Abstract
Using the example of Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg, Sioli examines how walking reveals aspects of the way we engage with the urban environment, offering an understanding of the city as perceived and sensed by the body. Sioli shows how the city’s built environment triggers thoughts and decisions among the novel’s pedestrians, her analysis illuminating the characteristics of the modern city walker. Since this walker is not a non-participatory passive observer intrigued by the phantasmagoria of the city (W. Benjamin), the chapter examines the more open and creative relationship he experiences with the urban environment, one that manifests his perception as action. Unlike Benjamin’s flâneur or Engel’s monad, Bely’s characters demonstrate that walking the city streets had become a crucial aspect of human consciousness.
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Notes
- 1.
Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloomington, 1978), 12, 32. All subsequent citations of the novel are to the same edition. For reasons of convenience and economy they are followed only by a page indication next to an abbreviation that signifies the title of the novel: P. The novel was originally published in book form in 1916. As Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad point out in the introduction to their translation, however, Bely was dissatisfied with this first complete edition, and began tinkering with it immediately. ‘Working more by massive cutting than by actually rewriting, he subjected the text to such changes that the result was virtually a new novel, which appeared in 1922. The 1922 text represents the last version of the novel that Bely himself created before censorship intervened’ (ibid., xxiv).
- 2.
Bely was the originator of what later became a school of ‘ornamental prose’, a prose that concentrates the reader’s attention on small details as independent smaller units: Konstantin Mochulsky, Andrei Bely: His Life and Works, trans. Nora Szalavitz (Ann Arbor, 1977), 7.
- 3.
Elaine Blair, Literary Petersburg: A Guide to the City and its Writers (New York, 2006), 71–2.
- 4.
Franscisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, 1993), 9.
- 5.
Alva Nöe, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness (New York, 2009), 40, 47.
- 6.
Alva Nöe, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 1–2.
- 7.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 416–55.
- 8.
Ulla Hakanen, ‘Panoramas from Above and the Street from Below’, in Olga Matich (ed.), Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900–1921 (Madison, 2010), 199.
- 9.
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, 2005), 129.
- 10.
According to the 1914 edition of Baedeker’s handbook for travellers, there are three main categories of streets in Petersburg. ‘Streets of the first class are called Prospékti, or Perspectives. Among them there are the Nevski and Voznesénski Prospékts. Streets of the second rank are called Úlitzi while streets of the third rank are called Pereúlki (lanes)’: Karl Baedeker, Baedeker’s Russia 1914 (London, 1971), 101.
- 11.
Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York, 1995), 10–11.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Many walks in Petersburg are triggered by the characters’ wish to avoid the usually suffocating atmosphere of their domestic environments, longing for the soothing comfort of being at home in the city: Peter I. Barta, Bely, Joyce and Döblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel (Gainesville, 1996), 116–17.
- 14.
The topic of patricide was common among the turn-of-the-twentieth-century authors who looked at it as both a natural childhood wish for a parent to be dead, seen in Freudian terms, and as a metaphor for breaking with the past, seen in the context of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both Freudian and Nietzschean influences have been traced in Bely’s Petersburg. See Judith Wermuth-Atkinson, The Red Jester: Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as a Novel of the European Modern (Berlin, 2012), 119–20.
- 15.
Peter Barta, ‘Symbolization of Urban Space in Burges-la-Morte and in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg’, in Philip Mosley (ed.), Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays (Madison & London, 1996), 164.
- 16.
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York, 1997), 182.
- 17.
Alexander I (1777–1825) was tsar from 23 March 1801 to 1 December 1825 and tried to introduce liberal reforms during the first half of his reign. The quotes are from Hakanen, ‘Panoramas from Above’, 199.
- 18.
Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (London; 2001), 73.
- 19.
Alter, Imagined Cities, 93.
- 20.
Crossley, Social Body, 85.
- 21.
Andrey Bely, ‘The Magic of Words’, in Steven Cassedy (ed.), Selected Essays of Andrey Bely (Berkeley, 1985), 94. The Russian name of Andrei Bely (Андре́й Бе́лый) appears in different transliterations in the various English translations of his novels and theoretical work: Andrei and Andrey for the first name, Bely and Biely for the last. Throughout the chapter I use the transliteration ‘Andrei Bely’ but whenever the name appears as ‘Andrey’ or ‘Biely’ in titles of cited works, the footnote references respect the different transliteration.
- 22.
Alter, Imagined Cities, 93–4.
- 23.
Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History (Berkeley, 1998), 228.
- 24.
John Cournos, ‘Introduction’, in Andrey Biely, St. Petersburg (New York, 1959), xii.
- 25.
The literary production of the nineteenth century in Petersburg portrays the city as a menacing presence, a hostile environment; its inhabitants believe that the city is cursed by the fact that it was built at the expense of so many human lives. Authors like Pushkin and Dostoyevsky based the plots of their stories on this perception of the city. It was at the turn of the century that ideas about Petersburg began to shift and that an admiration for the city and its cosmopolitan spirit developed among authors and poets like Alexander Block, Anna Akhmatova and, of course, Bely: Blair, Literary Petersburg, 12.
- 26.
Nöe, Out of Our Heads, 15–32.
- 27.
Varela, Thompson and Rosch, Embodied Mind, 25.
- 28.
Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, 1993), 87.
- 29.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendhall (Berkeley, 1984), 105.
- 30.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1998), 199.
- 31.
Crossley, Social Body, 89.
- 32.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Architecture and Narrative’, trans. Huw Evans, in Identity and Difference: Integration and Plurality in Today’s Forms: Cultures between the Ephemeral and the Lasting (Milan, 1996), 67.
- 33.
Merleau-Ponty develops this argument in his attempt to contradict Jean Paul Sarte’s view as expressed in Being and Nothingness that any event is equally possible at any time. Quoted in Crossley, Social Body, 135.
- 34.
Bely was associated with the symbolist literary movement but, as scholars like Alexander Woronzoff and Steven Cassedy have pointed out, he developed a personal and particular interpretation of Symbolism. In 1930 Bely wrote in his memoirs that ‘I am a symbolist. My sensory organs are measuring instruments’: quoted in Christa Boris, The Poetic World of Andrey Bely (Amsterdam, 1977), 12. The statement idiosyncratically combines two contradictory notions of perception under one common belief. The metaphorical and suggestive approach to reality advocated by the symbolist writers, and an active, engaged, embodied interaction with the world that values direct perception and the immediateness of the body as a measure of its surroundings, seem to merge. Indeed in many of the novel’s urban descriptions the two seemingly contradictory approaches merge poetically, revealing both symbolic and sensorial elements of the city.
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Sioli, A. (2016). Walking in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg: Active Perception and Embodied Experience of the City. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_11
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