CC BY
32
УДК 82.09 АНДРЕЙ БЕЛЫЙ
ББК 83.3(2Рос=Рус) И ИСАЙЯ
©2017. M. Юнггрен
Гетеборгский университет, Стокгольм, Швеция Дата поступления статьи: 23 декабря 2016 г. Дата публикации: 25 марта 2017 г. DOI: 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-1-212-219
Аннотация: Тема гибели и возрождения — постоянный мотив в творчестве Андрея Белого. Ощущение катастрофы присутствует на личном, национальном и космическом уровне. В значительной степени Белый опирается на Откровение Иоанна Богослова, однако иногда обнаруживается связь и с так называемым Апокалипсисом от Исайи, в частности, с его пророчеством о развратном городе, который за свою греховность был разрушен мстительным Богом, а затем возродился в новой форме. Так, Москва и Петербург в романах Белого представляются городами-разносчиками болезей; городская цивилизация описывается враждебной людям и противоположной природе. Сочинения Белого являются своеобразной эхокамерой, полной цитат и аллюзий. Он часто цитирует самого себя, многократно повторяет ключевые заимствованные фразы. Одна из них — цитата из Апокалипсиса пророка Исайи «Ужас и яма и петля для тебя, житель земли!« проходит сквозь все творчество Белого. Она также встречается в его письмах, которые, на наш взгляд, должны включаться в общий корпус художественных текстов писателя.
Ключевые слова: проза Белого, Апокалипсис от Исайи, современный город, греховность, эхокамера, цитаты.
Информация об авторе: Магнус Юнггрен — почетный профессор русской литературы при Гетеборгском университете. Grondalsvagen 177, 117 69 Stockholm, Sweden.
E-mail: magnusljunggren@telia.com
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ANDREJ BELYJ AND ISAIAH
This is an open access article ©2017. M. Ljunggren
distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
University of Gothenburg Received: December 23, 2016 Date of publication: March 25, 2017
Abstract: The theme of doom and resurrection is a constant in Andrej Belyj's works. Catastrophism on the personal, national, overarching cultural and cosmic planes are always present. To a significant degree, of course, he draws upon Revelation, but he has a recurrent need of Isaiah's Apocalypse and its mighty prophecy about the "city of confusion" that is condemned for its sinfulness and destroyed by the vengeful God to eventually arise in a new form. It is no coincidence that in his great novels, Belyj condemns Petersburg and Moscow as breeding grounds of disease. He regards urban civilization as hostile to humans and contrary to nature. His collected works are an echo chamber abounding in quotations and allusions. Especially often he quotes himself, returning to borrowed key phrases. An especially important passage about the sinful city from the Isaiah Apocalypse — "Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth" — runs throughout Belyj's oeuvre (since his letters should also be regarded as one of his artistic genres).
Key words: Belyj's prose, Isaiah Apocalypse, catastrophism, modern city, sinfulness, echo-chamber, quotations.
Information about the author: Magnus Ljunggren, Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at the University of Gothenburg. Grondalsvagen 177, 117 69 Stockholm, Sweden.
E-mail: magnusljunggren@telia.com
At the beginning of what is known as "Isaiah's Apocalypse" in the Book of Isaiah, there is a powerful prophecy about the destruction of a metropolis, followed by the advent of a new era. The first chapter of the apocalypse, 24, which in the New International Version bears the rubric "The Lord's Devastation of the Earth," declares that God will destroy his creation as punishment for humanity's sinful ways. The entire world will "languish and fade away." All joy will be darkened, and the few who remain will call out in vain to the Lord. Beset by terrible tremors and quakes, the earth shall reel to and fro "like a drunkard" and never rise again. The heathen "city of confusion" will be reduced to a pile of rubble.
One key passage is 24:17, which in the King James Version reads: "Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth." In the New International Version it is condensed somewhat to: "Terror and pit and snare await you, people of the earth." The Russian translation is also shorter: "Uzas i jama i petlja dlja tebja, zitel' zemli!" As in fact Vladimir Orlov managed to point out in the late Soviet period, Nikolaj Gumilev quotes it in his poem Zvezdnyj uzas, written shortly before he was executed in 1921 and published that year both in volume two of the Acmeists' Cech poetov and in his last poetry collection Ognennyj stolp. There an old man one starlit night foretells misfortune for his young descendants: "Gore! Gore! Strach, petlja i jama / Dlja togo, kto na zemle rodilsja." Basing himself on the ex-Symbolist critic of the 1920s Jurij Verchovskij, Orlov emphasizes that here in his final phase, Gumilev seems to be returning to the Symbolism out of which his poetry once emerged before he turned against the movement. As in the works of the Symbolists, the perspective of the poem is apocalyptic, a dark commentary on the age that is at the same time deeply personal. The cocky romantic world conqueror has become a pessimistic witness of the times [11, p. 126-127].
In a 2004 article on Andrej Belyj's novel Serebrjanyj golub', Nikolaj Bogo-molov argues that Gumilev was even more indebted to Symbolism than Orlov asserts, since his Bible quotation probably came via Belyj [9, p. 176-177]. Near the end of Belyj's first novel, the young poet Dar'jal'skij realizes that in his desire to unite with and reincarnate the mother earth of Russia by participating in the orgiastic rituals of the Khlyst sectarians, he has been playing irresponsible games with the holiest of holies and conjured up satanic forces from the depths of the common people. Although she has features of a witch, he is irresistibly attracted to the peasant woman Matrena, the incarnated Earth Mother and the bearer of the future world redeemer: "No on uze nacinal ponimat', cto to — uzas, petlja i jama: ne Rus', a kakaja-to temnaja bezd-na vostoka pret na Rus' iz etich radeniem utoncennych tel. "Uzas!" — podumal on" [7, p. 188, 193]. Bogomolov emphasizes that here, as in Gumilev's poem, the stars light up the firmament [9, p. 176]. Dar'jal'skij is in the power of the mystical Doves, the captive of their diabolical leader. He is doomed, and soon he will be murdered.
The allusion to Isaiah has been pointed out earlier by Aleksandr Lavrov in his doctoral dissertation Andrej Belyj v 1900-gody [10, p. 291]. In the notes to Belyj and Aleksandr Blok's correspondence, Lavrov also notes that the quotation occurs in Belyj's letter of 10 January 1913 from Berlin, where it figures in a very detailed report just before the founding of the Anthroposophical Society and at a point when Belyj was deep into work on his second novel, Peterburg [8, p. 486, 489 (note)]. In the context of his occult meditation exercises and closely related interpretation of the Symbolist experience centered on the 1905 Revolution, Belyj attempts in this letter to explain to Blok what has now become clear to him. He wants to show why in this situation it is Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science that offers him the only possible way out of the crisis besetting Symbolism and Russia. He stresses that the Anthroposophical meditations he is engaged in are painful but enlightening. It is as though he casts off his "old soul" and is simultaneously reborn and fortified. To illustrate what he is experiencing, he quotes Afanasij Fet and his own and Blok's earlier works. Notably, by so doing he is distancing himself from what the newly minted Acmeist Gumilev — echoing Brjusov — stands for. Blok and Belyj himself had tried to conjure up the soul of the people in their poetry, but the result was "uzas i petlja Tebe, celovek!" The reason was exactly what had been suggested in Serebrjanyj golub', namely that those who were unprepared and ignorant had allowed themselves to be misled by black magic. As is evident from the famous, anguished apostrophe to Russia toward the end of Mertvye dusi, Gogol' before them had sensed the eyes of that soul upon
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him. Unable to cope with it, however, he perished. Now Steiner was urging Belyj and other nationally conscious Russians to train themselves to discern what it was saying and be in a position to reverse the nation's disastrous course. Russian Symbolists, and with them all of Russia, must undergo a purification process in order to avoid "the fear and the pit" and rise to new life [8, p. 486, 489 (note)].
Thus here, I think, there is link between Serebrjanyj golub' and Peterburg. In the former the poet escaped to the countryside, the sectarians, the earth. In the latter the young heroes are imprisoned in a doomed metropolis of stone that recalls Isaiah's city. In that text Belyj had already prophesied apocalyptic cosmic quakes and tremors as the judgment upon this Petersburgian Babylon. In a second letter to Blok written in Berlin at the same time, he describes the German capital in terms strongly reminiscent of the Russian city: perverted and corrupt. Influenced by his friend Emilij Metner's anti-Semitic characterization of Berlin musical life as ruined by "Jewish commerce," Belyj speaks of Berlin as "perniciously Judaized" [8, p. 502]. He took care to conceal such outbursts in the novel, but the tendency is present below the surface, and it is not for nothing that the destroyer of the city, Lippancenko, has Mongolian-Semitic physical characteristics.
Belyj, in fact, alludes to Isaiah on several different occasions. Interestingly enough, Isaiah's judgment falls again some ten years later when the writer again portrays Berlin, the city to which he was driven in temporary exile. In his essay Odna iz obitelej carstva tenej (1924) he notes of the decadent and morally lax post-war atmosphere in the city: "Opuskaju glaza, ctoby ne brosit'sja i ne kriknut': 'O petlja i jama tebe, burzuaznyj Sodom!'" He describes the scene as organized madness, hallucinatory confusion, pervasive malice and baseness, where speculation and "Negro drums" have turned life upside down. One hears a distant echo of Metner here, but now there are some new expressions of racism (that will also soon reappear in Be-lyj's trilogy of Moscow novels). In addition to the "Japanese mugs" that could be glimpsed in Peterburg, here it is black, "primitive" cultures that seem to be invading Europe and setting it on the path to disintegration [4, p. 33].
The truth of the matter is that throughout his works, with more or less explicit Biblical support, Belyj regards urban civilization as hostile to humans and contrary to nature. It is no coincidence that in all of his powerful novels he condemns Petersburg and Moscow as breeding grounds of disease. His collected works are an echo chamber abounding in quotations and allusions. Especially often he quotes
himself, returning to both his own and borrowed key phrases. As early as 1911, just before he began working on Peterburg, he in fact cited Isaiah in his article "Egipet" in connection with the complex anguish he experienced in March of that year as he contemplated the Sphinx and the nearby pyramids at Giza. It was outside Cairo that the idea of his novel was born as he mused on the riddle of the Sphinx, much as he a few years earlier had sat and meditated at the foot of the Bronze Horseman statue in Petersburg and sought an answer to Puskin's question about the fate and future of Russia. He writes that both at the Sphinx and high up on the pyramids he sensed the presence of treachery and terror, the "provocation" and diabolical duplicity that would become a central theme in his literary interpretation of Russia's contemporary tragedy. It was as though everything had been turned inside out and nothing was what it purported to be. He seemed to hear the heavy thud of a falling body, accompanied by the words: "Uzas i petlja tebe, sovremennyj celovek" [3, p. 179]1. This, he concluded, was Cairo's message: "Petlja i jama tebe zdes', sovremennyj celovek!" [2, p. 214]. After having been confronted with the Devil himself, who has emerged from an anti-world where everything is its opposite, Aleksandr Dudkin in Peterburg wishes that the city would be reduced to rubble [5, p. 306]. Finally, in the epilogue, Nikolaj Ableuchov finds himself in Egypt, where he becomes aware of modern humanity's perdition and here, among the massive stone pyramids, recognizes his own doomed civilization. The overwhelming experience of Giza is palpable throughout.
Belyj's impressions of Egypt as described in his memoirs written in the 1930s again return to Isaiah. They climax in the vertigo he felt as he climbed a pyramid and the urge to simply throw himself into the abyss, for everything around him seemed to cry out "Uzas, jama i petlja tebe, celovek!" Here there is a direct connection between Isaiah's judgment and what Belyj later wanted to convey in Peterburg, namely awareness that he no longer was master over himself [6, p. 395, 389, 390].
It is interesting to note that Belyj's first reference to Isaiah was in an article entitled "Sfinks" from 1905, the revolutionary autumn in which Peterburg is set. The theme of the Egyptian Sphinx had aroused his interest early on, for it embodied the ambiguity that was inherent from the beginning in his symbolic language and dreams of an approaching transformation of the world. Here he describes how lis-
1 Cf. also Belyj's North African travel sketches, where it is the pyramid of Cheops that appears to pronounce judgment: "Uzas, petlja i jama tebe, celovek sovremennosti!" ("Afrikanskij dnevnik," ed. S.D. Voronin, in Rossijskij Archiv. Istorija Otecestva v svidetel'stvach i dokumentach XVIII-XX vv. Moscow, 1991, p. 346.)
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tening to Cajkovskij's music during the course of the Revolution caused him acute anxiety. Within these harmonies he discovered hidden dimensions that suddenly brought the listener face to face with horror. There was the Fourth Symphony, whose final section descended into "hysteria," and the Sixth, the "Pathétique," that seemed to end with "everything collapsing," which made Belyj want to shout "Uzas i jama i petlja" [1 p. 45].
Thus an important Biblical passage runs throughout Belyj's oeuvre (since his letters should also be regarded as one of his artistic genres), and it seems to have influenced Gumilev as well, when in his final year of life he returned in some degree to his Symbolist beginnings. The quotation appears in Belyj's works in at least six or more slightly varied versions. Such returns to favorite quotations are also typical of him, as he attempts to achieve new echo effects in different contexts. It is especially the addressee that changes: "inhabitant of the earth" ("zitel' zemli") becomes (thou) "man" ("celovek") or (thou) "modern/contemporary man" ("sovremennyj celovek") and finally (thou) "bourgeois Sodom" ("burzuaznyj Sodom"). Occasionally he uses "the pit" ("jama"), sometimes "horror" ("uzas"). Only "the snare" ("petlja") occurs everywhere.
The theme of doom and resurrection is a constant in Belyj's works. Cata-strophism on the personal, national, overarching cultural and cosmic planes are always present. To a significant degree, of course, he draws upon Revelation, but as we have seen, he also has a recurrent need of Isaiah's Apocalypse and its mighty prophecy about the "city of confusion" that is condemned for its sinfulness and destroyed by the vengeful God to eventually arise in a new form.
There is profound significance in the fact that in 1911 Belyj traveled from Egypt directly to Jerusalem, the holy city whose contours are conjured up by Isaiah. This is what Belyj is searching for — Sodom's opposite, the otherworldly, purified, resurrected city far beyond "fear, and the pit, and the snare."
Список литературы
1 Белый А. Петр Чайковский в: Сфинкс // Весы. 1905. № 9-10.
2 Белый А. Египет // Современник. 1912 а. № V.
3 Белый А. Египет // Современник. 1912 б. № VI.
4 Белый А. Одна из обителей царства теней. Letchworth, Hertfordshire: Prideaux Press. 1971 (репринт). 75 с.
5 Белый А. Петербург / ред. Л. К. Долгополов. Л.: Наука, 1981. 696 с.
6 Белый А. Между двух революций / ред. А.В. Лавров. М.: Худож. лит., 1990. Ч. II. 608 с.
7 Белый А. Серебряный голубь. Рассказы / ред. В.М. Пискунов. М.: Республика, 1995. ззз с.
8 Белый А. / Блок А.А. Переписка 1903-1919 / ред. А. В. Лавров. М.: Прогресс-Плеяда, 2001. 608 с.
9 Богомолов Н.А. Перечитывая Серебряного голубя. 2. Николай Гумилев // От Пушкина до Кибирова. Статьи о литературе, преимущественно о русской поэзии.
М.: Новое Литературное Обозрение, 2004. 623 с.
10 Лавров А.В. Андрей Белый в 1900-е годы. Жизнь и деятельность. М.: Новое Литературное Обозрение, 1995. 336 с.
11 Орлов В.Н. Перепутья. Из истории русской поэзии начала века. М.: Худож. лит., 1976. 365 с.
References
1 Belyj A. Petr Chaikovskii [Petr Chaikovsky] in: Sfinx [Sphynx]. Vesy [The weighs], 1905, no 9-10. (In Russ.)
2 Belyj A. Egipet [Egypt]. Sovremennik [The contemporary], 1912 a, no V. (In Russ.)
3 Belyj A. Egipet [Egypt]. Sovremennik [The contemporary], 1912 b, no VI. (In Russ.)
4 Belyj A. Odna iz obitelei tsarstva tenej [In the Kingdom of Shadow]. Letchworth, Hertfordshire, Prideaux Press, 1971 (reprint). 75 p. (In Russ.)
5 Belyj A. Peterburg [Petersburg], ed. L.K. Dolgopolov. Leningrad, Nauka Publ., 1981. 696 p. (In Russ.)
6 Belyj A. Mezhdu dvukh revoliutsii [Between two revolutions], ed. A.V. Lavrov. Moscow, Khudozh. lit. Publ., 1990. Part 2. 608 p. (In Russ.)
7 Belyj A. Serebrjanyigolub'. Rasskazy [The silver dove. Tales], ed. V.M. Piskunov. Moscow, Respublika Publ., 1995. 333 p. (In Russ.)
8 Belyj A. Blok A.A. Perepiska 1903-1919 [Belyi A., Blok A.A. Correspondence 1903-1919], ed. A.V. Lavrov. Moscow, Progress-Pleiada Publ., 2001. 608 p. (In Russ.)
9 Bogomolov N. A. Perechityvaja "Serebrianogo golubia". 2. Nikolai Gumilev [Rereading The Silver Dove. 2. Nikolay Gumilev.]. Ot Pushkina do Kibirova. Stat'i o russkoj literature, preimushchestvenno o russkojpoezii [From Pushkin to Kibirov: Essays on Russian literature, predominantly on Russian poetry]. Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie Publ., 2004. 623 p. (In Russ.)
10 Lavrov A.V Andrei Belyi v 1900-e gody. Zhizn' i deiatel'nost' [Andrey Belyj in the 1900s. Life and work]. Moscow, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie Publ., 1995. 336 p. (In Russ.)
11 Orlov V.N. Pereput'ia. Iz istorii russkoj poezii nachala veka [Crossroads. From the history of Russian poetry of the beginning of the century]. Moscow, Khudozh. lit. Publ., 1976. 365 p. (In Russ.)
