Petersburg, Andrei Bely

Petersburg is a novel by the lesser well-known St Petersburg based author from the turn of the twentieth century, Andrei Bely. His most notable novel, Petersburg, a tale of parricide and loyalties amid a bourgeois establishment precedes the 1905 revolution with underlying references to mutinies, riots, strikes and petitions that are engulfing a city and its surrounding provinces on the verge of descent into a dark Russian winter with biting winds, permanent snow and a frozen Neva.

Russian literature has a reputation for being lengthy and relentless with intense text so heavy it can at times feel like a full raincloud in a summer storm is encircling your head. The stories depict misery and struggle regardless of the subject whether the backstreets of Sennaya Ploschad (the inhabitants of which include Raskolnikov and his victim in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) or the high society balls of Moscow in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It would be false and deceptive, disrespectful to these books to deny that they are not trying reads that do not require perseverance, concentration, moral and philosophical reflection- indeed, reading them is an embodiment of the mental and physical struggles faced by the characters. Not only were there struggles in the novels but also within the world in which their authors were writing. Dostoevsky’s journey through the Neva gate and on towards Siberian austerity following his arrest for offences against the state provided the material for his novel House of the Dead. Bely’s novel whilst retaining this struggle- the main narrative which follows student Nikolai Apollonovich as he is entrusted with the task of assassinating his Senator father involves a severe examination of the merits of family loyalty and the effects of remorse on the brain and the body- attempts to balance sorrow with the Romance of the title city, St Petersburg whose bridges, canals, prospects and statues have provided solace and comfort for many individuals as well as a silent muse for artists throughout history. Reminiscent of the verse of Pushkin Petersburg is a devoted description to the city, its history as well as its potential directing the reader’s attention towards remnants of the city’s past, The Bronze Horseman and Nevsky Prospect, which have guided the inhabitants throughout the decades, the winters and the revolutions.

Petersburg does not suffer from the prejudices sometimes faced by other Russian works such as The House of the Dead, The Brothers Karamazov or even the plays of Muscovite Chekhov, the latter being the scribe of a play a friend of mine left uttering the remark ‘well now I feel awful about everything in the world ever.’ Bely’s work benefits from being less eminent although it remains a challenging read and demands no less attention particularly as much of the text is broken, disjointed, a symbol of the anguish suffered by the plights of the characters who have fallen victim as much to the hypnotic beauty of St Petersburg as to the stimulation of its politics. It is however perhaps an easier introduction than the daunting task of War and Peace… As well as this, its main character is St Petersburg, an intellectually vibrant, naturally vivacious and historically overpowering city.