only in performance.’ Or, in other words: ‘In talking about Dante it is more appropriate to bear in mind the creation of impulses than the creation of forms …’27

Constantly, Mandelstam laments the lack of vocabulary: ‘Again and again I find myself turning to the reader and begging him to “imagine” something; that is, I must invoke analogy, having in mind but a single goal: to fill in the deficiency of our system of definition.’28 And so, since ‘this poem’s form transcends our conceptions of literary invention and composition’, Mandelstam doesn’t offer theories, but improvised metaphors:

We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at the creation of this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and greater numbers as they were required. The work of these bees, constantly keeping their eye on the whole, is of varying difficulty at different stages of the process.