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Demonstration on October 17, 1905 by Ilya Yefimovich Repin Picture sourceWhat an amazing, strange, wonderful, funny, frustrating, magical book. Needless to say, I highly recommend it. So what have you heard about Petersburg? Vladimir Nabokov declared it one of the most important works of the twentieth century, but he also stated no good English translation […]
Woman Sitting on a Red-Flowered Sofa by Gustave Caillebotte (1882)Picture source Anna Petrovna! We had forgotten about her: but Anna Petrovna had returned and now she was waiting…but first: —those twenty four hours! — —those twenty-four hours in our narration expanded and scattered throughout psychic spaces: as a hideous dream; and the closed off the […]
Work is taking all my time…and then some. But I wanted to share a passage I read last night that captured much of what I’m enjoying about Petersburg. There have been many plot twists and revelations. What should I do when I want to comment on what I’ve read before more is revealed and before […]
Yet another extended quote from Petersburg. Many of the themes and motifs I mentioned in the first post continue to surface. Early in Chapter Six, the crowd in the streets is described as a wave, made up not of people but parts of bodies and articles of clothing. Bely captures the feeling surrounding the loss […]
To make up for light posting and little time to read, I wanted to share a passage from Petersburg that I found fascinating. I realize it is an overlong excerpt, but I found I couldn’t cut anything out of it and retain its power. To set the stage: Nikolai Apollonovich (Kolenka) has just returned home […]
Those were strange, misty days: venomous October was passing with its freezing tread; frozen dust blew around the city in drab-brown vortices; and the golden whisper of foliage lay down submissively on the paths of the Summer Garden, and he rustling purple lay down submissively at people’s feet, to wind and chase at the feet […]
How terrible is the fate of an ordinary, perfectly normal man: his life is resolved by a vocabulary of readily understood words, and by the practice of exceedingly clear actions; those actions carry him into the boundless distance, like a little boat rigged with words and gestures that are entirely expressible; if, however, that boat […]
Nikolai, upon crashing a ball wearing a cape and domino but freezing on the dancefloor, begins to realize he has turned a bad situation into something worse… It was still him, of course: Nikolai Apollonovich. He had come today to say—to say what? He had forgotten his own self; forgotten his thoughts; and forgotten his […]
Apollon Apollonovich had a strange secret of his own: a world of figures, contours, tremors, weird physical sensations—in short: a universe of oddities. This universe always arose on the brink of sleep, and it arose in such a way that, at the moment he dropped off to sleep, Apollon Apollonovich would remember all the incoherences […]
“During late 1905 and several times in 1906, Andrei Bely stayed in one of the furnished rooms at the “Bel-vu” in the corner building on 64 Nevsky and Karavannaia Street. It was during these stays in Petersburg, prompted by his frenzied and tormented love for Blok’s wife Liubov Dmitrievna, that the vision of Petersburg began […]