Constructing the City: Petersburg by Andrei Bely
and the Development of the Twentieth Century
Montage
.By Nataliya Mateboer S1448978
Supervisor: Dr. E. C. S. Jongeneel
Second Reader: Dr. V. Robillard
Contents.
Introduction. 2
Chapter I. Historical, Cultural, and Literary Background. 4
1.1. Modernism, Symbolism or Silver Age? The Cultural Atmosphere in Russia after Realism.
1.2. Andrei Bely and Symbolism. 1.3. From Poetry to Prose.
1.4. Petersburg. The Rise of the Avant-Garde.
Chapter II. Montage: History and Theory. 14
2.1. Montage as a Term.
2.2. Montage in the 1900-1920s: Historical Overview. 2.3. Theoretical Model of Montage.
2.4. The City Novel. Montage and the Representation of Metropolis.
Chapter III. The Study of Petersburg: Montage of Cultural Texts (“Fremdmaterial”). 25 3.1. The Role of Intertextuality. The Literary Myth of Petersburg.
3.2. Newspapers and other Documentary Material in Literary Montage. 3.3. Intermediality. Montage and the Structural
Elements of Other Art Forms.
Chapter IV. The Study of Petersburg: The Use of Montage Techniques. 41 4.1. Development of the Plot Lines.
4.2. Fragmentation and Juxtaposition. 4.3. Multiplicity of the Points of View.
4.4. Effects on the Reader: Simultaneity and Spatiality of the Narratives.
Conclusions. 52
References. 54
Introduction.
“A chaotic novel with the imprint of genius.” Alexander Blok, a close friend of Andrei Bely and an outstanding Symbolist poet, characterised Petersburg with these famous words, which one can often come across in the works written about the novel. The words were pronounced almost a century ago and Bely’s genius has been generally acknowledged since then. The impressions of confusion, chaos, and incoherence have also dominated the novel’s reception since its first publication in 1913-1914. Remarkably, as early in Bely’s career as 1903, ten years prior to the publication of Petersburg, one of his contemporaries, D. Filosofov, explained his creative nature in the following terms: “[Bely]
constantly pours out over the board of aesthetic boundaries; he breaks up continually the unity of form and indulges into prophesies of non-literary character1” (qtd. in Burlaka 17-18). This description
points at Bely’s reluctance to submit to the conventional realist aesthetics, indicates his explorations of a new literary form, but also mentions the writer’s interest in global philosophical issues. Another critic and Bely’s contemporary, Emil Metner, observed that for Bely as a writer, “the visible world first and foremost becomes the material for getting shots of the other world”, while his “filming often seems fragmented, but truly wonderful in its detail” (qtd. in Burlaka 18). Remarkable in this thought is the parallel with film and photography in connection with the fragmentary manner of Bely’s writing. Thus, while many critics expressed their disappointment in the lack of talent in their reactions to Petersburg, some other critics, similar to Metner, attempted to analyse Bely’s writing not only in terms of artistic perfection. They managed to discern the writer’s endeavour to apply fundamentally new aesthetic principles and artistic instruments to create an innovative type of narrative unknown before. What they perceived was Bely’s aspiration to reveal and overcome the “new chaotic condition” of modernism by his creative works2. As the critic Griftsov wrote, plot, characters, and coherently
demonstrated thoughts give way to the “new and chaotic world which did not exist before the novel Petersburg at all, but which becomes compulsory now” (qtd. in Burlaka 20). The novel, consequently, has often been considered the first novel in Russian literature that attempted to enclose the turning point in Russian history and the representational crisis in arts in a new experimental literary form.
Since the famous pronouncement by Michel Foucault that “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space”3, it is often assumed that the spatial focus is a feature of Postmodernism,
while the Modernists were primarily preoccupied with the notions of time, progress, and history. In literature, however, such genres as the city novel or cubist poetry testify that space in its complex interrelationship with time is particularly among Modernist concerns. The theme of the city became
1 D.V.Filosofov in the journal “World of Art” № 15, 1903.
2 According to Griftsov’s “Andrei Bely’s Novel” (1914), “Bely approaches some important fundamental tasks of
art to reveal and overcome the new chaotic condition aesthetically” (“Белый приближается к каким-то важнейшим, первичным заданиям искусства в выявлении и эстетическом преодолени нового хаотического состояния”) (qtd. in Burlaka 20).
for many writers a focal point of the new experience of reality. Aside from thematic focus on space and place, Modernist writing is marked by the authors’ attempt to incorporate their vision of space into the textual surface and design of their works. The allusive construction, fragmentary style, and
seemingly chaotic presentation of events in experimental prose of the early twentieth century convey a reality that is multidimensional and complex in its simultaneity, as well as demonstrate the breakdown and disintegration of conventional novelistic forms.
The subject of this research is the novel Petersburg by Andrei Bely and the degree and manner in which it translates the modern urban space into the verbal construction of its narrative. In other words, the central issue of this study is to what extent and by what means Bely’s novel becomes a structural image of Russian urban reality. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the constructive properties and functions of montage in relation to plot, motif structure, composition, and point of view.
In order to create a powerful image of the city and to render his vision of the metropolis, Bely applied the method of montage. The writer radicalized the existing narrative devices, employed experimental artistic means, and incorporated a wide range of cultural material to convey the urban experience in a unique montage construction. As a result, the novel strikes its readers by the scope of its thematic implications and the distinctiveness of its narrative structure, which achieves a high degree of simultaneity and spatiality. Moreover, Bely’s manner of representing the metropolis and its experience anticipates many principles and means of representation, which came to be widely applied in other modernist city narratives, avant-garde literature, and film.
Chapter I.
Historical, Cultural, and Literary Background.
1.1 Modernism, Symbolism, or Silver Age? The Cultural Atmosphere in Russia after Realism.
Historical Overview of the Period.
The social and political conditions, in which Russian society found itself after the 1860s, determined the changes that characterized the Russian cultural development. The historical shift, which brought about the rise of a new epoch and the crisis of old ways of life along with it, dates back particularly to the 1880s and the 1890s. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 did not disrupt the Russian tsarist authority as many hoped and expected. Autocratic form of government reached its apogee during the reign of the tsar Alexander III (Emperor of Russia from 1881 to 1894). Following the advice of his political counsellor Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Alexander III adopted the policy opposite to the more liberal rule of his father, Alexander II, who was assassinated by the members of a nihilist group. Anarchy and revolutionary disturbances were to be controlled by autocracy, imposition, and centralization of power. The new tsar abandoned the course of democratic reforms initiated by his father and his reign is often referred to as the period of anti-reforms. Alexander’s son, Nikolas II, inherited the throne in 1894 with the intention to continue his father’s policy of autocracy. The festivities after his coronation ended in what has come to be known as the Khodynka tragedy: more than 1,300 people, anticipating a banquet and gifts on the occasion, were trampled to death in the field nearby Moscow. The Russo-Japanese War and the fall of the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1905, which marked the defeat of Russia in the war, were next in the long chain of events that contributed to the growing social discontent and disillusionment in imperial power. The country was paralyzed by strikes and mutinies. The ensuing turmoil culminated in the revolutionary outbreak in the winter of 1905 near the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. The event led to bloodshed and shattered what was left of the people’s belief in the unshakeable power of the tsar. The historical events and the socio-political atmosphere in Russia of these years were, no doubt, a major catalyst in creating the atmosphere of anxiety and terror in Petersburg of Andrei Bely’s novel.
Developments in Arts and Literature.
Neo-Romanticism, the Silver Age, and Symbolism are among the common labels attached in cultural and literary studies to the period around the turn of the centuries (Keys 3).
The tragic events of Russian history and the political and social turmoil in the country have logically left their imprint on developments in cultural life. The period between the 1850s and the 1900s witnessed the rise of various phenomena in the cultural life of Russia. The Realist novel and the associated aesthetic of unmediated representation of social reality and moral utility of art dominated most of nineteenth-century literature in Russia. As the social and political situation began radically changing towards the end of the century, there arose an acute need of renewing and reforming all forms of life, including artistic representation. The peak of the Realist novel with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, and others had passed by the 1880s. Writers and critics alike felt the decline of Realism and the novel as its central genre and referred to the last decade of the century as the period of “inertia”, “absence of outstanding talent”, and “incomprehensible stagnation”- to quote the writer Merezhkovsky (qtd. in Keys 87). The need to evolve new forms of artistic expression took frequently the form of a reaction against the laws and conventions of previous periods, particularly against Realist tradition.
The decades that followed were regarded widely as a new era. The shorter fictional forms were revived by such writers as Chekhov and Leskov alongside the genre of lyric poetry, which by the end of the nineteenth century had come to the foreground of Russian literature. The new generation of writers and poets did not utterly estrange themselves from the achievements of their predecessors. They did not deny the Russian cultural past, but drew on its accomplishments; at the same time, they looked forward, into the future, understanding the need of renewal. Thus, following this trend, Valery Bryusov founded a Symbolist school of poetry on the model of its French counterpart and a number of adherents joined him. Among them are some outstanding figures of the time, such as Fedor Sologub, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, and, of course, Andrei Bely4.
The dominant role of poetry in this period prompted parallels with the Golden Age of Russian poetry in the beginning of the nineteenth century, represented predominantly by Pushkin. Therefore, the new epoch has come to be viewed as the “Second Golden Age” or, a more common term
nowadays, the “Silver Age”. As the Symbolist school of poets dominated the literary scene in Russia during these decades, the period has come to be referred to as the “Age of Symbolism” as well. Most critics and scholars have adopted this name to designate post-Realist developments in Russian literature.
4 The article “Causes of the Decline in Contemporary Russian Literature and the New Currents within It” by
D.Merezhkovsky, published in 1892, and the collection of poems under the title Symbol mark, as it is generally stated, the birth of Russian Symbolism. Around the same time, V.Bryusov founded the publishing house “Scorpion”, which brought out several translations of the works by French Symbolists and later issued a journal
The Balance (Vesy, 1904-1909), which published the major Symbolist works. Among other periodicals of the
time circulating Symbolist ideas were The Northern Herald (Severny Vestnik, 1885-1899), The New Path (Novy
At first, the Russian Symbolist poetry tended to be rather individualistic and romantic in character, concerned predominantly with the poet’s personal feelings and impressions. Decadence, pessimism, religious search, and impressionistic perception of the world characterize poetry of the so-called “first generation” of Symbolists (Bryusov, Gippius, Merezhkovsky, Sologub). Formally, their works, prose in particular, were rather traditional in structure and style. The apogee of Symbolism in its altered form came in the first decade of the twentieth century with the works of such writers as Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, and Andrei Bely. Particularly during this second wave of Symbolism in Russia, its strife to grow beyond a representational method came to the fore. The renewed aesthetic saw the artist (poet) as a prophet whose task is to mediate between the real world and the higher reality beyond it. The Symbolist poets strove to comprehend the world beyond
empirical experience and to reveal its essence by means of symbols. The symbol has become a crucial medium that made it possible for the Symbolists to overcome the separation between an object and its true meaning, between visible and imperceptible. The poet’s task was to “reproduce the eternal in forms given by nature”5. Furthermore, “to underline an idea in an image means to turn this image into a symbol and from this point of view all the world is ‘the forest full of symbols’ according to the words of Baudelaire” (qtd. in Dolgopolov 36). The poet’s role is crucial in this case, as he reveals the meaning behind the symbols.
1.2. Andrei Bely and Symbolism.
The sense of crisis and inevitable catastrophe, which filled all spheres of life in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, produced remarkable artistic and literary phenomena, among which the work of Andrei Bely occupies a prominent place. Russian literature of the twentieth century developed under the influence of Bely’s aesthetics and his stylistic and formal discoveries. The poetry of avant-garde represented by Mayakovski, Esenin, Pasternak, Ahmatova and many others stemmed from Bely’s innovations and experiments with poetic form. His influence infused the prose works of the 1920s and the 1930s (Pilnyak, Babel, Zamyatin, Bulgakov). Vladimir Nabokov called Petersburg by Andrei Bely “one of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose” and put it alongside such touchstones of Modernism as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Joyce’s Ulysses. The novel’s allusive construction, fragmentary style, and the discovery of the subconscious as the object of literature distinguish Bely as a master of experimental prose and justify the name of the “Russian James Joyce” often given to the writer. Andrei Bely, however, experienced a lot of
uncertainties and disappointments in his literary career before the novel ripened and took its final form.
Thus, the Russian Symbolist movement has come to be generally associated with the name of Andrei Bely. Critics and scholars regard him as its central figure and chief theoretician. He was born as Boris Bugaev in 1880 into the family of the mathematician Nikolai Bugaev and the famous Moscow beauty Alexandra Bugaeva. In the years when young Boris Bugaev attended a Moscow gymnasium, he already became interested in occultism, Buddhism, and literature. He developed a fascination for the writings of Ibsen, the music of Wagner, and the philosophy of Nietzsche in the last years of gymnasium. At this early stage of his life, young Boris Bugaev struggled to combine his artistic and philosophic interests with his commitment to natural sciences, to reconcile mysticism with positivism. After gymnasium, he entered the faculty of mathematics at the University of Moscow, which he finished successfully in 1904. During a few years that followed, he attended the historical philological faculty.
During his university years, Bugaev was a member of a literary cycle called “Argonauts”; he also made acquaintance and became close friends with the Symbolist poet Alexander Blok. In the period between 1904 and 1909, he actively contributed articles and lyrical works to the journal The Balanace (Vesy) and became close with Bryusov and other representatives of the Symbolist group. Bely began evolving his aesthetic theory around this time. His dual vision of the world, as an empirical everyday reality and as a higher spiritual reality (“byt” and “bytie”), became central in the writer’s worldview. As it is often observed by the critics and Bely’s biographers, the writer’s initial artistic interests concerned music, rather than literature (Keys 102). In his book of memoires, Nachalo Veka (The Beginning of the Century, 1933), Bely himself reflects on his hesitations between music, philosophy, poetry, prose, and criticism: “I had not sorted out whether I was a theoretician, critic, and propagandist of art, a poet, a prose writer, or a composer. [...] I saw my future as a keyboard, and it depended on me to play a symphony” (qtd. in Keys 102-103). Much of his writing in the period between the end of the 1890s and 1910 reflects this wavering. Thus, Bely’s love and fascination for music combined with experimentations in literary form resulted into five Symphonies (1902-1908), the Second Symphony published first in 1902. Different from both traditional poetry and prose, this debut in literature was neither poetry nor prose: an unusual form of creative writing, which the writer preferred to name “symphonies”. Bely absorbed Schopenhauer’s “musical philosophy” and the ideas about the synthesis of the arts very early in his life (Keys 111-117). The belief that one can approach the highest forces of the universe and contemplate the world behind everyday reality through music inspired Bely’s lyrical works of this period. The poet justified his preference of a symphonic form in a later article “About Myself as a Writer” (1933) in this way:
Bely applied this artistic process of combining and connecting phenomena and things in order to create images throughout his later prose works as well, and not the least in his major novel Petersburg. Bely’s description is also remarkable in its parallels with the method of montage, which developed in arts in and outside Russia at the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century. The presentation of an image consisting of different objects, juxtaposition of fragments, synthesis of bits and pieces, and the collision of elements in order to convey an image are the means of
representation drawing on montage techniques and finding their development in (Neo-) Impressionist painting, Cubist and Futurist art, as well as in the theories and practices of cinematic montage.
At the same period, in the early twentieth century, Andrei Bely began writing numerous articles, essays, and reviews, which reflected his artistic and philosophical exploration. His non-fiction writing combined logical reasoning with lyricism and poetic metaphors, analysis with prophecy, speculation with formulas and analytical methods borrowed from physics and mathematics. The writer’s attempts at explaining his philosophical and aesthetic views displayed a great degree of confusion and uncertainty. His contemporaries, consequently, pointed out the lack of coherence and consistency in Bely’s theoretical writings (Dolgopolov 44-45).
Bely continued his formal experimentations in the collections Gold in Azure (Zoloto v Lazuri, 1904), The Return (Vozvrat, 1905), and Goblet of Blizzards (Kubok Metelei, 1908). These works, together with the earlier mentioned Symphonies, cover the period of Symbolist poetry in Bely’s literary career. The collections also contained some pieces of rhythmical prose (or prose poems), which were predominantly mood pieces, presenting lyric perceptions, dreams, fantasies, and visions in the first person. Bely continued his experimentation with the musical form and the analogy between music and literature as well. The notion of verbal leitmotif6 became central as the most significant and
consistent device transferred from music to literature. Bely’s experimental works that represent this early period in his oeuvre revealed already many features and devices expounded further in his later prose writing. Bely continually disrupts the conventional coherent development of plots and characters by presenting fragmented descriptions and images. Numerous plot lines, themes, and variations succeed one another in a seemingly chaotic way producing, thus, a structural pattern that anticipates similar phenomena in later fiction by Zamiatin, Pilnyak and others in Russia, but also James Joyce and many others abroad.
Esotericism, mysticism, and mythologist-religious exploration reflected in Symphonies, early poems, and essays by Bely, were followed by the works suggesting new tendencies in the writer’s aesthetical and philosophical views. Two collections- Ashes (Pepel), dedicated to and written in the
6 In music, leitmotif is a recurring theme. This meaning extended to literature indicating recurring themes,
style of the nineteenth-century poet and writer Nekrasov, and Urn (Urna), reflecting the thematic and stylistic achievements of the Golden Age of Russian poetry, which were published in 1909, revealed the turn to social motives. This tendency is even stronger in the writings of the next period in Bely’s literary career, which is also characterised by the writer’s turn from poetry to prose.
1.3. From Poetry to Prose.
While the Silver Age of Russian poetry reached its apogee, especially through Symbolist lyrical works, there reigned a general feeling of decline concerning prose genres, the novel in particular. Those few fictional prose works that appeared from the pen of the Symbolists between 1890 and 1910 were viewed rather as a by-product. The conclusion of the critics in the period sounded often as follows: “The Symbolists, victorious in poetry, did not at first succeed in finding a new style in prose” (qtd. in Keys 23). The critics were particularly negative about the content-oriented and didactic character of the early Symbolist prose works. The writers who continued in the line of Realism and Naturalism did not achieve general critical acknowledgement either. The belief in a renewed form that would restore the Russian novel had found no material embodiment for a long time. The first decade of the twentieth century, however, witnessed the appearance of a few longer works of fiction that stood out for their innovative themes and formal originality: Sologub’s Petty Demon (1902), Remizov’s The Pond (1903), Bryusov’s The Fiery Angel (1908), and Bely’s Silver Dove (1910).
A characteristic feature of symbolism in art is the desire to use an image taken from reality as a means of conveying an experienced content of consciousness. The dependence of images of the visible world on the conditions of the consciousness, which perceives them, moves the centre of gravity in art away from the image itself to the way it is perceived (qtd. in Keys 177).
Consequently, the poet’s interest shifted towards the processes of making art and the formal study of artistic means. The period between 1907 and 1909 with its rapid changes in Bely’s spiritual
development and in his literary views prepared the writer’s return to fiction and his turn to prose. The period around 1909 was hard and challenging in Bely’s personal and professional life. Bely’s passion for and complex relationship with the wife of his friend, the poet Alexander Blok, which ended in cruel rejection of his love, as well as his personal depression aggravated by continuous disagreements and arguments with other Symbolists, culminated in a nervous breakdown. Bely
himself regarded this period as a turning point in his life and the end of the agonizingly difficult period in his career as a writer. Feeling a strong desire to return to creative writing, Andrei Bely began working on his first major novel, The Silver Dove, which was published in parts towards the end of 1909 and as a separate edition in 1910.
The Silver Dove develops further the themes and literary practices established in Bely’s earlier fictional works, particularly in Second, Dramatic Symphony. However, it is also a novel like no other written by him before. The novel represents a serious transition in Bely’s philosophical and aesthetic beliefs and introduces new stylistic and structural devices, which are to be further developed and refined in Petersburg. Due to its linear plot, with the description of Russian rural reality at its centre, a fixed narrative line, and a number of psychologically deep characters, the novel seems at first glance to belong fully to the Realist tradition. However, the ever-present element of authorial motivation lying outside the fictional world of The Silver Dove, the metafictional elements clearly, though not predominantly, present throughout the text of the novel, as well as the perspectival ambiguity, lend a specific modernist quality to Bely’s novel. The features of self-conscious writing present in The Silver Dove are new to Bely’s fiction and will be even more tangible in Petersburg. By foregrounding the compositional and linguistic elements of the text, the author often leads the reader to the realisation that what he is reading is the writer’s production. The effect produced is even stronger in Petersburg, as the narrator at times plays with the idea that the whole text, as well as the city of Petersburg, is a product of somebody’s fantasy. Bely experiments with a number of devices to achieve the effect. Beside the use of the recurrent motif or symbol, which he applied already in his early writing, the writer makes use of what Keys refers to as “perspectivism” (Keys 217). The novel presents various points of view of the narrator as well as of different characters. The Silver Dove also stands out by the extensive use of free indirect speech (in order to reveal inner experiences and thoughts of the
Petersburg, particularly due to the specific character of the narrator and the narrative style, which approaches that of “skaz” tradition. Bely’s fascination with Gogol combined with the incessant theurgist exploration explains the stylistic and compositional distinctiveness of The Silver Dove. The novel contains numerous echoes and borrowings from Gogol’s prose and revives Gogolian stylistic devices. The image of the narrator, in particular, is modelled upon the famous Gogolian narrator. The writer’s influence appeared so great that Bely’s text often imitates Gogol’s melodic quality, language, and imagery and at times even borrows certain phrases and sentences. The novel, nevertheless, is still far from the complex montage construction of Petersburg with its intricate network of intertextuality. However, it is an important step in Bely’s formal experimentation.
1.4. Petersburg. The Rise of the Avant-Garde.
Andrei Bely intended his following major novel, Petersburg, as a second part of the trilogy entitled East and West, with The Silver Dove as its opening novel. The writer’s original project was obviously immense. The trilogy would embrace all of European and Asian reality, with its past, present, and future. The question of East or West relating directly to the problem of Russian historical fate would also be a starting point in Bely’s literary study of the world history and its future development. In this respect, the novelistic trilogy would continue the thematic line of Bely’s previous works, particularly his poetic cycle Ashes. Bely began working on Petersburg in October of 1911. The first version of the manuscript was completed in November 1913 and appeared in three parts in the almanac Sirin over the period of 1913 and 1914. The novel was published as a separate book later, in 1916. The history of the novel’s origin and publication is, however, not that simple. Years after its first publication, Bely revised and edited his novel. The new edition appeared in Berlin in 1922. This particular version, considerably altered and abridged, is known to the Western readers through its English translation by R.A. Maguire and J.E. Malmstad (1978)7.
Andrei Bely’s adherence to Symbolism is generally recognized and is frequently taken as a starting point in approaching his life and interpreting his poetry as well as prose. During his lifetime, Bely was already a renowned representative of the Russian Symbolist School and its important theorist. A great number of Bely’s philosophical articles and essays on Symbolism, written predominantly before 1909, seem a good theoretical foundation for interpreting Bely’s poetry and fiction. However, many critics have pointed out the difficulty and challenge of such an approach,
7 The 1922 Berlin edition of Bely’s novel differs significantly from the original text. All citations from
Petersburg in this thesis will appear in two languages. The page numbers following the English quotations refer
to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, translated and annotated by Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad
particularly because of the contradictions within Bely’s philosophical and aesthetical beliefs and inconsistencies concerning their reflection in his theoretical and fictional works. It is also easy to overlook the shift in the writer’s artistic views, which is more evident in his fictional works than in his theoretical articles of the period8. Thus, Bely continued writing numerous theoretical works on
Symbolism and giving lectures, which followed the course of his early views and beliefs.
Nevertheless, the change in the writer’s position was felt already in his collection of poetry Ashes and in his novel The Silver Dove. Petersburg indicated an even greater shift in Bely’s Symbolist
worldview and particularly in his conception of artistic form. As the writer’s theoretical works of the period do not provide a satisfactory answer to the question of why Bely chose the particular form and the specific devices of his novel for the presentation of his worldview, it seems helpful to look for the key to interpreting Petersburg and its formal novelty within broader developments in the arts during the period.
While Symbolism continued dominating literature in Russia during the first decade of the twentieth century, the newly emerging avant-garde groups of artists came into being around the same period and actively contributed to the development of Russian art and literature. Thus, around 1910, a number of poets established a group of “budetlyane”, also named “Gilea”, in Saint Petersburg. The leading member of the group was Velimir Chlebnikov, who had close links with the Symbolists in the beginning of his career. Together with another poet and writer, Alexei Kruchenyh, Khlebnikov worked on the theory of a new poetic language, which later came to be known as “zaum”. The circle consisted of other well-known poets and artists of the time, such as Burlyuk, Kamenski, Mayakovski, and is considered the first Futurist group in Russia. Though the Futurists proclaimed their refusal to go along the traditional literary and artistic lines and announced openly9 their opposition towards previous
schools, including Symbolism, there were, nevertheless, significant parallels between Symbolism on the one hand and Futurism and other avant-garde movements on the other (Klotz 462-464). Many critics, therefore, prefer to speak of a gradual transition rather than a gap between different tendencies in the development of Russian literature in the early 1910s (Klotz 463, Keys 15). From this
perspective, Bely’s novel Petersburg marks the transition of Russian prose fiction in the wake of the Revolution of 1917 from a Symbolist aesthetic paradigm to avant-garde principles. The representation of universal dynamism and movement, the altered vision of the relationship between subject and object, subject and outer world, as well as the emphasis on fragmentation and simultaneity are among the innovative aspects of Bely’s novel, which demonstrate its intermediary character, particularly as they coexist with the novel’s explicit Symbolist subtext. Putting the novel into a broader context of
8 Thus, for example, Roger Keys criticizes Vladimir Alexandrov, who in his study of Bely’s literary career, fails
to recognize the major shift from an earlier clairvoyant view of art towards a more expressionist one (176-178). Consequently, according to Keys, Alexandrov’s interpretation of The Silver Dove, as well as of Petersburg, suffers a great deal of discrepancies and invalidities.
9 The first manifesto of the Russian Futurists, “The Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912), advanced these and
developments in arts and literature of the period at large proves an effective means of dealing with the literary form, for which, as some critics admit, literary criticism has not yet found necessary concepts or terms (Dolgopolov 313).
The beginning of the twentieth century was also a period marked by significant collaboration between artists of different kinds. The World of Art, a periodical issued under the editorship of Sergei Diaghilev, was among the major sources that acquainted the Russian artists, writers, and critics with the contemporary developments in the Western arts, particularly painting. One of the central ideas of this project was the “aspiration towards artistic synthesis”– the desire to bring various art forms together (Woronzoff 13). A close interaction between various art forms infused the arts, including literature, with new ideas, devices, and techniques. The World of Art also introduced paintings of the Italian Futurists to Russian public. Marinetti’s famous Manifesto was translated into Russian the same year it appeared, in 1909, and its author visited Russia twice, in 1910 and 1914. Likewise, Cubist art was widely known to the Russian public and Andrei Bely, no doubt, was well informed and familiar with the important developments in arts abroad, as well as at home.
Chapter II.
Montage: History and Theory.
2.1. Montage as a Term.
Though the technique of montage (and the related practice of collage10) has been generally recognized
as the most significant and distinguishing in the Modernist and avant-garde arts, there has been relatively little research conducted on the general theory of montage as an artistic method. The ambiguity prevails in many critical works and even dictionaries when it comes to defining the origins of montage as a technique as well as a term. The terminological inconsistency prevailing in various arts and scholarly studies can be accounted for in many ways. The confusion begins already when one considers a great number of related terms and techniques, such as collage, decoupage, papier collé, assemblage, photomontage, and editing widely applied in various forms of art. Furthermore, the term montage itself has come to designate various artistic practices and genres, as well as non-artistic phenomena. Thus, originating from technology, the term found its widespread application in cinema. Cinematographic montage, however, assumes various meanings as well, depending on the user and national language. As Ulrich Weisstein11 relates in his article, the notion has become synonymous with
editing or cutting– the English and the American usage of the term to define the process of selection and arrangement of cinematographic shots into a film (127). Filmic montage, on the other hand, can also refer to a distinctly aesthetic application of editing, in order to suggest a certain idea or impression through the juxtaposition or linking of heterogeneous or even contrasting shots. This latter application of the term, which experienced its climax in Soviet cinema of the 1920s among such avant-garde filmmakers as Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Vertov, and others, seems to have expanded into other art forms, particularly literature. Thus, montage became a central issue in literary theory as well. The over-emphasis on film-montage, however, led to the conclusions made by many critics that montage as a method in literature follows the example of film (Möbius 19). Moreover, it was often assumed that montage as a technique, as well as a term, stems from cinema: “Montage is, of course, a term
10 Critics have attempted to differentiate between the terms of montage and collage in various ways (Möbius
196-197). Collage seems to dominate when one speaks of painting. It also occurs as a term indicating the literary technique of juxtaposing fragments of other texts into a new piece of literature. Möbius explains the difference in this way: “Die Collage gibt somit für die Rezipienten die Gleichzeitigkeit des Räumlichen vor, in der sich aber […] auch eine zeitliche Tiefe erschließen lässt. Die Montage hingegen vermittelt eine fragmentarisierte
Räumlichkeit im zeitlichen Prozess, wobei auch die räumlichen Fragmente ihre genuine Zeit mitbringen” (198).
11 In his short article from 1978, Weisstein concludes that the term montage should be “limited to the
borrowed from film” (Dollenmayer 319). Möbius refers to one of the literary dictionaries defining montage as a term that came from cinema and a method of representation borrowed from film (Möbius 26). However, such a view ignores the earlier historical applications of the term under consideration in industry and technology. Literature and other art forms, moreover, testify to the fact that the semantic field of collage goes much further back than its application later in art. If one considers the Greek root of the word “kola” meaning glue, which constitutes the basis of the later Latin “colla”, French “coller” and eventually collage, then the earliest application of the technique of gluing can be found in Plato’s dialogue, while the term itself occurs in Socrates’ speech (Möbius 15).
Nowadays, the concept of montage is generally applied to refer to an artistic composite of juxtaposed elements. However, such a definition is problematical, as it will appear that nearly all art is montage. Yuri Lotman, a central figure of Russian structuralist narratology and semiotics, comes to a similar conclusion (Möbius 285-286). Lotman’s associate, Boris Uspenski, in his work A Poetics of Composition (1970), acknowledges montage as a universal principle governing art and the process of its creation. The central focus of Uspenski’s study is the articulation of a structure of a work of art through the investigation of points of view and their interrelationship. Any artistic text, according to the critic, possesses a certain level of structural organization. Narrative texts specifically consist, in their majority, of parts and sections, which together comprise a general picture. Uspenski,
consequently, applies the concept of montage in its general sense to any artistic text and defines it in terms of artistic production, “genesis” of a work of art, literature in particular (5).
To avoid generalisations and confusion, there is, therefore, a need to narrow the term of montage. A more accurate description would be that of a technique, which juxtaposes diverse
elements, often taking them out of one context and putting them into a new context. Such an approach, though, leaves out those artworks or texts, which do not make use of borrowed components, but contain such features of montage as juxtaposition and paratactic transitions. Therefore, in view of the ambiguity surrounding the status and the application of the concept, it is of great significance to delineate historically and theoretically the framework of montage as an artistic means before proceeding with the study of the chosen novel.
2.2. Montage in the 1900-1920s: Historical Overview.
boundaries between art and technology. Moreover, a new understanding of art alongside an altered status of the artist as a monteur came into being in this period. The photographers John Heartfield and George Grosz alongside Russian and Italian Futurist painters and poets expressed their fascination for technology and industrial development and preferred to assemble and construct rather than create art in a traditional way.
The period of avant-garde art between the two World Wars proved to be the peak of artistic montage, when the method infused various art forms, including music (Möbius18). According to Hanno Möbius, it was particularly in this period that various art forms in different countries witnessed the appearance of montage forms proper (what he refers to as “die Grundformen der Montage”) (139). The painting of this period advanced the technique of montage in art through the first Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque. The word “collage” is generally known to have come from the French verb “coller” and means “pasting, sticking, or gluing” (Hoffman 46). Collage was practiced long before it found its way to Cubist experimental painting, particularly in daily life and folk art. The earlier collages primarily functioned as simulations of reality. The early twentieth- century painting raised collage to the critical medium of art.
Many critics, such as Wescher, Weisstein, Hoffman, and Möbius, agree that Cubism in painting was a breakthrough of the method of montage. The innovative ideas and experimental techniques of the Cubists were prototypical of montage in later periods. They suggest a model of montage and introduce the main features of the technique. The early twentieth-century collage compositions are distinguished by the transfer of materials from one context to another and the
significance of both contexts for interpretation (Hoffman 47). The idea behind the first collages was to include different materials into a composition12. This idea was adopted and developed rapidly by other
artists, so that within a few years a host of genres, such as photomontage, construction, and assemblage started to play a central role in the arts. The quality of materials used and the range of strange elements incorporated into artworks evolved as well. The meaning of collage advanced beyond mere pasting or gluing towards insertion of materials and objects into a work of art in order to question the conventionally accepted nature of art as imitation of the real world (Möbius 142). The
consequences of such experiments were far-reaching. On the one hand, as already mentioned, the status of the work of art and art in general and its relation towards actual reality was called into question. On the other hand, the incorporation of non-artistic objects and materials into the work of art defied its closed character and broke its unity. The illusion of reality was challenged and wiped out through the fragmentation. Moreover, the traditional role of an artist underwent a significant
transformation. The material for an artwork is already there, and the artist’s task is to choose out of the
12 Pablo Picasso expressed this idea in this way: “If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us
multiplicity of ready-made objects and to (re-)arrange them in juxtaposition to one another or incorporate them into a new context. Furthermore, the recipient’s role altered as well. As strange objects enter a new work of art, the context out which they originate infuses the new text with a new meaning. The recipient is to recognize foreign elements and their original context (Möbius 142-144). He is stimulated to search for associations and to make necessary connections between fragments in order to obtain a complete picture.
Parallel to the Cubist experiments with collages, the notion of montage found its development in the artistic projects of the Futurists. The use of different materials discovered by the Cubists was taken up by the Italian Futurists. Fascinated by technological and industrial progress, the Futurists searched for ways to infuse their works with speed, dynamism, and energy. The montage principle of juxtaposing disparate elements was widely applied for the sake of propaganda13.
Experiments in the visual arts extended into the verbal arts, particularly poetry. Collage as a visual concept was soon adopted by other forms of art, especially literature. Cubist collage paintings were essentially characterized by breaking up objects and spaces and integrating foreign materials, introducing, thus, multiple perspectives. Literary texts underwent comparable procedures. Unified narrative perspective has been replaced by multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Extra-literary materials incorporated into a new literary text, fulfilled a role similar to the scraps of newspapers or cloth in the Cubist and Futurist collages. Cubist poetry (Gertrude Stein in America or Vladimir Mayakovski in Russia as the first important representatives), zaum- poetry, and Futurist concrete poetry contributed in this way to the development of montage forms (Möbius 146-165).
In the following years, the art of Dada took up the Cubists’ experimentations with foreign materials and increased their variety in unique and original ways (Möbius 165-176). From two-dimensional, collage developed into complex assemblies of everyday objects. This development brought new forms of montage art into being, such as assemblages and happenings (Möbius 189). The notion of a prefabricated, manufactured object was supplemented by a “ready-made” converted into an artwork. The provocative Dadaist constructions of incompatible parts and objects of everyday life discarded the dichotomy of art and reality. The experiments with text, typography, and visual material produced a variety of montage works in literature as well (Möbius 172).
Therefore, the central feature of the early twentieth century collages and montage works is the use of borrowed or strange materials or objects (“Fremdmaterial” in Möbius’s terms). Integration of these elements into a work of art and their juxtaposition breaks its continuity, opens it up, and results in fragmentation and interruption of a unified perspective. However, the question arises with respect to the artworks before the twentieth century, presenting similar features without making use of
borrowings and foreign materials. Literature in particular abounds with instances of the works that employ montage principles. Probably among the most famous and frequently quoted examples is the
use of parallel action in the comices agricoles scene of the novel Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert. The passage presents the dialogue of two lovers, Emma and Rodolphe, interrupted by the speech of the spokesperson at the show. The two actions, taking place simultaneously, unfold in Flaubert’s narrative as the alternation of shortening fragments, accompanied by the increase of tempo (Möbius 36-38). Möbius also gives earlier literary examples of the use of fragmentation and increase of tempo, which lead to the impression of simultaneity. Charles Dickens, for instance, employed effectively the major principles of montage in his rendering of the hustle and chaos of the market in Oliver Twist (Möbius 33-35).
Furthermore, in the second half of the eighteenth century, growing cities and the changing experience of space and time had their impact on literary works. In order to convey their impressions of social concurrency and simultaneity, authors resorted to unconventional narrative techniques. In place of traditional sequential narrative with the clear cause and consequence structure, there came records of visual and acoustic sensations and impressions, succeeding each other in rapid tempo. The linear nature of the narrative presented a challenge for writers who strove to reproduce chaos, speed, and simultaneity of urban space. Fragmentation proved an indispensable means to reach the effect. The significant feature of these representations in comparison to the later use of montage in narratives was the dependence on a single unified perspective of the narrator. Narrative fragmentation is
characteristic of such works as those by Hoffmann and Sterne as well. The technique was later refined by such Realist writers as Dickens and Flaubert and contributed to the development of montage forms of the twentieth century. Sergei Eisenstein gives credit to these early forms and proceeds in his elaboration of montage in film from the mentioned narrative techniques as applied in the works by Pushkin, Dickens, Flaubert, Sterne and others. An American filmmaker Griffith also admitted the influence, which the realist writers and their achievements had had on his cinematic method of parallel montage (Möbius 45). Thus, literature before the twentieth century contains narrative forms and practices that closely relate to montage in various art forms of later periods. These forms can be interpreted as important “Vorformen” and forerunners of the technique of montage (Möbius 30, 47).
According to Möbius, the tendency to transfer foreign elements and fragments into a new context increases historically. Thus, literary quotations and hidden montage forms belong to the early stages of montage history. Alongside fragmentation of narratives14, later montage forms develop such features of montage structures as the replacement of a unified perspective by multiple perspectives, as well as the rapid succession of various points of view. Thus, multiperspectival presentation is an essential feature of montage construction, achieved by means of breaking up the narrative strand by incorporated foreign parts. Such a method is widely applied in montage literature of the twentieth
14 Fragmentation in narrative literature developed, according to Möbius, from narratives cut into parts that
century, particularly by Dos Passos and Döblin. Nonetheless, polyphonic and multiperspectival structures occur in literature prior to the well-known montage narratives of Modernism. Mikhail Bachtin indicates the presence of their root forms already in the works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabbles. Furthermore, in his comprehensive study of the point of view, Boris Uspenski gives
numerous examples of the narratives, mostly from the nineteenth century (Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy), but also from the earlier periods, which contain multiple perspectives (or points of view). Thus, the narrative point of view often tends to change, so that it shifts from one character to another, from one scene or detail to another. Consequently, “the reader is given the task of piecing together the separate descriptions into one coherent picture” (Uspenski 60). In this respect, Uspenski often resorts to the analogy between literature on the one hand and cinema and cinematic montage on the other (62).
A close look at the history of literature, but also of other arts, will reveal, thus, that elements and features characteristic of montage occur long before it acquired its official place in art and art criticism. Is any art then conceivable without montage? Alternatively, is montage a method that is confined to a particular kind of art (literature) in a certain period of history? In view of these questions, it seems highly necessary to delineate the conceptual framework of montage and its features and to demarcate its limits with respect to the history and theory of literature in order to make it an operational approach in the analysis the chosen novel.
2.3. Theoretical Model of Montage.
The recent work of Hanno Möbius Montage und Collage is probably the most exhaustive and detailed account of montage and its development in the arts of the twentieth century. The author emphasises the central role of montage in avant-garde art on the one hand and traces its origin and sources in previous periods on the other. His principal statement is that montage as a literary as well as cinematic method starts its development in the early twentieth century. As mentioned above, within various forms of art and literature in particular, one encounters different phenomena that are akin to montage and are interpreted by the critic as its prototypes, or forerunners.
outside a newly created text and standing in opposition to its purely fictional parts (Möbius 227). Their status, however, is dual, as they become a part of a fictional text at the same time. The duality of the borrowed element lies, thus, in its relationship to the context of its origin on the one hand and the new context on the other. The tension between fiction and reality is central in this respect. On the one hand, incorporated documentary montage fragments seem to convey the aspiration to truthfulness, realism, objectivity (“Wahrheitsanspruch”); on the other hand, however, they expose constructiveness of a work and emphasise the process of artistic creation (Möbius 229). Furthermore, montage of elements taken from reality outside a literary text creates tension between artistic and non-artistic components. This tension was particularly significant in Futurism, for instance, and its challenge to the traditional meaning of art. In such cases, the intention is to sustain and even emphasise the strangeness of an incorporated fragment. A foreign object (a text fragment) becomes a part of an artefact, while at the same time it preserves its connection with everyday reality.
Presence of prefabricated and foreign parts in a montage construction necessarily interrupts the continuity of an artwork and breaks up its unity. The spatio-temporal and perspectival string of an incorporating text is broken in order to make space for a fragment to be integrated. Accordingly, the text loses its coherence; causality in its conventional sense is challenged or even abandoned
completely (Möbius 280). Montage becomes, moreover, an effective provocative means to challenge conventional notions of the unity of an artwork. When fragments or objects of everyday reality enter a new text, an artwork can no longer be seen as an isolated closed artistic entity.
Thus, the assimilating text and the incorporated fragment enter complex relationships, which influence both the status and meaning of the fragment on the one hand and the meaning of the incorporating text on the other. The crucial role in identifying these relationships within montage constructions belongs to the recipients (readers). As a montage fragment is integrated into a new text without any explicit indication of their association, it is up to the reader to make the necessary link and to discover the relation of a foreign fragment to a new context (Möbius 289). In other words, readers bring their own experiences into a reading process: original context of borrowed fragments is involved in the interpretation of a new text through readers. Furthermore, the readers’ challenge is to reconstruct causality, which is no longer self-evident in montage constructions15. The montage text, therefore, is
open for a variety of interpretations and invites each reader to construe its meaning in his or her own way. It seems justified to draw the conclusion that montage, as a method of fragmentation and incorporation of “Fremdmaterialen”, complicates the reading process and stimulates recipients to a more active participation in reading and interpretation in comparison with more traditional literature (Möbius 292).
Literary montage functions primarily as a compositional means of building up a narrative. It takes the form of juxtapositions of heterogeneous fragments, abrupt transitions between parts of a
15 “Die fehlende Kausalität der Texte gibt nunmehr den Rezipienten die Aufgabe, selbst nach einem möglichen
narration, disjointed plot lines that interlace in seemingly random ways, and shifts between various perspectives and points of view. The role of the narrator alters considerably in such a narrative. His presence becomes less explicit, at times even indistinct. On the other hand, the narrator is often assigned a crucial task of an engineer, a monteur who assembles parts and fragments into a whole.
Montage as an artistic phenomenon gained prominence especially in the Modernist and avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Its development into a significant representational device was symptomatic of the important shift in the experience of reality. Rapid industrial and scientific developments and the explosion of mass communication induced a new kind of perception of the world, which has come to be seen increasingly in the spatiality and simultaneity of objects and events.
The experience of fragmentation, discrepancy, and disintegration of traditional worldview required new forms of artistic expression. Constructive possibilities of montage lent themselves as effective means to convey the socio-historical and cultural changes in a new aesthetic form. In the form of montage, authors have at their disposal a means to bring together and arrange seemingly formless material. Aiming at authenticity and directness in representing the changing world, many authors began introducing elements of everyday life– extra-literary reality– into their works.
Fragments of newspapers, advertisements, signboards, but also authentic voices from the streets and fragments of individual lives entered narrative works as “raw” material to be assembled into a picture. Collage in painting followed by montage in cinema served as models for newly emerging literary works. Readers, accustomed to unified structures of the Realist novels, encountered works, which produced impressions of chaos, breakup, and incoherence by their fragmentary compositions.
Montage as a Critical Tool for the Interpretation of Texts.
The first half of the twentieth century set in motion the theoretical debates about montage and its artistic form. As already mentioned, the Russian school of Formalism followed later by the Tartu branch of Structuralism and Semiotics initiated the view of montage as a general principle of art making and demonstrated, thus, a new understanding of art. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Sergei Eisenstein became the major theorist of montage in cinema and pointed to its prototypes in the Realist literature of the nineteenth century. Ernst Bloch made the first step in the direction of the general theory of montage in 1935. The issue of (literary) montage surfaced in various critical works since then, but the research was mostly limited to a particular author or work of art.
appeared in the course of the following decades. The definition of montage by Victor Žmegač summarizes the theoretical views on the concept, particularly put forward by Volker Klotz, without going into detail about its social and historical aspects. The critic also assumes Bloch’s division between direct (“mittelbar”) and indirect (“unmittelbar”) montage and differentiates between open/demonstrative (“demonstrative”) and hidden (“integrierend”/”verdeckt”) montage (286). The hidden montage conceals the incorporation of (non-)artistic texts and does not break the integrity of the work, while the open narrative montage makes use of foreign elements in a demonstrative and provocative way and lays bare the construction of the work. The latter form of literary montage in particular has come to be associated with the famous Modernist novels by Joyce, Dos Passos, and Döblin.
2.4. The City Novel. Montage and the Representation of Metropolis.
The rising metropolis drew the attention of numerous artists and writers and for many of them it became a focal point of the new experience of reality in the beginning of the twentieth century. A number of novels concerning the city and the experience of urban reality appeared almost one after another during the 1920s and the 1930s. Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce, Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos, and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin are traditionally considered the major modern city novels. The list can be rightfully supplemented by Andrei Bely’s Petersburg. Each of the mentioned authors has his own style of writing and presents his own solution to the modern crisis of representation. Nevertheless, all of them were inspired by the developments of montage in other art forms and applied the fundamental principles of the technique in the expression of their metropolitan visions. Thus, as early as 1913, Döblin referred to his narrative technique as “Kinostil”, thus pointing out the method he shared with filmmaking (Möbius 19, 447). Similarly, Dos Passos admitted the great influence that cinema produced on the development of his artistic method. Both writers were inspired by other art forms, such as photography, theatre, architecture, and, not least, painting. Along with Joyce, they endeavoured to infuse their writing with experimental devices and montage principles derived from Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dada. The authors also radicalised the existing literary montage techniques, such as parallel action, use of quotations, and shifts in narrative point of view.
well as with energy, vibration, speed, and restlessness16. The penetration of the changing urban reality
into the consciousness of city dwellers and the complex interrelationship between the inner and outer worlds became a central issue for the city novelists. The novels, therefore, present the multifaceted image of the city, which is no more reduced to the background setting or mere descriptions of the outside world.
Confusion and multiplicity of perception and experience take the form of radical polyphony17
and multiple perspectives in the city narrative:
Der Verzicht auf eine eindeutige Perspektive des Erzählers und ihre Überführung in eine relativierte Mehrperspektivität der Romanpersonen ist mit dem Aufbrechen des malerischen Raums seit dem Kubismus vergleichbar, unterliegt in der zeitbetonten Erzählkunst aber anderen Voraussetzungen (Möbius 431).
The problem of simultaneous presentation of various perspectives and points of view on an object could be effectively resolved in Cubist painting, but due to the sequential nature of literature, it presented major challenges to the writers of prose. The device of parallel action, which was already widely applied by many authors before the twentieth century, was radicalised. Fragmentation and juxtaposition of numerous fragments next to each other, without conventional transitions, reminded of an elaborate cut-and-paste technique of painterly collage and film montage. Musical and spatial structuring principles came to replace the more conventional linear build-up of the narrative dependent on the development of plot and characters. Joyce, for instance, developed a great number of verbal leitmotifs, which form an intricate pattern of associations in his novels. In a similar manner, as it will be shown later, Andrei Bely constructed many of his works, Petersburg in particular, by analogy with musical composition.
In his novel about New York, Manhattan Transfer, John Dos Passos captures diversity and density of the modern metropolis through the presentation of different life stories of a number of city dwellers. Many plot lines turn into numerous narrative episodes and scenes that succeed each other in the manner of filmic parallel montage. The narrative sequence (“Nacheinander”), consequently, acquires the quality of simultaneity (“Nebeneinander”) through parallelism and juxtaposition of fragments (Möbius 439). The novel also lacks a unified perspective as the narrative involves numerous points of view. The heterogeneity of perspectives is reinforced by the incorporation of newspaper clippings, fragments of news reports, advertisements, and popular songs. The foreign texts function as documentary materials, which “chronicle the life of the city”18, as well as bring a new perspective into
the text of the novel.
16 See Döblin: “In das Bild von heute gehört die Zusammenhanglosigkeit […], das Flatternde, Rastlose” (qtd. in
Möbius 430).
17 I refer here to a general notion of polyphony as a feature of narrative, which displays a variety of points of
view and voices.
The age-old device of quotation acquires a different quality in the city novel. Thus, Joyce’s character, Stephen Dedalus, associates with various historical and literary figures by means of quotations and borrowings from other texts. Allusiveness also provides an infinite range of possibilities to compare, contrast, and interpret the characters and events. Joyce widely applies the allusive method in an attempt to “escape from the confines of time,” as “a revolt against the
entrapment of historical time” (Woronzoff 150). Bely’s narrative method, likewise, employs a wide range of historical and literary allusions. His novel, like that of Joyce, presents a collage of cultural texts encompassing history and mythology of the depicted city, as well as creating a prismatic, multidimensional image of urban reality.
The influence of the city on the individual is among the central issues in the modern city novels. For Dos Passos and Döblin, the city appears a mighty and threatening force. The city as perceived and represented through the consciousness of the characters replaces the city as a background or scenery of the earlier literature19. Subjective visions, immediate impressions, and
sensory data abound in the novels, turning the narrative into an abstract kaleidoscopic picture of urban reality. Similarly, Bely renders the personality of Saint Petersburg by means of powerful expressive imagery. The writer also exploited the experimental artistic techniques of the Cubists and Futurists to offer a new literary account of the energy, motion, and confusion comprising the modern metropolis. Similar to the mentioned city novels, Bely’s work gave rise to the remarkable vision of the city with its dynamism, vigour, and changeability.
Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg reveals noteworthy parallels to major early twentieth-century fiction. The author shares not only his interest in the phenomenon of the growing metropolis. His representational method and innovative narrative techniques are also rooted in the artistic principle of montage.
19 See Peter I. Barta: “Subjective perception and inner response offer more truthful accounts than the stale,
Chapter III.
The Study of Petersburg: Montage of Cultural Texts (“Fremdmaterialien”).
The plot of Petersburg covers a few days in October 1905. Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, the son of a prominent Petersburg state official, Senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, is paid a visit by his acquaintance, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin (alias a terrorist Neulovimy- Evasive). On behalf of “the party”, with which Nikolai Apollonovich was connected by a promise given rashly, Dudkin asks him to store a package. The package turns out to be a sardine tin with a bomb intended to kill the Senator. At the masquerade ball organised a day or so later at the house of the Tsukatovs, young Ableukhov receives a letter that reveals the nature of the promise and the content and purpose of the package. Unable to bear such a serious blow, Nikolai Apollonovich rushes outside in his Red Domino, thus becoming a talk of the day. Later he turns to Dudkin for help. Dudkin, who in his turn could not believe that the party would make such a horrible request, kills the author of the letter, Lippanchenko, and goes insane. The confusion increases as the Senator’s wife, who left her family to join an Italian lover and spent some years abroad, comes back and reconciles with her husband. The bomb, which brought about chaos in the lives of the characters, explodes eventually without causing any damage. From the epilogue, the readers learn that the Senator retired and moved with his wife to the
countryside, while his son spent years in Egypt and returned to Russia after the death of his parents to live a lonely and secluded life. The novel also includes other important characters, such as Sofia Likhutina, with whom Nikolai Apollonovich is unrequitedly in love, as well as her husband, officer Likhutin, who fights with Nikolai and attempts suicide. The enigmatic statue of Peter the Great, the Falconet’s Bronze Horseman, roaming the streets of Saint Petersburg and haunting the characters of the novel, is another significant figure and even the novel’s leading character, according to Vyacheslav Ivanov (qtd. in Barta 21). His constant presence in the lives and consciousness of the characters signifies their fate, dictated by the higher invisible powers.
European culture, to fight the backwardness of the Asian Russia, and meant to lead the renewed Russia into the future, Petersburg becomes the central symbol and the main protagonist in Bely’s novel.
The story of Petersburg is, thus, simple. However, the novel strikes the readers by its unusual, highly complicated narration. The traditional sequential mode of representation gives way to the fragmented accounts of events and characters lacking coherence and succeeding each other in a seemingly random manner. The multiplicity of different viewpoints and voices replaces the
conventional unified perspective. The emphasis shifts from the narrated story to the narrative process. Bely resorts to the new mode of representation and applies the experimental narrative techniques, which display close parallels with the montage and collage techniques of the avant-garde art, in order to construct the image of the city and build up the narrative. Intertextuality permeates the novel: a variety of literary texts, as well as historical and cultural points of reference, produces a literary collage. Foreign elements, such as fragments of other literary texts, newspapers, and other
documentary material function as building blocks in the complex image of the urban reality. In its application of montage techniques, Bely’s novel also reveals remarkable parallels with Cubist and Futurist painting as well as with the avant-garde cinema. This chapter will focus on intertextuality and intermediality as significant features of Petersburg and their function in the montage structure of the novel.
3.1. The Role of Intertextuality. The Literary Myth of Petersburg.
The essential principle of montage, as indicated in the previous chapter, is the processing and integration of foreign elements (“Fremdmaterialien”). For literature, external texts are the most obvious “Fremdmaterialien” to be incorporated. Numerous allusions and borrowings from the famous works in Russian literature, relating mostly to the theme of Saint Petersburg, bring Andrei Bely’s novel close to the later montage constructions by Joyce, Dos Passos, and Döblin. This feature of Bely’s novelistic art has been noticed and pointed out by some of the critics. Thus, Dolgopolov mentions the writer’s constant necessity to rely upon somebody, to use and repeat somebody else’s motifs and images, to lead a continuous discussion (73). The critic emphasises that Bely is among the few authors whose literary works abound in so many “borrowed motifs, plot lines, and artistic images, coming from the works of other writers” (73). “Not Andrei Bely, but the complete history of
