Cooke, Olga M. Andrei Bely's Petersburg: A Centennial Celebration (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 762 Following the chapter on the intense friendship and suppressed inner life at the centre of ‘A Weak Heart’, Corrigan turns to different conceptions of doubling and self-forgetting in various early works, re-calibrating the idea of self-consciousness to provide a welcome corrective to Bakhtin’s overly optimistic assessment of Dostoevskian dialogue. Jumping to the post-Siberian texts, the analysis of The Insulted and Injured addresses motifs of transparency, self-revelation and hidden traumas, arriving at a striking reinterpretation of the ‘Lazarus’ theme from Crime and Punishment. The chapter on The Idiot, focusing on the triadic relationship of Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin and Nastas´ia Filippovna, offers new insights, but in covering ground that has been investigated by so many critics, its originality appears less pronounced. The ‘empty’ self of Stepan Trofimovich in Demons as the source of the mass loss of personality afflicting the town, and the self displaced to an external object — the letter Arkadii has sewn into his clothes — in The Adolescent, both show to good effect how the motifs from the earlier works are recast to fulfil Dostoevskii’s more expansive later vision. The interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov addresses the main characters’ dreams as epiphanic experiences that represent ‘the very dramatic breach of a series of collective selves’ at the centre of the novel’s plot (p. 121), brings the study together effectively, but renders the Conclusion, which touches upon ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, perhaps slightly redundant. Unusually, there are no separate chapters on Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment. The final stages of earlier chapters elucidate connections with the latter, but the former is mentioned only in passing, an absence that may indicate the extent to which the approach adopted by Corrigan departs from the mainstream of Dostoevskii studies, but nevertheless feels like a slight gap in his theory. The analysis he presents, however, more than makes up for the omission, perhaps particularly in relation to works that are often neglected: ‘A Weak Heart’, ‘The Landlady’, Netochka Nezvanova and The Insulted and Injured. This is a study that will be required reading for Dostoevskii specialists for years to come. UCL SSEES Sarah J. Young Cooke, Olga M. (ed.). Andrei Bely’s Petersburg: A Centennial Celebration. The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2017. xiii + 260 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $99.00. A fine tribute to the memory of Georgette Donchin, author of the pioneering Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958) and of the Introduction to the Chicago Russian Specialities 1967 edition of Petersburg, and REVIEWS 763 much loved, gratefully remembered lecturer at the School of Slavonic Studies in London, this collection of studies by American, British, Scandinavian, Russian and Israeli scholars is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of Belyi’s extraordinary novel. Some of the articles have been previously published but are here cogently arranged and presented, often for the first time in English translation, by the editor in a helpful ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–18). Preliminaries include a foreword by Thomas R. Beyer Jr. which emphasizes the not infrequent comparison drawn between Belyi’s Petersburg and Joyce’s Ulysses. Beyer regrets how little Petersburg is still read, not only in translation but, in spite of two comparatively recent academic editions, even in the author’s own country. Belyi himself, he tells us, had hoped that future generations would yield readers ‘who could make him accessible to others’. ‘This collection of authors’, Beyer concludes, ‘more than fulfils his wish’ (p. vii). The ‘Introduction’ is followed by ‘Acknowledgements’ which identify and contextualize individual contributors, and by Vladimir Nabokov’s charming, stream-of-consciousness reflections on Petersburg, originally delivered as a lecture and here seamlessly prepared from a rough draft in the Vladimir Nabokov Berg Collection at the New York Public Library by Brett Cooke, who maintains that the publication ‘elucidates Nabokov’s often-cited statement that Petersburg is one of the four great novels of the twentieth century’ (p. viii). Given these preliminaries, it seems legitimate to put the question: will this highly specialized symposium really make the novel more accessible to a wider readership? The answer is, at best, a...