Their cooperation expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.29

Yes, I think that Mandelstam is talking to Bely. Indirectly, he is offering a precise description, in fact, of Bely’s strange invention in Petersburg. For Mandelstam rejects the idea that Dante was an obscure mystic. Instead, he argues, Dante’s investigations into the meaning of what happens were part of his investigations into the art of composition: ‘the inner illumination of Dantean space derived from structural elements alone’.30 The illumination was an effect of art. Just as a third term, a sign, had emerged as the only true form of the real, in Bely’s investigations into words.

Tsvetayeva thought that Bely was a man in flight. And now – by chance – Mandelstam projects this flight into the structure of Dante’s composition, based on the principle of ‘convertibility or transmutability’:

… just imagine an airplane (ignoring the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. Furthermore, in the same way, this flying machine, while fully absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch yet a third machine.31

The self-assembling flying machine: this fantastical metaphor seems to me to be the best description of what Bely invented in Petersburg: a process of metamorphosis and reversal, a multiple escape …

One must traverse the full width of a river crammed with Chinese junks moving simultaneously in various directions – this is how the meaning of poetic discourse is created. The meaning, its itinerary, cannot be reconstructed by interrogating the boatmen: they will not be able to tell how and why we were skipping from junk to junk.32

Adam Thirlwell, 2011

NOTES

1. Emma Gerstein, Moscow Memoirs, translated and edited by John Crowfoot (London: Harvill Press, 2004), p. 58.

2. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1961), pp. 10–11.

3. Nikolai Gogol, ‘Nevsky Prospect’, in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, edited by Leonard J. Kent and translated by Constance Garnett, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 238.

4. Marina Tsvetayeva, ‘A Captive Spirit’, in A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, edited and translated by J. Marin King (London: Virago, 1983), p. 100.

5. ibid., pp. 102 and 154.

6. ibid., pp. 151–2.

7. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p. 188.

8. Nikolai Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, translated by Katherine Lampert (London: Godfrey Bles, 1950), p. 196.

9. Quoted in Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 48.

10. ibid., p. 53.

11. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Igitur, Divagations, Un Coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 251, my translation.

12. Ivanov-Razumnik, Vershini (Summits) (Petrograd: Kolos, 1923), p. 110: quoted in Ada Steinberg, Word and Music in the Novels of Andrey Bely (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 93.

13. Andrei Bely, Masterstvo Gogolia (Gogol’s Craftsmanship) (Moscow: 1934), pp. 306–7.

14. Andrei Bely, ‘Vospominanija’ (‘Memoirs’), in Literaturnoe nasledstvo, nos. 27–8, p. 453.

15. Shklovsky, p. 187.

16. Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, in Readings in Russian Poetics, edited and with a preface by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), p. 6.

17. ibid., pp. 6–7.

18. Quoted in Cassedy, p.