There is so much going on in Bely’s book and I know I won’t be able to capture it all, but hopefully with several smaller posts on it I can at least provide some of the flavor. I wasn’t sure how often I would post on Petersburg, but after finishing the first chapter I wanted to get started. The prologue and first chapter can be found here, translated by Robert A. 74 (all quotes and spellings are from the Pushkin Press edition, 2009, translation by John Elsworth) Once his brain has erupted in the mysterious stranger, that stranger exists-exists in fact: he will not vanish from the Petersburg Prospects, as long as the senator exists with thoughts of this kind, because thought, too, exists.

Apollon Apollonovich is endowed with the attributes of this existence and with the attributes of this existence all his cerebral play is endowed too. The author, having once displayed these pictures of illusions, ought quickly to remove them and break off the thread of the narration with this very sentence but…the author will not behave like this: he has sufficient right not to do so.Ĭerebral play is only a mask beneath this mask proceeds the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us: and what if Apollon Apollonovich is woven from our brain-he will still be able to terrify with another startling existence that attacks at night. This shadow arose by chance in Senator Ableukhov’s consciousness, receiving there its ephemeral existence but Apollon Apollonovisch’s consciousness is a shadow consciousness, because he too is possessed of ephemeral existence, being the product of the author’s imagination: needless, idle cerebral play.

In this chapter we have seen Senator Ableukhov we have also seen the senator’s idle thoughts in the form of the senator’s house, and in the form of the senator’s son, who carries in his head idle thoughts of his own and lastly, we have seen another idle shadow-that of the stranger. All three members of this famous erotic triangle met in Bely’s room in the spring of 1906 to discuss their troubled relationship.' 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 to crystallize in the novelist’s mind. '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.

Bely st petersburg